 Thank you all so much for coming. I'm really excited. I was worried after the Pantheon party and the Lullabot party last night, y'all would be hungover in your beds, so it's nice to see you early at a session, ready to talk about some accessibility. That's exciting. If anybody needs to follow along, it's there up on the screen. It's tinyurl.com, a11y101nola, and that'll be a full text transcript. I do tend to read my slides. I know it's bad presenter etiquette, but I do that for accessibility reasons, so please bear with me if I'm reading something you're seeing on the screen. I'm doing it for a reason. So welcome to, including everyone, Web Accessibility 101. So I'm Helena. I'm a front-end developer at Lullabot. I'm also a web accessibility specialist, which means that my specialty is that I specialize in making the web awesome for everybody. I'm super passionate about not building anything that not everyone can use, and even though it's not a perfect science, I think it's important to do our best. I work at Lullabot. Little shameless plug right here. We're a strategy, design, and development company. It's the best place to work in the world, and my boss isn't in the room, so yeah, we're interactive strategy, design, and development. We create delightful experiences using Drupal and other open source technologies. Build a lot of cool stuff like MSNBC and Sci-Fi, and we have a great time. We build really neat stuff. So today, we're gonna go over just a few different things. We'll talk about what accessibility is. I'm hoping a lot of you already know. If you don't, that's fantastic because you're gonna learn, and it's so important, I'm glad you're here. We'll also talk about the users who benefit. We'll go over the accessibility standards just a touch. I'm not gonna sit here and like read you section 508. Don't worry, it won't be horribly painful, but we'll just talk about it for a second. We'll also talk about how stakeholders benefit. A lot of the time that conversation comes up and we wanna make sure that we know exactly how that's gonna work. Agencies also benefit. We'll talk about how that is, and we're gonna talk about how to integrate accessibility into your organization to make sure that it happens. Oh yeah, and it's gonna be awesome. So web accessibility refers to the inclusive practice of removing barriers that prevent interaction with or access to websites. Basically all that means is that if websites are not built properly, not everybody can use them and we wanna break that down so that we have free reign into the website. It might sound daunting because there are so many different spectrums of ability. Like, oh, how can we do this for everybody? But the good news is accessibility is probably easier than you think. So that's really exciting. We have the poor principles. That's the foundation of accessibility and it's easy to remember because of the acronym. It's perceivable, operable, understandable, and robust. So accessibility is not about hard and fast rules. Like you must have this and you must have that. I mean, there is some of that, but it's really the spirit of accessibility. Just because you're adhering to a specific rule doesn't mean that someone disabled can definitely use that. So it's more about finding the needs of the users than the technical requirements themselves. So our first poor principle is perceivable. Users should be able to perceive your content despite possibly needing to access the information in an alternative way. That means that it should be able to get from the computer or the website into your user's brain. Easy enough, right? Operable, users should be able to operate your website using a variety of methods and forms of technology. Means even if they can't use a mouse and they're going through a keyboard instead, they should still be able to make a purchase. They should still be able to read your blog. The whole website should be operable no matter what they're using to operate it. Understandable, your content should be understandable. Be clear, concise, and allow users to explore content at their own pace. People with dyslexia or cognitive disabilities might not have the easiest time reading content at your pace. So don't slam through with a slider that auto scrolls and you can't go back. You want to keep it at a nice steady rhythm that people can control themselves. And robust, this is the tricky one in our industry, isn't it? Because technology's changing all the time, but robust means that your website should be able to stand up to reasonably outdated technologies, current technologies, and I know none of us have like a crystal ball sitting in our office, although that would be really useful in this industry, but at least looking forward to the anticipated tech standards to some extent and the assistive technology that goes with them. So who benefits? We have this big myth and accessibility that it's an edge case, but let's talk about that a little bit. We've got the visually impaired users, usually blind, deaf, these are the ones that everybody thinks about, motor impaired, but we have our visually impaired users, and it's not just people who are completely blind either. We've got people who might not be able to distinguish between colors. People who can't view content without enough contrast, and then we do have our completely blind users who can't see anything at all, and we need to accommodate for them as well. We also have motor impaired users, people who might have had a stroke, born with a CP, anything like that where you don't have full use of your body. There's a lot of great assistive technology out there that you can still get through the website as long as it's built properly for you to do so. We also have our users with vestibular issues. A lot of people