yeah so we're going to get started with our WordPress accessibility Meetup today and we have accessibility ask me anything with Amber Hines Chris hin Jones and Ja vendra so just we have we have a few announcements here um you can join our Facebook group to connect between UBS um that's the best place to speak to most of the people that are here in the chat and get any questions answered or answer any questions about anything related to accessibility um and that is on facebook.com SLG groups slw
wordpress. accessibility you can also find upcoming events and past recordings in one place we always get asked if this if this Meetup is being recorded and it is you can find it in about one to two weeks after the date and that's going to be on equalized digital.com Meetup and you can also join our email list to get news and event announcements that's going to be on equalized digital.com Focus State Focus D State and we usually send an email every Wednesday where we have the Meetup Recaps and s
ome Meetup an upcoming Meetup announcements and sometimes other events and we also have any news related to accessibility you can also tune in to our podcast uh where we upload the recorded version the only the audio version of the meetups and that's going to be at accessibility craft.com we are seeking additional sponsors for the Meetup um so the WordPress Foundation does not um does not sponsor um the captions or the transcript or ASL so we're always looking for sponsors for meetup and if you'
re interested in learning more about sponsor Meetup or if you have any questions um you can email us at Meetup at equalized digital.com and that goes to both me and Amber and we usually reply within 24 to 48 hours um so I've mentioned equal digital a lot of times we are the organizer of of um this Meetup and we have our WordPress plug-in accessibility Checker that stand for accessibility problems and provides reports on the post edit screen to make building accessible websites easier you can fin
d us on Twitter I will continue saying Twitter um not X at equalized digital and we have a live captioning sponsor today we have ivycat um ivycat helps clients and agencies create market and maintain High performing WordPress websites and web apps that are fast easy to use accessible and get results ivats website care plans search engine optimization and accessibility Services help clients grow and succeed without the stress and headaches of doing it alone their website is Ivy cat.com and you ca
n find them on Twitter at icat web and we always encourage people to say thank you to our sponsors on Twitter so if you have a chance um you can just go do that um we're very glad to have them sponsoring today's meet up and we have our upcoming events um the next one is the next WordPress visability Meetup is sunshine photo card accessibility audit with Alex Stein and Amber and that's going to be on Monday March 18 at 700 p.m. central then we also have a WordPress V WordPress VIP event it's call
ed a blueprint for federal web modernization that's going to be with lone Lan Rock Point um WordPress VIP and with Amber from equalize digital that's going to be on Tuesday March 19th at 12:00 pm Central then the next Meetup that we have in this same time law the first Thursday of the month it's going to be demystifying European accessability loss and engaging overview we're very excited to finally have someone come talk about European accessibility loss um so that's going to be on Thursday Apri
l 4th at 10: a.m. Central and then we are going to have the mobile accessibility building and testing accessibility mobile sites and Native apps on Monday April 15th at 7 pm Central um so we're done with announcements um now I would like our panelists to introduce themselves um so I'm just going to stop sharing um my by the way my name is Paula and I'm going to be moderating today's um panel I am the content specialist at equalized digital so pretty much everything you see close to% of everythin
g that you see on social um I'm the one that posts that um and I help planning Meetup so now um take it away Amber yep thank you so I think most people know me because I I help run Meetup so you see me a lot if you come to meetups but for anyone who doesn't or maybe who's watching this on YouTube after the fact I am Amber Hines I'm the CEO at equalized digital uh we're a Missi driven organization that focuses all on WordPress accessibility uh it sort of stemmed out of a business that started wit
h me as a freelancer and then it grew into a full agency um with Chris and Steve and some other team members um and we really started doing accessibility in around 2016 and have gotten you know deeper and deeper into it because it was a passion that I realize I loved and I think they love too and I'll hand off to Chris if you want to introduce yourself and share a little bit uh you are muted yeah um so my name's Chris Hines I handle our company's sales uh HR and finance efforts that's primarily
what I've been doing with the company for uh a a long time even since our agency days back in the mid-2010s um I have done you know some project management and project fulfillment work but I feel like I'm at my best when I'm helping connect people with the right Solutions whether that's accessibility a new bespoke website um or a combination of things and so if you've ever reached out to equalize digital needing help with something related to accessibility or website um you have probably exchang
ed emails or spoken with at some point and if you haven't spoken me with me yet but you feel like you need some help with something related to accessibility I would be happy to talk to you and try to connect you with the best possible solution whether that is us or uh Rago which will who he'll introduce himself in a minute or with someone else entirely who isn't even here my goal is really just to get people connected with the thing that's best for them based on their goals uh Steve yeah I'm Ste
ve Jones I'm owner and CTO here at equalized digital I oversee the development of our accessible products and services most notably our accessibility check or WordPress plugin um unlike Chris I'm more of the man behind the curtain who Amber drags out every now and then to come and talk to you guys so I'm I'm happy to be here and then Raga do you want to introduce yourself yes hi everyone my name is ragavendra Satish per everyone calls me ragav and I'm the founder of digital 11 y I'm do a lot of
Consulting with large and small Enterprises I work here with equalized digital sometimes a lot with Amber both on WordPress accessibility Meetup uh and the conference the yearly conference also thank you everyone for your introductions um so Amber for our first question um Petra asks how do you ensure that the semantic heading structure is logical when editors that may not be aware of accessibility can pick and choose components and put them in any order yeah so um I think there's a couple of di
fferent ways that we can ensure that content editors who don't know anything um are choosing things appropriately um and it's twofold one is creating training I think you have you have to train people um so whether that's a customer who's going to be managing the website after you've buil built it and you're handing it off um you need to include some basic ex accessibility training to them or your internal team um I think including tools is really important so obviously that was a lot of the mot
ivation between behind our accessibility Checker plugin was to get them information right where they're creating content because that is the easiest but if you don't have a WordPress website or something there's other um browser based tools that can be used like wave um there's on the on the like heading structure specifically there's a free plugin that I love called headings map I say plugin it's it's not actually a plugin when it's for your browser a browser extension yeah it's aows it's a bro
wser extension all right there uh yeah so I love that one because I just have it and I use it all the time in addition to um some of the stuff in WordPress because like WordPress has WordPress core has that outline tool in the block editor but it only recognizes the WordPress heading block it does recognize any custom blocks or which would include sometimes block libraries so it's almost useless uh so that headings map browser extension which we can definitely include um some I think we can incl
ude some links to this when we post the recording um but I think and Steve I might hand this off to you like one of the things that we've thought about a lot on this as we're building custom blocks because when we build websites we use core blocks and we use custom ACF blocks typically um we don't use a lot of block libraries or things but when we're building something like let's say an accordion or even like a team block where there's a going to be a group of people that are pulled from a team
post type and then there's a heading above it that says like what category they're in for their team right yeah we've realized that you can't just say by default that's going to be an ag2 because a client might come along and be like but I want to show a team of people nested three levels down right so then we have to build options for them to choose their heading level on all those custom blocks and I don't know if you want to speak to that at all about like how you think about when someone nee
ds a choice for a heading level yeah I mean I don't know that we can like necessarily like from a programmatic standpoint like choose the exact right heading we might be able to choose the next right one um but we could like block ones that we know absolutely should not be next right um but then you get into you can get into a lot of technical stuff when it comes to Wordpress websites and stuff and what's hardcoded you know like what's what else exists on the page what's the heading order of all
all you know things outside of the content area so there there's a lot to think about and I think that goes back to your initial point was you know education really under having the knowledge of what correct semantic heading order is yeah and I'll add something really quick as a content creator that does not know anything about developing I call myself a mogul in that aspect um what I do is that um for example I was working on my personal website and I installed a theme for it and the heading o
