Transcript

Chris Hinds:

Hello everybody and welcome. We’re going to give everybody just a couple of minutes to file in, here, and then we’ll be going ahead and getting started. Look at that, we’re already up to 50, almost. There’s 50, 51. For the several dozen people that just joined, we’re going to be waiting just a couple minutes to let more people come in, and then we’ll be getting started. Thank you for your patience.

Amber Hinds:

Hey, I’m going to unmute just because we don’t have a chat. Ryan says she’s looking for the link. Are you able to resend it to her?

Chris Hinds:

All right. We just topped 70 people, here. For the 11 or 12 or so people who are just coming in, we’re waiting just a couple of minutes for our final panelists to join as well as to give our attendees the opportunity to file in, here. So we’ll be starting in just a minute or two.

Amber Hinds:

Oh.

Chris Hinds:

All right. Thank you very much, everybody, for being here. Welcome. My name is Chris Hinds. I am the COO of Equalized Digital. We offer WordPress accessibility consulting, development, and we are the makers of Accessibility Checker, which is a WordPress plugin that puts accessibility reports directly in your backend dashboard.

We are incredibly excited to partner with WordPress VIP on this webinar. WordPress VIP is the foremost enterprise grade host for WordPress websites. Their agile content platform provides unmatched scalability, reliability, and security for their customers. And today we’ll be talking about accessibility and how it intersects with business. We’ll be starting off by having our four amazing panelists, here, introduce themselves, and from there I’ll be asking some prepared questions of each panelist. And we will reserve some time at the end for audience questions. So if you have any questions, you should see or be able to find a button down in the bottom center of your Zoom application called Q&A. If you open the Q&A module, you’ll be able to put in questions. I’ll see those and we’ll get to them at the end. So what I’d like to do is go ahead and have Gary introduce himself first.

Gary Jones:

Hi, there. Thanks so much, Chris. My name’s Gary Jones. I’m a software engineer currently working at WordPress VIP as a customer success engineering lead. I’ve been writing code since about 1999. I ran my own WordPress business for 10 years before joining VIP. I’m based here in the UK. We’re currently all melting in the UK, as we’ve just hit our hottest ever temperature. It’s around 104 Fahrenheit, so a bit warm here.

Unlike some of the others here today. I haven’t positioned myself as a accessibility specialist or an accessibility expert, but it is something that I’m passionate about, and I advocate to my WordPress RP colleagues, and in the wider community about putting accessibility considerations into everything we do. I prefer to frame it as the creative consultants or creative citizens of the web. Making accessible interfaces is just the right thing to do to be inclusive. I was part of a panel that talked about web accessibility at WordCamp London a few years ago. And then I can also sign a little British sign language as well, which I learned just in case I happened to come across some British sign language users anywhere as well. So that’s me.

Chris Hinds:

Amazing. Ryan, can you introduce yourself next?

Ryan Kenny:

Yes. Hi, I’m Ryan Kenny, owner and founder of the Kenny Firm, a US-based law firm. I have been within the tech industry and heavily involved in the WordPress community for about five years now, been an attorney for 12 going on 13, and certainly within advising businesses to reduce their legal liability and to be more compliant, accessibility is something that often comes up. And I’ve had to get very adept at knowing what best practices, not just the answer to the legal question, but how can you better protect yourself and limit your liability? So that is why I am here today.

Chris Hinds:

Fantastic, and it’s great to have you. Thank you, Ryan. Alex, would you mind introducing yourself?

Alex Stein:

My name is Alex Stein. I got my start a few years ago in WordPress, slowly worked my way up, taught myself some code, got interested in accessibility development about five years ago after I lost my remaining vision, and now I am a cloud platform engineer at Waystar. Unfortunately, it is a very much non-WordPress role for me now, but in my free time I still get back to accessibility when I have the opportunity.

Chris Hinds:

Thank you so much, Alex. It’s great to have you here. And Amber?

Amber Hinds:

Yep, I’m the CEO of Equalize Digital, which I won’t introduce, because Chris already introduced it, but I also run the WordPress Accessibility Meetup, and I’m one of the two lead organizers for WordPress Accessibility Day, which will be a 24 hour conference in the fall. And I’m just a general accessibility advocate. And we’ve been focusing on accessibility since 2016.

Chris Hinds:

Great. And we’re actually going to go right into our prepared questions, here. So Amber, I’ve got one for you first. For people who are not familiar with accessibility as it relates to the web, can you give us just a brief overview of what accessibility is and who’s impacted by accessibility features on websites?

Amber Hinds:

Sure. The short answer is that accessibility is about ensuring that all of your web content, which could be your website, it could be the PDFs that you add, or videos that you put on, all of your web content can be accessed by everyone no matter how they access it. So some common examples might be someone who is blind might use a screen reader that reads out the content to them. Someone who is deaf might rely on captions in order to access video content. People with mobility challenges might not be able to use a mouse. And this is a great challenge. If you’ve never done this, turn your mouse off, stick it in a drawer and try and use your website, just using your keyboard only, and see if that’s something that you’re able to do.

But it can have a broader reach, too, beyond that. So even on mobile devices, there are things where someone who might typically not consider themself to have a disability can face challenges. If websites are not coded properly, or they may have maybe low color contrast, and you’re outside in the sun, and you’re looking at it on your phone, it could be really hard to engage with that website. So accessibility is really about ensuring that all people, but especially people with disabilities, have equal access to the content that’s on the web.

