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dataLayer.push( dataLayer_content ); \nJoin this 4-hour website accessibility crash course to learn which laws around the world might apply to your projects and how to ensure the websites you build are accessible, from design to development, testing, and ensuring ongoing compliance post-launch. There will be a special focus on the business of accessibility - how to fit it into your processes, sell clients on the investment, and grow recurring revenue with accessibility offerings.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n","livestream_live_transcript_text":"Well now I guess most spring breaks are probably over ring. last hours is this week. Oh, is it? Yeah. Ours was two weeks ago which felt so early to me.\r\n\r\nWow. Yeah, that is that is prettier. Yeah.\r\n\r\nThe big thing that they're all talking about is that we are in the path of totality for the solar eclipse on the eighth. Oh, no kidding. Yeah. So we've been getting like there's a bunch of news and they've been talking I still I think we're supposed to get like in our town are supposed to get three minutes and 16 seconds of total darkness.\r\n\r\nNo kidding. Yeah.\r\n\r\nBut if you go like a little bit further north of us, I think you can get up to like eight minutes of it. But but I'm not we're not going anywhere. Because I've I've heard like news stories about just how bad the traffic is and stuff. I heard something on NPR like a week ago where they were talking about when there was one, maybe like 10 years ago in Wyoming and people went from Colorado to Wyoming and it took them like 12 hours to drive back. When in what would normally have been like a two hour drive. That's\r\n\r\nnuts. Oh, welcome, everybody. Glad you're here. We're just chatting about the solar eclipse that's coming up here and it's a couple of weeks, right. Is that? April 8? Yeah, a couple of weeks away. Yeah. Oh, so Phoebe's saying Phoebe's in the 97% area.\r\n\r\nYeah, so that's coming up. So welcome. Just go ahead. Oh, I\r\n\r\nwas just gonna answer PBS where I was. So I am in Georgetown. Texas, which is north of Austin.\r\n\r\nGotcha. Yeah. So\r\n\r\nwe're gonna get our three minutes. Well, I ordered the glasses off Amazon. They're supposed to get here today. It'll be it'll be fun. That was blocked our calendar so nobody would book a meeting with me.\r\n\r\nYou know what, I didn't do that. We don't have totality here in the Birmingham area but it's it's obviously it's gonna go a little bit dim but we ordered the Amazon glasses to and I'm sure that you know these $8 glasses set of glasses that we ordered. Perfectly protect our eyes, right from this putting my trust to me pretty cheap equipment here. I\r\n\r\nknow, they're real. And I was like, Well, if we go blind, we will be extra advocates for accessibility. And maybe we'll also make a lot of money off Amazon.\r\n\r\nOh, yeah. Good luck with that. Oh, gosh. Well, welcome everybody. We're just talking about the Eclipse. It's going to be happening in a couple of weeks. I'm not sure how we got on that subject. But it's it's an interesting one. So glad you're all here. As you're coming into zoom, open up the chat and say hello, tell us where you're logging in from today. The captions are working and going I'm also going to drop in our link bundle there in the chat. Both sessions have slides or they're waiting on you. You can download those and follow along if you'd like. Also some helpful links in there that you can click along the way as well. So we'll be getting started here in just about three minutes from now with accessibility Crash Course. And behind us with us today from access from equalize digital, the accessibility pros. You can't go very far these days without running into Amber and a news story or doing something fun. So we'll talk to her about that as we get going. Hey, Dad, good to see you. So let's do a check in question in the chat on a scale of one to 10. How would you write your understanding of web accessibility and the issues that surround it? So give us a one to 10 there in the chat if you would. And if you're just now coming into zoom, open up the chat say hi. And we just have a few minutes before we were getting started today. Good to see everybody coming in. Do me a great four hours of training with Amber all about the issues that we need to be aware of in accessibility. Oh wow. So Doug is he's a Doug's a nine. So you are living the accessibility that's part of your world Now Doug, that's\r\n\r\nawesome. Very, very good.\r\n\r\nDoug can check me on the AO da my talk about it later.\r\n\r\nYeah, so Phoebe thinks she understands it. But yeah, there's a lot to just seems to be more and more and more detail that you have to like you you understand and you realize oh, no, wait, wait. There's like three more levels to this that I didn't realize that I needed to know.\r\n\r\nNow, I feel like that's everything and you know, WordPress, development, marketing and all that kind of stuff. There's always layers. You start and then you can go a little deeper and then a little deeper and yeah, what makes it fun and interesting. doesn't get boring, right?\r\n\r\nI know. It definitely doesn't get boring that that is absolutely for sure. Let's see. So class is a four Ben is an eight thanks to your pro plugin, Amber.\r\n\r\nAh,\r\n\r\nTammy is reading a three. Yeah. All right. So by the way, you may be chatting with only hosts and panelists. So if you look at the chat and you see your name and host and panelists just flip down the little blue drop down from hosts and panelists to everyone in the chat area. I'm going to drop in the slide bundle of the link bundle again here with today's slides. You can follow those along. Just about a minute to go before we get started with accessibility Crash Course is going to be a great few hours of training here a lot to learn on this topic and it's a subject that we all need to be aware of.\r\n\r\nOh, yeah, okay, here's\r\n\r\na loaded question. Sue wants to know if Zoom is accessible.\r\n\r\nZoom is actually very accessible. Our WordPress accessibility day conference, we run it out of zoom and zoom even has the ability to have a separate sign language interpretation view. Oh, that's super neat. Yeah, that was a new thing that they added last year. And we tried it out for the conference last year and it worked really well. And of course, they have the captions, which is very helpful. And there's some streaming webinar platforms that don't even have the automated captions. So yeah,\r\n\r\nthat's that's really cool.\r\n\r\nWe attach otter to zoom restream the captions are just much better with otter II own technical terms and abbreviations and things like that. Alright, folks, we're just about ready to get started. Actually, it's three minutes after so let's start our recording and dive in officially.\r\n\r\nWelcome, everybody to\r\n\r\nthe WordPress accessibility crash course here on solid Academy. glad you've joined us for this two days and four hours of training with our friend Amber Hines. From equalize digital Welcome back. Amber, how are you?\r\n\r\nI'm glad to hear I'm doing pretty well.\r\n\r\nI really appreciate your time. Being with us this week and your expertise on this issue of accessibility. It is an important one that those of us who Build and Manage websites for clients need to be informed about and educated on not only how to build accessible websites, but also the laws and all the things we have to know and so really, really appreciate you being with us. So one thing just kind of get the conversation started today. You folks that equalize digital, you're everywhere in the WordPress space. I mean, you're you're working with NASA I see you in news articles all the time. Give us an update of what's been going on with you and your company. Yeah,\r\n\r\nso we do do quite a bit of speaking and we're doing more events which I'm super excited. I'm gonna go to WordCamp Europe for the first time this year. I've never been before. I don't know if you've been but I'm excited about that. And yeah, we did some accessibility audit and we are still doing some accessibility auditing on the new NASA website which was built in WordPress and we do quite a bit on the auditing and remediation front in higher ed and for other bigger businesses. And then I try as best I can to contribute to WordPress plugins where I can, you know, just reporting issues because I think that's a really important way to get back to the community.\r\n\r\nYeah, absolutely. And so what I think is really interesting, especially for our audience, is that you started on the agency side working with clients, right? And then you pivoted more toward this product, but what was that journey like?\r\n\r\nYeah, so we my husband and I started an agency I guess I started as a freelancer. He joined me and we grew it into a marketing agency that did website design, development, social media, search, engine optimization, content creation, all kinds of stuff. And we as we started working with larger clients, we got more exposed to accessibility and we realized it was something that was really interesting to us when we really liked it. And that was sort of our COVID pivot we decided we were going to fully focus on accessibility and and do more we created our accessibility checker WordPress plugin which has a free version and that's been sort of a fun challenge to learn what it's like to run a plugin business, in addition to a services business. I'll tell you though, I don't really mind not having to manage people's social media accounts anymore. I just do my own and that's just fine with me.\r\n\r\nOh, that's amazing. So folks, if you're not familiar with Amber and what you're doing over equalized digital, the link is there in the chat at equalized digital.com. They have a great WordPress plugin called Accessibility Checker. It's used on many, many websites. It's an excellent way to identify the accessibility issues on a website. I'm sure you're going to be talking about, even how the free tool works and how we as site builders can leverage that in our client work. So Amber, give us just a broad overview of where we're heading today.\r\n\r\nYep, so today on this first half of the webinar, we're going to start by talking about the laws and standards, which would be some laws around the world and Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. That'll be about the first half. And then we're going to talk about important things to know to avoid accessibility issues or violating those laws and standards.\r\n\r\nSuper important. Okay, so today is more about the knowledge about the kind of the lay of the land as far as the accessibility world goes. And tomorrow, what are we going to focus on?\r\n\r\nSo tomorrow, we're going to start by talking about testing and building in your workflow. And then we are going to do a deep dive into the business of accessibility. So we'll talk about how you can grow recurring revenue, including accessibility in your care plans, sales language around accessibility on new website builds, I have some contract language that I'm going to share and some other things like that. Now, I'm not an attorney, but you can sort of I'll give you some insight around how we sell accessibility to our clients and how we protect ourselves legally when we do that.\r\n\r\nVery good. All right, this is gonna be a great couple of days. So a couple of housekeeping notes and they'll disappear and let me get started. You're welcome to use the chat to conversate with others that are alive in the live stream today. Just use that Zoom chat. But if you have a question, please open up the zoom q&a. So just mouse over the shared screen, click the q&a icon, and it's helpful just to keep that q&a box open throughout the livestream today. You can ask a question as it comes up to you. But also you can upvote the questions of others and roughly at the middle of today's session, and then at the end, we'll have these two separate times of questions and answers, where we'll take the questions in the order of up votes. So really important to upvote questions that you also have. So we get those questions answered first. All right, well, I'm going to disappear and Amber, let's get started accessibility laws and standards.\r\n\r\nYep.\r\n\r\nAll right. So what we're going to talk about in this first half of the webinar, I'm going to give a incredibly brief intro to accessibility for people who aren't familiar with what it is. Then we're going to talk about some key web accessibility laws around the world. We'll talk about Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, otherwise known as what I'm going to pronounce as WIC ag WCAG. I'm going to call that wicked. And then we're going to talk just briefly about accessibility requirements impact on agencies and as Nathan mentioned, we'll have time for questions. So feel free to type those in the q&a. So I'm not before I get started, I want to say I'm not going to spend a bunch of time today talking about the real details of why websites should be accessible, how many people they impact all of those things. I did give a bootcamp on accessibility a couple of years ago. You can find it on the solid Academy website. If you look word if you just search the term accessibility in the search box or if you have the slides. I do have that link to over that presentation goes a lot more in detail on why accessibility matters and who is impacted by accessibility. So I definitely recommend checking that out as well. If you are new to accessibility broadly what we are talking about when we're saying making a website accessible, is we're talking about making sure that the website works for everyone, people of all abilities, and disabilities using a variety of devices and assistive technologies. So this could be people who use a normal laptop, and they type with a normal keyboard but they can't use the mouse. So maybe they're blind and they can't see the mouse or maybe they have mobility challenges that makes it difficult to use the mouse. It could also be people who can't use a keyboard at all. And they use voice recognition and voice control in order to operate their devices. This could also mean making things work well on mobile devices, those sorts of things. So that's broadly what we're talking about. There are a number of benefits for websites as a whole when you make them more accessible. So there's a lot of overlap between accessibility and search engine optimization. When you make a website more accessible, you're typically improving underlying HTML code that search engines understand which means you are going to come out with better SEO and greater reach for the website. Of course, if you make it easier for people to navigate through a website and take the actions you want them to take submitting forms, purchasing products, whatever those actions might be, then you are more likely to have increased conversions. On that website, not just from people with disabilities from everyone, but especially from people with disabilities. accessible websites can help to reduce operational costs. If I want to buy something from a business and the website does not work, then but I really want to make that purchase. I might call them on the phone or I might go into their physical store, and then they have to have a human being to assist me in order to for me to make that purchase. If I can just self serve on the web. It allows the business not to have to maybe staff as many people or have longer business hours in which they are open and operating. And so therefore it can reduce costs if more people can just do their own helping on a website rather than having to do it in person. Of course having an accessible website is a great way for nonprofits, for businesses, any sort of organizations to live their corporate values. So if you have a client who has values around community, or values related to diversity, equity and inclusion having an accessible website is a key part of actually living and meeting those values. And then what we're about to talk about is accessible websites. help organizations comply with accessibility laws around the world. So I do want to preface I said this before, but I'll say it again here. I'm not an attorney. I am an accessibility professional. I've done a lot of research on accessibility laws. I have listened to a lot of well known attorneys that specialize in Disability Rights speak. I'm sharing this information with you but I'm not an attorney. If you have specific concerns about laws and whether they impact your business or your clients, businesses, then you are the client should definitely consult with an attorney. So I'm going to start in the United States and the first law that I'm going to talk about is the Rehabilitation Act of 1973. This law has a couple of different parts as many laws do. And there are two key parts that apply to website accessibility. Section 504 states that no otherwise qualified individual with a disability in the United States shall solely by reason of his or her disability, be excluded from participation in be denied the benefits of or be subjected to discrimination under any program. or activity receiving federal financial assistance. So this law applies to anyone who receives any funds from the federal government. Obviously, this is a federal government website. So like we talked about NASA before, but it's also any sort of federally funded projects. So k 12. Schools, post secondary schools, so state colleges, universities, vocational training, private schools, as well, anything where they, they or their students can receive federal financial assistance or federal grants, nonprofit organizations that receive federal grants. All of all of them need to have accessible websites under Section 504. And then the second part of this is section five await which specifically applies to any FET any federal government entities and section 508 bars the federal government from procuring electronic and information technology goods and services, which includes website design damn specified that that are not fully accessible to those with disabilities. Sections five oh wait actually does apply a standard for the Rehabilitation Act and the measuring of accessibility and it specifically requires a minimum of Web Content Accessibility Guidelines WCAG 2.0, double a compliance and we'll talk more about what that means when we get to the WIC ag section. I do recommend if you want to learn more about either of these if you go to section five await.gov You can get a ton of information about this law notably links on all of the slides for all of the laws that we're talking about. But if you build websites for anyone who gets federal dollars of any kind, and there's no minimum threshold, so if they got $500 grant from, you know, a nonprofit to get a $500 grant, it would apply to them. So the next one in the US is the Americans with Disabilities Act. There are two parts of this law that are relevant. So title two, this specifically deals with public services, transportation, any sort of state or local governments would fall under this. And it talks about communications with persons with disabilities must be quote, as effective as communications with others. So this means all communications including websites, PDF documents, emails can fall under this as well. If it's a library, that would be a public service that sends out an email newsletter about events happening at the library or new books they got in the library that would also fall under the American with Disabilities Act. And then Title Three, title three deals with public accommodations, and it applies to businesses and nonprofits, and any sort of private entities that serve the public. And it specifically says that they must provide people with disabilities and equal access to access the goods and services or or services that they offer to the public. So right now, one of the big things that is changing or happening with the ADEA is that the Justice Department announced in July of last year, a proposed rulemaking specific to state and local governments. So we talked about how title two said that communications had to be just as effective for people with disabilities as they are for people without disabilities. One of the challenges with the ADEA is that it doesn't specifically state a standard to measure against\r\n\r\nwhite like we saw with section five away which said we can 2.0 Double lay. So the Justice Department announced over the summer that they were proposing a new rule specifically for state and local government websites. Under Title two of the ADEA. And it was going to say that state and local government website content must meet wicked version 2.1 level double A. This rule would apply to websites, mobile apps PDFs, any web content, anything, videos, anything that's on the web. The only exceptions that they are making to this, if is if it is archived content or content that is not frequently used to give the example of a water quality report from 1998. That might be a PDF that's not a tagged PDF, because maybe it's just a scanned piece of a handwritten paper. They're like most people aren't referencing this so it doesn't have to be made accessible. That's an example of content not frequently use any sort of third party content that's included on the website. So for example, if a city council allows the public to submit comments, the content of the comment that then gets published on the website doesn't have to be accessible, like they could have links that aren't meaningful or, you know, be typed in a way that maybe isn't as accessible and that would be excluded because it's third party content included on there. And then the other exception for this rule would be any sort of password protected content. And the example of this would be for example, if a state or local government or like a school, so k 12. Schools will fall under this. If the school had a course that was online. And there were documents for the course that only students registered in the course could access they have to log in with a password to get them and there is no one in that course who has a disability, or needs any sort of adjustment to that content, then it's okay if the content for example, includes images without alt texts, because it's not publicly consumable, and the professor knows that there's no one in the class that can access the content that needs it. So that's an example of a password protected exception. So those are the only exceptions under this new rule. The timeline to comply that is proposed currently is that any it's based on the number of constituents or the population of the area that the state or local government website, including school websites, or all that serves, so if the population is fewer than 50,000 people then they will have three years to get their websites in compliance with the CAG 2.1 Double A if they have more than 50,000 people in population, then they're going to have two years to get in compliance. There was a public comment period for this that ran through October or November, and the final rulemaking is on the docket for April. So this is worth watching. If you again, state local government can include like public libraries, some sometimes depending on where you are like economic development centers, chambers of commerce, these are all things that I know a lot of us is agency owners, maybe have worked with them to help them build their websites. You'll want to watch this in April to see if this law does go into effect because it can impact the websites you were building and also potentially help you from a sales perspective to motivate people to invest more in their websites. So the other flip side of this is the private entities the businesses and at this point, it's pretty well established that the Americans with Disabilities Act applies to websites. There's lots of case laws that have shown damages were delivered when a website was not accessible. So some examples of the types of private entities that it applies to or retail stores, restaurants, hotels, or motels, movie theaters, private schools, doctors offices and hospitals, daycare centers, gyms credentialing organizations. There have been cases against businesses that don't have a physical location. So for example, Blue Apron, which if you're not familiar with it, it's one of those meal delivery kits you just go on their website, you order a subscription box and they send you food every week or something that you've been cook. They got sued for not having accessible websites so you don't have to have a physical brick and mortar business. For the ATA to consider you serving the public. It's just It is literally do you offer your products or service to anyone in the world like general public or anyone in America I guess we should say and if so, then it would apply. So it is pretty much safe to assume that the ADEA applies to you like your agency and also your clients and their websites. So the ADEA is a little different. The Rehabilitation Act, the way that is set out is that there can be fines or issues with enforcement from the government. The way the Americans with Disabilities Act was written as a law is that it is enforced with lawsuits, isn't it? This isn't great. Mostly because the reason why I say it's not great, it's not because all business owners get sued. I think it's not great because I don't really think we should be putting the onus on people with disabilities to force people to give them rights or access equal access to things. So I think that's not super great, but this is the way the law is written. I have a chart up here that shows the number of website accessibility lawsuits that were filed as from 2016 until 2023. And we went from 262 in 2016. That was when they first started exploring can we do this and trying to set a precedent for websites do apply to the ADEA all the way up to last year, there were 4605 lawsuits against websites under the ADEA have those 4605 lawsuits. 82% of them were against e commerce businesses. So if you build WooCommerce stores Shopify stores, any sort of E commerce and it could maybe not even just be WooCommerce right, easy digital downloads or any of those other online purchasing or selling platforms. You definitely want to be aware of this because that is the top area where complaints come in because it's very, it's very easy to show I could not use this website, therefore I could not get the product from the business. The next largest percentage was 7%. And that was against food service businesses. So either meal delivery, or grocery stores or restaurants those sort of are grouped in that food service category. One thing but we'll talk a little bit about this tomorrow. I talked a lot more about it in my last webinar for solid so I would recommend going and looking at that one if you want to know more but some people ask well does adding an accessibility overlay helped me does it protect me against getting sued. And last year of those 4605 lawsuits? 933 of them were against businesses that were already using an accessibility overlay. Or widget. So that's about a quarter of the lawsuits. About 20%. Were already against people that had that so those will not necessarily protect your clients from getting sued. It's very important to know and we can talk more about those if you have questions or we'll talk more about that tomorrow. Top states so these lawsuits do kind of happen all over but there are some key states where they're happening a lot. Last year New York was the biggest state the year before California was where most of the lawsuits were happening that changed in 20 2003. Because California there was more precedent set that the complaintant had to be in California. And the business had to have nexus in California and and I gotta say it got harder for like, I'm a person in let's say Texas, to sue a business from Minnesota in California. California is like a no, you need to do it wherever you are not in our state. So that sort of decreased the California lawsuits. But if you have clients in California and then you definitely there is there is strong precedent there. Florida is another state as well. And then there are some states that I saw, which I don't have listed here, but like for example, Minnesota is one I just mentioned, or New Jersey where there weren't any in previous years and there are some so there are quite a lot of states and I'm taking all this data from a report that usable net puts out twice a year they go through all of the lawsuits. They have like legal paralegals that they pay to research all this and they put out a report and those are LinkedIn aside, there's a ton more information there. I definitely recommend looking at it. If you're a content creator, go write a blog post about it and on your website and then send it to your clients.\r\n\r\nSo what happens if someone gets sued the cost of an accessibility lawsuit for small businesses, it's really going to range the numbers that I'm seeing both from Chris Rittenberg is one source. He is an attorney that specializes in Ada and DQ which is another web accessibility company like mine. Small businesses are typically looking at paying between 19,040 $5,000 on average. And what this breakdown looks like is typically always people settle. It's very rare that they just keep going, then they almost never win. Sometimes they do get it dismissed. Like I mentioned that there were some examples where California was starting to say no, you're not in our state. You can't see we're dismissing this or you can't prove that you were legitimately going to try to cert get a product or service from that business. And so therefore you can't prove harm. But a lot of the times, companies just settle because it's easier. It's faster, and the settlements usually means you're paying the whoever got sued is paying the plaintiff attorneys law fees which could be 515 $1,000. Paying your defense attorney so the estimate there was maybe 5000 Obviously everyone's attorneys build different hourly rates. Some people have the you know, $100 an hour attorneys some people have the $300 an hour an attorney so that could really impact things on there. And then the settlements always require website audits and remediation. So then you're looking at anywhere between five to $20,000 paying to get the website audited and remediated or potentially you just say, No, we're scrapping it and we're just gonna invest $20,000 into totally rebuilding our website and making it accessible. But we still have to have an audit as part of that rebuild to prove that the new website doesn't have the same problems the old one had. And then for example, if you were in California, California has minimum damages of $4,000. Big businesses, though real world legal fees from a bunch of different accessibility related courses, or lawsuits, not including settlement fees, just the actual fees paid to the attorneys over $350,000. So it can be really expensive. There was a big case that was talked about a lot in January this year, where a web developer in California who built a system to for people to book camping spots for the state parks in California that was not accessible. They got ordered to pay over $2 million in damages back to the plaintiff and a little bit to the state. So because because it was also a fraud case. Because they had said that the website was accessible when it clearly wasn't. So they promised something they couldn't deliver, which we should definitely never do as agency owners. But anyway, it can be very expensive, and so it's better to be proactive. Instead of reactive to this sort of stuff. Beyond the federal laws, there's a bunch of states that have individual state laws which you don't have time to go into but if you were in Alabama, Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Louisiana. Massachusetts, Minnesota, Missouri, New York, Oklahoma, or Virginia, or you have clients in those places. Do some research into the laws in your state. Now want to leave the United States and go visit our friends up north and Canada. There are a couple of laws that apply on the federal level, the Canadian Human Rights Act of 1977. This specifically applies to federal and First Nations governments and federally regulated private sectors such as banking, telecommunications and transportation. And they need to have accessible websites, mobile apps and contents as part of that act. The accessible Canada Act and employment Equity Act requires that parliament the federal government and federally regulated employers have to eliminate barriers to employment. And one thing that is stated in that is that they have to ensure that technologies necessary for work are accessible. So this may or may not apply to websites. But it could mean that if you were building something for a federally regulated employer in Canada, and they had someone with disability who had to do work on the website and the website wasn't accessible, then that could be a violation. And then the 2011 standard on website accessibility in Canada requires that the Government of Canada web content, so again, web content, goes beyond websites must conform to WCAG 2.0 level double A, I would say generally at a national level, the Canadian laws are less strict than what we see here in the United States. However, there are some provinces in Canada that have laws that go much further than what we see both at the federal and the state level here in the United States. So there are two of those. The first one is the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act, otherwise known as a ODA, and I know we saw someone in the chat who mentioned they've been deeply working on this, so feel free to correct me if you know more. But this was enacted in 2005 to improve accessibility standards for people with physical and mental disabilities in all public establishments by 2025 was the goal. There are a few different requirements under this, but all businesses with 20 or more employees must file an accessibility compliance report every three years and this includes literally stating how accessible their website is and whether or not they're complying with the EO da businesses with 50 or more employees, their public websites and public content. Anything that had been posted since January 1 2012. Has to meet wicked 2.0 level double A, with the exception of you don't have to have live captions, or pre recorded audio descriptions for people who are blind that describe what's happening in the video if there's no sound but there's just visuals happening on the video. Those are the only exceptions. The ao da as opposed to the United States where we are enforcing the ADEA with lawsuits there are fines connected with the EO da businesses can be fined up to 100,000 Canadian dollars per day until the violations are resolved. An individual or an unincorporated organization can face a penalty of up to $50,000 Canadian dollars per day. So this could mean that a company gets the $100,000 per day fine or up to that. And the CEO of the company personally also gets a personal fine. I haven't as far as I've seen, I haven't seen a ton of instances where these fines are actually going out yet. However, there are reports of businesses receiving random letters from the government warning that their website is not compliant. Like perhaps they used a crawler, or someone went and reported it to the government and the government sent out a letter I think we're still in early days on seeing a lot of enforcement on this law. But there but it is increasing and it does exist in the law is not going away. The other province that has a similar law is in Manitoba the Accessibility for Manitobans Act this requires that websites meet WIC egg 2.1. So a newer version level double A and it has different deadlines for when this needs to be done based upon the entity so the Manitoba government has to add to meet it by May 1 2023. We've passed that deadline, public sector organizations, libraries and educational institutions may 1 of this year 2020 For private sector, nonprofit organizations and small municipalities. So private sector again, that means businesses need to meet WIC egg 2.1 Double A by May 1 2025. And this one includes the possibility not of a daily fine but of a fine perhaps per instance, of up to 250,000 Canadian dollars. There is an exception in the Accessibility for Manitobans Act for, quote undue hardship. There's no clear definition when you read the law of what an undue hardship is. They do explicitly say stay in some of the writings about it on the go to accessibility nb.ca You can read more about the law. They do stay that cost is not necessarily an undue hardship. So a small business owner can't necessarily say well, I can't afford to make my website accessible it would put me out of business. I think they would have to really be able to prove that they can't literally say I have $0 for it.\r\n\r\nBut that is something to be aware of and as time goes on and you know we get beyond these deadlines. I'm sure there's going to be more evidence where someone got fined and they fall back on it and then there'll be a better clearer definition of what is undue hardship. I would generally operate on the let's set our clients up for success and and try to get them as accessible as possible. And we can talk more about what that means tomorrow. So skipping across over the ocean, I'm going to talk a little bit about the European Union. There are a couple of laws that can apply here. In 3015 49 is the European standard of accessibility requirements for information and communications technology products. So this is the broader or more legal term that we frequently hear for websites or software SAS products and services in the European Union. And basically, all public sector or semi public sector websites in the EU had to meet that standard as of September 23 2020. And they have to report on compliance every three years. En 3015 49 does require WIC egg 2.1 Double A and it also has some requirements that go beyond wicked. So it has specific things for accessibility that they think are important that are not written in WIC ag and I have this linked off the slide if you work on European government websites, then definitely go take a look at that. The European Accessibility Act this is the probably one of the biggest ones that you might hear about if you follow accessibility news. And the reason for this is that it impacts businesses, nonprofits and private websites not public government websites like the one we were just talking about, and enforcement for it begins in June. 2025. So we're at the key time right now where businesses really need to be thinking about this and getting their websites ready. The European Accessibility Act applies to private entities delivering products or services, specifically including e commerce, any websites, mobile apps or chaos. It also lists things like e readers, if you make an e reader it has to be accessible, a lot, that kind of stuff. There is no specific tech standard. So a lot of the other laws we talked about referenced a certain level of wicked compliance. This does not say that but presumably we're going to assume it's safe to assume it's WIC hag double A since that's what most laws around the world require. What is different about the European Accessibility Act is it is a directive under the EU that tells member countries that they have to set laws and start requiring accessibility by June 2025. But each member country will be able to set its own laws and decide how to enforce it like do they have fines? How much are those fines? All those things? Do they require people to publish annual reports or submit reports every couple of years like some of the other ones, each country is gonna be able to set that on their own. This is a lot like GDPR and the privacy laws so you may have seen things like all Germany really doesn't like it if you use Google fonts that are not self hosted and they're off on the Google server. But you know, in France, they don't care about Google fonts as much on it. So so this is going to be a little bit like that where it's going to have a broad implication across the EU but there might be slightly different definitions for it within each member country, so it'll be really important if you are in the EU or if you have customers in the EU or that they have. They sell to people in the EU so they have nexus you'll want to kind of look up what their country is. Some of these countries don't have laws published yet, which is a little bit frustrating. Like they're still working on them so we don't have full deadlines. So again, that's what I'm saying. Like if you sort of assume we CAG double A that's going to be the best place to get started. And of course, we only have so much time. There are a lot more many more rules or laws that I have listed out. So I as I mentioned before, if you have specific concerns or check with an attorney, there's some other resources that we're happy to share. And I'm always interested to know if you know of any that I mentioned today that you think are really important other people should know about post those in the chat and during q&a. And we can also make sure that we read those out so everyone is aware of those laws as well. So, a lot of the laws pointed to Web Content Accessibility Guidelines or WCAG. So what is that we can get is a set of internationally agreed upon testable standards. So that means they are rules that you can say this passes or fails. There's no gray it's a yes or a no festival standard. Created by volunteers in the World Wide Web Consortium, the W three C, which is basically an open source project that's like WordPress. The current version of WIC AG is 2.2. The versions build upon each other so when they released a new version, like 2.2 includes everything from 2.1. This was one instance where they got rid of one guideline which is they've never done before. But but basically if you pass 2.2 You are also going to pass 2.1 And you're also going to pass two data. So if you just shoot for the current version, you don't have to worry about going back and reading about past versions or anything like that. Like the law says you have to be two Dotto compliant. If you're 2.2 compliant then you are also meeting two Dotto. There are three levels of conformance in the criteria we call them success criteria that we measure against. So A is the lowest this is like a bare minimum. Almost no. Like no I haven't seen any laws that say you just have to meet a so only passing to a things is not enough. Double A is the current best practice you want to pass everything that's marked as this is a double a standard. And then AAA is the highest level of conformance if you're able to meet some or all AAA guidelines, then you definitely can. Sometimes that's more difficult and we can talk about some examples of those later.\r\n\r\nSo all\r\n\r\nof the success criteria are created as testable things that you can measure as part of the four different principles that are the foundation for accessibility. And that is that things everything in order for something to be accessible. It has to be perceivable, operable, understandable and robust. What does that mean? Perceivable means that information needs to be transformable from one form to another and your main content and your message needs to be separated, separated, separable. There we go from the way it is styled or presented. So I have a graphic up here that shows sight, hearing and touch and it's all pointing at a brain right? We have a lot of different ways that we can consume information and then it goes to our brain and we understand it what it is. So making something perceivable means that if I am on a webinar, look right now, and I cannot hear the information. I'm looking at the captions that there is in zoom and I can still get that information. It's transformed into another it's transformed into written so that I can get it if I am blind and I'm on a website and there is an image it has alternative types so that even though I cannot see the image, I can still understand what the image is about or get whatever important information the image is conveying on the post or the page. That's what Persil about it's really about making sure that the information is still available, no matter how someone might be entering that web page or experiencing that information.\r\n\r\nOperable the baseline\r\n\r\non this is not everyone uses a standard keyboard and mouse to navigate the web. So the website needs to work. No matter how people are navigating or engaging with the website. There needs to be multiple ways to interact with the website so I could use a mouse or I could just use my keyboard. Users need to be able to set control over time limits or certain timings. So if you have a carousel or a slider that includes a lot of words, and it's going too fast, and I can't read it fast enough, I need to have some way to pause it so that I can read at the pace that makes sense to me. And then I can go to the next slide. That's an example of user being able to control time when you need to have clear instructions. So a lot of the success criteria is around this float around like making it clear what something is and how to use it. If you have an error that happens on the website, like let's say I miss a required field on a form there needs to be clearly announced to everyone so not just the sighted person but also there needs to be an auditory announcement for a screen reader user. And then it needs to be clear to me how I can recover from that error, fix it and move forward. That's all operability understandable is having appropriately target language and reading level supplemental representation of information. So if you have graphics, you might also have a video. If you have audio players, you have a transcript. If you have a really long piece of content, maybe you have a summary or an abstract or an excerpt before it this sort of says here's the key points like bulleting them out. All of this is are examples of supplemental representation of information that make it easier for people to consume. And then the other items under understandable are understandable functionality. So the navigation structure should be really consistent. It should make sense how form how to interact with a form and what to do and you know what information to type or select and how to do it. Maybe you have tooltips in certain areas to explain things that people might not know at first glance like if you have jargon or or like have a feature on a product, but the name of the feature isn't very meaningful. Maybe you have a little description all that helps with understandability. And then robust robust is a really short number of guidelines. And basically this means that you need to have functionality across current and future devices, operating systems and browsers. We want to make sure that we are able to support some outdated versions and that you are validating against the technical standards for the platform. So like for example in WordPress, we have WordPress coding standards. And if you are following WordPress coding standards that helps to make sure that your code is working better in a WordPress website, which makes it more robust and more likely, you know to be more secure or to work better for all the users who visit that website. So we talked a little bit about what level you should meet before as I mentioned, a single A is not sufficient. AAA is a gold star. The most recommended on laws and standards is WIC hag 2.1 Double A. I would recommend as an ideal target WIC egg 2.2 Double A or triple A. We can 2.2 only added a few success criteria. Most of them in my opinion are really easy to meet on a WordPress website. I can throw a link in the chat later if anyone is interested. I have a blog that talks about each of the posts or each of the success criteria and it has literally examples of all of them what a pass or fail would be for each one. So if you can target two dots you that's going to be the most forward looking and help put your clients websites in their best place. And then look at can you meet some AAA success criteria. So for example, color contrast is a rule that has both a double A level and a AAA. AAA has higher contrast than the double A double A's. Okay? Most laws CW is fine. But maybe you can meet AAA for color contrast, especially on maybe your important tests like your body text to make things more readable and visible. And so really looking at that and assessing that can be really helpful. Reading levels. Another one, the reading level guidelines are all AAA, which is that in general, you want your content to be a ninth grade reading level or lower, or if not, you provide a supplemental summary that's at that lower reading level that explains it. This is just it's great for everyone. If content is easy to read, it helps with SEO, it helps increase like people spending time on the page. So why not try to have easier to read content, those sorts of things. Tab target size is another example where there's a double A and a triple A they're all they used to be a triple A but they added the double a guideline with 2.2. But it's just how big are the buttons like on mobile, for example. And the size it's not really that big. That in order to hit the the AAA it's like 46 by 46 pixels. So I'm like do that that you can pass you can meet it and then you're going above and beyond in some areas. So when we go over to WIC and I don't have time I wish I could like walk people through every single one. Of these. There are a couple of different components that I am want to make sure you're aware of. And basically when you go there, what you're going to see is the principles so like we talked about perceivable is once you're going to see the principle up at the top and then we have things nested below it. So the guidelines are the next thing that you see. So in this example I have a guideline of 1.1 text alternatives. These are these are not testable things. They're basically like section headings that group the success criteria and they they have a written description that describes the basic goal. So for example for text alternatives, it's saying that all of the success criteria are under this help you make sure that you are providing texts alternatives for any next note any non text content non text content is like videos, images, graphs, charts, tables, those sorts of things, that it can be changed into other forms people need such as large print Braille speech symbols or simpler language. So that's like the the main goal for this section. So then below it, you'll see all the different success criteria and these are things that you measure against. They are testable criteria that help you determine if something is a pass or a fail on the rights on each of these. You're gonna see and they're kind of small on the screenshot and I apologize but there's two links that are very helpful when you're trying to understand what these mean. So there will always be an understanding link. This is understanding and the name of the success criterion. So we're looking at one dot 1.1 non text content, which is a Level A and there's understanding non text content and then there's also a how to meet nontax content. So when you go to work the first time it is totally overwhelming. I'm not gonna lie as this giant list of things you're like, What the heck am I doing? These are your friend. You can go there and like even just how to meet. Understanding is nice because it says why is this important and it gives you examples of scenarios and that kind of stuff. But a big thing with meeting web chronixx Web Content Accessibility Guidelines is being able to test against it.\r\n\r\nSo I'm\r\n\r\nhow accessibility requirements impact agencies. The biggest thing I want to say, as a takeaway from all of this is you shouldn't ignore accessibility. Around the world. More and more laws are getting passed. Some of these laws likely apply to your website. They definitely apply to your clients websites. And in the United States. As I mentioned, there are starting to be cases where the web developer was sued in addition to the business so I have a photo of that I found that I was like, this is perfect. Here's the lady with her arms out, looking at a train as it leaves the station and I can only imagine the expression on her face, but the accessibility train is coming. You can either be on it, or you can get left behind and it may not do well for your business, right. So things that you'll need to consider and I and I want to say this now because I want you to start thinking about it as we go through the next three hours of this webinar. Starting to think about how accessibility fits in your workflow, maybe what modifications your workflow you need to make changes that you'll need to make to your tools, your team, which doesn't necessarily mean that you have to hire a bunch of w two employees. You could bring in contractors, like my company or other companies or freelancers, people with disabilities to help you with testing, or to improve maybe your development skills if you're like okay, well I'm really good at building websites in this platform. But this thing needs to be remediated and I'm not great at JavaScript. Okay, maybe you just need to find a good resource that can help with that, like the little JavaScript pieces. So So when I'm talking about team it doesn't necessarily have to mean everyone. But sort of thinking about that as we go through the webinar, like where are the gaps that might exist in your current toolset and your current team that you need to fill. And then obviously, we'll be talking a lot about this tomorrow, but adjustments that you need to make to your services and your pricing to account for all of this How are you going to change your scripts for your sales conversations? And then what modifications do you need to make for your proposals and your contracts?\r\n\r\nSo\r\n\r\nwith that in mind, I think we have time for some questions.\r\n\r\nYes, absolutely. This was really, really good. And we're appreciate the the good overview and I kind of tell you, I'm just kind of watching the way folks have been approaching accessibility. I've noticed a real change lately, not only from our clients that I work with as an agency but also from people who are doing client work on the agency side. Like I'm finding in more discovery conversations with folks that we've never talked to before. We're just talking about, hey, we want this website or whatever. I'm finding more clients are bringing up accessibility now and asking those questions before we even get there in our script. Which is good. I think it's becoming more Yeah. It's\r\n\r\nbecoming a thing.\r\n\r\nI think that there's just in general, more public awareness about it. It helps that you know, the media will sometimes write about some of these really big cases. If I go back and forth on that, because you know, like we talked about, oh, the you saw the graph I shared where they're going out. But if you think about in reality 4000 lawsuits out of how many millions or billions of businesses like it's not like the risk is, is low, but it's growing all the time. Right and there are not a lot of benefits there. Um, so I don't like to get too hung up on the like, fear side of it as much, although it does help sell. And I think that's what makes the clients ask us about it. You know, someone they knew at the Chamber of Commerce got a complaint letter. And now all of a sudden they're worried about their website. Yeah,\r\n\r\nabsolutely. And, you know, from the developer side, when this issue first came up, it was, well, people, the exhale I just had was how people responded like, it's something else I have to learn now and do and whatever. And so it was really, there's a lot of friction, I think, at least in personally, that I just have conversations with, with agency owners, a lot of friction in getting into accessibility, but now that seems to have subsided as well. And folks are realizing, you know, there's some small things I can do that make a huge difference in this and so anyhow, now we got a bunch of great questions here. Go ahead.\r\n\r\nYeah, let me just say one thing about that, because I think it really is important, and I feel like there's always there's always pain points like this as you grow as whether you're a freelancer or an agency. And you're you're growing and what you're doing. I'm started building websites before they had to be mobile responsive. Yeah. And then when we first had to make people were asking for over signs, I'm like, Okay, well, I'm going to charge you extra. This is way more work, right? And then my processes evolved. And now it's like, we just have all the code like the CSS, it's like mobile first in a lot of cases or if it's not like, we have our proxy setup or doesn't really make a difference or workflow like maybe it'd be harder actually. Now to make it a not mole or something like we'd have to go break things I don't know. Right And and I think accessibility is a lot of the same way. Yes, there is a learning curve upfront. And there is probably more work like I talked about, you know, we'll talk about, you know, over the next three hours where you have to change what you're working on. But once you get that foundation going, then it's not necessarily more work in order to achieve it.