don't know about this one. Vestibular issues can happen if you have all those really cool parallax effects that we all really love, like, oh, look at that slide, and look at, that can make people seasick. So it's important to be careful that you're not gonna make your users throw up into their really expensive MacBook because you use too many parallax effects, so be gentle, that can trigger motion sickness. We've also got our deaf and hard of hearing users. If there's audio content without appropriate alternative transcript or captioning, that's important, too. Don't leave them out of your videos. A lot of marketing happens there. Next, we have our people with seizure disorders, like vestibular disorders. Again, this is really important because you can hurt someone if your website isn't built properly. If you've got a video with all these cool flashing animations, like you made an explosion comic book video, you could give someone a seizure, which is really dangerous, so really try to be careful about your hurts there. And again, our users with cognitive differences. People with cognitive differences might need more time to ingest the material, so allow users to explore content at their own pace. For that reason, I always post my slides and I've provided a transcript because, again, you don't wanna push anybody through it too quickly. Especially me, because I tend to talk really fast. I apologize. In that vein, sometimes I'm not early because I ramble too quickly, and in that case, you guys can get a jump on the lunch line, but I'll try to keep it to the right amount of time. So we have this great myth and accessibility. It's the edge case myth, and it rears its head all the time in what I do because we're in an industry where time is money, right? Every single second, the clients are just seeing that money coming out of their wallet. And they're like, oh, man, I don't wanna add any hours to this. They're an edge case, just skip it. But they're not an edge case. Accessibility's really important. I have a feeling that if you went to your client and you're like, hey, the website works great, just not in New York. Doesn't work in New York. They'd be like, what? No, you can't launch a website that doesn't work in New York. But that's what we do all the time. When we put out websites that aren't accessible because we have 18.55 million more severely disabled people in the United States than there are people living in the entire state of New York. That's almost double. So it is important that we not skip that. It's 38.3 million severely disabled people. And that's not counting people who, oh, I need glasses. These are severe disabilities. It's a very sizable number. We also have, huh? Yeah! Australia all the way. But did you know that just here in the United States, we have more than twice as many people with disabilities than the entire population of Australia. So you're, what? Yes. Got all those crazy animals out there. It's amazing that anybody survives. But you guys must be tough out there in the outback. But yeah, we've got 56.7 million people in the United States with some form of disability. And that might be like, oh, I have glasses, or I have a little bit of a hearing aid. But 56.7 million people is not a number to sneeze at. So when somebody tells you, oh, accessibility is an edge case, let's skip it. No, not an edge case, let's keep it. One more little point to drive at home. How many people have clients who want everything IE tested? You can't launch until it works in IE. But you've got two to three times as many people who would benefit from web accessibility on your website than people using internet explorer. So don't forget your accessibility. We've got 6.2% of users according to the W3 schools. That stat is like a year old now, so hopefully less. I mean, I didn't say that. But yeah, we've got 18.7 of our users with some kind of disability, and 12.6% was a severe disability. So that's a good chunk. So let's talk about web accessibility standards. We're gonna qualify access as best we can, and I swear this won't be super dry. All right, so we have the WCAG 2.0 web content accessibility guidelines. And the system provides three levels of accessibility rating based on conformance to the success criteria, outlined throughout the guidelines. And it's based on the poor principles that we just reviewed. Single A accessibility is like, it's got the minimum requirements. You could maybe plunk through it if you're using assistive technology and you could get to most of the stuff. It's not easy or convenient for people with disabilities to use. Then we have double A accessibility. That's the general standard for accessibility. It's the level that most closely aligns with the requirements, lined out in section 508, which I will not read to you here, but they're available for you on the internet. It balances ease of access for users and ease of development nicely. So this is usually the standard that we're shooting for when we build websites. Excuse me, just a touch parched, hold on. Then I'll tell you all about triple A. So triple A accessibility is the holy grail of accessibility. This is the one where I'm gonna come to your house and knock on your door and when you open it, I'm gonna throw a whole bunch of confetti around and dance around your living room and tell you how great you are. That's not a guarantee, I can't buy that many plane tickets, but this is the standard that's most often used for websites that are built for people with disabilities. Like, if you've got a school for the deaf, you probably want your site to be triple A accessible because you know most of your users have a disability. So this is when you go above and beyond what is needed to make it fantastic. It's the difference between live captions and an ASL translation embed in the video. This is the golden ideal. This is what in a perfect, beautiful world, all websites would be. So section 508 compliance. This requires that all electronic and information technology of federal agencies be accessible to people with disabilities. It is the law. It grades each criteria item as pass or fail. So you either did it or you didn't. There's no gradient at all. And it is required for all agencies that are covered by section 504. Because it's a civil rights law, mistakes can be both illegal and costly. So if you're from a school or anything like that, you need to be extra super careful that you're hitting these. And we'll go into section 504. 