Your Website’s Accessibility Deadline Got Pushed Back (But Your Legal Risk Didn’t)

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we’re live so that’s good there it is it pops up so should maybe that means we can talk yeah yeah we know it’s a
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the comments and wants to let us know that they can hear us okay that’s the last hurdle we got to we got to climb before we know we’re good to go and we
can get on with this show Taylor’s here good to see you
Taylor all good Greg says I imagine that means we sound all good yep loud and clear all good thank you Jonathan Steve
Roger awesome Charlie both sound good Charlie we both look good too you just forgot that part
oh that’s an important part that’s right I don’t get dolled up like this for just anybody you
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Interview Agenda
you guys here today as soon as uh I guess it was earlier this month April’s kind of flown by it feels like it was
maybe maybe longer than that ago but earlier this month there was news from the United States justice department
about a new decision on accessibility and anytime that happens my ears perk up and I know exactly who I want to turn to
so got Amber uh signed up for a call just as quickly as I could and we’re going to pick her brain today on what
exactly this means now I will say amber did us the favor of reading through about 300 pages of legal jargon so we
didn’t have to and she’s put together an awesome summary post here I’m gonna dump into the chat and I’ll dump it in there
later too and that kind of summarizes everything that’s in that uh decision uh
however we want to phrase it there um they call it the final rule the final rule yes they call it okay perfect so
there’s there’s the overview of that and so now you don’t have to read the 300 pages and thank you Amber for doing that
for us uh but before we jump in to start asking all these questions and finding out more I want to give everybody a
Who is Amber Hinds?
chance who might not know you yet Amber to get to know you a little bit uh Amber has been a huge uh help for us inside
the admin bar as far as accessibility she wrote uh 52 accessibility weekly posts all of last year which was
absolutely awesome we owe her a ton for that uh she does the accessibility Meetup she has all kinds of things going
on I’ll stop doing it and I’ll let Amber tell us a little bit about herself yeah so thank you Kyle I’m
excited to be here uh and I do love the group very much I get a lot of benefit out of it myself as well so it’s always
nice to hear other agency stories so I am the CEO of a company called equalized digital we are a mission-driven
organization that focuses on WordPress accessibility we have a plugin for
WordPress websites that helps you audit for accessibility called accessibility Checker there’s a free version on
wordpress.org and you can also get paid versions of it off of our website and
then in addition to that we do a lot of accessibility related Services uh many
of which are for other agencies we were excited to be the accessibility team on the NASA website for example last year
which was really fun and um and we do Audits and user testing and I run the
Meetup I am also run I’m one of the co-lead organizers of Wordpress
accessibility day conference and I’m on the core WordPress accessibility team
that’s a lot of stuff yes sometimes I definitely do not
get enough else yeah yeah and I have four I have four daughters and uh my husband is my business owner or partner
so that is always fun to have a a Business Partnership in the house which some people are like I would never do
that and other people are like yeah it’s awesome so so basically what you’re saying is you have five children if you include him only at dinner time that’s
right well sweet well and and obviously you’ve been one of the huge things y’all
do is pour so much into education and I really appreciate you being here to do this I know you have plenty of things to
be doing so sitting here talking to me uh I feel privileged to have that so I’m going to jump in here and start asking you questions so I think the biggest uh
uh I think the rest of us get anxiety we don’t know how to take these things uh we’re not sure what to do with all this
What is this decision all about?
so I’m hoping we can clear up some of those questions today the biggest problem has been there’s just been not a lot of clear guidance it feels like
everything around accessibility is a little bit muddy here in the United States same with privacy uh but I I
wonder if maybe just in a nutshell you could tell us what this decision from uh the doj is kind of all
about yep so basically up until now title two of The Americans with
Disabilities Act specifically has said that public entities so any government
funded thing uh needed to be accessible uh to people with disabilities and that
included their websites but up until April there wasn’t any specific
technical standards within the Ada about how to measure accessibility and they
were sort of relying on public entities to take it upon themselves to become accessible and what they found was that
that was not happening and there was also confusion about what does it mean because there’s other that specifically
reference the web content accessibility guidelines but the Ada does not so this rule specifically says that um all
government websites state and local governments and also special district
governments which I have a list of them in that post like examples of what those are have to comply with web content
accessibility guidelines 2.1 and all of the level a and level double a success
criteria so it provides a technical standard and it has a timeline for compliance excellent so I’m guessing a
Do you agree with this decision?