rders were all messed up so what I had to do in that case as a non-developer was I had to go onto the customization um bar that comes on the on the left on WordPress um so that helps me work with the heading order there and The Styling because sometimes what content creator people think about usually it's how it looks not how accessible it could be um so that could be a way to deal with that aspect you can keep you can have a correct head instructor and still make things look how how you want th
em to look um you just have to know how to use the customization tool in war press which is very easy um so I think we're going to have another question for Steve um Peter said that he has a client asking about guidance for a QR code driven app landing page that will mainly be used Outdoors to display info about Memorial markers or sculptures in a park setting they're asking about Fun Size word count per page and navigation so Steve what recommendations would you have about a website like this y
eah yeah thanks for the question Peter this is definitely a a unique one um I think as far as like compliance right you're still like held to the normal Wick ad guidelines in this regard because my assumption is that people would be using their phones to scan these QR codes to pull up this website on their phone uh I hope that's the correct assumption but uh but I think I think you got to take environment into in in into consideration here too right these people will be outside um you know uh th
ere'll be so like I don't know if I want to nail down a minimum font size but like if it was me I'd probably go a little beyond the uh the guidelines and I'd probably stick with something like a minimum 16 U pixel font um yeah or even like 18 or 20 maybe I don't know on a mobile phone yeah I definitely go up from what the guidelines are because these people you know people would be outside they're kind of like looking at real life elements and their phone at the same time and then I think your h
eading font sizes should go up from there accordingly um as far as word count i' probably be like I'd probably be as concise as possible while still conveying the message I don't know like a word count like 250 300 something that might even be too much too um um so like you can use like you can use elements HTML elements to help convey that information quicker like bullet points and uh you know of course having the right semantic headings as we've just talked about um if there's navigation invol
ved in this page that comes up uh I'd make it as simple as possible and as intuitive as possible probably not drop downs not like it's going to be on a phone in in most cases here so probably not like you know the typical like expanding sliding menus probably something as simple as possible for the navigation so and since it's outside I would definitely put a lot of consideration into color contrast as well I'd go I'd go well beyond the spec there because you got to think you know not everybody
has the most the latest OED bright million nits whatever brightness screen right on their phone maybe some people do right but most people on average have a typical phone and and um so I would up that color contrast quite a bit um to make sure that it's readable outside in the sunlight so as so finally like as far as the QR code now I think this is probably the biggest consideration to think about I think if you have a QR code on I don't know if it's on a pedestal or right next to uh you know ri
ght next to the monument or or or is that what it sculptures or something right um I I think you have to have clear instructions right next to that QR code and I think that you need to um you need to explain the accessible features of that QR code and maybe offer some alternative because like that's going to be hard for you know uh somebody that's not a sighted user to be able to scan a QR code with with a with a phone now I think the phones are pretty good about these days have access features
to help you take pictures of people and you know where to move it and stuff but I would I'd be real cautious about that and take extra steps to make sure that that's accessible um and and I'd be curious what raaga yeah has to say about like this this answer like scanning QR codes outside and visiting a website to learn about a piece of artwork like how detailed would you want it to be and what features would you need so I think Steve most do you want bra I don't know Braille no I don't know Brai
lle oh yeah so some people might want Braille next to the QR code like on the sign right telling them there's a QR code there yes yeah yes yes but because you you need to be specific you know because if it's a straight if it's a offline QR code on the paper what happens is if where should I put the phone where is it so you need a tactile type of thing you know where or there's a symbol or something where I can yeah it's like an alternative URL a good solution y okay so I don't use QR codes in pu
blic spes a lot uh because I'm afraid of the security I have iPhone and so many people around me I'm like okay yeah yeah because it's very difficult to take your phone and you know waving it in the air and like did it come did it come and there's a lot of noise you can't hear voice over but if you're in the public space yeah yeah that's true the security thing is is something to be mindful of you know we were at a conference last year I think and Amber and I ran into a data scientist right or ri
ght he was a data scientist or something like that and he had a QR code on his phone like ready to go and Amber just scanned it I was like oh he's got you now Amber yeah that to like get his contact information like his LinkedIn and all this stuff yeah yeah yeah I'm curious on the on the actual text on the website if you were wanting to learn about a sculpture or a piece of artwork or something how descriptive would you want the wording about it to be and like what do you feel like are important
details that someone would want to consider when they're trying to decide how much to write about a piece of artwork I go in like how how a cited person describes it so not everyone like I got with a lot of friends to Mum museums and art places some people are very artistic and creative in describing the art stuff so those are the people that I want to be around with because they make even a restaurant or the usual things like you know someone uh a police standing near the traffic signal a frie
nd of mine describes it so well and that that gives me a mind mind's eye view of what's happening around me so same thing to do with you know artwork you have to be cre you need to hire someone who's creative and keeps it simple not uh so I I read a lot of simple English so how simple can it be plain language yeah reading level is probably really important if we're talking general public we want it to be eighth grade or lower yeah um yeah not really complex yeah that makes total sense um so I do
n't think hold on I was just thinking I'm gonna let you go to your next question but I realized we didn't say this so we had a few questions that we got ahead of time so we have those um but we are going to get to questions in the Q&A as well so feel free to put those in but I just wanted to give everyone that background oh y um so on the cell side Simon asks how did equalized digital generate leads and convert them to pain clients when you were first starting out what strategies would you recom
mend to a new web accessibility agency looking to grow it client base um Chris do you want to start with this one yeah and I'm I'm popping these in the chat as we go for these questions we received ahead of time so uh I'm happy to speak to this first and I spent some time reflecting on this this morning since we got some time or since we got this question in advance uh I'll provide the the short version first which is we tried a lot of things like a lot of things and we we failed a lot of times
before we figured things out and I think that's the the first thing you know if you're feeling uh frustrated or discouraged I'm not insinuating that the person that that's asking this question is feeling that way but if you're a person out there who's feeling frustrated or discouraged because you feel like you're working your butt off and nothing's catching um just keep trying new things um but here's what worked for us so I have a list of of six different things and I don't know if they necessa
rily have to happen in exactly this order but I do feel like they kind of build on one another um so the first one and maybe the most critical is to specialize in something that you believe there is or is going to be demand for and that you genuinely have a reason to care about um and try to make this narrow so start narrow and try to own that narrow space right and then expand outward from there rather than being the everything person right who will do anything um that someone comes to you for
like a a digital marketing generalist not that that's not valuable it's just that lumps you in with a lot of people versus being a specialist um also as you go if you decide what to go into interview existing or prospective customers ask them what they need what's keeping them awake at night and build offers around those things so that's number one number two do everything you can to be present relevant and provide real value for people who need the thing you're going to specialize in so that's
creating articles podcasts public speaking meetups right we're all here um so do those things like You're engaging in a marketing effort right now for us this is where press accessibility meet up we run it as volunteers right but this has a marketing benefit for equalized digital but we're also providing you with a lot of value right so you need to find things that you can do within whatever you want to specialize in where you're doing the same thing you're providing value but you're also creati
ng a positive marketing outcome for yourself number three chime in real quick on this Point like or the first one maybe like one thing I think that's worthwhile to think about is that accessibility like it is an niched but it also is really Broad and so like I was talking to someone who H they are in Northern California and they've started doing a lot of work with Wineries and like becoming the person who does not just like Winery websites but like accessibility for wineries like you know oh may
be you are the one who really knows about reservation platforms which reservation platforms are accessible and which ones are not or e-commerce if they're able to sell you know like wines of the month subscriptions or something like that so like thinking even maybe more Niche which I know sounds weird because we're not just like that thing but I I do feel like like what you're to give a more concrete example to what Chris is saying I think it's helpful to think about like who like the tighter yo
