Boulder WordPress Meetup_ Accessibility for Web Designers
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We have Ron here today to talk to us about accessibility. So now I'm going to hand it over to him and let him introduce himself and go ahead and get going. So 

excellent. So my first question, can you hear me? Yes, I can. So I'm going to sound that if you can, everybody else can. And if anybody else can't chat Dave, and then he'll let me know tons of chats already that say loud and clear.

So you're good. Awesome. So I'm going to hide. Okay. Now also my second thing I'm going to say is I am not the zoom expert, so I might accidentally go dark throughout this process cause I clicked the wrong button. So bear with me. Okay, well, thanks to. Yeah. So my name's Ron Stauffer and I actually started my company 12 years ago this month, which makes me feel really old next this receding hairline, uh, make a little bit more sense.

And basically what I've been doing is, uh, I started out doing website design and development, mostly front end development. And about four years ago, uh, I actually had a client come to me and they said, we're having some challenges with our web accessibility. What do you know about that? And because I said, because the way I started my business 12 years ago was by saying, oh yeah, I know about what design, let me design your website and build it when I had no idea what I was doing, but I figured that I could figure it out.

I did the same thing with accessibility. So they said, ah, you know, we need to build a new website, but accessibility is really important to us. Can you bake that into your proposal? And I felt like, yeah, sure. How hard can it be? And I was right to a certain extent and I was wrong to a certain extent. Um, I was right that having the background of being a web designer and developer made it absolutely.

Um, the next step for me, it made perfect sense. So going through the, um, you know, going through the, the process of learning, what are the building blocks of a website? What are the foundational technical pieces that you need to have in place? What goes on top of that? How do people interact with that? What happens when you click this button?

That sort of thing. Um, It was a very natural segue into accessibility. But the interesting thing is that these days I'm about 50% accessibility consulting and then 50%, uh, websites and marketing. So about four years ago, my business, you know, it's, it's almost probably by the end of this year, it will eclipse everything else I'm doing.

Just focusing on accessibility. It that's important to mention because the reason why we're having this conversation in the first place is accessibility is been on a lot of people's minds recently. Uh there's there are reasons for that, which I'll talk about in a little while, but the web is pretty old.

It's been around for a long time. And despite the many advancements we've had in things like social media, mobile devices, things of that nature, um, it really the ability for people using assistive technologies or people with certain disabilities. Their ability to use a lot of the platforms and web apps and things that we have on the web.

It's really pretty sad. It's pretty abysmal how inaccessible the web is. So anyway, you put those things together and, you know, marketing a big part of marketing and migrant background. And what I'm passionate about is understanding the user who's sitting behind the keyboard. So, you know, building a website that has a nice design is great.

Um, but what's more important to me is how do people actually interact with it? And how do they, uh, are they enjoying their experience? Are they finding it helpful? Are they getting what they want out of it? So I titled this talk, helping yourself, your clients and users. And, uh, you may note, I'm not a PowerPoint experts.

Um, those of you who are much better than PowerPoint, feel free to criticize my design. I'm a web guy, not a PowerPoint guy, but also I was trying to think how, how can I explain what we're going to talk about? And nothing really catchy came up, but I thought, you know, accessibility in this conversation, we're going to be talking about helping ourselves as web designers and developers and helping your clients who are the entities, whether that's governments or non-profits, or, uh, you know, for-profit businesses and helping the user, the end user, that actually is the consumer for those ones.

And part of the reason why this is important is because web accessibility is good for everyone. It's not just good for, um, somebody who's partially blind, who's relying on a certain assistive device to help them. It's good for all three parties involved. So yourself, this is the Boulder WordPress group.

We think of our, you know, I think of, uh, the people who I can't see on the other side of this, probably similar to me, small companies, maybe one person, a couple people. They've probably been in the industry for a few years, maybe 10 plus years, and they have an established client base and they're always looking for new opportunities, uh, you know, services that they can upsell their existing clients on, or they're trying to empower themselves when clients like the first client that I had as good question.

Hey, can you help me with this? Um, it's really important for us to understand how accessibility works so that we can offer that that helps our business. Right. There's a tremendous opportunity. Like I said, especially right now with all the focus on accessibility, um, for us to kind of add that into our basket of, of services for clients.

Um, you're helping your clients with this because liability for, uh, having an inaccessible web presence is becoming very expensive. Mind-blowingly expensive. Well, we'll talk about that later, but you're doing, you know, not only are you doing yourself a, uh, a service. You know, increasing your offering to potential clients, but this particular service is going to still save your clients a lot of money and legal fees and stress and hassle so we can help them avoid lawsuits.

Um, and then finally users, obviously the, you know, helping what I have here written on the screen is helping users accomplish tasks online, online, and participate in the web is the whole point, right? That's why we're here. We're here building websites because real life human beings are going to be using iPhones or iPads or laptops or Siri or whatever it is to interact with websites.

And that's what drives all of this. So if you can nail, uh, uh, you know, solid understanding of web accessibility, it will help yourself, your clients and the end user. So it's good for everyone.

All right. So we need to define terms. So web accessibility is. It's not necessarily hard to define. It's just that a lot of people think about it differently than it really is. People typically think of, um, what I've noticed is they think of a user who has either a permanent or a sorry, total or partial blindness.

And they think, oh, that person uses a screen reader. So web accessibility is all about making websites accessible to screen readers. And that's true, but that's only a part of it. Um, it's certainly the most visible part. Like, you know, when you see or hear somebody using a screen reader, you go, wow. You know, that'll, that'll capture your attention because it it's, um, I don't know what to say other than attention grabbing, but there are many subtler ways that some people with other disabilities might use, um, assistive technology or, you know, they might have certain settings on their phone that you don't even know.

So we'll talk about, um, some of those, but basically right here, I have a quote here that says web accessibility means that websites, tools, and technologies are designed and developed so that people with disabilities can use them. And at a base level, that sounds very simple. Right? But on the next slide, I'll show you where it's a little bit more complicated.

Now this, this quote comes from the W3C, which is the worldwide web consortium. They're the people who put together web standards and it's kind of a political body. It's kind of a nongovernmental organization. So a lot of volunteers who are a part of it, um, they do really important work and they've been around a lot longer than I have, and they know much, much more about this than me because you know, these are the people writing the rules and the standards for, um, HTML and CSS and XML and things like that.

But they're also big on focusing on web accessibility. Okay. So now we need to define on that previous slide, it said for P you know, for people making the web accessible for people with disabilities now, disability does not necessarily mean, like I said, blindness, it doesn't even necessarily mean someone using a wheelchair.

For example, it means somebody who has a lack of an ability to accomplish something. It's a dis ability that does not always mean it's permanent. So on my list here, we'll start with kind of review these. Sometimes it is a permanent disability. There's auditory disabilities. Deafness is one cognitive disabilities.

Uh, you know, someone can have a traumatic brain injury and that affects their ability to understand what they're seeing. Um, neurological that gets into more medical scientific stuff, physical, um, that we've referred to that as like a motor disability. If somebody has, for example, um, cerebral palsy and they've got fingers.

You know, they don't have the fine motor control. The biggest complaint that I see with that is using devices with tiny little, uh, you know, buttons or tiny, little active focus, uh, links when they're trying to hit that with their finger, if they can't hit that, that's going to be very frustrating for them.

So physical disabilities, speech disabilities, that can definitely affect things. Um, like if you're trying to use Siri for example, and you know, you have a list of some sort or you have, um, some sort of a speech impediment and you're trying to, you know, say, or like on a Google phone. Okay. Google, you know, send a text message to so-and-so and it misunderstands you and then tries to.

Do what you don't want it to do. So that could be a speech disability, visual disability. Again, this is the one that we typically think of. Um, this is where people have visual impairments and there are lots of reasons for that. Some of those are due to age. It can be, you know, glaucoma diabetics sometimes can have visual disabilities.

Um, it doesn't always mean total blindness or partial blindness. It could mean colorblindness. So there, you know, this term disability has a big basket of, of disabilities inside it. So that first list is permanent. The second list, or the second line on my list is temporary. This is where you get into people who were non-disabled in the beginning, and then they became disabled and they will probably get back to their former state at some point.

So an example of that is someone who falls down and breaks their right arm. Well, for me, if I fell down and broke my right arm, Seriously impaired in my ability to work because I'm right-handed. And I use my right hand for mousing and typing and all kinds of things. So that's a temporary disability, a lost glasses, you know, if somebody relies on their glasses because they can't see the computer screen and they accidentally step on their glasses or something, their kids lose them.

Now they have a temporary disability, which is just as disabling as a permanent one in this context, sports injuries, um, I my left hand, I, I was a wrestler in eighth grade and at one point in time, I put my hand behind me and the guy was wrestling, slammed into my body and smashed my wrist into the bone of my arm.

And I don't remember what the trainer called it. He didn't have a technical term, but he said you had a bone on bone crunch. And I said, what does that mean? He said, it's probably going to hurt for the rest of your life. And he was right. It does. And sometimes I need to wear a wrist brace and it's really annoying.

Um, cause it hurts when I type sometimes that can make me temporarily unable to do what I'm trying to do on the web surgery. Recovery is another great example. I had a friend who fell off a motorcycle. He broke both his wrists. That's a significant impairment in trying to get anything done online, where you are normally able to use both of your hands and all of a sudden you can't use either of them situational limitations.

Um, believe it or not, the W3C actually puts this as you know, they count this as a disability. So if you're looking at a device under bright sunlight and you're outdoors and you're squinting, if you can't see it, um, they, they would call that a disability. Or if you can't listen to audio for whatever reason, and you're trying to gain the information, that's in a video, then you've got, um, you've got a disability in that, in that circumstance there.

Technical challenges. So they don't call this a disability. They call it challenges. Sometimes there are devices with really small screens. Sometimes you have different input modes. That means, you know, devices or not devices, but inputs beside, from just a mouse. So you could have, uh, a whole list of, um, uh, assistive devices, which we'll talk about, I think in the next screen where some people may have not even heard of these particular pieces of technology that allows some people to use, uh, their computers, but slow internet connection, limited bandwidth.

These are all things that cause people to not be able to use the web. And so essentially my conclusion is any situation that affects or impairs access to the web is a disability for the term, you know, for the purpose of this discussion on what is accessibility. Okay. All right. So, uh, probably on this crane is where I'm going to start doing this.

I I've littered, I've sprinkled links throughout this PowerPoint presentation. I'm not exactly sure what's going to happen when I click the link. So, um, hopefully it's going to go where I wanted it to, but basically I've, uh, I'm happy to share my slides afterward for anyone who's interested. And you can do a lot more research on this yourself, but assistive technologies is a very specific term.