504 protects people with disabilities from discrimination or exclusion from organizations or programs receiving federal financial assistance. That means that if your organization gets $1 federally from the government, you've got to be accessible all the way. No chance, no if, no anything. And I see more and more lately, schools and other federal agencies coming on board. And it makes me so happy. Like how many of you in this room right now are from a university? Look at that, yeah. Because you guys have to do it, right? I'm glad you're here. And I know for a lot of 504 companies, it feels like a task. You're like, oh, we have to do this and it's such a pain in the butt. But honestly, it can be really fun and I'll talk to you about it. And it's not just an obligation, it's an honor to get to make websites that everyone can use. But this includes all of our K-12 schools, state colleges, universities and vocational training schools. So let's talk about Target in case you're in the private sector. Cause Target is not a 504 company. I see some of you laughing. You know what happened to Target, didn't you? Target made a mistake. They had some accessibility issues on their site. They didn't have their alt text on their images. They didn't make it so that anybody could buy anything online on their website without using a mouse. And as we know, most of our blind users don't use mouses, a lot of our paralyzed users don't use mouses, so that was really kind of a blocker for a lot of people. Their image maps to show store locations were also inaccessible. So people couldn't actually see where their store was and many of the headings that are important to navigating the site were missing or in the wrong place. So in short, they kind of didn't bother as much as they should have. So what happened was a judge found that California anti-discrimination law does cover websites, whether or not they are or connected to a physical place. And that those aspects of Target.com services that are sufficiently integrated with those of physical Target stores are covered by the ADA's non-discrimination provisions. So especially in California, although I would say please make everything accessible everywhere, always, in California be extra, extra, extra careful. And then there was a legal foundation for this case. The California Unrest Civil Rights Act requires any business establishment of any kind to be accessible if doing business in California. This is important to you even if you own a business that's not in California. Say you own a business here in Florida, but someone in California buys one of your widgets. Hey, guess what? Your site better be accessible because you could get in trouble. The California Disabled Persons Act requires any public place, which they determined a public place is a website to which the public are invited to be accessible. And the ADA, which prohibits discrimination against people with disabilities in places of public accommodation. Blah, blah, blah, blah, legal jargon. So what happened is Target ended up shelling out $9,700,000 plus whatever their court costs were, which was probably a doozy. They paid $6 million in paid damages. They paid $3.7 million for their plaintiffs' court costs. And we don't know what they paid their attorney, but I'm guessing he drives a really nice car. The real bummer about this is that the National Federation for the Blind did come to Target first. And they said, hey, Target, would you mind fixing your website so we could use it? And Target was like, ooh, you guys have kind of an edge case. Well, yeah, it wouldn't have cost them much to fix the accessibility, but they really paid out not fixing it. So they settled out of court for a good chunk of change. But there's a happy ending for accessibility and for Target, because Target.com is now AA compliant. And they have a full page telling you all about the accessibility measures on their site and how great it is to use. iCompliance tested it for funsies. It is, it's good. They did a really good job. So the series of events supports the legal claim that websites are covered by the ADA in the US. So that was a good frontier for them to break. And individuals in California who are unable to use your website due to accessibility issues can and sometimes do sue for damages, which can be very costly. So let's talk about our benefits to our stakeholders. These are, if you work in an agency, your clients, the people who come to you for a website, they can increase their traffic and revenue with accessibility. So this isn't just a social, oh, we have to do it because we have to do it. This is a great way to make money. It's a money maker if you do it right. So that's great. When you invest in having a website built with accessibility in mind, it's one of the strongest investments that you as a stakeholder can make. It's gonna lead to improved SEO, a decreased bounce rate, increased ad impressions, increased sales, and increased revenue. Let's talk about how you can step it up. First of all, you're gonna improve your SEO. Everybody wants better