u get in your audience I think that can be more helpful being a niche of Niche does not hurt um the riches are in the niches right um so I'm gonna I'm going to hop to number three I love that I might put that on a t-shirt Steve um so number three on my list was have ways to passively or as passively as possible get people's information so that you can contact them then give them even more value and then eventually ask them to collaborate with or hire you so really a list of engaged customers and
potential customers is hands down your most valuable business asset and if you aren't building that right now you should start find a way to start number four and this is where I have I've literally been doing this for years and the process always changes and evolves but have a heavily dialed in process for sales and connect it to a CRM where you can track and measure things so have scripts for calls emails test sequences for every stage of a Deal's life cycle don't be afraid to call people be
friendly and helpful even when you get a no and recommend other companies if they're a better fit build referral relationships with those companies you're recommending be proactive and patient because and this is a rule in sales effort today yields results in like 90 to 120 days so what you did four or five months ago is going to have Ripple effects you know today so consistent effort getes better dividends than you know a buch of effort like little pockets of a lot of effort right um number fiv
e go out and meet your peers kind of like what you're doing right now right you're networking with another one another in the chat maybe you go to word Camp Events maybe you go to events in your community get out there and meet people get coaching and mentorship try to build relationships with people who are 10 years ahead of you in business at least one person that you can reach out to and ask for advice and number six and then I'll be quiet and let other people answer this question because I k
now I'm not the only person with valuable advice here uh don't stop improving so we've collectively like this team and there's PE there's members of this team who aren't on this call right this is like maybe a a what do you think Amber like a third or half the team right there's there's um there's a bunch of other people who aren't here but uh We've achieved a lot but there are probably arguably like a hundred things we we want to fix about our company like right now um and after those 100 thing
s are done there's going to be another hundred things right so just constantly improve you're never done yeah so I like circling back I think to the initial of just like attracting people I think it's worth saying that um what has been most beneficial for us one is creating really good quality content um like I published the blog a blog post over the weekend last weekend about wiag 2.2 it's almost a 6,000 word blog post and it has tons of screenshots and a lot of detailed and then I saw today th
at my friend Kyle in the admin bar shared it in his Facebook group I never asked him to do that he just did it but I think like if if you're creating really helpful meaningful content then that makes people want to share it with other people and keep coming back to you um and I think like that's really important over the I see sometimes where people are publishing these like 800w blog posts that are just kind of like half idea I feel like sometimes when I read them right and and I'm like no one'
s going to share that raaga you and and maybe you can follow up with your experience as a freelancer but you do a lot of this like content creation and I think that brings people back to your website right yes uh the digital El gets about quar million visitors a year and it's purely driven on content and uh if I come across of anything let's just say someone today when we spoke about Q codes the idea is still in my mind so I already noted that I haven't written about QR codes so maybe that is on
e so when when I come across anything like last week I was in a restaurant and the staff is not engaging with me but with my cited partner so why is it do they think only cited people pay the bill or they can choose what is for the blind people so I'm I'm writing on that so the I what happens is once you start creating content you see patterns everywhere that you can create content of and the the last post that I wrote is on WordPress because I was working with a designer who told you are saying
add the call to action button but you know what it reads as a link in the screen data why do you need a visual button when it's a link and we wrote a blog post on that is it a really link or a button the CTs should be what is it so we I create a lot of content and that brings visitors that brings people asking I do a lot of mentorship I I run a largest accessibility community at of India networking uh I don't travel anymore but otherwise I would have traveled to speak at engagements or be in th
e conferences so whatever Chris covered I do all of that yeah I would say like that's another big area that I put into um which I'm not doing as much right now but the first couple years that we created equal equiz and we had pivoted from our just generalist marketing agency into equalize I put a lot of effort into doing podcast interviews I like podcast interviews because it gets you in front of someone else's audience and it's not like the the 6,000 word blog post you guys it took me like 10 h
ours to write that and create all the screenshots and find all the example right it's a huge time investment a podcast interview is like you talk with them a little bit via email or on a podcast matching platform um pod match I think is the one that I found the best out of the ones I tried but I can follow up on that um but let but then you like show up for like an hour and you just talk and then it goes out so I do feel like if creating all that content is hard like that is a good way to get in
front of other people's audience and like share your knowledge um and and kind of attract more attention yeah those are great answers everyone um so moving on to the next one to Tonia has developed a WordPress site using Mill a WordPress platform for the US Department of Defense and says that she has no idea how to make it accessible she mentioned she's not techsavvy oh a muggle and doesn't know much about plugins Amber where would you recommend that she can start yeah so I I actually when I sa
w the this come in I was all like I messaged her to be like can I view this she sent us a URL I was like can I view this because I tried to go there and it wanted me to log in with my uh Department of Defense credal she's like oh no it's not public uh because I was like it'd be good if we can give some but I would say like if you are not a techsavvy person um the best place to start is probably by using some of the automated testing tools and just fixing some of the things that you can um so I d
on't know she probably doesn't have the ability to install accessibility checker on there she should go talk to her whoever runs that because I'm sure it's a multi-site or network um and they have the ability to install and get them to install it but if not like using Wave would be great if she's able to scan it with wave I would think about the things that I think about for a non-ex Savvy person that can really have meaningful value is um just doing some quick testing with your tab key and make
sure that you can get through the navigation menu um that like when you tab to sub items it actually opens and is visible to you and isn't just hidden um I would say check your headings make sure you're using headings in the correct order we talked about that headings map browser extension um link having links that are meaningful so don't link the word here click here learn more like links that actually communicate something about where they're going can be really important um we always talk ab
out alt text on images just describing images the other thing that comes to mind when I think about this as like a a government website is I don't know if it has like charts and graphs and tables but if it does then um for any sort of graph if it's just like a screenshot of a bar chart for example you need to also provide a table of that data so that um people who can't view the image can still access the same information um or you also want to think about not using Color alone like sometimes in
graphs like the red and the green mean different things but to someone who's red green color blind it looks exactly the same and we're looking at a you know a a bar chart and we have no idea how to tell what those are so maybe having patterns on your bar charts if you're creating them um and you know you would do that wherever you create it like in Excel or sheets you'd apply a pattern to it instead of um just having a solid color and then um of course making sure your table have appropriate he
aders because that's a big mistake that people forget they just put everything in as table data and then maybe they make it bold so it looks like a header but it's not really a header those are some things that come to mind for me um what about you Raga I think we did not touch B on forms you know visible labels for form Fields forms avoiding placeholders and appropriate error messages and easy to find error messages not just you know not in line just you know give even links on the top of the f
orm that's one and avoid carousels if you can uh you know that are auto moving then you know keep I think you should keep the navigations consistent and that's all from me I think a lot of Wordpress websites come forms yeah yeah I think I think sometimes in organizations you know such as government or higher ed right you have to you have to uh to achieve the accessibility stuff that you would like to achieve or need to achieve sometimes you have to become an advocate you got to seek out the Depa
rtments that actually do have the ability to make the changes in the platforms they're using and uh so I I wouldn't be afraid to like try to find out who those people are identify them send out emails to them put you know I don't know if they have a track or something open a ticket to see if you can get uh some change made on the sides from the people that actually can access the platform yeah I think this uh I think you know if they are able to partner with an accessibility specialist whether t