And again, here's the definition from the W3C software or equipment that people with disabilities use to improve interaction with the web. So assistive technology for motor disabilities. That's um, again, the, the example I used before the guy, let's say, guy has cerebral palsy, or he's got some involuntary spasm or motor disability.

There's a lot of assistive technology available for. Um, including things that I said, like I said, you might not have even heard of there's mouth sticks, head ones, single switch, access, sip, and puff devices, track ball, mouses, adaptive keyboards, um, there's eye tracking where they're actually software and hard know pieces of software and hardware where your screen can have a camera that looks at your eyeballs and follows your eyeballs around.

And you can engage with a website using only your eyes. So the, the technology that we have for this stuff is amazing. But the problem is, as we'll talk about a little bit later, um, the website that your you're surfing has to be built in order to, um, facilitate that it has to be built a certain way. So I'm going to try clicking on this land.

Hopefully it works excellent. Yes. And hopefully you can all still see my screen. Um, so, you know, here's a picture of a motorized wheelchair. Sometimes people with motor disabilities have, um, they have hands, but they can't use their hands and or sometimes they might use their hands differently. I think back to, um, I had a gentleman who was a client of mine, uh, excellent client re really nice guy.

And he had been shot in a terrible, terrible accident, um, was an awful crime, but he had literally been shot in the throat and it paralyzed him for the rest of his life. And so he sits in a motorized wheelchair and he's not able to use his left arm at all and most of his right hand. And so when he navigates on the web, he uses his.

And attract pad. So a mouse is no good for him. So he uses just his thumb, his single thumb, and he'll type out a whole email, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, and he has to lean over really, really close. Um, so that was one of the first times that I saw this kind of assistive technology for motor disabilities firsthand.

And I was amazed at how efficient he was, but obviously, um, he, that took a long time for him to learn how to adapt to that new disability. Um, okay. So again, for people with certain motor disabilities, you can use a mouth stick. So if you have like a touch screen computer, you can literally put this thing in your mouth or a caregiver can put this in your mouth.

And then the tip of the stick is just like a finger. So you can use touch screen, like an iPhone or an iPad. Head wind is very similar. You can actually put this thing on the top of your head, and then you've got this one, which you can either type with one click at a time. You can press on certain parts of the screen.

If you have a touch screen, single switch access, that's kind of a, you know, it's a yes, no sort of thing. So you can click it.

There's lots of different ways that people can use these certain technologies to kind of get around, um, out what we would typically think of as the normal mode of mousing and clicking. So I can mouse and click and see everything on the screen that makes my experience online. Very easy. If you take that away, it makes my experience very difficult sip and puff switches.

It's astounding. The technology that we have, if, if the only motor ability you have is to be able to suck or blow there's this device where you can actually put a tube in your mouth and suck on it or puff on it. And that will allow you to click, um, pretty amazing stuff, adaptive keyboards, trackball mouse.

Again, you can kind of read this at your leisure eye tracking. This was something I was talking about before, or kind of like I was saying, Syria is a great example. It's a very everyday example of voice recognition software. Um, so there's lots of different kinds of technologies for motor discipline.

Assistive technologies for visual disabilities. Uh, this it's really funny. I love this article here on this website, which has links to where, you know, the person who writes this talks about visual disabilities and, um, you know, he, or she says, you know, when I go to a room and I say, how many of you have visual disabilities?

Very few hands go up until the person says, you know, how many of you use glasses? And then it's like, oh, oh, okay. Oh, oh, that's a very interesting point. Well, glasses are an assistive technology. Um, screen readers, screen readers are very common. They're um, again, they're very easy to, to notice for people like me, because I, I would be able to hear somebody using that.

Um, but even braille keyboards. So just as a fun aside, I actually met a gal the other day, a lady named Haben Girma and I went to Fort Collins. Um, The university of Fort Collins and she was giving a speech. Uh, my eyes look really red and watery because the light was really bright, but this is me taking a selfie with Haben Girma and she is a disability rights attorney and she's deaf blind and went to Harvard law.

And what's amazing is that she gave a speech and had Q and a at the very end of it. And the way we did that was I sat down with a keyboard and typed out my question on my keyboard, which had an input into her keyboard, which was a braille keyboard. So with her fingers, she could read out the question that I was asking her, and then she could speak back, uh, the answer to me.

So that's a braille keyboard. And so not all people with visual impairments can know how, first of all, most of them don't, uh, use. That's a topic for another conversation. Um, but in this case she does. And so she can read and type and communicate two ways using just her fingertips. Um, so braille keyboards are a great example of assistive technology for visual disabilities and then screen magnifiers.

Sometimes that's software based like there programs you can get that have, there's a way you can get like a really big magnifying glass that you it's, it's a virtual magnifying glass that you kind of put over your screen with your mouse, but there are also screen magnifiers that are really large, uh, you know, square glass, almost like, um, almost looks like a, a second screen that you put over your screen and it really magnifies what's on the screen.

So there are ways that people can use these assistive technologies to understand how to use a website, but here's the. This is shocking, but it's true. Most of the web is not accessible. So this, this shirt that I'm wearing right here. So as friends, don't let friends ship inaccessible code. And this is a kind of a fun shirt that I got from DQ systems, which is a really great organization.

They do research and reports and statistics, and they've got a great tool called acts, which we'll talk about later eight X E, which is a great resource that I highly recommend, but they did a study. They commissioned a study last year, and I have a link to more information on that study. But the nut that I wanted to take out of that is that it says internet users who are blind, abandoned to internet transactions a month because of an accessibility, two thirds of their transactions on average end in abandonment.

And aside from the fact that it's frustrating for that user, which it is, and we should care about. Just, just, just look at that from a pure business perspective, if two thirds of a particular group of your users can't even buy your product online, you're doing something wrong and you should really focus on that.

And you know, this is where, like, when I talk with other people in the accessibility world, they say things like money talks, and this is the point. So if you can't convince someone that accessibility is important because, uh, people need to rely on assistive technology in order to use the web. If that will not help you prove your case, you can probably try proving your case by saying it's costing you money, significant amounts of money.

Um, this study actually talks about how there's about $6 billion worth of untapped, uh, potential business from people trying to use assistive technology who can't interact with websites because they are, um, they're inaccessible. So the second quote I have here is 97.8% of homepages. This is a project that web aim put together.

They, they found the top million websites and then analyze the home pages for all of them. And basically what they found was that 97.8% of homepages had a detectable, a what? CAG two had detectable carry two failures. We'll talk about what that means in a little bit actual what CAG two, a or AA level conformance is very low, perhaps below 1%.

That's shocking. And they did this study in February of 2019, and then updated it in February in August of 2019. And the numbers were, they almost hadn't changed. One statistic, went up and the other went down slightly, but it was a wash. So even as you know this, as recently as summer of last year, we're not seeing what we need to see.

Um, Finally, there's this great study called it's a very similar to the web million project. It's called a higher ed in 4k, and it was run by a group that used to be called dyno athletics. Any of you who are familiar with Genolitics, um, that name might ring a bell, but now the company is called Pope tech, but they ran a study on education, higher education, and they found that 0.07, 8% of educational institutions have no errors.

99.922% had detectable what CAG violations on a page level 93.3, three, 1% of pages had detectable what keg violations. So just think about that. That means that 93% of the pages they analyzed in the study had accessibility errors, 93%. That's we could talk about that, about how abysmal that is, but just, just to try to absorb that.

And then we'll talk about what to do about that. Uh, so here's the irony though. So we live in a society that loves technology, and we say things like technology is empowering, it's enabling, and it is in some ways, but the ultimate irony of all this is that the technology that can offer the most help doesn't.

So I have a couple of quotes here, one from Tim Berners Lee, who is the director of the W3C and the inventor of the worldwide web. He says the power of the web is in its universality, accessed by everyone, regardless of disability is an essential aspect. I think that's absolutely true. And that's obviously what he had in mind when he invented it.

The problem. It's not working out that way. So recently, Vint Cerf, um, who, you know, we can kind of think of as a co-designer of the internet, um, is a co-designer of TCP IP. Uh, he's also, he works for Google now as their internet evangelist, and he's got international awards as long as my arm. Um, he says it's a crime that the most versatile versatile device on the planet, the computer has not adapted well to people who need help, who need assistive technology.

And it's especially ironic in his case because vent, uh, I believe has a hearing disability and is colorblind and is married to a woman who is. So, this is really personal to him that, I mean, what a significant failure we have all this amazing technology that could solve so many of these problems, but it just doesn't.

Um, so this last one, this is, again, this is the woman that I met a couple of weeks ago, Haben Girma. She says I have limited vision and hearing the biggest barriers I encounter are digital barriers, websites, and apps that aren't designed with accessibility. And I mean, just, just think about that. This lady.

Is deaf blind and went to graduate. You know, she graduated from Harvard law school. She's very smart, obviously very ambitious and yet digital barriers to access on simple things like devices are the biggest barriers she meets and partially that's because the ADA, which we'll talk about a little bit later, I keep skipping ahead.

The Americans with disabilities act of 1990, came out before the internet, as we know it existed. Right? So it doesn't talk about the internet and websites and apps and smartphones. It does talk about things like curb cuts and ramp, um, you know, grades of how steep ramps can be and how wide hallways are.

So 30 years later, a lot of those obstacles have been solved. We've found ways to better the way we build new buildings and, uh, retrofit existing buildings. Pretty pretty successfully, you know, I'm not an expert on the percentage, but I would say I see accessibility baked into buildings and neighborhoods and schools all the time, everywhere I go on the web, not so much.

So that's really a shame that, um, you know, I, I asked havin when I was there, they had a Q and a session at the end, and I said, you know, what, what are the biggest barriers for you? Like, give me an example of that. And she said, the one that annoys me the most is when people shares a picture on Facebook and they say, oh, this is so funny, LOL, uh, you know, isn't this great, ha ha ha.

And she has no idea what it says. And so she feels left out. She feels excluded from the group. So her solution to that was to provide a text alternative. And if you follow her on Facebook or Instagram, She labels. Um, she's actually really, um, she's, she's really active on social media, but she she's real she's takes, she takes pictures all the time.

She's constantly posting updates and always, even if it's a video or a picture, no matter what it is, she's always giving us a text description of what she's sharing. And obviously she's doing that because that's what she wants people to do for her. So there you go. It's a little bit ironic that the technology that has these things baked, it could have these things to offer the most help it doesn't.

Um, okay. So then when you talk about why is it the way it is? There's an additional challenge there, which is I'm going to get really acronym happy here. So hopefully I won't stumble over my words, but there's no single standard for web accessibility. Not really a lot of people say, well, yeah, but what about what CAG?