Chris Hinds:

Next question will be for Ryan. Ryan, what laws are there in the United States related to website accessibility? And are businesses legally required to make their websites accessible? You are muted, Ryan. Our WordPress VIP host behind the curtain, are you able to click the three dots on Ryan’s profile and unmute her from your end?

Amber Hinds:

Is this better? Can you hear me now?

Chris Hinds:

Yep. Yeah. I can hear you now.

Amber Hinds:

Sorry. I don’t know what’s going on.

Chris Hinds:

All right, Ryan, go ahead and try to mute again. We’ll come back to you. I’ll reserve this question. Alex, let’s bounce over to you. Are there certain things that most impact a website’s accessibility from your perspective? Or, for an organization that’s just getting started making their website accessible, are there certain areas that you believe they should focus on first?

Alex Stein:

Text is good, lots of dynamic content, images, graphics, icons sometimes are not so good. Text is simple. Images add complexity. And with complexity comes introduced barriers, not even intentional barriers, but for example, it is much better to simply add the text of a flyer to your website versus trying to describe the entire flyer with an image in alternative text. It’s an opinion of mine, but it removes complexity. And any way you can remove complexity for provides better results in the end. I think this is what a lot of websites fall into.

And then the other thing is fancy icons. Fancy icons are not read to screen readers. So the famous three bars that signify most mobile menus are not read. You have to add text for those. It could be invisible text, but my way of thinking is if you can get away with text only and still make your website look good, do that. Icons, they have their place, but don’t build your entire website out of them.

Chris Hinds:

I’d love to have that on a t-shirt. By the way-

Amber Hinds:

If it’s okay.

Chris Hinds:

I didn’t mention this before, but if other panelists want to chime in on questions as I ask them after the initial panelist that I addressed has provided their answer, you are welcome to do so. So I’ll try to leave a natural pause in between questions if anyone wants to chime in.

Amber Hinds:

Yeah, I think one of the things, going with what Alex said about simplicity, and this is something I noticed comes up a lot with enterprise clients is they frequently want to put PDFs on their website. And PDFs can be really, really challenging for a variety of reasons. And so we’re frequently saying, “Can you remove this as a PDF and just make it an HTML page, like an actual page on the website?” That can make a big difference.

I think another thing we see is that using the correct headings and the correct order can be very helpful because headings are a way that people can, especially someone who’s not sighted, they probably don’t want to listen to every word on the website. I’m sighted and I don’t read every word on a website. I skim and I try to get to the part that I want. And headings are a way that makes it easier for someone who’s using a screen reader to jump around. So I think organizing your content thoughtfully and not picking a heading because of the color it is, is helpful. It should be the correct number based on outline format. And empty links and empty buttons or links that are ambiguous that just say, “Learn more.” Or, “Read more.” But don’t actually tell anyone where they’re going without any surrounding context is something else I think could be focused on to help improve accessibility. Gary’s nodding.

Gary Jones:

Yeah, the one-

Amber Hinds:

You have thoughts about this?

Gary Jones:

Yeah, no, I agree with all of those. Another one would be form fields as well. So if you’ve got a contact form, or a lead generation form of some sort on the website, and it doesn’t correctly associate the labels with the form fields, then someone who’s using a screen reader may not understand, “Okay, I can see this three form fields, but I don’t know if it’s name, address, and a topic, or a message, or whether it’s in a different order, or whether it means something else completely different.” Some of the ones that Amber mentioned and the form fields, in terms of web development and engineering, they are relatively easy fixes. They’re some that can be easily detected with automated tests. There’s a lot of accessibility items that can’t be detected with automated tests, but those ones are fairly easy to see. Are you headings in the right order? Are you skipping any? Does this form field have a named label associated with it? So some of these are the ones that are easy wins or easier wins, shall we say, for organizations to look at first.

Chris Hinds:

All great points. All great points. Ryan, do you want to take another shot at the accessibility loss question? All right. Well, Ryan, maybe try disconnecting and reconnecting, or maybe a reboot of some sort maybe that will help.

Ryan Kenny:

Perfect.

Chris Hinds:

We’ll continue to reserve your questions and hopefully we can get you in here. Maybe we’ll have a whole legal section right at the end. All right, we will move on to Gary. I’d be curious to know where does the accessibility of a web hosting panel come into play? I know that VIP team’s been working on making VIP’s dashboard more accessible. And can you share a little bit with us about that effort?

Gary Jones:

Yeah, so a web host will often provide tooling to manage a hosting account and website associated with that account. This could be something commercial that already exists as a product out there. There’s cPanel, there’s Plesk, there’s there’s many others as well. But it could also be a custom interface as well. So this interface would be used by a wide variety of customers who in turn may have a wide variety of accessibility needs. So a host will want to ensure that the tooling they’re providing is as accessible as possible.

And this is getting to the legal area, but under many countries’ laws, a website host, just like other service providers, they have a legal responsibility to provide access to the services in a way that doesn’t discriminate against people with disabilities. Now, it doesn’t have to be the same experience, the same exact experience for everybody. So Alex was saying earlier about having the image of a flyer versus having the text on the page, so alternative forms of the content, for example, a correctly marked up table, tabular data, instead of a visual bar chart of the request that a website might be getting would be sufficient to meet the accessibility requirements.