here is one internally at the Department of Defense or if not um you know bringing in an outside vendor I think would probably be helpful um and making sure you know that sort of thing both the testing is done but also that there's training resources available for people that are using meal Suite obviously I've never accessed it because I'm not in the military so I have no idea but great um I'll uh chime in just one more thing sorry uh but uh Tanya I know just like from from the perspective of n
ot really knowing where to start if you wanted to send me an email Chris equalized digital.com I'm not going to sell you anything I just happen to be working on an ebook right now with a partnership in partnership with another organization that's focused on like real world steps that more novice people can take to start to tackle accessibility meaningfully and if you email me I will just send you some some stuff that I have drafted that will give you some things that you can take to start to mak
e like at Le at the very least the content on the page more accessible and introduce some better best practices there it it wouldn't get you to 100% but it would be a starting point and maybe is uh approachable right as a list of best practices to introduce happy to do that if you want to send me a note that was all I was going to say yeah um those are great tips everyone um so let's talk about ways to learn accessibility um Steve can you start off with some resources that you found helpful when
you were learning to code from an accessibility first perspective sure um my my intro into accessibility is a little different than I think most because uh we had done some accessibility uh stuff early on in our previous agency and uh but then I was tasked you know we came up with the idea to make the accessibility Checker so to make a a a tool that evaluates your accessibility you got to learn it and you got and I was drinking from a fire hose so like it was it was a lot at first but there's s
ome there's some practical places where you can go I mean there's documentation uh there's the wick a guidelines I think that we all reference those as the official docs and uh you know as Amber me mentioned she has written a gigantic blog post uh with a supplement for the wick a 2.2 guidelines we also have an accessibility craft podcast episode about that that is out or is coming out not sure we came out on Monday oh it came out this Monday so the latest episode of accessibility craft so check
that out um um those are kind of the official docs and and there's a lot of good code examples in there uh that are help um as a developer uh I I'll use the the Mozilla MDM docs uh they have some pretty good accessibility docs uh they're not official but I have found those very useful and they explain things to me in a developer kind of way and uh and they kind of get to the point right like as a developer I just want to know the right way to do it I don't want you know a lot of times I don't wa
nt to get caught up in all the words right um and also I mean the you not to keep tooting our own horn but our our equal our equalized digital accessibility check or documentation is is is very well written uh Amber has done a a fantastic job of writing that documentation and to be honest if if you know if I'm working on a a client website and I see an air in the accessibility checker and and I'm not 100% sure and I made the accessibility Checker right like so I'll click on that link and I'll ru
n over to to the documentation and Amber's got it uh listed out you know like you know this is what it should look like right so there's you know this is what's wrong and this is what it should like look like like with code examples and I love that and it's super helpful so the accessibility Checker is not just a it's not just scanning and telling you what's wrong right it's kind of an education tool of sorts right it it highlights what's wrong and then we provide you a documentation on how to r
esolve that so um next there's browser extensions and we've mentioned a few of those already here on this Meetup um but uh there's the you know wave which is a you know a front-end you know it's a browser extension um that evaluates uh one page at a time just like a front-end evaluation it's a great Tool uh another one uh similar to that is like the ax Dev tools um I'll use that quite a bit uh Google Lighthouse which is built into the Chrome browser or most chromium browsers if you use another b
rowser like Brave um we mentioned the headings map extension um that's that's great you you you just hit that and it pops up on the side and it shows you shows you your heading it'll highlight ones that are out of order um there there's a a color blindly that we've used that kind of simulates uh it it simulates like uh like the way different people perceive colors right I don't know if I'm explaining that correctly but uh yeah different types of color blindness yeah different different types of
color blindness that's a cool tool and then uh another one that we've used frequently is called tabali it's t a b a l l y uh and that one uh you initiate that browser extension and it basically goes through and it Maps the tab order of the website and kind of it's kind of from a visual standpoint it's cool because it like draws a line a visual line from the first tab order second third right down the page and you can see where if your tab ORD is off it'll highlight that so those are great tools
and super low barrier of entry for the browser extensions to just start getting in there and playing around and seeing what's actually wrong and and in that process you kind of start to learn these things and absorb them um moving more into development stuff there's there's like a you could use some linters now in WordPress world we still are real heavily in PHP so it's not always super easy to lint PHP um so when I say lenting it's in your IDE and your IDE has a like I use Visual Studio code an
d you can install plugins inside of uh Visual Studio code that can then check code as you're coding so like if I if I'm if I'm writing a you know like a react block right for WordPress and I write something that's inaccessible it'll highlight it and tell me why it's not accessible and so the little linter that I'll use for that is the the the axe accessibility accessibility linters so um and that's for visual studio code you can just go in there plug in search ax accessibility linter and uh that
's probably the best one that I've seen and probably really the only one that I I use in in my IDE for that um moving away from the code stuff uh I think it you move into like testers and and evaluation so there's like uh screen readers like uh if you're not familiar with using a screen reader I would I would suggest get in get in there like uh if you're on a Mac you use voice over if you're on a PC you use nvda uh or Jaws which I think Jaws cost money but uh um just initiating that on your comp
uter and using it and see what it tells you and and you know be brave close your eyes and try to use your keyboard to tab through a website and and experience what it's what it's like to not to be able to see the website and uh if you're writing code like if you're writing a modal or a or some tabs um you know uh something that expands some something that loads Dynamic content uh test it with the screen reader and and see what that experience is like um it's just learning by doing yeah it totall
y is and that's I that's the kind of person I am I'm totally like if you give me like a whole bunch of documentation to read I'm gonna no way I'm not GNA do it right like but like but like if you tell me we have to achieve this right and it has to meet this and I like okay I could figure that out right and I'm like okay so these tabs like these tabs I go to these tabs and it hits the first tab like I'm talking about like a tab you know Dynam Dynamic content tabs on a website it hits the first Ta
b and then it just jumps down past it doesn't go through all the tabs right so now I need to code in something you know to grab that Tab and to announce the screen reader that it is a tab and then to use the arrow keys to go back and forth between all the tabs in that that component um so yeah it is a lot of learning by doing and and and exploring and playing I mean that it's it's vital um so there's WordPress plugins as well we've mentioned ours quite a few times our accessibility Checker plugi
n um install the install that go to a post or page save a post or page see what it says right like it'll list out errors or Warnings and uh typically errors are things that can be programmatically found pretty accurately and warnings are typically things that require a human to audit and evaluate that and and resolve it and you can click on it and then you can hit the view on page and it'll just jump you around over to the front end of the website and highlight that issue on the page for you um
there's some other accessibility plugins that kind of help make your website more accessible which we've uh uh the wp accessibility plugin by Joe Dolson um uh is very helpful in that regard adding skip links and things like that um so check those out explore those and then finally like I know this is a long list but uh finally um I would say uh you know I'm lucky enough to have have Auditors and testers testing my code such as Amber and ravendra um but and Chris has mentioned this too it's about
Community too like uh you know utilize utilize uh slack groups utilize Twitter like if you're stuck on an accessibility issue put it out there I'm I'm sure probably one of us will will chime in uh there's Facebook groups we've got a Facebook group that is amazing for uh for questions like that so uh utilize your community utilize people on your team to uh it's always good to have a second you know uh set of eyes on something even if they're not the the accessibility expert right um so yeah it's
a long list but that's what I have I have so I might throw two in and then I think um Paula was going to switch us over to doing questions in the Q&A but the ones that I'll just say real quick as far as like learning resources that are helpful so the a11 Y Collective which is um a project started by some people from level level in the Netherlands they have a lot of training videos that are useful and then of course um Raa and I and Peter who's here and Isa and Adrien and some other people who a
re attending are all um organizers of Wordpress accessibility day um and I just put a link to if you go to WP accessibility. daypast events uh you can actually watch all of the videos for free um from the past WordPress accessibility days and so I highly recommend that as a training Resource as well yeah thank you that was very comprehensive now we're going to go jump into the Q&A that you guys have been posting um the first one that I'm going to call is Laurel what kind of training or certifica