ruling like this is something you’re applauding from your side of it yeah I mean I there was I don’t know
if you remember this but in the news around the last election there’s a lot
actually about um voting websites in the state of Texas which is where I live not
being accessible and if you think about you know what um you know what is some
of the core things that we as human beings should have the right to do like being able to find a place to go vote
however you want to vote right and and being able to get that information that’s like really important and there
were other things I think that came up in recent years um you know like access
to covid information or te or free testing or um transportation like
there’s a lot that really impacts quality of life for people with disabilities and our government is
supposed to be for the people and if it’s not supporting everyone or giving
everyone access to how they can get the services that they need um I think you
know we’re our government’s failing and so I’m excited to see a rule that is
going to push that to actually do what it’s been supposed to be doing since the
70s when the Ada um was written um I think of course there’s also some
benefits which we could talk about later from an agency standpoint that I think there’s a lot of opport potential
opportunity here for WordPress developers um if this isn’t you know
serving public entities is something that they want to get into when you want to increase your Revenue in that area um
so I think you know of course there’s benefits there as well but I have a lot of friends who are disabled and I want
them to have access the same thing I do so I think having a more clear standard it reduces confusion it’s it’s good all
around yeah and it used to be that stuff on the internet was kind of like a bonus like there was still physical ways to
Why digital accessibility is critical
find all this information or other places to go for the information but now the internet is the Baseline like when
something you need gets published it gets published online so until somebody go ahead yeah I was just gonna
say like increasingly there’s there’s stuff that’s only online U like I was down in Austin for a conference uh last
week and to pay for parking you had like in the city you had to in inst their
mobile app well what if that mobile app is not accessible for some reason but
the person who has to pay for the parking like maybe they didn’t drive the car but they’re the one who needs to pay right um and so there’s a lot of and
there’s literally no other alternative there’s not meters it was like you have to download the app and pay and that’s
it yeah and and if that’s I mean that happens at restaurants now you can’t order a meal without you know scanning a QR code or whatever and if that’s the
way everything’s going to go that I mean fine by me I don’t mind using devices but until people are obligated to make
things accessible obviously just doing it on their own wasn’t working great uh so besides you know you mentioned
What’s new about this decision?
that I guess this is the first time that they’ve really come out and specified the technical guidelines is that kind of
the big difference between what we had previous to April and what we have now is spec like specifics for us to go off
of yeah so that’s that’s the biggest difference is it’s very clearly saying that it has to be um Wick Haag 2.1 AA
compliant um whereas before it was just a generic it needs to be accessible um the other thing is is they’ve created a
lot more really clear standards about what it covers so for example um they’ve
defined what web content means uh so when we’re talking about this and and
what has to be accessible so it’s the website and they provide examples of like the code the structure anything
like that the images videos animations um controls on a website so
all the things that we would normally sort of think of as websites but they’re also including social media posts so
they say for example if a public entity is using a social media platform like
Facebook or Instagram to communicate information to the public and that platform supports the ability for them
to add alt text on their image but they don’t use that then they can get in trouble because they need they have to
make it as accessible as whatever social media platform supports um captions on videos are another thing um they also
talked a lot and there was a lot of discussion about documents uh things like spreadsheets
PDFs um word docs presentation files uh
like keynote files that kind of thing uh and and in the public comment section
there were some people that were arguing that it’s too hard to make those accessible or maybe they shouldn’t count as web content because you don’t open
them in your browser you usually download them and open them somewhere else so it’s not web content but the justice department was really clear that
a lot of times these documents are really important for people to get the information they need and so they are
including those as well and they weren’t having any exceptions for that um so I
think this provides a lot more clear idea of um what is covered and required
feels like the need for accessibility Consultants is going to be on the rise soon
oh yeah I expect over the next um two to three years that there’s going to be a
big push for this because so many are not accessible I mean my City website
which is built with WordPress I actually discovered this when I was looking around for a talk and I was like where can I demo testing and I didn’t you know
you don’t want to call it your own clients right sure but I went it’s horrible it’s like one of the worst WordPress websites I have ever
seen oh which I laugh but it’s actually very sad right because it’s like how you pay it’s how we pay our water bill and I
was like I don’t know like you can’t even use the navigation so I was like I don’t even know how somebody with disabilities that’s blind would pay
their water bill like maybe they have to ask someone to help them every time because they you know it’s not also not
easy to fill out a paper form or write out a check right so you kind of need the electronic payment platform um so
yeah you know I think there’s a lot of room for growth here Matt Mullen WG said
a couple years ago learn Java script deeply I think the the new one is learn accessibility deeply that seems like the
important thing today um so we we kind of talked about government organizations and I imagine
What businesses need to comply?