For those hosting companies, though, making the service more accessible for them often means it becomes simpler and easier for everybody to use. That’s one of the great things about tackling accessibility. For example, providing that tabular data means it’s easier for anybody to copy that data and share it with their manager or colleague, or maybe they make their own visualization in spreadsheets locally with perhaps they consolidate it with requests from other websites that they have with that same host.

A chart may simply not have the correct granularity to determine specific numbers. So having that data available in the numerical form provides value to everybody, not just those who can’t see the chart. Empowering users with accessible data and the tooling features can reduce the number of tickets or live chats which are opened. And that has a tangible benefit for the web host. And likewise, for any front-end implementation that customers might have for their own websites. For web hosts, it can help reduce the number of human support engagements that they need to deliver. From a web host perspective. That would seem like a sensible driving force for why to take up this, fix these accessibility fixes, and why to make these changes, and not just because there’s potential legal threats or repercussions from that. From a customer’s perspective, especially those who do have accessibility needs, they get more control to manage their websites without having to open a ticket or a live chat, wait for the live chat responses. So everybody wins for that.

For VIP, we’ve got three main properties that we control, that we engage customers on. We’ve got our wpvip.com, our marketing site. We have our docs.wpvip.com documentation site, and then we also have a separate dashboard site as well. Now, our VIP dashboard is a tool that account holders can use to manage aspects of their applications such as initializing data syncs between production and non-production environments, purging page caches, setting up domain mapping, and just launching new sites all by themselves without interference or support from VIP.

Now, my role at VIP isn’t directly involved in managing those properties, but we do have a culture where anyone can contribute to areas outside of their team if they think they can provide value. So I’ve been advocating for accessibility best practices at every opportunity for those. Until recently, honestly, it’s been hard to get traction. The work would be designed, it would be developed, and it’d be ready to deploy before there was be a call for testing, at which point I would jump in with a long list of accessibility issues and explain why I didn’t think it was ready for release, because I knew there was certain groups of users who wouldn’t be able to access the feature or the tooling.

I’ve since been told by colleagues that they did find this annoying and draining, but they have since come to realize that I was right and there is value in having accessibility in mind earlier on at the design and early development stage, effectively shifting left the efforts for this, that reduces the expense of adding in fixes and support later. Now, recently VIP acquired some US federal and some state level customers, and as such, we need to make sure that our customer facing properties are section 508 compliant, which I’m sure Ryan will come and explain exactly what we mean by that shortly.

For VIP, this is a work in progress. We had a detailed accessibility audit carried out by one of our featured agency partners early this year for our VIP dashboard. We’re now in the process of rolling out fixes to that dashboard to improve accessibilities. Now, some of those issues were fundamental, so the layouts, the breadcrumbs, the heading structures that we talked about earlier. But also fixing items at the React component level as well, so that future features that use these components will also be accessible from the beginning.

Now, the audit uses the web content authoring guidelines, web WCAG 2.1, AA compliance conformance as the base, and since section 508 uses the 2.0 rather than 2.1, it means that once we have completed that work and we’re compliant with WCAG 2.1, we’ll be exceeding the requirements for section 508, because WCAG 2.1 adds on 17 success criteria on top of the 2.0 version.

We’ve also got, work is nearly complete on the audit for our marketing site, wpVIP.com as well, and we’re scheduling time to fix the identified issues that arise from that. As well as improving the code, we’ve also made accessibility training available to the various product teams so that they can understand why accessibility is beneficial and how that then can be manifested in the code. What we don’t want to do is just make this a checkbox activity to just do it because we want to avoid legal repercussions. We actually want to open the audience, open the tooling, and make it as simple and available to use as possible. It’s taken a while to get traction internally, but I am seeing more and more parts of WordPress VIP really get on board with accessibility, be that in product, in sales, or simply the advice and guidance that we provide to customers in our customer success team.

Chris Hinds:

Amazing. And Gary, you mentioned legal, so I want to use that as a segue. I think I saw Ryan disconnect and reconnect, so let’s give this one more shot. And Ryan-

Ryan Kenny:

Yes.

Chris Hinds:

… what-

Ryan Kenny:

I’m here.

Chris Hinds:

Hey. Okay, great. So just to remind our audience, because it’s been a few minutes, it was a two part question. One was about laws in the United States related to web accessibility and then followup, are businesses legally required to make their websites accessible?

Ryan Kenny:

Yeah. Within the US there’s federal, and then local, and state laws. At a federal level, we’re talking a lot about the ADA, specifically Title III of the ADA, which is the Americans with Disabilities Act, which was promulgated back in the 1990s. So the internet wasn’t really around in the ’90s, but this law has evolved over time, and through the court’s interpretation of the application of this law, has been expanded to extend to websites. So it’s a quick, “No individual shall be discriminated against on the basis of disability, and the full and equal enjoyment of the goods, services, facilities, privileges, advantages, or accommodations of any place of public accommodation by any person who owns, leases, or leases to, or operates a place of public accommodation.”