tions do you think are necessary in order to specialize in accessible WordPress design and I wonder if R raaga do you want to talk about this because you probably have the most certifications out of all of us on this call yeah so I think more than CER ifications we need to know the fundamentals of accessibility because certifications help um to enhance your knowledge that's what I realized so I learned accessibility uh first I learned HTML from W3 schools then I learned accessibility by doing it
rather than when I got started in 2008 2009 there's very few resources available online back then and what I learned from w3c uh websites and other places is you know when you practice it and when you come work with other accessibility professionals you get a lot of clarity on what is really you know a failure of veag or is it usable is it a great design experience for someone with u disability that is where the thing is because uh when I did certifications they enhan my knowledge because I hav
e to go read a ton of stuff um I did IAP cpacc where I learned learned about um various disability types Universal Design Universal Design for Learning and when I did web accessibility specialist uh I need to learn uh a bit of JavaScript I learned CSS so I did uh I went to edx.org I did uh fundamentals of JavaScript HTML CSS so that is where course the certification s but always you know stick to the fundamentals where you're creating any accessible website either it is on WordPress or any platf
orm uh in WordPress you know by default you get lot of accessible themes now um at 2023 2022 theme and there a lot of plugins out there and we all spoke about accessibility checker on WordPress but uh at the same time you need to do a lot of testing before you choose which Plugin or which theme because um I really found out that there are plugins out there that says oh we are ADA Compliant and I was testing one Carousel just yesterday and it the previous next buttons are just read as buttons and
the carousel content is hidden uh visually with because they use area hidden on the entire content so there's a lot of learning you need to have both technically and from the user side of it the US usability side of it because you want to make it easy rather than so this two things here making it accessible making usable it should be going in hand in hand yeah so do you feel like the certifications are um they're not necessarily the best way to learn but I'm assuming you know certifications can
maybe help with getting clients has that been your experience yes so certifications are not definitely to learn so if you want to learn about accessibility you want to do audits uh um uh I would suggest the DHS trusted test it's a very thorough course on how to perform accessibility audits for wak and there are steps outlined on how to test each success criteria and all that um but the course is defin defined in such a way that you'll learn really because there's lot of practice work that goes
into it and then you have to score about 90% to pass the exam so you learn the technicalities of auditing but if you want to really learn accessibility you have to keep doing the work day in day out learning new things uh as Steve said you have to build your own sometimes code samples test them out uh uh I do a lot of work in that space because that's the only way I I realized I learn and certifications come in handy to you know get new employment and lately when clients ask are you AAP certifie
d are do you are you a certified accessibility consultant this is one of the re recent and last one year this I'm hearing a lot thank you um going on to our next question um Karina asks can you explain the governing body behind the efforts around wiag are these guidelines a good approach for international compliance instead of just us us focused are there other International standards we should be aware of for multinational Brands um if anyone wants to take that one so the governing body behind
Wick a wiag is basically what would be considered like an open source project so anyone can volunteer and contribute to it um the short and I'm gon to try I know we're like I'm gonna try and go fast because I want to get through everyone's but I'm gonna say the short answer on are they a good approach for international compliance yes um people who contribute to them are around the world and there are laws around the world that reference them they're the best standard for testing or measuring acc
essibility that we have worldwide they're not just us Focus um the only other thing is there are some things like I know in EU they have some in the EU or European Union they have some laws that are specific um that don't necessarily reference wieg but also have their own guidelines so you may need to check with a specific country um if you're really worried about legal compliance I always recommend talking to a legal professional of which none of us are um but but yeah I would say using Wick EG
outside the US works well yeah and I'll just um add to that the idea of you know uh compliance with laws versus compliance with standards this is a very this is a very gray area um and some solutions will promise that they will make you comply with specific laws um even though if you actually read the legal text of the laws themselves they don't create like they the law the legal text does not create a qualitative or excuse me a quantitative measurable accessibility standard that you can actual
ly prove it'll say something like it offers an equivalent experience that's more of a qualitative very subjective way of analyzing accessibility that's not that one is more um I don't know valuable than the other right but it's just in terms of Standards you really want to hold yourself to the thing that is most measurable most quantifiable that can be proven that can be charted on a graph right um because that is ultimately what is uh provable that can be shown to you know whether it's um you k
now a lawyer um or just someone who's registering a complaint or a regulator whatever it is um and that's why wcag is often referenced because it really is the most comprehensive standard that exists thank you great answer um going on to the next question Simon asks I currently write articles for my blog in markdown and then make layout and visual edits in Elementor do you know of a more accessible friendly content editor for WordPress both in terms of access accessible usage and ensuring that t
he content on the page being edited is accessible raaga do you want to respond on I'd be curious what's your what do you think is the best most accessible way to edit content in WordPress so I follow multi-step here what I do is I write everything in Word document I tag all the headings list then I use I don't use element or I use good INB because it outputs accessible semantic HTML but when you post it the word document in good INB it creates all the blocks automatically and you don't have to d
o a lot of tweaking just in case you know if there is something that is not accessible when I'm testing on the front end uh there's a Code like you can view the entire code I can go change the code in the editor so this is one way so people who find it difficult with screen leader to move into Gutenberg and edit what you can do is uh you can enable the classic edor after you put everything in good INB and see where you want to edit the content edit that piece of content and then disable the clas
sic edor that's an interesting idea to go back and forth between two I know a lot of people have said that you know there's still some major accessibility challenges in the block editor I know from an accessibility standpoint a lot of the um blind users that I've spoken with do use the classic editor plugin and they're always um I mean you're really Tech savy so maybe you've figured out work arounds I figured editor because I've been using good in book since its version It's initially released i
t and it improved a lot when it comes to uh using with screen data because you can do a basic blog uh where I couldn't do uh tabs accordion and tables as successfully as uh a cited person could do it because you need to go through multiple so what I do even tables and and the when a classicor was there I used to write all the HTML code or use a table generator put all my content in there take the HTML put it in the text form of the classicor and move on from there but Gutenberg is very different
you need to have a cited person work on some of the aspects in the blocks definitely yeah I think from uh like the quick answer on in my opinion and feel free to conflict me anyone here disagree but I think that if you're using Wordpress core blocks and not custom blocks from a block Library the most accessible experience will be with the block editor rather than some sort of um page builder like Elementor or Beaver Builder or um I don't know any of them oxygen and I'm not trying to like call o
ut any specific one like all of them pretty much I think from an editing standpoint yes block editor is going to be better than any of those third party tools I don't deny because I use some page Builders I couldn't even uh get to the edit screen and understand at least the fields or what is the field names are yeah and then I think like on the other side of that question like ensuring the most accessible output I kind of think it's the same way because and that's why we've ended up one of the m
any reasons but why we don't use any outside block libraries anymore like it's either core blocks or we build our own because most of the even the block Library collections are not doing adequate accessibility testing and they're releasing blocks that sometimes have major deficits like you were talking about ra like it said double A compliant and then it had unlabeled buttons on a carousel content couldn't even be accessed right um so I don't know that's not a great answer for people who like pa
ge Builders but I think if you really care about accessibility you really have to start thinking about the page builder that you're using and if there is one that that is really important to you like talk to them and tell them how important accessibility is and hopefully you can like like if you open issues on their GitHub or in their WordPress support Forum like maybe that will help them to see where there are problems and I've had good luck with them making fixes when I've said hey this doesn'