\r\n\r\nYeah, that's, that's a great analogy. I really like that. Okay, several questions here. And, folks, if you haven't opened up the q&a, open that up and upvote the questions that you'd like to have answers to, we'll start off with Sherry's question. Amber, do you think all sites should have an accessibility statement?\r\n\r\nYes, I say this because I so I run the WordPress accessibility meetup. And we were so lucky, maybe like two years ago to have Lainey Feingold, who is one of the top disability rights attorneys in the United States. come speak at our meetup. She's the reason why ATMs have headphone jacks, just like that's how big she is. Right? She's been doing this since the 60s. And I asked her that question, and she said that she does believe that having accessibility statement one it is more likely to deter the like drive by lawsuits because they're gonna be like, Oh, okay, they're doing something or they're paying attention or they're more likely to have something and add to it will actually help users. So even if it's a short blurb, the most important thing in the accessibility statement is how can they contact you? And it should have both a phone number and an email address, not just go use our contact form because what did the contact form doesn't work? So you need to have those two options. But yes, they should. It will help protect you from lawsuits, and it will help your users\r\n\r\ninteresting. And Tonya following up wanting to know any good templates for that. Sort of information that you're aware of.\r\n\r\nfor accessibility statements statements, yes. So if you install the free version of our equalised Digital Accessibility Checker plugin, it's going to create a draft post in your WordPress website just like WordPress has a draft privacy policy, we create a draft accessibility statement posts that you can then or page that you can go edit and publish. That's the best template I've got for you.\r\n\r\nBrilliant. That's wonderful. All right, I'm gonna drop the link to the plugin in the chat for those of you that aren't aware of it. That's just in the free plugin. So yep. And that yeah, the link to the wordpress.org plugin is there in the chat. Okay, Paul would like to know the section 504 referred to K to 12 private schools if they don't get federal money.\r\n\r\nSection 504 does not apply to private schools. If they do not get any federal dollars. The Americans with Disabilities Act would\r\n\r\nand you're not an attorney. So make sure you ask your\r\n\r\nI'm not an attorney. So if you really want to really answer that the school should ask their attorney. All schools have attorneys. That's\r\n\r\nYes, yeah. And so and by the way, let's just pause there for a second. When we're talking about accessibility, this is a something that we as agency owners need to be very aware of is don't come in as the accessibility law expert. You are opening yourself up to risk as an agency owner. You don't have letters after your plumbing maybe you do but most of us don't have letters after their last name that qualify us to answer those questions. You can give a best guess but say look, you need to talk to your attorney. Just like we'd say the same thing for taxes like go talk to your accountant. That's not our thing.\r\n\r\nSo tomorrow, come back tomorrow because I'm gonna give you the exact language that our attorney told us and put on our website, which literally says we are not a law firm. But I mean, it's a little more than that, but that's literally what is that. So that's,\r\n\r\nthat's awesome. Okay, Mani would like to know if it's a Mr. Again, if the organization is nonprofit in the States, that would be like a 501 C three. Are there any specific things that would change the way accessibility law applies to them that you've discussed so far?\r\n\r\nNo, because the Americans with Disabilities Act specifically says it includes the nonprofit organizations. Yeah, very good. I think there's some possibility. There's always with all of these things. There's a threshold risk based on the size, right? If it's a very small nonprofit, that maybe only has one founder, and is volunteering, you know, in the community or, you know, fundraising a very tiny bit they're not running any ads. They're not really driving maybe you go look at your clients Google and and we all the clients like this, and we're like, oh, look, they got 50 visitors to their website. Celebrating I know, and they're excited like one person today. I did it right. So threshold on that is a lot smaller than like, a larger nonprofit that's doing a lot in the community. So\r\n\r\nthat's good.\r\n\r\nStephanie would like to know what about an artists gallery? Are the pictures decorative or must there be good descriptions? Without text?\r\n\r\nThey are definitely not decorative, especially if you have the ability to either directly purchase them or contact the gallery to say you want to purchase them because a blind person might want to purchase a piece of art to give to their friend. Very true.\r\n\r\nTanya would like to know Oh, this is such a good question. And just those of us you know, if you're a member and you come to office hours, you know, Tanya has these excellent clients, right. And there's an inside joke there. But Tanya would like to know that I'm sure this is purely hypothetical. What do you do with brand colors that aren't accessible? And those brand colors are set in stone.\r\n\r\nSo can we hold this for the next hour? Yes, I have some slides about this. And I'm actually going to deviate off my slides for a few minutes and show you a few other things. Perfect.\r\n\r\nLet's see. Let's do a couple more questions and we'll take a break Paul would like to know, reading level is a triple A success criteria. Does that mean we need to dumb down our sight? How is this an accessibility issue and not an intelligence issue? Okay, well, thank you Paul, for that.\r\n\r\nI had time for it. So I'm going to say please don't ever say that you're dumb downing something that is very ableist term. And I'm sure you didn't mean it that way. But it can come across as not very kind. But it's so reading level is not necessarily about not using big words a lot of times. So our plugin includes a flash Kincaid reading level grade level check. And, and also if you use the Yoast SEO plugin that also has these flesh Kincaid reading ease. So same thing there plug in is kind of handy because it'll highlight some of the things we recommend or like if you use Grammarly, Grammarly will also do that too. Reading Level is a lot of times about maybe having shorter sentences or not using passive voice using active voice so it's really clear like who is doing what having headings to break up sections can really help with reducing the reading level, maybe not having paragraphs that have 20 sentences in it, right like make shorter paragraphs, so there's a lot you can do that it doesn't necessarily make it dumber, right. It's just making it easier to read. And the other thing that I think is really important to remember when we talk about users that are we think about how users like everyone how many times over the past week and you and I are the only ones who can raise your hand but like when you read something are you literally reading top to bottom or are you skimming right like you skim 100%? Yeah, so reading level make it is oftentimes helps make it more skimmable which is how the vast majority of users are engaging with our content. They're skimming looking for pieces, then they might read a paragraph here go a little further. Oh, this heading jumped out at me. Now I'm going to read this right. And so really, I think that's a big thing to think about on the reading level. Now if you have clients that literally do serve, so if you build a website for a county health department, they really do. They can't hand out in front they like this is a really good example if you go on the CDC website too. You can find examples of these are you think about when you took your kid to the doctor's office and they handed you a fact sheet about like the flu vaccine? What does the flu do? You don't want the doctor level version of that. None of us do right? Like it has all these things in it like you want the this is the parent version about why this is good and you know how to take care of your kid afterward or whatever that might be. And so I think if you have clients that are doing that you really have to think about who their audiences because the average person we don't need the expert level stuff. We're not the expert level. Now if you've have if you're building a website for academics, and it's all go of course, the reading level is going to be a little bit high. Right? Yeah. So you have to think about your audience\r\n\r\na great answer. I just want to circle back that that I don't. That was not Paul's intent to be.\r\n\r\nYeah. I don't think so. And I know, we\r\n\r\nall know Paul here. So definitely not his intent. And so but that's, that provoked such a great discussion. It's something we really all need to think about. And it's another one of those issues of gosh, if I design if I think accessibly, it really helps everybody in the end like make my content skimmable and more easily digestible. Yeah. All right, folks. There's a couple of questions remaining that I'm gonna save for our next break. We're already 10 minutes after into the second hour. So let's take a five minute break. We'll be back at well we're gonna call it 16 minutes after so 16 after we'll come back for part two and we'll begin we'll\r\n\r\nbe quiet until then.\r\n\r\nThis is your One Minute Warning we're back in one minute from now.\r\n\r\nAlright folks,\r\n\r\nwe're back for the second hour of day one of the accessibility Crash Course. Amber, what are we going to be covering this hour?\r\n\r\nYeah, I realized it would have been smart of me to change my slides. Sorry about that. So we are going to be talking about avoiding issues so things to think about before you build using key tools carefully. And then we'll wrap up with a little bit about what's coming tomorrow.\r\n\r\nAll right, I've just dropped in the chat. The link to the lawsuit explanation that Amber talked about earlier. Also in the chat earlier on was I did find that link on the equalist digital blog Amber for the examples of the wicked 2.2. So all that oh, great for folks. Yeah. All right. Well, let's get started. Again, folks, if you have questions along the way, use that Zoom q&a, and we'll take that we'll we'll wrap up today with a good time of questions and answers. Yep.\r\n\r\nAll right. So before you build, so thinking about avoiding issues, we talked about lawsuits, hopefully I didn't terrify everyone too much. I saw Tanya posted something about having a client that won't launch four months after the website was ready. I because they're worried about a lawsuit which is a bummer. Hopefully, you can convince them to launch. But I do think there are ways that we can set up if we're doing a new website to really put us in a good place where we don't have to have those concerns. And broadly what you need to think about when you're thinking about accessibility problems on a website is that they can come from a lot of different angles. I have this cartoon illustration of Popeye the Sailor and he's holding his arms out left and right, trying to block sprays of water as they're shooting at him. And I think this is a good way to kind of get started on where accessibility problems come from. Because they can come from a lot of places. The biggest one frequently starts and this was a question we had that we're going to dive into is even before the website was built and that's that they can come from inaccessible branding. If a client's color palette is not accessible, you have no way of meeting color contrast unless you make changes to it. They can also come from incorrectly entered content so you could do the best that you do or you can choose all the right tools, the right theme, the right plugins and have no accessibility issues coming from the code. But if there are issues in the content, then there will be accessibility issues on the website. But probably one of the biggest places that accessibility problems come in is in the code and in WordPress you know we're WordPress is wonderful in that we can bring a lot of different features in from themes from plugins, we can also integrate with other third party embeds or SAS solutions. We have nonprofits that use donation forms that come from third party donation platforms, or we have businesses that use different platforms for posting their jobs and then allowing people to hire for them and they want us to, you know, connect with those via an API or maybe embed them in an iframe on the site. So all of these things can add a lot of great features of the website, but every time you bring something new in, there's a possibility that it could be adding an accessibility problem to the website. So so when we're thinking broadly about accessibility, these are the sorts of areas where problems can come in, and we're going to sort of talk through some of those. So when you are building a new website, which is really important if you want to avoid accessibility issues, also if you want to optimize your process and optimize your own profits, is that you really need to think of accessibility as part of the entire process of the website. Build. And that's why I have this line. It shows discovery at the left, then content design development, test and debug user testing and remediation, launch, training and post launch support and it keeps going off to the right of the screen. And then there's an arrow above it. This is accessibility. So accessibility is really needs to be part of every phase of a website projects. From app discovery, spending time talking to clients and figuring out who were their users. We talked before about reading level and how some audiences might need a lower reading level than others. Spending time during discovery, understanding who are the users that are coming on the website, mapping out user journeys, and then and then having conversations with the customer or your client about okay, well, you said that they need to be able to do XYZ as part of their journey through the website. And perhaps this includes submitting a form and then we think, okay, well what do we need to do in order to make sure that that form works for people of all abilities, or we've had a customer before where they said, the lifecycle user journey, is that they submit the form and then we call them to book a meeting. And, and so we said, Okay, what if those people are deaf and they don't have a phone? Some deaf people don't like to give them I have smartphones, because they use a smartphone, but they don't like to give out their phone number because they can't really receive a call. What are the options there? And so then we had conversations about, oh, well, maybe it would be better to embed something in the website that allows them to book their own meeting time. And then meeting time is on the form. They can say if they need to have an ASL interpreter there. Or they can choose instead of meeting over the phone to meet over zoom where we know that we can do caches, right. So so starting to think about those, like, what is the whole user journey interacting with the business, not just on the website? Because I think sometimes if you just stop with your your clients as part of this process, and you just say, what do you need them to do? And they say, oh, we need them to fill out forms. Then you don't get to the end. You don't ever say okay, what happens after then you'd miss that whole piece about, oh, we're going to call them on their phone to set up a meeting. And that's where an accessibility problem actually happens. And it's a gap in their journey. And this is one area where if we spend a lot a little bit more time in the discovery and we really map this out with clients, we can create a website that better meets what their actual business goals or objectives are. That helps everyone helps them better gives them better results. And also, I think that this really presents us more as the expert and then the person that they can come to for guidance when they're not sure you know what to do, which is what is ultimately going to allow you to sell larger projects and those sorts of things. So really starting to think about accessibility during discovery questions you need to ask we in our business, do we build websites? Where do we get content first? So we'll talk about accessibility in content with them. And then we have a checklist which we're going to talk about in just a minute about content. Then we go into design, we spend a lot of time looking at accessibility in the designs before anyone is coding anything. We do accessibility checks on our designs, and make our designer change things if we need to. And then during development, you really want your developers your dev team whether that's you or a contractor or an employee who's a developer, but they need to be thinking about accessibility. You can't just wait till the end till you're in testing and say, Okay, now I'm going to run Accessibility Checker, or I'm going to run wave or now I'm going to keyboard things. You want developers to be doing that as part of their own QA. They need to self check themselves while they're building. And ideally, you want it to happen in little bits along the time. Because let's say they need to build. i We just launched a website that had three uniquely styled tab sections our developers had when we get out of designing, we're all like, yes, you're gonna build three different tab blocks. They're all gonna look different, but they're all tabs. But because they all need to look and function different or have different content inside of them. You are going to have to build multiple of them and they're different. It's not the same one, it's not reusable. Well, if they're not self checking on the functionality on that first one, when they do that, and let's say they keep going, and they build more and more and more of them, all three of them, then by the end, they've maybe repeated the exact same mistake on all of these blocks. And then they have to go back and fix all of the box. But if they spend time, the first time they make tabs, say going and just saying, Can I do this with my keyboard? And they know this isn't keyboard focusable I can't get the tab to open without using a mouse, then they can fix that one. And then they can build the new ones in the better fixed way. Right. So there's a lot of sort of training and building up of your team, especially your dev team. So that they're starting from a better place and and they're not waiting all the way into the end. And then of course, during testing and debug there's a lot of accessibility, thinking about and happening and and checking for if you have clients where there is the budget for user testing, and doing additional remediation based on user testing, I highly recommend it. Even all of our clients don't have the budget for user testing. So it just sort of depends.\r\n\r\nBut bringing in real users of assistive tech technology, particularly people who are blind is going to give you a really good picture of how they might move through the website or solves particular problems. You can't substitute user testing for whatever sort of accessibility specialists or detailed accessibility testing that you do during testing and debug because a blind person isn't going to hear the things they don't hear. So you still need a sighted accessibility specialist to go through and really audit everything, even if you include user testing, but user testing is great. It they'll catch other things that are not necessarily accessibility problems, but are actually just usability problems. So you know, like, the wording on a link made no sense to them, and they never would have thought to follow that link to go find XYZ, right. And so then you go back and you're like, hey, maybe you should rename this thing to your client. So that's very helpful. And then you're launching and then hopefully, you're providing some sort of training to your clients on an ongoing basis if they're maintaining some content on the website, publishing blog posts or whatever that might be and then providing support to them on an ongoing basis. And of course, accessibility can all be rolled into that as well. So let's talk about branding and colors and I might pull some other stuff over since Tanya asked for it and it seems like we'll have enough time\r\n\r\na big thing.\r\n\r\nA big piece of color contrast is having the right color selections. I love to use this tool, this contrast grid tool that I have linked on the sides with all of our clients. When they come in and they have brand colors. We put them in the colors that you're seeing right now on the before. These are from my personal blog, which I just decided last week, and I was like I'm so sick of how bad this website is. And I've known it's bad. Like I'm gonna go fix it. And I had over 688 Different color conscious errors, which is not as bad as it could have been. I've seen way worse on client websites. But I had a lot and and so and I was like this is weird because I thought I really had thought about my colors. And my color scenes was I had a white and I had sort of what I call a dusty purple. It's like a grayish purple that I was using as a background. And I have a dark purple and then I had almost black which is mostly what I use for text. The dark purple was backgrounds and then I had this kind of like hot pink color. And I was using the hot pink for links. It works fine on the white it past double A it only did double 18 which means large size. There in the color contrast guidelines. There's normal text size, passing and large text size passing. We never on client websites allow colors that only pass for large types. Because just because it's large s on desktop does not mean it's large checks on mobile. So we will only pass it if it's straight double A I usually normally Ignore double 80 So my links were not great on the light gray as you can see here they don't work. If they are put on the dark purple or the dark black and that's where all my color contrasts were coming in. And it wasn't as obvious to me because I think I actually had the link set to white on those dark purple but the hover color was the pink and the hover colors has to pass color contrast to so I looked at this of course it's my wife's and I don't have to talk to anybody and I just said okay, how do I fix this? I ended up making my hot pink a little bit darker. Only a tiny bit it's it's partly noticeable if you put those two colors together. This allowed it to pass double A on the dusty purple background. It also made it AAA on the white which is great because Mark was talking about if we can make it past AAA let's make it past AAA and then I ended up going and adding another light color that past AAA on that dark purple and on the black so that I could get rid of the color contrast errors for clients. There's a couple of different ways that you can handle this. Let me just pull over a few things so we can see a little more real world. So this particular website and I'm showing you a figma file right now. Just a part of it. The client came in and their brand colors were this like lighter green. Kind of I don't know not quite limy but a bright green and the purple. And then they had some black and some grays that they were using in different places. They had this light green with white text on it and it doesn't pass but it does pass just fine with black text. So some of the ways that we handle this is well your buttons if you want it to be that light green, they have to have black text and then they contrast. I don't think this is as readable as I would love it to be it's only a double a pass. I'd rather have a triple A but this was a compromise that they were willing to make. The other thing that we did, because there were some instances and let me see if I can find one real quick.\r\n\r\nYep, all right.\r\n\r\nSo\r\n\r\nif we go over to aren't just on their homepage, for example, the categories above their blog posts are green text. Well, we remember that that light green does not pass on white, so we couldn't use it. But we didn't they didn't want it just to be black. So what we did happening was we created a second shade of green that we call WIC ag green that's that's the color that we name it. It is a little bit it's it noticeably darker when you put the two right next to each other in a big square. But on the homepage. The difference between this we can green right here and this green button right down here. You can barely tell it looks pretty much the same. I think most people wouldn't know they're different. But this one is darker enough that it passes color contrast on there. So this is an example of how we handled that with the client, where we came up with how can we have something that fully passes for everything. And other times we will straight up eliminate or we will modify more of the colors. So this is one that I don't have a figma file for yet because I'm just working on it. This client has a literal rainbow of colors. And the biggest challenge was so and this is so I will say something this is a nonprofit that works with K 12 schools. One of their biggest clients was the LA school district's Los Angeles school districts in California. And they lost the contract this year. Because the LA school district says we cannot purchase anything that is inaccessible. And because their website was not accessible. They lost the contract with La school districts and it was huge and I mean it sucks for them. I feel bad for them. But we're working on fixing that right. But they had body text that was gray. And it doesn't really pass on white or light gray or the light blue backgrounds that were they're using. They have a they have almost all these colors. So for example the yellow, the turquoise, the light blue, they're using all those as literal text colors on white. So it's very hard to read. So what we did is, you know, we had a combination, a conversation about this, there's a couple of other ones to where there's a light red and a red. And we're like okay, what can we do that still gives them this rainbow but helps them to have better color contrast. So so what we did was well hey, you already have this dark gray all your body tech should be dark gray, AAA passing on all the backgrounds you have that is an easy and a no brainer fix for me. And they didn't really argue about that. This, this turquoise. We eliminated it. It's not that different from the blue green. To be totally honest. I feel like the person who built the website maybe wasn't paying enough attention to the color codes or they use like a hex selector and that's why it's like slightly different because they don't you know again, like they look really they look different when they're right next to each other like this, but when you put them on places you think they're the same. So we're gonna get rid of the turquoise that doesn't work on either lighter blue, and then that other light blue, we're going to lighten it up a little more so that it AAA passes with the dark gray. Then the other change that we made was the down here with the reds. So we have a light red that doesn't pass with anything and we have a red, the straight red that doesn't pass with anything. So we make the light red lighter so that it will pass with the dark gray and we make the red red, darker so that it will pass with our light colors and it is a little bit different but the overall feel of it is not definitively different. And it will work. It will have the same feel and that is a big thing that you have to have common because at first they were like, oh I don't know like the we can't change our colors and we're like well first of all, do you want to lose contracts from school? Right? Like if you have those kinds of things, it is helpful. But also it's like like showing them things like I showed with that figma file. It's like yeah, they look really different here. But look at these two greens on the figma file. Could you tell the difference now you probably can't without inspecting them. Like these kinds of changes are not totally they're not as obvious as we think they are when we see them on a color palette. So sometimes you just have to kind of like talk clients through it and then you say things like, Okay, how about if we design with this and then once you see the design if we need to make more adjustments to the colors, we will but at least we're starting with combinations that we know work. And usually they'll say, okay, um, but I think it's just a matter of figuring out you know, how to have those conversations with the clients. And do that because this really if you start with a bad color palette, it's gonna You can't overcome that and it's not the developers fault. So some other things I mentioned that we do, design review before we hand off design so beyond color contrast, so I will always go through we use figma I just before I even show them to clients. This is really important. You always need to do this before you show it to the client because it really kind of sucks to have a client get attached to something and then you'd be like, Oh, nevermind, we can't do it like that. Oh, I also recommend on that note, if you're doing designs before you build, and you have a separate designer, from a developer, have your developer look at it, because sometimes our developers will look at stuff and be like, I could do that. But it's going to take all this extra time and if you're using a contract developer or whatever right, like you're trying to maximize your profits, like sometimes you need to rein in the designer so they have some really great ideas that aren't necessarily going to make or break a website and it can be better to just check them first. So so we'll do a past and we also recommend will have our designers designed for multiple screen sizes, devices orientations. Sometimes they are designing everything for like an entire page and I can go back later if anyone's interested like through that figma file. Sometimes they're just doing like this one section like oh, they this one section. Here's how it needs look on mobile. That is important because a lot of people are going to engage with the website on mobile. You want to make sure that it's going to work you want to make sure like we were talking about tab target sizes that the buttons are actually big enough not too squished together otherwise you know, some of us that have bigger thumbs might have a hard time hitting them, that kind of stuff. Designing hover focus and error states is really important. Now, we only sometimes design error states we use the gravity forms plugin and I'm much prefer to just do like default error states out of Gravity Forms but occasionally we'll have clients that really want like, oh, I want my errors to look like this. So then we will actually design them first and not just use out of the box Gravity Forms. But having like what the hover is supposed to look like what the focus is supposed to look like, especially if it's a unique element that's just not going to have a unique a specific border. We need the focus to go around the entire card. When you tab to a blog post not just go to the image and then go here like it's really helpful to have a designer design those things out so that when you hand it off to a developer, you're going to get better results because they're going to have really specific this is how this has to look and yes, it has to look different and there the links have an underline but when you hover over them, the underline is going to go away randomly those sorts of things. Another thing is always making sure during design that all fields have visible labels, and clear text required indicators if something is a required field. Don't just use placeholder text. This comes in and design a lot of times designers design fields. Maybe it's only an underline and what looks like a placeholder text. That's really hard. It's not super great. And there's a hilarious video that I could find and share with you all about fields. But I can't remember what it's called right off the top of my mind. I might be able to find it while we're doing q&a. But really thinking about that and like how do your fields look in the design? Because a lot of developers they follow instructions so you want to give them good instructions, not instructions that they're just gonna have to go back and undo later. Avoid designing any text that cannot be styled with CSS also, we really do not do the sentences that have multiple colors in them. Or I've even seen websites where each letter of a word is a different color. The only way that can be achieved is with spans you put a span around each letter in the word well when you do that a screen reader is no longer gonna read it like one word, it's going to read each thing separately. So So really thinking about how you're designing texts so that it will sound good to a screen reader.\r\n\r\nIn your designs, you want to use sentence case don't do all caps headings. These can read out really weird for screen readers, underlining any links in paragraphs or if you have a link that somewhere else on its own. Maybe it has an arrow next to it or like a carrot pointing right or some other way to differentiate that it is a link. What's really important is that you don't in your designs use color alone to convey information. So if something is interactive, it can't just be that the color is different. Because what if someone is colorblind and they can't see the difference between that and the text that's right next to it, they would never know there's links there. And then the other thing is keeping the navigation really consistent throughout the site.\r\n\r\nWe may have just lost Amber\r\n\r\nare you folks seeing me? Yes. Okay.\r\n\r\nWe'll give it just a minute here. Hopefully she'll be able to reconnect and pop back in. You really don't want me talking about accessibility. There she went. Okay, so some Wi Fi issues happening there. I will just kinda AWS and chat for a minute let's see. What would y'all like to talk about? Yeah, right. I can't remember the last time this has happened.\r\n\r\nOh, that's Yep. All for the when Amber. No longer accessible.\r\n\r\nSo yes, Phoebe, there are screen readers. Matter of fact in the first the first time we had amber with us about a year and a half ago, she actually demonstrated one of those. If you're on a Mac, it's built into the operating system actually.\r\n\r\nYeah, interesting.\r\n\r\nSo hopefully Amber will get reconnected and bumped back in.\r\n\r\nYes, thank you, Paul. It\r\n\r\nis under Accessibility and the System Preferences the way it the way it\r\n\r\nOh, no problem. What\r\n\r\nhappened? I just switched to a hotspot give me one sec. I will reshare I apologize. No\r\n\r\nproblem. Paul had the great comment that you became inaccessible. There you go. I\r\n\r\ntotally did.\r\n\r\nWhat we'll get the screenshare back up here in just a second everybody and we'll dive right back in.\r\n\r\nYeah. All right.\r\n\r\nLet's think where did that except for where did that window go? There we go. All right. You can see it\r\n\r\nYes. All right. Okay, um,\r\n\r\nI'm just gonna start at the top on content accessibility. Right. Okay. All right. So when we do our content requests with clients, we spend a bunch of time talking to them about how we want content to be formatted. This is pre training for how they're going to have to maintain the website. So and I know some of you may do all of the content editing yourself, so maybe you don't have to do that as much. But a lot of times, we're building websites, we're handing them off to clients. We're only doing dev work afterwards. And they're like writing all their own blog posts. And editing pages and that kind of stuff. But regardless of whether you're doing it internally or you're teaching your clients to give you the content in this way, what we're looking for in in content is that headings are present. They're using a proper order, like we have clients give us headings in we use slick plan, but even if you use the Google doc they can choose a heading level and we're all like you need to give us the heading level that you expect. It needs to make sense in outline format. Link anchor text is meaningful. Don't link the word here, click here, learn more and needs to tell where you're going. If you have to say about what to know what the link is, is four than that means it doesn't have a good anchor alt text for images you need to think about this in your projects. Are you spending time running on old texts? You asking the client to read the alt text or provide the alt text with the photos that they give you? Again, that can impact how you're pricing things. content should be formatted and list this is another thing with reading level. It doesn't always have to be paragraphs right. Can you have some sentences broken out into bulleted lists instead or numbered lists those sorts of things. If we're looking for tabular data, it needs to be in top in tables. We need to know what the headings for each table need to be. We need to have if someone wants to show a graph, we were talking about information transforming. Maybe it's a screenshot of a graph, so an image but then what would be great is we're going to stay at the client. Okay, great. We're gonna put that on this page. We also need you to get bogged down with all that data in a table as well because we're gonna put the table right below it, maybe it's gonna be an accordion. So it's squished, and it doesn't take up too much space on the page, but someone who needs that in a tabular format could expand the accordion access the information in the table so they have the same information that someone has when they can see the graph. So that's really important. And then providing captions so all videos have to have captions on them. Need to have transcripts, both for videos Yes. For videos, even caption videos need transcripts. This is because deaf blind people cannot access captions. You need to have transcripts for them so that that can transform into refreshable braille for them to read in Braille. And then of course, you have to have transcripts for podcasts and, and the other benefit of transcripts when clients say something about this is I'm like transcripts help your SEO, help your SEO a lot. And then you we talked about reading level already. So there are a ton more things I have a six page checklist. If you want this you can just email me I'm Amber at equalise digital.com I'll send it to you but we're limited in time so I can't dive into it. But that's kind of a high level of things I'm thinking about before we start building. Now I want to talk real quick about choosing tools carefully choosing the right theme is really important. You don't have to build custom themes. There are some good themes out there that exist. I know at solid Kadence has been putting some effort into there's there's free themes. I actually have a screenshot up here that says fixing 1000s of accessibility errors and three days without writing any code. This is a before and after of accessibility checker reports on my blog when I mentioned that I decided to do that the other day. All I did was I removed the theme I bought off ThemeForest and I know you all are like Amber Why do you buy a theme off the enforce it was a long time ago I promise. And I replaced it with 2020 for like the free standard WordPress thing. I don't think it looks that bad. It's not like super designed but also I didn't have a designer or developer working on it. I did it myself. And that removed almost 3000 accessibility problems. And then also I fix my colors, right. So the theme you choose to really impact things. The theme and curl controls whether or not you have skip links. It controls how accessible the navigation is. HTML landmarks that may or may not exist on the page. So this is things like is your main content in a HTML main tag like mine on my my website until I did this? It wasn't it was just all in a div and there was no like header tag main footer, like none of those existed. Those are really important for accessibility. And the theme decides that I'm in forums This was another thing on my website, the theme developer when I went and looked at the code actually, they even put a note that it's like removing the labels from the fields for a slimmer design. They had literally removed the labels from the name and the email address on the comment form on blog posts. So like they had intentionally broken that because I guess they didn't know about accessibility, right? But or like read more links on your archive pages is all controlled by the theme. So if you choose the right theme that can help you the wrong theme can add 1000s of problems. It has a lot of work to remediate. So how do you choose look for accessibility ready themes? So if they have the accessibility ready tag on wordpress.org, that is helpful. If you're not choosing one off of wordpress.org and you're choosing a premium theme, or a plugin, more talking about that I would check documentation for accessibility, contact the developer to ask if they've included accessibility features. They have a lot of documentation about accessibility or how to use their plug inaccessibly or their theme excessively. That is a good sign. If they don't have any that doesn't necessarily mean that it's going to have accessibility problems, but but it also might mean that they haven't thought about accessibility. Another really good way to tell if a plugin or theme is going to add accessibility problems is you can go look in the WordPress support forums or on their GitHub repos if they have a public GitHub repo for reported accessibility issues. So I would either search just accessibility in those places, or a 11 y which is the abbreviation for accessibility, which I've included on one of these lines because I was trying to keep it there in those places and that will pull up if any old tickets or support threads that were started about related to accessibility and read how they respond. Did they solve the problem to take them a long time to solve it? Did they I mean, I've seen things we've put in developers like yeah, I'm not going to do that. And they've literally written that. Sorry, I don't have time to do this, or this doesn't impact my users or you know, like, then you know, okay, they don't care. So even if I find something in this, they're unlikely to fix it. So that's another thing that I would recommend. And then really, you need to test it for problems and we'll talk more about testing tomorrow and how to do that. But you can either test their plugin or theme demo page for problems, or you can install and try on a clean install. The biggest downside of testing it on their demo site is that you have to separate the problems on their website, with the more in their demo content from the problems that their tool is actually going to add to the website you're building. So for example, a lot of these they don't have a focused indicator. An outline so far removed tabs through it, I can't tell where I am. But most of the time that comes out of the theme. So I don't I'm not really worried if a plug in doesn't have it. But if I would just win their demo site. I would be like, oh, you know, this is a problem except it's not I'll just ignore it. Because it doesn't matter on the on the plug in that I'm going to use or not because I know my theme is going to add that so you sort of as you start learning more about testing, you realize what are things you can ignore while you're testing on plug in demo. Otherwise, I'd say go test it on like 2024 Because you know, 2024 doesn't have those accessibility issues. And then you get more of a clean instance of that plugin to see and then of course using caution with any third party code. So any embeds need to be tested just as you would test a plugin? Things that you want to pay extra attention to are embedded legal documents or cookie notices. So I didn't talk about this in the laws but one of the things to keep in mind and I have seen instances of this where any unit United States where a person who was disabled, was able to get out of a contract because it was proven that and that they literally it was inaccessible. To them and they had no way of accepting the terms of that contract, or the terms of service on that website. And so therefore, the court said, no, this doesn't apply to them. So if you have a customer who needs a cookie notice or needs an or like is embedding privacy. policies or Terms of Service from like a third party like an IU vendor or something like that. You need to make sure that those things are accessible because otherwise it's possible that they're not complying with the privacy laws that they have to comply with. I'd reconsider or think very carefully about any sticky elements in the making sure test those like live chat is a big one. There are some that are accessible. There are a lot that are just complete\r\n\r\ngarbage code.\r\n\r\nAnd they don't work for anyone who can't use mouse. I would also be aware of anything that's guaranteeing and instant accessibility or quick fixes. It's not super possible, to be honest, unfortunately. Unless the quick fix is change your theme force theme to 2020. For that it\r\n\r\nis quick fix. But yeah.\r\n\r\nSo the other thing is if you're trying to assess tools as you can ask them for either an accessibility conformance report or a V Pat. So a V Pat is the abbreviation for Voluntary Product Accessibility Template. It is a free tool that can be used to create a standardized accessibility conformance report or an ACR. I recommend asking vendors if they have a VPAT or an ACR if you are building websites for government or higher ed or K 12. You need to tell your clients that they have to do this and this includes WordPress plugins. Technically they are not allowed to purchase inaccessible it and a lot of times they are required to have a VPAT on file from the vendor. So you should be asking other WordPress plugin developers for these. It's something that I think is going to come up increasingly and hopefully more of them will be creating them and any third party tools. So if you have someone that that's like, oh, we use this registration platform, or we have this platform that volunteers go and pick their volunteer shifts on, you need to tell your client that they need to ask they should be asking those platforms those questions because that will come up and and could be included in a lawsuit. I have a link on the slide if you want to see an example of what a V pad looks like for our equalized Digital Accessibility Checker plugin. If you want to learn more about it, or you can go see that template as well. So tomorrow, we're gonna talk about deep dive on testing and the business side of accessibility sales pricing contracts, but I think we have time for questions. So what questions can I answer?\r\n\r\nYes, yes. All right. This was great. Again, of course, excellent overview of all these things and great foundation for what we're going tomorrow. So several questions here in the q&a. Folks, if you have not opened up the q&a do that. Take a look about the questions you want to have answered. And we will start with Paul. Amber's good. This is going back to the last hour when we were talking about the accessibility statement template that the free plugin require gives you the free Accessibility Checker plugin. Does the premium Accessibility Checker plugin give a better template than the free one?\r\n\r\nNo, it's the same. There you go.\r\n\r\nAll right. Manu would like to know is so I think what he's asking is when we talk about a website passes a certain level of accessibility, you know, W CAG, whatever, double a triple A. Is there an entity that has to grant that certification? Can a website be certified this talk\r\n\r\nabout how that works?\r\n\r\nYeah, so a so the accessibility conformance report. There isn't there's an AI certification. However, what is helpful and I'll pull this up real quick. You can create a V Pat for a website. And we have done this before when we've had clients that were like we really need to prove that we've done it. And at a high level. What a VPAT looks like is it has tables for each success criteria. And you choose your level and there's international forms. So like there's an EU wide member who mentioned some EU laws actually have extra requirements beyond WCAG. But this for example, it says non text content. So that's specific criteria. And you can basically say it supports it partially supports, it does not support or it's not applicable and then you put notes about each thing. And so this is something that if you build this in like you'd either bring in a contractor to do this, if you have clients that need them, you could learn WCAG and you could be creating these kinds of reports and selling them to your clients as well. I don't see them a lot for websites, but they can be made for websites and we have done them for websites. But there that's probably the closest to a certification or an officially recognized document that you would have to prove a website is accessible I would say the other big thing just in general that you want to do as a developer is make sure you're just documenting what you're testing in debug practices are and that you have screenshots particularly at time of launch. So you know if you know I launched it and there were no problems on the homepage in the accessibility checker, you could screenshot that. And then you'd have the time and you know the time stamp on your browser maybe or whatever that might be, and that can help to protect you if that's a concern.\r\n\r\nYeah, and there's an important point here, and that's that there's not you don't go to WIC Ag in an office or whatever and submit your website for certification and some board from on high stamp set as certified right. And yeah, it's also important to think about it this way that okay, we're 2.2 compliant. Today at this moment. That doesn't mean that 10 seconds from now, somebody doesn't log in and add an image without alt text or something like that, right.\r\n\r\nYeah. But the other thing too, is that one, what's a little weird about WCAG? Is it is technically all or nothing, but there is definitely shades right so it's like okay, we have all these success criteria except for this one, right like you saw on ours. I had a partially supports for that first one and there isn't right which I don't remember what it says read like, Okay, this is we're done. Here's the one word. And I know I've now logged the GitHub issue. But I think yeah, it's really about, you know, accessibility is a journey for a lot of websites and website owners. And, and it's an it's an ongoing practice to just like SEO isn't really you don't say, Okay, we started to optimize a website. We're done now. Right? Like accessibility is sort of the same thing. Changing websites, plugins, get updates, content, gets added content gets edited. You need to be monitoring it and just keeping that kind of stuff in mind. Yeah, interesting.\r\n\r\nOkay, question from Tanya, how important is punctuation especially in alt text? I forget periods and alt text and alt tags for some reason.\r\n\r\nPunctuation is actually really important. Blind people can tell if you have left off a comma or a period, because there's no pauses sometimes with alt tags if there's not a period at the end, it'll pause anyway because it's ended the image. But it is best practice to have periods even in alt text.\r\n\r\nIt is bad practice\r\n\r\nit no it is best practice. Best practice. Got it. Okay. Yes. Okay, here's an interesting question from Doug. Doug says I used to see more websites with a little icon at the top to increase or decrease font sizes, is allowing users to adjust text size colors layout with controls a good idea.\r\n\r\nSo you can do it. I don't see that as much outside of the accessibility overlays.\r\n\r\nBut the biggest\r\n\r\nchallenge with that is that sometimes those tools don't play very nice with users actual assistive technology. Yes, so someone so a thing to think about on this is someone who needs large size font on a website. They probably have their base font size in their browser settings or even their operating system settings much larger and every website they go to they're just zoomed like you can set your default zoom instead of 100% in Chrome or brave or whatever you're using. It's gonna be 200% on every website you go to. And so So that's like one of the complaints about those things or even like high contrast, toggles things like that is that it? There's ways that people are doing this everywhere. And so I don't know. We did put if you go to WP accessibility dot day, we have a light mode, dark mode toggle on that website. Now the thing that's interesting about that website I have it, I'll pull it over real quick. So it's up here at the top. Now, when you go to this website, at first, it actually responds to your Operating System Preference. So if you have set your Mac or your PC to dark mode as your preference you're going to get started the dark mode website. If your light mode is a preference, you'll get the light mode. I get the light mode on my computer and the dark mode on my phone. But we added the toggle. I'd say this toggle is a little bit of a parlor trick and it's kind of fun. I don't think it's necessary. I don't think many people use it. But what is more helpful from an accessibility standpoint is that we recognize that they've said they care about something in their OS preferences, and then we're trying to serve them that and so that's the thing to think about when you're designing. There is actually a third color mode here which is high contrast which we don't have a toggle to turn on. But if you had your OS set to high contrast, it would serve you a high contrast version of the website.\r\n\r\nThat is just super cool. And\r\n\r\njust to check the the replays for all of the the accessibility accessibility they talks are there on that website right now\r\n\r\nnot the worst happens to be on the 2024 website. But if you go to the main WP accessibility day and you know maybe it's not going to load for me because I'm on a mobile hotspot right now. But if you if you go there, then you can go to the events or events page and you can find all of the past events and all of the recordings from those and they're all free and public.\r\n\r\nYeah, very good. So if you want to folks if you want to dig more into accessibility just a load of great speakers on all of those events. Okay, Stacy quiet has a question here and we'll we'll wrap up after this one. Regarding link anchor text when writing a post. It's easy to make meaningful text. But how do you handle things like a blog archive, which has a snippet of the post and then like a Read More link?\r\n\r\nYeah, so\r\n\r\nthe best way to do those ideally is what we call like a card style where you have a single link that wraps around everything like the image and the date and like everything, so they could click anywhere. And then you usually have an ARIA label that includes just like the post title or whatever important thing they might need on the links. So it's not quite as noisy for screen reader user. If you have a read more link, then you just want to make sure that there's the urine ARIA label on it or hidden screen reader text so that it might visually look like just read more to a sighted person, but a screen reader user read more about Amber, that sort of thing. So there are ways to put more context on links for because that's an important like passing criteria. screenreader users are not always going to hear all of the links or all the things next to a link. They might just open a list of all the links on the page if they're looking for something specific. And so that's why you really need to have those meaning. Typically, that's going to come from your theme or if you're using a block plugin or a page builder that like creates like a loop of posts. It's gonna do those so that is less like, Li unless you're coding them custom. It's probably something that's being controlled by the theme or plugin developer. And so you would want to just test for those when you're selecting what tools to use. Yeah,\r\n\r\ngreat answer.\r\n\r\nAll right, this has been great. Amber, thank you so much, again, for your expertise today. Give us just a quick preview of what's coming tomorrow. Yep,\r\n\r\nso again, we're gonna talk about contract sales language. We're gonna of course talk about testing. I'm gonna show testing provide like some things that I look for when I'm looking at a website. We'll talk about, you know, how you could maybe scale to include this in your team or not.\r\n\r\nYeah, very good.\r\n\r\nSo lots of thank yous in the chat for you there. I'm dropping, dropping once again, the link bundle if anybody wants to quick download the slides. We'll have the replays up in about an hour or so. And we'll see everybody back here tomorrow. 1pm Central Time for day two of the WordPress accessibility Crash Course. Thanks again. Amber. We'll see you back here tomorrow and I iThemes Training. Know on solid Academy. We go further together.\r\n\r\nYeah. Can I just say yeah, it was questions that didn't get answered. If you message me on Twitter or LinkedIn, or I gave my email address before. I'm happy to answer them too. Yes.