How this has been expanded by the courts and the Department of Justice is that websites themselves can be places of public accommodation because we are now involved in e-commerce and buying and selling these goods and services online. The other major law, which Gary was referencing was section 508. In the US, that’s section 5 0 8 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973. And that section 508 was actually added in ’98 to require federal agencies to make their electronic and information technology accessible to people with disabilities. So federal agencies, governments, universities are all compelled and required by federal law in the US to be accessible.

Then there are, additionally, and this is really important for listeners to understand, there are also state specific laws. So California takes it a bit further with the California UNRUH Civil Rights Act. There’s an Arkansas Act of 1999. Texas has a bill. Illinois also has a bill. So above and beyond your federal guidelines, you also have these state things that you need to look at if and when something arises, and/or when you’re developing your products, goods and services. And something to point out, Gary mentioned the hosting requirements, and we talk about websites a lot. But yes, mobile apps and digital content, whether it’s on a website or even within an app, are all subject to these laws for accessibility. And just so you know, I highlighted the major two, there’s also a Telecommunications Act of Accessibility, one that requires cell phone providers to include auditory tools and things. So there are a lot more, I’m highlighting the two that I think that are going to be most useful to the listeners of today’s program.

Now, your question of, “Are you legally required to make your websites accessible?” Certainly, based on the industry, as I said, governments, universities, and certain … That is a no question. There are also 12 industries outlined in the actual ADA, American Disabilities Act, like hotels, restaurants, these grocery stores, things that are public accommodations. Those are clear, bright line. Where I’m going with this is some of this is very complex. Different jurisdictions within the US have different court opinions, different judicial opinions on whether it is or is not.

So when you ask a lawyer like me, when you’re putting something on the worldwide web, whether you should be accessible or not, the answer is, “Yes, you should, not just for limiting your legal liability, whether you’re subject to US federal law because you fit within an industry, or California state law, because you’re selling to a resident of that state. But also just for business, you want the broadest reach possible, you want the widest audience, you want to reach more people. So yes, you should be access-ful.”

And then the second part of it is, and I don’t want to go too far into this, but happy to take questions about it later, is the US, actually for everybody, the counter argument that I hear with my clients is, “Yeah, but being accessible is really expensive. It takes extra hours to code to the standard or whatever.” The US government actually has a tax credit, the Accessible Access Tax Credit, that you can get up to $5,000 a year it making your mobile app or your website more accessible, and get a credit off your taxes. So I don’t want to take over the time, but those are the main laws. And should you be accessible? Yes. And those are the reasons why. And yes, you may be eligible for a tax credit to assist you in offsetting the costs of making your products and services more available and accessible to everyone.

Chris Hinds:

Wow, that’s incredibly valuable information. Shifting over to Amber, what tools are available for identifying accessibility problems on websites? And how would an organization know if there are accessibility problems on their website that need to be fixed?

Amber Hinds:

So there are a lot of tools, many of which are free. We mentioned earlier we have our accessibility checker, which is a WordPress plugin. There’s some common browser extensions. Wave is one that a lot of people have heard of that you can install and run on any website. It gives quick reports. I don’t know that I think it’s the most thorough of the browser extensions. Ones that I like better is IBM has an equal access one, which, I really like the way that one reports because there’s different views, and one of views you can have is it actually shows you issues broken out by the web content accessibility guidelines, which is helpful if you’re trying to create a VPAT or ensure that you’re meeting your requirements under the law.

Also, DQ has a browser extension called axe, and there’s a free version and if you pay for axe pro, it has some really handy tools to help you do guided testing. Earlier, I think Gary mentioned, and it’s true for all tools, that they cannot identify every problem. There are some things that are very easy to identify with a tool that just looks at the code. And there are other things that require a human assessment. This could be, for example, color contrast of text over an image. It’s really hard. There’s a lot of different colors in an image. A testing or scanning tool isn’t going to be able to check that. Another example is, is your alternative text for your images actually accurate? A tool can tell you if it’s missing, but a tool probably cannot assess your image and the content on the page and figure out if the alternative text is contextually accurate for the image and how it is being used on that page.

So there are some great tools available that can help you or your content people that are part of your organizations find problems that are obvious. And that’s a great place to start. But then the next way is you really need to develop as part of your process and as early as you can. So even having someone who’s familiar with accessibility review designs before they get built can be really helpful because there’s a lot of problems that can come up in the design phase or even the content phase. Having somebody read content when it’s still in a doc format before somebody starts designing for the website around that content can be helpful.

And like I mentioned before, just tabbing through the website or trying to do everything. Can you add a product to the cart and complete a checkout without using a mouse? Can you change the slides on a carousel? Can you open the accordions on the FAQ section and read them without a mouse? All of those sorts of things. And then there’s screen readers as well, which maybe Alex could talk a little bit about screen readers, but that’s a whole nother, if you start getting to that step, that’s really where your gold standard of testing, I think.

Chris Hinds:

All right.

Ryan Kenny:

I just wanted to jump in there real quick and say one thing. As an attorney helping people file logos and trademarks, people are investing significant money in protecting their intellectual property. I would highly recommend you have an accessibility expert take a look at your website and your logo for that contrast prior to filing the colors for your mark, because don’t pay twice. Just pro tip.

Chris Hinds:

Yeah.