people are thinking of huge big government organizations that are going to be covered under this but my understanding is this this trickles down
all the way to like uh local M municipalities and could even have to do
with people who get funding from government like some nonprofits I know we have a ton of people in the group
maybe not a ton that work for cities or big government organizations but a ton that work with nonprofits so how does
that kind of work and who is and isn’t included in this yeah so um schools are
they’re including those in the state and local government categories so if you do anything for like a school district um
that counts they have the what they call special district governments which are things that are considered public
entities but they’re not and they’re like authorized by state law to provide a function um so sometimes these are
nonprofits sometimes there even for-profit companies that are authorized to deliver a service for
the state um and like an example here in Texas is we have Workforce Solutions
that helps people um if they’re going to get unemployment or if they’re going to get uh snap food benefits then they have
to work with Workforce Solutions well Workforce Solutions is what the program is called but it’s actually a for-profit
company that bid on and got the contract to be able to deliver the services of
Workforce Solutions and so technically they’re not like they’re not a government entity but because they are
getting money to deliver the services of the government then it would apply and
that would apply to any nonprofit that is the same thing I know um there are nonprofits that do you know the same
sort of thing in some states or um help people with like housing assistance uh
it so if you’re doing anything to represent the state um libraries a lot of times libraries just seem like small
and not a big deal and I’ve seen a lot of people actually in the group that have said like shared a a library
website or talked about something on the library website so so that’s one um airports what else did I have in this
list yeah water Transit uh parks and wreck can apply if it’s getting any sort
of funding from the state to like help create a park U then their website would
apply as well yeah and I tried to P copy and paste that list into the chat but it looks
like it’s Garb goo in here so I’ll just paste the link again here in case anybody wants to go check out that list
uh it’s all all those are listed out in Amber post okay so I think uh that that
probably helps people give some kind of self assessment go through your mental Rolodex of all the clients that are under your care and think about the ones
that could be affected with this if nothing else it’s probably important to reach out to them if you think they might be on the cusp or might be Ed by
this it probably be important to know but I guess the the thing we’re going to have to talk with clients about first and I do want to get into talking with
When is the deadline to comply?
clients about this but uh when is the deadline for them to comply with all this and what happens if you
don’t Yeah so basically there’s a two or threeyear deadline based upon the
population of the area that they serve or that are in their jurisdiction um so
if there are fewer than 50,000 people then they have two years
and their website needs to comply by April 24th or sorry they have three years and they need to comply by April
26 2027 if they have 50,000 or more than they have two years and that’s April
24th 2026 okay so we got a little bit of time that’s
good that feels like so I mean I think that’s good it gives you time to assess um and make a plan and sometimes it’s
auditing and Remediation and just fixing things because maybe the website isn’t that old it works Works in other ways uh
really well they like the design so then it’s like okay let’s just go through and make fixes where we can other times it’s
a complete overhaul and they had to give some number of time and they gave the
additional year to the smaller entities because they might have fixed budgets
they might have to go through a grant process sometimes to get additional funding especially if they need a
complete rebuild and then usually with all of these entities there’s an RFP process um although sometimes we all
know rfps are a little rigged like if you have a relationship with them they’re like okay here’s how you can
write your answer to the RFP yeah yeah that’s they all happen back channels
right so what about okay let’s let’s fast forward to April 26 20127 is three
What are the consequences for non-compliance?
years from now and our client is not compliant what happens so I kept hoping in that 289
page document I was going to hear about fines uh I don’t think that the justice department has the ability to implement
fines I suspect that that would have to come from Congress and the Americans with Disabilities Act Right Now does not
include anything with fines however under the Americans with Disabilities
Act there’s a couple of ways that it can be enforced so uh people with disabilities can submit official
complaints to the justice department and then the justice department can go through a process with them uh with the
the website owner if you will that’s not a great word but uh to make it compliant
and can sometimes mandate it with potential risk of losing funding which could be very bad in some cases um also
under the Americans with Disabilities Act people with disabilities are allowed to Sue and so we’ve seen a lot of
lawsuits primarily against for-profit businesses or nonprofit organizations
under the Americans with Disabilities Act but I think this strengthening it could potentially increase lawsuits
against the actual government so this is maybe not potential for you to get fine
directly from the government but for those uh for lack of a better term ambulance chasing type lawyers to maybe
create a bunch of problems on top of people actually with issues that need the help I’m not saying that that
doesn’t exist I’m just saying that here in America it seems at least it’s the people who want to take advantage of all
these systems uh that seem to give us it kind of depends there are definitely law
firms that a lot of lawsuits come out of but sometimes the way I like to think about it I was air on the side of giving
them the benefit of the doubt which is literally like the only way it was written into the law that that was how
the law would be enforced and the only way that people with disabilities have been able to make change sometimes has
been suing you know so I don’t know it’s hard to say but the thing to be aware of
uh earlier this year in January in California uh there was an ADA complaint
against um a website that was built for the camping like camping registration
system for state parks where you can go reserve a campsite and that it was a
very large pro project like a $60 million project so I’m gonna preface that first right but the actual web
developer ended up getting sued in addition to the state and the web developer had to pay over $2 million
um in Damages because they had said they
were delivering an accessible website and they were not so I think for those of us that build websites for any
entities covered by the Ada which is for-profit as well like we’re not it
doesn’t this particular conversation is about what’s changed for government but it applies to for-profit businesses and
nonprofits as well um you need to be really clear about what you can deliver
and not and don’t promise something like bring in a partner or whatever right
because you can put yourself at risk as a developer or an agency if you say
something is accessible and it’s not do you know of any good resources where you know uh there’s some already pre-written
language we might want to include in contracts yeah so on the accessibility
weekly on the admin bar I have a post about this and I don’t have the link off the top of my head but maybe we can find