\r\n\r\nSo perfect. Thanks, Amber. We'll see everybody tomorrow. Have a great night. Bye.\r\n\r\nAnd I'm going to drop in today's link bundle in the chat. So there you can begin to download the slides if you'd like to follow along and have those links to click those are waiting on you there in the chat again, if you're just joining us, sorry, we hit some technical issues. It took us a few extra minutes to get started today.\r\n\r\nWe will get going here momentarily.\r\n\r\nHe says a bunch of sites are down around the world. Oh, awesome.\r\n\r\nYeah.\r\n\r\nWeird. Mystery. Yes. Yes.\r\n\r\nWow, how about that? Thank you for that CD.\r\n\r\nSomehow good. Okay. There was a slight conversation going on. So yes, it wasn't just you it was It wasn't you? It was me. So I will give this another 30 seconds or so for folks to come on in. Welcome. We're just about to get started with the day two of accessibility crash course if you're just joining us in zoom, open up the chat. You'll find today's slides and the other links there waiting on you. And we will dive in here in just a moment. Yes, I blame it on me. I broke the internet. 100% I wish I was that smart.\r\n\r\nPaul WP Nathan has just broken. It's just constantly broken. Yeah.\r\n\r\nAll right. All right. Okay, well, let's go and get started. I'm gonna start the recording and we'll dive right in.\r\n\r\nWelcome back to day two of the accessibility crash course here on solid Academy. My name is Nathan Ingram. I'm the host here at solid Academy joined again by Amber Hines from equalised digital. Welcome back. Amber, how are you today? I'm doing pretty well. Good to be here. Excellent. So I see several folks just popping in now. So yes, we were a few minutes late getting started today with some technical issues with Zoom and audio sharing and other things but we'll jump off that bridge when we come to it. So Amber, we have a lot to talk about today. Give us an overview of where we're heading here in the first hour. Yeah, so in the first hour, we are going to be talking about screen reader testing. Automated testing, keyboard testing, and everything about finding accessibility issues. Yeah, very good. So same framework as yesterday, folks, use the zoom q&a to ask your questions. We'll take a break roughly in the middle of our time today. And we'll have a time of q&a just before the break and then at the q&a right at the end so because we're already getting a little few minutes late here I'm gonna go and disappear and Amber, let's get going. Okay.\r\n\r\nAll right. So what we're gonna be talking about today is the website testing process.\r\n\r\nBasically, at a high level, what this looks like and how we handle testing for accessibility problems as we start by running an automated book scanning tool, so you can use our accessibility checker plugin. There are other options for these as well. And we'll talk about some single page browser extensions that are also super helpful that are totally free as well. But we'll do a bulk scan and that enables us to get a picture of what problems exist everywhere and what we can fix easily and we'll fix all of those I mentioned yesterday. When we were talking about developers and the development phase that you really want your developers to be using some of these tools. So definitely training that is really helpful. Then once we think okay, we fixed all the really obvious automated, identify identifiable issues, then we will do manual testing. manual testing is done with a keyboard only with a screen reader with the website zoomed in 204 100% And then once we resolve all the issues with from our manual testing, then as a bonus if the project allows or the client has budget for it, that would be when you would bring in screen reader users or other users with disabilities for user testing to confirm accessibility.\r\n\r\nYou don't really want to do you know that user testing until you have a website that you think is pretty close to accessible because they won't necessarily catch everything or there might be things about the user journey that hang up that hang them up that you want feedback on that aren't necessarily literal accessibility problems, as I mentioned yesterday, so what I'm going to do is start by talking about some automated testing tools. I'll talk about keyboard testing. I'm going to be going back and forth from my slides to a couple of different sites to show some things off.\r\n\r\nSo why don't we start with the automated tools. First of all, it can speed up identification of many problems in bulk, and it can rapidly provide a full site assessment and a picture of what needs to be fixed across an entire website. The other thing is, it can really save time, so you don't need a human being to tell you these images on these 100 pages are missing alternative text, or these are all the links on a site that are using the words click here instead of something meaningful. That's really easy for an automated testing tool to find. And it can provide a list that you can then work through to solve the problems. And obviously anything that is faster that speeds up that means saved cost. So automated tools are very helpful in helping you maximize your profitability, and also allowing people who maybe aren't quite as experienced with testing to find some problems and then go ahead and fix them themselves.\r\n\r\nSo what I'm going to talk about and show is our accessibility checker plugin which works on WordPress websites. It adds accessibility scanning and reports into the post and page edit screen at the free level. You can do unlimited posts and pages. If you have a client website that is just posts and pages. You could use just a free plugin on it and there's no limits. It's not like it'll only do 10 pages or something it if it was a 1000 page website, it would do all 1000 pages.\r\n\r\nAnd one of the reasons why we recommend not just testing with it, but keeping it on on an ongoing basis is as I mentioned yesterday, things change that kind of stuff. But one of the things that's really important about having that report right there in the editor, if you have whether you have your own content specialist at your company, or whether you're handing it off to a client who's doing their own content is is going to put that report there in front of them. It's going to help make it really obvious that this is something that they need to look at and work on just like you would with an SEO plugin right. It can help reinforce that this is something that needs to be done on an ongoing basis.\r\n\r\nSo let's take a look real quick at what this looks like inside of a WordPress website. I'm going to use my own site.\r\n\r\nMy personal blog, which I mentioned, I just decided I needed to rebuild it. I need to remediate it. So in the free plugin, if I were to go over to Pages, or posts, that's where I'm gonna get my information. In the Pro Plug in. There are some columns where I can sort of see like there are some issues that might exist, those sorts of things.\r\n\r\nThe columns aren't in the free plugin, but if I go in, I'm going to see my content this one happens to be built in the block editor and and then a report down below. I might have a report save so I have an error message on this particular one. And just some the details and I can see the different rules that may or may not have passed. Let me pull over actually because I realized I want to actually edit something so I'm gonna pop over. This is another site. This one happens to be fake. We'll go back to my site in just a minute.\r\n\r\nThis site has where's the homepage.\r\n\r\nI'll give you a quick view of it actually. And then we'll edit it also.\r\n\r\nIf you tuned in, I did a I'll pop a link here and maybe Nathan can pass it on.\r\n\r\nI did this for a talk. It's built with Kadence this is just how it looks. I have a couple of different sections because I was trying to show examples of not good and bad. And there is definitely a video of this that you could go find that would be very helpful if you want to dive in more.\r\n\r\nBut one of the common things that we could see and we'd want to fix as we're working i i would sort of recommend doing maybe section by section or you can do the whole entire page.\r\n\r\nBut we could look at on this for example if I go to ambiguous anchor text, these arrows right here, if I'm not sure where they are, I can click and it's going to show me this is the particular element. So you know on the back end it's it's a code snippet that's not super helpful for your content specialists necessarily how to find it. But this is going to show me right here on the front end. Okay, this is where this thing is. So if I were to want to fix this and I can see if I go through these right there's three of them.\r\n\r\nOn my page, I can find that same section. Now there's a couple of different ways you'd fix these. Depending on how you're built. It's going to be really different. This happens to be a Kadence button block, which has this really handy thing under Advanced where I can set an ARIA label. So I could say instead of read more, which is really generic, I could say read more about project planning, or whatever length this goes to write.\r\n\r\nDo the same thing on this one. If you aren't using Kadence there are other ways that you can do this. There's a really great plugin that I love called screen reader text format, which allows you it works with like the core buttons if you're using core button blocks.\r\n\r\nRead more about interior work, we're just gonna do two.\r\n\r\nSo I think I fixed this the way the plugin scans is I just hit update and that should trigger it to rescan if my page will save, there we go.\r\n\r\nAnd now if I were to go in there, I only actually have one of these left because we fixed two of them. So you can use a testing tool like this to get a picture of a lot of different problems that might exist on your website, on an individual page by page basis, if you want to do bulk scanning so our pro plugin will go out and crawl all the webs that all the pages on a website which is normally what we would do. If we were bringing on a remediation client we want to like scan everything they have the Pro plugin we tell it to run through and scan all the pages and then it comes back with this and it tells us what all the problems are now my website before I switched away from that ThemeForest theme that I was using was way worse than this. Now I can see that the biggest problems I have is that I have low quality or empty alternative text. I have missing sub headings, or maybe some duplicate alternative text. I'm linking to some PDFs. So these sorts of things. And what's helpful about this, like even this missing table header, oh, I know tables need to have headers.\r\n\r\nI can go here and this if I click on the report, it'll take me in and it'll tell me exactly what the post is. So this particular Saturday surfing post.\r\n\r\nAnd again, I could edit to go there I can view on the front end and it would take me to that post and it didn't particularly find that one so that was not a great example.\r\n\r\nYou know it's possible sometimes I might not have one run another reskin since I deleted that one, but But anyway, so the idea being that if you use an automated tool, right, it can take you over and it can help you find things throughout the whole site without you having to be a human being going and testing all of those things. So the other option is there are browser based extensions that you can install. The one that is most well known is wav. I use it all the time.\r\n\r\nI tend I use it in combination with our plugins sometimes on our websites, but I also use it on other websites when I just want to get a peek and I want to assess them.\r\n\r\nThe other thing that is useful to know about WAV is that most of the lawsuits mentioned errors in wav, so it's what law firms use. So even if you're using ours or like lax, which is another browser extension that I have listed here, which also has free and it has a pro version that can guide you through some of the manual testing you have to do even if you're using like our plugin or you're using apps or you're using both. You should probably also just take a peek and wave at websites that you launched because it is ones that we know they use. Lighthouse is another browser based tools that people might be familiar with because we check PageSpeed and stuff with it. I would generally not recommend using it for doing the accessibility tests. It's so limited. I think in the blog post where I wrote about redoing my thing I had a screenshot from my Google PageSpeed because I also mentioned Oh as a bonus is improved my page speed. And the accessibility score was like almost perfect, even though what accessibility checker found what wave found was way worse than that. So you need to I would not really rely on lighthouse.\r\n\r\nAnd then there's two other extensions, the headings map extension and the tablet extension. What I want to do is I want to jump over to the city of Georgetown texas.org website.\r\n\r\nThis is a WordPress website. This is my city's website. And as we are about to find out, it is not an accessible website. So I'm going to just show you real quick a couple of the browser extensions that I mentioned and then we'll talk about keyboard testing and we'll do some keyboard testing on this website. So wav was the one I mentioned. You can install it if you just go to wave doubt web aim.org, which it looks like TONYAN through in the chat there and you run it, it's gonna give you a overview on the left errors contrast errors, alerts. That's the same thing. Like we have warnings they have alerts. And so similar sort of idea. Most of the checks overlap we have a few checks that are pretty WordPress specific. You can see on this website, there's contrast problems so like the text isn't contrasting sufficiently here.\r\n\r\nThere's if I click on details, we've got some forms that are missing labels. So I normally when you click on these, they jump. It's not showing sometimes things are hidden. So in wave, there's this code view that will open the code and if I click it again, then it will show me so it's in this e to him a signup form element, which if I like went back up, I could try and figure out where this is. It's somewhere under like, subscribe to our weekly email, wherever that might be. An h3. It's also possible it might be in a pop up sometimes things like this are a little bit hard but if you've built the website, you can usually look at this and start to recognize Oh, okay, it's in the signup form for that and hey, I have a text input where I'm asking someone for their first name, but there's no label, telling people that that's what this field is about.\r\n\r\nSo this is wave.\r\n\r\nThe other two plugins that I really like one that I use all the time is headings map, sorry, it's a plugins it's an extension brothers and what headings map does is it it gives you a view of all of the headings on the page. And I'm gonna scroll up, we'll talk about that video in just a minute.\r\n\r\nOr scroll down.\r\n\r\nBut basically what we're saying is this page has one heading one, it's City News. I find this a little bit hilarious this right here in the middle third column is there heading one and then it's giving us the heading structure. Now what's interesting about this page is that wave didn't notify us about skipped heading levels. Our plugin wouldn't notify about skipped heading levels either because a skip tending level occurs if we go from like one to four or one to five or whatever, right.\r\n\r\nIt's a lot what's a lot harder to tell. And this is one of those things where it requires human testing is does the heading provide a correct outline format for the website?\r\n\r\nSo this these items being H TOS under City News, I mean, maybe that's fine, but what gets a little weird is this h three special topics. This is technically a sub item of spring arts roll and April arts news.\r\n\r\nFor a screen reader user from a literal what should the format of the website be? No, it is absolutely not a sub item of that but that's the way this is going to sound to a screen reader.\r\n\r\nSame thing with there's another special topics over here which this is also I would call this a failure because we have the same heading but they're for very different elements. And I would tell a content creator you need to rename one of these because I don't know why they're both separate special topics when they do very different things. screenreader users use headings to jump around on a page to understand the content of the page. This is probably one of the biggest fixes you can make that will have a huge impact for users. That requires no coding, right it's like choose the right heading level and use text in your headings that actually makes sense.\r\n\r\nSo so this is this plug in which I find super helpful. And then the other one which is nice is called happily. Tab A 11 Why you turn that on.\r\n\r\nSo what it does is it will allow me I'm just going to use all the default settings. I don't usually change them but you can change them if you want and I'm going to click Run tattly It's going to go down through the content on the page and it's going to mark up the tab stops on the page. So when a keyboard only user engages with the page, one of the way that they'll move down is using their tab key to move around.\r\n\r\nAnd we really want to have our tabs match the order of the page and make sense on the page. And this can be helpful obviously you want to tab it yourself. But what I like about this browser extension is that what I'm seeing right here is the first thing on the left is city of Georgetown, but that's actually tab stop number five, so you can follow the numbers. So the first thing it does is goes to the submit button for the form which is a little odd. Like why would you want to submit button before your form?\r\n\r\nLike you'd have to go backwards reverse order. If you actually entered search, you'd have to go backwards in the tab order in order to be able to submit your search. So it goes here then then it goes to the form. Then we go backwards from right to left through our Nav menu. Then we jump down to the far right pay your bill. Then we go back to the front and we go to number set right so you can see this is definitely not following the tab order on the page. It's going to be really confusing for users.\r\n\r\nAnd And what's nice about this is you can screenshot this and you can hand it to a developer and be like this is wrong.\r\n\r\nHere's a visualization of why it is wrong.\r\n\r\nInstead of you having to write out all the things like you need, you can just give him the screenshot and say tab order needs to be left to right top to bottom and it will save you a lot of time.\r\n\r\nAnd then let me turn it off.\r\n\r\nGo back to where it went.\r\n\r\nSo then once I've run it, I can just hit clear gnome turnips.\r\n\r\nAlright, so those are my browser tools. And I know I'm going a little bit fast, but there's a lot to cover in an hour. So I'm going to talk about keyboard testing now.\r\n\r\nSo we're going to start on the desktop version of the website. We're going to use only our keyboard. Then we're going to zoom in, we're going to use the keyboard again, we're going to check both at 204 100%. There are different WCAG guidelines that specify this. So we want to check both for low vision users. Then we're going to turn on reduced motion on our operating system. I'm on a Mac so I'll show you how to do it on a Mac, but you can google how to do it on a PC. And we want to make sure that the website respects that and that any animations don't play. Then we're going to turn on a screen reader and we're going to use the website.\r\n\r\nSo I'm not I'm going to be talking about these things and going through them. So if you want I'm not going to show them when I talk about it. So if you want to have the PDF open on her screen that might be helpful. But everything in this I will talk about and these are sort of like our checklist point items when we're doing manual testing. So I'm actually going to drag that away so I can see it. Make sure I don't forget something I'm supposed to tell you all.\r\n\r\nAnd we are going to do a little bit of testing here on our Georgetown Texas website. So if I were to come, I'm going to load it. The first thing I'm going to check is is the page title and that's not a visual patient that is literally talking about the page title in the tab accurate. Does it reflect the title of the page? Because this is what's screen readers here when they come so they know if they're on the right page. And on the homepage of a website. I think it's fine for it just to be the name of the website. So in this instance Yes, this is correct. If I went into like one of these other pages like let's say I click Pay my bill Georgetown Customer Portal like that is probably fine. So check. Yep, that's good. They did a good job there. The next thing is I want there to be skipped links on the page and they should be the first focus will element. So what do I mean by skip links? I'm pretty sure we have these on our Kadence website. Let's see real quick here.\r\n\r\nSo if I hit Oh, I refreshed it without this.\r\n\r\nLet me remove that. Okay, so if I hit tab, and I go past the admin bar, I should get a link just like this. It says skip to content. And if I hit the return key because it's a link, it would jump me down and now when I hit tab, my focus is on this button, which is the first focusable element in my main content container. This is good. This is what you want to see.\r\n\r\nBecause we don't want to force people to have to tab through every item in the navigation. In order to get to content on the page. We want them to be able to skip I mean look at how many items are in this navigation. It's a mega menu with what five columns. That's a lot of tabbing we don't want to make people have to do so. So I can just start at the top and I can hit Tab and where did I go I went to this guy right here my Submit button. There are no skip links on this website. So that would fail.\r\n\r\ntab order and following order of the page. We talked about this before this does not work. That's a failure.\r\n\r\nThere's a focus element on on a focus outline on every element. So what am I talking about? I'm talking about this guy right here the outline that's what shows a keyboard only user that they where they are on the page so they can actually use it. You want it to be this was a new 2.2 guideline. We want it to be two pixels solid, not dotted, not one pixel two pixels. Our preferences we don't set the color and we allow the browser to do it. So this purple one on this website, they're doing the same thing. They're not setting the color. Purple is coming from the browser. And why why is that helpful? Because the browsers, most browsers will add a two pixel or two color border so it's white and purple. If you can sort of see that on the orange. You can see the white pops out more. But if we are on the white, then the purple pops out more. This is easier if you define a specific color and then what ends up happening is in your code, you have what you can do if you're building themes, it's it's totally fine, but then you have to say like in this section, it's going to be dark in this section is going to be like you have to reverse it. It's a lot more work. So we've changed to we just allow the browser to set the color and and leave it the way it is. So in order to check this I would say okay, it passes that I normally like it to have a two pixel outline offset, so there's a little bit of space, so I might flag that for a dev. And then I would basically tab through everything and make sure that everything has an outline and if I find one thing on the page anywhere like it could be all fine until you get right here and these guys don't have outlines.\r\n\r\nThen I would just flag that. So that's a manual check.\r\n\r\nThen we want to look at any of the carousels, tabs accordions, any sort of interactive elements and make sure they can be interacted with the keyboard all alone.\r\n\r\nWe'll circle back to that video in just a little bit. But on this page, there are some accordions here under our one of our two special topic headings. So I can jump I could tab all the way there but I also use a shortcut with my mouse sometimes where I'll just select the text that gets me my focus there and then I can hit tab and it will take me to the next item. This is one where the focus outline I would tag is not sufficient because it's a one pixel dotted. Now, these should function like a button. buttons can be clicked with your return key and your spacebar. So I'm going to test with my spacebar first because that's the one people most frequently forget. And it opened so open and close Return key open and closed. So that's good. If I open it, I can go into it. So I would give that a pass that works perfectly. So you do the same thing with tabs. Can you and those should also function like a button not a link links or return keys, buttons or spacebar or return key.\r\n\r\nSo I would go through all of any examples of those and make sure that they work and can be interacted with. Just with my keyboard if there's captions. I don't have an example here. If you use Jetpack, the mask CAPTCHA no longer is sufficient as of wicked 2.2. Can't use that. You can use I mean, you can use some of the captures like the google recaptcha that has people pick things\r\n\r\nis sufficient for double A it's not sufficient for triple A. So if they need triple A then you can't do that.\r\n\r\nIn general, if you can have invisible captures or use a honeypot instead, that's what we try and do on login forms we'll we'll use like solid security and just have them all by factor authentication setup instead, instead of having a CAPTCHA so I try to avoid catches as much as possible.\r\n\r\nSo so this next item on my keyboard testing list is that users can control whether or not to play audio and videos. So I am instantly giving this website a fail. Because there is a video at the top in the banner that cannot be paused. There is a wicked success criterion two dot 2.2 called Pause, Stop hide and the rule there is anything that automatically plays for more than five seconds needs to have a method for the user to stop it. So that could be a video like this. It could be a slider that you have that automatically changes slides. Any animations that are gifts, animated GIFs same thing have to be possible.\r\n\r\nSo that is a failure.\r\n\r\nLet's see we don't have any examples of I'll come back to the zoom in just a second. We don't have any examples of text over background images. So we won't do that here.\r\n\r\nSo I'm going to do my automated testing. I'm going to tab through make sure everything works. I'm going to like spot check some of these other things that we've already talked about and flag them. I am then going to zoom in so I'm just gonna go Command loss on the right browser window. There we go. So I'm going to do 200% first. So that got me to 200% and I would essentially do the same thing, which is I would make sure that I can get to everything. I would make sure nothing goes off the page. So if something didn't reflow Well, this is where mobile responsiveness is really helpful, right? If they haven't set up for that, make sure that the line height didn't get weird sometimes if you have a fixed height on a div or a container, it'll cut off some of the text. In this instance, I'm not seeing anything at 200% That looks like a problem. So I think it's good. So I can then go bump us up to 400%.\r\n\r\nWhen you zoom in a lot, you will get the mobile navigation. So I've had developers asked me before Why does my mobile navigation need to be keyboard accessible to people plug their keyboards into their phone? No. But when we build mobile responsive websites at some point if a user zooms in they get the mobile nav, and so it is really important that the mobile nav work with the keyboard. So I have zoomed in I am now going to see if I can open and close this navigation which we can see on the left hand side here.\r\n\r\nIt goes like this. It's not actually super great. There's some weird overlapping that's happening anyway.\r\n\r\nBut like, can I get to the sub items and actually, I'm actually flagged this is broken anyway because there was a whole mega menu there and I don't see any way in this mobile nav to be able to expand the mega menu. So this seems like this is broken for everyone. Yeah, I tried refreshing. Sometimes there's JavaScript that doesn't kick in when you zoom. I refreshed just to make sure But nope, not there. But we're gonna see if we can get to it at all. So I hit tab and right on the left hand side of my screen below.\r\n\r\nThe menu is a purple border. That is my focus outline. So I'm actually focused on an off screen element right now if I look down in the bottom left, I can see that the link I'm focused on is visit.georgetown.org\/events-calendar.\r\n\r\nLet me open this up. This is what I was focusing on. So I'm not sure why right I shouldn't be able to focus on you should never be able to focus on anything that is off screen.\r\n\r\nAnd and I'm like Why couldn't I get to this button to open and close it? So I'm going to inspect the code and what I find is this is a div with a span and that is it. So divs are not focused will elements and you really need to make sure that you use buttons for interactive things. So this is a problem. It can't be used by a keyboard at all. Because it is not a literal button. This could be remediated by adding a role equals button to it. But but it is definitely I mean this is this is a critical failure. It needs to be fixed right away. I literally emailed the ADA contact at our city last night when I was thinking I was like do you know that your entire Nav menu cannot function?\r\n\r\nSo like this would be a problem, right?\r\n\r\nSo let me go back to my regular zoom and we'll talk just submitted about Nav menu accessibility in general, because I think that is a good pivot. So we talked about mobile, how mobile needs to function.\r\n\r\nBut let's talk about this mega menu. It is possible to have accessible mega menus. What you need to make sure when you're testing a navigation menu is a couple of things. First of all, all of your colors pass color contrast, there needs to be a really clear indicator for the hover that is different. So I would fail this hover because we have a off white or slightly white and then it gets more white when you hover. It's not sufficiently different. Someone who has low vision is not going to tell so there should be a contrast. In color that is sufficient. So like that, that double A color contrast. You could use the same thing to say between the normal and the hover states. Or a really, probably a better answer is on hover underline it right or add a border bottom or add an arrow that points to the right or whatever decorative element you want to do. But you need to make sure that you're doing that both for the regular for the hover also for the focus date, and then your current page indicators. So wherever you are, you want to make sure that that indicates there needs to be separate buttons to be able to open and close this. So I'm gonna hit tab I'm on my logo. If I tab to residence, this is actually a well it might be a current page link which is a little weird. I'm not sure what that's about.\r\n\r\nBecause when I look down, that's what I see. But I hit tab again and I am like where am I? I can't even tell where I am. I am down here in Fire Department inside the menu so I was able to tap into it and it didn't open.\r\n\r\nIt is sufficient to have it open when you tab to it. It is much better and I'm going to tell you that we're doing some work with the with universities that we're having to remediate with the Office of Civil Rights and the Justice Department is they instead they want to have a separate button.\r\n\r\nI actually have a better example. Of this on our website, a separate button that can be used to open and close the nav menu.\r\n\r\nSo we have for example, a link and then next to it is a button that can be opened and closed and it uses already expanded to tell people all have that kind of stuff when you're in a drop down. So let's say you're in there, the Escape key should work to be able to close it. This is really important, especially if you get on websites that have these huge navigation menus. Because if someone is here you don't want to force them to have to tab 20 times to go back to the page if they realized actually no, I don't need anything in this admin escape. Get out of it. Right like move quickly.\r\n\r\nThat's like a really high level on nav menus I recommend there is I can share a link or you can find on the WordPress accessibility meet up a recording that talks a lot more about them as well.\r\n\r\nI'm gonna pop back to my slides for a second because I don't have a example of pop ups but we can just talk real quick about pop ups and testing them you can have accessible popups or modals that are triggered by a button. So like a search that opens up in a modal that's totally fine as long as it's accessible. And what you'd want to look for is on open the focus is shifted to the pop up screen readers announced that a pop up has opened it needs to contain a heading. It could be screenreader only if you visually don't want one for stylistic reasons. The heading has to have clear text that explains what it is the any forms that are contained in the pop up have to be accessible when you are hitting the tab key in a pop up you should not be able to leave the pop up so you would do a rotation between the Close button whatever like if it's an email subscriber the name the email address the submit button and back to the close button like a circle every time you hit tab you can never get to anything behind it without closing.\r\n\r\nObviously your close button needs to be a button it needs to be labeled and work with the keyboard. And when it's closed, the users focus needs to return where they were on the page.\r\n\r\nSo I am going to turn on a screen reader and we can listen a little bit to that there are three different screen readers the two that people are most likely to use is voiceover which is built into Macs if you have a Mac you already have it and NVDA for it only works on Windows and it is free open source you can go download it and I recommend you do that both of my slides have links to where you can learn the keyboard shortcuts. Keyboard shortcuts are incredibly helpful to know because they're going to help you understand like how to navigate through the screen reader and that sort of stuff. So I definitely recommend checking these out for whichever screen reader you are using and testing with. Jaws is a third screen reader. We have some of our blind users use JAWS. It's very popular. It is paid and it's quite expensive. We don't typically test with it internally we test with NVDA which is what most screenreader users are on Windows. And then we'll secondarily test with VoiceOver. I am going to demo voiceover today because I am on a Mac so when you're doing screen reader testing, I guess I could have left my side job over there. So you can open the page. And the first thing I usually do is I just have it read it all and I listen to it as it reads the entire page. And what I'm doing is I'm looking for does it read things in the order that I expect it to read? Does anything sound funny? Are there alt text are labels that are Are they accurate or are they inaccurate? Is content grouped appropriately? This is this is a really big one. So you can use lists lists are really helpful for grouping content together and it gives screen reader users information about how they're connected it oh, it will tell them how many elements there are if they're in a list, and it will also enable them to skip to the end. So for example, you would notice if you looked at the WordPress core post block that it outputs them in an unordered list and they've just hidden the bullet point, right. But what's helpful about that is they would encounter that and it would be it would say list 12 items and they can hear the first and be like oh I don't want the I don't want any more posts. They can skip past the list and just move down to the next section. But if you just have all of your posts in divs, for example, and you you know, arrange them in whatever way you want, they wouldn't have to go through all 12 of those because they would know there are 12 there wouldn't be a shortcut to be able to jump to the end of it unless they just like use a heading and said okay, I'm just going to go to a different heading on the page. So lists are really helpful. And then after I've listened to it, I go back and I re listen to any elements that sound off.\r\n\r\nAnd then I'll engage with interactive elements and I'll check to make sure that any page changes are announced. So if I have search and filter and then an I search something and the results change, you know, like a WooCommerce store for example, the product does it does it tell me like 10 products found 12 product found or whatever the visual changes, does it announce that to the screen printer and then I'll look at forums and I'll make sure that the confirmation messages for success and the error messages are announced.\r\n\r\nSo I'm going to turn this on we're not 100% sure what, how the sound will work. I'm hoping it will but if it is a problem. I'm also going to have some text on the screen\r\n\r\nAlright, can you give me a thumbs up if you can hear that?\r\n\r\nIt was a little muffled in the background. Hold on. I'm gonna that may be the best we can do.\r\n\r\nWe don't have anywhere on this. So here we go.\r\n\r\nAll right.\r\n\r\nHello.\r\n\r\nI'm just going to make it really loud.\r\n\r\nWhen you turn on a screen reader, one of the things you want to look at in those lists of commands the first time is figured out how to turn it off.\r\n\r\nBecause it will just keep talking about you. So it's really helpful to know how to make it stop with VoiceOver. And usually with NVDA you can use the caps lock but depending on your default settings, you might be able to do something else so it's good to know how to turn that off.\r\n\r\nSo you will be able to read in the black box what it's saying and we're not going to go through one of the elements but I want to give you a feel so I'm just gonna go on.\r\n\r\nI'm gonna go up and I am going to do a refresh on my page or something. Department was the short term Fire Department. Most of my content is my content. You're currently on my content inside of the folder whenever you press CTRL A CTRL SHIFT I'm missing items you're currently about to click this on questions. functionspace So this is good because they told me it was a button. Again, we're missing skip links. I don't know why this is our first element on the page. But like that's something I'm listening for. Did it tell me it was a button? I'm gonna just hit my caps like a which is going to have it just read through some elements on the page and we'll just listen for a minute.\r\n\r\nBefore I go to Chamber of Commerce visits last time, basically Singapore's time this one I went to my go to departments just last names before commission me on English physical intervention.\r\n\r\nAlright, so something I noticed is that it's telling me list and the number of items so these are grouped in lists, but these are actually navigation elements. They are probably missing a navigation tag. So I'm going to inspect that\r\n\r\nelement less than or equal slash slash nordstrom.org.\r\n\r\nAlright, so I'm indeed when I look at this, we just have a an unordered list with items they're not using a nav tag in HTML NAB tag.\r\n\r\nSo this will I yeah, I do have I can slow it down. Sorry. I just noticed in the chat that it might be kind of fast for people.\r\n\r\nOnce again, then you just press ctrl teletrack to system settings, system settings.\r\n\r\nRotary six extended appearance, accessibility\r\n\r\nvoiceover utility voiceover Utility window slippery casting worthless. You might currently just like speech, you're\r\n\r\nvery sporty.\r\n\r\nAlright, that should be better.\r\n\r\nOnce you do it more you'll be able to listen to it faster and then you get through testing faster.\r\n\r\nSo like I alerted right away that these are navigation items, but it didn't tell me on a normal website it would announce and tell you that it is a navigation Dev Tools is docked around. Current Page visited like Week One was the digital.com contents selected addressing search so people always have visual elements selected for each one as a digital select date. So many visited current page visited link image. Alright, so just listen to the difference here.\r\n\r\nCurrent Page visited linkimage equalize digital equalized digital website accessibility consulting, training and development are those two items positive link my account visited link check out primary menu navigation list five items. So primary menu because it has an ARIA label on a time that's the primary navigation it's a navigation and then now many items. So I would flag on this Georgetown website that they're not. They don't have their navigation labeled appropriately and I'm going to guess that even this one isn't less less than\r\n\r\nYeah, so even this one is not in a navigation tab. So having a navigation tag is really important because it also people on screen users can jump to the tags and if you have them labeled, so you don't just want a nav tag but you want a navigation tab with appropriate label then they can replicate brief Georgetown VoiceOver off, then they would be able to jump to that navigation element. So I don't have a ton of time you know to go all the way into like all of these things, but I would say like those are things that you want to listen for. You can familiarize yourself with the the different HTML tags that are available because most of them read out and I would recommend that you know, because then you can start to feel okay, it should tell you if it's a navigation it should tell you if it's a button it should have the right label, all of that sort of thing.\r\n\r\nThis is a really fast and in you know, hyper speed on doing some testing. I'm wondering if we have some questions that I can answer.\r\n\r\nAnd then I could try and point out some other resources as well if that's helpful for people.\r\n\r\nYes, I'm scrolling down the questions to see if there were any specific questions related to testing. Okay, Tony would like to know if there are links to tools that you're using for the keyboard testing and manually testing Um, yes, I guess I didn't have those. So the I usually the the two browser times, if you just Google then oops. So tab a live and why they're listed in there.\r\n\r\nThat should pull up like this is a Chrome extension. And the same thing headings map all one word, and they have like a Firefox and whatever version and I'm in Brave right now.\r\n\r\nSo I don't have a specific I didn't put links to those in the slides because it's not as easy when I don't know what browser people are using. Got it. I added those two links to the chat. So folks, I have access to this now.\r\n\r\nLet's see Tanya would also like to know how to screen readers handle a form on the page.\r\n\r\nUm, so the label is an interesting thing. We didn't talk about this yet. But you notice this field doesn't have a visible label.\r\n\r\nIt also it did announce it though when I went there. It told me that it has a label so it has a correct label for a screen reader user. I would still fail this because it doesn't have a visible label. So everything because to be honest, like we're web professionals, we can look at this and see this eyeglass and think this is the search field but especially on a website like like an older person, they might just think that's a white box. Like To be totally honest, especially with where this this icon, the button to submit it is super strange. So visually I would say like what you want to do if you get a design can I talk and type at the same time?\r\n\r\nharder than it seems? There we go. Okay, so if you get designs where they really want the it to have what looks like placeholder text, what we do is we do what's called a floating label. So when you've typed in there, it still stays visible. And this is really important, especially on really big forms because if you have a forum that's properly set up with autocomplete attributes, where you know you go in it starts you start typing your name, and you'll be like, Oh, I know you I'll fill in your name, your email address and your all these things, right? Well, if you do that, and there's fields down below, and there's no labels, they might select something and it could auto fill the field incorrectly. And because they can't see the label, because the placeholder is gone. They won't know that you know, it put their address, you know, in a in the wrong field or something like that. So it's really important that you always have visible labels. You can do this thing where it floats up and down. It's actually it's like not too bad with JavaScript.\r\n\r\nBut it's extra work. So so we've been just trying to convince our designers that you should just design forms with visible labels.\r\n\r\nInteresting.\r\n\r\nYeah. And Sue's asking, does gravity forms have that option? I don't ever recall seeing floating labels in Gravity Forms. So it is not an option in Gravity Forms core but we do it for Gravity Forms. Like honestly, this search might actually be like a gravity form that we just haven't going to the pay like sometimes we do that we do it in Gravity Forms all the time.\r\n\r\nSo it definitely can be done with gravity forms, but I don't think they have a setting for it. Yeah. In Gravity Forms. They've actually stated one of their unique things. They want to be the most accessible form for WordPress. Is that right? Have you found that to be the case? Oh, yeah, I mean, I know that they've done a lot the other thing that I really like about them that I have not seen many other plugins doing is that in addition to fixing things on the front end, they have guidance in their form editor. So if you try to use a field that for some reason, like the date picker or something that they had to keep around because it's depth, it's like a deprecated field, you probably shouldn't use it moving forward, but there's they can't take it away. There's a break people's websites. They'll have a warning that says, hey, this doesn't work. Or if you leave the label blank for decorative purposes, right? It'll say this is a wig violation. You have to put text in this label. And I think that is really good and positive that they're doing that and I'd love to see more plugin developers doing that because that's what content creators, you know, website owners, they need that kind of guidance, because if we don't provide that guidance to them, then they're just going to break their website after we hand them a really nice accessible website. Right? Yeah, exactly. Looking at the time and we need to take a break, but we have seven questions stacked up here. Maybe we can do quick answers on these questions. Okay. Yeah, we'll go fast. Okay, so sticking with this form label thing Tanya wanted to know, is there a way to hide from the front end the label for aesthetics, but keep for accessibility and I guess that floating label is the best way to do that? Yep. Yeah, that's the way I would do that. Let's see.\r\n\r\nAll says it looks like a Georgetown site theme is not as good as equalize digital. The only way Georgetown could probably easily fix things would be to change the theme. Is that right? Or would they change? Would they hire a programmer to try to remediate this? What would you do? Yeah, so we can talk about that a little bit next time. But I would say there's a decision point where it depends on how, how many problems there are. This was I had a lot of problems. And then also one of the things I look at is is the website otherwise meeting objectives. Like that was our to me it looks a little bit dated.\r\n\r\nProbably it's not doing a great job on SEO because their headings are all over the place. Really. There's other things and and if it's also been a long time, like maybe they built that website five plus years ago, well then yeah, it's probably time for any website anyway. So I would change the theme. And that will be a lot faster and probably less expensive or maybe more expensive, but it's but it'd be part of that remediation.\r\n\r\nIf the website is relatively new, and it's otherwise achieving all the goals and doing everything it needs to do and they love the design. Then I would just remediate the existing site. Got it? Makes sense. Let's see. Hey, Paul, you have a question about a Facebook pixel. Can you clarify what caused that problem? What thing do you please in the chat? And in the meantime, I guess on that is that our accessibility checker plugin flagged him in the Facebook pixel and we have an open GitHub issue for this because it should be ignoring the pixel. Haha. Okay.\r\n\r\nOkay, so Paul wanting to know on the accessibility page that gets generated, do you list all the checks that accessibility checker checks?\r\n\r\nYes, so um, let me get that real quick. So the, the open Issues page does list out everything that is checked. And basically, if nothing failed, it's just going to show up at the bottom as a past so the goal is, is that you can eventually as you work through things, get it everything to say past and then your main summary, which is for your whole entire site would all say 100%.\r\n\r\nNice. Yep.\r\n\r\nOh, this is a good question. Jean is curious about making PDFs accessible. What, what's involved in that and that's beyond the scope of what we're talking about, but is there a good resource you can give about how to do that? So PDFs are they follow the exact same guidelines as far as headings, links, all that kind of stuff. So things that are listed in wiki also apply to PDFs. You are most able to create accessible PDFs if you use something like InDesign or Microsoft Word. If you are creating Google Docs, there is an extension called grackle. Like it's a Chrome extension that can help export tag PDFs but it doesn't work as well. So I'd recommend word or InDesign over that Canva does not create accessible PDFs. Do not make your PDF Canva is not for PDFs. I know they say they can make PDFs because now it was for interesting.\r\n\r\nDoug is wondering if you can show checking alt tags again and keyboard testing.\r\n\r\nYeah, I mean, the main thing that I would look at if we're keyboard testing and we're looking for alternative tax is I'm trying to see if one of these has been done but is I would just, you can either listen to it, the string reader or all inspect it. The testing tools are all going to tell you if it's empty. But what you would want to do is you would want to actually look and make sure that the text is accurate and make sense the testing tools can't tell you that yet. And even the AI image generating alt text image generators don't do a good job. So like does this accurately describe the image? And the only other thing that I would that you want to be really clear about is that if it is a linked image, Don't dis don't describe the image. So for example on like, like these right here, images that link over to my thing, I wouldn't want to write like X icon because they'd here link X icon and that makes them think that maybe it's just going to open the icon. So I would just say, so these ones actually would say like, Link, Amber. I don't know it's probably an ARIA label on it in this instance, but it says like, Amber on Twitter, right, like, like something like that. So if you've linked it you got to describe where it's going, not how it looks. Oh, that makes a lot of sense. That's a good rule of thumb. Okay, we have a couple more questions here that I'm gonna save for the next hour. Robert, I think your question might just be answered in the next hour when we talk about the business of accessibility.\r\n\r\nOkay, well, let's take a five minute break. It is just about to be five minutes after so we'll come back at 10 After and we're quiet until then.\r\n\r\nThis is your One Minute Warning we're back in one minute from now.\r\n\r\nAll right, we're back for the final hour of the accessibility Crash Course. And this I think is going to be very interesting to everyone here. I believe. Just about everybody here is doing client work with WordPress. And Ember when accessibility first became a thing that was on our radar as people working with clients there was a lot of friction in adopting it.\r\n\r\nAnd really, it's an opportunity not only just from a principle of making the web a better, more accessible place for everybody, but also, it's a way honestly to have another service to sell to clients. So it's good from a business perspective. It's good from a world perspective. So I'm looking forward for your insight on how to do that. So let's get started. All right.\r\n\r\nSo what we're going to talk about in this second hour is we're gonna be talking about different plans, you can make pricing, marketing accessibility sales conversations, and then I have some contract language that I will share as well. So on the plans and pricing front, of course, you have to decide what to offer.\r\n\r\nThe way I see this is basically you can roll accessibility into your new website development projects, build accessible websites. I would love if everyone here started doing that or doing as much of that as they can and we'll talk about what that means in just a minute.\r\n\r\nYou can also do one time accessibility fixes so this is like a fixed project for a flat fee where you fix some amount of things or everything, whatever that might be over some amount of time and then it ends. You can offer recurring accessibility fixes every month, quarter or year. You can offer accessibility monitoring. You can include your the accessibility checker plugin in your hosting and care plan fees. So just like some of us include image optimization or things like that, you can include accessibility plugins as well as part of what you offer and mark them up and make money off of that.\r\n\r\nSo how do you decide what to offer? These are some questions that I think you'll want to think about initially to figure out what makes the most sense for you and your agency, or what you're doing. So the first is who on your team can find accessibility problems. Do you have someone on your team that already knows accessibility and is able to be a tester who on your team can fix accessibility problems? So sometimes, we talked about you know, headings that aren't in the right order. A lot of times those can just be fixed in the editor and you can have a content specialist that you educate them on how to correct you know, correct those and they can go do that. Sometimes it is a code required fix, and sometimes that depending upon what the problem is, it might be a basic PHP, HTML change that any WordPress developer can do. Sometimes it might require a lot of very complex JavaScript, and then you need a developer who's a lot more experienced in JavaScript. So you sort of have to ask, like, who on your team do you have that has these different types of skills and that can help you decide what to offer? Or, you know this third question, do you need to bring in an outside partner for either testing or development or some of the work and then you are the person who manages that partner and maybe even white liberals their work and sells it?\r\n\r\nSo then the other thing is, of course, like thinking about what accessibility tools that you would want to use both to find them to report on how things are going, what do those tools cost? And then a big thing that comes into this if you are doing the work, you're building out a plan or a fix that's recurring is you'd want to think about what is the minimum number of hours that you need in a month to make meaningful fixes. So we had a lot of conversations about this, when we set up our recurring plans, and we were talking about you know, sure, you can do some, a lot like very many content tasks in two or three hours. But sometimes you encounter a dev problem like that navigation menu, right if they were keeping their theme on the city of Georgetown website, and they were like, but we need to make our navigation accessible. That is that might be more than a two or three hour task for a developer to have the staging site, work on it, test it, have someone else your accessibility tester, come back test confirm is good, and then push it to production. So this is where sometimes you need to think about tearing your plans based upon how bad some you know how bad someone's site is, how much work needs to be done. That sort of thing. And really spending time think about that, what is the smallest amount of time that we think we can actually do something that is beneficial to the client and makes a dent and is helpful, and then you kind of go up from there. And then the other thing I would always just ask you is what would you do if you encountered problems that you don't know how to fix? Because this may happen where something comes up and you're not sure how to fix it, or there's, you know, discussions about should we even fix this because, sure we we've had this happen where a plugin was causing a problem. And our dev team is like, well, yes, we can write JavaScript that will modify that but every time now plug in releases an update, we need before that can go live on the website, we need to test and make sure that our Fix still works. So then you go okay, well, wait a minute, is this the best? Maybe instead, we should go to the plugin developer and ask them to do the fix right? Or because then it fixes not just for our client for everyone, or we need to literally say fixing this thing is not worth fixing, or it's too hard to fix. Or maybe it's not even WordPress and it's a third party plugin, or add on that they're using and there's literally no ability to fix it because everything is in an iframe and so then the answer is we just need to choose a different vendor for whatever this particular component is.