Amber Hinds:

Yeah. It’s really hard if you brand colors are not accessible and then you realize your website needs to be, and then you’re like, “Do we completely rebrand? Do we just have a logo that doesn’t match any of the colors we use on the website?” Yeah. So if you’re early enough in the branding process, definitely, pull in an accessibility person just to ask about your colors.

Gary Jones:

Another easy way to test on the website is just to zoom in. So command or control plus hit that, get up with 300, 400% magnification, or zoom in and just see what breaks. Does the layout break? Can I still access all the features for screen magnifiers? Which is where it’s zoomed into one part. If you can’t click a button over here and an alert pops up somewhere else, would you still see that? So just simple things like that, that anybody can test with a keyboard, just land on the page, hit the tab key. Is the focus obvious where the keyboard focus would be? Is there an outline around where you’re focused? Or do you just have to guess where you might be focused? So yeah, there’s some really simple ways that you don’t need extra tool and you don’t need extra extensions, that you can just test come straight away as well. That’s also useful.

Chris Hinds:

All right, Alex, can you tell us a little bit, just high level, about what a screen reader is? Maybe name a couple of the major ones and give people some advice on how they could learn to use them to test their own websites?

Alex Stein:

A screen reader is a lot simpler than people like to make it. It simply allows you to interact with an operating system, whether it’s a Windows, Mac, or Linux, and it reads back to you the text or the content on the screen. Three of the most popular are NVDA, and JAWS for Windows, and VoiceOver for Mac.

Chris Hinds:

And do you have any advice for people who are looking to learn how to use these at a base level of competency for testing purposes?

Alex Stein:

There are a few tutorials out there, none that I really used, because I’m strange and to go bore myself with the documentation, but there are lots of documentation sources out there for the three screen readers that I mentioned, all provided from official sources. So if you’re really dedicated to learning, the information’s there, you just have to find it.

Chris Hinds:

Great. And thank you so much. Do any of the other panelists have any thoughts or recommendations on that one before I move on?

Amber Hinds:

DQ, that’s a company I mentioned before. They have a lot of resources and training courses. And I think they have some on using screen readers. A good thing if you’re just getting started, if you’re on a Mac, you already have VoiceOver installed, and when you go to your accessibility settings on your Mac, there’s a space where you can enable VoiceOver. And there’s a tutorial that you can take that’s built into that, that will walk you through some of the things.

But in the beginning it might be helpful just to Google VoiceOver keyboard shortcuts or NVDA keyboard shortcuts and you can get a list of what all the different keyboard shortcuts are that would allow you to do it. And there’s a few recordings we have from WordPress Accessibility Meetup where people have talked about using screen readers and some of the settings. I know we had one where Glen Walker went through how to use the settings that he likes in NVDA, so that could be a useful resource, too.

Chris Hinds:

Okay. Shifting gears a bit, Ryan, one thing that we frequently get asked just on our end in our consulting work by clients is whether they should have an accessibility statement on their website. Do you recommend to your clients that they get accessibility statements published? And if so, what should be in those statements? And is this something that an organization should write themselves or should they have an attorney draft it?

Ryan Kenny:

Yeah, I do recommend that people have an accessibility statement. And there are varying thoughts as far as what an accessibility statement really even is. But really it’s your opportunity as a business to say, “We care about being accessible and we’re working on it.” You know, can craft the accessibility to be specific to where you are. Maybe it’s a newer website and you’re working on becoming WCAG 2.0 compliant. So you can be as specific as, “Here’s where we are and here’s where we’re going. We’re seeking to do this in a reasonable amount of time.” Or state what you have accomplished. And of course you want to include if you have alternate ways for them to contact you rather than just via web, if you have telephone assistance or something of that nature. What’s most important is that you’re using clear, natural language. This is not a legal disclaimer like your terms of use or your privacy policy. This should be a straightforward statement of your commitment to accessibility, what you’ve done, or what you intend to do, and ways that they can reach out to you for further assistance to offer that.

There are free accessibility statement generators out there. One that I like a lot is the one that’s by W3C. I’m sure that we can share that in our Q&A links with the listeners, but it’s free and it’s a great place to start when crafting it, because it really sets forth a template for you. And then sure, have an attorney look that over, or somebody in your in-house team just to make sure it’s consistent with where you are with things.

Chris Hinds:

If a member of our audience would be so kind as to put in a question of, “What is the link to the free accessibility statement generator?” I can put that link in as an answer for everyone to see. Followup question, Ryan. If a business receives a demand letter or a legal complaint regarding accessibility problems on their website, what steps should they take or how should they respond?

Ryan Kenny:

Yeah, I’m going to give you the same advice I would give myself if I was confronted with this issue. And that’s seek out an attorney that specializes in ADA accessibility defense work and has a focus in litigation. So we’re clear, Kenny Firm is not an ADA specialist or litigation firm. I would find someone, and I’m telling you the keywords to Google if you’re confronted with that, because your situation is dependent on very specific facts and circumstances, some of which we’ve covered a little bit today, which is the federal laws that may be applicable, the state laws that may be applicable, but also what are your goods and services? And each jurisdiction, what court, what judge can and might rule differently. So do not respond to that demand letter or complaint. Don’t think you’re doing yourself a failure by saying, “Oh, I’m sorry. We’re working on it.” Talk to an attorney. Make sure that you’re have somebody that specializes in this area to advise you on what the next steps are, so you’re moving forward with confidence and informed decision making capabilities.

