 Thank you very much. I am so excited to be here. But before I get into the great love affair between accessibility and WordPress, I'd really like to know who my audience is today. So how many people are new to WordPress? You're just beginners. Awesome. How many people consider yourself an intermediate to build sites for clients? Great. And how many people in the room know more than me? I knew I'd get one. So on the next topic, how many people are familiar with web accessibility? Have heard about it? Know it exists? Oh, I love that. How many people have not a clue how to implement it? Don't have a clue. I love it. Well, that means I have something for everybody in the room. I've been designing websites since 1997 and when I first started working with websites, I have to tell you they were the all-time ugliest websites you can possibly imagine. I admit it, but at the time in 1997, what did we have to work with? Exactly, not a lot. But over the years, we changed, we got new tools, we got new software, and then suddenly WordPress was on the market and I discovered WordPress and fell in love and started to convert all my old sites to WordPress. Loved it. Then through the years of working with it, my niche market are attorneys. And suddenly I realized, by attending some of their training courses, that there are laws that pertain to websites that many of us didn't know about. And I started to become very educated on what those laws were. I have a personal passion for accessibility. It affects my life personally and professionally. So when I discovered what was the entire world of accessibility with websites, I dove in head first. I spend at least two-thirds of my day and my week either studying, working on it, talking to people, asking questions, or remediating sites. So it is my priority and I love it. I'm really in love with it and I hope that at the end of the 40 minutes that we share together today, you might get a good like for it and maybe kind of head your way towards a little bit of love yourself. I recently attended a accessibility technology conference that was put on by CSUN in Anaheim. And there were some awesome speakers that were talking about accessibility as well as legal issues. And I will share some of the things I learned that week. But one of the things that I learned that day, one day that I was there that was a little disturbing, a particular company that has a tool that tests for accessibility tested one million home pages across the world. How many of those home pages, do you believe a percentage wise, were accessible to persons with disabilities? I'm hearing 20, 3 percent. Anybody else have a guess? Zero? Well, between zero and three. It was two percent of all the websites that they tested were accessible to persons with a visual disability, a hearing disability, a cognitive disability, a motor disability. Two percent worldwide. And that market area, two percent doesn't seem like a lot, but yet when you look at the whole picture, it's a lot. The definition of a disability is defined by the American Association of Disability. They say the ADA defines a person with a disability as a person who has a physical or mental impairment that substantially limits one or more of their life activity. And a disability, sometimes we can see it. We can see someone with a wheelchair. We can see someone with a white cane or a side assisted dog. We can see someone that has someone that is giving them assistance for whatever it is, but we can't see them all. One out of every five person has a disability. It's either hereditary or somewhere in their life they've had an accident or an injury that has caused it or it's age. So if one in five persons have a disability, we have a target market of almost 20 percent or greater than 20 percent of persons that we're not able to reach that cannot use our products. And services because they cannot access our websites. So today I want to talk about what is your motivation to want to fix your website? Is it the stick? Lawsuits against businesses with websites that are not accessible is rising at a rate of almost 200 percent per week. There used to be as few as 200 lawsuits in a year. In 1985 there were almost three, excuse me, 1985, there were 1,800. Last year, 2018, there were over 3,800. Recently I'd say it was maybe four to six weeks ago a restaurant in downtown Los Angeles got hit with a lawsuit because a customer went to her website and couldn't access the website. And filed a case against her. She was on NBC4 News, if you Google it you will see her interview. And in her interview she said, well if I'd have only known I would have done whatever we could to make it work for this person. Nobody warned me, I had no warning. You might have heard last year even when people said, oh you know what, they're sending letters out. Fix your website or else. A nice threat. Well we have since learned from defense attorneys that they're not sending those letters anymore. They're going straight to court. So you get no warning until you see someone at your door that's handing you the lawsuit. So we have two reasons to want to be accessible. One is because you don't want to be sued, you don't want your clients to be sued. And speaking to the defense attorneys that I met in the last three weeks at these various conferences that I attended, they said the cost of a lawsuit is so expensive, especially in California, that it is so much more easier, wiser, smarter, efficient to fix it ahead of time. Or do we want to go for the carrot to increase the value? And that's why we have a picture of somebody with thumbs up, because I'd like to see that web designers, web developers, anybody that develops an app, anybody that develops a theme or a plugin to make it accessible, increase value. There are laws that protect persons with disabilities. The ADA covers that you cannot