\r\n\r\nSo how do you price all of this?\r\n\r\nI would say when you're thinking about a new build, a really good way to do this is to start take your starter site. So if you use like a blueprint or something where you have a lot of your plugins in and pre configured and it has whatever your starter theme is, but no client content on it, and not a lot of the design yet. Go run Accessibility Checker scans on that and you can use just the free plugin to go test like what your homepage, your contact page, whatever those default things that will get the header and the footer that will tell you how your theme is and how much you might need to fix or change. You can also just create like a style guide page where you insert an example block of everything. So here's an accordion, here's a tab. Here's a carousel, and you can test everything on that one page. And that's going to give you a baseline for how much time that you need to put into getting your starter up. But the thing is, if you make all these fixes, whether it's to your custom theme or you do some testing, you say, Oh, I can't use this accordion plug in that I used to use. So I'm gonna, you know, find a different one. I replace it and I just use that new one moving forward. I didn't have to custom code something but I just changed the tool I was using.\r\n\r\nYou put it requires that upfront time investment but then every website you build moving forward has all those fixes into it. And so it gets a lot less. But I would say if you're trying to figure out how to price it for the at least the first time, you need a 20 to 50% budget increase the first time and the way we think about this is that basic accessibility isn't optional. We roll it in to every line and I'm sitting around arguing about there's accessibility touchpoints that happen at every phase of the project. So you don't send your proposal when you're bidding it out. You don't say like you know, here's your design fee. Here's your development fee. Here's your accessibility. Now instead, you need to think about everything that you're doing on a project. So when I talked about I do accessibility audits on our figma files before we show them to the client. Well if I know that there's going to be six pages in a project and I'm going to spend 30 minutes auditing every single one of those for accessibility. That's three extra hours that I need to add to my proposal for the design budget. So you can sort of start to figure stuff like that out and then and then you have this is like the baseline accessibility. And then what we do as options on the new build proposals is you could we don't do this, but I know a lot of our customers do this, where they have testing by us as an option on their proposal. So they're doing some baseline stuff, and they'll maybe communicate to their clients. You know, I try and observe best practices, these are the things that I include, but if you really need it, need to know if it's WCAG compliant, then I recommend bringing in a certified and trained accessibility professional and this is the cost for that. And then the clients can opt for it or they can decline it which but then you have told them it may not be fully compliant unless you go for this option.\r\n\r\nAnd and then that's you know, that was a choice that they made and you have a paper trail that they made that choice. So sometimes that is an option. We always include user testing sessions with people with disabilities as options because not all clients have the budget for that, or the interest necessarily in having that so it'll be an option on our proposals. And then we will include a baseline of what parts of the site are accessible in the scope. And so if they want us to do extra accessibility testing, we're fixing remediation on other parts. So for example, if you have a WooCommerce site and it has 500 products, we are we are not going to guarantee the accessibility of every product page because we have not looked at it. So if they are like we really need a human being to tell us that every single one of our product pages is accessible. And we're gonna account for that time and that is an extra add on on their proposal. On top of the baseline. Yes, we know that like the theme control parts of the WooCommerce shop will be accessible, but I can't say anything about your product description because I didn't look at it. Right? Or I didn't you know, we just imported all these images that you already had in your own commerce site. And maybe they're all missing alt tags, right. So we'll have those as options on there. I can't give you a literal dollar amount because this is so different for everyone, right? Like what you charge is your baseline hourly, what you need your profit to be.\r\n\r\nYou have to think about that. I would just always circle back to this the first one, at least 20 to 30% more expensive than what you are charging right now. And and maybe account for there's gonna be a learning curve, especially on the first one while you're getting some of your tools up to date, or up to up to code maybe if that is a better way to say it.\r\n\r\nSo if you're gonna do a recurring plan this is the same sort of thing. We price on a combination of time and tool cost. Do what makes sense for your costs and your clients. It doesn't have to be expensive. I know of one of our customers who has multiple tiered plans, and their their base plan is it includes our accessibility checker plugin and one hour a month for them to go in and make some small fixes. And they they charge $99 a month for it. Is it going to make that website like super accessible really fast? Absolutely not.\r\n\r\nBut they're transparent about that and they're like, this is just like to get you started and free you to help and maybe in an hour, they can fix all the headings. They can fix all the links on a particular page. And they can you know if they've already built the site they know that the core components like there are skip links. There are things in in the navigation that all function appropriately because they built the site using a theme that they know. So this kind of like ongoing just one page, they can actually do things and that works well for small business budget.\r\n\r\nOn the other end, you have people that come to you, if you you know, that are emergent, they are being sued or they are under mandated remediation with the Department of Education or whatever that might be. And they're going to say I need my website as accessible as possible. You know, and then and then you're looking at okay, well, this is not a one hour a month solution that you're looking for. And so then you figure out like how many hours over how many months and then maybe they start high. And then over time you drop them and they go down to that one hour or that three hour or whatever you set your minimum plan to as sort of like their monitoring and remediation like ongoing accessibility support.\r\n\r\nSo the big thing I would say is that I feel very strongly and I know some folks in the disability community feel this way as well that some accessibility is better than no accessibility. So even if you have to start small because you don't think your clients will be open to it, and you're only doing some of the things that can make a difference and won't necessarily, quote protect them from being sued. The only thing that's going to protect someone from a lawsuit is actually having a functional website and doing a good job if something doesn't work in responding to a complaint from a user with disabilities. But over time, you can do small things over time to make a website more accessible and usable.\r\n\r\nI gave a whole hour and a half long webinar about our recruiting remediation plans, including literally showing what the user journey is like how we move people through them. It shows our pricing and like all kinds of stuff. So those are linked on the slides. If you want to go check that out.\r\n\r\nSo once you've decided on what plans you're going to offer, and how you're going to price them. How do you get people to come to you? Right, so let's talk a little bit about marketing.\r\n\r\nWho buys accessibility? There are some key industries that we have found that are guaranteed buyers, this is government. I think there's there's been a lot I know someone who uses our plugin he is in Colorado and he told me that Colorado has a state law about state and local government websites that is going into effect really soon. And over the last year, he has had a huge internet uptick and encourage just because of that. So I think you know we're gonna see a lot more of that increasingly with laws so any sort of government or government funded, government adjacent entity higher ed, large healthcare small doctor's offices, I we have not had as much luck we actually spent quite a bit of time when we first set up equalization we're doing like, like literal cold calling and cold emailing like doctors offices in our area and being like, you have accessibility problems on your website. We want to help you fix them.\r\n\r\nThe other one that I would say which I don't have listed there, and then I'm like doesn't maybe respond as well is restaurants. Restaurants get sued a lot for accessibility problems, but they have very small margins and they have very tight budgets and even though they might acknowledge they have accessibility problems, they are very unlikely to be willing to invest in it.\r\n\r\nBut the the other ones besides these that do ecommerce is another one. They know that they need to be accessible and the larger shop that they have, the more they're going to be interested in that. So creating content that speaks to these industries is a good way to get people that do that. Other ones that we've seen is organizations that serve people with disabilities obviously like they know they want to be accessible. And then any kind of business what we've seen kind of like a revenue threshold is one to 2 million in annual revenue and up I do think it can be challenging on those like recurring remediation plans. If if you price them very high. You're not gonna get a lot of micro businesses to purchase those. That said, you can get micro purchase micro businesses to be interested when they come to you for a new website in you making it accessible. And you know, doing something like that plan I mentioned that one of our customers has where it's just like an hour a month, they will definitely buy that but they they might not be your largest revenue finds ever in revenue to you. It might be more that you have like a lot of them on smaller retainers.\r\n\r\nI think the other thing I would say that triggers those micro businesses is sometimes we've heard this where we get outreach from like a very small business and they'll literally be like my friend at the Chamber of Commerce got a demand letter or got sued and now I'm worried about mine like we we have one where it's a mental health counselor and it's her and one other person and they have to it's a pretty small practice. And she was like, Yeah, I literally know someone who got sued. And so now I want to make my website accessible. So sometimes they can have a triggering event like that. But I would say if you're trying to do outreach, I would look at probably more of the they still technically call them small businesses but kind of like bigger, more established companies in your area.\r\n\r\nAnd then of course, this is just general marketing advice. But how can you stand out in a crowd? So becoming an authority in a specific niche? It says abilities a niche but you could be even more?\r\n\r\nI know someone that's like they do wineries. And they're in Northern California, a lot of wineries in Northern California have been sued, right? If you become the person that like builds the best websites for wineries, then you're gonna get a lot more referrals and word of mouth and if you make that right, and it can be accessibility and maybe you also do like UX and like how can we optimize what people want to buy the wine of the month club or whatever that might be right so if you become the person that really knows what that niche is, so whatever your niche is like this is going to help you in general whether it's with accessibility or with selling new services, is definitely focusing there.\r\n\r\nCreating content is really key. This is a thing that we have found a lot you need to invest in content marketing strategy and create content that people will want to share. This could be long form blog posts, it could be videos, it could be a podcast, whatever that might be like creating content is really important, not just because it will help you to bring people to you, but also because it gives you something to give people as follow ups which we'll talk about in just a minute.\r\n\r\nTry to grow an email list and send regular email newsletters so you stay in front of people. And then a big thing on accessibility is talk about it really early in the process. All the time. This is something that we've had people tell us when they chose us as part of a bid process. They were like we talked to 10 agencies, and you were the only one who told us about accessibility and this is even early and I'm saying this like we were doing accessibility under the under our other brand which was called Broadway creative and it was just a marketing agency. They would say no one else told us about accessibility or about this laws that apply. And so that helped differentiate us and it made us seem like more of an expert who was really thinking about the holistic view of their business. Rarely the same thing. Like you might ask someone in a sales process. Do you need to be GDPR compliant or CCPA? compliant? Do you need to worry about privacy policies and how you're How are you going to handle them? If no one else talks about these things, then all of a sudden it looks like wow, this person really knows their field and then they start to question like, why did this other person don't ask me about accessibility or privacy? What are they missing? So that's another way to really help stand out there.\r\n\r\nSo existing clients, this is a question I get like, I launched a website for someone last year, and I wasn't thinking about accessibility. How do I go back to them? I don't want to tell them, thank them for your socks. Right. And I don't think that's what you're saying.\r\n\r\nI think it's more of a matter of so one having that email newsletter where you're regularly keeping in touch with your clients sending them useful resources. This is where content comes in, right creating content. So maybe you're also creating content about SEO or you're also creating it about you know, local Google optimization or whatever. But like having a regular newsletter, you can then have some of that accessibility content go out to them as well. Without you personally reaching out to them. The other thing I would say is if you're planning personal outreach, there are two ways that we have done this that has been really successful. So the first one is you always need to be aware of when your clients are writing their budgets. Different industries do this at different times. Like higher ed and K 12. A lot of times they're like finalizing budgets right now, because their fiscal year is gonna start in July.\r\n\r\nOther companies are working on budget plans in like October and November for a January start. So if you know your client you know when they're working on their marketing budget and making plans for the next year, that is a great time to reach out. The other thing is, is when there are changes to the laws, or if you see something in the news specifically about accessibility, sending it to them, and I have a blurb here written on the screen which I'm not totally going to write out since you have it in the PDF readout since you have it in the PDF. But what I will say is basically we would just say something like you know, since we launched your website six months ago, there have been changes. I want to make sure you are aware of them. Right. So for example next month, if this law or the snow law, if the rulemaking from the Justice Department gets finalized and there is a final rule which says within two or three years state and local governments have to meet WIC egg 2.1 Double A that is a great opportunity if you have a client that this is going to apply to to reach out to them and and just be like, Hey, I saw this and I was thinking about you and I want to let you know, and our original contract did not include website accessibility. But with this large change. I think it's really important that we focus on it now. And maybe let's talk about budgeting this year or we can have a call and we can talk about how you can budget it in your next year's budget. Right? And, and really just maintaining those relationships with your clients and sending them things that seemed valuable over time is really helpful. And I don't think that makes you look bad. Like we didn't include this in your original scope. It's not saying I forgot or I didn't know, right, like there's just like, this wasn't in your original scope. You didn't, you know, wasn't discussed. But now it's really important and I care about you. And clients always respond positively to those sorts of things. They don't necessarily always buy but they appreciate it right. So the other big thing is just as I mentioned, like dripping information, so don't think that you're going to reach out to them one time and be like this law exists now. We need to make your website accessible and here's my plans go by them and they're going to do it especially bigger contracts. They can take a lot longer to close. And it might take a lot of like dripping of information, which is why that monthly email newsletter can be really helpful because then you're getting something in their inbox all the time. And maybe by the time they get to seven email, they're going to be like, Whoa, there's been a lot of this stuff about accessibility I need to do something about it.\r\n\r\nBeyond the emails, think about maybe holding webinars or training sessions for your current clients. This is really an interesting idea, right? Can you get your clients together with one another? So you only have to talk you know, do it one time, but you can invite multiple and a lot of times this can help with loyalty and retention because you're providing a lot of value, especially if you have clients where they're maintaining their own content.\r\n\r\nBecause you could also just have like a webinar on like, you know, best practices for, you know, adding blocks or whatever it might be right. Or maybe you find a friend to come and talk about SEO or whatever that might be. But again, like it helps to do put content in front of them and provide more opportunities that makes them feel like you're giving them a ton of value for whatever their regular monthly hosting and support plan is.\r\n\r\nAnother thing that has worked for us is you can use the accessibility checker free plugin, and you could go skin, their homepage or you could use Wave or something like that. And you can put together a report and send it to them and just be like, hey, this new tools available. I tested your website, here's some things that we probably need to fix. Let's set up a call talk about and then and then that, you know you can turn that into maybe like a one time accessibility thing or potentially even getting them on a regular retainer or to increase their care. plan if you're just adding some hours of dev time to their regular care plan that they're already paying for every month.\r\n\r\nSo here's what's really important in all of these conversations and all of these marketing, don't promise compliance with laws. So this is what we had a lot of conversations with our attorneys. We use a an a law firm called Dentons, which is an international law firm.\r\n\r\nSo they're familiar with a lot of stuff and what they said to us is they're like, You are not a lawyer, you are not a judge. You don't know if something is legally compliant. So the and, and language is super important.\r\n\r\nAlso, the other reason why you can't really promise compliance with laws is that many laws around the world don't have clearly defined standards for proving compliance. So for example, we talked about the ADEA currently does not reference wicked on ada.gov. It says we can is a good way but it does not require that so because there's a lot of gray area, how can you really promise that and then I would just say in general, you should be really honest about what you can deliver and clear about what standards you're measuring against. So we always talk about we're measuring against Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, that is what we use to say if something is accessible or not. If you're just getting started, I would not go and be like, I'm gonna make your website 100% accessible and I'm a super expert at this right like I think there's ways to talk about it instead be like, you know, we're going to follow some best practices, here are the things that we are going to do and then if you need to pull someone else in, but that's really important that fraud whistleblower lawsuit go out the website that wasn't accessible, like a big part of why that had so much damages was because the agency lied. So be honest about what you can deliver and what you are doing and what you're not doing. And it's not that you can't do all that other stuff. It's just they might have to have a bigger budget and sometimes they don't have a super big budget. And so you're going to do what you can that works in their budget and as long as you're clear with them and truthful about that that's going to be helpful. So some examples on the language side is I wouldn't say equalize digital will make your website ADA compliant. This is literally like an example that the attorneys me. He's like what you would say is equalize digital will ensure your website needs WIC AG, which can help you meet requirements under the Americans with Disabilities Act ADA. So I'm not making your website ADA compliant, because they're responsible for the ADA compliance and legal compliance in their business, whether it's in their brick and mortar shop or whether it's on their website. What I am doing is making it meet WIC ag or I can say WIC compliant, which can be part of them, helping them meet their legal requirement under the ADEA again, I said this yesterday, I'm not an attorney. I'm repeating some things that have been said to me, but if you have concerns about this, you should definitely consult your own attorney.\r\n\r\nSo I've mentioned this a little bit and I really want to pause here and emphasize that accessibility services, whatever you're offering, it is not about building a 100% accessible website and you might be like wait a minute what Amber? I thought we were talking about like making websites work for people with disabilities.\r\n\r\nAnd yes, it is possible to build 100% accessible websites, particularly if they're very small, right, a small handful of pages and blog posts. The larger the scale of the website, the less likely it is that it is going to be perfectly accessible all the time. We're even at launch so this goes a little bit back to that. Be honest about what you can do. So what we talk about, and I'll show you this in our contract, is that when we are building accessible websites for people we are guaranteeing accessibility to WIC egg 2.2 Double A for the things that we have built and or tested and configured. So if we've configured the gravity form, it's going to be fully accessible if we have coded the header, the footer, the sidebar, there will be no accessibility problems in those. If we have imported content from their old website. I am not going to guarantee the accessibility of 5000 blog posts that go all the way back to 2005. I'm no idea they're probably not well run the scanner on them and I can guarantee you like we always find that happen. We have a website that we launched just now and it's got like a 70% score. In Accessibility Checker. All the pages we built have a 100% score and the first three blog posts that they had us fix and then show them how we fix it so we could explain as part of a training right?\r\n\r\nAre all 100% All the other blog posts I mean, color contrast issues like literally in the text was not in the theme. It was like inline HTML, so somebody has to manually go remove it right. Missing image alt text ambiguous anchor links or just all kinds of things, videos that are embedded without captions. So So you want to think about this in your language and how you're talking to people. Don't tell someone you're gonna make them a 100% accessible website, because that is a huge endeavor, especially on a large website. It's not it's probably not realistic and it may not even be needed, right. We talked about the Justice Department is saying archived content content people don't use or reference doesn't have to be accessible under this new law that they're going to say. Now you need to have a way for maybe for people to request the information but so I really would think about that.\r\n\r\nSo in the sales conversations, you've gotten your lead, they've come to you they've expressed interest, how do we actually close them?\r\n\r\nI have some questions up you know, obviously we always start with identifying their pain points. And goals, things that and I'll say my partner Chris does a lot more of our sales than I do. I'd pop in every once in a while, but he does most of them.\r\n\r\nBut I know we talked with them a lot about you know, why are they building it? What do they want the website to do immediately after launch? He'll who always ask them when you celebrate success 12 or 18 months after the website launches, how will you know it is successful? This is really good because it helps to tell you what like literal KPIs or metrics they're going to measure success on and we'll ask them that. Okay. Well, it's not just It looks nice. Like how will you know 18 months from now what are you trying to get more leads? Are you doing those sorts of things? What's working on their current website? What's not working on their current website? How important is website performance and code quality to achieving their goals? So this is this is a really good one because if somebody says that they really care about having really quality code, where they really want it to be really fast. You can use that to be like, we should not have any fade up animations on the page. They're not great for accessibility. They also slow your website down. Can we cut out JavaScript maybe we don't need carousel to slide back and forth. Right. So you can once you understand these goals, then you can start connecting accessibility to the goals.\r\n\r\nAlso, we always ask questions to establish legal needs of everyone. Does your organization receive federal funding or federal grants? Is the business located in or does it have customers in high lawsuit areas? We'll ask them California, New York, Florida, and we'll just be like any other states right beyond where you are? Is the business in Ontario. That's the same thing now that there's the Manitoba act. If you're in Canada, you might want to ask that about Manitoba as well.\r\n\r\nIf yes, how many employees does it have because there's an employee's threshold on the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act that impacts things is the business located in Europe or will the European Accessibility Act apply in the future? So for that, we'd want to ask about the revenue the more than 2 million euros per year for more than 10 employees trying to figure that out? Has the organization received an accessibility complaint? So we will always ask that upfront, because that really helps us with being able to know how urgent it is and being able to close the deal.\r\n\r\nSo then, you get to the proposal stage. Number one, always make sure you're talking to the decision maker. This happens to us a lot where we have, you know, a developer or like a Web Services team or a marketing manager, but the marketing manager doesn't actually write the check.\r\n\r\nYou got to you need to have some sort of FaceTime like get past that gatekeeper and get to the person who makes the decision. So isn't as much of a problem when if you're building more like small business websites, and then that was those are a lot nicer because then you're dealing with the owner typically, and the owner makes all the choices. So it's a little easier but as you're going up market, you definitely want to work really hard to figure out who is the decision maker, and how can you get on a call with them.\r\n\r\nThen all those goals we talked about their goals, their pain points, map them to accessibility, they won't always come to you being like, I need an accessible website. They might really need better SEO, or we launched one for someone that they make all their money off affiliate and ads. And they were like, we just need people to we need people to stay on our site longer to go to more pages and to click on things that pay us money.\r\n\r\nRight? So so it's like, okay, we can map accessibility to that. That's user experience. That's user journeys, right, like all that. So that kind of stuff is is helpful at figuring out like what is the goal and how can you connect it to accessibility and then you can be like, This is why you should pay extra for this accessibility service. Because this is how it's going to meet roll. And then always the higher market you get, do not email them the proposal. Get on a call on Zoom, give a presentation. Do not send them like with some like little like ranges but if they want a real price, don't give it to them until they are on a call with you. And then when I was talking about creating content, so this one I'll give a little throat and I think he has some content on to Troy Dean he calls it the anti follow up. So after you present a proposal to someone, instead of sending the emails that are like, Hey, did you make a decision? Hey, are you ready to close? Hey, can we get started? That are kind of like naggy and a little more desperate sounding to a degree. The thing that we've been doing, which has worked really well is that we do the anti follow up. So they'll get follow ups from my partner, Chris, but he doesn't ask them about the proposal at all. He operates like, we're already working for them and we're already thinking about them and he'll be like, Hey, I saw this news article that's really relevant to you or your specific goal or whatever it might be on your website and I wanted to send it to you because I needed to make sure that you saw like find some resources and some of these are can he sends them to everyone but some of them are unique for that specific person that you can send them as follow ups and then it keeps you in front of them without just being like, Hey, are you ready to sign?\r\n\r\nSo contracts.\r\n\r\nWhat I have here is sections from our contracts that are specifically relevant to accessibility. They were written by an attorney, but you should still have them vetted by your own attorney.\r\n\r\nIn our terms of service, which these are fully public on are the footer of our website. So if you want to read that full document, you can just go click that link and read it. There's two definitions that were included in the definition sections. One is laws and the other one is WIC ag and it's just saying that it means Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, laws shall mean all applicable local, federal fate, local, state, federal and international laws and regulations related to accessibility. So they're defining those things because they're referenced somewhere else.\r\n\r\nThen we have a whole section in our terms of service with a heading compliance with laws. And there are two sections within that. So the first one is that we are not a law office.\r\n\r\nOur company's employees are not attorneys. We do not practice law, and our clients should not use us. As their sole source of information related to compliance with laws and should always have their own attorney.\r\n\r\nAnd then the second section is compliance standards. And it says that everyone recognizes that the laws governing web accessibility are numerous and the regulatory environment is changing rapidly. We further agree that the accessibility of any site or deliverable will be measured against WIC AG. And basically, that we cannot guarantee that conforming with WCAG equates with compliance with ADA section 508 or any other applicable laws, any of those sorts of things.\r\n\r\nSo these are some of the things in our terms of service. Then everyone gets a proposal and then when they're ready to sign they get a statement of work. That's like our big scope document. And in the accessibility section in our scope document. This is where we are committing to what we are going to make accessible when we're building a new website. So what we specifically say again, we met we mentioned that it's measured against the weekend. And then and then it has this wording provided that they were first developed, coded or assembled by company that's us the following parts of the deliverable will conform to WCAG 2.2 Double A you need to change that for whatever level you agreed to with the client, header, footer and sidebars web forms, web pages that we assembled manually, and front end elements controlled solely by the template and not content areas.\r\n\r\nAnd then so that is that is what we are guaranteeing will be accessible remember this whole not 100% accessible website. These are the things we guarantee accessibility on it. Then it says we can also manually Review and Correct additional posts or pages that we didn't develop code or assemble and then we will list out the ones that they've asked us to add in the scope and they will literally be written they're like what they are.\r\n\r\nSo I have two examples here. If you want to exclude accessibility or if you are limiting accessibility so if you're not currently including accessibility in your contracts and you have concerns, I think it would be good to one check with an attorney and potentially with your business insurance and your errors, omissions and just make sure we're doing but a lot of times having an exclusion clause that makes it really clear in your contract that the contract does not include accessibility services. Don't always you don't always need this. Because usually the Statement of Work The only things that are included is what's listed in it but I I've heard from other agencies that they include statements that specifically say yeah, we don't do this and if you or or not that we don't do this, it this particular contract doesn't include it and if you want it then a specific than an additional agreement will be added right with a separate statement of work. And cost and all that kind of stuff. So that's what this example is limiting the accessibility is helpful if you're doing more of the, you know, we if you're not doing a lot of custom development, and you're doing template builds and you're kind of trying to observe best practices, but you're not promising full accessibility compliance, even of the all of the areas. So this is where you might put something where you're saying, you know, we use automated testing tools to identify and address potential accessibility issues during the development process and we'll use a good faith effort. However, we all agree that I'm not an accessibility expert, right? If you're saying this, and our subcontractors are not accessibility experts, and the client understands and agrees that the company cannot guarantee full weekend compliance or compliance with any laws, right? So it's saying you know, we're gonna do our best, but we're not guaranteeing anything. So you might want to check with an attorney and see if you need to have something like that in your contract as you're starting to do it.\r\n\r\nSo that's all the business side of things, and I'm happy to answer any questions. Very good lot of great insight there and several questions in queue. Let me just invite everybody to open up that q&a If you don't have it open already, and drop in your question or upload the question of others. Robert, you have dropped in a question in the last hour that was pretty extensive about business. If there's anything in particular I think she's embers covered all the items that you mentioned. If there's anything in particular that you have left over, just drop it in the chat and we'll get that over. Next up here is Tanya, what liability do you open yourself up to do you think if you offer accessibility to clients, since people are getting well, there's a lot more litigation these days.\r\n\r\nUm, I don't know if I can totally know the answer to like, what liability, you know, like or how much risk is if you start offering it, but I don't feel like it's going to be any different than the moment you start, you know, talking to your clients about do you have a privacy policy? Right. I think as long as you're really clear in your terms of service, like make it really clear and I also did this all the time in in meetings with clients, I'll be like, so this is what I think I'm not giving you legal advice.\r\n\r\nRight. So if you have that I think that's really helpful. i If you don't have business insurance, you should have business insurance. You should have errors and omissions insurance, which basically means if you make a mistake, it will be covered. We switched to three by Berkshire Hathaway because they they were one of the few that told us that they would include accessibility, like if our clients got sued. And then we got pulled in.\r\n\r\nThe other thing you have to think about what the lawsuits do is it's not necessarily that you're getting sued, it's there could be loss of work time. Like if your client gets sued and then you have to go testify or give depositions or something like that.\r\n\r\nSo like that's where the insurance could be helpful because it would pay for that time.\r\n\r\nI don't know. I just feel like in general, I don't. I have never found anything where it seems like talking about the laws whether it's accessibility or privacy or you know, Cookie notices has made me feel like I'm putting myself or my business at risk. I feel like I always get positive feedback from clients. Even in the early days before we were even like digital where they were like, they really appreciated that I was bringing these things to their attention, because a lot of times they don't know and they trust us to be the experts and to provide them with recommendations and advice and I sort of feel like you actually are more likely to put yourself at risk if you know that they need something and it can be documented that you knew it and you never told them because then you're not living up to your duty to that client as their you know their guide Yeah, this is something we've kind of, we've dealt with in the in my monster contracts.\r\n\r\nThe same thing as your contracts. Yeah. So I mean, the default position of monster contracts is we don't promise anything about anything and that is the safest place you can be and that goes for privacy, accessibility, all of those things that is bad stating in your account. And again, I'm not a lawyer, either. I've talked to lawyers, this was the advice you should talk to your lawyer. But if you don't if you're explicitly not promising anything, then you're good. If you that the place to promise, or delineate what accessibility services you provide, at least in my model is in the scope of work where you're itemizing the just like you gave and same for privacy or any other laws. It's always the client's responsibility to inform us if the website has to be compliant. Ultimately, now we may say, Hey, you might want to look at this but it's up to the client that goes for things like even down to what tax What should I charge on my WooCommerce site, right? I'm not the tax guy. I'm like, I should talk to your accountant. Right? It's so it's the it's up to the client to inform us we might give some educated pointers, but it's gotta be on them. I mean, biggest thing too, if you start doing this, like let's say you guarantee that the header and the footer are going to be accessible. You just have to be willing to work on it until it is. Right like we've we've had this happen where we miss something and a website got launched, and we didn't notice and they came back like two months later. And it was we added a 30 day support periods. It was after their support period, and they're like, Hey, we just noticed this and we're like, oh gosh, we totally missed that. So we fixed it for free and we didn't charge them anymore. And then they were like happy you did that. And and we're like okay, we're totally fine, right? Like I think that's the thing if you're if you're just being honest, and and then you're willing to back what you promise people and make it happen, then I think your your clients are gonna be happy with you. Yeah, I agree. Okay, both Karen and Doug have the similar question here about accessibility policies, accessibility statements.\r\n\r\nKaren is asking, is there a checklist? Doug wants to know if there's a good place to start now yesterday you mentioned that something like that is included even in the free version of accessibility checker, you want to talk about that again? Yeah, so if you activate the free version of accessibility checker, it will create a draft page in your WordPress website that you can then go and edit. There isn't a real checklist for this and accessibility statements aren't. They're not legal documents.\r\n\r\nSo there's not you know, like a contract usually is expected to have certain formats and things like that. accessibility statements aren't the best practice is that your accessibility statement needs to have ways for people to contact you if they need accessibility support or contact the company.\r\n\r\nBut I've seen some where they list out everything they've done, we do that we've listed out everything we've added.\r\n\r\nThere is also a general recommendation. I'll say this if you know something isn't accessible and putting that in the accessibility statement is really beneficial. Or, for example, on the the University website that we were working on. They use a third party platform for registration for courses that had accessibility problems and the the Office of Civil Rights told them that they needed to literally stayed that above the link to go to the platform that was like this platform was not accessible because it was getting fixed. But like in the meantime, it's like because they're like don't waste people's time. So I I published a video of my talk at a post from my talk last week at decode and I linked over to it on YouTube and I noticed that it did not captions. I messaged him to ask them if they could add captions. But when I link to it in the blog post, I put video on YouTube frenzies on captioned and that's something I've seen too, a lot of where it'll be like PDF on tagged because then it saves time people don't have to download it, try to use the string meter and find out that it's not going to work.\r\n\r\nIt doesn't mean that you shouldn't eventually provide the right version but but if you tell people in advance that can be really helpful. So putting in your accessibility statement or putting that you know, wherever you're linking to the thing that can be helpful. Yeah, that's really good.\r\n\r\nTanya, what should we say to clients who request the installation of overlays like excessive B and all the others that would negate that would negate our liability. In other words, I'm suing you because you told me not to add the overlay. If you ever run into that, yeah, um, I, I have three things that I send to clients regularly when they asked for an overlay one is overlay fact sheet.com. That is a really good resource. The second one is I saved a New York Times article from like, two years ago, maybe a year and a half ago about overlays and and problems that blind people report with them.\r\n\r\nSome clients really respond well to like it was in the news in a major publication, right? So it's like you have to read your client. And the third thing is I actually have a PDF copy which if somebody reaches out to me, I can send it to you of the i Bob's V Murphy lawsuit, which was a I Bob's is an E commerce glasses store and they had an overlay they were using excessively and they got sued. And it's the full complaint that lists every problem, including problems caused by excessive fee. And there's a very detailed report like 30 page report as an addendum to that legal complaint from Carl groves that like shows research he put into all these and why they don't work. And so for clients that are really like, some are like, kinda scientific, and they like need proof, like it's like, well, here's a lawsuit where someone got sued from having one and it lists all the problems and I don't know if the videos all work it used to link to like private YouTube videos where it literally showed the overlay breaking things so like I've had good results with just doing those.\r\n\r\nAnd, you know, it's an interesting like, I noticed when whitehouse.gov launched it had text resign. Well, we looked at that right. And then we went there yesterday, and he's gone.\r\n\r\nAnd, and I'm like, Well, that was really interesting. That probably means they were tracking it and not enough people used it. And they were like, Let's remove this feature. Right? So I think like, there's stuff like that, that you can share. You know, just in my, in my experience, people don't use them. So interesting. If if you would email me that PDF, I will post it in our academy slack group for folks. If that's if that's Yeah, yeah, I can grab it and email it to you after. And folks if you are not a member of the Academy slack group, the link to join is there in the chat.\r\n\r\nIs the New York Times article you mentioned this one for blind internet users. The fix can be worse than Oh yeah, I can send that also.\r\n\r\nInteresting. I just found it. I'll drop the link. Oh, okay. Good. Yeah. All right. Yeah, let's see. I think you have recommendations or plugins on adding meta tags to a ton or I think she means alt tags to a ton of photos.\r\n\r\nNo, unfortunately the only reason why I say that is so ignore set as the featured image the featured image pulls the alt text out of the media library. So a really easy way to do this is we use the admin columns plugin and I can't remember if it's only in free if it's in free or if it's only in pro but you can set up columns on the media library with admin columns. And so you could make the alt there and then you could have someone go through and do that that will fix all future uses of the image and it will fix it if it was set as the featured image. But in WordPress anytime that an image is already embedded into a post or a page, if you edit the alt text in the media library, it doesn't go out and update that. So you still have to go through the post and page and correct it. Wherever it is embedded in us. We are actually working on a fix for that that we're going to include with the accessibility checker so that you could optionally like check a box and be like, go find this and replace it everywhere. It's not anytime soon. Because there's a lot of testing and stuff. But yeah, I would imagine Yeah, that a potential for harm. They're done exactly right. Yeah, because you don't want to overwrite if there's existing all texts because all texts should also be contextual. And yeah, challenge. That's cool, though.\r\n\r\nOkay, Jean says I work. We'll be back in just a minute. So there are tools out there. There's one that's like alt text that AI or something and you plug it in and it reads so what do you think about AI generated alt text if it doesn't exist? So I have a whole podcast episode about this on our craft podcast.\r\n\r\nI wonder if you could find the link real quick where we talked about so I tested it was right after\r\n\r\nevery alt came out. I tested every alt I've since also tested all types.ai I don't think that they do a good enough job.\r\n\r\nI am probably I think from all of them. I think all textile AI is getting the closest because the thing that it does that's different from a lot of the other alt text generation plugins is it doesn't just look at the image. It also looks at the surrounding content, which is really helpful. But the thing is, is a lot of times they they just miss context or they give information that's totally wrong. Like, you know, when I tested to every all on my website, it was a picture. We used to live on antigay, nine pictures of my daughter on the beach and it's all like a kid on vacation. I was like well, no, this is literally incorrect. was just a Monday evening. We're not on vacation. We live here. Like you know that kind of stuff. So I I am hopeful that they will work because I think they're very needed. I don't think that you can use them without having a human check their work right now. Yeah. Interesting. Tanya wants to know, is there a standard length for all texts? While we're on that subject?\r\n\r\nNo.\r\n\r\nIt should be the right length to adequately describe the image and the purpose of the image on the page.\r\n\r\nWe will flag so wave flags if your alt text is longer than 100 characters. We up to ours after getting a ton of feedback, including from NASA and ours by default flags. It's about the length of a tweet. So it's like 250 so it's double what length wave will flag.\r\n\r\nIf you're writing a book in there, it's probably better to make it like a caption or something visible because it's probably helpful for everyone. Right? Like if it's a graph, sometimes they're like, I need giant alt text and I'm like, no, just put a table below. Like, like you can literally put, you know, graph of this data in table below any alteration. Yeah, and don't let your keyword or your SEO people keyword stuff your alt text. Yes. Yeah, it is not for SEO it is for blind people to understand what the man man reading a book in front of bakery in Birmingham, Alabama, right. It's like every photo is Birmingham, Alabama. Yeah, exactly. rank for Google.\r\n\r\nPhotographers are the worst at that, to be honest. Oh, wow. Yeah, I can imagine.\r\n\r\nTigers. Oh, yes. Right.\r\n\r\nAnd we're a bit over time. We have a couple more questions left. Are you okay for a couple more? Yeah, I have a couple more minutes. Okay. Jeans question. I work with a graphic designer that requires parentheses loves uppercase for most heading levels. Any advice on how to convey to her the negative impact of using these you just literally next time you get a design from her you provide a comment. That's like we are no longer doing I mean Diller in advance.\r\n\r\nfor accessibility reasons we're not using all uppercase because it it can be really hard for people to read there is research on this that can be found. I don't have any off the top of my head but basically the problem with all caps is that every letter fits in the same height. And from a readability especially for people who have dyslexia where they might like reverse letters like having the up and down where different things are different heights is really helpful. Trying to fix everything so I mean I would share some information about that with them and but then I would just literally start I mean that that was a thing our designer is fabulous but he like it took us a little while and I would go through and and multiple different projects in a row. I would just tag no caps, no caps no gaps, no gaps, right. Underline this link. Right. And but but eventually they learn, but I would just like say, Hey, we're drawing a line in the sand. This is the thing we're not doing any more starting now. Yeah, that's great. Okay, one final question from Tanya, why don't screen readers use the standard target equals blank to tell users that the link opens in a new window? This is a question that everyone wonders about all the time. I think it is a problem in screen you're right like they they. So the thing with screen readers is they don't announce every attribute on HTML elements. They look for ARIA attributes. But there's a lot of other attributes and there are some you know like the look for required on form in inputs or disabled on buttons, things like that, but they don't by default, announce everything. I think it would be great if screeners just did that.\r\n\r\nI will say though, the other thing about the link if you're warning users so like our new window warnings plug in it also puts a visual icon that is helpful for sighted people to Yes. So if you only had the screen reader warning, you'd still maybe have a problem for people who aren't using screen readers, but maybe have a different situation where they need to be warned that it's going to be opened in a new tab or window so you would still want to have the icon anyway. Yeah, I just added a link to the accessibility New Window warnings plug in in the chat, folks, if you're not using that it's a really handy tool to give those tooltips and icons and let folks know that you're heading to someplace else.\r\n\r\nGood. Amber, this has been awesome. Thanks a lot, have a lot of things in the chat there and that really appreciate your expertise over the last couple of days. Any final thoughts as we're wrapping up now? Well, I guess I'll circle back a little bit to what I said earlier, which is that some accessibility is better than no accessibility.\r\n\r\nI know it can be totally overwhelming. I hardly did a dent in testing. And you know if any of you followed up and went and looked at WIC hag yesterday you might have been like, what the heck, this is scary. Because I know that's how I felt when I first looked at it. Um, but I you know, small things and you can make small changes and you could so like we just talked about the headings, you could say, Hey, we're we're gonna make sure this month like everything we do moving forward. We don't ever use all caps. And we are going to always make sure that we're not saying Click here for links. And that's the change we're going to implement first, and then we're going to choose another change and then you just build upon it over time. Love it. Love it. Well, thanks again. So much. Thank you all for being with us as well. It's been a great couple of days of information. The replay will be up here in about an hour. And that'll do it for us today. We're back tomorrow with Office Hours here on solid Academy where we go further together by\r\n\r\n\r\n","livestream-resources-group":"s:34:\"a:1:{s:6:\"_state\";s:8:\"expanded\";}\";","multi-day_replay_details":["s:1329:\"a:7:{s:18:\"event_replay_title\";s:42:\"Day 1 - Laws & Standards \/ Avoiding Issues\";s:25:\"day_description_cloneable\";s:290:\"\r\n\r\nWebsite accessibility laws around the world that may apply to your projects\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nAccessibility considerations for design\r\n\r\n\";s:35:\"livestream_vimeo_video_id_cloneable\";s:9:\"927714276\";s:16:\"course-resources\";a:2:{i:0;a:4:{s:28:\"resource_link_text_multi_day\";s:32:\"Hour 1 Slides - Laws & Standards\";s:22:\"resource_url_multi_day\";s:82:\"https:\/\/drive.google.com\/file\/d\/1n13GeZ0WzrlkiUO7rSe4uj617LD4bRnX\/view?usp=sharing\";s:23:\"resource_type_multi_day\";s:6:\"Slides\";s:6:\"_state\";s:8:\"expanded\";}i:1;a:4:{s:28:\"resource_link_text_multi_day\";s:31:\"Hour 2 Slides - Avoiding Issues\";s:22:\"resource_url_multi_day\";s:82:\"https:\/\/drive.google.com\/file\/d\/1iU8LD_Nt_-Mf3QKf9IWm8v8f7tSte0_e\/view?usp=sharing\";s:23:\"resource_type_multi_day\";s:6:\"Slides\";s:6:\"_state\";s:8:\"expanded\";}}s:23:\"livestream_chat_log_url\";s:82:\"https:\/\/drive.google.com\/file\/d\/17cArfnhUwGXJPiT3Vcam7BFZesYGuZYv\/view?usp=sharing\";s:40:\"livestream_live_transcript_url_cloneable\";s:66:\"https:\/\/otter.ai\/u\/8-gmLrrfgsO0MV_IqC_oXD1qWmQ?utm_source=copy_url\";s:6:\"_state\";s:8:\"expanded\";}\";","s:1338:\"a:7:{s:18:\"event_replay_title\";s:68:\"Day Two - Accessibility Testing \/ Selling Accessibility as a Service\";s:25:\"day_description_cloneable\";s:256:\"\r\nHow to identify and fix common accessibility problems\r\nHow to budget for accessibility in projects.\r\nWays to sell clients on accessibility.\r\nIdeas for building recurring revenue with accessibility offerings.