Chris Hinds:

Great. Let’s say a business is ready to take this step and make their website accessible, starting with Amber first, and then following up with Alex. If a company is looking to hire a web developer or an agency to build their website and they want it to be accessible, what are some questions they should ask to make sure that that agency or developer can truly deliver an accessible website to them?

Amber Hinds:

I think one of the best questions to ask is, “Can you give me a list of a couple websites that you built?” And then you can go there, and you can run one of those browser extensions that I mentioned on it, and see if it flags any obvious errors. So if you’re not even sure, that’s an easy way to tell. Now, of course, sometimes they might have built it and it might have been accessible at launch, and then the client did something, if they’re not maintaining it. But that can give you some conversation to come back. I think I would also ask things like, “What is your approach to accessibility? When does accessibility come into your process?” You might possibly ask them if they or anyone on their team has accessibility certifications from the International Association of Accessibility Professionals because it might not, but it may be an indicator that they take accessibility seriously and they know what they’re doing. I think those are probably some good questions. Alex might have thoughts about what developers should say or need to know on the accessibility front.

Alex Stein:

I’ve found through working experience that most developers don’t know anything about accessibility, even if they pretend they do. So I think one of the most important things you could ask a developer is just ask them a simple implementation question. “I want the login form on my website, I’d want to put it in a dropdown. How would you do that?” And if the first thing out of their mouth is, “Well, I would make it so it works like this visually.” Then you already know they’re not thinking about accessibility. Anything that relates to icons, slide-in forms, anything like this, this is very tricky to get working, and unless they have an impressive portfolio, I’d take it with a grain of salt.

And the other question, if you were looking to hire someone, this is going through experience I learned you shouldn’t be asking, and that is when someone applies for an accessibility job and the first question you say is, “Oh, if you don’t have vision, how can you do this job?” This is a business meetup of sorts. I feel like it’s appropriate to address this. Just because you do not have vision does not mean you are not a good accessibility developer. And people have passed me up on a lot of jobs because of that. So that’s another way that you can be accessible, is to not automatically make up your mind and not hire accessibility professionals because they themselves have a disability.

Amber Hinds:

[inaudible 00:43:02]-

Chris Hinds:

That’s an amazing point.

Amber Hinds:

Yeah, I feel like the more diversity you can have on your internal team, the better it is. So having people with a variety of different disabilities, they’re going to provide a huge amount of different life experiences, and knowledge, and expertise that throughout your entire organization, not just your website, is probably going to make it a better organization. Just-

Alex Stein:

Just to mention it, I’m not going to sit here in this meeting and pretend like I know what deaf people go through, because I have absolutely no clue, but I can speak from experience on what the blind go through. So having those helpful perspectives really can influence your company for the better.

Gary Jones:

You got a shout-out on the Q&A, Alex, that says, “I’ll hire you, Alex.” So you’ve got a job there already. Another red flag from it, if you are asking questions about an agency is if they say, “Oh, we can build you this site for X, but if you want it accessible, it’ll be X plus some number.” I think from the ideal perspective, just like most sites now will come with a mobile responsive layout, it should be coming with accessibility built in. That should be ground zero. That’s starting point, the base, is to have an accessible website from the beginning. So if they’re, “Oh, that’s going to be an extra. That’s extra work, extra cost.” Then that’s a red flag from that particular agency.

Alex Stein:

It actually, in the grand scheme of things takes less work for accessibility. But you know, that’s how you can tell right there, your developer has no idea what he’s doing.

Gary Jones:

Yeah.

Chris Hinds:

Yeah. This will probably be our last prepared question because I want to leave enough time for Q&A. It goes without saying as we just established, that accessibility on the front of your website is essential, and definitely should just be a default. We consider responsive the default now, right? Accessibility should be right there with it. But what we sometimes don’t think about is that is really only half the experience a user might have. Once you log into the backend of a content management system like WordPress, there’s a whole other different dashboard there, that you have to be able to use. So Alex first, then Amber, what can we do to ensure an accessible experience on the backend? And is there anything we shouldn’t do?

Alex Stein:

I’m going to step out of the way for a moment and address this from a different angle.

Chris Hinds:

Okay.

Alex Stein:

Any way that you are making something inaccessible to users is wrong, rather it’s intentional or not. Now, the way you make that better is to, well fix the problem. Ignoring the problem is definitely not something we can do. And I also want people to remember that disabilities seem like this really far off foreign concept. And that’s exactly the way I thought before I lost my vision. Just remember, disability is never that far away. One accident, one quick event, you’ll be right there thinking, “Gosh, why didn’t I think about this before?” Because that’s where I was.

Now, in saying that, the backend is equally important, because there are web developers like me who decided to go into web development simply because we felt content development was not accessible enough. So content relies very heavily on visuals, such as different colors, different styles of texts, such as bold, italics, things of this nature. And some editors are great for communicating this information, some editors are not. So the best thing we can do is we can actually, from a development perspective, create our editor in such a way that it communicates information to users and allows them to navigate effectively.