And the answer is? Yes, basically. That's like the de facto, but at least in the United States, there's no law that says, here are the guidelines that everyone must adhere to. Um, there isn't, there are settlements when the department of justice, um, comes down with a judgment against like a title, two entity, that's a governmental entity that has a responsibility to adhere to the ADA as part of their settlement.

They will lay out exactly what needs to happen. And as far as I've seen, they do use the vocab guidelines, but, uh, it's not baked into like the, the ADA or the U S the United States federal law. It just isn't. So there's a challenge. The W3C came up with the web accessibility initiative long time ago before my time.

Um, and the, the keyword that we're focusing on today, right here, web content, accessibility guidelines, WC, AIG, or if you say it out loud, everybody says what CAC and what CAG 1.0 was a set of proposed rules for how to make the web accessible back in 1999. Okay. That was a really long time ago. Right? Really long time ago, it was updated to WCAG 2.0 in 2008.

So what's, you know, do some quick math, I don't know. That's, uh, that's many years after that, right. I'm thinking of calculating at the same time, it took a long time for them to come out with the CAC 2.0, after that, they went to WCAG 2.1, which took 10 years. And now here we are in 2020, right after what 2.1 came out and there's already a draft of a locale 2.2.

So there's, there's a lot of different, um, I don't know how to say it, but not necessarily different versions, but I guess they are versions in the sense that the idea is that what CAG 2.2 replaces 2.1 and 2.1 replaces 2.0, et cetera. But right now there's definitely some gray area in terms of, you know, what CAG 2.1 has been out since 2018, but for legal settlements, again, with the department of justice, they're still using vocab 2.0 standards.

The ones that were written in 2008. So they're using some really old data. So now if you're trying to be proactive and think ahead, like, okay, well, if I want to start a new website for my new business, which set of guidelines should I conform to? Well, if you want to stick with the legal, uh, answer, you would say 2.0, but that's really old and it's getting older.

And what happens when 2.2 comes out, this is tricky. Another part, another reason why it's tricky is there are three conformance levels, um, at least starting in 2.0, so there's level a, which is the bare minimum. If you want to adhere to the vocab 2.0 guidelines, you choose what level of conformance you want.

You have conformance level, a AA and AAA, and I'm not sure if my camera's on and you can see me holding up my fingers here, but the first level level a is, um, the basic bare minimum. And then the second level level AA is everything in a. Plus additional criteria from AA and then triple a is just like you would guess in order to conform to what CAG 2.0 or 2.1 triple level, AAA, that means you have to conform to level a and level AA and additional criteria and level AAA.

So then you even get more into the weeds about, well, which conformance level are you talking about? So again, for, for department of justice, settlements and judgements against, uh, entities that are required to make their websites accessible, like cities, counties, states the federal government, um, typically there from what I've seen, I'm not a lawyer, but what I've seen in the actual judgements and settlements, which you can read them online, um, they are suggesting or requiring what CAG 2.0 at level AA to make it even a little bit more confusing.

If you're a federal agency, there's a set of requirements called section 5 0 8. That, that sounds like it's a totally separate set of requirements, but it actually kind of isn't because when section 5 0 8 was revised, it incorporated WCAG 2.0. So if you're kind of pulling out your hair thinking, like, I don't even know what to do with this.

First of all, it's okay. I'll walk you through it. And second of all, to be honest, neither does the government and neither do most companies. This is, I hate to say uncharted water, cause it's not, I mean, what kegs has been around since 2008 or 2.0 anyway, that's a long time. So. This should be much, much more standardized and very, very simple to explain, but I can almost guarantee you, like, if you pulled 50 small businesses, for example, in the United States, 50 random businesses and ask them, are you required to make your website accessible?

A they would probably say I have no idea B they would probably say, I don't know if my website is or isn't and see, they would probably say, I don't even know where I would start or who I would call or what those guidelines are or what agency deals with. That's why as part of why this is so challenging.

And then on the, on the bottom of my slide here, I have a list of, you know, some other countries outside the USA, Canada, Canada is very strict. Um, they have a lot of federal guidelines for web accessibility and, uh, several of the provinces, especially Ontario have their own guidelines for web accessibility above and beyond.

Um, so you can have like what CAG and then Canada's rules and then Ontario's rules. So it's kids, it gets pretty Byzantine and really layered. Uh, the EU has a whole set of directives, which are totally different. Not, they're not totally different in the sense that they're trying to accomplish the same goal, but they're different in the sense of who needs to conform and at what level and what the penalties are, if you don't, um, Australia, the UK, a lot of these other countries.

They have their own rules. So that's just, it makes it really challenging for people to understand how does this word who's in charge? Who's responsible for it? Is it my job? Is it my web guy's job? Is it my attorney's job? So I sympathize, if this sounds a little bit confusing or hard to follow. So there are two things that we need to keep in mind when we talk about accessibility, there's the legal aspect and the technical aspect, accessibility is technical and legal, right?

Um, so the legal aspect, you can think of it in terms of, if you run a business, are you legally required to make all of your product offerings or service offerings accessible to everyone? If so, what does that look like? Here's a hint for you. It's more than just websites. So if a, what if a company is required to make their products or service offering, um, accessible to everyone?

Like I mentioned before, that's what the ADA took into consideration. Like, is your bathroom wheelchair accessible? Do you have enough, um, uh, handicapped, you know what? They used to call handicapped parking spaces with the placards out front and that sort of thing. If that's the case, then your website, arguably right now in the legal circumstance that we're under, based on some court cases, which I'll mention in a couple of minutes, that probably falls onto your organization as a whole, um, which has almost nothing to do with the technical aspect of how do we make this website accessible, right.

It's a bigger question of am I required to provide accommodations or to make accessible all my products and services? So here's a, here's a really great example. I have some friends who run a company that does accessibility consulting, um, offline. They deal with things like striping and parking lots. And you know, the number of steps, the rise in steps and elevator doors and stuff like that.

And sometimes they'll talk to municipalities and a municipality will say, well, our website is totally separate from this. We want to just focus on our liability for the ADA, with our parks and rec. Classic. We want to save money, our website, we don't have money to update that until, you know, next fiscal year or we need the city council to vote on it, whatever.

And so one of my friends who works for this group, he'll say, okay, so you're saying that you want to make sure your parks and rec department is complying with the Americans with disabilities act, right? Yes. Okay, good. So you want to make your service and your service offerings open to the public like you're legally required to do?

Yes. Okay. So if I am partially blind or totally blind, and I want to sign my kids up for swimming lessons, what do I do? And then usually they'll say something like, oh, well you just go to our, uh, uh, oh, right. Um, yeah, you have to go to our website in order to do that. And it, obviously that begs the question, right?

Which is okay, well, if you have to go to the website to do that, is your website accessible? So the point being like these days, the, the legal line between like, oh, this is my business office and this is my web presence. Those lines are getting fairly blurry. So, um, That's something to keep in mind. That's the part that I don't get involved in.

And that's the part that is web developers and designers. You probably shouldn't either, if you're not an attorney, you should probably find an attorney who specializes in this area of law and partner with them or, or collaborate with them. But what I do and what you should think about doing is the technical aspect, right?

Which, what are the, what kegs success criteria? How do we make websites, apps, online products and services accessible to everyone regardless of disability. And regardless of whether users rely on assistive technology or not, um, how do I technically accomplish them? And, uh, another thing to keep in mind is there's, there's something called assistive technology, which we've discussed, but there's also a term that we talk about called adaptive strategies.

That's where people find ways to use. Um, your website in a way that works for them without necessarily using assistive technology. A great example of that is if somebody is using Chrome, let's say, and they hit command plus plus plus plus plus let's call it a text to zoom, which is different than a screen zone.

So they're, they're adapting their browser to give them the information in a different way, but not actually relying on an assistive device or an assistive technology to do that. Um, so think about assistive technology, but also think about adaptive strategies. And that's something that would CAG is very, they very finally delineate between those two.

There's a difference between zooming a screen or, you know, zooming a website and then zooming text only, for example, two different kinds of things. It sounds on the surface, like it's the same, but it really isn't. Okay. So the legal cases, and this is where I highly recommend you find an attorney who knows.

How this works, especially if you have a client that's really worried about their current status, the legal landscape for this is changing very, very quickly. In 2006, there was a really big, um, story about national Federation of the blind versus target corporation. Basically NSIB sued, target saying we can't use your website.

And I think that the straw that broke the camel's back was they said we can't apply for jobs using your job portal, uh, online. And so therefore that's discriminatory because you're preventing people who have visual impairments from using your website. Target said whatever. They said, however, they said it.

They said, no, that's not true. It's different. You can come into our building instead, if you need help, this, this case was settled. So as far as I know, there was no major case law that came out of that. So then national association of the deaf, a different organization. So we're talking about two different types of disabilities.

Blindness and deafness national association of the deaf or NAD sued Netflix and said, Netflix is not providing adequate closed captioning on videos. So that one was settled as well. So again, it's like these, these organizations that are suing, uh, private corporations on behalf of their, their members or their clients with disabilities, they're trying to get the courts to enforce a standard of, or a set of web standards.

And so far the courts have been really reticent to do that. And so, you know, people keep settling and they keep settling another one national association of the deaf. So NAD sued Harvard, Harvard university. And they said that it's nice that you've put all these courses online, but, uh, we can't view, or we can't, you know, if we're dead.

Or if we have partial deafness or some other hearing impairment, and we're watching the computer screen for these great free courses that Harvard put online. But if we can't use those, then you're giving your content to everyone except deaf people or people with, you know, uh, auditory challenges, again, that was settled.

So there was no major, you know, groundbreaking case law that came from that. But one thing that's really interesting to note about this lawsuit is it specifically mentioned iTunes, U YouTube and SoundCloud as the platforms that Harvard was using. So it didn't work for Harvard to say, well, that's YouTube problem or that SoundCloud's problem, or that's iTunes use problem two, you know, they're the ones who need to capture these videos.

This lawsuit was intended to say, no, Harvard, you need to do this again. That was settled. The most recent one. And the most important one for our conversation today is, uh, roadblock versus Domino's. So I guess maybe it's fortunate. Maybe it's unfortunate, depending on your view, if you're an attorney, you would know more than me, but the Supreme court declined to review an appeals court decision and that appeals court, I think it was the ninth circuit court decided that Domino's pizza has to make their website and their app accessible.