discriminate against someone with a disability. In California we have what's also called the Unruh Civil Rights Act. These lawsuits I'm being told are being filed under both of these. And in California I'm told the Unruh Civil Rights Act starts with a minimum fine of $4,000. Non-negotiable. Now I am not an attorney, so I can't give you legal advice on any of this. I can only share with you what these attorneys have told me. And I hope that by sharing that advice, first off it saves you the cost of having to retain them to answer your questions, but you can see that there is an active legal presence in the field. As these lawsuits continue, more and more defense attorneys get involved. And what I learned when speaking to these defense attorneys is very simple. The cost of a lawsuit is extremely expensive. The cost of a lawsuit can put you out of business. And defending against these lawsuits is really tough. It's really tough. They will settle most of them instead of going to court, but even a settlement amount could close your doors. So rather than wait until you do get caught, why not be proactive and take yourself out of the crosshairs? That is my position. I used to speak and still do to conferences of business owners. I used to talk to them about the accessibility of their website. And then they would go home and yell at their designer. And I thought, I'm doing this backwards. I need to go to the designers and say, hey guys, here's a way to increase your value and make your clients happy, so that they're not in the crosshairs. Separate yourself from the people who are doing their website for $150. Increase your value to them. Show them how much you know. Make yourself a valuable asset to them. So that is my position. Increase your value. When you increase your value, not only does that mean that it will drive innovation. We have more plugins coming out for accessibility. We have themes that are coming out that are already accessible. In fact, WordPress has an entire focus on any new themes in their repository need to be accessible. Pretty nice. They're on board. We also know that it will enhance your brand if you can tell your clients, your prospective clients, that you will build their site according to accessibility. And the great part about that is, if we have so many people that are functioning fabulously with their disability but they can't access your website, you're missing out on a niche market. And so is your client. So does your client know that if a blind person wants to buy their products, but if they can't access their website, they lost a sale? They don't know. But wouldn't it be great if they suddenly were able to get those clients? Also, when you have accessibility in your toolkit and you're building websites for your clients that are accessible, then persons with disabilities can refer to you. So now you will have a new bank of clients that are looking for someone who can build a website that they personally can use and they can feel very comfortable having their friends and their clients use it as well. So you extend your target market as well by doing that. And you will obviously minimize your legal risk. Moving along. This is one of the websites that at the end of today, I will have a URL that you may visit that will have a link to every resource that I mentioned today. But this is one that I want you to know. This is Making the Web Accessible with the Web Accessibility Initiative. This is where, if you have heard about WCAG, WCAG 2.0, 2.1, the Content Accessibility Guidelines, this is where it comes from. When you start here, you can educate yourself as to how this started. Who are these people that are coming up with the success criteria? Who are these people and how can you learn from them? They have tutorials. They have educational materials. They have examples. They have testing tools. This is where I always recommend when someone is looking to educate themselves, this is the place to start. It is a vast area of knowledge. When you start going through what it takes to make the success criteria of your website meet accessible, I know people have gone to the guidelines and completely overwhelmed themselves. There are pages and pages and pages and pages and what is the text font and what is the color contrast and what difference does my hyperlink make? It can be overwhelming because you are looking at the entire thing all at once. Today I want to give you some tidbits on some basics and show you how simple they are. And then when you go back to the guidelines, then you can see, oh, that fits. I understand that. That is where that applies. And that is my purpose today, is to show you that in order to build a site from accessibility, it is easy to begin that way. But if you have sites that don't have it, it is easy to remediate them. When you first were introduced to WordPress, you had to learn it, yes? And the first time you went and got a theme, you had to learn how to work with that theme in WordPress, yes? And then there was a plug-in or then there was something else you were adding to it. So every point in your business progress you have learned something. So this is an opportunity to learn something else. Instead of making it overwhelming, it can be very fun and it can be great. And I suggest we start with a strategy. When we have a website that we are building or if we receive one from a defense attorney and our job is to remediate it, the first thing we do is determine what is our goal. When you are talking to a client about their website, their goal usually is, give me a great website. I want everybody to know where I am. I want everybody to know what I do. And you take that goal and you work with it. When we have a goal, our goal is we want to give the client exactly what they want and we want 100% accessibility. Because we believe that a website is more