Speaking specifically to WordPress, the WordPress classic editor is great. The WordPress Gutenberg editor is something well short of great. I can say it’s getting better and I’ve been one of the active contributors to help make it better. But there is still this thought around the project that if it works for most users, it’s fine. And that’s the wrong way of looking at it. Quite frankly, it disgusts me, because if we had even a small percentage of sites that went down due to a WordPress update, or even a popular plugin update, we would pull the revert immediately. But now we’re making the argument because we don’t think accessibility matters, “As long as it works for the most, oh, well.”

Chris Hinds:

No. Amber, what do you have to add?

Amber Hinds:

Yeah, well, certainly one thing that comes to mind for me is that, as Alex said, even if one of your employees that works on your website is typically able, they might not be at any moment. But I do think, and probably Ryan could touch on this, website accessibility isn’t just for your customers. I think we have legal requirements to accommodate our employees in their jobs. And so really, I think from a WordPress standpoint, what that means is ensuring that you want to have a diverse team. You want to allow multiple people to contribute. So the backend does matter on that front. And I think where you have to be especially careful is a lot of the plugins are probably going to introduce backend issues, like their setting pages may not be accessible, or how you add the content in that. And so that could be limiting whether or not if you were editing your WordPress website in one way, and that worked for someone, and then you install a new plugin and now they can’t edit the content, that means they can’t do their job. I think that definitely could be a problem.

And so you need to consider testing the backend of the WordPress website as well, or trying to highlight. There are some plugins, Gravity Forms is one that comes to mind that I think has done a phenomenal job. They went out and got an accessibility audit, and they’ve been working on not just the front end, but also, I think, the back end experience with their plugin. They put alerts so that if you make certain decisions in their plugin, it will literally tell you, “This is a web content accessibility violation. You can’t leave this field label blank.” Which I think is great. And so maybe if you’re trying to figure out what plugins are right for you, starting to ask plugin developers, what efforts have you put into accessibility? Because the more plugin developers hear that that’s important, the more they’re going to make that priority for their tool and in their development processes.

Chris Hinds:

Many things to you both. And I think it’s important for everyone to understand that accessibility is more of a journey than it is a destination. We should be constantly improving. We should be constantly looking for ways to go beyond good enough or effective enough for 98% of people. We should be constantly making sure that all of the solutions we build, all the solutions that we create are accessible to all. So in that spirit, and looking at numerous, I’ve got 14 questions, here, that look good and I’m going to dive right in if our panelists are ready. If I think of a particular panelist is suited to a question, I’ll call them out first. But again, anyone’s free to chime in. So the first one I want to lead with, and I’m leading with this one, because it didn’t really get brought up a whole lot in our discussion. Shante asks … And I hope I’m pronouncing that correctly, Shante, I apologize if I’m not. “Can you talk about accessibility plugins, AKA overlays? I’m hearing that they blow internal code and make the website worse.”

Alex Stein:

Overlay-

Ryan Kenny:

I’m a non developer, so I know Alex is going to have the technological answer, but as a non developing person that’s worked with accessibility, I haven’t heard anyone say good things about overlays and actually assisting with accessibility compliance. I defer to Alex.

Alex Stein:

Yeah. Overlays are so annoying that I actually installed a browser extension to make sure they remain as blocked as possible. Not only do a lot of overlays add tremendous loading time to websites, this is what I’ve noticed here, recently. They get in the way. They change things, because it’s essentially a very rough JavaScript library that attempts to interpret incorrect HTML elements and fixes them. The problem is, I would say it has a fail rate of about 99%. A really popular website that this definitely still applies to is the Lenovo website for laptops. This giant website, this giant company that his this, could be an awesome website, they put an accessibility widget on it one point, and now it is awful. Yep. What used to be a great website is now terrible. So accessibility overlays do you no good, do not waste your time. And that’s pretty much long and short of it.

Amber Hinds:

Yeah, I-

Gary Jones:

I was going to say there’s a website called overlayfactsheet.com, which tries to pull together a lot of the thoughts around and overlays. And to summarize Alex’s point, essentially say that a lot of them are bad implementations. They’re to make accessibility worse. There seems to be this thought that, “Oh, if we want to protect ourselves legally from accessibility issues, we can just throw an overlay widget on it, and we’ll be fine.” That’s definitely not the case. You’re in some ways more likely to be sued because you’ve never worse accessibility for the website than if you hadn’t tackled it. So accessibility does need a little bit of effort to do things the right way. But as we said before, some of these are easy to test, easy to get right, easy to fix. But the wrong way of an easy fix is just trying to use one of these overlays on there. So speak to the right people who know what they’re talking about, not just somebody who’s trying to either sell or push their widget for your money.

Chris Hinds:

All right, Yanik asks, “How do you ensure clients maintain the accessibility standards when updating their content? And then how frequently should you check that your website editors are following guidelines?”

Amber Hinds:

This is part of why we created Accessibility Checker, because our clients were telling us they were having problems maintaining accessibility. So what that does is it puts something similar to what you might see with some of the SEO plugins, where there’s a report on the post or page edit screen that tells them what issues they are. Beyond our tool, you need to have classes or have webinars for your employees having resources.

A lot of universities or government organizations have great examples of this on their website where they document accessibility and what best practices are for content. So you could maybe even borrow some of that for your internal use or your employees there. There are also SaaS solutions that you can purchase that do weekly scans or monthly scans and send you a report, or you can log into their dashboard and look at it. We tend to be on the side of, “We like the real time reports,” because trying to get them to go back and fix problems, it’s always more work than if they can see that there’s an issue when they’re editing the content. But that’s probably the closest as far as that. You really just have to do training and teaching them what to look for and what not to do.