This is really important because as far as I know, it was the most, um, prominent case that went as high in our court system as any had ever gone, where a court, a federal appeals court said, yes, Domino's you have to make your. Website and app accessible, even if your building is accessible. So Domino's was basically saying, but our website's different.

Our website has nothing to do with our, our pizza service. People can go into our pizza service and have, or you know, our building and enjoy our pizza there. And we're very accommodating towards people with disabilities. They're just not on our app. Domino's lost that. And because the Supreme court decided not to review it right now, that's kind of setting precedent.

And again, I'm not an attorney, but this was one, um, circuit court, but everybody else is looking at that and saying, okay, if is this the legal landscape? All right. It seems like it's going that way. So now kind of the flood gates have been open to a lot of lawsuits where, where attorneys and law firms are hoping that this is going to be the new standard legal state.

Where businesses can no longer say my physical location is accessible to people with disabilities, but my app is not. So that's very tricky. And again, I try really hard not to get talk. I try not to talk to clients about this. I try not to opine about this cause I'm not an attorney. And I don't know, but what I do know is that these are four very important cases.

And, um, as a result of these cases, we're starting to see a lot of lawsuits very, very quickly. So that's something that people should be aware of. Here's a great example. Here's a, uh, a gentleman I was talking to a couple of weeks ago, sent me an email and he was panicked and he said, we got this letter in the mail.

We didn't even know what to do. Can you help us? So some people call these drive by lawsuits where basically the idea is, and I'm not saying this is what happened in this case or not an attorney. Find somebody with a certain disability and hires them and pays them money to them. Get in their car or walk down the street or however they do it to go, try to visit these businesses and find something on a checklist and say, ah, aha.

They're discriminatory because they didn't check this one box. Therefore we should Sue them. So then what happens is, again, I'm not commenting on the legality of it or even the ethics of it. I'm commenting on the fact that this is out there and it shocks a lot of people. So I'm just going to read this for a second.

What I have on the screen, this is a monetary demand letter from a law firm in Florida and Florida. So this is interstate, which is very interesting that purports to be representing an individual who tried to use a Colorado company's website, but couldn't due to contrast errors. These types of lawsuit threats, like I say, this is a threat.

It's not a lawsuit. They haven't been served. It's a monetary demand. Um, this may or may not be legitimate. They might be serious. They might be. But let me tell you legal fees are expensive. And so if you get one of these in the mail, you're going to be paying attention to it. And the important re the reason why I bring this up and I think is so important for us to focus on is as web designers and developers, we are the ones who should be advocating for our clients to have the best technology that will give their users the best experience and will limit their liability.

Right? How bad is it going to make you look as a web designer? If you build a great new website and then they get a letter like this, um, that says that websites and accessible. So these lawsuits, and here's another development that's new and different from years past. These are lawsuit. Threats are developed or started being directed towards small businesses, not just target, not just Harvard, not just, um, Netflix.

This is a small local business family owned local business in Colorado and somebody in Florida, uh, decided that it was worth their time to write this letter. And I don't know if you can read it because it's very small. I tried to highlight the important part. I'll read what it says. It says toward this end, the monetary demand of $15,000, uh, absent litigation will remain on the table for 20 business days from the date.

This correspondence is delivered to you. So what this letter says is we have a client who tried to use your website. Our client has a visual impaired. Your website is not accessible to people with visual impairments and therefore you're discriminating against people who are blind. So it has two very specific demands.

The first one is it says, if you pay us, it almost literally says, if you pay us $15,000 will go away. So the gentleman I spoke to said, that's extortion. And I said, I can't comment on that, but that is scary. The second thing is it says, if you do not follow through, uh, we will have no choice, but to demand at least $250,000, which is the low end of damages in these class action suits.

So this business owner woke up one morning and went to the mailbox and saw a letter from a law firm in Florida saying, pay us $15,000 and we'll leave you alone. Or we're going to Sue you for $250,000. This is where we're at as a society. And this is a liability for business owners and it's not just governmental agencies.

It's not just title two entities where, you know, it's like a, like a parks and rec department for a county. Like I was mentioning before, this is a private local business. And my question for an attorney about this would be, did they really have a client with a visual disability who actually in good faith, tried to buy something on this website and couldn't, or did they find somebody and give them some sort of remuneration and say, will you sign here attesting to this?

And then they're using that to now Sue them for $250,000. I don't know the answer. Um, and it's essentially irrelevant to me because my job is to help them figure out how does this not? What do we do now from a technical perspective? How do we make the website accessible? And number two, how do we make sure this doesn't happen?

Um, ironically, I do want to point this out. I went to their website of the law firm listed and it has several accessibility issues. So I hope I get to speak to the attorney who is representing the gentlemen who received this letter. And I would love to point that out to him because I think if you're going to make a living out of suing other people for not having an accessible website, you should, your website should be accessible.

Uh, okay. So I'm going to read through this and maybe we'll take a, a quick break. So what to do, what to do about all this right here. We are. Now I've talked about assistive technologies. I've talked about the legal landscape. Uh, the liability is scary for a small business. So what do we do about this? Well, at a minimum adhere to what?

CAG 2.0 level. Again, I'm not an attorney. That's not legal advice, but everything I've seen where with settlements, especially from the department of justice, that's typically the standard they use. Here's an example. And I link and if I share this presentation later, um, you'll be able to click to this to actually read it yourself.

But if you read the two, 2018 department of justice settlement with the city and county of Denver, it's it, there's a, I have a screenshot on the right side here and it's highlighted in yellow. It refers to web content, accessibility guidelines, 2.0 at level AA multiple times. So that's good enough for me to say, okay, if the department of justice is dealing with a discrimination suit and the department of justice is the top dog, when it comes to, uh, the Americans with disabilities act, if they determine that the website of the city and county of Denver is discriminatory, um, or it's inaccessible and it's there for discrimination.

Their solution to that is you need to remediate your website to the level of WCAG 2.0 at level AA. Now what's also interesting. Is it also stipulates that the city and county of Denver must provide training to web content personnel on how to conform to what carrier 2.0 level AA? So part of what that means is it's not good enough to just say like we fixed it.

No, you, you have to train your staff and employees. So this doesn't happen again in the future. It also states that they need to perform automated accessibility tests. And then finally it says that they have to enlist individuals with different disabilities to test its pages for ease of use and accessibility barriers.

So that means it's not good enough to just run their website through a scanner and say, we got six green check marks. We're good. Right? No, you're not good. That's not good enough. You need actual, real live human beings with actual disabilities using, you know, alternative. Strategies and, and assistive technology.

Um, I think, I believe on this one for Denver, it actually just, it delineates between somebody with a visual disability, someone with a motor disability, um, someone with, uh, uh, an auditory disability. So that's very interesting that the department of justice is saying in order for us to consider this settlement closed and say, you are no longer, uh, you know, your website's no longer offending in a legal sense.

It's it states here are the guidelines that were carried 2.0, go ahead lines. You need to conform to these. You need to provide training. You need to perform automated accessibility tests, and then you need to enlist individuals with different disabilities to manually test. That is the, as far as I have ever seen that is absolutely.

I completely agree with this. This is the best solution. They give you a foundational framework and say, this is the level that you need to adhere to. And then they say, it's not good enough for you to just get there once and check the box and say, we're done. You have to train people and you need to, um, you know, run, run your scanners.

All you want, which are helpful, but that's not good enough because what they want to know is like, they don't really care that a website was run through some scanner that says, you know, oh, we guarantee that your website's accessible. That's not the point. The point is the Americans with disabilities act is all about our human beings being discriminated against on the basis of their disability.

And if you can show is the city and county of. We tested this with somebody who is totally blind or partially blind or colorblind. And we tested this with someone who's perhaps deaf blind and someone with motor disabilities and they didn't experience barriers to access then. Great, your job's done, you did it, but this is very complicated.

It's very expensive. It takes a lot of time. Um, obviously the, it says, no, you know your costs, you have to undergo all of these steps and you have to do it within three months. This particular settlement says they have to start it within three months. And there are a couple of things in the settlement where they say and annually, you have to do this again.

So those are the stakes that's for city and county. Is it the same for private business? I'm not sure that's a legal question, but clearly this is the direction it's going and we should be paying attention to this. So, so what do you do? Right. So this is bad. Ah, what do we do? So it's my job to freak you out and then to tell you that there's something we can do about it.

Okay. Hold on. Let me hide floating meeting controls. There we go. All right. One super easy way to start is by using free automated evaluation tools. One of my favorite tools, one of everyone's favorite tools is called wave and there's this great organization out of Ogden, Utah. One of the universities there, um, it's a group called web aim, which has web accessibility in mind.

And they're a nonprofit that somehow has sourced associated with the university. They thrive off of grants. They're a fantastic, fantastic resource. Absolutely. One of the best and their website is so full of so much good stuff. They've got QA. Um, the FAQ's they have email archives going back for like 15 years.

So that way, if you just go to their website and search, um, something about like what CAD 1.0, that was, you know, it's been outdated for 12 years. They still, even that stuff is still lying. So it's a treasure trove. And then also what they do is they made a tool called wave and wave works two different ways.

Either you can click on this link. Once I share these slides with you, or you can just go to wave dot web aim.org. And it has a little bar where you just enter the address of the. And, uh, it will give you a result. So here's a sort of a half a screenshot of a website that I, I just like thought what's the most random website I can think of that.

A lot of people use Pepsi, pepsi.com. So I went to pepsi.com and I, I, I plugged it into wave and it found all kinds of errors, all kinds of errors. Now, how does that happen with a giant multinational conglomerate with billions of dollars where they're not even paying attention to their accessibility, and yet, you know, the little local shop in Northern Colorado, that's a family owned business is getting demand letters.

I don't know. I don't know what to tell you, but what I do know to tell you is that pepsi.com has all kinds of accessibility issues. And the great thing about wave is if you plug a URL into wave and then hit enter, it will scan it. And it will tell you not just what's wrong with it, but why and what to do about it.

So in this particular case, pepsi.com, it's got 46 errors where you have images with missing alternative text. That's important for obvious reasons, but it's worth stating it in case you're not familiar with it. If I am totally blind, let's say, and I'm using a screen reader to tell me what pepsi.com is all about.

And there's all this great stuff going on in these images and people celebrating and dancing and enjoying Pepsi. And all of that, my screen reader reads out is image one dot JPEG image, tube dot JPEG image, three dot JPEG. First of all, that's a miserable experience. Second of all you are. You're not conveying the meaning.

That's the term in accessibility that we focus on is conveying meaning. So if you have an image that doesn't have texts that a screen reader can read, it's not going to know what to do with that image. So either it will skip it, or it will read the alternative text, but that requires an additional step of the people@pepsi.com.