than a pretty face. It has to be functional. It has to load fast. It has to have good SEO. It has to appeal to the target market. You want a low bounce rate and we want accessibility. The great part about accessibility is that when you build it into your toolbox, it becomes so second nature, it's not something that you have to think much about. It almost becomes the first thing you think about. The tasks, when we have a website, are we going to audit it or design it? Obviously there's a difference in the approach that we have when we do that. And then we decide, when we start, are we testing or are we remediating? Every website that we work on, we test immediately. When we install a fresh WordPress, we test it. WordPress out of the box is almost completely accessible. And if I choose a theme that is in the repository in the accessibility section and add it, we're going to test it again. We're still going to make sure that before we put one letter of content or one image that we're starting with a platform of accessibility. On the other hand, if we're remediating a website, we need to run a test on it to find out where it needs additional assistance. So in the beginning, this is where we start and then we prioritize. What's most important first? What do we need to fix first? What can wait till second? What can we wait till third? What resources are we working with? You will all have different resources. Some of them I will show you at the end, different services that you can use, different tools that you can use, but you have your own resources. You want to know what those are when you're working with sites. How are you going to measure that you are moving forward? I'm sure you already have a measurement program when you're building a client site. How are you going to add accessibility into that measurement and what are your benchmarks? So we always start with a plan so that we don't get lost in the middle and go, did we cover that? Did we do that? Did we fix that? We start with a plan with a checklist and go check by check by check by check so that we're able to know that we've made it easy to fix them one by one by one. There are automatic testers on the market. And I will start by letting you know that there is not a single automatic tester on the market that is going to say the exact same thing as the other ones. They each have their own protocol. We use the Wave tool. It is both an online and a browser add-on, and we love the Microsoft Axe. That was introduced three weeks ago. It is a partnership between Microsoft and Deque. If you were using the Axe plug-in previously, this is a combination of both. We love it. We also do a lot with the A Inspector, which is a Firefox add-on. It was developed by the University of Illinois, and we also love it. The reason we love the Wave, we show it to clients, is because all the colors. And this particular report was run on the same website, by the way. So where Wave says there's only two red flags and 18 contrast errors, if you look down here, our automated tool says that there are 18 failures on that same page. So we don't want to rely on one tool. We want to rely on as much information as we possibly can. The great thing that I like about the accessibility insights for the web, if you can see on this screen. If not, you'll be able to see on the slides, which you will have a link to all of these slides. It says down here, I don't know if this has a pointer. Nope, it doesn't seem to stand in the light. Down here it tells us that the color contrast. The elements have insufficient color contrast, and it tells you the WCAG number to go look at. So you don't have to guess, well, what's wrong with it? And what do I have to do to fix it? It's not only telling you what it's identified, it's telling you where you can find the solution. So it's helping you see and learn at the same time. What we have learned is the Wave tool sometimes says that there is a color contrast problem when there's not. I have not yet discovered that with the accessibility insights. But if you have a background color in your website, and then you put a module on top of that, let's say you have a dark background. You put a module with a transparent background, and then you put an image on top of that. The Wave tool will say, oh, excuse me, and then you want to put text on top of the image. The Wave tool will measure that text against the background of the site, not the background of the module. So we had a number of them, we had a number of them that were failing white text against a white background, and we couldn't figure this out. So I sent an email to the developers with Wave, it's Web AIM, and I said, I don't understand. Can you please go to this site and tell me what it is I'm seeing? And that's when he said, you know, we don't see the transparent background, our tool says transparent is white. So the tools are not always 100% correct. You need to manually look at what it's telling you. I like all of the colors when I show a client because they respond to the colors. They don't have a clue what all these things mean, but we do. The biggest failures we see we're going to see on accessibility insights are just exactly what they're naming, the color contrast, the name of a link, and a unique landmark. Those are very common errors, and most people either aren't aware of them or don't know how to fix them, and they tell you a link to the answer. On our priority list, we don't go, okay, we've got to fix all three of these right now. We take them one at a time. So don't overwhelm yourself trying to fix everything immediately, one at a time. Start remediating, become very comfortable. And if you build a similar site for each of your clients, you use the same theme perhaps or a similar theme, the same plug-ins, a similar layout. If you remediate one client's site, then it's very easy