Ryan Kenny:

I think-

Chris Hinds:

I-

Ryan Kenny:

… the document and the training is critically important. I also think too, just calendaring at minimum, it should be corporate policy. I don’t care what size your business is, that you do an annual review or an annual audit for accessibility. Privacy is legally required by CCPA to review and update your privacy policy a minimum of once a year. It doesn’t have to be at the same time, don’t overload your team. But yeah, because even if you have, and when you have all of that in place, the documentation, the training, somebody doesn’t put the alt text in, and that’s the thing that the tester and the litigant finds and has an issue with. So create those checks and balances. One of the checks is having that annual audit that is not just automated, but as we said, has testers with different abilities that can go in there and manually look at that and diagnose issues in real world situations.

Amber Hinds:

Also-

Chris Hinds:

We-

Amber Hinds:

We didn’t talk too much about laws outside the United States. But when you said that, it reminded me there are a lot of worldwide laws around website accessibility. And one of the strongest one I’ve seen is in Canada, in Ontario, and they require all businesses with more than 20 or 25 employees to file an annual report. And all businesses with more than 50 employees have to meet web content accessible WCAG guidelines, or you can get daily fines of very large amounts. So I think you also have to think about if your business reaches outside of the United States, which I think we might have had a question about that.

Chris Hinds:

Yeah.

Amber Hinds:

You probably would, you could be legally required under those laws even though you’re not located in that country, too.

Chris Hinds:

Right. In the three minutes we have left, I’m going to try to do this rapid fire. What I’d like to have each panelist do is in 30 seconds or less, what’s your number one piece of accessibility related advice that you would like to impart on our audience? And we will go in the same order as we did initially. So we are going to begin with Gary.

Gary Jones:

One thing we haven’t talked about is the actual content itself. It’s not just the technical aspect of the web accessibility, but about the content for the non-web accessibility. For example, if you’re creating a website for a conference, or an event, or a shop, or restaurant, then does the content explain where the nearest accessible train or subway station is? Is there a hearing loop present that somebody can make use of? Is there a place for new mothers to breastfeed? Is there a quiet room if folks are getting overwhelmed from a conference noise and crowd? So providing this information in a clear and simple plain text can really help attendees or customers feel more at ease about coming to your event or business. So something that’s often overlooked in terms of accessibility related to website.

Chris Hinds:

Thank you Gary. Ryan, you’re up next.

Ryan Kenny:

Yep. Accessibility isn’t something that you attain, it’s something that you maintain through the ongoing education, the laws change, technology changes, you have to stay on top of it. And doing the annual audit to make sure that you’re up to date, and you’re staying current is a good way to go. And just a reminder that there are tax credits available to assist you with the compliance. You’re not alone in this. There’s money available to assist you with getting the training and the audits that you need in order to maintain your accessibility compliance.

Chris Hinds:

And Ryan, should people who are curious about that reach out to you?

Ryan Kenny:

Well, to help-

Chris Hinds:

Oh.

Ryan Kenny:

… them, direct them where they need to go.

Chris Hinds:

Okay, Alex, you’re up next.

Alex Stein:

My tips are keep it simple. Test a lot. Read the Mozilla developer network W3 schools. They always have really great examples if you don’t know how to do something. And back to the point about using software as a service services for testing accessibility, make sure the service you’re using is actually accessible itself. I’m talking about Siteimprove at the moment. I actually have been provided reports of audits through Siteimprove that weren’t accessible. So that was really great. So if you’re going to do an accessibility audit, make sure that the tools you use are accessible. That is how you can at least be a bit more sure that what you’re getting is legitimate.

Chris Hinds:

Thank you so much, Alex. And Amber?

Amber Hinds:

Sorry, I was trying to answer some of the questions in the Q&A. I think for me, one of the things we haven’t talked about a lot that is really important and that we’ve been trying to do increasingly in our own practices is including users. We have hired users to do user testing sessions for us, which is very helpful on a variety of fronts beyond accessibility. Sometimes they point out things and just like, “Your language that is confusing or that could be improved, or how you could make your conversions better.” So I think don’t leave out the people with disabilities, because they’re going to provide incredible insight to what you can do better. And it is 100%, every time we’ve either in our own, we’ve paid people to test our own stuff, or whether we’ve run user testing sessions for our clients, it is always worth the investment and you always get huge benefit from actually hearing from people with disabilities.

Chris Hinds:

All right. That concludes today’s webinar. Thank you to WordPress VIP for partnering with us on this. I’ve been Chris with Equalize Digital. We have Gary Jones with WordPress VIP. We have Ryan Kenny representing her law and firm, which is Kenny Firm. And we have Alex Stein, who’s an absolutely incredible software engineer, who has also graced us with his presence today. So thank you all for being here. Thank you to our audience for listening and for all the wonderful questions. I’m sorry if we didn’t get to your question. It was just a factor of time. And I know that some of our panelists have been in there trying to frantically answer them in writing, now. So yep, I think that does it for today. And thank you all very much. Take care. Thank you.

Amber Hinds:

Thank you.

Alex Stein:

Thank you.