SEO, right? Well, accessibility is awesome for SEO. Accessible websites are easier for search engines to crawl because all of your images have their all tags on them, right? Those are all keywords. I mean, don't like keyword stuff. Do your all tags right. But if you make them relevant, that makes it way easier for Google to find you, which is great because when it's easier for Google to crawl and to put you in the listing, it's also easier for people both with and without disabilities to find your website. So it's a really great win for you, SEO-wise, to put in all your accessibility measures. And I'm guessing all of you know what SEO is, but just to back up, SEO is the process by which websites are made more attractive to search engine algorithms. So by making your site accessible, you're making it easier for everyone to find it. You're also gonna increase your retainment rate. Yeah, you get to keep your users. User bounce is when somebody comes to your website and says, oh, ooh, I don't like this. Or they say, ooh, I can't use this. And they just leave right away. That's a bounce. Bounces are not good. First of all, if someone can't use your website, they won't stay. And if they don't stay, they don't buy anything. They don't click on ads, they don't go to other pages. There's lost impressions, so we don't want that. We want them to stick around. Sites with high bounce rates are also penalized by search engines. If Google sees a lot of people hitting your site and going, oh, nevermind, I'm leaving, you start to sink in the ratings. So you don't wanna do that. So by making your site accessible, you're making it inviting for everyone to stay, which is good. We want people to stay. Because when people say, we make more money, right? Because people with disabilities count as ad impressions. They're students that apply and fill out your applications. And that's tuition money. That's book money. People with disabilities like to buy goods and services. They go to school. They become brand evangelists. I'm sure a lot of us in this room have disabilities and I'm sure you'll vouch. Yeah, I do stuff. I have money. So it's good. We want those customers. And customers who have positive experiences are more likely to return. If someone comes to your site and it doesn't suck for them, they'll come back. They'll buy more stuff. Probably, if they liked what they bought. If they come to your site and it did suck for them. You're either telling them that you didn't consider them or you did consider them and you disregarded them. And between the two, once you spit, you really can't take it back. That doesn't make someone feel good to say I wasn't accounted for. Nobody cared about me. So that's a hard way to hurt your branding. So when you make it inclusive and people feel really included, that's a good way to get somebody to stick around. So by making your site accessible, you're increasing your own profitability. And popular consensus has determined that nearly 100% of companies prefer to increase their revenue. I didn't research that fact. But there are benefits to agencies too. This isn't just something nice that you're doing for your client because, oh, it'd be really great if my client made more money. Although, of course, we want that for them. But it's good for us too, as agencies, to be a little selfish and do accessibility right for our own reasons too. So when agencies invest in building websites with accessibility in mind, it's one of the strongest investments that we can make because you get higher quality work overall. You increase your legal safety. You increase your client satisfaction, which means you increase your sales opportunity, which, again, means you make more money. So you get a focus on quality. Most of our accessibility measures simply require adhering to standard best practices. A lot of it is already there. It's like, well, just don't break it. Just put your alt tags on. Don't use just a Twitter bird icon as your Twitter link. Put the word in there, even if you have to hide it. These are things that most web developers know they should be doing anyway. And a lot of the time, we're just in a hurry and we forget or skip it and nobody checks. But just adhere to best practices. That results in higher quality work overall, which means we have less bug tickets to fix and less technical debt. How great is that when you push something up and then there's no bugs that come back from QA and you're like, really, it's good? No bugs? You're just merging it? Yes! So that's always great and that's going to boost your employee's morale as well. And your own morale. When you feel like, yeah, I did something good. When you feel good about what you do, you do better work, at least in my experience. So by building websites excessively, you're improving your skill sets. Oh yeah, and it's a small investment but a developer who's trained to build websites properly applies the knowledge to new projects over and over again. So then there's the CAYA, a little bonus there. You increase your legal safety. Lawyers like it when we increase our legal safety, don't they? As we saw before, companies can and do get sued for inaccessible websites. So by giving your clients an accessible website, you avoid the risk of being held responsible for damages because if you build somebody an awesome website that is not accessible and they get sued, the next person they call when they hang up with that lawyer will be you. Hey, you know that website you built for us? We owe someone $9.7 million, do you wanna chip in on that? Even if you don't end up getting that buck pass to you, chances are if they get sued for your work, they're not going to be a repeat customer. Yeah, customers that get sued usually don't come back. So by building websites