t work in this space so thank you for that one um moving on to the next question FJ Nelson asks simple question perhaps Google page speed often Flags links in the body content as needing more than colors to distinguish them from non-l text a lot of my clients don't like underlined links I sometimes get away with a light dotted underline which satisfies accessibility checking but what are some suggestions for links other teammates other treatments for links Beyond just callers okay let's round ro
bin this everybody say I think that your links in body text have to have an underline does anyone are do we all feel the same way strongly agree strongly agree and rag is the certified professional here what do you think underlines make it easy all my site I work with a lot of sighted assistant and I say here is a link they're like no it's just paragraph and then I click on it and say yeah I changed color so there's a link yeah I I I literally think that this would be a wick failure so I mean te
chnically the it doesn't say they have to be underline they have to look different but the thing is is like you can't just make it bold because sometimes people use bold for emphasis you can't just make it italics because sometimes they use italic so then it's like okay well maybe you don't underline it you have a color but you have another little eyeon next to it that denotes it's a link but then at this but then I'm like that's even more distracting than an underline when you're reading right
yeah I think there's something to be said about a standardization too like you know like you said it may not be a violation if you use another method but everybody's just underlining them right like that's this is why we don't underline for emphasis because I've seen literally on heat mapping on websites when something was underlined like for decoration that people tried to click it because human beings see that and think it's a link yes because I've been tracking R clicks on some websites and t
hat happens they click on underline text yeah yeah yeah y clicky clicky clicky yep I've seen that on on screen recorders um where someone's trying to click something that isn't clickable so you can have the opposite effect or unintended effect if you use underlines uh you know not for what they're intended for that's kind of the flip side of this question the other the other thing I would say too and I've had this uh we've done this you know in interactions with customers who are pushing back ab
out a particular design element that they say looks quote dated or just isn't what they want or quote doesn't match their brand and one thing that often um helps those conversations is if you can provide aspirational examples of people doing the right thing so if you have a public sector organization who's saying we think underlines are horrible we don't want our links to be underlined show them white house.gov yeah or show them you know I don't know nasa.gov right which just relaunched in WordP
ress guarantee you those links are underlined uh on those websites so we we just I just had this conversation actually with a client we launched their website last year and then they've had a turnover in their marketing VP has changed um and the new person came and they're like can we remove the underlined from links it they just jump out they stand out too much I don't like it so I'm like explaining why and they're like plus I don't see other organizations doing this like they so yeah and and I
think they mentioned like the New York Times and I was like what are you talking about I swear the New York Times has underlines on their links so I went and looked and I I was like okay yes they do and I screenshotted for them and I was like I was looking at I was like you know I think part of why yours stand out so much is because they have a really bright blue that's almost like the blue in equalized digital branding like our color and like that was what their links were and I was like look
at the New York Times like they're using more of a teal color so it's still is passes color contrast but it's not this like bright and they're like oh yeah I like this so we ended up just changing the color of their links so they wouldn't quote stand out as much so sometimes you have to get it like what's the underlining reason that they don't want that and maybe there's a way to design it so that it's still like on the WordPress accessibility website we don't actually use color at all to denote
links they're the same color as the surrounding text we just use an underline yeah right so they're black so you know maybe there are ways to do it and now we're going too long yeah yeah great answer everyone um for the next one Laurel asks when a website has a lot of accessibility issues that are being addressed through a redesign what can be done to protect the company from accessibility lawsuits before the web design the website redesign is finished an accessibility statement right so I thin
k what I've heard from a lot of attorneys in the space and again we're not here giving legal advice is is that having an accessibility statement really helps and your accessibility statement should say number one how to get help that is probably the most important thing and it needs to be a real way to get help not like a contact form that goes to Nowhere yeah and it should list known issues right yeah I don't think you have to yes but yeah you're GNA say that ra like it's a best practice to lis
t known ISS a best practice because if there are any blockers that is there it's better to list and tell that you're working on them and what I also realized is uh as Amber is saying about contact it should be very easy and you need a phone number they want to talk to someone on the other side M who is empathetic and who understands you know that people always have seen um in some of the law searches we don't see a dis ility health desk phone number which is very specific so you might need the r
ight language also yeah I um the other thing that I've seen so we've done some remediation with universities that were and colleges that were under mandated remediation with the um office of civil rights which is part of the US Department of Education and they've actually advocated so like this one Community College for example the platform that people can register for like the lifelong learning classes it's a third party platform that was totally not accessible and they can't but we couldn't fi
x it Community College couldn't fix it and the vendor was like yeah we're not fixing it so they're like okay well we're gonna have to find a new platform and it's going to take us time and the one thing the office of civil rights said is they're like okay we'll consider this a pass but what they had to do was not just in their accessibility statement right above the link to go register they had to put a message that says this platform is not accessible here are the alternate ways and so like thi
nking about too like having it outside of your accessibility statement because that was the big thing the office of civil rights said was they're like don't make people waste their time like if you know that this doesn't work don't make them go there and figure it out like tell them and tell them what they can do to to get the more accessible version so I think that's probably the other thing that possibly could be done on a website while you're in process of building a new one or remediating gr
eat an steam I'm going to the next one NADA asks hi I'm a software trainer at a media company I train Linguistics on how to use a scripting tool to create dobs and audio descriptions we are starting to hire blind Q seers to review the audio descriptions to make sure they are accurate and accessibility friendly they will be using our software which we've made accessible my question is do you have any resources or advice on on how to best conduct training for blind users I make online courses one
on one-on-one trainings documentation Etc I would love to hear your expect your experience in training I want to make sure I am inclusive in my speech and make the Q seers feel comfortable do you want to answer this one raaga so um this is with regard to e-learning how to make e-learning content accessible so if it is a just like how to train how to train people who are blind on testing on testing that's that's how I understood this question to be okay so so yeah go ahead I I think it's all abou
t guidance when we do testing uh someone with blindness already who using screen leers they know how to use screen readers but they don't know the product that testing so having someone I always have a site assist that helps me identify what is there either they explain how the platform looks visually before I start testing it and once I test it I'll tell what I understood and they'll correct me from that um if it is e-learning content I I do test e-learning content uh when lot of videos are the
re it's uh blind people prefer not to so this is like personally me and I I worked with a lot of friends and community that I know we read lot of transcripts rather than videos because screen reader is much faster than listening to and we can jump to words spellings where we want that is how we access e-learning content so transcripts those are must for us thank you and just to give it a bit more context um NADA added how to make online cour accessible um they said they use articulate 360 not su
re I'm not sure if you're familiar with that platform so it's an e-learning platform articulates and storyboard I think there's there's two three e-learning platforms so we need to see if the platform itself is having the features of accessibility which sometimes are when you're creating modules from those platforms we need to test and see if we can Implement accessibility sometimes it's not possible because the components come from from the platform directly so we need to work with the platform
thank you the other thing I'll I'll add um as a presenter that I always try to stay mindful of and I know that we do this at our events is if there are visual elements on a slide say you're presenting learning materials to try to verbally describe those because that will end up in the transcript um that a blind person might use later to uh uh you know consume that material thank you and Amber did were you going to add something uh yeah I mean I was just going to say the other resource that migh
t be worth not necessarily using but referencing some of how they do uh the Carol center for the blind I'll put their Link in the chat it's just carol. org uh but they do training for people who are blind um on accessibility testing and some other things and maybe looking at what their approach is and their nonprofit organization they might even like consult with you or that kind of thing to help you figure out how you're create you can create the most accessible materials for people who are bli