When they upload a picture, they actually have to fill in a little blank that says, what is the alternative text with whatever CMS they're using? What's the alternative text for this image. And so. That's what alternative texts is all about. So in this case, they apparently have 25 images that are missing alternative text.

That's a lot. So a lot of the meaning that you can derive from pepsi.com, whatever their messaging is or whatever they're trying to get us to understand about Pepsi is lost on users with visual disabilities. That's a problem. Um, linked images, missing alternative text, uh, document language, missing, empty headings, empty buttons.

These are all really classic problems that many, many, many websites have. And it's just funny to me that like nobody at Pepsi thought to just plug their website into wave using, you know, the free wave tool like I did before this presentation, it took me all of 30 seconds and boom, there you go. There's the answer.

There's a lot of problems on pepsi.com and, you know, contrast yours. These we'll talk about those a little bit later. These are by far, the far. Like off the charts by far the most common error with accessibility that I've seen images or text with low ratio of dark to light. So the contrast is not dark enough.

So somebody with a visual disability like, uh, colorblindness or, um, you know, there's a lot of visual, uh, challenges that end in like opiates. I'm not an expert on the visual component, but there are lots of reasons why people have may have vision, but they can't determine what's going on. If the contrast isn't stark enough.

So that's what contrast areas are. Now, this goes back to what I said a little bit before, which is that, um, you can't, for part of the reason, like you can't say to the government, for example, well, we scanned this website and wave and it gave us all green check marks and there are no red Xs. That's not good enough.

Right. So. And that's why I actually say this right here, simply passing a basic scan with wave does not mean your website is accessible. And in fact, I've seen several websites that claim to be compliant. The leading use words like compliant, even though that's not actually an appropriate term in this context, or they'll say their website is accessible or that it does conform to the WCAG 2.0 guidelines and yeah, it should pass it.

What they meant by that is they ran it through wave and they didn't get any red boxes. Um, but trust me, I, I am like Sherlock Holmes. I'm going to find every accessibility issue your website has at some point, either in conjunction with a human tester, um, somebody, cause I work a lot of times with, um, in tandem with people that have these various disabilities.

I have a blind user. I collaborate on, um, these projects with frequently, uh, a man with cerebral palsy, a woman, uh, who is deaf. I believe she's totally. So between the four or five of us, we're absolutely going to find the accessibility issues. And it's not good enough to just say we got all green. So hopefully I'm not belaboring the point that this is a really good place to start.

It's an excellent place to start. If you were working at Pepsi and they said, make our website accessible, you'd say, okay, these are the big glaring errors that are very basic. And the funny thing is they're so easy to fix so easy to fix. Do you know how hard it is? I mean, just think if you're, you know, this is a bolder WordPress group, right?

Think about how easy it is to add alt text and WordPress. It's easy. Every time you upload an image, it asks you now every time you not just want to upload it, but every time you inserted into the page, it's going to ask you, what is your alt text for this? Um, easy fix. I mean, this could take somebody 13 minutes.

I'll bet you twenty-five missing all text. 13 minutes, 30 seconds a piece done. So webbing wave is a really, really great place to start. It's a very basic, it will give you a basic, like a thermometer check. You know, like when your mom, when you were growing up, she'd say, do you have a fever? And she put the back of her hand on your forehead and you'd say, I don't feel so good.

And then she feel your forehead and say like, oh wow, you feel pretty warm. This is wave as a thermometer. In my opinion, it's a great place to start. Um, wave has a Chrome extension and a Firefox Firefox. Pardon me? Extension. If you go to wave that wedding.org, it'll show you where you can download it. It's free.

It's a great tool. Ultimately where you're going to get your answers for this is a fantastic tool called the wikag quick reference guide. Now this is where your eyes will absolutely glaze over. And you would just, your mind will be numbed by the amount of information that's in this. This is like reading an encyclopedia and it's so technical.

But for the past four years, I've been reading somewhere in the UK reference guide probably every day. And, um, it will answer all your questions about what exactly is the problem and what do we do about it. So for a great example, right here, 1.1 0.1 non-text content. This is the, what they call the success criteria.

So all of these are success criteria and each one is a success criteria on, so sometimes you'll see S C that's what that means. So if it says like what CAG 2.0 S 1.1 0.1. That's what this means. So in this quick reference guide, if web aim wave like it does, um, go back. Well, okay. Let me just, let me just pull this up real quick.

Let's do a live one so I can get the link that I want. pepsi.com.

Oh, it's not working. That's why I try not to do live demos, but let's do it this way. pepsi.com. Let's see if it's the tool or just that website. Okay. So here it is. What perhaps it looks great, right? If you have total vision and no disabilities at all in discerning, what's looking at, you know what you're looking at on the screen, this X grade, it's exciting.

It's fun. It makes you want to click. If you're using assistive technology, let's see what happens. Okay. There you go. 46 errors. That's pretty bad. Well, like I was saying, okay, so it says 25 missing alternative text. If you click this little button here that says code, then when you click on each one of these, it's going to show you exactly which image it's talking about.

This image, this image, this image, all of these are missing alternative texts. And then if you say to yourself, well, golly, but what does that mean? And how do I fix that? Click this little eye icon right here. And it will give you an explanation of this is a summary. And if you really want to do the deep dive, you can click through to that exact success.

Oh, they changed it. Now it actually goes to webbing's website. Um, which is fine. But if you look it up in the success criteria, uh, here in the quick reference guide, there, there are three things you can do. You can click on understanding and then. I mean, really, if, if you want some really mind-numbingly technical stuff, where halfway through you get the page and you just think like, my brain doesn't even work anymore.

This is understanding the, how, the, why the, when, what does it mean? What does it not mean? It gives you examples of, okay. It, you have to use a text alternative in these cases, but not in these cases and unless you're doing this, it's, it's, it's really thorough, but it's tricky. Um, and then a lot of times, if you scroll down to the bottom or to the middle, it'll give you examples.

So it'll show you very specific examples. Like, okay, well, um, a photograph of a historic event in a news story, and then you can think like, oh, well that sounds like what I'm looking for with my website. And then it explains it, right. Um, or sometimes they'll give you techniques and they never, here's the thing to keep in mind.

They never mandate that you have to, they always use the term sufficient techniques. That means if you do this. You should be able to pass the criteria, but you don't have to because these are not rules, they're guidelines. But another helpful thing they do is a lot of times they will say, uh, common, common failures.

So you can actually scroll down and see, here are very specific instances of where it doesn't work or when it's gone wrong or when it doesn't pass. Here's why it doesn't pass. This is a wealth of information. So you can get the basic idea up here. You can get the sufficient techniques and then you can find out about the failures.

Right? So I highly recommend that. Okay. So use wit webbing. That's a, that's a great tool. So, but this, this, what had quick reference guide is super helpful. And just to kind of delineate between the two sets of guidelines that we're working through right now, Hopefully this little table will give you an understanding of like at the wikag Tupac with WCAG 2.0 level AA, there are 13 success criteria that are unique to level AA.

So in order to pass the test as it were for what CAG 2.0 level AA, you have to pass 13 success criteria from AA and the 25 success criteria for level a, if you want it to go, AAA, which is almost impossible to do, because that, that literally means that if you have a video with speech, you have to have another video with a sign language interpreter who's showing in sign language what's being spoken.

Um, sometimes so it gets really, really. Difficult. And honestly, the vocab guidelines rent, they actually say we do not recommend level AAA for most sites, because you have to kind of dumb down the, the functionality of your website so much in order to hit all those criteria. But anyway, there's a level, a AA AAA, and again, level eight AA means you have to meet all these and this for sorry.

And these same thing with 2.1, 2.1 supersedes 2.0, um, level AA means you got to get all these 20 and these 30. So now there's more success criteria. So all of these little success criteria here on the left-hand sidebar, that that is the meat of what does it mean for a website to be accessible. Now, when your edit, when you're sorry, when you're auditing a website for web accessibility, you have four options.

You can look at every individual success criteria and then say, does the website pass? Does it feel. Is this kind of content not present, or I can't tell. I can't tell because for whatever reason, usually that means like I need more testing or I need access to a end login or something like that. But that's how those reports are run.

When you're like giving a report to a municipality that has a department of justice settlement, you give them a report that says, okay, we've analyzed your website based on these criteria. And here's how you did for each one of these it's very time consuming. I have when I, when I'm compiling those reports, I take frequent walks around the block just to clear my mind from the wait.

Was that 1.1 0.1? Or was that 1.4 0.3? I can't remember. Oh, wait. No, that was the other client last week. So I frequently walk around the block to clear my mind. So, and I think this was a question I saw on the. The most common barriers to access. And it was really nice for me to see that, um, there's a project called the web 8 million, which I link to in this presentation where you can see where webbing put together, uh, an analysis of the top million websites and analyze their homepages and to see how they did.

And I think I referenced this in one of my earlier slides where I took out that, uh, the, kind of the executive summary about just how bad it was, but it was nice for them to split out the most common errors that they see. And I was reading it and I was like, yes, yes, yes, yes, me too. Um, contrast errors by wide margin, contrast errors are just, um, and if you click on this, it will take you here to show you what it means with the contrast error, but essentially a contrast error is where specifically, mostly.

On a screen is not dark enough. Or if it's reversed, if you have like light text on dark, again, that that's contrast is not stark enough to where it's blurring together. And I see this a lot where companies will try to have a website with like a light brown background or like tan and or gray. They'll have not like FFF FFF for their, you know, their hex coat for pure white.

It'll be slightly gray. Well, the problem is if you have slightly gray texts with, or, you know, if you have a slightly gray background with darker gray text, there's not enough latitude between them. And so they actually have a mathematical calculation where it has to be, it has to have a contrast ratio of at least 4.5 to one.

There's a tool that I love to use, which I linked to, um, later on towards the very end. But it's it's I have this open. Most hours of the day, it's called color contrast analyzer. And what you can do is you can go through and click here on your eyedropper and then say, all right, my text color is you got to get this.

And my background color is this. And then it'll tell you at each one of those conformance levels. And in this case, it's, if it's set to what character 0.1, but it will say for the contrast you pass at level AA and level AAA pass, pass, pass, pass. Great. So I know, okay, I can use this and I won't have any problems with that.

You can do this. Um, this is kind of cool because it floats so you can like pull up a new tab and then let's go to pepsi.com. Let's see what happens here. Okay. Let's check out their contrast. Foreground is white text and then the background is the. Okay, well, here's a great example. They can use this, um, if they're adhering to the AA level, but they can't, if they're trying to adhere to the AAA level, cause it's not contrasty enough.