it and yeah put it in the the chat for people um or in the show notes later um
but it has it has contract language from our contracts which came from an attorney I’m not an attorney so I always
recommend I mean you you could take it because my attorney wrote it but just because my attorney wrote it for my company does not mean it’s great for you
so I would recommend Consulting with an attorney um but it is there if you want
to reference it um and even with ours I know it’s a slight tangent but we’re very clear with our projects even as we
sell them that the parts we build will be
accessible but we do not say that we’re going to deliver a 100% accessible
website because we’re frequently and if you imagine if you’re building something for a city or state like you might be
importing in hundreds of blog posts or documents from a way long time ago and
you just don’t want to promise accessibility of something you’ve never looked at well I definitely don’t want
any more than you guys are promising because I know you’re doing about a thousand times better of a job than I am
so I definitely want to be below that do we run into some technical
issues uh maybe I can hear you hello hello hello yep sorry I don’t know what
happened to my earbuds that’s okay I I just said that I I don’t want to promise anything more than you guys are
promising because I know you’re doing a lot more than I am so that’s a great starting point for me um all right so
double A standards so for people that might have not read through all the wick Haag standards uh let’s try to talk
Easiest remediation tasks
about a little bit about that so what are the kind of like the lwh hanging fruit things that you see most often
that are like double A violations that we could probably make ourselves aware of and get educated on quickly to make a
significant difference yes so a common one uh
maybe I’ll just list some really fast that I think are like easy to find and maybe even really easy to fix so color
contrast is a big one making sure that you have good contrast so that things are easy to read for people with low
vision or people on mobile phones outside on sunny day um captions having
captions this is an interesting thing in that doc there was a whole conversation and discussion about whether automated
captions were sufficient for Live Events um because Wick Haag daa does require
captions for Live Events and the justice department decided that they were not going to weigh in on whether or not
automated captions were were not okay and they weren’t going to set a specific like percent accuracy that captions had
to have or anything like that because they were worried that um it might add
an undue burden or cost that would stop public entities from having like webinars or other like virtual events or
like sharing their town meeting on Facebook or whatever um so that was sort of interesting where they went a little
less strict on that specifically um but but there has to be captions of some
sort um alt text on images is a really um frequently mentioned one uh another
thing that I think is really important is headings using headings in the right order so they provide a meaningful
outline of the page and they’re not just picked because of the size or color they are um which we all know love to do in
their page Builders oh yeah uh the having meaningful links is really
important so not using things like click here learn more even download if it’s just download on its own and there’s
multiple downloads or whatever that might be it doesn’t really provide context or meaning for people um I
actually have a blog post which I think I can throw in that has like a a quick
like things that you can test and it talks a lot about keyboard testing so
even if you’re not an accessibility expert like something you can do that’s really easy is just going
to your website not using your mouse and using only your keyboard and making sure
or the website you’re building for clients and making sure that you can do everything that needs to be done on that website with only a keyboard so that
would be using the Tab Key to move forward through links and buttons um and shift tab to go backwards if you want to
go backwards and then making sure you can use the navigation you can um submit
forms you can navigate carousels open accordians change which tab is being
viewed because a lot of times those things are not keyboard accessible because they’re not coded semantically
like they use divs or something instead of buttons um so that’s a really big
one yeah and if you want to take that a step further turn on your your voice over uh and try to navigate the website
with your eyes closed I try that one every once in a while I get very disappointed in myself because it is not easy to do somewhere so um and so so
some of the easy things there and obviously your your guys’ plugin too accessibility Checker if you install that on your WordPress website it’s
going to cover a lot of those things as well that can be automate uh you know the testing can be done automated like
that and it’s going to give you instructions on how to go fix that and all those kinds of things so if nothing
else download the free version of y’s plugin and install it on your site you’re going to be able to see some of the issues you might have right away and
I found it’s it’s one of those things too that’s intimidating at first I mean it’s kind of always intimidating but uh
it becomes less intimidating the more you do it because you end up remediating less and building it right in the first
place more right so if you screw up color contrast two or three times and have to go back and fix it the fourth
time you’re going to remember to check the color contrast before you put it all over the website right and that kind of just multiplies throughout the process
and you end up just building more accessible sites over time hopefully anyways so yeah I mean what I would recommend too is if you have a starter
which if you don’t you should have a starter it saves you so much time just like audit your base whatever your theme
and the base plugins that you always have without any content from a client
uh because that’s nice because that will get sort of like what’s in the header what’s in the footer um you know what
already exists and then you can fix those things in your starter and then you never have to fix them again right
like we we spent time working on our navigation menu and our starter because we wanted to make sure it was super
accessible and it was an upfront time investment but now every time we build a website it just works so I think
spending that time to kind of work on your starter and audit your starter is helpful and then sometimes you do have
to make decisions and and I think this is something that plug-in developers increasingly are going to have to take
accessibility more seriously and there are some that really do a great job with it and there are others that don’t and it sucks to put it mildly um but
increasingly I mean this is not the only law that’s going to apply here the European accessibility act has a
enforcement Cliff that starts in June of 2025 and um we’re going to see websites
that need to comply are going to stop using certain plugins um and so I think
if you have a plugin in your stack and you find problems in it and you contact the developer and they’re like eh whatever or you open an issue for them
and they it’s still open six 10 months later I would start to look at are there alternative options because you don’t
want those things to be things that cause you problems down the road on your
client websites absolutely and the things you talked about like the header and the footer those are going to show up on every page of your website so you
want to make sure to get those things right or you’re just compounding your issues everywhere uh so there there’s
What are potential WCAG AA challenges?