nd thank you everyone um going to the next question Laura asks when I do evaluation on my site with wave I get no script element errors on images that I have all text for could you please explain if this is something I need to fix and how to fix it uh you know it's funny I was I was looking at one of our websites that we have almost ready till launch and I was looking at accessibility Checker and I was like Hey we're flagging some of these no Script images too just like wave yeah Steve what is t
hat's like a WordPress performance thing or something right it what's what's with the no Script images in WordPress and what do we need do we need to worry about those or not uh I don't know I'm stumped on this one a little bit uh so I think is in some cases and I think this happens more when you're using performance plugins like maybe perf matters does this it might have a second version of the image in a no script tag for certain types of images so that if you have JavaScript off yeah I think
it's in reference to Lazy loading I think yes what happens is the lazy load images doesn't load and they're deferred until in the performance as Amber is saying and they don't they don't pose any accessibility because while the Dom is still there for the screen leer user if you press uh in the shortcut key G he can still access the image and that on yeah so while while automation uh throws errors it's we need to evaluate each one of them and see which one is valid this is always I always say you
know don't just look at the automation results I think if you do have alt text on it then it's fine yeah yes yeah and I think I think from our standpoint like I think we were EV we were getting the issue where we were it was flagging two right it was showing both like it was showing the no script and the image as duplicates but yeah I think it's in reference to Lazy loading and and I think it's something that does require a little bit of a human evaluation like Raab said thank you um so the nex
t one it's very specific um David asks someone mention mention having an H2 heading titled popular products underneath each product card use h3s for product names however for SEO purposes they were advised to change the popular products heading to a div and make the product title titles H2S instead is that correct lighting round no no no wrong I did a big thumbs down just in case anyone cannot see me does anyone want to quickly explain why poor usability for screen reader uses and yeah yes I mea
n you need HTML semantics and they if you make that no popular product not a heading then it won't show up in the headings list and someone can't easily jump to it yeah so then you have a list of uh just random product names with no context yeah potentially right you don't know that these are prop popular products because the popular products label is no longer an H2 yeah does it exist on the same page as regular products or unpopular products we're all featuring unpopular products ra what were
you gonna say as someone who practices yeah someone who practices SEO you know Google reads the heading and reads the following content to get the sem relationship because uh this is again an accessibility it's called info and relationship that is is what even Google follows yeah this is one that it's not just bad for accessibility this is a bad SEO recommendation yeah I was going say maybe the closing remark here is David maybe explore some other SEO professionals to work with um potentially al
l right so there's a handful and we only get 15 extra minutes to buffer with our captioner so I'm gonna say um Paula when you're saying them why don't you try to pick somebody to respond if you know who it might be best for and then we're going to try to do fast let's do that okay another very specific one Stephanie asks I have a web page with a list of Publications from a faculty member they put the link to the article at the end of the citation would it be better to create a hyperlink on the t
ext of the citation as opposed to placing the link at the end Raga go for it yes it helps within the I do it both ways I put it at at the end and I put it in the content perfect and you don't want a naked link though right yeah no no link text should be proper okay great answer um next one Isa ask Ember and Chris your very first Contact at Nasa what was their job title if they're thinking of approaching bigger organizations it's handy to know who can become a cheerleader within the company thank
s in advance okay so I'll answer this because they contacted me first our first Contact at well for the the NASA project was actually JJ who is I can't remember his title but he's like the owner of Lo Ron Mark Point who was a developer who had the contract and they knew they wanted to bring us in so sometimes on those bigger things you need to build a relationship with the vendor who is serving the government but then do you remember Chris who the job title was of the person they connected us wi
th after we had multiple conver but we had multiple conversations with the vendor first um I believe it was Abby the director of web modernization at Nasa so like a a large department head um yeah yeah it was it was Abby was first person we talked to thanks um the next one NATA asked how is Gen AI being used in accessible Tech I don't know who who knows a lot about AI so whoever wants to take that one so so the Gen AI like we did have a we did we did have a question about this that we didn't get
to but uh and I think we could spend a whole meetup on that but uh we should have one yeah or at least a podcast episode yeah yeah a podcast episode um and to be quite Frank I'm not super super versed in it so but as far as Ai and accessibility I think there's great things like from a development standpoint AI is super helpful in helping me identify what's wrong like I could place code in or I could use a GitHub co-pilot to tell tell me why is this not accessible right or like is this Arya labe
l or Arya tag necessary attribute necessary right things like that now when you get in the generative AI where the AI is now for the enduser to augment their experience now that's a whole can of worms that that goes very deep how does the AI actually do that how does the AI uh evaluate the spectrum of the disability of the Inus and what if the end user has multiple disabilities and and at what spectrum is each one of those disabilities and how do they interact and how does the AI like can AI get
there maybe to augment the experience to make it uh a a unique experience for each in user based on their abilities right like it could probably get there maybe that's in 10 20 years I don't know right now it seems a little like uh I don't know like I don't know if it can fully evaluate that Inus abilities yeah AI is trained on a ton of inaccessible stuff so what do you think AI is going to think is the standard for the web right right we can't even get AI to generate uh adequate alt text right
now right yeah okay thank you next one Laura asks well Laura says social media icon links love the equalize accessibility Checker I get a area hidden and Link opens in new window or top Wars connected with my social media links please explain what to do Amber okay uh so in general the best practice for users is not to have any links open in a new tab or window unless they're going to literally break their flow like for example in a form when you have a privacy policy Link in the middle of the f
orm you of course want that to open in a new tab or window because you don't want them to lose their progress in the form other than that including social media links they should not open the best practice is not open new tab and windows because users can choose to do that um if you do have links that open in new tabs and windows then the second recommendation that's outlined in um some of the wiag um understanding docs is that you would provide a warning this is also required like for federal s
ection 50a compliance using the US WDS um us web design standards in the United States If You're Building organization that wants to follow those um so in our plugin this is telling you your social media link should not open a new T window best thing to do is change them like ours they just open in the same people know how to use the back button they will come back to your website it's okay but if for some reason you or a client really want them to you can install we have a free accessibility uh
new window warnings plugin on wordpress.org it will automatically add um our ARA attribute or an ARA label and a visible icon for cited people warning them that it opens a new window and when you have that plugin installed all of those issues in accessibility Checker go away installed and activated thank you and I posted the link to that plugin in the chat as well um next question denb asks Amber for a blog post how long it's too long I've been working on a post on multimedia and I generally sh
oot for about 1,200 to 2500 words but this one ended up closer to 3,000 should I pair it down or is it okay what do you think hey Amber how long was the wood KAG 2.2 summary post you wrote and published over the weekend yeah I said that earlier so it it was actually 5,883 words um to be specific I don't well I counted because I wanted to see uh how long is too long really depends on what the goal of the article is who you're targeting and that kind of stuff it if if it is a good piece of content
that is appropriately formatted with headings than um to like create structure and it makes sense logically for all that content to be together then it doesn't you could have a 10,000w post and it might not be too long I mean if from an SEO standpoint or something I used to read backlinko a lot if anyone and all he does all he did was create these epic I mean some of them were probably 20,000 word like huge pages that talked all about this certain aspect of accessibility with like research and
links and and stuff and it was great content and I would consume like from top to bottom I would read it all because it solved my problem I agree I also yeah so I I tend to think there is no such thing as too long as long as you it makes sense to keep it together and it's solving the user's problem now there might be reasons to say we're g to do a part one and a part two um but I don't know like I don't think anything is too long yeah I 100% agree and okay for the next one we have um Stephanie I