\r\n\";s:35:\"livestream_vimeo_video_id_cloneable\";s:9:\"928153270\";s:16:\"course-resources\";a:2:{i:0;a:4:{s:28:\"resource_link_text_multi_day\";s:37:\"Hour 3 Slides - Accessibility Testing\";s:22:\"resource_url_multi_day\";s:85:\"https:\/\/drive.google.com\/file\/d\/1CAhcS8SVPGe6vQy4eEp8QAOTllIc2P6O\/view?usp=drive_link\";s:23:\"resource_type_multi_day\";s:6:\"Slides\";s:6:\"_state\";s:8:\"expanded\";}i:1;a:4:{s:28:\"resource_link_text_multi_day\";s:37:\"Hour 4 Slides - Selling Accessibility\";s:22:\"resource_url_multi_day\";s:85:\"https:\/\/drive.google.com\/file\/d\/1L-uTfPqj4ebBvhJF3r-xjCfjaZErwAzb\/view?usp=drive_link\";s:23:\"resource_type_multi_day\";s:6:\"Slides\";s:6:\"_state\";s:8:\"expanded\";}}s:23:\"livestream_chat_log_url\";s:82:\"https:\/\/drive.google.com\/file\/d\/18E2xmk23b3og0iggP2zLz8LafpVCA2t-\/view?usp=sharing\";s:40:\"livestream_live_transcript_url_cloneable\";s:66:\"https:\/\/otter.ai\/u\/LSOxOO-zxT3-2imldhITetqCF1I?utm_source=copy_url\";s:6:\"_state\";s:8:\"expanded\";}\";"]}},"postCountOnPage":1,"postCountTotal":1,"postID":448496,"postFormat":"standard","geoCloudflareCountryCode":"US"}; dataLayer.push( dataLayer_content ); \nFrom the U.S. increasing requirements for website accessibility under the Americans with Disabilities Act to the European Accessibility Act beginning enforcement in June 2025, countries around the world are increasingly making website accessibility not just a best practice but a must-do. Are the websites you build accessible for people with disabilities?\n\n\n\nJoin this 4-hour website accessibility crash course to learn which laws around the world might apply to your projects and how to ensure the websites you build are accessible, from design to development, testing, and ensuring ongoing compliance post-launch. There will be a special focus on the business of accessibility - how to fit it into your processes, sell clients on the investment, and grow recurring revenue with accessibility offerings.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n","livestream_live_transcript_text":"Well now I guess most spring breaks are probably over ring. last hours is this week. Oh, is it? Yeah. Ours was two weeks ago which felt so early to me.\r\n\r\nWow. Yeah, that is that is prettier. Yeah.\r\n\r\nThe big thing that they're all talking about is that we are in the path of totality for the solar eclipse on the eighth. Oh, no kidding. Yeah. So we've been getting like there's a bunch of news and they've been talking I still I think we're supposed to get like in our town are supposed to get three minutes and 16 seconds of total darkness.\r\n\r\nNo kidding. Yeah.\r\n\r\nBut if you go like a little bit further north of us, I think you can get up to like eight minutes of it. But but I'm not we're not going anywhere. Because I've I've heard like news stories about just how bad the traffic is and stuff. I heard something on NPR like a week ago where they were talking about when there was one, maybe like 10 years ago in Wyoming and people went from Colorado to Wyoming and it took them like 12 hours to drive back. When in what would normally have been like a two hour drive. That's\r\n\r\nnuts. Oh, welcome, everybody. Glad you're here. We're just chatting about the solar eclipse that's coming up here and it's a couple of weeks, right. Is that? April 8? Yeah, a couple of weeks away. Yeah. Oh, so Phoebe's saying Phoebe's in the 97% area.\r\n\r\nYeah, so that's coming up. So welcome. Just go ahead. Oh, I\r\n\r\nwas just gonna answer PBS where I was. So I am in Georgetown. Texas, which is north of Austin.\r\n\r\nGotcha. Yeah. So\r\n\r\nwe're gonna get our three minutes. Well, I ordered the glasses off Amazon. They're supposed to get here today. It'll be it'll be fun. That was blocked our calendar so nobody would book a meeting with me.\r\n\r\nYou know what, I didn't do that. We don't have totality here in the Birmingham area but it's it's obviously it's gonna go a little bit dim but we ordered the Amazon glasses to and I'm sure that you know these $8 glasses set of glasses that we ordered. Perfectly protect our eyes, right from this putting my trust to me pretty cheap equipment here. I\r\n\r\nknow, they're real. And I was like, Well, if we go blind, we will be extra advocates for accessibility. And maybe we'll also make a lot of money off Amazon.\r\n\r\nOh, yeah. Good luck with that. Oh, gosh. Well, welcome everybody. We're just talking about the Eclipse. It's going to be happening in a couple of weeks. I'm not sure how we got on that subject. But it's it's an interesting one. So glad you're all here. As you're coming into zoom, open up the chat and say hello, tell us where you're logging in from today. The captions are working and going I'm also going to drop in our link bundle there in the chat. Both sessions have slides or they're waiting on you. You can download those and follow along if you'd like. Also some helpful links in there that you can click along the way as well. So we'll be getting started here in just about three minutes from now with accessibility Crash Course. And behind us with us today from access from equalize digital, the accessibility pros. You can't go very far these days without running into Amber and a news story or doing something fun. So we'll talk to her about that as we get going. Hey, Dad, good to see you. So let's do a check in question in the chat on a scale of one to 10. How would you write your understanding of web accessibility and the issues that surround it? So give us a one to 10 there in the chat if you would. And if you're just now coming into zoom, open up the chat say hi. And we just have a few minutes before we were getting started today. Good to see everybody coming in. Do me a great four hours of training with Amber all about the issues that we need to be aware of in accessibility. Oh wow. So Doug is he's a Doug's a nine. So you are living the accessibility that's part of your world Now Doug, that's\r\n\r\nawesome. Very, very good.\r\n\r\nDoug can check me on the AO da my talk about it later.\r\n\r\nYeah, so Phoebe thinks she understands it. But yeah, there's a lot to just seems to be more and more and more detail that you have to like you you understand and you realize oh, no, wait, wait. There's like three more levels to this that I didn't realize that I needed to know.\r\n\r\nNow, I feel like that's everything and you know, WordPress, development, marketing and all that kind of stuff. There's always layers. You start and then you can go a little deeper and then a little deeper and yeah, what makes it fun and interesting. doesn't get boring, right?\r\n\r\nI know. It definitely doesn't get boring that that is absolutely for sure. Let's see. So class is a four Ben is an eight thanks to your pro plugin, Amber.\r\n\r\nAh,\r\n\r\nTammy is reading a three. Yeah. All right. So by the way, you may be chatting with only hosts and panelists. So if you look at the chat and you see your name and host and panelists just flip down the little blue drop down from hosts and panelists to everyone in the chat area. I'm going to drop in the slide bundle of the link bundle again here with today's slides. You can follow those along. Just about a minute to go before we get started with accessibility Crash Course is going to be a great few hours of training here a lot to learn on this topic and it's a subject that we all need to be aware of.\r\n\r\nOh, yeah, okay, here's\r\n\r\na loaded question. Sue wants to know if Zoom is accessible.\r\n\r\nZoom is actually very accessible. Our WordPress accessibility day conference, we run it out of zoom and zoom even has the ability to have a separate sign language interpretation view. Oh, that's super neat. Yeah, that was a new thing that they added last year. And we tried it out for the conference last year and it worked really well. And of course, they have the captions, which is very helpful. And there's some streaming webinar platforms that don't even have the automated captions. So yeah,\r\n\r\nthat's that's really cool.\r\n\r\nWe attach otter to zoom restream the captions are just much better with otter II own technical terms and abbreviations and things like that. Alright, folks, we're just about ready to get started. Actually, it's three minutes after so let's start our recording and dive in officially.\r\n\r\nWelcome, everybody to\r\n\r\nthe WordPress accessibility crash course here on solid Academy. glad you've joined us for this two days and four hours of training with our friend Amber Hines. From equalize digital Welcome back. Amber, how are you?\r\n\r\nI'm glad to hear I'm doing pretty well.\r\n\r\nI really appreciate your time. Being with us this week and your expertise on this issue of accessibility. It is an important one that those of us who Build and Manage websites for clients need to be informed about and educated on not only how to build accessible websites, but also the laws and all the things we have to know and so really, really appreciate you being with us. So one thing just kind of get the conversation started today. You folks that equalize digital, you're everywhere in the WordPress space. I mean, you're you're working with NASA I see you in news articles all the time. Give us an update of what's been going on with you and your company. Yeah,\r\n\r\nso we do do quite a bit of speaking and we're doing more events which I'm super excited. I'm gonna go to WordCamp Europe for the first time this year. I've never been before. I don't know if you've been but I'm excited about that. And yeah, we did some accessibility audit and we are still doing some accessibility auditing on the new NASA website which was built in WordPress and we do quite a bit on the auditing and remediation front in higher ed and for other bigger businesses. And then I try as best I can to contribute to WordPress plugins where I can, you know, just reporting issues because I think that's a really important way to get back to the community.\r\n\r\nYeah, absolutely. And so what I think is really interesting, especially for our audience, is that you started on the agency side working with clients, right? And then you pivoted more toward this product, but what was that journey like?\r\n\r\nYeah, so we my husband and I started an agency I guess I started as a freelancer. He joined me and we grew it into a marketing agency that did website design, development, social media, search, engine optimization, content creation, all kinds of stuff. And we as we started working with larger clients, we got more exposed to accessibility and we realized it was something that was really interesting to us when we really liked it. And that was sort of our COVID pivot we decided we were going to fully focus on accessibility and and do more we created our accessibility checker WordPress plugin which has a free version and that's been sort of a fun challenge to learn what it's like to run a plugin business, in addition to a services business. I'll tell you though, I don't really mind not having to manage people's social media accounts anymore. I just do my own and that's just fine with me.\r\n\r\nOh, that's amazing. So folks, if you're not familiar with Amber and what you're doing over equalized digital, the link is there in the chat at equalized digital.com. They have a great WordPress plugin called Accessibility Checker. It's used on many, many websites. It's an excellent way to identify the accessibility issues on a website. I'm sure you're going to be talking about, even how the free tool works and how we as site builders can leverage that in our client work. So Amber, give us just a broad overview of where we're heading today.\r\n\r\nYep, so today on this first half of the webinar, we're going to start by talking about the laws and standards, which would be some laws around the world and Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. That'll be about the first half. And then we're going to talk about important things to know to avoid accessibility issues or violating those laws and standards.\r\n\r\nSuper important. Okay, so today is more about the knowledge about the kind of the lay of the land as far as the accessibility world goes. And tomorrow, what are we going to focus on?\r\n\r\nSo tomorrow, we're going to start by talking about testing and building in your workflow. And then we are going to do a deep dive into the business of accessibility. So we'll talk about how you can grow recurring revenue, including accessibility in your care plans, sales language around accessibility on new website builds, I have some contract language that I'm going to share and some other things like that. Now, I'm not an attorney, but you can sort of I'll give you some insight around how we sell accessibility to our clients and how we protect ourselves legally when we do that.\r\n\r\nVery good. All right, this is gonna be a great couple of days. So a couple of housekeeping notes and they'll disappear and let me get started. You're welcome to use the chat to conversate with others that are alive in the live stream today. Just use that Zoom chat. But if you have a question, please open up the zoom q&a. So just mouse over the shared screen, click the q&a icon, and it's helpful just to keep that q&a box open throughout the livestream today. You can ask a question as it comes up to you. But also you can upvote the questions of others and roughly at the middle of today's session, and then at the end, we'll have these two separate times of questions and answers, where we'll take the questions in the order of up votes. So really important to upvote questions that you also have. So we get those questions answered first. All right, well, I'm going to disappear and Amber, let's get started accessibility laws and standards.\r\n\r\nYep.\r\n\r\nAll right. So what we're going to talk about in this first half of the webinar, I'm going to give a incredibly brief intro to accessibility for people who aren't familiar with what it is. Then we're going to talk about some key web accessibility laws around the world. We'll talk about Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, otherwise known as what I'm going to pronounce as WIC ag WCAG. I'm going to call that wicked. And then we're going to talk just briefly about accessibility requirements impact on agencies and as Nathan mentioned, we'll have time for questions. So feel free to type those in the q&a. So I'm not before I get started, I want to say I'm not going to spend a bunch of time today talking about the real details of why websites should be accessible, how many people they impact all of those things. I did give a bootcamp on accessibility a couple of years ago. You can find it on the solid Academy website. If you look word if you just search the term accessibility in the search box or if you have the slides. I do have that link to over that presentation goes a lot more in detail on why accessibility matters and who is impacted by accessibility. So I definitely recommend checking that out as well. If you are new to accessibility broadly what we are talking about when we're saying making a website accessible, is we're talking about making sure that the website works for everyone, people of all abilities, and disabilities using a variety of devices and assistive technologies. So this could be people who use a normal laptop, and they type with a normal keyboard but they can't use the mouse. So maybe they're blind and they can't see the mouse or maybe they have mobility challenges that makes it difficult to use the mouse. It could also be people who can't use a keyboard at all. And they use voice recognition and voice control in order to operate their devices. This could also mean making things work well on mobile devices, those sorts of things. So that's broadly what we're talking about. There are a number of benefits for websites as a whole when you make them more accessible. So there's a lot of overlap between accessibility and search engine optimization. When you make a website more accessible, you're typically improving underlying HTML code that search engines understand which means you are going to come out with better SEO and greater reach for the website. Of course, if you make it easier for people to navigate through a website and take the actions you want them to take submitting forms, purchasing products, whatever those actions might be, then you are more likely to have increased conversions. On that website, not just from people with disabilities from everyone, but especially from people with disabilities. accessible websites can help to reduce operational costs. If I want to buy something from a business and the website does not work, then but I really want to make that purchase. I might call them on the phone or I might go into their physical store, and then they have to have a human being to assist me in order to for me to make that purchase. If I can just self serve on the web. It allows the business not to have to maybe staff as many people or have longer business hours in which they are open and operating. And so therefore it can reduce costs if more people can just do their own helping on a website rather than having to do it in person. Of course having an accessible website is a great way for nonprofits, for businesses, any sort of organizations to live their corporate values. So if you have a client who has values around community, or values related to diversity, equity and inclusion having an accessible website is a key part of actually living and meeting those values. And then what we're about to talk about is accessible websites. help organizations comply with accessibility laws around the world. So I do want to preface I said this before, but I'll say it again here. I'm not an attorney. I am an accessibility professional. I've done a lot of research on accessibility laws. I have listened to a lot of well known attorneys that specialize in Disability Rights speak. I'm sharing this information with you but I'm not an attorney. If you have specific concerns about laws and whether they impact your business or your clients, businesses, then you are the client should definitely consult with an attorney. So I'm going to start in the United States and the first law that I'm going to talk about is the Rehabilitation Act of 1973. This law has a couple of different parts as many laws do. And there are two key parts that apply to website accessibility. Section 504 states that no otherwise qualified individual with a disability in the United States shall solely by reason of his or her disability, be excluded from participation in be denied the benefits of or be subjected to discrimination under any program. or activity receiving federal financial assistance. So this law applies to anyone who receives any funds from the federal government. Obviously, this is a federal government website. So like we talked about NASA before, but it's also any sort of federally funded projects. So k 12. Schools, post secondary schools, so state colleges, universities, vocational training, private schools, as well, anything where they, they or their students can receive federal financial assistance or federal grants, nonprofit organizations that receive federal grants. All of all of them need to have accessible websites under Section 504. And then the second part of this is section five await which specifically applies to any FET any federal government entities and section 508 bars the federal government from procuring electronic and information technology goods and services, which includes website design damn specified that that are not fully accessible to those with disabilities. Sections five oh wait actually does apply a standard for the Rehabilitation Act and the measuring of accessibility and it specifically requires a minimum of Web Content Accessibility Guidelines WCAG 2.0, double a compliance and we'll talk more about what that means when we get to the WIC ag section. I do recommend if you want to learn more about either of these if you go to section five await.gov You can get a ton of information about this law notably links on all of the slides for all of the laws that we're talking about. But if you build websites for anyone who gets federal dollars of any kind, and there's no minimum threshold, so if they got $500 grant from, you know, a nonprofit to get a $500 grant, it would apply to them. So the next one in the US is the Americans with Disabilities Act. There are two parts of this law that are relevant. So title two, this specifically deals with public services, transportation, any sort of state or local governments would fall under this. And it talks about communications with persons with disabilities must be quote, as effective as communications with others. So this means all communications including websites, PDF documents, emails can fall under this as well. If it's a library, that would be a public service that sends out an email newsletter about events happening at the library or new books they got in the library that would also fall under the American with Disabilities Act. And then Title Three, title three deals with public accommodations, and it applies to businesses and nonprofits, and any sort of private entities that serve the public. And it specifically says that they must provide people with disabilities and equal access to access the goods and services or or services that they offer to the public. So right now, one of the big things that is changing or happening with the ADEA is that the Justice Department announced in July of last year, a proposed rulemaking specific to state and local governments. So we talked about how title two said that communications had to be just as effective for people with disabilities as they are for people without disabilities. One of the challenges with the ADEA is that it doesn't specifically state a standard to measure against\r\n\r\nwhite like we saw with section five away which said we can 2.0 Double lay. So the Justice Department announced over the summer that they were proposing a new rule specifically for state and local government websites. Under Title two of the ADEA. And it was going to say that state and local government website content must meet wicked version 2.1 level double A. This rule would apply to websites, mobile apps PDFs, any web content, anything, videos, anything that's on the web. The only exceptions that they are making to this, if is if it is archived content or content that is not frequently used to give the example of a water quality report from 1998. That might be a PDF that's not a tagged PDF, because maybe it's just a scanned piece of a handwritten paper. They're like most people aren't referencing this so it doesn't have to be made accessible. That's an example of content not frequently use any sort of third party content that's included on the website. So for example, if a city council allows the public to submit comments, the content of the comment that then gets published on the website doesn't have to be accessible, like they could have links that aren't meaningful or, you know, be typed in a way that maybe isn't as accessible and that would be excluded because it's third party content included on there. And then the other exception for this rule would be any sort of password protected content. And the example of this would be for example, if a state or local government or like a school, so k 12. Schools will fall under this. If the school had a course that was online. And there were documents for the course that only students registered in the course could access they have to log in with a password to get them and there is no one in that course who has a disability, or needs any sort of adjustment to that content, then it's okay if the content for example, includes images without alt texts, because it's not publicly consumable, and the professor knows that there's no one in the class that can access the content that needs it. So that's an example of a password protected exception. So those are the only exceptions under this new rule. The timeline to comply that is proposed currently is that any it's based on the number of constituents or the population of the area that the state or local government website, including school websites, or all that serves, so if the population is fewer than 50,000 people then they will have three years to get their websites in compliance with the CAG 2.1 Double A if they have more than 50,000 people in population, then they're going to have two years to get in compliance. There was a public comment period for this that ran through October or November, and the final rulemaking is on the docket for April. So this is worth watching. If you again, state local government can include like public libraries, some sometimes depending on where you are like economic development centers, chambers of commerce, these are all things that I know a lot of us is agency owners, maybe have worked with them to help them build their websites. You'll want to watch this in April to see if this law does go into effect because it can impact the websites you were building and also potentially help you from a sales perspective to motivate people to invest more in their websites. So the other flip side of this is the private entities the businesses and at this point, it's pretty well established that the Americans with Disabilities Act applies to websites. There's lots of case laws that have shown damages were delivered when a website was not accessible. So some examples of the types of private entities that it applies to or retail stores, restaurants, hotels, or motels, movie theaters, private schools, doctors offices and hospitals, daycare centers, gyms credentialing organizations. There have been cases against businesses that don't have a physical location. So for example, Blue Apron, which if you're not familiar with it, it's one of those meal delivery kits you just go on their website, you order a subscription box and they send you food every week or something that you've been cook. They got sued for not having accessible websites so you don't have to have a physical brick and mortar business. For the ATA to consider you serving the public. It's just It is literally do you offer your products or service to anyone in the world like general public or anyone in America I guess we should say and if so, then it would apply. So it is pretty much safe to assume that the ADEA applies to you like your agency and also your clients and their websites. So the ADEA is a little different. The Rehabilitation Act, the way that is set out is that there can be fines or issues with enforcement from the government. The way the Americans with Disabilities Act was written as a law is that it is enforced with lawsuits, isn't it? This isn't great. Mostly because the reason why I say it's not great, it's not because all business owners get sued. I think it's not great because I don't really think we should be putting the onus on people with disabilities to force people to give them rights or access equal access to things. So I think that's not super great, but this is the way the law is written. I have a chart up here that shows the number of website accessibility lawsuits that were filed as from 2016 until 2023. And we went from 262 in 2016. That was when they first started exploring can we do this and trying to set a precedent for websites do apply to the ADEA all the way up to last year, there were 4605 lawsuits against websites under the ADEA have those 4605 lawsuits. 82% of them were against e commerce businesses. So if you build WooCommerce stores Shopify stores, any sort of E commerce and it could maybe not even just be WooCommerce right, easy digital downloads or any of those other online purchasing or selling platforms. You definitely want to be aware of this because that is the top area where complaints come in because it's very, it's very easy to show I could not use this website, therefore I could not get the product from the business. The next largest percentage was 7%. And that was against food service businesses. So either meal delivery, or grocery stores or restaurants those sort of are grouped in that food service category. One thing but we'll talk a little bit about this tomorrow. I talked a lot more about it in my last webinar for solid so I would recommend going and looking at that one if you want to know more but some people ask well does adding an accessibility overlay helped me does it protect me against getting sued. And last year of those 4605 lawsuits? 933 of them were against businesses that were already using an accessibility overlay. Or widget. So that's about a quarter of the lawsuits. About 20%. Were already against people that had that so those will not necessarily protect your clients from getting sued. It's very important to know and we can talk more about those if you have questions or we'll talk more about that tomorrow. Top states so these lawsuits do kind of happen all over but there are some key states where they're happening a lot. Last year New York was the biggest state the year before California was where most of the lawsuits were happening that changed in 20 2003. Because California there was more precedent set that the complaintant had to be in California. And the business had to have nexus in California and and I gotta say it got harder for like, I'm a person in let's say Texas, to sue a business from Minnesota in California. California is like a no, you need to do it wherever you are not in our state. So that sort of decreased the California lawsuits. But if you have clients in California and then you definitely there is there is strong precedent there. Florida is another state as well. And then there are some states that I saw, which I don't have listed here, but like for example, Minnesota is one I just mentioned, or New Jersey where there weren't any in previous years and there are some so there are quite a lot of states and I'm taking all this data from a report that usable net puts out twice a year they go through all of the lawsuits. They have like legal paralegals that they pay to research all this and they put out a report and those are LinkedIn aside, there's a ton more information there. I definitely recommend looking at it. If you're a content creator, go write a blog post about it and on your website and then send it to your clients.\r\n\r\nSo what happens if someone gets sued the cost of an accessibility lawsuit for small businesses, it's really going to range the numbers that I'm seeing both from Chris Rittenberg is one source. He is an attorney that specializes in Ada and DQ which is another web accessibility company like mine. Small businesses are typically looking at paying between 19,040 $5,000 on average. And what this breakdown looks like is typically always people settle. It's very rare that they just keep going, then they almost never win. Sometimes they do get it dismissed. Like I mentioned that there were some examples where California was starting to say no, you're not in our state. You can't see we're dismissing this or you can't prove that you were legitimately going to try to cert get a product or service from that business. And so therefore you can't prove harm. But a lot of the times, companies just settle because it's easier. It's faster, and the settlements usually means you're paying the whoever got sued is paying the plaintiff attorneys law fees which could be 515 $1,000. Paying your defense attorney so the estimate there was maybe 5000 Obviously everyone's attorneys build different hourly rates. Some people have the you know, $100 an hour attorneys some people have the $300 an hour an attorney so that could really impact things on there. And then the settlements always require website audits and remediation. So then you're looking at anywhere between five to $20,000 paying to get the website audited and remediated or potentially you just say, No, we're scrapping it and we're just gonna invest $20,000 into totally rebuilding our website and making it accessible. But we still have to have an audit as part of that rebuild to prove that the new website doesn't have the same problems the old one had. And then for example, if you were in California, California has minimum damages of $4,000. Big businesses, though real world legal fees from a bunch of different accessibility related courses, or lawsuits, not including settlement fees, just the actual fees paid to the attorneys over $350,000. So it can be really expensive. There was a big case that was talked about a lot in January this year, where a web developer in California who built a system to for people to book camping spots for the state parks in California that was not accessible. They got ordered to pay over $2 million in damages back to the plaintiff and a little bit to the state. So because because it was also a fraud case. Because they had said that the website was accessible when it clearly wasn't. So they promised something they couldn't deliver, which we should definitely never do as agency owners. But anyway, it can be very expensive, and so it's better to be proactive. Instead of reactive to this sort of stuff. Beyond the federal laws, there's a bunch of states that have individual state laws which you don't have time to go into but if you were in Alabama, Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Louisiana. Massachusetts, Minnesota, Missouri, New York, Oklahoma, or Virginia, or you have clients in those places. Do some research into the laws in your state. Now want to leave the United States and go visit our friends up north and Canada. There are a couple of laws that apply on the federal level, the Canadian Human Rights Act of 1977. This specifically applies to federal and First Nations governments and federally regulated private sectors such as banking, telecommunications and transportation. And they need to have accessible websites, mobile apps and contents as part of that act. The accessible Canada Act and employment Equity Act requires that parliament the federal government and federally regulated employers have to eliminate barriers to employment. And one thing that is stated in that is that they have to ensure that technologies necessary for work are accessible. So this may or may not apply to websites. But it could mean that if you were building something for a federally regulated employer in Canada, and they had someone with disability who had to do work on the website and the website wasn't accessible, then that could be a violation. And then the 2011 standard on website accessibility in Canada requires that the Government of Canada web content, so again, web content, goes beyond websites must conform to WCAG 2.0 level double A, I would say generally at a national level, the Canadian laws are less strict than what we see here in the United States. However, there are some provinces in Canada that have laws that go much further than what we see both at the federal and the state level here in the United States. So there are two of those. The first one is the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act, otherwise known as a ODA, and I know we saw someone in the chat who mentioned they've been deeply working on this, so feel free to correct me if you know more. But this was enacted in 2005 to improve accessibility standards for people with physical and mental disabilities in all public establishments by 2025 was the goal. There are a few different requirements under this, but all businesses with 20 or more employees must file an accessibility compliance report every three years and this includes literally stating how accessible their website is and whether or not they're complying with the EO da businesses with 50 or more employees, their public websites and public content. Anything that had been posted since January 1 2012. Has to meet wicked 2.0 level double A, with the exception of you don't have to have live captions, or pre recorded audio descriptions for people who are blind that describe what's happening in the video if there's no sound but there's just visuals happening on the video. Those are the only exceptions. The ao da as opposed to the United States where we are enforcing the ADEA with lawsuits there are fines connected with the EO da businesses can be fined up to 100,000 Canadian dollars per day until the violations are resolved. An individual or an unincorporated organization can face a penalty of up to $50,000 Canadian dollars per day. So this could mean that a company gets the $100,000 per day fine or up to that. And the CEO of the company personally also gets a personal fine. I haven't as far as I've seen, I haven't seen a ton of instances where these fines are actually going out yet. However, there are reports of businesses receiving random letters from the government warning that their website is not compliant. Like perhaps they used a crawler, or someone went and reported it to the government and the government sent out a letter I think we're still in early days on seeing a lot of enforcement on this law. But there but it is increasing and it does exist in the law is not going away. The other province that has a similar law is in Manitoba the Accessibility for Manitobans Act this requires that websites meet WIC egg 2.1. So a newer version level double A and it has different deadlines for when this needs to be done based upon the entity so the Manitoba government has to add to meet it by May 1 2023. We've passed that deadline, public sector organizations, libraries and educational institutions may 1 of this year 2020 For private sector, nonprofit organizations and small municipalities. So private sector again, that means businesses need to meet WIC egg 2.1 Double A by May 1 2025. And this one includes the possibility not of a daily fine but of a fine perhaps per instance, of up to 250,000 Canadian dollars. There is an exception in the Accessibility for Manitobans Act for, quote undue hardship. There's no clear definition when you read the law of what an undue hardship is. They do explicitly say stay in some of the writings about it on the go to accessibility nb.ca You can read more about the law. They do stay that cost is not necessarily an undue hardship. So a small business owner can't necessarily say well, I can't afford to make my website accessible it would put me out of business. I think they would have to really be able to prove that they can't literally say I have $0 for it.\r\n\r\nBut that is something to be aware of and as time goes on and you know we get beyond these deadlines. I'm sure there's going to be more evidence where someone got fined and they fall back on it and then there'll be a better clearer definition of what is undue hardship. I would generally operate on the let's set our clients up for success and and try to get them as accessible as possible. And we can talk more about what that means tomorrow. So skipping across over the ocean, I'm going to talk a little bit about the European Union. There are a couple of laws that can apply here. In 3015 49 is the European standard of accessibility requirements for information and communications technology products. So this is the broader or more legal term that we frequently hear for websites or software SAS products and services in the European Union. And basically, all public sector or semi public sector websites in the EU had to meet that standard as of September 23 2020. And they have to report on compliance every three years. En 3015 49 does require WIC egg 2.1 Double A and it also has some requirements that go beyond wicked. So it has specific things for accessibility that they think are important that are not written in WIC ag and I have this linked off the slide if you work on European government websites, then definitely go take a look at that. The European Accessibility Act this is the probably one of the biggest ones that you might hear about if you follow accessibility news. And the reason for this is that it impacts businesses, nonprofits and private websites not public government websites like the one we were just talking about, and enforcement for it begins in June. 2025. So we're at the key time right now where businesses really need to be thinking about this and getting their websites ready. The European Accessibility Act applies to private entities delivering products or services, specifically including e commerce, any websites, mobile apps or chaos. It also lists things like e readers, if you make an e reader it has to be accessible, a lot, that kind of stuff. There is no specific tech standard. So a lot of the other laws we talked about referenced a certain level of wicked compliance. This does not say that but presumably we're going to assume it's safe to assume it's WIC hag double A since that's what most laws around the world require. What is different about the European Accessibility Act is it is a directive under the EU that tells member countries that they have to set laws and start requiring accessibility by June 2025. But each member country will be able to set its own laws and decide how to enforce it like do they have fines? How much are those fines? All those things? Do they require people to publish annual reports or submit reports every couple of years like some of the other ones, each country is gonna be able to set that on their own. This is a lot like GDPR and the privacy laws so you may have seen things like all Germany really doesn't like it if you use Google fonts that are not self hosted and they're off on the Google server. But you know, in France, they don't care about Google fonts as much on it. So so this is going to be a little bit like that where it's going to have a broad implication across the EU but there might be slightly different definitions for it within each member country, so it'll be really important if you are in the EU or if you have customers in the EU or that they have. They sell to people in the EU so they have nexus you'll want to kind of look up what their country is. Some of these countries don't have laws published yet, which is a little bit frustrating. Like they're still working on them so we don't have full deadlines. So again, that's what I'm saying. Like if you sort of assume we CAG double A that's going to be the best place to get started. And of course, we only have so much time. There are a lot more many more rules or laws that I have listed out. So I as I mentioned before, if you have specific concerns or check with an attorney, there's some other resources that we're happy to share. And I'm always interested to know if you know of any that I mentioned today that you think are really important other people should know about post those in the chat and during q&a. And we can also make sure that we read those out so everyone is aware of those laws as well. So, a lot of the laws pointed to Web Content Accessibility Guidelines or WCAG. So what is that we can get is a set of internationally agreed upon testable standards. So that means they are rules that you can say this passes or fails. There's no gray it's a yes or a no festival standard. Created by volunteers in the World Wide Web Consortium, the W three C, which is basically an open source project that's like WordPress. The current version of WIC AG is 2.2. The versions build upon each other so when they released a new version, like 2.2 includes everything from 2.1. This was one instance where they got rid of one guideline which is they've never done before. But but basically if you pass 2.2 You are also going to pass 2.1 And you're also going to pass two data. So if you just shoot for the current version, you don't have to worry about going back and reading about past versions or anything like that. Like the law says you have to be two Dotto compliant. If you're 2.2 compliant then you are also meeting two Dotto. There are three levels of conformance in the criteria we call them success criteria that we measure against. So A is the lowest this is like a bare minimum. Almost no. Like no I haven't seen any laws that say you just have to meet a so only passing to a things is not enough. Double A is the current best practice you want to pass everything that's marked as this is a double a standard. And then AAA is the highest level of conformance if you're able to meet some or all AAA guidelines, then you definitely can. Sometimes that's more difficult and we can talk about some examples of those later.\r\n\r\nSo all\r\n\r\nof the success criteria are created as testable things that you can measure as part of the four different principles that are the foundation for accessibility. And that is that things everything in order for something to be accessible. It has to be perceivable, operable, understandable and robust. What does that mean? Perceivable means that information needs to be transformable from one form to another and your main content and your message needs to be separated, separated, separable. There we go from the way it is styled or presented. So I have a graphic up here that shows sight, hearing and touch and it's all pointing at a brain right? We have a lot of different ways that we can consume information and then it goes to our brain and we understand it what it is. So making something perceivable means that if I am on a webinar, look right now, and I cannot hear the information. I'm looking at the captions that there is in zoom and I can still get that information. It's transformed into another it's transformed into written so that I can get it if I am blind and I'm on a website and there is an image it has alternative types so that even though I cannot see the image, I can still understand what the image is about or get whatever important information the image is conveying on the post or the page. That's what Persil about it's really about making sure that the information is still available, no matter how someone might be entering that web page or experiencing that information.\r\n\r\nOperable the baseline\r\n\r\non this is not everyone uses a standard keyboard and mouse to navigate the web. So the website needs to work. No matter how people are navigating or engaging with the website. There needs to be multiple ways to interact with the website so I could use a mouse or I could just use my keyboard. Users need to be able to set control over time limits or certain timings. So if you have a carousel or a slider that includes a lot of words, and it's going too fast, and I can't read it fast enough, I need to have some way to pause it so that I can read at the pace that makes sense to me. And then I can go to the next slide. That's an example of user being able to control time when you need to have clear instructions. So a lot of the success criteria is around this float around like making it clear what something is and how to use it. If you have an error that happens on the website, like let's say I miss a required field on a form there needs to be clearly announced to everyone so not just the sighted person but also there needs to be an auditory announcement for a screen reader user. And then it needs to be clear to me how I can recover from that error, fix it and move forward. That's all operability understandable is having appropriately target language and reading level supplemental representation of information. So if you have graphics, you might also have a video. If you have audio players, you have a transcript. If you have a really long piece of content, maybe you have a summary or an abstract or an excerpt before it this sort of says here's the key points like bulleting them out. All of this is are examples of supplemental representation of information that make it easier for people to consume. And then the other items under understandable are understandable functionality. So the navigation structure should be really consistent. It should make sense how form how to interact with a form and what to do and you know what information to type or select and how to do it. Maybe you have tooltips in certain areas to explain things that people might not know at first glance like if you have jargon or or like have a feature on a product, but the name of the feature isn't very meaningful. Maybe you have a little description all that helps with understandability. And then robust robust is a really short number of guidelines. And basically this means that you need to have functionality across current and future devices, operating systems and browsers. We want to make sure that we are able to support some outdated versions and that you are validating against the technical standards for the platform. So like for example in WordPress, we have WordPress coding standards. And if you are following WordPress coding standards that helps to make sure that your code is working better in a WordPress website, which makes it more robust and more likely, you know to be more secure or to work better for all the users who visit that website. So we talked a little bit about what level you should meet before as I mentioned, a single A is not sufficient. AAA is a gold star. The most recommended on laws and standards is WIC hag 2.1 Double A. I would recommend as an ideal target WIC egg 2.2 Double A or triple A. We can 2.2 only added a few success criteria. Most of them in my opinion are really easy to meet on a WordPress website. I can throw a link in the chat later if anyone is interested. I have a blog that talks about each of the posts or each of the success criteria and it has literally examples of all of them what a pass or fail would be for each one. So if you can target two dots you that's going to be the most forward looking and help put your clients websites in their best place. And then look at can you meet some AAA success criteria. So for example, color contrast is a rule that has both a double A level and a AAA. AAA has higher contrast than the double A double A's. Okay? Most laws CW is fine. But maybe you can meet AAA for color contrast, especially on maybe your important tests like your body text to make things more readable and visible. And so really looking at that and assessing that can be really helpful. Reading levels. Another one, the reading level guidelines are all AAA, which is that in general, you want your content to be a ninth grade reading level or lower, or if not, you provide a supplemental summary that's at that lower reading level that explains it. This is just it's great for everyone. If content is easy to read, it helps with SEO, it helps increase like people spending time on the page. So why not try to have easier to read content, those sorts of things. Tab target size is another example where there's a double A and a triple A they're all they used to be a triple A but they added the double a guideline with 2.2. But it's just how big are the buttons like on mobile, for example. And the size it's not really that big. That in order to hit the the AAA it's like 46 by 46 pixels. So I'm like do that that you can pass you can meet it and then you're going above and beyond in some areas. So when we go over to WIC and I don't have time I wish I could like walk people through every single one. Of these. There are a couple of different components that I am want to make sure you're aware of. And basically when you go there, what you're going to see is the principles so like we talked about perceivable is once you're going to see the principle up at the top and then we have things nested below it. So the guidelines are the next thing that you see. So in this example I have a guideline of 1.1 text alternatives. These are these are not testable things. They're basically like section headings that group the success criteria and they they have a written description that describes the basic goal. So for example for text alternatives, it's saying that all of the success criteria are under this help you make sure that you are providing texts alternatives for any next note any non text content non text content is like videos, images, graphs, charts, tables, those sorts of things, that it can be changed into other forms people need such as large print Braille speech symbols or simpler language. So that's like the the main goal for this section. So then below it, you'll see all the different success criteria and these are things that you measure against. They are testable criteria that help you determine if something is a pass or a fail on the rights on each of these. You're gonna see and they're kind of small on the screenshot and I apologize but there's two links that are very helpful when you're trying to understand what these mean. So there will always be an understanding link. This is understanding and the name of the success criterion. So we're looking at one dot 1.1 non text content, which is a Level A and there's understanding non text content and then there's also a how to meet nontax content. So when you go to work the first time it is totally overwhelming. I'm not gonna lie as this giant list of things you're like, What the heck am I doing? These are your friend. You can go there and like even just how to meet. Understanding is nice because it says why is this important and it gives you examples of scenarios and that kind of stuff. But a big thing with meeting web chronixx Web Content Accessibility Guidelines is being able to test against it.\r\n\r\nSo I'm\r\n\r\nhow accessibility requirements impact agencies. The biggest thing I want to say, as a takeaway from all of this is you shouldn't ignore accessibility. Around the world. More and more laws are getting passed. Some of these laws likely apply to your website. They definitely apply to your clients websites. And in the United States. As I mentioned, there are starting to be cases where the web developer was sued in addition to the business so I have a photo of that I found that I was like, this is perfect. Here's the lady with her arms out, looking at a train as it leaves the station and I can only imagine the expression on her face, but the accessibility train is coming. You can either be on it, or you can get left behind and it may not do well for your business, right. So things that you'll need to consider and I and I want to say this now because I want you to start thinking about it as we go through the next three hours of this webinar. Starting to think about how accessibility fits in your workflow, maybe what modifications your workflow you need to make changes that you'll need to make to your tools, your team, which doesn't necessarily mean that you have to hire a bunch of w two employees. You could bring in contractors, like my company or other companies or freelancers, people with disabilities to help you with testing, or to improve maybe your development skills if you're like okay, well I'm really good at building websites in this platform. But this thing needs to be remediated and I'm not great at JavaScript. Okay, maybe you just need to find a good resource that can help with that, like the little JavaScript pieces. So So when I'm talking about team it doesn't necessarily have to mean everyone. But sort of thinking about that as we go through the webinar, like where are the gaps that might exist in your current toolset and your current team that you need to fill. And then obviously, we'll be talking a lot about this tomorrow, but adjustments that you need to make to your services and your pricing to account for all of this How are you going to change your scripts for your sales conversations? And then what modifications do you need to make for your proposals and your contracts?\r\n\r\nSo\r\n\r\nwith that in mind, I think we have time for some questions.\r\n\r\nYes, absolutely. This was really, really good. And we're appreciate the the good overview and I kind of tell you, I'm just kind of watching the way folks have been approaching accessibility. I've noticed a real change lately, not only from our clients that I work with as an agency but also from people who are doing client work on the agency side. Like I'm finding in more discovery conversations with folks that we've never talked to before. We're just talking about, hey, we want this website or whatever. I'm finding more clients are bringing up accessibility now and asking those questions before we even get there in our script. Which is good. I think it's becoming more Yeah. It's\r\n\r\nbecoming a thing.\r\n\r\nI think that there's just in general, more public awareness about it. It helps that you know, the media will sometimes write about some of these really big cases. If I go back and forth on that, because you know, like we talked about, oh, the you saw the graph I shared where they're going out. But if you think about in reality 4000 lawsuits out of how many millions or billions of businesses like it's not like the risk is, is low, but it's growing all the time. Right and there are not a lot of benefits there. Um, so I don't like to get too hung up on the like, fear side of it as much, although it does help sell. And I think that's what makes the clients ask us about it. You know, someone they knew at the Chamber of Commerce got a complaint letter. And now all of a sudden they're worried about their website. Yeah,\r\n\r\nabsolutely. And, you know, from the developer side, when this issue first came up, it was, well, people, the exhale I just had was how people responded like, it's something else I have to learn now and do and whatever. And so it was really, there's a lot of friction, I think, at least in personally, that I just have conversations with, with agency owners, a lot of friction in getting into accessibility, but now that seems to have subsided as well. And folks are realizing, you know, there's some small things I can do that make a huge difference in this and so anyhow, now we got a bunch of great questions here. Go ahead.