some pretty good starting point on the most common things easy low hanging fruit type stuff that you might be able
to take care of as far as in the AA level is there uh are there things that
seem to be more tricky for people or that are going to be harder for people to comply with uh that you see people
needing expertise like yours to be able to accomplish that or is it all fairly standard
stuff well I think that if you’re not familiar with screen reader testing it’s
useful to have someone who knows how to screen reader test come in and um test
your work um at least one or two times and then you’ll start to get a feel for
it um I think in WordPress and like on these
types of websites in particular there’s some stuff that may be more difficult which is um if they have graphs or
charts um there’s not a ton of great options for really accessible table
blocks um or table plugins uh so that you know definitely can be something
that’s more difficult um so you might need to come up with a custom one we have a workaround like a code snippet
that we use to modify table press but most of the other ones and even the core table block it doesn’t support having
headings on the left like row headings so it’s almost useless unless it’s a very simplistic short small table and
the hard thing with tables too is a lot of times what people do like for pricing tables is not actually use a table
they’ll just arrange div into a grid you know into some kind of column thing and
then like there’s no accessibility left in that you know well actually if you look at our pricing page for
accessibility Checker we’re doing that um and like even on the WordPress accessibility day website on the like
sponsorship tiers so that’s not necessarily a problem I don’t think price just because we call them pricing
tables and they visually sort of look like that I don’t think they have to be tables because they can have meaning um
as long as there’s not stuff out to the left that you’re then connecting to if there’s stuff out to the left then it
wanted in a table but if you just have like the the column design then that could be really helpful just to have uh
headings for whatever the pricing tier is and then list like use a list for the
thing and then that semantically still provides meaning for people who can’t see it yeah that’s super helpful to know
that’s great all right so I think the biggest challenge we have as agencies and
How do we educate our clients on these changes?
dealing with clients our clients can’t understand God love them they can’t understand the most basic things
sometimes uh and sometimes that becomes the most difficult part of our job is just educating clients but it’s going to be really important in this case to get
them on board um obviously the law compelling them to do that is one thing
but there’s going to be a lot of Education that I think goes into this so let’s say we’re watching this live
stream now we’re making this list of clients that we think are going to follow under fall under these guidelines
or that we know are going to fall under these guidelines how do we approach them about this and start to talk to them
about uh compliance in the next two or three years so I think you know there is a
press release which I have linked in that post it’s like linked on a quote but it says official press release um
and maybe we can grab that and throw that in I would send that to your clients if you know this applies to them
I’d be like like I I think this is great to just do random Outreach for clients about you know whether it’s legal
compliance or security or something like that even if especially if you don’t talk to them all the time like they’re on a Manus plan that just kind of like
runs on its own or even if it’s a client that you launched and they are not on a maintenance retainer because right it’s
good upsells and it like makes them think oh they care about me they’re thinking about me they’re not waiting for me to reach out to them they’re
being proactive so I would draft just a short email that’s
like hey Donna I saw this press release from the justice department and I’m
pretty sure this new law a rule applies to your website uh when we originally launched the site this
rule didn’t exist and well you know maybe you say something like well we did some accessibility best practices it’s
maybe not fully Wick egg 2.1 compliant you have a couple of years to comply so
let’s have a call and talk about what you might want to think about from a budgeting standpoint so you can write
that in your budget for next year that’s how we do this a lot especially with these kind of where you like their
budget for this year is done you’re not selling them on starting next week probably right um but but that gets them
thinking and then if they are going to hit an RFP threshold um you can be the
like my partner Chris has had moments where he’s like worked with an entity to
help them write their RFB like he’s told them this is the language you should put in your RFB um and and then right so
then you can be their partner and all that and then they’ll they’ll keep you in mind um but I think sending it and
just sort of saying hey I was thinking about you you should be aware of this it’s a good way to make your clients
think that you know you’re really proactive you care about them so yeah I think I think there’s two really hard
Parts there and you did a great job of I’m just going to clip everything you said and put it into an email later for my clients but there’s there’s two parts
that make me a little anxious one is the well didn’t I just pay you a bunch of
money to build this website now you’re telling me that there’s some something wrong with it and I think you kind of covered that in the the last bit there
by you know this didn’t exist then it exists now we have that cover for uh basically no more time for no more new
websites you’re building but everything you did in the past but the other one is just getting buyin from them I just have
Getting client “buy-in”