to go to the rest of your clients and do the same thing, because you have just shown yourself how you can make your efforts better. After you test with the automated tools, this is critical. These are your screen readers. A person that is blind cannot see the screen. I have a family member that cannot see the screen of a website. I don't care if you hold it up here, even though she wears glasses that are very thick. She cannot. She uses a screen reader. These are all free. The one in the middle is Apple. The other two, JAWS and NVDA, are downloads that will work off of your PC. I would suggest if you've never heard one or seen one to download it, it's free and run it. But before you do, make sure you know how to turn it off, because its default is very loud and very fast. So you want to know, where's off? Where's off? Where's off? Because it will show you how they read a webpage and why some of these things that we ask for are important. Because we, a person that has no visual impairment, no visual disability, is going to look at a website and we kind of glance at what we're looking for and we pinpoint what we want. We're able to see the differences in the color and the pictures and the content and the thought. We have no problem with that, but the reader, it doesn't. It goes one word at a time, or with the tab it will go from one heading to a hyperlink to a heading to a navigation, whatever they are looking for. So it's a little different than what an able-bodied person is accustomed to. So after you run the Wave tool or the Accessibility tool or whichever tool you use automated, you will do yourself a great service if you run one of these tools and see what it really sounds like. What does your website really present as to a person who is using a screen reader? And just like those of us who have very little patience, we go to a website, we kind of skim, and if it's not what we want, we're gone. They're going to do the same thing with a screen reader. If they start at your website and it's not making any sense, they're out of there. If they can't get the information that they want, they're gone. There goes your bounce rate, there goes your potential client. And it also goes the same for persons that have a hearing disability. They have Braille readers. They have readers that will let them see the content. They will have larger captions. There are other tools that they're able to then perceive your website. If we look at what are the four dynamics of building an awesome website, and what I'm saying awesome, this means that it's for everybody. Accessibility is not making things better for some people at the expense of others. It is not putting effort in to make one group of people more special than another group of people. Accessibility levels the playing field so everyone can come play. Everyone can access your website. That's what it is. So if you follow the POUR, your website is going to be better for everyone. And when we look at what P, perceivable, the information is something that a person can look at and whether they're a visual person or using a reader, they can perceive it. They all, it's operable. That means that they can use their readers to get through your website. Or if a person does have the capability of their mouse or their keyboard, they can use that as well. It's not limiting. Understandable is the content in a way that it's understandable. Have you built the structure in a way that's understandable both to persons with the visual ability and those that are using readers? And is it robust? Can it be interpreted by a wide variety of equipment? So that's not just those that have no disability, but those that do have any disability. And it's not that difficult. We have three success criteria. A is standard. When the WCAG came out, it was first at a level that if you met A, you were great. Then it was upgraded to where it became to an AA. We had a little bit more information that was placed into the WCAG, the WCAG. So now, as of the 2.1 release last year, by doing certain other things, you can get a AAA rating. Do you need them? Is it important between an A or a AAA? The difference is, is your website accessible and how accessible is it? If you are selling websites to the government or you are selling a product that is going to be sold to the government, you must by law comply with section 508. 508, you want to get AA minimum and now they're asking for AAA. And a lot of the section 508 requirements that the federal government has been required to comply with for all these years are now part of WCAG 2.1. That's our AAA. I have a client. They're one of the regional permissioned health funders. So we do mental health. So I'll be tasked with the gays on the developers to do that. So in that instance, it is state government funding, but it is a non-profit. So it's not literally a government movie. How would this fall into that? Since it is for mental health, chances are very unlikely that our typical user case is going to access the website. It's going to be more guardian just because of limited amount of information. It's a very good question. I have to answer start by saying I'm not an attorney. However, what I have been told by attorneys who are involved in the section 508 and ADA and web accessibility, if they are getting federal funding is not necessarily mean that it's a requirement that they're 508. They have situations that would tell them that they have to comply with 508. You would have to ask them, are they in that section of government supported organizations that are required to follow section 508? They would know that because they are given that information. If they're given federal funds, they're told what those federal funds can and cannot be used for and what they have to do to qualify for them. So it'd be that information. Yes. It's always been a double A and