\r\n\r\nYeah, let me just say one thing about that, because I think it really is important, and I feel like there's always there's always pain points like this as you grow as whether you're a freelancer or an agency. And you're you're growing and what you're doing. I'm started building websites before they had to be mobile responsive. Yeah. And then when we first had to make people were asking for over signs, I'm like, Okay, well, I'm going to charge you extra. This is way more work, right? And then my processes evolved. And now it's like, we just have all the code like the CSS, it's like mobile first in a lot of cases or if it's not like, we have our proxy setup or doesn't really make a difference or workflow like maybe it'd be harder actually. Now to make it a not mole or something like we'd have to go break things I don't know. Right And and I think accessibility is a lot of the same way. Yes, there is a learning curve upfront. And there is probably more work like I talked about, you know, we'll talk about, you know, over the next three hours where you have to change what you're working on. But once you get that foundation going, then it's not necessarily more work in order to achieve it.\r\n\r\nYeah, that's, that's a great analogy. I really like that. Okay, several questions here. And, folks, if you haven't opened up the q&a, open that up and upvote the questions that you'd like to have answers to, we'll start off with Sherry's question. Amber, do you think all sites should have an accessibility statement?\r\n\r\nYes, I say this because I so I run the WordPress accessibility meetup. And we were so lucky, maybe like two years ago to have Lainey Feingold, who is one of the top disability rights attorneys in the United States. come speak at our meetup. She's the reason why ATMs have headphone jacks, just like that's how big she is. Right? She's been doing this since the 60s. And I asked her that question, and she said that she does believe that having accessibility statement one it is more likely to deter the like drive by lawsuits because they're gonna be like, Oh, okay, they're doing something or they're paying attention or they're more likely to have something and add to it will actually help users. So even if it's a short blurb, the most important thing in the accessibility statement is how can they contact you? And it should have both a phone number and an email address, not just go use our contact form because what did the contact form doesn't work? So you need to have those two options. But yes, they should. It will help protect you from lawsuits, and it will help your users\r\n\r\ninteresting. And Tonya following up wanting to know any good templates for that. Sort of information that you're aware of.\r\n\r\nfor accessibility statements statements, yes. So if you install the free version of our equalised Digital Accessibility Checker plugin, it's going to create a draft post in your WordPress website just like WordPress has a draft privacy policy, we create a draft accessibility statement posts that you can then or page that you can go edit and publish. That's the best template I've got for you.\r\n\r\nBrilliant. That's wonderful. All right, I'm gonna drop the link to the plugin in the chat for those of you that aren't aware of it. That's just in the free plugin. So yep. And that yeah, the link to the wordpress.org plugin is there in the chat. Okay, Paul would like to know the section 504 referred to K to 12 private schools if they don't get federal money.\r\n\r\nSection 504 does not apply to private schools. If they do not get any federal dollars. The Americans with Disabilities Act would\r\n\r\nand you're not an attorney. So make sure you ask your\r\n\r\nI'm not an attorney. So if you really want to really answer that the school should ask their attorney. All schools have attorneys. That's\r\n\r\nYes, yeah. And so and by the way, let's just pause there for a second. When we're talking about accessibility, this is a something that we as agency owners need to be very aware of is don't come in as the accessibility law expert. You are opening yourself up to risk as an agency owner. You don't have letters after your plumbing maybe you do but most of us don't have letters after their last name that qualify us to answer those questions. You can give a best guess but say look, you need to talk to your attorney. Just like we'd say the same thing for taxes like go talk to your accountant. That's not our thing.\r\n\r\nSo tomorrow, come back tomorrow because I'm gonna give you the exact language that our attorney told us and put on our website, which literally says we are not a law firm. But I mean, it's a little more than that, but that's literally what is that. So that's,\r\n\r\nthat's awesome. Okay, Mani would like to know if it's a Mr. Again, if the organization is nonprofit in the States, that would be like a 501 C three. Are there any specific things that would change the way accessibility law applies to them that you've discussed so far?\r\n\r\nNo, because the Americans with Disabilities Act specifically says it includes the nonprofit organizations. Yeah, very good. I think there's some possibility. There's always with all of these things. There's a threshold risk based on the size, right? If it's a very small nonprofit, that maybe only has one founder, and is volunteering, you know, in the community or, you know, fundraising a very tiny bit they're not running any ads. They're not really driving maybe you go look at your clients Google and and we all the clients like this, and we're like, oh, look, they got 50 visitors to their website. Celebrating I know, and they're excited like one person today. I did it right. So threshold on that is a lot smaller than like, a larger nonprofit that's doing a lot in the community. So\r\n\r\nthat's good.\r\n\r\nStephanie would like to know what about an artists gallery? Are the pictures decorative or must there be good descriptions? Without text?\r\n\r\nThey are definitely not decorative, especially if you have the ability to either directly purchase them or contact the gallery to say you want to purchase them because a blind person might want to purchase a piece of art to give to their friend. Very true.\r\n\r\nTanya would like to know Oh, this is such a good question. And just those of us you know, if you're a member and you come to office hours, you know, Tanya has these excellent clients, right. And there's an inside joke there. But Tanya would like to know that I'm sure this is purely hypothetical. What do you do with brand colors that aren't accessible? And those brand colors are set in stone.\r\n\r\nSo can we hold this for the next hour? Yes, I have some slides about this. And I'm actually going to deviate off my slides for a few minutes and show you a few other things. Perfect.\r\n\r\nLet's see. Let's do a couple more questions and we'll take a break Paul would like to know, reading level is a triple A success criteria. Does that mean we need to dumb down our sight? How is this an accessibility issue and not an intelligence issue? Okay, well, thank you Paul, for that.\r\n\r\nI had time for it. So I'm going to say please don't ever say that you're dumb downing something that is very ableist term. And I'm sure you didn't mean it that way. But it can come across as not very kind. But it's so reading level is not necessarily about not using big words a lot of times. So our plugin includes a flash Kincaid reading level grade level check. And, and also if you use the Yoast SEO plugin that also has these flesh Kincaid reading ease. So same thing there plug in is kind of handy because it'll highlight some of the things we recommend or like if you use Grammarly, Grammarly will also do that too. Reading Level is a lot of times about maybe having shorter sentences or not using passive voice using active voice so it's really clear like who is doing what having headings to break up sections can really help with reducing the reading level, maybe not having paragraphs that have 20 sentences in it, right like make shorter paragraphs, so there's a lot you can do that it doesn't necessarily make it dumber, right. It's just making it easier to read. And the other thing that I think is really important to remember when we talk about users that are we think about how users like everyone how many times over the past week and you and I are the only ones who can raise your hand but like when you read something are you literally reading top to bottom or are you skimming right like you skim 100%? Yeah, so reading level make it is oftentimes helps make it more skimmable which is how the vast majority of users are engaging with our content. They're skimming looking for pieces, then they might read a paragraph here go a little further. Oh, this heading jumped out at me. Now I'm going to read this right. And so really, I think that's a big thing to think about on the reading level. Now if you have clients that literally do serve, so if you build a website for a county health department, they really do. They can't hand out in front they like this is a really good example if you go on the CDC website too. You can find examples of these are you think about when you took your kid to the doctor's office and they handed you a fact sheet about like the flu vaccine? What does the flu do? You don't want the doctor level version of that. None of us do right? Like it has all these things in it like you want the this is the parent version about why this is good and you know how to take care of your kid afterward or whatever that might be. And so I think if you have clients that are doing that you really have to think about who their audiences because the average person we don't need the expert level stuff. We're not the expert level. Now if you've have if you're building a website for academics, and it's all go of course, the reading level is going to be a little bit high. Right? Yeah. So you have to think about your audience\r\n\r\na great answer. I just want to circle back that that I don't. That was not Paul's intent to be.\r\n\r\nYeah. I don't think so. And I know, we\r\n\r\nall know Paul here. So definitely not his intent. And so but that's, that provoked such a great discussion. It's something we really all need to think about. And it's another one of those issues of gosh, if I design if I think accessibly, it really helps everybody in the end like make my content skimmable and more easily digestible. Yeah. All right, folks. There's a couple of questions remaining that I'm gonna save for our next break. We're already 10 minutes after into the second hour. So let's take a five minute break. We'll be back at well we're gonna call it 16 minutes after so 16 after we'll come back for part two and we'll begin we'll\r\n\r\nbe quiet until then.\r\n\r\nThis is your One Minute Warning we're back in one minute from now.\r\n\r\nAlright folks,\r\n\r\nwe're back for the second hour of day one of the accessibility Crash Course. Amber, what are we going to be covering this hour?\r\n\r\nYeah, I realized it would have been smart of me to change my slides. Sorry about that. So we are going to be talking about avoiding issues so things to think about before you build using key tools carefully. And then we'll wrap up with a little bit about what's coming tomorrow.\r\n\r\nAll right, I've just dropped in the chat. The link to the lawsuit explanation that Amber talked about earlier. Also in the chat earlier on was I did find that link on the equalist digital blog Amber for the examples of the wicked 2.2. So all that oh, great for folks. Yeah. All right. Well, let's get started. Again, folks, if you have questions along the way, use that Zoom q&a, and we'll take that we'll we'll wrap up today with a good time of questions and answers. Yep.\r\n\r\nAll right. So before you build, so thinking about avoiding issues, we talked about lawsuits, hopefully I didn't terrify everyone too much. I saw Tanya posted something about having a client that won't launch four months after the website was ready. I because they're worried about a lawsuit which is a bummer. Hopefully, you can convince them to launch. But I do think there are ways that we can set up if we're doing a new website to really put us in a good place where we don't have to have those concerns. And broadly what you need to think about when you're thinking about accessibility problems on a website is that they can come from a lot of different angles. I have this cartoon illustration of Popeye the Sailor and he's holding his arms out left and right, trying to block sprays of water as they're shooting at him. And I think this is a good way to kind of get started on where accessibility problems come from. Because they can come from a lot of places. The biggest one frequently starts and this was a question we had that we're going to dive into is even before the website was built and that's that they can come from inaccessible branding. If a client's color palette is not accessible, you have no way of meeting color contrast unless you make changes to it. They can also come from incorrectly entered content so you could do the best that you do or you can choose all the right tools, the right theme, the right plugins and have no accessibility issues coming from the code. But if there are issues in the content, then there will be accessibility issues on the website. But probably one of the biggest places that accessibility problems come in is in the code and in WordPress you know we're WordPress is wonderful in that we can bring a lot of different features in from themes from plugins, we can also integrate with other third party embeds or SAS solutions. We have nonprofits that use donation forms that come from third party donation platforms, or we have businesses that use different platforms for posting their jobs and then allowing people to hire for them and they want us to, you know, connect with those via an API or maybe embed them in an iframe on the site. So all of these things can add a lot of great features of the website, but every time you bring something new in, there's a possibility that it could be adding an accessibility problem to the website. So so when we're thinking broadly about accessibility, these are the sorts of areas where problems can come in, and we're going to sort of talk through some of those. So when you are building a new website, which is really important if you want to avoid accessibility issues, also if you want to optimize your process and optimize your own profits, is that you really need to think of accessibility as part of the entire process of the website. Build. And that's why I have this line. It shows discovery at the left, then content design development, test and debug user testing and remediation, launch, training and post launch support and it keeps going off to the right of the screen. And then there's an arrow above it. This is accessibility. So accessibility is really needs to be part of every phase of a website projects. From app discovery, spending time talking to clients and figuring out who were their users. We talked before about reading level and how some audiences might need a lower reading level than others. Spending time during discovery, understanding who are the users that are coming on the website, mapping out user journeys, and then and then having conversations with the customer or your client about okay, well, you said that they need to be able to do XYZ as part of their journey through the website. And perhaps this includes submitting a form and then we think, okay, well what do we need to do in order to make sure that that form works for people of all abilities, or we've had a customer before where they said, the lifecycle user journey, is that they submit the form and then we call them to book a meeting. And, and so we said, Okay, what if those people are deaf and they don't have a phone? Some deaf people don't like to give them I have smartphones, because they use a smartphone, but they don't like to give out their phone number because they can't really receive a call. What are the options there? And so then we had conversations about, oh, well, maybe it would be better to embed something in the website that allows them to book their own meeting time. And then meeting time is on the form. They can say if they need to have an ASL interpreter there. Or they can choose instead of meeting over the phone to meet over zoom where we know that we can do caches, right. So so starting to think about those, like, what is the whole user journey interacting with the business, not just on the website? Because I think sometimes if you just stop with your your clients as part of this process, and you just say, what do you need them to do? And they say, oh, we need them to fill out forms. Then you don't get to the end. You don't ever say okay, what happens after then you'd miss that whole piece about, oh, we're going to call them on their phone to set up a meeting. And that's where an accessibility problem actually happens. And it's a gap in their journey. And this is one area where if we spend a lot a little bit more time in the discovery and we really map this out with clients, we can create a website that better meets what their actual business goals or objectives are. That helps everyone helps them better gives them better results. And also, I think that this really presents us more as the expert and then the person that they can come to for guidance when they're not sure you know what to do, which is what is ultimately going to allow you to sell larger projects and those sorts of things. So really starting to think about accessibility during discovery questions you need to ask we in our business, do we build websites? Where do we get content first? So we'll talk about accessibility in content with them. And then we have a checklist which we're going to talk about in just a minute about content. Then we go into design, we spend a lot of time looking at accessibility in the designs before anyone is coding anything. We do accessibility checks on our designs, and make our designer change things if we need to. And then during development, you really want your developers your dev team whether that's you or a contractor or an employee who's a developer, but they need to be thinking about accessibility. You can't just wait till the end till you're in testing and say, Okay, now I'm going to run Accessibility Checker, or I'm going to run wave or now I'm going to keyboard things. You want developers to be doing that as part of their own QA. They need to self check themselves while they're building. And ideally, you want it to happen in little bits along the time. Because let's say they need to build. i We just launched a website that had three uniquely styled tab sections our developers had when we get out of designing, we're all like, yes, you're gonna build three different tab blocks. They're all gonna look different, but they're all tabs. But because they all need to look and function different or have different content inside of them. You are going to have to build multiple of them and they're different. It's not the same one, it's not reusable. Well, if they're not self checking on the functionality on that first one, when they do that, and let's say they keep going, and they build more and more and more of them, all three of them, then by the end, they've maybe repeated the exact same mistake on all of these blocks. And then they have to go back and fix all of the box. But if they spend time, the first time they make tabs, say going and just saying, Can I do this with my keyboard? And they know this isn't keyboard focusable I can't get the tab to open without using a mouse, then they can fix that one. And then they can build the new ones in the better fixed way. Right. So there's a lot of sort of training and building up of your team, especially your dev team. So that they're starting from a better place and and they're not waiting all the way into the end. And then of course, during testing and debug there's a lot of accessibility, thinking about and happening and and checking for if you have clients where there is the budget for user testing, and doing additional remediation based on user testing, I highly recommend it. Even all of our clients don't have the budget for user testing. So it just sort of depends.\r\n\r\nBut bringing in real users of assistive tech technology, particularly people who are blind is going to give you a really good picture of how they might move through the website or solves particular problems. You can't substitute user testing for whatever sort of accessibility specialists or detailed accessibility testing that you do during testing and debug because a blind person isn't going to hear the things they don't hear. So you still need a sighted accessibility specialist to go through and really audit everything, even if you include user testing, but user testing is great. It they'll catch other things that are not necessarily accessibility problems, but are actually just usability problems. So you know, like, the wording on a link made no sense to them, and they never would have thought to follow that link to go find XYZ, right. And so then you go back and you're like, hey, maybe you should rename this thing to your client. So that's very helpful. And then you're launching and then hopefully, you're providing some sort of training to your clients on an ongoing basis if they're maintaining some content on the website, publishing blog posts or whatever that might be and then providing support to them on an ongoing basis. And of course, accessibility can all be rolled into that as well. So let's talk about branding and colors and I might pull some other stuff over since Tanya asked for it and it seems like we'll have enough time\r\n\r\na big thing.\r\n\r\nA big piece of color contrast is having the right color selections. I love to use this tool, this contrast grid tool that I have linked on the sides with all of our clients. When they come in and they have brand colors. We put them in the colors that you're seeing right now on the before. These are from my personal blog, which I just decided last week, and I was like I'm so sick of how bad this website is. And I've known it's bad. Like I'm gonna go fix it. And I had over 688 Different color conscious errors, which is not as bad as it could have been. I've seen way worse on client websites. But I had a lot and and so and I was like this is weird because I thought I really had thought about my colors. And my color scenes was I had a white and I had sort of what I call a dusty purple. It's like a grayish purple that I was using as a background. And I have a dark purple and then I had almost black which is mostly what I use for text. The dark purple was backgrounds and then I had this kind of like hot pink color. And I was using the hot pink for links. It works fine on the white it past double A it only did double 18 which means large size. There in the color contrast guidelines. There's normal text size, passing and large text size passing. We never on client websites allow colors that only pass for large types. Because just because it's large s on desktop does not mean it's large checks on mobile. So we will only pass it if it's straight double A I usually normally Ignore double 80 So my links were not great on the light gray as you can see here they don't work. If they are put on the dark purple or the dark black and that's where all my color contrasts were coming in. And it wasn't as obvious to me because I think I actually had the link set to white on those dark purple but the hover color was the pink and the hover colors has to pass color contrast to so I looked at this of course it's my wife's and I don't have to talk to anybody and I just said okay, how do I fix this? I ended up making my hot pink a little bit darker. Only a tiny bit it's it's partly noticeable if you put those two colors together. This allowed it to pass double A on the dusty purple background. It also made it AAA on the white which is great because Mark was talking about if we can make it past AAA let's make it past AAA and then I ended up going and adding another light color that past AAA on that dark purple and on the black so that I could get rid of the color contrast errors for clients. There's a couple of different ways that you can handle this. Let me just pull over a few things so we can see a little more real world. So this particular website and I'm showing you a figma file right now. Just a part of it. The client came in and their brand colors were this like lighter green. Kind of I don't know not quite limy but a bright green and the purple. And then they had some black and some grays that they were using in different places. They had this light green with white text on it and it doesn't pass but it does pass just fine with black text. So some of the ways that we handle this is well your buttons if you want it to be that light green, they have to have black text and then they contrast. I don't think this is as readable as I would love it to be it's only a double a pass. I'd rather have a triple A but this was a compromise that they were willing to make. The other thing that we did, because there were some instances and let me see if I can find one real quick.\r\n\r\nYep, all right.\r\n\r\nSo\r\n\r\nif we go over to aren't just on their homepage, for example, the categories above their blog posts are green text. Well, we remember that that light green does not pass on white, so we couldn't use it. But we didn't they didn't want it just to be black. So what we did happening was we created a second shade of green that we call WIC ag green that's that's the color that we name it. It is a little bit it's it noticeably darker when you put the two right next to each other in a big square. But on the homepage. The difference between this we can green right here and this green button right down here. You can barely tell it looks pretty much the same. I think most people wouldn't know they're different. But this one is darker enough that it passes color contrast on there. So this is an example of how we handled that with the client, where we came up with how can we have something that fully passes for everything. And other times we will straight up eliminate or we will modify more of the colors. So this is one that I don't have a figma file for yet because I'm just working on it. This client has a literal rainbow of colors. And the biggest challenge was so and this is so I will say something this is a nonprofit that works with K 12 schools. One of their biggest clients was the LA school district's Los Angeles school districts in California. And they lost the contract this year. Because the LA school district says we cannot purchase anything that is inaccessible. And because their website was not accessible. They lost the contract with La school districts and it was huge and I mean it sucks for them. I feel bad for them. But we're working on fixing that right. But they had body text that was gray. And it doesn't really pass on white or light gray or the light blue backgrounds that were they're using. They have a they have almost all these colors. So for example the yellow, the turquoise, the light blue, they're using all those as literal text colors on white. So it's very hard to read. So what we did is, you know, we had a combination, a conversation about this, there's a couple of other ones to where there's a light red and a red. And we're like okay, what can we do that still gives them this rainbow but helps them to have better color contrast. So so what we did was well hey, you already have this dark gray all your body tech should be dark gray, AAA passing on all the backgrounds you have that is an easy and a no brainer fix for me. And they didn't really argue about that. This, this turquoise. We eliminated it. It's not that different from the blue green. To be totally honest. I feel like the person who built the website maybe wasn't paying enough attention to the color codes or they use like a hex selector and that's why it's like slightly different because they don't you know again, like they look really they look different when they're right next to each other like this, but when you put them on places you think they're the same. So we're gonna get rid of the turquoise that doesn't work on either lighter blue, and then that other light blue, we're going to lighten it up a little more so that it AAA passes with the dark gray. Then the other change that we made was the down here with the reds. So we have a light red that doesn't pass with anything and we have a red, the straight red that doesn't pass with anything. So we make the light red lighter so that it will pass with the dark gray and we make the red red, darker so that it will pass with our light colors and it is a little bit different but the overall feel of it is not definitively different. And it will work. It will have the same feel and that is a big thing that you have to have common because at first they were like, oh I don't know like the we can't change our colors and we're like well first of all, do you want to lose contracts from school? Right? Like if you have those kinds of things, it is helpful. But also it's like like showing them things like I showed with that figma file. It's like yeah, they look really different here. But look at these two greens on the figma file. Could you tell the difference now you probably can't without inspecting them. Like these kinds of changes are not totally they're not as obvious as we think they are when we see them on a color palette. So sometimes you just have to kind of like talk clients through it and then you say things like, Okay, how about if we design with this and then once you see the design if we need to make more adjustments to the colors, we will but at least we're starting with combinations that we know work. And usually they'll say, okay, um, but I think it's just a matter of figuring out you know, how to have those conversations with the clients. And do that because this really if you start with a bad color palette, it's gonna You can't overcome that and it's not the developers fault. So some other things I mentioned that we do, design review before we hand off design so beyond color contrast, so I will always go through we use figma I just before I even show them to clients. This is really important. You always need to do this before you show it to the client because it really kind of sucks to have a client get attached to something and then you'd be like, Oh, nevermind, we can't do it like that. Oh, I also recommend on that note, if you're doing designs before you build, and you have a separate designer, from a developer, have your developer look at it, because sometimes our developers will look at stuff and be like, I could do that. But it's going to take all this extra time and if you're using a contract developer or whatever right, like you're trying to maximize your profits, like sometimes you need to rein in the designer so they have some really great ideas that aren't necessarily going to make or break a website and it can be better to just check them first. So so we'll do a past and we also recommend will have our designers designed for multiple screen sizes, devices orientations. Sometimes they are designing everything for like an entire page and I can go back later if anyone's interested like through that figma file. Sometimes they're just doing like this one section like oh, they this one section. Here's how it needs look on mobile. That is important because a lot of people are going to engage with the website on mobile. You want to make sure that it's going to work you want to make sure like we were talking about tab target sizes that the buttons are actually big enough not too squished together otherwise you know, some of us that have bigger thumbs might have a hard time hitting them, that kind of stuff. Designing hover focus and error states is really important. Now, we only sometimes design error states we use the gravity forms plugin and I'm much prefer to just do like default error states out of Gravity Forms but occasionally we'll have clients that really want like, oh, I want my errors to look like this. So then we will actually design them first and not just use out of the box Gravity Forms. But having like what the hover is supposed to look like what the focus is supposed to look like, especially if it's a unique element that's just not going to have a unique a specific border. We need the focus to go around the entire card. When you tab to a blog post not just go to the image and then go here like it's really helpful to have a designer design those things out so that when you hand it off to a developer, you're going to get better results because they're going to have really specific this is how this has to look and yes, it has to look different and there the links have an underline but when you hover over them, the underline is going to go away randomly those sorts of things. Another thing is always making sure during design that all fields have visible labels, and clear text required indicators if something is a required field. Don't just use placeholder text. This comes in and design a lot of times designers design fields. Maybe it's only an underline and what looks like a placeholder text. That's really hard. It's not super great. And there's a hilarious video that I could find and share with you all about fields. But I can't remember what it's called right off the top of my mind. I might be able to find it while we're doing q&a. But really thinking about that and like how do your fields look in the design? Because a lot of developers they follow instructions so you want to give them good instructions, not instructions that they're just gonna have to go back and undo later. Avoid designing any text that cannot be styled with CSS also, we really do not do the sentences that have multiple colors in them. Or I've even seen websites where each letter of a word is a different color. The only way that can be achieved is with spans you put a span around each letter in the word well when you do that a screen reader is no longer gonna read it like one word, it's going to read each thing separately. So So really thinking about how you're designing texts so that it will sound good to a screen reader.\r\n\r\nIn your designs, you want to use sentence case don't do all caps headings. These can read out really weird for screen readers, underlining any links in paragraphs or if you have a link that somewhere else on its own. Maybe it has an arrow next to it or like a carrot pointing right or some other way to differentiate that it is a link. What's really important is that you don't in your designs use color alone to convey information. So if something is interactive, it can't just be that the color is different. Because what if someone is colorblind and they can't see the difference between that and the text that's right next to it, they would never know there's links there. And then the other thing is keeping the navigation really consistent throughout the site.\r\n\r\nWe may have just lost Amber\r\n\r\nare you folks seeing me? Yes. Okay.\r\n\r\nWe'll give it just a minute here. Hopefully she'll be able to reconnect and pop back in. You really don't want me talking about accessibility. There she went. Okay, so some Wi Fi issues happening there. I will just kinda AWS and chat for a minute let's see. What would y'all like to talk about? Yeah, right. I can't remember the last time this has happened.\r\n\r\nOh, that's Yep. All for the when Amber. No longer accessible.\r\n\r\nSo yes, Phoebe, there are screen readers. Matter of fact in the first the first time we had amber with us about a year and a half ago, she actually demonstrated one of those. If you're on a Mac, it's built into the operating system actually.\r\n\r\nYeah, interesting.\r\n\r\nSo hopefully Amber will get reconnected and bumped back in.\r\n\r\nYes, thank you, Paul. It\r\n\r\nis under Accessibility and the System Preferences the way it the way it\r\n\r\nOh, no problem. What\r\n\r\nhappened? I just switched to a hotspot give me one sec. I will reshare I apologize. No\r\n\r\nproblem. Paul had the great comment that you became inaccessible. There you go. I\r\n\r\ntotally did.\r\n\r\nWhat we'll get the screenshare back up here in just a second everybody and we'll dive right back in.\r\n\r\nYeah. All right.\r\n\r\nLet's think where did that except for where did that window go? There we go. All right. You can see it\r\n\r\nYes. All right. Okay, um,\r\n\r\nI'm just gonna start at the top on content accessibility. Right. Okay. All right. So when we do our content requests with clients, we spend a bunch of time talking to them about how we want content to be formatted. This is pre training for how they're going to have to maintain the website. So and I know some of you may do all of the content editing yourself, so maybe you don't have to do that as much. But a lot of times, we're building websites, we're handing them off to clients. We're only doing dev work afterwards. And they're like writing all their own blog posts. And editing pages and that kind of stuff. But regardless of whether you're doing it internally or you're teaching your clients to give you the content in this way, what we're looking for in in content is that headings are present. They're using a proper order, like we have clients give us headings in we use slick plan, but even if you use the Google doc they can choose a heading level and we're all like you need to give us the heading level that you expect. It needs to make sense in outline format. Link anchor text is meaningful. Don't link the word here, click here, learn more and needs to tell where you're going. If you have to say about what to know what the link is, is four than that means it doesn't have a good anchor alt text for images you need to think about this in your projects. Are you spending time running on old texts? You asking the client to read the alt text or provide the alt text with the photos that they give you? Again, that can impact how you're pricing things. content should be formatted and list this is another thing with reading level. It doesn't always have to be paragraphs right. Can you have some sentences broken out into bulleted lists instead or numbered lists those sorts of things. If we're looking for tabular data, it needs to be in top in tables. We need to know what the headings for each table need to be. We need to have if someone wants to show a graph, we were talking about information transforming. Maybe it's a screenshot of a graph, so an image but then what would be great is we're going to stay at the client. Okay, great. We're gonna put that on this page. We also need you to get bogged down with all that data in a table as well because we're gonna put the table right below it, maybe it's gonna be an accordion. So it's squished, and it doesn't take up too much space on the page, but someone who needs that in a tabular format could expand the accordion access the information in the table so they have the same information that someone has when they can see the graph. So that's really important. And then providing captions so all videos have to have captions on them. Need to have transcripts, both for videos Yes. For videos, even caption videos need transcripts. This is because deaf blind people cannot access captions. You need to have transcripts for them so that that can transform into refreshable braille for them to read in Braille. And then of course, you have to have transcripts for podcasts and, and the other benefit of transcripts when clients say something about this is I'm like transcripts help your SEO, help your SEO a lot. And then you we talked about reading level already. So there are a ton more things I have a six page checklist. If you want this you can just email me I'm Amber at equalise digital.com I'll send it to you but we're limited in time so I can't dive into it. But that's kind of a high level of things I'm thinking about before we start building. Now I want to talk real quick about choosing tools carefully choosing the right theme is really important. You don't have to build custom themes. There are some good themes out there that exist. I know at solid Kadence has been putting some effort into there's there's free themes. I actually have a screenshot up here that says fixing 1000s of accessibility errors and three days without writing any code. This is a before and after of accessibility checker reports on my blog when I mentioned that I decided to do that the other day. All I did was I removed the theme I bought off ThemeForest and I know you all are like Amber Why do you buy a theme off the enforce it was a long time ago I promise. And I replaced it with 2020 for like the free standard WordPress thing. I don't think it looks that bad. It's not like super designed but also I didn't have a designer or developer working on it. I did it myself. And that removed almost 3000 accessibility problems. And then also I fix my colors, right. So the theme you choose to really impact things. The theme and curl controls whether or not you have skip links. It controls how accessible the navigation is. HTML landmarks that may or may not exist on the page. So this is things like is your main content in a HTML main tag like mine on my my website until I did this? It wasn't it was just all in a div and there was no like header tag main footer, like none of those existed. Those are really important for accessibility. And the theme decides that I'm in forums This was another thing on my website, the theme developer when I went and looked at the code actually, they even put a note that it's like removing the labels from the fields for a slimmer design. They had literally removed the labels from the name and the email address on the comment form on blog posts. So like they had intentionally broken that because I guess they didn't know about accessibility, right? But or like read more links on your archive pages is all controlled by the theme. So if you choose the right theme that can help you the wrong theme can add 1000s of problems. It has a lot of work to remediate. So how do you choose look for accessibility ready themes? So if they have the accessibility ready tag on wordpress.org, that is helpful. If you're not choosing one off of wordpress.org and you're choosing a premium theme, or a plugin, more talking about that I would check documentation for accessibility, contact the developer to ask if they've included accessibility features. They have a lot of documentation about accessibility or how to use their plug inaccessibly or their theme excessively. That is a good sign. If they don't have any that doesn't necessarily mean that it's going to have accessibility problems, but but it also might mean that they haven't thought about accessibility. Another really good way to tell if a plugin or theme is going to add accessibility problems is you can go look in the WordPress support forums or on their GitHub repos if they have a public GitHub repo for reported accessibility issues. So I would either search just accessibility in those places, or a 11 y which is the abbreviation for accessibility, which I've included on one of these lines because I was trying to keep it there in those places and that will pull up if any old tickets or support threads that were started about related to accessibility and read how they respond. Did they solve the problem to take them a long time to solve it? Did they I mean, I've seen things we've put in developers like yeah, I'm not going to do that. And they've literally written that. Sorry, I don't have time to do this, or this doesn't impact my users or you know, like, then you know, okay, they don't care. So even if I find something in this, they're unlikely to fix it. So that's another thing that I would recommend. And then really, you need to test it for problems and we'll talk more about testing tomorrow and how to do that. But you can either test their plugin or theme demo page for problems, or you can install and try on a clean install. The biggest downside of testing it on their demo site is that you have to separate the problems on their website, with the more in their demo content from the problems that their tool is actually going to add to the website you're building. So for example, a lot of these they don't have a focused indicator. An outline so far removed tabs through it, I can't tell where I am. But most of the time that comes out of the theme. So I don't I'm not really worried if a plug in doesn't have it. But if I would just win their demo site. I would be like, oh, you know, this is a problem except it's not I'll just ignore it. Because it doesn't matter on the on the plug in that I'm going to use or not because I know my theme is going to add that so you sort of as you start learning more about testing, you realize what are things you can ignore while you're testing on plug in demo. Otherwise, I'd say go test it on like 2024 Because you know, 2024 doesn't have those accessibility issues. And then you get more of a clean instance of that plugin to see and then of course using caution with any third party code. So any embeds need to be tested just as you would test a plugin? Things that you want to pay extra attention to are embedded legal documents or cookie notices. So I didn't talk about this in the laws but one of the things to keep in mind and I have seen instances of this where any unit United States where a person who was disabled, was able to get out of a contract because it was proven that and that they literally it was inaccessible. To them and they had no way of accepting the terms of that contract, or the terms of service on that website. And so therefore, the court said, no, this doesn't apply to them. So if you have a customer who needs a cookie notice or needs an or like is embedding privacy. policies or Terms of Service from like a third party like an IU vendor or something like that. You need to make sure that those things are accessible because otherwise it's possible that they're not complying with the privacy laws that they have to comply with. I'd reconsider or think very carefully about any sticky elements in the making sure test those like live chat is a big one. There are some that are accessible. There are a lot that are just complete\r\n\r\ngarbage code.\r\n\r\nAnd they don't work for anyone who can't use mouse. I would also be aware of anything that's guaranteeing and instant accessibility or quick fixes. It's not super possible, to be honest, unfortunately. Unless the quick fix is change your theme force theme to 2020. For that it\r\n\r\nis quick fix. But yeah.\r\n\r\nSo the other thing is if you're trying to assess tools as you can ask them for either an accessibility conformance report or a V Pat. So a V Pat is the abbreviation for Voluntary Product Accessibility Template. It is a free tool that can be used to create a standardized accessibility conformance report or an ACR. I recommend asking vendors if they have a VPAT or an ACR if you are building websites for government or higher ed or K 12. You need to tell your clients that they have to do this and this includes WordPress plugins. Technically they are not allowed to purchase inaccessible it and a lot of times they are required to have a VPAT on file from the vendor. So you should be asking other WordPress plugin developers for these. It's something that I think is going to come up increasingly and hopefully more of them will be creating them and any third party tools. So if you have someone that that's like, oh, we use this registration platform, or we have this platform that volunteers go and pick their volunteer shifts on, you need to tell your client that they need to ask they should be asking those platforms those questions because that will come up and and could be included in a lawsuit. I have a link on the slide if you want to see an example of what a V pad looks like for our equalized Digital Accessibility Checker plugin. If you want to learn more about it, or you can go see that template as well. So tomorrow, we're gonna talk about deep dive on testing and the business side of accessibility sales pricing contracts, but I think we have time for questions. So what questions can I answer?\r\n\r\nYes, yes. All right. This was great. Again, of course, excellent overview of all these things and great foundation for what we're going tomorrow. So several questions here in the q&a. Folks, if you have not opened up the q&a do that. Take a look about the questions you want to have answered. And we will start with Paul. Amber's good. This is going back to the last hour when we were talking about the accessibility statement template that the free plugin require gives you the free Accessibility Checker plugin. Does the premium Accessibility Checker plugin give a better template than the free one?\r\n\r\nNo, it's the same. There you go.\r\n\r\nAll right. Manu would like to know is so I think what he's asking is when we talk about a website passes a certain level of accessibility, you know, W CAG, whatever, double a triple A. Is there an entity that has to grant that certification? Can a website be certified this talk\r\n\r\nabout how that works?\r\n\r\nYeah, so a so the accessibility conformance report. There isn't there's an AI certification. However, what is helpful and I'll pull this up real quick. You can create a V Pat for a website. And we have done this before when we've had clients that were like we really need to prove that we've done it. And at a high level. What a VPAT looks like is it has tables for each success criteria. And you choose your level and there's international forms. So like there's an EU wide member who mentioned some EU laws actually have extra requirements beyond WCAG. But this for example, it says non text content. So that's specific criteria. And you can basically say it supports it partially supports, it does not support or it's not applicable and then you put notes about each thing. And so this is something that if you build this in like you'd either bring in a contractor to do this, if you have clients that need them, you could learn WCAG and you could be creating these kinds of reports and selling them to your clients as well. I don't see them a lot for websites, but they can be made for websites and we have done them for websites. But there that's probably the closest to a certification or an officially recognized document that you would have to prove a website is accessible I would say the other big thing just in general that you want to do as a developer is make sure you're just documenting what you're testing in debug practices are and that you have screenshots particularly at time of launch. So you know if you know I launched it and there were no problems on the homepage in the accessibility checker, you could screenshot that. And then you'd have the time and you know the time stamp on your browser maybe or whatever that might be, and that can help to protect you if that's a concern.\r\n\r\nYeah, and there's an important point here, and that's that there's not you don't go to WIC Ag in an office or whatever and submit your website for certification and some board from on high stamp set as certified right. And yeah, it's also important to think about it this way that okay, we're 2.2 compliant. Today at this moment. That doesn't mean that 10 seconds from now, somebody doesn't log in and add an image without alt text or something like that, right.\r\n\r\nYeah. But the other thing too, is that one, what's a little weird about WCAG? Is it is technically all or nothing, but there is definitely shades right so it's like okay, we have all these success criteria except for this one, right like you saw on ours. I had a partially supports for that first one and there isn't right which I don't remember what it says read like, Okay, this is we're done. Here's the one word. And I know I've now logged the GitHub issue. But I think yeah, it's really about, you know, accessibility is a journey for a lot of websites and website owners. And, and it's an it's an ongoing practice to just like SEO isn't really you don't say, Okay, we started to optimize a website. We're done now. Right? Like accessibility is sort of the same thing. Changing websites, plugins, get updates, content, gets added content gets edited. You need to be monitoring it and just keeping that kind of stuff in mind. Yeah, interesting.\r\n\r\nOkay, question from Tanya, how important is punctuation especially in alt text? I forget periods and alt text and alt tags for some reason.\r\n\r\nPunctuation is actually really important. Blind people can tell if you have left off a comma or a period, because there's no pauses sometimes with alt tags if there's not a period at the end, it'll pause anyway because it's ended the image. But it is best practice to have periods even in alt text.\r\n\r\nIt is bad practice\r\n\r\nit no it is best practice. Best practice. Got it. Okay. Yes. Okay, here's an interesting question from Doug. Doug says I used to see more websites with a little icon at the top to increase or decrease font sizes, is allowing users to adjust text size colors layout with controls a good idea.\r\n\r\nSo you can do it. I don't see that as much outside of the accessibility overlays.\r\n\r\nBut the biggest\r\n\r\nchallenge with that is that sometimes those tools don't play very nice with users actual assistive technology. Yes, so someone so a thing to think about on this is someone who needs large size font on a website. They probably have their base font size in their browser settings or even their operating system settings much larger and every website they go to they're just zoomed like you can set your default zoom instead of 100% in Chrome or brave or whatever you're using. It's gonna be 200% on every website you go to. And so So that's like one of the complaints about those things or even like high contrast, toggles things like that is that it? There's ways that people are doing this everywhere. And so I don't know. We did put if you go to WP accessibility dot day, we have a light mode, dark mode toggle on that website. Now the thing that's interesting about that website I have it, I'll pull it over real quick. So it's up here at the top. Now, when you go to this website, at first, it actually responds to your Operating System Preference. So if you have set your Mac or your PC to dark mode as your preference you're going to get started the dark mode website. If your light mode is a preference, you'll get the light mode. I get the light mode on my computer and the dark mode on my phone. But we added the toggle. I'd say this toggle is a little bit of a parlor trick and it's kind of fun. I don't think it's necessary. I don't think many people use it. But what is more helpful from an accessibility standpoint is that we recognize that they've said they care about something in their OS preferences, and then we're trying to serve them that and so that's the thing to think about when you're designing. There is actually a third color mode here which is high contrast which we don't have a toggle to turn on. But if you had your OS set to high contrast, it would serve you a high contrast version of the website.\r\n\r\nThat is just super cool. And\r\n\r\njust to check the the replays for all of the the accessibility accessibility they talks are there on that website right now\r\n\r\nnot the worst happens to be on the 2024 website. But if you go to the main WP accessibility day and you know maybe it's not going to load for me because I'm on a mobile hotspot right now. But if you if you go there, then you can go to the events or events page and you can find all of the past events and all of the recordings from those and they're all free and public.\r\n\r\nYeah, very good. So if you want to folks if you want to dig more into accessibility just a load of great speakers on all of those events. Okay, Stacy quiet has a question here and we'll we'll wrap up after this one. Regarding link anchor text when writing a post. It's easy to make meaningful text. But how do you handle things like a blog archive, which has a snippet of the post and then like a Read More link?\r\n\r\nYeah, so\r\n\r\nthe best way to do those ideally is what we call like a card style where you have a single link that wraps around everything like the image and the date and like everything, so they could click anywhere. And then you usually have an ARIA label that includes just like the post title or whatever important thing they might need on the links. So it's not quite as noisy for screen reader user. If you have a read more link, then you just want to make sure that there's the urine ARIA label on it or hidden screen reader text so that it might visually look like just read more to a sighted person, but a screen reader user read more about Amber, that sort of thing. So there are ways to put more context on links for because that's an important like passing criteria. screenreader users are not always going to hear all of the links or all the things next to a link. They might just open a list of all the links on the page if they're looking for something specific. And so that's why you really need to have those meaning. Typically, that's going to come from your theme or if you're using a block plugin or a page builder that like creates like a loop of posts. It's gonna do those so that is less like, Li unless you're coding them custom. It's probably something that's being controlled by the theme or plugin developer. And so you would want to just test for those when you're selecting what tools to use. Yeah,\r\n\r\ngreat answer.