so many clients that even if I tell them this is important it’s hard to really get their attention obviously uh a press
release from the doj should help but I think accessibility is more than just
like complying to the law it’s kind kind of a it’s a commitment to the way you’re going to represent your organization
right so I feel like we need to have a bigger conversation with clients about this isn’t let me check this off the
list this is a new way we need to approach maintaining improving uh adding
content to the website here and into the future right yeah we talk a lot about
how accessibility is not a oneandone and I’ll use the parallel about SEO a lot
because a lot of people get that like you don’t ever say I optimize my website for SEO last year I’m done
now right and they’ll be like oh yeah that makes sense you have to add content maybe the rules change like you have to
do things over time as you see how people are engaging on the website like converion optimization is the same thing
like you might tweak your headings or you might go change your meta description or you might go change the
questions in your form or what’s required to see if it will get more people to submit and so we’ll talk about
accessibility a lot of times as an ongoing practice um actually have a talk that I gave at our Meetup about how we
do recurring like we’ve used accessibility to grow recurring revenue and I know we’ve talked about that um
with the admin bar as well um but like having it as part of a care plan um or
whether or like an independent plan that’s like an audit and Remediation and that’s something that’s helpful too for
really budget conscious like nonprofits or um I mean even some of these state or
local governments like they might have very small bud and so we’ll talk about things like okay
well instead of thinking that you have to totally redo your whole website for
$20,000 in two months let’s talk about how can we each month for some small
number of dollars audit find some number of things
fix them and then wait till the next month right um and especially because right now we know that there’s two or
three years to comply like that’s a great time to get someone onto some sort of recurring retainer and then by the
time that compliance deadline comes around it will be a compliant website
and that whole time you will have had you know a more steady Revenue flow which is really nice anyway um and then
and then what’s also nice is it gets them in the thought of thinking that I had to pay for accessibility every month
so once it’s accessible right or it sufficiently meets what’s required um
then typically what we have is we don’t have them stop we just take them down to a smaller number of hours and then
there’s maintenance that that can be done in like checking in or doing smaller things or we talk we provide a
lot of training to our clients and I think our clients have really like that because we’ll it’s another way to help them reduce cost um a lot of times
they’re not paying us to write alt text for their image right because paying a web developers rate to do that when they
could pay an intern 15 I don’t know $10 an hour depending on who they’re hiring
to do it um so so I think thinking about ways that you can provide education and
value to your clients is really good because then you can say we’re going to be partners in making this accessible
together and we’ll divide up like we’ve even had clients and that’s what’s nice about our accessibility Checker if you
have the paid version it’ll scan your whole website and then there’s a report page where you can see like each
specific issue so for example headings out of order and then it will you
without having to go into each page check it’ll be like here’s all the pages with headings out of order and that’s
something frequently where clients has just been like oh I can go in and change the heading tags right maybe we show
them how and they do that or um fixing link text the ambiguous link text they’ll be like oh we’re gonna own this
we definitely can go in you know sometimes there’s things in themes or plugins that have to be fixed that they can’t but a lot of times it’s because
they wrote click here right and linked it right and so so I think that’s another
way if you have like more budget conscious clients is really talking about how this is something we can team
up together and over time you’re going to learn about accessibility so that as you’re adding new content to your
website you’re not adding more problems that you have to pay someone to fix um and then they really see you as a
partner and and then also you get to focus on the more fun and not the nitty-gritty like go in update the alt
text hit update on all these different posts so yeah that that’s not what I
want to be spending my time doing but it is such a risk when clients are getting in there posting new blog posts or whatever if they’re not educated on all
these things I mean you’re just kind of chasing your tail trying to fix the issues as they create more you know you’re just running around putting out
their fires all day long you need to put accessibility check on yeah that’s true very very good point then it Flags it
for them you’re not allowed to hit publish if the score doesn’t say 100 there you go that’s a good rule you you
earlier in the call you kind of alluded to this being maybe an opportunity for web developers too so is that you know
the ongoing accessibility kind of thing what you were alluding to or is there other opportunities you see out
there well I think in general um there are not a ton of developers yet who
really specialize or promote accessibility um I I know I’ve heard
from people in the in the group saying it we have a WordPress accessibility Facebook group and they’ve also there’s
been some people who said this as well where they have talked to prospective clients and they’ve brought up accessibility and they’ve been like wow
you were the only developer or agency who even mentioned this and um even if