So that's another great test that you can use. So there, there are lots of free tools that you can use that, that give you an understanding of, you know, what, what are your contrast errors? So that's number one, the number two most common. And this is not in terms of importance. I don't think I'm saying this is in terms.

Uh, this list is created in terms of the frequency that it's encountered in the wild right missing alt text. Um, we already talked about that. That's non text content. So that's, um, photographs and charts and things like that. If a user is relying on a screen reader to tell them what a photograph says, and it just says like I M G underscore 1, 2, 3, 4 dot JPG, that's.

Th that's very, very common. And by the way, I'm getting a little nit picky here, but it's called alt text. It's not all techs. I hear people say all the time, all tags, and I'm not trying to split hairs or be rude about it, but tags are different tags are that that's a technical term, but tags are in PDFs.

You can have a tag, a PDF or an untagged PDF. That's not what all text is. Pardon me? Empty links. It's number three. That's where you have links. Uh, like a lot of times fly out manuals will have a link. That's just a hash and you click on that to trigger some sort of action on the website. The problem is a screen reader.

Can't figure out what that's doing. It'll just say link. That's it like? So there, you know, the user is sitting there tabbing through using their keyboard, wondering like, what, what, like, should I activate this link? Should I not? Um, so empty links, missing form input labels. That's where you've got. Oh, no.

Okay. That's where you've got a form where if you are, I are using a website with a mouse and we've got the visual stimuli of being able to look at a screen and we can click, click, click, and then hit submit. This doesn't affect us at all. But again, if you're using a screen reader or something like that, that's telling a user who can't see what's on the screen.

This input, you know, this form input says, first name. This one says phone number. This one says email address. Um, if it's not, if it doesn't have the proper input label, that screen reader is going to get confused. And it's going to say like field text, field. Okay. So then the user says, well, what takes field?

What do I put in your, I don't know. Um, and then number five is missing document language, which is. Ridiculous. It's almost silly. Like, I can't even believe that this happens. That's where you do your, you know, your doc type declaration in the very beginning of the page, and then you have wrestling or whatever that tag is that says what language, the pages in, believe it or not.

That's the number five, most common mistake. Um, people forget to add the language of their page. Oh, that's important. And it's more, it's more important than you might think, because there might be people who have a screen reader or, uh, an iPhone that's set to read pages in Spanish. And if it doesn't know exactly which language is the default language of the website, it might get confused.

So that's important. Um, but notice what's missing from all those bullet points I talked about before only the automatically detectable errors are included. That means only the things that like that was that study that analyzed those million web. It didn't, you know, they didn't visit physically a million websites and click around and try to do things.

They use their software to go hit the homepage of a million sites and then just send them the automated results. But you can't just have automated tests. You have to have human tests in order to truly say if a website is accessible or not. So here on my slide, it says many accessibility barriers cannot be detected automatically and require manual slash human testing.

Some of those include, and here are four examples that just immediately came to me that I see all the time, even if a webpage passes wave, for example, or another website scanner, many times I'll see all green boxes in wave, and then I'll still find these problems here, contact forms for whatever reason, sometimes, you know, whether if, even if you have the, the input field titled.

The, the forum doesn't work or when they try to submit it, it doesn't properly trigger an error. And then the user core user keeps hitting, submit, submit, submit, and they can't tell what happened. Did it submit, you know, did it take my credit card payment? Did it actually send my email that says contact your city, Councilman?

Um, they don't know because the error messaging is not set up right. Or the required field is not reading off to the screen reader. Hey, there are seven fields in this form. You only filled out six of them. And it's the fourth one that you're missing very frequently contact forms. They're notorious for preventing actual real life users from completing tasks, even after automated tests, reveal no issues, image, all attributes.

So again, sometimes like I've seen CMS content management systems, and I don't think WordPress does this in any. No, I think that does it. I think it does it with a title, but not the Altecs. Um, if you upload an image that's IMG underscore 30, 26 to JPEG some CMS is we'll use the name as the alt tag, or let's see, I just did it as the alt text for the image that doesn't work.

It will technically pass, or it could technically pass automated testing because it's looking for the, on those automated scanners, like wave it's saying, okay, I see an image. Is there all texts? Yes. Moving on image all text. Yes. Image all texts. Yes. Good. Um, but if you have image with an Alteryx that says IMG underscore 30, 26, you're still not conveying meaningful information.

What does the image about, and you know, I've got a link here, which this is a great read on, um, the W3C website. They have some really great examples of w. Does meaningful alt texts look like and how long should it be and how descriptive should it be? Is it good enough to just say dog? No, it's not. So they give you some examples of, you know, like dog with a bill attached to its color.

Great example. There's context here. Right? So there's images use to supplement other information. So it's contextual depends on what kind of image it is. Um, if you have, by the way, like on this, uh, PowerPoint presentation that I have this green bar. PowerPoint thinks that's an image, even though it's just the green bar.

So I have to manually go in and check a box in the text section that says, this is a purely decorative image. And so what it will do is it will still give it an alt text attribute, but with a blank in it and that's acceptable. That's okay. Because that means that image is purely decorative. So if you're uploading a gradient like a gray gradient on the bottom bar of a website, you don't need to write out gray gradient.

That's silly because there's no meaningful information that needs to be conveyed. Um, so in that case you would leave it blank. Now, the thing that would trigger a scanner is if you have no alt equals quote quote at all. So if there's no alt attribute along with your image and that attribute is just gone, it will instantly say, this is, this is a problem.

I'm triggering it. I'm flagging this. Again, if you just have, if you do have all texts in here, but it's meaningless, um, you're still not actually being, you know, you're not complying with the letter of the law. You're not that defeats the whole purpose of all text. So that's a frequent error that I see capture challenges.

We could talk for capture so many times. Let me just say, ask a person, a person with visual disabilities, what they think about capture. I will let them speak for you there. Hell hath no fury like a person trying to fill out a caption, but can't because it's too convoluted. Um, so just because a scanner says you're good to go.

If that doesn't mean you are, if someone with actual disabilities is trying to submit your form and they can't use your capture because it's old or it's not loud enough or whatever. Um, and then captions and transcripts. I see this all the time, especially when they're auto. Sometimes you can have captions or transcripts and you can technically say, okay, well we do, we did we do that?

So we're helping people with visual disabilities by giving them captions. Okay. Well, if you really want to see just how horrendously bad this can be, and some of these are actually, um, maybe not safe for work, but it's just, it's bizarre how bad machines are. Even with artificial intelligence to try to figure out what's happening in as soon or in a scene in a movie like sobbing mathematically that's, you know, a Spock, what does that mean?

Uh, aggressively screams me out. It's so funny. Uh, so many of them are just really, really bad. I think this one's really, we're not gonna, we're not gonna talk about knowing, um, you know, intensity, intensity. How helpful is that? I don't know. Sometimes it's just totally unhelpful screaming like a sissy. So just, or sometimes it's just wrong.

Like, this is just, this is really sad. Tick, tick, tick, tick. Maybe that's a tennis sounds like, but that's not an accurate transcription of what's going on. There's probably some voiceover with, uh, you know, the commentators talking about this tennis match. So enjoy that link. If you want to really see just how bad it is.

So there are no quick fixes insights. So again, that's kind of the depressing part where I tell people like, oh, it's complicated, it's going to cost money. And it's going to be tough. It's going to take time. But that's the whole point. The reason why we got here I think is because it's complicated and it takes time.

And so people have said, well, you know, it's not a big deal or I've heard people say things like, yeah, but this is offensive, but it's true. How many disabled people are going to use my website in. These are bad. These are bad responses. They're bad answers. They're the wrong attitude. Um, but so is saying like, let's just check the box and make this go away.

That's not good either. So I tell people, accessibility is a process. You never get to like, say, okay, check our website is now fully accessible. And if you want to read my slide later, you know, I write here that the days of static websites published once and frozen in time are long gone. Most websites use a CMS and they're updated on a regular basis.

So even if you're able to check a box on a specific day and say, as of right now, we can form with vocab 2.0, you have to keep that effort going. Because every time you add a new page to that website or upload a new PDF, you have the potential for liability. So it's about continually monitoring and training all the admin users who add an edit content.

And you saw that when we talked about the Denver, the city and county of Denver and their settlement, that's exactly what. So do you have to keep re-evaluating it, um, every year and you have to train your staff. So here's just a quote that I like using when people send me a, a wave report and they say, I got all green boxes.

It says there are evaluation tools that help with evaluation. However, no tool alone can determine if a site meets accessibility guidelines, knowledgeable human evaluation is required to determine if a site is accessible. Um, so here's my frustration. Sometimes there's, you know, you wear a false sense of security and make sure your organization's priorities are right.

So I'll just read this. I feel like this happens sometimes. So this is me with an organization. Hey, is there a website accessible? May know them? Why not me? Lots of reasons. Here's my extremely detailed report, you know, complete with links and everything them well, that looks bad. How long will it take to fix me?

Uh, we might want to just delete the site and start over them. What that sounds hard and expensive me. Right. And then they'll say, does it even matter or let's deal with it later and typically ignore the report and I'll say, so you want to wait until you get sued. Sometimes they'll even say, nevermind. We found a plugin that fixes everything.

And then I just go home and cry into my pillow and feel like I'm wasting my time. Um, now here's, here's where I'm I get slightly controversial and I don't think it should be controversial, but there's so many companies that are Hawking software solutions to accessibility that it is worth mentioning because of my last slide.

I'm very serious about. Be aware of false sense of security, right? Do not rely on plugins or overlays. And in my opinion, bolt on solutions are not the answer. Um, there are definitely lots of accessibility overlays. I list 2, 4, 6, 8, 10 of them here. There's tons of there's many, many more that are out there that I haven't even seen yet.

And they look like this. They've got, you know, a little opportunity for you to click keyboard, nav, read page change, contrast. These are helpful to an extent, but they don't get to the heart of the issue. Um, there, there are lots of blog posts out there with competing views on this. My perspective is this is a bolt-on solution.

This is trying to retrofit something that was not designed for accessibility in mind, in the first place. And so you can use it. I'm not saying don't use it, but I'm saying do not rely on it. Um, and it's not ideal, plus it is. Some people would say that it is slightly offensive to say to a person with disabilities that you are going to help them by giving them this plugin, because you're kind of implying that they don't already use assistive technology.

Um, they do, if they're visiting your website, right. Odds are that they already use a screen reader. So, and I've actually seen in my runs with, um, one of my business associates who is totally blind. I've seen her screen reader, uh, fight with widget overlays like this, where this starts talking and her screen reader starts talking and then you can't figure out which one is doing what?