\r\n\r\nAll right, this has been great. Amber, thank you so much, again, for your expertise today. Give us just a quick preview of what's coming tomorrow. Yep,\r\n\r\nso again, we're gonna talk about contract sales language. We're gonna of course talk about testing. I'm gonna show testing provide like some things that I look for when I'm looking at a website. We'll talk about, you know, how you could maybe scale to include this in your team or not.\r\n\r\nYeah, very good.\r\n\r\nSo lots of thank yous in the chat for you there. I'm dropping, dropping once again, the link bundle if anybody wants to quick download the slides. We'll have the replays up in about an hour or so. And we'll see everybody back here tomorrow. 1pm Central Time for day two of the WordPress accessibility Crash Course. Thanks again. Amber. We'll see you back here tomorrow and I iThemes Training. Know on solid Academy. We go further together.\r\n\r\nYeah. Can I just say yeah, it was questions that didn't get answered. If you message me on Twitter or LinkedIn, or I gave my email address before. I'm happy to answer them too. Yes.\r\n\r\nSo perfect. Thanks, Amber. We'll see everybody tomorrow. Have a great night. Bye.\r\n\r\nAnd I'm going to drop in today's link bundle in the chat. So there you can begin to download the slides if you'd like to follow along and have those links to click those are waiting on you there in the chat again, if you're just joining us, sorry, we hit some technical issues. It took us a few extra minutes to get started today.\r\n\r\nWe will get going here momentarily.\r\n\r\nHe says a bunch of sites are down around the world. Oh, awesome.\r\n\r\nYeah.\r\n\r\nWeird. Mystery. Yes. Yes.\r\n\r\nWow, how about that? Thank you for that CD.\r\n\r\nSomehow good. Okay. There was a slight conversation going on. So yes, it wasn't just you it was It wasn't you? It was me. So I will give this another 30 seconds or so for folks to come on in. Welcome. We're just about to get started with the day two of accessibility crash course if you're just joining us in zoom, open up the chat. You'll find today's slides and the other links there waiting on you. And we will dive in here in just a moment. Yes, I blame it on me. I broke the internet. 100% I wish I was that smart.\r\n\r\nPaul WP Nathan has just broken. It's just constantly broken. Yeah.\r\n\r\nAll right. All right. Okay, well, let's go and get started. I'm gonna start the recording and we'll dive right in.\r\n\r\nWelcome back to day two of the accessibility crash course here on solid Academy. My name is Nathan Ingram. I'm the host here at solid Academy joined again by Amber Hines from equalised digital. Welcome back. Amber, how are you today? I'm doing pretty well. Good to be here. Excellent. So I see several folks just popping in now. So yes, we were a few minutes late getting started today with some technical issues with Zoom and audio sharing and other things but we'll jump off that bridge when we come to it. So Amber, we have a lot to talk about today. Give us an overview of where we're heading here in the first hour. Yeah, so in the first hour, we are going to be talking about screen reader testing. Automated testing, keyboard testing, and everything about finding accessibility issues. Yeah, very good. So same framework as yesterday, folks, use the zoom q&a to ask your questions. We'll take a break roughly in the middle of our time today. And we'll have a time of q&a just before the break and then at the q&a right at the end so because we're already getting a little few minutes late here I'm gonna go and disappear and Amber, let's get going. Okay.\r\n\r\nAll right. So what we're gonna be talking about today is the website testing process.\r\n\r\nBasically, at a high level, what this looks like and how we handle testing for accessibility problems as we start by running an automated book scanning tool, so you can use our accessibility checker plugin. There are other options for these as well. And we'll talk about some single page browser extensions that are also super helpful that are totally free as well. But we'll do a bulk scan and that enables us to get a picture of what problems exist everywhere and what we can fix easily and we'll fix all of those I mentioned yesterday. When we were talking about developers and the development phase that you really want your developers to be using some of these tools. So definitely training that is really helpful. Then once we think okay, we fixed all the really obvious automated, identify identifiable issues, then we will do manual testing. manual testing is done with a keyboard only with a screen reader with the website zoomed in 204 100% And then once we resolve all the issues with from our manual testing, then as a bonus if the project allows or the client has budget for it, that would be when you would bring in screen reader users or other users with disabilities for user testing to confirm accessibility.\r\n\r\nYou don't really want to do you know that user testing until you have a website that you think is pretty close to accessible because they won't necessarily catch everything or there might be things about the user journey that hang up that hang them up that you want feedback on that aren't necessarily literal accessibility problems, as I mentioned yesterday, so what I'm going to do is start by talking about some automated testing tools. I'll talk about keyboard testing. I'm going to be going back and forth from my slides to a couple of different sites to show some things off.\r\n\r\nSo why don't we start with the automated tools. First of all, it can speed up identification of many problems in bulk, and it can rapidly provide a full site assessment and a picture of what needs to be fixed across an entire website. The other thing is, it can really save time, so you don't need a human being to tell you these images on these 100 pages are missing alternative text, or these are all the links on a site that are using the words click here instead of something meaningful. That's really easy for an automated testing tool to find. And it can provide a list that you can then work through to solve the problems. And obviously anything that is faster that speeds up that means saved cost. So automated tools are very helpful in helping you maximize your profitability, and also allowing people who maybe aren't quite as experienced with testing to find some problems and then go ahead and fix them themselves.\r\n\r\nSo what I'm going to talk about and show is our accessibility checker plugin which works on WordPress websites. It adds accessibility scanning and reports into the post and page edit screen at the free level. You can do unlimited posts and pages. If you have a client website that is just posts and pages. You could use just a free plugin on it and there's no limits. It's not like it'll only do 10 pages or something it if it was a 1000 page website, it would do all 1000 pages.\r\n\r\nAnd one of the reasons why we recommend not just testing with it, but keeping it on on an ongoing basis is as I mentioned yesterday, things change that kind of stuff. But one of the things that's really important about having that report right there in the editor, if you have whether you have your own content specialist at your company, or whether you're handing it off to a client who's doing their own content is is going to put that report there in front of them. It's going to help make it really obvious that this is something that they need to look at and work on just like you would with an SEO plugin right. It can help reinforce that this is something that needs to be done on an ongoing basis.\r\n\r\nSo let's take a look real quick at what this looks like inside of a WordPress website. I'm going to use my own site.\r\n\r\nMy personal blog, which I mentioned, I just decided I needed to rebuild it. I need to remediate it. So in the free plugin, if I were to go over to Pages, or posts, that's where I'm gonna get my information. In the Pro Plug in. There are some columns where I can sort of see like there are some issues that might exist, those sorts of things.\r\n\r\nThe columns aren't in the free plugin, but if I go in, I'm going to see my content this one happens to be built in the block editor and and then a report down below. I might have a report save so I have an error message on this particular one. And just some the details and I can see the different rules that may or may not have passed. Let me pull over actually because I realized I want to actually edit something so I'm gonna pop over. This is another site. This one happens to be fake. We'll go back to my site in just a minute.\r\n\r\nThis site has where's the homepage.\r\n\r\nI'll give you a quick view of it actually. And then we'll edit it also.\r\n\r\nIf you tuned in, I did a I'll pop a link here and maybe Nathan can pass it on.\r\n\r\nI did this for a talk. It's built with Kadence this is just how it looks. I have a couple of different sections because I was trying to show examples of not good and bad. And there is definitely a video of this that you could go find that would be very helpful if you want to dive in more.\r\n\r\nBut one of the common things that we could see and we'd want to fix as we're working i i would sort of recommend doing maybe section by section or you can do the whole entire page.\r\n\r\nBut we could look at on this for example if I go to ambiguous anchor text, these arrows right here, if I'm not sure where they are, I can click and it's going to show me this is the particular element. So you know on the back end it's it's a code snippet that's not super helpful for your content specialists necessarily how to find it. But this is going to show me right here on the front end. Okay, this is where this thing is. So if I were to want to fix this and I can see if I go through these right there's three of them.\r\n\r\nOn my page, I can find that same section. Now there's a couple of different ways you'd fix these. Depending on how you're built. It's going to be really different. This happens to be a Kadence button block, which has this really handy thing under Advanced where I can set an ARIA label. So I could say instead of read more, which is really generic, I could say read more about project planning, or whatever length this goes to write.\r\n\r\nDo the same thing on this one. If you aren't using Kadence there are other ways that you can do this. There's a really great plugin that I love called screen reader text format, which allows you it works with like the core buttons if you're using core button blocks.\r\n\r\nRead more about interior work, we're just gonna do two.\r\n\r\nSo I think I fixed this the way the plugin scans is I just hit update and that should trigger it to rescan if my page will save, there we go.\r\n\r\nAnd now if I were to go in there, I only actually have one of these left because we fixed two of them. So you can use a testing tool like this to get a picture of a lot of different problems that might exist on your website, on an individual page by page basis, if you want to do bulk scanning so our pro plugin will go out and crawl all the webs that all the pages on a website which is normally what we would do. If we were bringing on a remediation client we want to like scan everything they have the Pro plugin we tell it to run through and scan all the pages and then it comes back with this and it tells us what all the problems are now my website before I switched away from that ThemeForest theme that I was using was way worse than this. Now I can see that the biggest problems I have is that I have low quality or empty alternative text. I have missing sub headings, or maybe some duplicate alternative text. I'm linking to some PDFs. So these sorts of things. And what's helpful about this, like even this missing table header, oh, I know tables need to have headers.\r\n\r\nI can go here and this if I click on the report, it'll take me in and it'll tell me exactly what the post is. So this particular Saturday surfing post.\r\n\r\nAnd again, I could edit to go there I can view on the front end and it would take me to that post and it didn't particularly find that one so that was not a great example.\r\n\r\nYou know it's possible sometimes I might not have one run another reskin since I deleted that one, but But anyway, so the idea being that if you use an automated tool, right, it can take you over and it can help you find things throughout the whole site without you having to be a human being going and testing all of those things. So the other option is there are browser based extensions that you can install. The one that is most well known is wav. I use it all the time.\r\n\r\nI tend I use it in combination with our plugins sometimes on our websites, but I also use it on other websites when I just want to get a peek and I want to assess them.\r\n\r\nThe other thing that is useful to know about WAV is that most of the lawsuits mentioned errors in wav, so it's what law firms use. So even if you're using ours or like lax, which is another browser extension that I have listed here, which also has free and it has a pro version that can guide you through some of the manual testing you have to do even if you're using like our plugin or you're using apps or you're using both. You should probably also just take a peek and wave at websites that you launched because it is ones that we know they use. Lighthouse is another browser based tools that people might be familiar with because we check PageSpeed and stuff with it. I would generally not recommend using it for doing the accessibility tests. It's so limited. I think in the blog post where I wrote about redoing my thing I had a screenshot from my Google PageSpeed because I also mentioned Oh as a bonus is improved my page speed. And the accessibility score was like almost perfect, even though what accessibility checker found what wave found was way worse than that. So you need to I would not really rely on lighthouse.\r\n\r\nAnd then there's two other extensions, the headings map extension and the tablet extension. What I want to do is I want to jump over to the city of Georgetown texas.org website.\r\n\r\nThis is a WordPress website. This is my city's website. And as we are about to find out, it is not an accessible website. So I'm going to just show you real quick a couple of the browser extensions that I mentioned and then we'll talk about keyboard testing and we'll do some keyboard testing on this website. So wav was the one I mentioned. You can install it if you just go to wave doubt web aim.org, which it looks like TONYAN through in the chat there and you run it, it's gonna give you a overview on the left errors contrast errors, alerts. That's the same thing. Like we have warnings they have alerts. And so similar sort of idea. Most of the checks overlap we have a few checks that are pretty WordPress specific. You can see on this website, there's contrast problems so like the text isn't contrasting sufficiently here.\r\n\r\nThere's if I click on details, we've got some forms that are missing labels. So I normally when you click on these, they jump. It's not showing sometimes things are hidden. So in wave, there's this code view that will open the code and if I click it again, then it will show me so it's in this e to him a signup form element, which if I like went back up, I could try and figure out where this is. It's somewhere under like, subscribe to our weekly email, wherever that might be. An h3. It's also possible it might be in a pop up sometimes things like this are a little bit hard but if you've built the website, you can usually look at this and start to recognize Oh, okay, it's in the signup form for that and hey, I have a text input where I'm asking someone for their first name, but there's no label, telling people that that's what this field is about.\r\n\r\nSo this is wave.\r\n\r\nThe other two plugins that I really like one that I use all the time is headings map, sorry, it's a plugins it's an extension brothers and what headings map does is it it gives you a view of all of the headings on the page. And I'm gonna scroll up, we'll talk about that video in just a minute.\r\n\r\nOr scroll down.\r\n\r\nBut basically what we're saying is this page has one heading one, it's City News. I find this a little bit hilarious this right here in the middle third column is there heading one and then it's giving us the heading structure. Now what's interesting about this page is that wave didn't notify us about skipped heading levels. Our plugin wouldn't notify about skipped heading levels either because a skip tending level occurs if we go from like one to four or one to five or whatever, right.\r\n\r\nIt's a lot what's a lot harder to tell. And this is one of those things where it requires human testing is does the heading provide a correct outline format for the website?\r\n\r\nSo this these items being H TOS under City News, I mean, maybe that's fine, but what gets a little weird is this h three special topics. This is technically a sub item of spring arts roll and April arts news.\r\n\r\nFor a screen reader user from a literal what should the format of the website be? No, it is absolutely not a sub item of that but that's the way this is going to sound to a screen reader.\r\n\r\nSame thing with there's another special topics over here which this is also I would call this a failure because we have the same heading but they're for very different elements. And I would tell a content creator you need to rename one of these because I don't know why they're both separate special topics when they do very different things. screenreader users use headings to jump around on a page to understand the content of the page. This is probably one of the biggest fixes you can make that will have a huge impact for users. That requires no coding, right it's like choose the right heading level and use text in your headings that actually makes sense.\r\n\r\nSo so this is this plug in which I find super helpful. And then the other one which is nice is called happily. Tab A 11 Why you turn that on.\r\n\r\nSo what it does is it will allow me I'm just going to use all the default settings. I don't usually change them but you can change them if you want and I'm going to click Run tattly It's going to go down through the content on the page and it's going to mark up the tab stops on the page. So when a keyboard only user engages with the page, one of the way that they'll move down is using their tab key to move around.\r\n\r\nAnd we really want to have our tabs match the order of the page and make sense on the page. And this can be helpful obviously you want to tab it yourself. But what I like about this browser extension is that what I'm seeing right here is the first thing on the left is city of Georgetown, but that's actually tab stop number five, so you can follow the numbers. So the first thing it does is goes to the submit button for the form which is a little odd. Like why would you want to submit button before your form?\r\n\r\nLike you'd have to go backwards reverse order. If you actually entered search, you'd have to go backwards in the tab order in order to be able to submit your search. So it goes here then then it goes to the form. Then we go backwards from right to left through our Nav menu. Then we jump down to the far right pay your bill. Then we go back to the front and we go to number set right so you can see this is definitely not following the tab order on the page. It's going to be really confusing for users.\r\n\r\nAnd And what's nice about this is you can screenshot this and you can hand it to a developer and be like this is wrong.\r\n\r\nHere's a visualization of why it is wrong.\r\n\r\nInstead of you having to write out all the things like you need, you can just give him the screenshot and say tab order needs to be left to right top to bottom and it will save you a lot of time.\r\n\r\nAnd then let me turn it off.\r\n\r\nGo back to where it went.\r\n\r\nSo then once I've run it, I can just hit clear gnome turnips.\r\n\r\nAlright, so those are my browser tools. And I know I'm going a little bit fast, but there's a lot to cover in an hour. So I'm going to talk about keyboard testing now.\r\n\r\nSo we're going to start on the desktop version of the website. We're going to use only our keyboard. Then we're going to zoom in, we're going to use the keyboard again, we're going to check both at 204 100%. There are different WCAG guidelines that specify this. So we want to check both for low vision users. Then we're going to turn on reduced motion on our operating system. I'm on a Mac so I'll show you how to do it on a Mac, but you can google how to do it on a PC. And we want to make sure that the website respects that and that any animations don't play. Then we're going to turn on a screen reader and we're going to use the website.\r\n\r\nSo I'm not I'm going to be talking about these things and going through them. So if you want I'm not going to show them when I talk about it. So if you want to have the PDF open on her screen that might be helpful. But everything in this I will talk about and these are sort of like our checklist point items when we're doing manual testing. So I'm actually going to drag that away so I can see it. Make sure I don't forget something I'm supposed to tell you all.\r\n\r\nAnd we are going to do a little bit of testing here on our Georgetown Texas website. So if I were to come, I'm going to load it. The first thing I'm going to check is is the page title and that's not a visual patient that is literally talking about the page title in the tab accurate. Does it reflect the title of the page? Because this is what's screen readers here when they come so they know if they're on the right page. And on the homepage of a website. I think it's fine for it just to be the name of the website. So in this instance Yes, this is correct. If I went into like one of these other pages like let's say I click Pay my bill Georgetown Customer Portal like that is probably fine. So check. Yep, that's good. They did a good job there. The next thing is I want there to be skipped links on the page and they should be the first focus will element. So what do I mean by skip links? I'm pretty sure we have these on our Kadence website. Let's see real quick here.\r\n\r\nSo if I hit Oh, I refreshed it without this.\r\n\r\nLet me remove that. Okay, so if I hit tab, and I go past the admin bar, I should get a link just like this. It says skip to content. And if I hit the return key because it's a link, it would jump me down and now when I hit tab, my focus is on this button, which is the first focusable element in my main content container. This is good. This is what you want to see.\r\n\r\nBecause we don't want to force people to have to tab through every item in the navigation. In order to get to content on the page. We want them to be able to skip I mean look at how many items are in this navigation. It's a mega menu with what five columns. That's a lot of tabbing we don't want to make people have to do so. So I can just start at the top and I can hit Tab and where did I go I went to this guy right here my Submit button. There are no skip links on this website. So that would fail.\r\n\r\ntab order and following order of the page. We talked about this before this does not work. That's a failure.\r\n\r\nThere's a focus element on on a focus outline on every element. So what am I talking about? I'm talking about this guy right here the outline that's what shows a keyboard only user that they where they are on the page so they can actually use it. You want it to be this was a new 2.2 guideline. We want it to be two pixels solid, not dotted, not one pixel two pixels. Our preferences we don't set the color and we allow the browser to do it. So this purple one on this website, they're doing the same thing. They're not setting the color. Purple is coming from the browser. And why why is that helpful? Because the browsers, most browsers will add a two pixel or two color border so it's white and purple. If you can sort of see that on the orange. You can see the white pops out more. But if we are on the white, then the purple pops out more. This is easier if you define a specific color and then what ends up happening is in your code, you have what you can do if you're building themes, it's it's totally fine, but then you have to say like in this section, it's going to be dark in this section is going to be like you have to reverse it. It's a lot more work. So we've changed to we just allow the browser to set the color and and leave it the way it is. So in order to check this I would say okay, it passes that I normally like it to have a two pixel outline offset, so there's a little bit of space, so I might flag that for a dev. And then I would basically tab through everything and make sure that everything has an outline and if I find one thing on the page anywhere like it could be all fine until you get right here and these guys don't have outlines.\r\n\r\nThen I would just flag that. So that's a manual check.\r\n\r\nThen we want to look at any of the carousels, tabs accordions, any sort of interactive elements and make sure they can be interacted with the keyboard all alone.\r\n\r\nWe'll circle back to that video in just a little bit. But on this page, there are some accordions here under our one of our two special topic headings. So I can jump I could tab all the way there but I also use a shortcut with my mouse sometimes where I'll just select the text that gets me my focus there and then I can hit tab and it will take me to the next item. This is one where the focus outline I would tag is not sufficient because it's a one pixel dotted. Now, these should function like a button. buttons can be clicked with your return key and your spacebar. So I'm going to test with my spacebar first because that's the one people most frequently forget. And it opened so open and close Return key open and closed. So that's good. If I open it, I can go into it. So I would give that a pass that works perfectly. So you do the same thing with tabs. Can you and those should also function like a button not a link links or return keys, buttons or spacebar or return key.\r\n\r\nSo I would go through all of any examples of those and make sure that they work and can be interacted with. Just with my keyboard if there's captions. I don't have an example here. If you use Jetpack, the mask CAPTCHA no longer is sufficient as of wicked 2.2. Can't use that. You can use I mean, you can use some of the captures like the google recaptcha that has people pick things\r\n\r\nis sufficient for double A it's not sufficient for triple A. So if they need triple A then you can't do that.\r\n\r\nIn general, if you can have invisible captures or use a honeypot instead, that's what we try and do on login forms we'll we'll use like solid security and just have them all by factor authentication setup instead, instead of having a CAPTCHA so I try to avoid catches as much as possible.\r\n\r\nSo so this next item on my keyboard testing list is that users can control whether or not to play audio and videos. So I am instantly giving this website a fail. Because there is a video at the top in the banner that cannot be paused. There is a wicked success criterion two dot 2.2 called Pause, Stop hide and the rule there is anything that automatically plays for more than five seconds needs to have a method for the user to stop it. So that could be a video like this. It could be a slider that you have that automatically changes slides. Any animations that are gifts, animated GIFs same thing have to be possible.\r\n\r\nSo that is a failure.\r\n\r\nLet's see we don't have any examples of I'll come back to the zoom in just a second. We don't have any examples of text over background images. So we won't do that here.\r\n\r\nSo I'm going to do my automated testing. I'm going to tab through make sure everything works. I'm going to like spot check some of these other things that we've already talked about and flag them. I am then going to zoom in so I'm just gonna go Command loss on the right browser window. There we go. So I'm going to do 200% first. So that got me to 200% and I would essentially do the same thing, which is I would make sure that I can get to everything. I would make sure nothing goes off the page. So if something didn't reflow Well, this is where mobile responsiveness is really helpful, right? If they haven't set up for that, make sure that the line height didn't get weird sometimes if you have a fixed height on a div or a container, it'll cut off some of the text. In this instance, I'm not seeing anything at 200% That looks like a problem. So I think it's good. So I can then go bump us up to 400%.\r\n\r\nWhen you zoom in a lot, you will get the mobile navigation. So I've had developers asked me before Why does my mobile navigation need to be keyboard accessible to people plug their keyboards into their phone? No. But when we build mobile responsive websites at some point if a user zooms in they get the mobile nav, and so it is really important that the mobile nav work with the keyboard. So I have zoomed in I am now going to see if I can open and close this navigation which we can see on the left hand side here.\r\n\r\nIt goes like this. It's not actually super great. There's some weird overlapping that's happening anyway.\r\n\r\nBut like, can I get to the sub items and actually, I'm actually flagged this is broken anyway because there was a whole mega menu there and I don't see any way in this mobile nav to be able to expand the mega menu. So this seems like this is broken for everyone. Yeah, I tried refreshing. Sometimes there's JavaScript that doesn't kick in when you zoom. I refreshed just to make sure But nope, not there. But we're gonna see if we can get to it at all. So I hit tab and right on the left hand side of my screen below.\r\n\r\nThe menu is a purple border. That is my focus outline. So I'm actually focused on an off screen element right now if I look down in the bottom left, I can see that the link I'm focused on is visit.georgetown.org\/events-calendar.\r\n\r\nLet me open this up. This is what I was focusing on. So I'm not sure why right I shouldn't be able to focus on you should never be able to focus on anything that is off screen.\r\n\r\nAnd and I'm like Why couldn't I get to this button to open and close it? So I'm going to inspect the code and what I find is this is a div with a span and that is it. So divs are not focused will elements and you really need to make sure that you use buttons for interactive things. So this is a problem. It can't be used by a keyboard at all. Because it is not a literal button. This could be remediated by adding a role equals button to it. But but it is definitely I mean this is this is a critical failure. It needs to be fixed right away. I literally emailed the ADA contact at our city last night when I was thinking I was like do you know that your entire Nav menu cannot function?\r\n\r\nSo like this would be a problem, right?\r\n\r\nSo let me go back to my regular zoom and we'll talk just submitted about Nav menu accessibility in general, because I think that is a good pivot. So we talked about mobile, how mobile needs to function.\r\n\r\nBut let's talk about this mega menu. It is possible to have accessible mega menus. What you need to make sure when you're testing a navigation menu is a couple of things. First of all, all of your colors pass color contrast, there needs to be a really clear indicator for the hover that is different. So I would fail this hover because we have a off white or slightly white and then it gets more white when you hover. It's not sufficiently different. Someone who has low vision is not going to tell so there should be a contrast. In color that is sufficient. So like that, that double A color contrast. You could use the same thing to say between the normal and the hover states. Or a really, probably a better answer is on hover underline it right or add a border bottom or add an arrow that points to the right or whatever decorative element you want to do. But you need to make sure that you're doing that both for the regular for the hover also for the focus date, and then your current page indicators. So wherever you are, you want to make sure that that indicates there needs to be separate buttons to be able to open and close this. So I'm gonna hit tab I'm on my logo. If I tab to residence, this is actually a well it might be a current page link which is a little weird. I'm not sure what that's about.\r\n\r\nBecause when I look down, that's what I see. But I hit tab again and I am like where am I? I can't even tell where I am. I am down here in Fire Department inside the menu so I was able to tap into it and it didn't open.\r\n\r\nIt is sufficient to have it open when you tab to it. It is much better and I'm going to tell you that we're doing some work with the with universities that we're having to remediate with the Office of Civil Rights and the Justice Department is they instead they want to have a separate button.\r\n\r\nI actually have a better example. Of this on our website, a separate button that can be used to open and close the nav menu.\r\n\r\nSo we have for example, a link and then next to it is a button that can be opened and closed and it uses already expanded to tell people all have that kind of stuff when you're in a drop down. So let's say you're in there, the Escape key should work to be able to close it. This is really important, especially if you get on websites that have these huge navigation menus. Because if someone is here you don't want to force them to have to tab 20 times to go back to the page if they realized actually no, I don't need anything in this admin escape. Get out of it. Right like move quickly.\r\n\r\nThat's like a really high level on nav menus I recommend there is I can share a link or you can find on the WordPress accessibility meet up a recording that talks a lot more about them as well.\r\n\r\nI'm gonna pop back to my slides for a second because I don't have a example of pop ups but we can just talk real quick about pop ups and testing them you can have accessible popups or modals that are triggered by a button. So like a search that opens up in a modal that's totally fine as long as it's accessible. And what you'd want to look for is on open the focus is shifted to the pop up screen readers announced that a pop up has opened it needs to contain a heading. It could be screenreader only if you visually don't want one for stylistic reasons. The heading has to have clear text that explains what it is the any forms that are contained in the pop up have to be accessible when you are hitting the tab key in a pop up you should not be able to leave the pop up so you would do a rotation between the Close button whatever like if it's an email subscriber the name the email address the submit button and back to the close button like a circle every time you hit tab you can never get to anything behind it without closing.\r\n\r\nObviously your close button needs to be a button it needs to be labeled and work with the keyboard. And when it's closed, the users focus needs to return where they were on the page.\r\n\r\nSo I am going to turn on a screen reader and we can listen a little bit to that there are three different screen readers the two that people are most likely to use is voiceover which is built into Macs if you have a Mac you already have it and NVDA for it only works on Windows and it is free open source you can go download it and I recommend you do that both of my slides have links to where you can learn the keyboard shortcuts. Keyboard shortcuts are incredibly helpful to know because they're going to help you understand like how to navigate through the screen reader and that sort of stuff. So I definitely recommend checking these out for whichever screen reader you are using and testing with. Jaws is a third screen reader. We have some of our blind users use JAWS. It's very popular. It is paid and it's quite expensive. We don't typically test with it internally we test with NVDA which is what most screenreader users are on Windows. And then we'll secondarily test with VoiceOver. I am going to demo voiceover today because I am on a Mac so when you're doing screen reader testing, I guess I could have left my side job over there. So you can open the page. And the first thing I usually do is I just have it read it all and I listen to it as it reads the entire page. And what I'm doing is I'm looking for does it read things in the order that I expect it to read? Does anything sound funny? Are there alt text are labels that are Are they accurate or are they inaccurate? Is content grouped appropriately? This is this is a really big one. So you can use lists lists are really helpful for grouping content together and it gives screen reader users information about how they're connected it oh, it will tell them how many elements there are if they're in a list, and it will also enable them to skip to the end. So for example, you would notice if you looked at the WordPress core post block that it outputs them in an unordered list and they've just hidden the bullet point, right. But what's helpful about that is they would encounter that and it would be it would say list 12 items and they can hear the first and be like oh I don't want the I don't want any more posts. They can skip past the list and just move down to the next section. But if you just have all of your posts in divs, for example, and you you know, arrange them in whatever way you want, they wouldn't have to go through all 12 of those because they would know there are 12 there wouldn't be a shortcut to be able to jump to the end of it unless they just like use a heading and said okay, I'm just going to go to a different heading on the page. So lists are really helpful. And then after I've listened to it, I go back and I re listen to any elements that sound off.\r\n\r\nAnd then I'll engage with interactive elements and I'll check to make sure that any page changes are announced. So if I have search and filter and then an I search something and the results change, you know, like a WooCommerce store for example, the product does it does it tell me like 10 products found 12 product found or whatever the visual changes, does it announce that to the screen printer and then I'll look at forums and I'll make sure that the confirmation messages for success and the error messages are announced.\r\n\r\nSo I'm going to turn this on we're not 100% sure what, how the sound will work. I'm hoping it will but if it is a problem. I'm also going to have some text on the screen\r\n\r\nAlright, can you give me a thumbs up if you can hear that?\r\n\r\nIt was a little muffled in the background. Hold on. I'm gonna that may be the best we can do.\r\n\r\nWe don't have anywhere on this. So here we go.\r\n\r\nAll right.\r\n\r\nHello.\r\n\r\nI'm just going to make it really loud.\r\n\r\nWhen you turn on a screen reader, one of the things you want to look at in those lists of commands the first time is figured out how to turn it off.\r\n\r\nBecause it will just keep talking about you. So it's really helpful to know how to make it stop with VoiceOver. And usually with NVDA you can use the caps lock but depending on your default settings, you might be able to do something else so it's good to know how to turn that off.\r\n\r\nSo you will be able to read in the black box what it's saying and we're not going to go through one of the elements but I want to give you a feel so I'm just gonna go on.\r\n\r\nI'm gonna go up and I am going to do a refresh on my page or something. Department was the short term Fire Department. Most of my content is my content. You're currently on my content inside of the folder whenever you press CTRL A CTRL SHIFT I'm missing items you're currently about to click this on questions. functionspace So this is good because they told me it was a button. Again, we're missing skip links. I don't know why this is our first element on the page. But like that's something I'm listening for. Did it tell me it was a button? I'm gonna just hit my caps like a which is going to have it just read through some elements on the page and we'll just listen for a minute.\r\n\r\nBefore I go to Chamber of Commerce visits last time, basically Singapore's time this one I went to my go to departments just last names before commission me on English physical intervention.\r\n\r\nAlright, so something I noticed is that it's telling me list and the number of items so these are grouped in lists, but these are actually navigation elements. They are probably missing a navigation tag. So I'm going to inspect that\r\n\r\nelement less than or equal slash slash nordstrom.org.\r\n\r\nAlright, so I'm indeed when I look at this, we just have a an unordered list with items they're not using a nav tag in HTML NAB tag.\r\n\r\nSo this will I yeah, I do have I can slow it down. Sorry. I just noticed in the chat that it might be kind of fast for people.\r\n\r\nOnce again, then you just press ctrl teletrack to system settings, system settings.\r\n\r\nRotary six extended appearance, accessibility\r\n\r\nvoiceover utility voiceover Utility window slippery casting worthless. You might currently just like speech, you're\r\n\r\nvery sporty.\r\n\r\nAlright, that should be better.\r\n\r\nOnce you do it more you'll be able to listen to it faster and then you get through testing faster.\r\n\r\nSo like I alerted right away that these are navigation items, but it didn't tell me on a normal website it would announce and tell you that it is a navigation Dev Tools is docked around. Current Page visited like Week One was the digital.com contents selected addressing search so people always have visual elements selected for each one as a digital select date. So many visited current page visited link image. Alright, so just listen to the difference here.\r\n\r\nCurrent Page visited linkimage equalize digital equalized digital website accessibility consulting, training and development are those two items positive link my account visited link check out primary menu navigation list five items. So primary menu because it has an ARIA label on a time that's the primary navigation it's a navigation and then now many items. So I would flag on this Georgetown website that they're not. They don't have their navigation labeled appropriately and I'm going to guess that even this one isn't less less than\r\n\r\nYeah, so even this one is not in a navigation tab. So having a navigation tag is really important because it also people on screen users can jump to the tags and if you have them labeled, so you don't just want a nav tag but you want a navigation tab with appropriate label then they can replicate brief Georgetown VoiceOver off, then they would be able to jump to that navigation element. So I don't have a ton of time you know to go all the way into like all of these things, but I would say like those are things that you want to listen for. You can familiarize yourself with the the different HTML tags that are available because most of them read out and I would recommend that you know, because then you can start to feel okay, it should tell you if it's a navigation it should tell you if it's a button it should have the right label, all of that sort of thing.\r\n\r\nThis is a really fast and in you know, hyper speed on doing some testing. I'm wondering if we have some questions that I can answer.\r\n\r\nAnd then I could try and point out some other resources as well if that's helpful for people.\r\n\r\nYes, I'm scrolling down the questions to see if there were any specific questions related to testing. Okay, Tony would like to know if there are links to tools that you're using for the keyboard testing and manually testing Um, yes, I guess I didn't have those. So the I usually the the two browser times, if you just Google then oops. So tab a live and why they're listed in there.\r\n\r\nThat should pull up like this is a Chrome extension. And the same thing headings map all one word, and they have like a Firefox and whatever version and I'm in Brave right now.\r\n\r\nSo I don't have a specific I didn't put links to those in the slides because it's not as easy when I don't know what browser people are using. Got it. I added those two links to the chat. So folks, I have access to this now.\r\n\r\nLet's see Tanya would also like to know how to screen readers handle a form on the page.\r\n\r\nUm, so the label is an interesting thing. We didn't talk about this yet. But you notice this field doesn't have a visible label.\r\n\r\nIt also it did announce it though when I went there. It told me that it has a label so it has a correct label for a screen reader user. I would still fail this because it doesn't have a visible label. So everything because to be honest, like we're web professionals, we can look at this and see this eyeglass and think this is the search field but especially on a website like like an older person, they might just think that's a white box. Like To be totally honest, especially with where this this icon, the button to submit it is super strange. So visually I would say like what you want to do if you get a design can I talk and type at the same time?\r\n\r\nharder than it seems? There we go. Okay, so if you get designs where they really want the it to have what looks like placeholder text, what we do is we do what's called a floating label. So when you've typed in there, it still stays visible. And this is really important, especially on really big forms because if you have a forum that's properly set up with autocomplete attributes, where you know you go in it starts you start typing your name, and you'll be like, Oh, I know you I'll fill in your name, your email address and your all these things, right? Well, if you do that, and there's fields down below, and there's no labels, they might select something and it could auto fill the field incorrectly. And because they can't see the label, because the placeholder is gone. They won't know that you know, it put their address, you know, in a in the wrong field or something like that. So it's really important that you always have visible labels. You can do this thing where it floats up and down. It's actually it's like not too bad with JavaScript.\r\n\r\nBut it's extra work. So so we've been just trying to convince our designers that you should just design forms with visible labels.\r\n\r\nInteresting.\r\n\r\nYeah. And Sue's asking, does gravity forms have that option? I don't ever recall seeing floating labels in Gravity Forms. So it is not an option in Gravity Forms core but we do it for Gravity Forms. Like honestly, this search might actually be like a gravity form that we just haven't going to the pay like sometimes we do that we do it in Gravity Forms all the time.\r\n\r\nSo it definitely can be done with gravity forms, but I don't think they have a setting for it. Yeah. In Gravity Forms. They've actually stated one of their unique things. They want to be the most accessible form for WordPress. Is that right? Have you found that to be the case? Oh, yeah, I mean, I know that they've done a lot the other thing that I really like about them that I have not seen many other plugins doing is that in addition to fixing things on the front end, they have guidance in their form editor. So if you try to use a field that for some reason, like the date picker or something that they had to keep around because it's depth, it's like a deprecated field, you probably shouldn't use it moving forward, but there's they can't take it away. There's a break people's websites. They'll have a warning that says, hey, this doesn't work. Or if you leave the label blank for decorative purposes, right? It'll say this is a wig violation. You have to put text in this label. And I think that is really good and positive that they're doing that and I'd love to see more plugin developers doing that because that's what content creators, you know, website owners, they need that kind of guidance, because if we don't provide that guidance to them, then they're just going to break their website after we hand them a really nice accessible website. Right? Yeah, exactly. Looking at the time and we need to take a break, but we have seven questions stacked up here. Maybe we can do quick answers on these questions. Okay. Yeah, we'll go fast. Okay, so sticking with this form label thing Tanya wanted to know, is there a way to hide from the front end the label for aesthetics, but keep for accessibility and I guess that floating label is the best way to do that? Yep. Yeah, that's the way I would do that. Let's see.\r\n\r\nAll says it looks like a Georgetown site theme is not as good as equalize digital. The only way Georgetown could probably easily fix things would be to change the theme. Is that right? Or would they change? Would they hire a programmer to try to remediate this? What would you do? Yeah, so we can talk about that a little bit next time. But I would say there's a decision point where it depends on how, how many problems there are. This was I had a lot of problems. And then also one of the things I look at is is the website otherwise meeting objectives. Like that was our to me it looks a little bit dated.\r\n\r\nProbably it's not doing a great job on SEO because their headings are all over the place. Really. There's other things and and if it's also been a long time, like maybe they built that website five plus years ago, well then yeah, it's probably time for any website anyway. So I would change the theme. And that will be a lot faster and probably less expensive or maybe more expensive, but it's but it'd be part of that remediation.\r\n\r\nIf the website is relatively new, and it's otherwise achieving all the goals and doing everything it needs to do and they love the design. Then I would just remediate the existing site. Got it? Makes sense. Let's see. Hey, Paul, you have a question about a Facebook pixel. Can you clarify what caused that problem? What thing do you please in the chat? And in the meantime, I guess on that is that our accessibility checker plugin flagged him in the Facebook pixel and we have an open GitHub issue for this because it should be ignoring the pixel. Haha. Okay.\r\n\r\nOkay, so Paul wanting to know on the accessibility page that gets generated, do you list all the checks that accessibility checker checks?\r\n\r\nYes, so um, let me get that real quick. So the, the open Issues page does list out everything that is checked. And basically, if nothing failed, it's just going to show up at the bottom as a past so the goal is, is that you can eventually as you work through things, get it everything to say past and then your main summary, which is for your whole entire site would all say 100%.\r\n\r\nNice. Yep.\r\n\r\nOh, this is a good question. Jean is curious about making PDFs accessible. What, what's involved in that and that's beyond the scope of what we're talking about, but is there a good resource you can give about how to do that? So PDFs are they follow the exact same guidelines as far as headings, links, all that kind of stuff. So things that are listed in wiki also apply to PDFs. You are most able to create accessible PDFs if you use something like InDesign or Microsoft Word. If you are creating Google Docs, there is an extension called grackle. Like it's a Chrome extension that can help export tag PDFs but it doesn't work as well. So I'd recommend word or InDesign over that Canva does not create accessible PDFs. Do not make your PDF Canva is not for PDFs. I know they say they can make PDFs because now it was for interesting.\r\n\r\nDoug is wondering if you can show checking alt tags again and keyboard testing.\r\n\r\nYeah, I mean, the main thing that I would look at if we're keyboard testing and we're looking for alternative tax is I'm trying to see if one of these has been done but is I would just, you can either listen to it, the string reader or all inspect it. The testing tools are all going to tell you if it's empty. But what you would want to do is you would want to actually look and make sure that the text is accurate and make sense the testing tools can't tell you that yet. And even the AI image generating alt text image generators don't do a good job. So like does this accurately describe the image? And the only other thing that I would that you want to be really clear about is that if it is a linked image, Don't dis don't describe the image. So for example on like, like these right here, images that link over to my thing, I wouldn't want to write like X icon because they'd here link X icon and that makes them think that maybe it's just going to open the icon. So I would just say, so these ones actually would say like, Link, Amber. I don't know it's probably an ARIA label on it in this instance, but it says like, Amber on Twitter, right, like, like something like that. So if you've linked it you got to describe where it's going, not how it looks. Oh, that makes a lot of sense. That's a good rule of thumb. Okay, we have a couple more questions here that I'm gonna save for the next hour. Robert, I think your question might just be answered in the next hour when we talk about the business of accessibility.\r\n\r\nOkay, well, let's take a five minute break. It is just about to be five minutes after so we'll come back at 10 After and we're quiet until then.\r\n\r\nThis is your One Minute Warning we're back in one minute from now.\r\n\r\nAll right, we're back for the final hour of the accessibility Crash Course. And this I think is going to be very interesting to everyone here. I believe. Just about everybody here is doing client work with WordPress. And Ember when accessibility first became a thing that was on our radar as people working with clients there was a lot of friction in adopting it.\r\n\r\nAnd really, it's an opportunity not only just from a principle of making the web a better, more accessible place for everybody, but also, it's a way honestly to have another service to sell to clients. So it's good from a business perspective. It's good from a world perspective. So I'm looking forward for your insight on how to do that. So let's get started. All right.\r\n\r\nSo what we're going to talk about in this second hour is we're gonna be talking about different plans, you can make pricing, marketing accessibility sales conversations, and then I have some contract language that I will share as well. So on the plans and pricing front, of course, you have to decide what to offer.\r\n\r\nThe way I see this is basically you can roll accessibility into your new website development projects, build accessible websites. I would love if everyone here started doing that or doing as much of that as they can and we'll talk about what that means in just a minute.\r\n\r\nYou can also do one time accessibility fixes so this is like a fixed project for a flat fee where you fix some amount of things or everything, whatever that might be over some amount of time and then it ends. You can offer recurring accessibility fixes every month, quarter or year. You can offer accessibility monitoring. You can include your the accessibility checker plugin in your hosting and care plan fees. So just like some of us include image optimization or things like that, you can include accessibility plugins as well as part of what you offer and mark them up and make money off of that.\r\n\r\nSo how do you decide what to offer? These are some questions that I think you'll want to think about initially to figure out what makes the most sense for you and your agency, or what you're doing. So the first is who on your team can find accessibility problems. Do you have someone on your team that already knows accessibility and is able to be a tester who on your team can fix accessibility problems? So sometimes, we talked about you know, headings that aren't in the right order. A lot of times those can just be fixed in the editor and you can have a content specialist that you educate them on how to correct you know, correct those and they can go do that. Sometimes it is a code required fix, and sometimes that depending upon what the problem is, it might be a basic PHP, HTML change that any WordPress developer can do. Sometimes it might require a lot of very complex JavaScript, and then you need a developer who's a lot more experienced in JavaScript. So you sort of have to ask, like, who on your team do you have that has these different types of skills and that can help you decide what to offer? Or, you know this third question, do you need to bring in an outside partner for either testing or development or some of the work and then you are the person who manages that partner and maybe even white liberals their work and sells it?