have a web page with a list of Publications from a faculty member they put the link to the article at the end of the citation would it be better to create a hyperlink on the text of the citation as opposed to placing it in the link at the end sounds familiar to I think we did this one yeah I think we it may have yeah doubled okay next one just ignore that bear asks my clients loves PDF files when possible I try to convince them to convert to the content to HTML but often it's not thoughts on th
at Steve good to confir the content to HTML but yeah I mean yeah convert it to HTML like make an HTML yeah yeah make a web page why not I mean I think that's the best approach Amber do you have a difference of opinion no but if if PDF is the way they need to tag them properly because yeah yeah yeah they need a tag PDF so there are things where it does make sense that it has to be a PDF um anything that you think someone's going to literally print out yeah like you know a a a brochure that they c
an print out or you're creating something I mean we we did this uh for a client a long time ago during our agency days they were um an OBGYN and we created like you know for Women's Health month like a breast self exam little designed thing with the idea that people would print it out and stick it in their bathroom or something right and it had branding from the client but like that we're intending that that's a PDF yeah yeah um and so then I think like Raga said they have to be accessible they
just have to be tagged just the same way like most of the wickhead guidelines follow it but if it's if it if it's valuable content that is not necessarily intended for print out right like make it a make it a web page I mean you're going to get the you're going to get the SEO juice off of that and and all the accessibility that comes along with making it semantic AG to Mill sounds good um next one Stephanie asks what about underlining for headers raaga the heading yeah how do you feel about unde
rlining headings headers and I'm guessing that is in the context of links as well right yeah what we were talking about if possible avoid uh links on headings but I think sometimes it's unable yeah then you need to underline them because was running user test yeah but don't underline your headings for design yeah for design please do not yeah okay the next one have you had users feedback that underlined text is hard to read users with some form of reading disabilities of course we should make su
re we're not underling a long text or paragraph but we also want to make links descriptives so it might not be a word or two yeah I'll I'll chime in on this and then I'll let other people who know more about accessibility followup but I think um I I think that they kind of answered their own question a little bit I think some of it depends on length right like I I definitely have trouble reading underlined text if there is not a lot of spacing between the rows of text and its multiple rows of te
xt underlined it could really mess with my eyes um so yeah if you're if you're if you have underlined hyperlinks keep have it be reasonably descriptive but also not too long right would there be anything else other people would like to add I think that's a pretty comp comprehensive answer um the next one wow go me next one can I have your insights on conducting an accessible webinar or Zoom session in many blind Focus sessions hosts usually ask attendees not to use the chat because the notificat
ion is distracting to screen reader users and also hard for them to navigate and listen to the chat while listening to the main session but chat function is widely used in other disability events also because it is a useful feature for those who do not like to speak on the mic but want to share thoughts how would you strike the balance for the potential accessibility conflict um I can ask that one to raaga so uh I think before any webinars or calls I do I do prep with my zoom and teams because i
t's always a challenge so there are a lot of settings accessibility settings and notification settings we need to turn them off turn them on according to the meeting uh how you want them to alert you and those settings are in there just we need to find them and I think it's it's a learning curve there's a huge learning curve on these tools on how to navigate both Zoom teams or any other platforms yeah know I actually think this is this is an interesting question because we've never we've never a
sked people not to use the chat um and if we've had a a speaker who was blind then um we've usually during the pre before we go live work walk them through how to turn off chat notifications in their Zoom settings if they don't know how because otherwise it does well but but this is an interesting thing that maybe I should think a little bit more about like is that unfair that they don't have access to the same thing it would be better for everyone to not have chat or like do you have any though
ts on that Raa or do you think it's okay no it's okay so until the notification is not distracting the screen leader because what happens is everything someone joins the room someone has put an emoji icon chat a text the screen a live region pops up and like you know it's like blah blah blah and we don't hear anything else and sometimes I the real problem is not the screen leader speaking or announcing and something we couldn't sometimes you know we trying to stop it doesn't stop it it it keeps
on going mhm and that's where feel like it's okay to have chat though I do chat on yeah right now I read every chat that's coming from that 10 days yeah you're just really good at multitasking you're listening to the chat and uh yeah so the in Jaws there's a feature where in one year we can listen to the webinar and the other year I'm listening to the JW screen reader yeah I I will say too like I am never not blown away and impressed when I hear uh like someone who uses a scream reader all the t
ime like listen to their Scream reader and it's like that's like that's what it sounds to me I can't understand it at all but for them it's plain as day and so I would say too like don't doubt people's ability to parse this information um that's coming in if that's something that they're very well versed in and very practiced at right yeah it's definitely a superpower um going on to the next question we have a few minutes left so let's see if we can get through the last three questions um Emily
asks in the blog themes the logo or site name is an H1 that means if the site name is in the footer it's also an H1 how would you handle that my understanding is that there would only be one H1 on your page which is the page title Amber this is a mistake in your block theme yep okay the it should not be an H1 it arguably might not even be a heading at all the site title y That's the answer okay um next question Samra asks hi I'm using an icon as a button but it gives empty link warning how to fi
x that in WordPress Steve screen reader text or an ARA label right okay yes so it depends on how you're creating your button yeah this could be a developer level fix yeah or it could be um it could be something that you could just change in the editor depending on what it is if you post a link to this in the WordPress accessibility Facebook group we can help you actually figure out how to fix the specific thing yep great and going back to to our PDF question earlier this is a followup so you can
have the same information in multiple formats I think of PDF as a PR version too um Lori said that yeah so Lori said that I think that's fair like you could have a web page for something and then also a PDF so maybe that's the way to handle it with a client that they're like well it really needs to have this designed or PDF or whatever um so maybe you convince them to have both I saw there were there were two more that maybe didn't copy over um uh one about uh QR code being the only thing that
is presented on printed material uh says this uh Anna says I usually recommend putting both a QR and a short link do we think it's helpful to have a QR and a short link I think so yeah I think so too uh and then Sue recently read an article saying that links should oh this is about um links not opening in new windows or tabs so we might have addressed this already let me look um the compelling so she's asked does anyone have a compelling reason not to do this other than the wick hag recommendati
on I mean the reason why is that why you have to warn people is when you open a new window or tab the back button doesn't work and the normal expectation is when I follow a link if I want to go back where I was before I can use my back button but that doesn't function when it's in a new tab because there's no history in that tab so the way you get back is different you'd have to close the tab and so the idea behind the warning is it tells someone how they can get back without them having to expl
ore and figure it out yeah and like I think you mentioned that uh opening links in a new tab is something a user can can choose to do like you know I know on a on a Mac you can just hit hold down the command key and click and it opens in a new window window and I think you can even set your browser settings to open all all links in new windows so it's something a user can can Define so why why override that right yeah I am actually going back through a lot of our older content where we were like
opening things in new windows and even though we have the warning and I am removing it as I update those pieces of content so yeah I think it goes back to like you know the thing I like about accessibility when it comes to development and stuff is that it does create some standards right it's not something we have to think about anymore right like it's not like well this client wants to open in a new link right it's just like no we just don't do that it's not our standard and and it and the sam
e with you know underlining link text like we spoke about earlier it's like no it's just not something we do we have a standard and that makes projects go a lot quicker so we are definitely over time uh our captioning is going to stop in two minutes so I think we should up um but this has been great we'll have a recap with all of those links that were shared in the chat um in a couple weeks uh if you have any additional questions you can always get a hold of us on the equalized visual.com websit
e um we also recommend checking out if you're not in the Meetup group or you can go to our events calendar either way and you can register for other upcoming events and join the Facebook group and you can post additional questions there as well so thank everybody thank you everyone bye thanks everyone bye see you
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