And you know, and then it's like, well, go away. How do I close that? I don't know. How did I activate that? I accidentally hit the wrong thing and then it's talking and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And it's, it's kind of a disaster. So the assumption that I always have is if someone's totally blind and they're using a screen reader, they're already using a screen reader because they know that they need it and they know how to use it.

Okay. They're not just like sitting around twiddling their thumbs, waiting for you to give them this gift and solve their problem. They know how to solve their problem. If you build your website the right way. That's my perhaps, um, slightly, uh, offensive statement towards these things. I'm sorry. If any of you have websites with these, uh, overlays or plugins again, I'm not saying they're terrible.

I'm not saying don't use them. I'm saying just be aware that, um, They're not the answer. They may be an answer for some people at some time, but not the answer. And here's a great example. So just look at that department of justice settlement. Um, did you see anything? I read that whole settlement. It doesn't say anything about plugins or overlays.

It doesn't say that you can add in this assistive, uh, script, just this one line of Java script, and then now your problem solved. Now it says you have to perform automated accessibility tests and annually enlist individuals with disabilities to test its pages. So I'm not telling you how to run your business or what to tell your clients, but as far as the department of justice has confirmed or, um, it's word, I'm trying to concern, that's their solution.

Their solution is not an overlay or a plugin. Um, plus again, and here here's a, here's an example. I have my family business. Um, I have some extended family. They have a construction group. Where they build new homes. And we just, we talked about this as a company all the time, which is what do you do if you're building a house for somebody that uses a wheelchair, for example, or a cane or a Walker or something like that?

Well, there's a couple things you can do, someone like that can either go out and buy a house and then have it retrofitted by adding a wheelchair ramp, you have to modify the bathroom, put, grab bars on things. You know, you've, you've gotta be careful with the width of, um, hallways and that sort of thing.

So retrofitting an existing house for somebody with mobility issues, for example, is maybe better than nothing, but it's not the best, obviously. Um, all else being equal. You should start the process of, you know, building a house with accessibility in mind. And in that particular example, you could avoid having steps all together.

So my family's business, um, they would always try to, for example, build a house with a garage that does not have a step up into the house that way, whether it's older folks who are carrying groceries and, you know, they've decided they're going to retire in that house and spend their, their final base there.

They want to know they can still use a cane or a Walker and not always have to navigate that step. That there's a term for that these days in architecture. And it's just a simple terms, just universal design, which is saying like all else being equal. How can we design something that is as inclusive as possible to everybody that doesn't require somebody with a particular disability or challenge to need special help?

Or, you know, special, special needs, just make it as accessible as possible for everyone. That's the, in my opinion, that's a better solution. And I love this quote from the W3C, which says when developing or redesigning a website, evaluate accessibility early and throughout the development process to identify accessibility problems early, when it's easier to address them.

To me, it seems like a lot of companies that use plugins and overlays they're there. It's like, here's our whole design development process. Here's our lunch. And then like right before we launch, oh yeah, we need to install that plugin. That's not the right way. In my, maybe not so humble opinion now. So answering somebody's question, who asked there's some greatness for WordPress users and I mean, WordPress developers and designers, WordPress has accessibility baked in, and it's been very impressive to see that since the theme 2017 was released, uh, WordPress, if you download, uh, an actual theme from WordPress, you know, automatic, the, the organization, if you download one of those out of the box themes, there is so much accessibility baked into it.

It's really amazing how very deliberate they were in thinking about. How can we make this as accessible to everybody? And for example, if you're a sighted user like me, who's never had to rely on a screen reader. Um, you might not have even noticed that, but you actually have, if you use 2017 or later, you have skip links already built in where, when somebody is navigating with the screen reader, there's an option that says skip to main content.

I don't see it because it's hidden, but a screen reader sees it. So, um, I'm so pleased and impressed with the effort that WordPress has been doing. Really. You really can't go wrong at a base level anyway, until you start to add a whole bunch of inaccessible content onto it, but at a base level, the CMS that WordPress is, has a lot of accessibility.

Um, I do have a note here. Not all third-party themes are accessibility or sorry are accessible and some are especially problematic in particular, watch out for really fancy themes that try to be super visually stimulating with parallax sliders or, um, you know, like, like 3d effects where if you scroll with your mouse, the background goes down and the content goes up and it looks like there's depth, content, carousels fly out menus, things of that nature.

Those are typically pretty problematic. And a lot of times they're more hassle than they're worth. So, you know, just, just my advice as a designer, and I'm not the world's greatest web designer, but I've designed a lot of websites, my advice, and my, my consistent theme in all of my designs. And you can see.

Here in my, uh, my PowerPoint presentation, simple, simple, simple, simple. And by the way, my PowerPoint presentation is accessible and I used color contrast analyzer to make sure that the text color, the background color had enough. Um, you know, the ratio was appropriate to conform to the WCAG 2.0 level AA, cause I didn't want to be a hypocrite.

So official themes found on wordpress.org are great, um, resources and tools. Almost all of them are free. There's uh, I'll I will modify my slides here to link to this, uh, to each one of these, but again, browser extensions or web tools, web name. Wade is a really great scanner. DQ X. These are the, the people that made this shirt.

Um, I really like ax. It's a great tool. It's it's more in depth than. Uh, then wave, it allows you to test forms. You can run some pretty sophisticated tests where it it'll catch a lot of those form errors that wave won't, um, HTML code sniffer is, uh, it's a little bookmarklet where you, you click on it and then it gives you this pop-up on the screen that you're looking at and it tells you all the, the HTML problems that are causing errors, um, Chrome box.

That's a really great, um, it's, it's still, you can still get it. It's not being developed anymore, but that's the built-in screen reader for Chrome. So if you have a Mac and I think it works on windows too, but if you have Google Chrome and you want to just test out, like, what does it sound like to use a screen reader?

Or what does someone relying on a screen reader experience on my website? For example, you can use Chrome box, the plugin, and then when you activate it, it will read everything to you. And it's really overwhelming. And if you're not someone who's familiar with screen readers, you're going to turn it off.

Maybe even just a couple of seconds because it'll, but because it's so overwhelming, but I highly recommend that you do that as an exercise, just to get a sense of like, wow, this is a lot trickier to navigate a website using just a keyboard and a screen reader than I thought color, contrast analyzer.

That's a great tool. Um, I showed you that one before on Pepsi and the W3C validator. That's they also call it the new HTML checker. That's really helpful. Um, sometimes you have extremely technical errors, like, and I don't mean technical. Like it'll take your mass amount of brain power to figure out what it is, but I mean, it's, it's none of the above.

It has nothing to do with alt text or anything like that. It'll be like, you have a redundant or you have an open key tag and you forgot to close it here. That's something that like most users would never notice, but the W3C validator, it has a great validator where you can run your HTML. Um, and then it will flag the errors that you have parsing errors, technical errors, and then for websites and blogs with more info, the W3C there, you know, they started at all.

They're the ones they're not really in charge, but they're the best. Even the European union is looking at the W3C saying their guidelines are awesome. Stick to that. Um, I do want to show you real quick. We've got a couple minutes left, but, uh, I already mentioned the quick reference guide and then web aim.

This is their website, um, where you can read more about their resources, but I want to show you this. I think this is the last thing I want to share. There's this great. They call it the bad demonstration a before and after demo. So if you look at this website right here, you can open the before homepage.

Now this looks very, very dated. I know it's 2020, but this looks like it was made in 1995. But if you open up the before. And then run, wave. Let's see what it does. 38 errors, two contrast errors, a bunch of alerts, right? We've got problems. But if you open up this link that says after, so this is after they've remediated this, then you click wave, check it out.

So this is better and this is worse. But the funny thing is, if you notice, like, look at the difference between these two bad, good, bad, good visually, there's very, very little that you would notice is significantly different, but the behind the scenes, um, actual accessibility that's built into this. This is all remediated and people of all different kinds of abilities or disabilities and relying on lots of different assistive technology can use.

But can not use this. So if you really want to read about that, you know, go to the w3c.org, they'd have so much information. It's really helpful. They've got, um, oh, and, uh, as a final resource, they just came out with it, which is why I'm sorry, I didn't mention this before, but the, if you really want to get a sense of, like, I want a class, a course on what web accessibility is start to finish checklist after checklist principle 1, 2, 3, 4, in my opinion, there's never been something like that until now.

And it just came out like, um, uh, a couple of weeks ago, I think, keg, um, testing, um, edX. Let me see if I can find it. I don't know mine here. It is. Yes. Introduction to web accessibility. So I'll be happy to share this. With you, but this is a whole course and it's a four week course and you can take it for free.

It's amazing. It is so full of really good stuff. You just look at this, uh, the syllabus here, what is web accessibility? Let's talk about people in digital technology, the business case benefits, principles, standards, checks getting started. It's very well done. Um, I highly recommend this. This is the best resource I've found for somebody who just says, you know what?

Like I want to do it. I want to learn what's in it. I want to know where to start, you know, everything that I should know to, to a certain level, and then say, now I understand at a high level, what it's all about. This is an excellent course. Um, highly recommended. And again, it's free and it's cool because it's, it's actually synchronous, right?

Like you actually enroll and there's a start date and a finish date. It's a real course, there are other students and you can post messages. You can ask questions. If you sign up for this, you might see me in there cause I'm currently enrolled in one of them. Cause I'm just so thrilled that I found it. So I think, uh, yeah, I think that's what I have.

That's all I have for right now. So at this point, I'm going to stop and with a few minutes left, I'll see if Dave wants to say anything about whether we have questions or not. Sure. Well, thank you so much, Ron. Um, there was one or two questions that, um, if we can, I mean, we just got a couple of minutes, but um, uh, Betty had asked, um, if there was, uh, any kind of cost for hiring a company to do accessibility work and come in and fix problems.

And I'm sure that that can range, um, a lot based on what somebody needs and how many issues there are. Um, there, I think there was another question to Corinda kind of at the end there too asked about, um, More, maybe from like what she should be charging. It sounded like, um, other people, if they come to her with accessibility issues, can you speak at all just a little bit, or maybe give us some ballpark or some ranges, or maybe a strategy you use to think about how you price out different accessibility projects, anything you can share?

Hmm. That is a good question. I think the way I would probably approach that two different two different ways. So when people come to me and they say we received a letter, I tell them great. Here's my hourly rate. Because I have no idea what you're going to need at this point, because it's, it's so situation dependent, right?

So I'll tell them like, the best thing to do is like buy a block of hours and then I'll tell them. So here's some paid discovery, just like an attorney, right? Like, I'm going to estimate that in order to remediate this, it's going to take many hours, but to get started, let's like pay me for five or 10 and then we can get the conversation going.