the client doesn’t go for like the big accessibility package or whatever but they like say okay yeah we’ll agree with
that like sometimes that can be a way to stand out um and I mean from what I’m seeing it’s still early enough that if a
a developer or an agency decides you know we’re going to talk about accessibility we’re going to include it
in our sales conversations we’re going to have a baseline accessibility that we promise to deliver in our projects um
one I think you can you can attract bigger clients so maybe you’ve just been
working with more small businesses but you want to try and get into education or like local governments or things like
that um this is that’s going to be required and um so I think it positions
you really well on that front and you don’t necessarily have to be an expert because you can hire you know we do that
for other people but there’s also a lot of um people with disabilities uh there’s the iaap International
Association of accessibility professionals has a directory of Consultants or independent testers that
you can hire so even if you aren’t an accessibility expert you can still add that to your projects you just have to
find a partner to help you deliver on that absolutely I know one so reach out to me if you need Amber’s contact information I’ll just send you her her
way all right uh I want I want to save just a few minutes here to go through questions and answers here because we
already had some people drop in some questions and if you’re watching this live and you have a question go ahead and drop it in I’ve starred a bunch of
Q&A
these so I can go back and ask them and we’ll see what kind of damage we can do here so uh this first one says will this
also go for any local organizations like region Regional emergency preparedness
uh I can’t even read now coalitions yeah I think it’s coalitions under this umbrella since they are paid for by the
state Public Health Organization so as my non- lawyer opinion I would
believe the answer to that is yes got it that’s what I was thinking too since they’re getting they’re being contracted
by the government state funding or contract and that was a big thing that was specifically said in there is they
are not giving any exclusions for like third-party contracted content or apps or anything
like that so anything if it state or government funds paying for it tax
dollars paying for it then it has it’s G to fall under this probably easier to air on the side of caution with that all
right um we have one here uh off topic but are there any current or planned accessibility laws related to the UK now
you mentioned something earlier for the EU I believe so do you have any more insight on
that um yes so the European accessibility act which is a directive that requires all member states to
enforce uh Wick Haag accessibility in 20 25 doesn’t apply to the UK because of
brexit um the UK does have accessibility
laws I think they’re lagging behind on laws that apply to private businesses but they do have a lot that apply to
government interesting all right uh let’s see Charlie here says do candidates for
political office do their websites need to be accessible I do see a lot of people in our communities doing those as
election season is ramping up here in the states so I will say I’m not 100%
certain you know how when you do your taxes you can donate money to the political fund campaign fund yeah I
don’t know if that applies to like if that’s only presidential candidates who get that or if there’s other people um I
would assume that if they’re getting any money from the government then the answer is yes if they’re not then
technically the answer is no however if you want people to vote for you
you or if they do get elected and then they are being paid a salary as like the
city council member and their city council website is where people would go to contact them about you know potholes
on their Street then it would definitely apply so I would say I would air on the side of if you are
building political candidate websites they should be accessible yeah and it feels like that’d be uh going back to
your kind of sales Spiel a minute ago that would be a good one for any political candidate
yeah get Vates yeah no doubt uh Mark ask how about the usage of the S Soo
accessibility plugin does that help so I’m not familiar with that one
but I’m going to take a wild stab at it might be a toolbar there are a number of
plugins on WordPress repo that add a uh
a toolbar which has like a little floating accessibility icon and when you click it then it has things like make
the text larger uh change the contrast uh a number of different things that is
what it is I’m checking it on the okay yeah so those are slightly different from overlays which I saw a question
about we maybe talk about that a little bit because it’s just a toolbar that allows the user to change things if they
are coded accessibly and they actually work and
get all elements like I was on a a website that had um one of these toolbar
plugins and it had to make the font size bigger button but it only got some of
the fonts probably because it’s generic it wasn’t coded for that specific website um so if it actually works and
does what it’s supposed to do they’re not a problem I don’t think that they NE like there isn’t any studies or research
I’ve been able to find that they’re actually super helpful um like like people ask about should I
have the high contrast or whatever and I’m like no just make your color contrast
high enough for everyone right like don’t make someone push a button to get it right um so we never put them on
websites that we build I or remediate
so yeah without knowing the tool it’s kind of hard to answer that one yeah uh let’s see my buddy Taylor here
said for the click here when we were talking about kind of the non-descriptive text with descriptive air ARA labels with normal button text
like click work yep so it is totally fine do to have visible text it’s like click here
learn more read more uh download uh where they all look the same because you