most parts of it have been triple A. And now we have WCAG 2.1, a lot of the new points are triple A. So section 508 has always been more stringent because it's the federal government. So if you are dealing with a federal organization, then you want to really know your 508. And it's very specific. And it says things that I will go over the difference in just a second and a couple of things that we used to think were okay that in 508 weren't okay. This is an accessibility checklist that makes it real easy to know POUR. If you want it to be perceivable, here is your four points, guidelines for your text, your time based, your adaptable and your distinguishable. It tells you exactly which numbers they are. If you want it to be operable, you want it to be keyboard accessible, you want to have enough time for them to fill out forms. You want to make sure that you don't have animation that is flashing at a rate that could cause a seizure. And you need to make sure that it's navigatable by the keyboard or by the tab. You also want to know understandable. Is it readable, predictable, and can it use input assistance? And robust, it's compatible. But these are the numbers that tell you if you want to be level A, then follow what it says in the yellow column. If you want to be level AA, it has been upgraded to add more information, which you'll see in the gray. And level triple A is the green. So if you only did this, you are miles ahead of a lot of other people. And the great thing about it is when you start working with accessibility on your website, your SEO gets better. When you start working with accessibility, you may find that your design begins to look better. Because there are certain things you're going to do differently. So because we're working in WordPress, I know a number of people say, well, shoot, I will just install a plugin. We're good to go. Yes and no. The good part is, is because it's WordPress, there are plugins. And these plugins will do a lot, but they will not do 100%. The bad part is, so many people rely upon the plugin to do everything, and yet there's so many parts the plugin did not do. And they don't take the time to look and see what those are. And the ugly part of plugins is that some can break your site. We used a particular plugin for years. We loved it. It was great. And then the developers stopped upgrading it. Well, we know WordPress, WordPress updates, themes update, other plugins update, and now this plugin crashes sites. We're hoping it comes back around because we liked it. The other thing that I've seen people do is they will install a plugin and say, okay, I've done everything the plugin needs to do, but they don't fill out the specifics in the settings. They just install the plugin and they activate it. I wonder why it's not working. There are settings in every plugin. A couple of the settings that are important. Where is your main content? Because someone using a screen reader or a keyboard is wanting to find the main content of your website. But if you're using a theme that says main content is main, but you didn't set it in the plugin as main, the plugin may look for main content or main hyphen content. Same with navigation. What is your theme? Call your upper navigation versus your in-line navigation and put those in the settings of the plugin so that it speaks to your theme. So go beyond just installing it. See which one. Myself and my team, we test every plugin that we find that says that it's accessible or that it creates accessibility. Some of them even cost money and we will still test it to see if it is doing what they are saying it will do. And what I find amusing and interesting and kind of confusing is I get these referrals to plugins that are supposed to create 100% accessibility and they guarantee it and I go to their sales page and their sales page is not accessible. It fails miserably. And two that I know I have written to them and said, I don't get it. If your plugin is that awesome, how come your page fails? Oh, we haven't done our home page yet. We haven't fixed that yet, but the plugin is great. So if your plugin is great, how come you didn't use it on your own site? Just a question. But the plugins that we use, we have a couple that we're testing now and we've found bugs. We make sure to tell the developer this is not working. Can you explain did we do something wrong or is this a bug? Because we want it to work. So I can't tell you what plugin will work with your particular installation of WordPress, your theme and your plugins. You need to experiment. We do, however, always start with the WordPress accessibility plugin. After all, it's WordPress. Why not start there? And then we look to see what's missing. If we're using a theme that has its own accessibility plugin, we may or may not add that. We know one theme that their accessibility is great except that it breaks the search feature. So we've been having talks with the developer to say, how come it breaks my search form? I can't use my search form with the plugin installed. They wouldn't know to fix that if someone didn't tell them. They wouldn't even know what other people are doing with it unless we tell them. So it's important to give feedback. There's two or three themes that I know of that do have accessibility plugins that developers have worked on for that specific theme. And contact forms. Many of the contact forms built into themes are not accessible. They do not identify the actual field. It looks like it to you when you're looking at the website as its name, address, phone number, whatever. But in the code, that field is not identified. So the reader doesn't know, what am I supposed to do with this spot? Contact form seven and gravity forms both have accessibility plugins. But if you add them after you've installed either one of those, you have to redo your forms. But