\r\n\r\nSo then the other thing is, of course, like thinking about what accessibility tools that you would want to use both to find them to report on how things are going, what do those tools cost? And then a big thing that comes into this if you are doing the work, you're building out a plan or a fix that's recurring is you'd want to think about what is the minimum number of hours that you need in a month to make meaningful fixes. So we had a lot of conversations about this, when we set up our recurring plans, and we were talking about you know, sure, you can do some, a lot like very many content tasks in two or three hours. But sometimes you encounter a dev problem like that navigation menu, right if they were keeping their theme on the city of Georgetown website, and they were like, but we need to make our navigation accessible. That is that might be more than a two or three hour task for a developer to have the staging site, work on it, test it, have someone else your accessibility tester, come back test confirm is good, and then push it to production. So this is where sometimes you need to think about tearing your plans based upon how bad some you know how bad someone's site is, how much work needs to be done. That sort of thing. And really spending time think about that, what is the smallest amount of time that we think we can actually do something that is beneficial to the client and makes a dent and is helpful, and then you kind of go up from there. And then the other thing I would always just ask you is what would you do if you encountered problems that you don't know how to fix? Because this may happen where something comes up and you're not sure how to fix it, or there's, you know, discussions about should we even fix this because, sure we we've had this happen where a plugin was causing a problem. And our dev team is like, well, yes, we can write JavaScript that will modify that but every time now plug in releases an update, we need before that can go live on the website, we need to test and make sure that our Fix still works. So then you go okay, well, wait a minute, is this the best? Maybe instead, we should go to the plugin developer and ask them to do the fix right? Or because then it fixes not just for our client for everyone, or we need to literally say fixing this thing is not worth fixing, or it's too hard to fix. Or maybe it's not even WordPress and it's a third party plugin, or add on that they're using and there's literally no ability to fix it because everything is in an iframe and so then the answer is we just need to choose a different vendor for whatever this particular component is.\r\n\r\nSo how do you price all of this?\r\n\r\nI would say when you're thinking about a new build, a really good way to do this is to start take your starter site. So if you use like a blueprint or something where you have a lot of your plugins in and pre configured and it has whatever your starter theme is, but no client content on it, and not a lot of the design yet. Go run Accessibility Checker scans on that and you can use just the free plugin to go test like what your homepage, your contact page, whatever those default things that will get the header and the footer that will tell you how your theme is and how much you might need to fix or change. You can also just create like a style guide page where you insert an example block of everything. So here's an accordion, here's a tab. Here's a carousel, and you can test everything on that one page. And that's going to give you a baseline for how much time that you need to put into getting your starter up. But the thing is, if you make all these fixes, whether it's to your custom theme or you do some testing, you say, Oh, I can't use this accordion plug in that I used to use. So I'm gonna, you know, find a different one. I replace it and I just use that new one moving forward. I didn't have to custom code something but I just changed the tool I was using.\r\n\r\nYou put it requires that upfront time investment but then every website you build moving forward has all those fixes into it. And so it gets a lot less. But I would say if you're trying to figure out how to price it for the at least the first time, you need a 20 to 50% budget increase the first time and the way we think about this is that basic accessibility isn't optional. We roll it in to every line and I'm sitting around arguing about there's accessibility touchpoints that happen at every phase of the project. So you don't send your proposal when you're bidding it out. You don't say like you know, here's your design fee. Here's your development fee. Here's your accessibility. Now instead, you need to think about everything that you're doing on a project. So when I talked about I do accessibility audits on our figma files before we show them to the client. Well if I know that there's going to be six pages in a project and I'm going to spend 30 minutes auditing every single one of those for accessibility. That's three extra hours that I need to add to my proposal for the design budget. So you can sort of start to figure stuff like that out and then and then you have this is like the baseline accessibility. And then what we do as options on the new build proposals is you could we don't do this, but I know a lot of our customers do this, where they have testing by us as an option on their proposal. So they're doing some baseline stuff, and they'll maybe communicate to their clients. You know, I try and observe best practices, these are the things that I include, but if you really need it, need to know if it's WCAG compliant, then I recommend bringing in a certified and trained accessibility professional and this is the cost for that. And then the clients can opt for it or they can decline it which but then you have told them it may not be fully compliant unless you go for this option.\r\n\r\nAnd and then that's you know, that was a choice that they made and you have a paper trail that they made that choice. So sometimes that is an option. We always include user testing sessions with people with disabilities as options because not all clients have the budget for that, or the interest necessarily in having that so it'll be an option on our proposals. And then we will include a baseline of what parts of the site are accessible in the scope. And so if they want us to do extra accessibility testing, we're fixing remediation on other parts. So for example, if you have a WooCommerce site and it has 500 products, we are we are not going to guarantee the accessibility of every product page because we have not looked at it. So if they are like we really need a human being to tell us that every single one of our product pages is accessible. And we're gonna account for that time and that is an extra add on on their proposal. On top of the baseline. Yes, we know that like the theme control parts of the WooCommerce shop will be accessible, but I can't say anything about your product description because I didn't look at it. Right? Or I didn't you know, we just imported all these images that you already had in your own commerce site. And maybe they're all missing alt tags, right. So we'll have those as options on there. I can't give you a literal dollar amount because this is so different for everyone, right? Like what you charge is your baseline hourly, what you need your profit to be.\r\n\r\nYou have to think about that. I would just always circle back to this the first one, at least 20 to 30% more expensive than what you are charging right now. And and maybe account for there's gonna be a learning curve, especially on the first one while you're getting some of your tools up to date, or up to up to code maybe if that is a better way to say it.\r\n\r\nSo if you're gonna do a recurring plan this is the same sort of thing. We price on a combination of time and tool cost. Do what makes sense for your costs and your clients. It doesn't have to be expensive. I know of one of our customers who has multiple tiered plans, and their their base plan is it includes our accessibility checker plugin and one hour a month for them to go in and make some small fixes. And they they charge $99 a month for it. Is it going to make that website like super accessible really fast? Absolutely not.\r\n\r\nBut they're transparent about that and they're like, this is just like to get you started and free you to help and maybe in an hour, they can fix all the headings. They can fix all the links on a particular page. And they can you know if they've already built the site they know that the core components like there are skip links. There are things in in the navigation that all function appropriately because they built the site using a theme that they know. So this kind of like ongoing just one page, they can actually do things and that works well for small business budget.\r\n\r\nOn the other end, you have people that come to you, if you you know, that are emergent, they are being sued or they are under mandated remediation with the Department of Education or whatever that might be. And they're going to say I need my website as accessible as possible. You know, and then and then you're looking at okay, well, this is not a one hour a month solution that you're looking for. And so then you figure out like how many hours over how many months and then maybe they start high. And then over time you drop them and they go down to that one hour or that three hour or whatever you set your minimum plan to as sort of like their monitoring and remediation like ongoing accessibility support.\r\n\r\nSo the big thing I would say is that I feel very strongly and I know some folks in the disability community feel this way as well that some accessibility is better than no accessibility. So even if you have to start small because you don't think your clients will be open to it, and you're only doing some of the things that can make a difference and won't necessarily, quote protect them from being sued. The only thing that's going to protect someone from a lawsuit is actually having a functional website and doing a good job if something doesn't work in responding to a complaint from a user with disabilities. But over time, you can do small things over time to make a website more accessible and usable.\r\n\r\nI gave a whole hour and a half long webinar about our recruiting remediation plans, including literally showing what the user journey is like how we move people through them. It shows our pricing and like all kinds of stuff. So those are linked on the slides. If you want to go check that out.\r\n\r\nSo once you've decided on what plans you're going to offer, and how you're going to price them. How do you get people to come to you? Right, so let's talk a little bit about marketing.\r\n\r\nWho buys accessibility? There are some key industries that we have found that are guaranteed buyers, this is government. I think there's there's been a lot I know someone who uses our plugin he is in Colorado and he told me that Colorado has a state law about state and local government websites that is going into effect really soon. And over the last year, he has had a huge internet uptick and encourage just because of that. So I think you know we're gonna see a lot more of that increasingly with laws so any sort of government or government funded, government adjacent entity higher ed, large healthcare small doctor's offices, I we have not had as much luck we actually spent quite a bit of time when we first set up equalization we're doing like, like literal cold calling and cold emailing like doctors offices in our area and being like, you have accessibility problems on your website. We want to help you fix them.\r\n\r\nThe other one that I would say which I don't have listed there, and then I'm like doesn't maybe respond as well is restaurants. Restaurants get sued a lot for accessibility problems, but they have very small margins and they have very tight budgets and even though they might acknowledge they have accessibility problems, they are very unlikely to be willing to invest in it.\r\n\r\nBut the the other ones besides these that do ecommerce is another one. They know that they need to be accessible and the larger shop that they have, the more they're going to be interested in that. So creating content that speaks to these industries is a good way to get people that do that. Other ones that we've seen is organizations that serve people with disabilities obviously like they know they want to be accessible. And then any kind of business what we've seen kind of like a revenue threshold is one to 2 million in annual revenue and up I do think it can be challenging on those like recurring remediation plans. If if you price them very high. You're not gonna get a lot of micro businesses to purchase those. That said, you can get micro purchase micro businesses to be interested when they come to you for a new website in you making it accessible. And you know, doing something like that plan I mentioned that one of our customers has where it's just like an hour a month, they will definitely buy that but they they might not be your largest revenue finds ever in revenue to you. It might be more that you have like a lot of them on smaller retainers.\r\n\r\nI think the other thing I would say that triggers those micro businesses is sometimes we've heard this where we get outreach from like a very small business and they'll literally be like my friend at the Chamber of Commerce got a demand letter or got sued and now I'm worried about mine like we we have one where it's a mental health counselor and it's her and one other person and they have to it's a pretty small practice. And she was like, Yeah, I literally know someone who got sued. And so now I want to make my website accessible. So sometimes they can have a triggering event like that. But I would say if you're trying to do outreach, I would look at probably more of the they still technically call them small businesses but kind of like bigger, more established companies in your area.\r\n\r\nAnd then of course, this is just general marketing advice. But how can you stand out in a crowd? So becoming an authority in a specific niche? It says abilities a niche but you could be even more?\r\n\r\nI know someone that's like they do wineries. And they're in Northern California, a lot of wineries in Northern California have been sued, right? If you become the person that like builds the best websites for wineries, then you're gonna get a lot more referrals and word of mouth and if you make that right, and it can be accessibility and maybe you also do like UX and like how can we optimize what people want to buy the wine of the month club or whatever that might be right so if you become the person that really knows what that niche is, so whatever your niche is like this is going to help you in general whether it's with accessibility or with selling new services, is definitely focusing there.\r\n\r\nCreating content is really key. This is a thing that we have found a lot you need to invest in content marketing strategy and create content that people will want to share. This could be long form blog posts, it could be videos, it could be a podcast, whatever that might be like creating content is really important, not just because it will help you to bring people to you, but also because it gives you something to give people as follow ups which we'll talk about in just a minute.\r\n\r\nTry to grow an email list and send regular email newsletters so you stay in front of people. And then a big thing on accessibility is talk about it really early in the process. All the time. This is something that we've had people tell us when they chose us as part of a bid process. They were like we talked to 10 agencies, and you were the only one who told us about accessibility and this is even early and I'm saying this like we were doing accessibility under the under our other brand which was called Broadway creative and it was just a marketing agency. They would say no one else told us about accessibility or about this laws that apply. And so that helped differentiate us and it made us seem like more of an expert who was really thinking about the holistic view of their business. Rarely the same thing. Like you might ask someone in a sales process. Do you need to be GDPR compliant or CCPA? compliant? Do you need to worry about privacy policies and how you're How are you going to handle them? If no one else talks about these things, then all of a sudden it looks like wow, this person really knows their field and then they start to question like, why did this other person don't ask me about accessibility or privacy? What are they missing? So that's another way to really help stand out there.\r\n\r\nSo existing clients, this is a question I get like, I launched a website for someone last year, and I wasn't thinking about accessibility. How do I go back to them? I don't want to tell them, thank them for your socks. Right. And I don't think that's what you're saying.\r\n\r\nI think it's more of a matter of so one having that email newsletter where you're regularly keeping in touch with your clients sending them useful resources. This is where content comes in, right creating content. So maybe you're also creating content about SEO or you're also creating it about you know, local Google optimization or whatever. But like having a regular newsletter, you can then have some of that accessibility content go out to them as well. Without you personally reaching out to them. The other thing I would say is if you're planning personal outreach, there are two ways that we have done this that has been really successful. So the first one is you always need to be aware of when your clients are writing their budgets. Different industries do this at different times. Like higher ed and K 12. A lot of times they're like finalizing budgets right now, because their fiscal year is gonna start in July.\r\n\r\nOther companies are working on budget plans in like October and November for a January start. So if you know your client you know when they're working on their marketing budget and making plans for the next year, that is a great time to reach out. The other thing is, is when there are changes to the laws, or if you see something in the news specifically about accessibility, sending it to them, and I have a blurb here written on the screen which I'm not totally going to write out since you have it in the PDF readout since you have it in the PDF. But what I will say is basically we would just say something like you know, since we launched your website six months ago, there have been changes. I want to make sure you are aware of them. Right. So for example next month, if this law or the snow law, if the rulemaking from the Justice Department gets finalized and there is a final rule which says within two or three years state and local governments have to meet WIC egg 2.1 Double A that is a great opportunity if you have a client that this is going to apply to to reach out to them and and just be like, Hey, I saw this and I was thinking about you and I want to let you know, and our original contract did not include website accessibility. But with this large change. I think it's really important that we focus on it now. And maybe let's talk about budgeting this year or we can have a call and we can talk about how you can budget it in your next year's budget. Right? And, and really just maintaining those relationships with your clients and sending them things that seemed valuable over time is really helpful. And I don't think that makes you look bad. Like we didn't include this in your original scope. It's not saying I forgot or I didn't know, right, like there's just like, this wasn't in your original scope. You didn't, you know, wasn't discussed. But now it's really important and I care about you. And clients always respond positively to those sorts of things. They don't necessarily always buy but they appreciate it right. So the other big thing is just as I mentioned, like dripping information, so don't think that you're going to reach out to them one time and be like this law exists now. We need to make your website accessible and here's my plans go by them and they're going to do it especially bigger contracts. They can take a lot longer to close. And it might take a lot of like dripping of information, which is why that monthly email newsletter can be really helpful because then you're getting something in their inbox all the time. And maybe by the time they get to seven email, they're going to be like, Whoa, there's been a lot of this stuff about accessibility I need to do something about it.\r\n\r\nBeyond the emails, think about maybe holding webinars or training sessions for your current clients. This is really an interesting idea, right? Can you get your clients together with one another? So you only have to talk you know, do it one time, but you can invite multiple and a lot of times this can help with loyalty and retention because you're providing a lot of value, especially if you have clients where they're maintaining their own content.\r\n\r\nBecause you could also just have like a webinar on like, you know, best practices for, you know, adding blocks or whatever it might be right. Or maybe you find a friend to come and talk about SEO or whatever that might be. But again, like it helps to do put content in front of them and provide more opportunities that makes them feel like you're giving them a ton of value for whatever their regular monthly hosting and support plan is.\r\n\r\nAnother thing that has worked for us is you can use the accessibility checker free plugin, and you could go skin, their homepage or you could use Wave or something like that. And you can put together a report and send it to them and just be like, hey, this new tools available. I tested your website, here's some things that we probably need to fix. Let's set up a call talk about and then and then that, you know you can turn that into maybe like a one time accessibility thing or potentially even getting them on a regular retainer or to increase their care. plan if you're just adding some hours of dev time to their regular care plan that they're already paying for every month.\r\n\r\nSo here's what's really important in all of these conversations and all of these marketing, don't promise compliance with laws. So this is what we had a lot of conversations with our attorneys. We use a an a law firm called Dentons, which is an international law firm.\r\n\r\nSo they're familiar with a lot of stuff and what they said to us is they're like, You are not a lawyer, you are not a judge. You don't know if something is legally compliant. So the and, and language is super important.\r\n\r\nAlso, the other reason why you can't really promise compliance with laws is that many laws around the world don't have clearly defined standards for proving compliance. So for example, we talked about the ADEA currently does not reference wicked on ada.gov. It says we can is a good way but it does not require that so because there's a lot of gray area, how can you really promise that and then I would just say in general, you should be really honest about what you can deliver and clear about what standards you're measuring against. So we always talk about we're measuring against Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, that is what we use to say if something is accessible or not. If you're just getting started, I would not go and be like, I'm gonna make your website 100% accessible and I'm a super expert at this right like I think there's ways to talk about it instead be like, you know, we're going to follow some best practices, here are the things that we are going to do and then if you need to pull someone else in, but that's really important that fraud whistleblower lawsuit go out the website that wasn't accessible, like a big part of why that had so much damages was because the agency lied. So be honest about what you can deliver and what you are doing and what you're not doing. And it's not that you can't do all that other stuff. It's just they might have to have a bigger budget and sometimes they don't have a super big budget. And so you're going to do what you can that works in their budget and as long as you're clear with them and truthful about that that's going to be helpful. So some examples on the language side is I wouldn't say equalize digital will make your website ADA compliant. This is literally like an example that the attorneys me. He's like what you would say is equalize digital will ensure your website needs WIC AG, which can help you meet requirements under the Americans with Disabilities Act ADA. So I'm not making your website ADA compliant, because they're responsible for the ADA compliance and legal compliance in their business, whether it's in their brick and mortar shop or whether it's on their website. What I am doing is making it meet WIC ag or I can say WIC compliant, which can be part of them, helping them meet their legal requirement under the ADEA again, I said this yesterday, I'm not an attorney. I'm repeating some things that have been said to me, but if you have concerns about this, you should definitely consult your own attorney.\r\n\r\nSo I've mentioned this a little bit and I really want to pause here and emphasize that accessibility services, whatever you're offering, it is not about building a 100% accessible website and you might be like wait a minute what Amber? I thought we were talking about like making websites work for people with disabilities.\r\n\r\nAnd yes, it is possible to build 100% accessible websites, particularly if they're very small, right, a small handful of pages and blog posts. The larger the scale of the website, the less likely it is that it is going to be perfectly accessible all the time. We're even at launch so this goes a little bit back to that. Be honest about what you can do. So what we talk about, and I'll show you this in our contract, is that when we are building accessible websites for people we are guaranteeing accessibility to WIC egg 2.2 Double A for the things that we have built and or tested and configured. So if we've configured the gravity form, it's going to be fully accessible if we have coded the header, the footer, the sidebar, there will be no accessibility problems in those. If we have imported content from their old website. I am not going to guarantee the accessibility of 5000 blog posts that go all the way back to 2005. I'm no idea they're probably not well run the scanner on them and I can guarantee you like we always find that happen. We have a website that we launched just now and it's got like a 70% score. In Accessibility Checker. All the pages we built have a 100% score and the first three blog posts that they had us fix and then show them how we fix it so we could explain as part of a training right?\r\n\r\nAre all 100% All the other blog posts I mean, color contrast issues like literally in the text was not in the theme. It was like inline HTML, so somebody has to manually go remove it right. Missing image alt text ambiguous anchor links or just all kinds of things, videos that are embedded without captions. So So you want to think about this in your language and how you're talking to people. Don't tell someone you're gonna make them a 100% accessible website, because that is a huge endeavor, especially on a large website. It's not it's probably not realistic and it may not even be needed, right. We talked about the Justice Department is saying archived content content people don't use or reference doesn't have to be accessible under this new law that they're going to say. Now you need to have a way for maybe for people to request the information but so I really would think about that.\r\n\r\nSo in the sales conversations, you've gotten your lead, they've come to you they've expressed interest, how do we actually close them?\r\n\r\nI have some questions up you know, obviously we always start with identifying their pain points. And goals, things that and I'll say my partner Chris does a lot more of our sales than I do. I'd pop in every once in a while, but he does most of them.\r\n\r\nBut I know we talked with them a lot about you know, why are they building it? What do they want the website to do immediately after launch? He'll who always ask them when you celebrate success 12 or 18 months after the website launches, how will you know it is successful? This is really good because it helps to tell you what like literal KPIs or metrics they're going to measure success on and we'll ask them that. Okay. Well, it's not just It looks nice. Like how will you know 18 months from now what are you trying to get more leads? Are you doing those sorts of things? What's working on their current website? What's not working on their current website? How important is website performance and code quality to achieving their goals? So this is this is a really good one because if somebody says that they really care about having really quality code, where they really want it to be really fast. You can use that to be like, we should not have any fade up animations on the page. They're not great for accessibility. They also slow your website down. Can we cut out JavaScript maybe we don't need carousel to slide back and forth. Right. So you can once you understand these goals, then you can start connecting accessibility to the goals.\r\n\r\nAlso, we always ask questions to establish legal needs of everyone. Does your organization receive federal funding or federal grants? Is the business located in or does it have customers in high lawsuit areas? We'll ask them California, New York, Florida, and we'll just be like any other states right beyond where you are? Is the business in Ontario. That's the same thing now that there's the Manitoba act. If you're in Canada, you might want to ask that about Manitoba as well.\r\n\r\nIf yes, how many employees does it have because there's an employee's threshold on the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act that impacts things is the business located in Europe or will the European Accessibility Act apply in the future? So for that, we'd want to ask about the revenue the more than 2 million euros per year for more than 10 employees trying to figure that out? Has the organization received an accessibility complaint? So we will always ask that upfront, because that really helps us with being able to know how urgent it is and being able to close the deal.\r\n\r\nSo then, you get to the proposal stage. Number one, always make sure you're talking to the decision maker. This happens to us a lot where we have, you know, a developer or like a Web Services team or a marketing manager, but the marketing manager doesn't actually write the check.\r\n\r\nYou got to you need to have some sort of FaceTime like get past that gatekeeper and get to the person who makes the decision. So isn't as much of a problem when if you're building more like small business websites, and then that was those are a lot nicer because then you're dealing with the owner typically, and the owner makes all the choices. So it's a little easier but as you're going up market, you definitely want to work really hard to figure out who is the decision maker, and how can you get on a call with them.\r\n\r\nThen all those goals we talked about their goals, their pain points, map them to accessibility, they won't always come to you being like, I need an accessible website. They might really need better SEO, or we launched one for someone that they make all their money off affiliate and ads. And they were like, we just need people to we need people to stay on our site longer to go to more pages and to click on things that pay us money.\r\n\r\nRight? So so it's like, okay, we can map accessibility to that. That's user experience. That's user journeys, right, like all that. So that kind of stuff is is helpful at figuring out like what is the goal and how can you connect it to accessibility and then you can be like, This is why you should pay extra for this accessibility service. Because this is how it's going to meet roll. And then always the higher market you get, do not email them the proposal. Get on a call on Zoom, give a presentation. Do not send them like with some like little like ranges but if they want a real price, don't give it to them until they are on a call with you. And then when I was talking about creating content, so this one I'll give a little throat and I think he has some content on to Troy Dean he calls it the anti follow up. So after you present a proposal to someone, instead of sending the emails that are like, Hey, did you make a decision? Hey, are you ready to close? Hey, can we get started? That are kind of like naggy and a little more desperate sounding to a degree. The thing that we've been doing, which has worked really well is that we do the anti follow up. So they'll get follow ups from my partner, Chris, but he doesn't ask them about the proposal at all. He operates like, we're already working for them and we're already thinking about them and he'll be like, Hey, I saw this news article that's really relevant to you or your specific goal or whatever it might be on your website and I wanted to send it to you because I needed to make sure that you saw like find some resources and some of these are can he sends them to everyone but some of them are unique for that specific person that you can send them as follow ups and then it keeps you in front of them without just being like, Hey, are you ready to sign?\r\n\r\nSo contracts.\r\n\r\nWhat I have here is sections from our contracts that are specifically relevant to accessibility. They were written by an attorney, but you should still have them vetted by your own attorney.\r\n\r\nIn our terms of service, which these are fully public on are the footer of our website. So if you want to read that full document, you can just go click that link and read it. There's two definitions that were included in the definition sections. One is laws and the other one is WIC ag and it's just saying that it means Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, laws shall mean all applicable local, federal fate, local, state, federal and international laws and regulations related to accessibility. So they're defining those things because they're referenced somewhere else.\r\n\r\nThen we have a whole section in our terms of service with a heading compliance with laws. And there are two sections within that. So the first one is that we are not a law office.\r\n\r\nOur company's employees are not attorneys. We do not practice law, and our clients should not use us. As their sole source of information related to compliance with laws and should always have their own attorney.\r\n\r\nAnd then the second section is compliance standards. And it says that everyone recognizes that the laws governing web accessibility are numerous and the regulatory environment is changing rapidly. We further agree that the accessibility of any site or deliverable will be measured against WIC AG. And basically, that we cannot guarantee that conforming with WCAG equates with compliance with ADA section 508 or any other applicable laws, any of those sorts of things.\r\n\r\nSo these are some of the things in our terms of service. Then everyone gets a proposal and then when they're ready to sign they get a statement of work. That's like our big scope document. And in the accessibility section in our scope document. This is where we are committing to what we are going to make accessible when we're building a new website. So what we specifically say again, we met we mentioned that it's measured against the weekend. And then and then it has this wording provided that they were first developed, coded or assembled by company that's us the following parts of the deliverable will conform to WCAG 2.2 Double A you need to change that for whatever level you agreed to with the client, header, footer and sidebars web forms, web pages that we assembled manually, and front end elements controlled solely by the template and not content areas.\r\n\r\nAnd then so that is that is what we are guaranteeing will be accessible remember this whole not 100% accessible website. These are the things we guarantee accessibility on it. Then it says we can also manually Review and Correct additional posts or pages that we didn't develop code or assemble and then we will list out the ones that they've asked us to add in the scope and they will literally be written they're like what they are.\r\n\r\nSo I have two examples here. If you want to exclude accessibility or if you are limiting accessibility so if you're not currently including accessibility in your contracts and you have concerns, I think it would be good to one check with an attorney and potentially with your business insurance and your errors, omissions and just make sure we're doing but a lot of times having an exclusion clause that makes it really clear in your contract that the contract does not include accessibility services. Don't always you don't always need this. Because usually the Statement of Work The only things that are included is what's listed in it but I I've heard from other agencies that they include statements that specifically say yeah, we don't do this and if you or or not that we don't do this, it this particular contract doesn't include it and if you want it then a specific than an additional agreement will be added right with a separate statement of work. And cost and all that kind of stuff. So that's what this example is limiting the accessibility is helpful if you're doing more of the, you know, we if you're not doing a lot of custom development, and you're doing template builds and you're kind of trying to observe best practices, but you're not promising full accessibility compliance, even of the all of the areas. So this is where you might put something where you're saying, you know, we use automated testing tools to identify and address potential accessibility issues during the development process and we'll use a good faith effort. However, we all agree that I'm not an accessibility expert, right? If you're saying this, and our subcontractors are not accessibility experts, and the client understands and agrees that the company cannot guarantee full weekend compliance or compliance with any laws, right? So it's saying you know, we're gonna do our best, but we're not guaranteeing anything. So you might want to check with an attorney and see if you need to have something like that in your contract as you're starting to do it.\r\n\r\nSo that's all the business side of things, and I'm happy to answer any questions. Very good lot of great insight there and several questions in queue. Let me just invite everybody to open up that q&a If you don't have it open already, and drop in your question or upload the question of others. Robert, you have dropped in a question in the last hour that was pretty extensive about business. If there's anything in particular I think she's embers covered all the items that you mentioned. If there's anything in particular that you have left over, just drop it in the chat and we'll get that over. Next up here is Tanya, what liability do you open yourself up to do you think if you offer accessibility to clients, since people are getting well, there's a lot more litigation these days.\r\n\r\nUm, I don't know if I can totally know the answer to like, what liability, you know, like or how much risk is if you start offering it, but I don't feel like it's going to be any different than the moment you start, you know, talking to your clients about do you have a privacy policy? Right. I think as long as you're really clear in your terms of service, like make it really clear and I also did this all the time in in meetings with clients, I'll be like, so this is what I think I'm not giving you legal advice.\r\n\r\nRight. So if you have that I think that's really helpful. i If you don't have business insurance, you should have business insurance. You should have errors and omissions insurance, which basically means if you make a mistake, it will be covered. We switched to three by Berkshire Hathaway because they they were one of the few that told us that they would include accessibility, like if our clients got sued. And then we got pulled in.\r\n\r\nThe other thing you have to think about what the lawsuits do is it's not necessarily that you're getting sued, it's there could be loss of work time. Like if your client gets sued and then you have to go testify or give depositions or something like that.\r\n\r\nSo like that's where the insurance could be helpful because it would pay for that time.\r\n\r\nI don't know. I just feel like in general, I don't. I have never found anything where it seems like talking about the laws whether it's accessibility or privacy or you know, Cookie notices has made me feel like I'm putting myself or my business at risk. I feel like I always get positive feedback from clients. Even in the early days before we were even like digital where they were like, they really appreciated that I was bringing these things to their attention, because a lot of times they don't know and they trust us to be the experts and to provide them with recommendations and advice and I sort of feel like you actually are more likely to put yourself at risk if you know that they need something and it can be documented that you knew it and you never told them because then you're not living up to your duty to that client as their you know their guide Yeah, this is something we've kind of, we've dealt with in the in my monster contracts.\r\n\r\nThe same thing as your contracts. Yeah. So I mean, the default position of monster contracts is we don't promise anything about anything and that is the safest place you can be and that goes for privacy, accessibility, all of those things that is bad stating in your account. And again, I'm not a lawyer, either. I've talked to lawyers, this was the advice you should talk to your lawyer. But if you don't if you're explicitly not promising anything, then you're good. If you that the place to promise, or delineate what accessibility services you provide, at least in my model is in the scope of work where you're itemizing the just like you gave and same for privacy or any other laws. It's always the client's responsibility to inform us if the website has to be compliant. Ultimately, now we may say, Hey, you might want to look at this but it's up to the client that goes for things like even down to what tax What should I charge on my WooCommerce site, right? I'm not the tax guy. I'm like, I should talk to your accountant. Right? It's so it's the it's up to the client to inform us we might give some educated pointers, but it's gotta be on them. I mean, biggest thing too, if you start doing this, like let's say you guarantee that the header and the footer are going to be accessible. You just have to be willing to work on it until it is. Right like we've we've had this happen where we miss something and a website got launched, and we didn't notice and they came back like two months later. And it was we added a 30 day support periods. It was after their support period, and they're like, Hey, we just noticed this and we're like, oh gosh, we totally missed that. So we fixed it for free and we didn't charge them anymore. And then they were like happy you did that. And and we're like okay, we're totally fine, right? Like I think that's the thing if you're if you're just being honest, and and then you're willing to back what you promise people and make it happen, then I think your your clients are gonna be happy with you. Yeah, I agree. Okay, both Karen and Doug have the similar question here about accessibility policies, accessibility statements.\r\n\r\nKaren is asking, is there a checklist? Doug wants to know if there's a good place to start now yesterday you mentioned that something like that is included even in the free version of accessibility checker, you want to talk about that again? Yeah, so if you activate the free version of accessibility checker, it will create a draft page in your WordPress website that you can then go and edit. There isn't a real checklist for this and accessibility statements aren't. They're not legal documents.\r\n\r\nSo there's not you know, like a contract usually is expected to have certain formats and things like that. accessibility statements aren't the best practice is that your accessibility statement needs to have ways for people to contact you if they need accessibility support or contact the company.\r\n\r\nBut I've seen some where they list out everything they've done, we do that we've listed out everything we've added.\r\n\r\nThere is also a general recommendation. I'll say this if you know something isn't accessible and putting that in the accessibility statement is really beneficial. Or, for example, on the the University website that we were working on. They use a third party platform for registration for courses that had accessibility problems and the the Office of Civil Rights told them that they needed to literally stayed that above the link to go to the platform that was like this platform was not accessible because it was getting fixed. But like in the meantime, it's like because they're like don't waste people's time. So I I published a video of my talk at a post from my talk last week at decode and I linked over to it on YouTube and I noticed that it did not captions. I messaged him to ask them if they could add captions. But when I link to it in the blog post, I put video on YouTube frenzies on captioned and that's something I've seen too, a lot of where it'll be like PDF on tagged because then it saves time people don't have to download it, try to use the string meter and find out that it's not going to work.\r\n\r\nIt doesn't mean that you shouldn't eventually provide the right version but but if you tell people in advance that can be really helpful. So putting in your accessibility statement or putting that you know, wherever you're linking to the thing that can be helpful. Yeah, that's really good.\r\n\r\nTanya, what should we say to clients who request the installation of overlays like excessive B and all the others that would negate that would negate our liability. In other words, I'm suing you because you told me not to add the overlay. If you ever run into that, yeah, um, I, I have three things that I send to clients regularly when they asked for an overlay one is overlay fact sheet.com. That is a really good resource. The second one is I saved a New York Times article from like, two years ago, maybe a year and a half ago about overlays and and problems that blind people report with them.\r\n\r\nSome clients really respond well to like it was in the news in a major publication, right? So it's like you have to read your client. And the third thing is I actually have a PDF copy which if somebody reaches out to me, I can send it to you of the i Bob's V Murphy lawsuit, which was a I Bob's is an E commerce glasses store and they had an overlay they were using excessively and they got sued. And it's the full complaint that lists every problem, including problems caused by excessive fee. And there's a very detailed report like 30 page report as an addendum to that legal complaint from Carl groves that like shows research he put into all these and why they don't work. And so for clients that are really like, some are like, kinda scientific, and they like need proof, like it's like, well, here's a lawsuit where someone got sued from having one and it lists all the problems and I don't know if the videos all work it used to link to like private YouTube videos where it literally showed the overlay breaking things so like I've had good results with just doing those.\r\n\r\nAnd, you know, it's an interesting like, I noticed when whitehouse.gov launched it had text resign. Well, we looked at that right. And then we went there yesterday, and he's gone.\r\n\r\nAnd, and I'm like, Well, that was really interesting. That probably means they were tracking it and not enough people used it. And they were like, Let's remove this feature. Right? So I think like, there's stuff like that, that you can share. You know, just in my, in my experience, people don't use them. So interesting. If if you would email me that PDF, I will post it in our academy slack group for folks. If that's if that's Yeah, yeah, I can grab it and email it to you after. And folks if you are not a member of the Academy slack group, the link to join is there in the chat.\r\n\r\nIs the New York Times article you mentioned this one for blind internet users. The fix can be worse than Oh yeah, I can send that also.\r\n\r\nInteresting. I just found it. I'll drop the link. Oh, okay. Good. Yeah. All right. Yeah, let's see. I think you have recommendations or plugins on adding meta tags to a ton or I think she means alt tags to a ton of photos.\r\n\r\nNo, unfortunately the only reason why I say that is so ignore set as the featured image the featured image pulls the alt text out of the media library. So a really easy way to do this is we use the admin columns plugin and I can't remember if it's only in free if it's in free or if it's only in pro but you can set up columns on the media library with admin columns. And so you could make the alt there and then you could have someone go through and do that that will fix all future uses of the image and it will fix it if it was set as the featured image. But in WordPress anytime that an image is already embedded into a post or a page, if you edit the alt text in the media library, it doesn't go out and update that. So you still have to go through the post and page and correct it. Wherever it is embedded in us. We are actually working on a fix for that that we're going to include with the accessibility checker so that you could optionally like check a box and be like, go find this and replace it everywhere. It's not anytime soon. Because there's a lot of testing and stuff. But yeah, I would imagine Yeah, that a potential for harm. They're done exactly right. Yeah, because you don't want to overwrite if there's existing all texts because all texts should also be contextual. And yeah, challenge. That's cool, though.\r\n\r\nOkay, Jean says I work. We'll be back in just a minute. So there are tools out there. There's one that's like alt text that AI or something and you plug it in and it reads so what do you think about AI generated alt text if it doesn't exist? So I have a whole podcast episode about this on our craft podcast.\r\n\r\nI wonder if you could find the link real quick where we talked about so I tested it was right after\r\n\r\nevery alt came out. I tested every alt I've since also tested all types.ai I don't think that they do a good enough job.\r\n\r\nI am probably I think from all of them. I think all textile AI is getting the closest because the thing that it does that's different from a lot of the other alt text generation plugins is it doesn't just look at the image. It also looks at the surrounding content, which is really helpful. But the thing is, is a lot of times they they just miss context or they give information that's totally wrong. Like, you know, when I tested to every all on my website, it was a picture. We used to live on antigay, nine pictures of my daughter on the beach and it's all like a kid on vacation. I was like well, no, this is literally incorrect. was just a Monday evening. We're not on vacation. We live here. Like you know that kind of stuff. So I I am hopeful that they will work because I think they're very needed. I don't think that you can use them without having a human check their work right now. Yeah. Interesting. Tanya wants to know, is there a standard length for all texts? While we're on that subject?\r\n\r\nNo.\r\n\r\nIt should be the right length to adequately describe the image and the purpose of the image on the page.\r\n\r\nWe will flag so wave flags if your alt text is longer than 100 characters. We up to ours after getting a ton of feedback, including from NASA and ours by default flags. It's about the length of a tweet. So it's like 250 so it's double what length wave will flag.\r\n\r\nIf you're writing a book in there, it's probably better to make it like a caption or something visible because it's probably helpful for everyone. Right? Like if it's a graph, sometimes they're like, I need giant alt text and I'm like, no, just put a table below. Like, like you can literally put, you know, graph of this data in table below any alteration. Yeah, and don't let your keyword or your SEO people keyword stuff your alt text. Yes. Yeah, it is not for SEO it is for blind people to understand what the man man reading a book in front of bakery in Birmingham, Alabama, right. It's like every photo is Birmingham, Alabama. Yeah, exactly. rank for Google.\r\n\r\nPhotographers are the worst at that, to be honest. Oh, wow. Yeah, I can imagine.\r\n\r\nTigers. Oh, yes. Right.\r\n\r\nAnd we're a bit over time. We have a couple more questions left. Are you okay for a couple more? Yeah, I have a couple more minutes. Okay. Jeans question. I work with a graphic designer that requires parentheses loves uppercase for most heading levels. Any advice on how to convey to her the negative impact of using these you just literally next time you get a design from her you provide a comment. That's like we are no longer doing I mean Diller in advance.\r\n\r\nfor accessibility reasons we're not using all uppercase because it it can be really hard for people to read there is research on this that can be found. I don't have any off the top of my head but basically the problem with all caps is that every letter fits in the same height. And from a readability especially for people who have dyslexia where they might like reverse letters like having the up and down where different things are different heights is really helpful. Trying to fix everything so I mean I would share some information about that with them and but then I would just literally start I mean that that was a thing our designer is fabulous but he like it took us a little while and I would go through and and multiple different projects in a row. I would just tag no caps, no caps no gaps, no gaps, right. Underline this link. Right. And but but eventually they learn, but I would just like say, Hey, we're drawing a line in the sand. This is the thing we're not doing any more starting now. Yeah, that's great. Okay, one final question from Tanya, why don't screen readers use the standard target equals blank to tell users that the link opens in a new window? This is a question that everyone wonders about all the time. I think it is a problem in screen you're right like they they. So the thing with screen readers is they don't announce every attribute on HTML elements. They look for ARIA attributes. But there's a lot of other attributes and there are some you know like the look for required on form in inputs or disabled on buttons, things like that, but they don't by default, announce everything. I think it would be great if screeners just did that.\r\n\r\nI will say though, the other thing about the link if you're warning users so like our new window warnings plug in it also puts a visual icon that is helpful for sighted people to Yes. So if you only had the screen reader warning, you'd still maybe have a problem for people who aren't using screen readers, but maybe have a different situation where they need to be warned that it's going to be opened in a new tab or window so you would still want to have the icon anyway. Yeah, I just added a link to the accessibility New Window warnings plug in in the chat, folks, if you're not using that it's a really handy tool to give those tooltips and icons and let folks know that you're heading to someplace else.\r\n\r\nGood. Amber, this has been awesome. Thanks a lot, have a lot of things in the chat there and that really appreciate your expertise over the last couple of days. Any final thoughts as we're wrapping up now? Well, I guess I'll circle back a little bit to what I said earlier, which is that some accessibility is better than no accessibility.\r\n\r\nI know it can be totally overwhelming. I hardly did a dent in testing. And you know if any of you followed up and went and looked at WIC hag yesterday you might have been like, what the heck, this is scary. Because I know that's how I felt when I first looked at it. Um, but I you know, small things and you can make small changes and you could so like we just talked about the headings, you could say, Hey, we're we're gonna make sure this month like everything we do moving forward. We don't ever use all caps. And we are going to always make sure that we're not saying Click here for links. And that's the change we're going to implement first, and then we're going to choose another change and then you just build upon it over time. Love it. Love it. Well, thanks again. So much. Thank you all for being with us as well. It's been a great couple of days of information. The replay will be up here in about an hour. And that'll do it for us today. 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Help Docs Software Kadence WordPress Accessibility Crash Course

WordPress Accessibility Crash Course

From the U.S. increasing requirements for website accessibility under the Americans with Disabilities Act to the European Accessibility Act beginning enforcement in June 2025, countries around the world are increasingly making website accessibility not just a best practice but a must-do. Are the websites you build accessible for people with disabilities?

Join this 4-hour website accessibility crash course to learn which laws around the world might apply to your projects and how to ensure the websites you build are accessible, from design to development, testing, and ensuring ongoing compliance post-launch. There will be a special focus on the business of accessibility – how to fit it into your processes, sell clients on the investment, and grow recurring revenue with accessibility offerings.

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