excessively, you keep your company safe. The other great thing about that is that, or I guess not great thing about that, is that if somebody gets sued for your website, they probably won't say nice things about you. But if you make them happy, they will. You can increase your customer satisfaction with accessibility because more clients are religiously reviewing metrics and ROI on their websites these days. I mean, how many of you guys have clients who are in HubSpot every day like, okay, what about the blue button? Did we AB test the blue button? And they're measuring every teeny little thing these days. So when the proof is in the pudding, clients see it, they know, even if they don't know this happened because of accessibility. They see the numbers go up and green numbers are good. We like green numbers. Clients who see positive results will often say nice things about you to other people in their network. That's how Lullabot gets a lot of our business, is we do good work for a client and they love us and they tell their friends, oh, Lullabot was so great and then we make money. So it's a good thing. And clients who see positive results usually stay loyal to you when more work is needed. So they'll come back to you. So by building websites excessively, you keep your clients happy. And happy clients are good for your company. And again, more money. Increased sales leads due to positive words of mouth. People say nice things to you. More people come. More money in your pocket. Increase repeat business. Again, people come back. And with accessibility becoming more of a legal and social requirement, Europe just passed laws the other day. Yay, everything's accessible in Europe now from now on. Canada's already rolled in those laws. The US is looking at it. They're talking about it in Congress. So you want to be ahead of that curve. You do not want to be trying to scramble and find an accessibility agency after those laws drop because it will be a nightmare for you. But the great news is as an agency, if you're offering accessibility and you have this in your portfolio, all those people in that mad scramble are funneling into you. And that's a goldmine. So that's fantastic. So by building websites excessively, you're increasing your own profitability. So our project managers, who's a project manager in here? Anybody? Okay. Does the accessibility scare you a little bit? No? Good. Oh, I like that. Awesome. A lot of PMs get nervous. And I hear this a lot. Helena, we don't have room in a competitive budget for this. The hours are ticking down. Don't panic. It's really less expensive and less time consuming than a lot of people are worried about if you do it right. So the key to implementing accessibility without hurting your budget is to work smarter instead of harder. We've all heard that. So it's most cost efficient right at the beginning. Obviously, these are not firm numbers. These are my numbers. From my own experience, I kind of tracked my work to see. So if you're waiting to see if you have hours left over to use on accessibility, you won't. Because what would likely take me five to 10 hours over the course of an entire project is I naturally work as a front end developer. Like, oh yeah, okay, I'm making the Twitter link. I'd better put that hidden accessibility text in there too so I'm not a jerk. That stuff is easy to do. If at the end of the project, I'm going back and saying, okay, let me find everywhere where I missed doing that, that's a job. Because now you're combing over every page and digging back through old code. It's already been pushed and it's a mess. It could take me a week, two weeks, 60 hours. It's long to do it that way. So it's good to just do it as you go. And then you'll always have time because it's not time consuming as you go. So despite this, oh, let me back up and give you where I got this data. Last year at DrupalCon LA, you may have had me run up to you with an iPad or one of my coworkers with big doe eyes and say, can you please fill out my survey? It'll be really quick. And I just badgered a whole bunch of people to take a SurveyMonkey survey. And then this year, I analyzed that data and you get to see what happened. So I talked to project managers. They had their own survey. And I asked them if they account for accessibility from the very beginning. Well, 12.5% of my project managers say they don't account for accessibility at all. A quarter of them are doing it right, right at the start of the project when it's ideal. 37.5 only do it if it's important to the client. And that's important. We're gonna come back to that on another side. 12.5% will only do it when problems come back from QA. 12.5% do it at the end. If there's leftover time, there won't be. And 12.5% won't, just don't. But it's easy. Accessibility is not a scary, costly undertaking. I promise. Your agency can make great accessible sites without hurting your timeline or budget in just three simple steps, which I made up myself. Inform, integrate, and advocate. The magic key, the key to successful accessibility organizational implementation. That is a mouthful, but it's not a handful. Of all developers, salespeople, and project managers that I surveyed, the majority rated accessibility as an important basic feature that all websites need to have to be considered fully functional. That's awesome. So why are we making websites that still aren't including everybody? I made a funnel, because I'm a huge geek and I like data. I made a funnel. So the clients, half of my salespeople that I talk to said that they sometimes answered sometimes or rarely when asked how often clients ask them for accessibility. So half the time, pretty much never. And 62% of my project managers answered that they were rarely asked. Not a shocker, because