at least the forms are then accessible. So you look at what are you using and what plays well with what you use. And go for the simplest way possible. What you don't want to do, and I had someone in one of my workshops told me they did this, they thought it was really smart, is they took an accessibility logo and they threw it up in the upper navigation of the site and they said, well, since I have an accessibility logo up there, that means that somebody will just go to the site and they'll see that it's okay so they won't sue me. I said, well, it kind of reminds me of my son. When I walked in his room and he had stuff all over the floor and all over the bed and I said, I need you to clean up your room. This is a mess. Get the stuff off the floor. And I walked in about 20 minutes later and everything was off the floor, but he was on his bed and he just covered it up with a blanket. He gave the illusion that he followed the instructions, but it wasn't done. So that trick does not work. So don't try it. The most common thing missing. And I'm sure you've heard this over and over again, alt tags. Give your images a name. But don't say that it's an image or a logo. Give it more. Give it robust. So if it is an image, what is it an image of? Describe what it is. Give an intent. What is it doing in the content? If I was using best practice, this is a logo. And it's only used in the header or the footer of the page. So the alt tag on that would be the name of the company and it's a logo. It doesn't really need much more than that because no one's going to go look for it in the content because it's not there. But what if you had this on the page? How would you describe that? If the image didn't show, what would you want people to know about that image and the content? It's cute that there's a lost cat and they posted a sign on a poll. So when a screen reader is going through and reading it, does it pronounce before it starts reading the description? Image. Description. So it tells them it's going to read an image and then it says what the alt is. And if you've provided a long description and in your media library you can provide long descriptions when you upload an image. Then if it's there, it gives them the option to click to hear what the long description is. So if your description, if you're writing something comedic about sketching, that would be one way to write an alt tag for this image. But if you're on an animal site, that would have a different image. I mean a different alt description for that image. So make the alt description fit the image so it becomes part of the content of your page. And even for someone who isn't with a visual disability, if the image doesn't show, they can see what was supposed to be there. And that information is good for your SEO. So originally I heard that you're supposed to put that on alt images. Alt images have to have an alt tag. Okay, because I just read recently that obviously they're wrong that you weren't supposed to put them on this decorative image. You're correct. Thank you. Decorative images, there is a box in your media library that you can click that it's decorative. And the reason for that is if you have, let's say, a bunch of red flags or bullets or little decorative portions on your content. You don't want the reader to go bullet, content, bullet, content, bullet, content. It will go past that decorative point and just read the content. So thank you for bringing that up. So if you're using like a P&G and replacement of a bullet pass. I didn't hear you. So like you have a checklist or you have a bullet list and you replace the bullets with like a P&G. You don't need to move the bullet. Exactly. In your media library, you would label those as decorative. So how would you label that if you're hand-coding? If you're hand-coding the image, in your description it would say alt. And in there you would put decorative. And the way that you can check that is go to your media file. The image, market is decorative. Put it into a page and see what it looks like. And that's specifically doing it. It tells the screen reader. Ignore it. How about this one? Again, it depends on the content of where this was at. We can say that it's a picture of a sad dog with some text on it. And in the long description we can actually say what the text is. But again, it depends what's in there. Here's the other way that I see that a lot of sites fail. Your font, your spacing and your alignment. These fonts that I have put up there are the ones that are the most easily read by all persons. Those with perfect vision and those using a reader. And the reason is because look at the space between the letters. You can see what the letters are. So if you're using a decorative font then you need to be careful if the letters have enough spacing. So in 2.1 they actually went farther to say this is what it usually looks like on somebody's content. But in 2.1 they have said we would like you to put .12 pixel between letters. We would like 1.5% line spacing and 2% between paragraphs so that same text looks like this. So anybody can read it. So it's not just we're saying oh you got to do this for accessibility. Anybody can read it. Your structure. Here's where I see a lot of people. In the past we would use our CSS to tell us what size were our H tags. And a lot of people were doing just that without realizing those H tags have purpose. Your H1 is important. What is the title of your page? And what is the most important point on that page? And everything that follows it. So the structure tells the reader to go. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. I was talking to someone on the phone. I ran a test on her website and she went H1, H4, H6, H3, H2, H9. I went what? I said why? And she goes well because those are the sizes in my CSS file. And I said I got it. But how about if we put those in order so that the screen reader is not trying to find what's next all over the page but can go down the page systematically. She's why I want to do that. I said well that's your choice. But that's my recommendation is to understand the structure. And we're talking about WCAG 2.4 where you can get more information about the actual structure. Hyperlinks. They need to say more than click here or link. And I don't know about you but probably all my websites previously were designed and built to say click here. Paragraph, paragraph, content, content. Click here. You need to add more information but you don't want it to be so long that it runs off the page. I did that on purpose. You want it to have content that tells it what they're linking to. Link to the article about such and such. That alone makes a difference when somebody's going through the website with the JAWS, the screen reader. What am I clicking? What is there? Is it the article? Is it the rest of the paragraph? What's there? Give them that information. It has good length and there is a 3 to 1 contrast ratio between the color of your hyperlink and your text. I have seen pages where the background is dark blue, the text is white, and the hyperlink is red. Can't see it. And you also want to make sure that when you do a hover on it that that also works with color. I'm going to move fast because we're running slow. I mean we're running low on time. Color. Did you know that color blindness one in 188 people are blind? One in five persons has a disability. So given the number of people in this room, that means there's persons in this room that have a disability. We don't know if it's hearing, visual, cognitive, motor. But it's there. One in 30 people have low vision. Color blindness one in 12. When I was dealing with a client. Here is a when you get the slides you'll be able to see the chart that that particular company has put together on what colors work best on what backgrounds. But I was working with a client so it's not just the color of your font against the background. How about colors that are close together like a pie chart or an infographic. I was with a client and he wanted to do something like this and I said that's not going to work. Watch what happens for a color blind person. Part of our pie is missing. He said, oh, that's no big deal. Let's go see what other people in the company think about it. So we took my laptop and we went into various people's offices and we walked into one man and he said, don't worry about me. I can't tell you where I'm color blind. Ding, ding, ding, ding. Good. Would you tell us? And he said, I don't know what's there. Looks like two things, three things. So what we did then, we can put a line in there to show the difference. Put the numbers on those colors so when we then lose the color, we still have what we need. And again, WCAG 1.4.1 use of color. Captions on videos and audio files. If you go to YouTube, there is on the drop down menu the opportunity that you can get the full transcription of that video. So that if you can't hear it, you can read it. If you're putting captions on your videos, then you're making sure that people when they're sitting in their offices and they have the sound off can still know what you're saying on that video. But you're also making sure that people that are with a hearing disability can also know what's going on in your video or your audio file. You also don't want auto play audio and visual. I have not done that for years because I know given that my attorney, my niche market or attorneys, if someone at work wants to look for an attorney, they certainly don't want to launch it at work and have everybody in the office know they just went to an attorney's website and says, hey, you need an attorney call me. So make sure that you can read up. Here's the various places in the WCAG that have transcriptions for your videos, whether right on the page or a link to the page. So if somebody wants to know what it is. The YRE landmarks is 1.3.6. Here's where I mentioned previously. It's going to say, where's your main content? The ARIA tag is the accessible rich internet application that the screen reader is going to read and it's going to tell them where to go. There are a number of accessibility plugins that will automatically add the ARIA tags for you. But the ones they seem to miss like I previously mentioned is what is your content? Is it called main? Is it called content? Is it main hyphen content? What is your navigation? So you want to know what it's called in your theme so that you can do it. And the extra benefit? Good ARIA tags being great SEO benefits. So working with accessibility is not to make your job more difficult. It actually makes your job easier when you include it in what you do and it makes the end product a better product. So in summary, plan your design to include accessibility. Use plugins that prioritize accessibility. Test, test, test, test, test, test, everything. Check for the obvious, your font, your structure, your color schemes. The things that I mentioned here today are the obvious ones people fail. There are more than these. I couldn't possibly tell you everything about accessibility in 40 minutes unless I talked as fast as I did last night. But I'm trying not to do that today. Test your site sometimes without using your mouse. Use the tab key and see what it does to your site. Does it go from heading to paragraph to hyperlink? Did it miss something very important? Test it as if it was a person that couldn't use a mouse. Take that extra step to see what are you presenting. And think user experience. I've talked a lot about the technical parts of what you can do for your website. But think about user experience. Think about the person that's accessing your website. If you use very good alt tags that describe what that image