want it to fit like a certain space across all of the elements uh and then you can either have an ARA label that
describes it or you can add hidden screen reader text and I think we have examples of both of those in the accessibility weekly post yes we do I
think the the biggest challenge for that or at least the biggest one that I’ve ran into is when you’re doing something like a quick Loop you can design one of
the loop items right so you might have a button that says click here and you could put an AA label on that one button
but then it’s going to be the same for every one of them in the loop and you probably need something unique for everyone and that becomes kind of a
challenge so this is where we need to go to plug-in developers and say to them
hey when we’re adding an ARA label we need to the ability to have a dynamic fill in the title of the post right so
to some degree some of this is going to fall on WordPress plug-in and theme developers
to either add features or you know correct features so that they can
actually be used uh and to enhance accessibility all right uh we had a
couple questions here on uh our good friends the overlays so Mike asked if we
were going to address plugin widgets like userway and we also had a question here is accessib a good solution for
small business so I’m just going to duck and let you take over for a second on those questions maybe while I’m
answering this you can go find a link to Overlay fact sheet.com so overlays I mentioned before
there’s the toolbar plugins and then there’s overlays which have a toolbar but they also have a component that uses
a JavaScript snippet to attempt to modify the page at time of page load and change things uh I highly advise against
them for a couple of reasons one is that all of my friends who are blind despise
them uh I have never found I actually tried for a while I like put on LinkedIn
and Twitter and Facebook I was like if you like an overlay and you have disabilities would you please tell me like I was like you can contact me
privately if you don’t want to post it like I I was trying to just find one person who said that they thought it was helpful and I even had like like 8,000
views or something on LinkedIn and like no everyone was like no not helpful so
I’m like well I’m going to listen to people with disabilities I’ve also seen um you know a bunch of studies and reports and like like AI generated alt
text is frequently not actually good alt text so if it’s filling in alternative
text for things it’s probably not actually putting what it should put um I’ve seen instances where users talk
about it hijacking their experience like during a conference presentation I saw someone like who was a screen reader
user demoing on an actual website and it was doing weird things that actually made the website less accessible to him
so I don’t recommend them for those reasons also a lot of times they say they will stop you from getting
sued uh usable net every six months puts out a report on all of the accessibility
lawsuits in the United States and at the end of 2023 over 30% of them were against
companies or websites that already had an overlay and they got sued anyway uh I
think it can sometimes put a Target on your back because some of these law firms are seeking to prove that they’re not good and so they will sue people
because they’re using an overlay uh and then usually what happens is you have to
agree as part of the settlement to remove the overlay and to actually make the website really
accessible so I would not sell them to my clients that sounds like about a million and a half good reasons
there yeah all right I think that gets us to the end of the questions here
unless anybody has anything last second Elijah just said uh fantastic information thanks for doing this and I
want to tell him I agree thank you for doing this Amber I really appreciate it been super helpful here I did drop in
some links for other bits we mentioned like the ambiguous links there’s an accessibility article there if you just
go to the admin bar.com accessibility weekly there’s 52
different articles that cover a lot of this information Amber did an awesome job of making it all really uh easy to
digest and easy to understand which is huge because we get so snowed under and if if you haven’t uh seen the
accessibility Meetup I’m going to post a link to that in there I think one of the most amazing things I I’ve gained from
uh watching some of these events and replays of these events is watching actually somebody using a screen reader
go through a website and how you’re asking them questions on I believe Alex
you’ve done it with Alex a bunch of times asking questions on what do you prefer to have here does this work for
you and it’s so eye openening every time I’ve watched one of those I’ve I’ve Come Away with tons of things that I just
would have never thought of as like aided user who is going through websites visually having to like listen to all
that it it’s so eye openening so if you haven’t done that I would at least encourage everybody to go do that once for
sure yeah yeah those are they’re fun meetups and we have all the Recaps um on
our website with full transcripts and all that kind of stuff so I’m sure that there are full transcripts good job
also good for SEO I’m gonna tell you that like they’re great for accessibility but they really help your SEO so any client who’s like I don’t
want to make transcripts you should be like well would you like to rank and search that’s right no doubt we’re gonna
kill multiple birds with one stone figuratively of course all right well Amber I really appreciate you taking the
time to do this today I learned a ton we got lots of good comments here of people saying thank you and super informative and great talk so it looks like it was a
hit here I really appreciate your time and I’m sure it will not be the last time we’re doing this if I can twist your uh twist your arm to get you here
again yeah well thank you all right we will talk to you all soon bye-
bye bye