We can discover just how difficult is the issue. How long is it going to take to remediate it? Um, how much back and forth do we need to have with an attorney? So that's what I would do. If somebody said I'm already in trouble, please help. But otherwise, if they're just being proactive and saying, like, we just want to be good stewards of our website, we want to make sure that everybody who visits it can then typically I'll run a quick.

Uh, I'll, there's a great tool called screaming frog. If you haven't used it, if you've ever done SEO, you're probably familiar with it. It's called screaming, frog, SEO, spider. And if you plug in the URL, it will crawl a website up to the first 500. Elements. I think they call it, but several hundred pages worth.

And then you can just look and you can export a CSV sheet sheet and say, okay, I see what they're doing. They've got all right. The homepage here about here, child pages off of this one child pages off of this one. And then I'll start to get a sense of like, how many templates are they talking about?

Because with a website, let's say, let's say it has 350 pages. You cannot inspect every page and nor are you expected to. So what the, the CAG guidelines say is you want to get a representative sample. So sometimes that could be 10 pages. Sometimes it could be three pages. It depends on how big the site is.

So determine what your representative sample is. And then in my case, I try to figure out how many templates are there. There's clearly a homepage template. There's like a full width template. There's an about us template with some child pages off of it. And then just say, what would it take for me to. All of these pages, give them a really nice report.

Um, how many hours would that take? And then I would make a project fee based off of that. But then the thing you have to be careful about is you have to delineate between, am I solving your problem? Or am I just giving you the report about what your problems are? It's always every time it's always different.

A lot of times, at least with municipalities, for example, they say, no, no, give us the report. We'll have our staff do this, which is great. I love that because then I say, wonderful, here's your report. Have a nice day. Where's my check. And I don't get bogged down in these long back and forth multiple week, drawn out things like, how do we do this?

Oh, we tried this, it didn't work now. What? So as part of that proposal, if you're going to create a proposal, I would definitely make it a project based fee or a fee based project. However you want to say that and. With a very clear explanation, super clear of what the deliverables are. I'm going to give you a report that shows you this, this, this, and this, and then I'm going to walk away.

And if you want to talk more, we can, but that's a separate proposal for a separate phase because the first phase is figuring out what are the problems in the first place? And you can't fix anything till you figure out what that is. So typically that's how I work. I say, let's decide, let's discover what all the problems are.

And then you, Mr. Client or Madame client or whatever you tell me, do you want to keep working with me? Or do you want to give this to your webmaster? And then especially if they're a small business, they'll almost always say, yeah, we'll just send to our web guy and have him do it. And then three weeks later they say, I get an email from, you know, Joe schmo@gmail.com.

He'll say, Hey, I'm the webmaster for such. I have no idea what this is talking about. Can you help me, I'll say put you out of course, for a fee. Um, so that's how I would approach it. So it's kind of, you know, one project price with very clear deliverables and in phases. So phase one, phase two, and then maybe phase three.

And if it's an unknown and there's like an active, legal issue going on, then for me, it's all hourly. Great. Yeah. That's awesome. Thanks for that. Um, it is eight o'clock now. So, um, there are like one or two more quick things, Ron, if you have maybe five more. Sure to ask and for anybody else that needs to head out now, thank you guys for joining us, um, and stay safe and healthy and take care of those around you and your community.

Um, but, uh, one or two more questions we'll try to get to here real quick, just for another five minutes and then we'll, then we'll call it. Good. Um, Ron, one thing I wanted to, um, we don't need to go through it now, but if you, if you have a chance and you wouldn't mind, um, Lisa asked that those examples that you have have a really good, um, well put together accessible site, um, whether it's maybe popular ones you've seen before, um, you may reference your own site.

I haven't looked at it and run it. We don't know we can, we can give you a hard time for that later, but, um, if you have one or two examples of really well done, highly accessible sites, the path with gag, two that you like, or that you've seen, um, maybe even some of your clients, you can share those. But Lisa was asking for a few examples of good ones.

You can just jump in the meetup group and post those in the comments. Um, when you get a chance, that'd be awesome. Um, and, um, another question from Lisa was we talked a little bit about WordPress themes and that's great to know that all of automatics, um, themes starting from, I think you said 2010 on, um, 27, 20, 20 17 on, sorry.

Yeah, have done a really great job. Um, she at least asked about the top priorities, uh, in terms of accessibility, if you are using WordPress or would you say those match up to the, the same sort of your slide that had the most common things you see in terms of color, contrast, missing all texts? Like when you work on a WordPress site, um, if they're not using it in a theme that's already done a really good job with accessibility.

What are the top handful of things that you and your team would work on solving for, for a WordPress theme that you've maybe seen before? Yeah, I think that's a great question. If I understand, I'm sure it's a great question. I, I think I understand it. Right. So going back to my slide, which talked about, you know, the frequency of errors, not necessarily the importance, right?

Contrast areas are very important. They're very, they're very important because they're high they're what do they call it? Sorry, not high, low hanging fruit, right? In a lawsuit, for example, the, the threatened lawsuit, at least of the guy who said, you know, we're going to Sue you for $250,000. That's what they specifically mentioned.

They specifically said contrast errors and our client has a visual impairment and they go on to list what his exact visual impairment is, which may totally be true. And it may very well be that he can't use the website, but so I would prioritize that very highly. That's such easy fodder for people who are looking to Sue a company.

So image contrast, sorry, not, not image contrast. If I said image contrast, I meant contrast. So contrast errors are, you know, text on backgrounds that they can't read. Um, but the other thing would be all texts. Definitely all texts because especially with WordPress sites, they're full of galleries all the time.

Right? WordPress is really good at showing showcasing photos, um, visual stimulant stimuli involving photographs or even videos. You've got to have alt text for that, and it's so easy to do. And it's so, um, challenging for people who, you know, Like just imagine, like, you know, if you show up at a website that's full of photos and the whole focal point of that, the website or the page you're on is to view a beautiful gallery and there's literally no information you can glean from it, then you're getting absolutely nothing from it.

It doesn't help you at all that you're, you're gaining 0% of the information. So I'd say alt text for images are really important. And just to jump in real quick on that, I completely agree. It is super easy and WordPress to add them, but WordPress, by default with WordPress core, it won't automatically add them for you.

So it isn't easy. It is easy for you, but it won't automatically do it. Um, I don't have the names of the specific plugins now, but I do believe there are one or two plug-ins. One of them is an SEO plugin that does some AI and tries to actually insert alt texts when you upload the image. Um, but again, like Ron kind of alluded to, there's like with captioning, how bad that can be.

Um, I'm sure that even these plugins that are trying to do use AI to come up with all texts, they're not all going to get it right. And they're going to come up with some pretty silly things and aren't going to make any sense. So, um, I'll, I'll see if I can find those and add them to the meetup group. Um, if you guys are curious about some, uh, some ways to try to automate that, but with the huge caveat that be careful and still look at them yourselves, because you may need to be somewhere.

Definitely and, and real quick on that, not on that exact note, but to the, to the question at hand P uh, PDFs are incredibly problematic. I've seen more complaints about government. My goodness, governmental agencies get in trouble all the time for PDFs because they're not exporting a PDF from the original source file.

And it's kind of, it seems stupid, but you kind of understand where they're coming from. Most of them like elected officials, they're not hired because of their tech savvy, right. They're in their role for different reasons. So they'll do things like create a minutes for a meeting and then they'll print it out.

They'll take it to their meeting. And then as part of like open records acts, they have to share that if they have like council chambers meetings and there's like three or more people there, like the Colorado open records act, right. Says that if there are two or three city council members meeting together talking about city council business, they have to share what was talked about with anybody who asks.

And so sometimes they'll scan that PDF. They'll scan that pace of paper and then upload it to their website. So what they've essentially done is stripped all meaningful information and turned what could have been a really great, awesome, you know, tag rich optimized document into a, essentially just an initial.

Without any old text at all. So that is a classic example where all the time municipalities, government agencies and companies get hammered for having, um, image like images of text or PDFs that are scanned PDFs that are not tagged. That's why I said tag is a different term. Tag PDFs is really important.

Um, but the same thing goes for menus. Restaurants are notorious for having their menus online. As an image, you can't do that technically. You can't do that because you can't convey that the meaningful information to a user relying on a screen reader with something that says menu dot JPEG, it doesn't work.

So you, if you want to be complete. And if you want everybody to be able to consume the information on your website and not be excluded, if you're sharing a menu, there is a way to create a table and yes, it's tables where there's a table header and that sort of thing. So a screenwriter can parse out rows and columns and know, okay, this data piece goes with this because it's in this column and it corresponds with this.

Cause it's in this row. And, you know, a classic example I use, um, some sometimes I'll see a restaurant that has like an HTML, uh, menu and I'll be like, good job, but they'll screw it up on the same page. Cause they'll have like a dairy-free options or a gluten-free menu below that. And it's very clear that somebody added that after.

And whoever did the original menu on the website put a lot of time and effort into doing it the right way. But the person who added that subsequent one, when they came out with a new menu, it's just a screenshot or like an iPhone grab of an actual menu. So those, those are the important things, low hanging fruit restaurants.

You've got to put your menus online because it is many times I believe courts and reasonable people have found that it is in fact, very discriminatory to say, we'll check our menu online. You know, if a block, if a person who's totally blind says, you know, what do you have? Do you have a dairy free menu or something like that, or a vegetarian vegan menu?

And you say, well, just check it out on our website. And then they go to your website and it's not, they can't understand it. That's inherently exclusive. So that's really low-hanging fruit in terms of effort, but in terms of priority, that's a high priority. No scanned PDFs, no screenshots of text. Great. If you, um, if you have any resources for how to best optimize a PDF for accessibility, um, if you could share those in the, in the comments of the meetup page, that'd be awesome too.

I'm sure if you've at least a few people would, uh, would get a lot of use out of that.

Awesome. All right. Well, it's almost 10 after eight. Um, just wanted to, uh, thanks again, Ron. Uh, the presentation was awesome and, um, I'll work with Ron on getting a copy of that and seeing if we can post that to the group. Um, cause there's a lot of really good references in there and a lot of links that, um, and tools and stuff that we can use.

So, um, so thanks again to Ron and thank you all for joining us. I think this was a success. If you have any feedback on how it went technically, um, because we may be doing this, um, at least for another couple, um, of the next few meetups then, please. Yeah. So please, please share your feedback, um, in the comments.

Um, but we do plan on continuing to, to bring as much information as we can about WordPress to you guys once a month, like you normally do so thanks again for joining, um, and take care of guys like Trump.