is, that's a better user experience than just saying grass out of window. And there's this beam of sunshine that's going across some poppies and there's a cat laying in the grass. You're creating a better user experience. If you start to word your content instead of just saying click here, but describe why you want someone to click that link, you're providing a user experience where someone is more welcomed to your website and its content. If you think about the images that you place in your content instead of just taking up space but enhancing your content, then again you're creating a user experience. So it's not all about hurry up and do this so that you don't get sued. It's about creating user experience and a website for more people to access. Did you have a question? Is it all websites, no matter what you're doing, that must be ADA compliant and businesses? It is termed as public facing websites. What I have been told by attorneys is there's not a specific law that says you as a business must have an accessible website. However, if a person that cannot access your website does so and feels that you discriminated against them because of their disability, that's where the ADA and the Unruh Civil Rights Act come into play. It falls into the discrimination. What I know about the cases that I've seen in the news, it doesn't make any difference the size of your business or the size of your celebrity. Because we have seen restaurants that are five page websites and a celebrity that has a multi-million dollar website. We have seen fast food restaurants and restaurant chains. We have seen e-commerce sites that don't have a physical presence brick and mortar. We have seen brick and mortar retail stores whose websites are hit. So it's not going to get you out of trouble because you don't have a brick and mortar and you only have a website. What I'm told by the defense attorneys is that the DOJ clarified just a few years ago that a website is the extension of your business. It is your storefront. Another question. You don't have to be selling. Your content is your sales pitch. This particular celebrity that I have in mind, I have to say I have not visited that person's website so I don't know if they were selling products. They could be because they are, well, it's Beyonce. So I don't know if she sells stuff on her website or whether she's booking for her tours or what, because I never have been there. I just know that she is one that a lawsuit was filed against just a few months ago. Yes. In theory, like, say you have a website, all you do... I understand. That's what you do. And someone visits your website and wants to participate in the content, but they'll have to connect because you haven't made that website. It's just a good thing. If they talk, they throw up. In theory, by the law. By the law. However, here's, again, this is not legal advice. I'm not an attorney. What I have been told and I do ask lots of questions. When I get a defense attorney that is defending these cases, I show up with every question I've ever been asked because I want to know. If you are someone like Beyonce, millions of dollars off of the people who come to her events and her products and such, like I said, I've never been there. The person that is suing her, it's a large organization. So it's not just a person. It is an organization that represents a large group of people. Their objective is to make access for all. Their objective is not just to empty your pocket. On the other hand, there are what are termed opportunistic plaintiffs that go after people that are the small business because they know you will hurry up and settle and they will get some money. That is my opinion. That is what I've been told. I can't tell you if that's an absolute fact, especially since I'm on video. So as far as your example, someone asked me a similar example last night about if he was a college student and he had a blog and he was just blogging. Would that make him a target? And my response to him was, I'm not an attorney and I can't say for sure, but I would imagine no because you don't appear to have the money that this person would want to get from you. Yes? With the fonts, you said you listened to them and they were accessible. But what if you have the same designers? As long as it has the adequate space between the font and the line size, test it and see if it works. A lot of the reason for the fonts that I showed you is because they already come with that correct spacing between them. So there are people that want awesome designer fonts on their site and great, do it. Just test. Test and see if it works and if not, make an adjustment. But be careful of using a lot of decorative fonts with standard fonts because then it's just crazy for the eye. Was there someone else? Yes? To try and enlighten you with my clients, is there some kind of statistic in how many people who need or who need sites along with disabilities to access them? Is there some kind of statistic about this percentage? Well, the percentage that we talk about is how many people overall are persons with a disability, whether it's visual or audio, whether it's cognitive. You can go to various sites like the Association for the Blind and see what their percentage is. You can go for the various groups and see what their percentages are. But as a general rule, we talk about one in five. One in five. And again, it's summer hereditary, summer by accident and summer by age. So just because somebody's okay today doesn't mean this afternoon that doesn't change. Write down this particular URL. This is where a copy of these slides and all of the references that I have made to the various WCAG information, as well as the testing tools, the various plugins that we use, that will be live by tomorrow. Is there any other questions? I think we're on the nose. Thank you so much.