most clients don't know what accessibility is these days. They hire us because we're the web experts. They come to us trusting us to know what they need and to tell them what they need. So if we don't tell them, they don't know. So then I went over to my sales guys again and I said, okay, well, how often are you mentioning the importance of accessibility to current or prospective clients? And half the time they said, oh, sometimes they're rarely. So we can see we've got a little bit of a hole in our bucket. Because then when we get down to our project managers, again we have 37.5% of project managers only accounting for accessibility in a project if the client asks for it. But if sales never told them and they never knew, then they're not asking project management for it. And if they are, now it's not in scope. So we've got a little bit of a pickle there. So then we get down to our developers. 60% of the developers I surveyed said that they reliably review work for accessibility when it is a project requirement. The other 40% answered that they sometimes did. If accessibility is not a project requirement, the number for reliable accessibility reviews drops to a mere 20% with a third admitting to making no effort at all. So unfortunately as developers, because we're feeling that crunch, if it's not required and accounted for and you aren't given the hours for it, a lot of the time we don't do it. And that's a bummer. So the first step is to train everyone involved on the basics of what accessibility is and why it's important. You don't need an army of specialists. You don't have to hire a dream squad of accessibility people. It's honestly pretty easy. Again, mostly just best practices. So just a little bit of training will go a long way for the majority of your team. If you've got at least one person who knows accessibility well enough to be a point person to help, when questions come up. At my company, that's usually me. I'm on SOC. We've also got Chris Albrecht and a few of my other coworkers. And they can just type in ping accessobots. What do I do with this aria thing on this form? And that's it. That's all anybody needs is we poke our heads in and help. Easy to do. My guess is that the ratio is one point person for every 20 developers, depending on how accessibility-heavy your projects are. It's probably good. You don't need everyone to be a master at this. But the next step is to integrate and this is the most important step. You can't skip integration. It has to happen the whole way through. At my last agency, we got a whole initiative going and sewed it through the whole thing. It was glorious. Everyone got in on it. It needs to be integrated into your entire project workflow. Excuse me. Yeah, right? That's okay. I can hold it. I'll be okay. If you guys see me dancing, you know he's right. But the best way to do it is to cement checks for it through your whole company's workflow and processes. And then it seamlessly blends in with the other project requirements without becoming forgotten or becoming a last minute crunch sticking point. This is not just developers. This is not just project management. This starts at sales as soon as you talk to the client. When the architecture happens, plan for it through the whole way. When the comps are made, design for it. Check it in a color contrast checker. Check it in a color blindness checker. Check it all right from the very beginning because it's gonna be so much easier to do it right the first time than to backtrack later. Project management, ticket it out. Make tickets for it. Make it really happen. Budget time for it. And development. Of course, check your work. Check your coworkers work. Be the person in the poll review that's like, hey, that's accessible. Can we get the focus styling on that? Hover styling, do it all. Really get in there because it really takes a village. It takes everyone in a company to have the web accessibility initiative work. Have QA checking for it. Do it the whole way through. And let your client be a part of it. When I was working with Sci-Fi for Blaster, they were like, hey, what's this weird blue line? I don't like this blue line. And I was like, no, no, you want that. That's the focus indicator. And they said, okay, that's cool. And because I explained to them, I was like, you know, if I take that out, it's like prying the wheelchair ramp off a restaurant. You don't wanna do that. And they were like, oh, well, can we style accessibility stuff? Yeah, you can style accessibility stuff. Send me a style guide. And they were so excited. The next day, I got this big style guide. They're like, oh, okay, well, we can make this focus stay like that. And we can make this do that. And I'm like, oh, I love you guys. I love you guys. So they were really into it and they had a lot of fun with it. So include everybody. We all have important roles to play. And the next step is to advocate. Be courageous about insisting on accessibility. Whether you're a developer, a designer, a CEO, sales, put your foot down. Really, it is important to not leave anybody out. It's not okay to exclude people because they're missing a sense or they're not missing it, but they don't have it. Don't leave anybody out. The internet is about including people. That's the whole reason we have the internet is so that we can all be included with each other. So let's not knock people out of that circle. But yeah, be courageous. If you're met with resistance toward accessibility, sometimes that happens. Don't let it phase you. Water off a duck's back. Be kind and be firm. Focus on the positives and don't budge. Just be a mule. I'm known for kind of being a pain on it. I apologize to my team members, but you can't move. And the other thing is be helpful. A lot of the time when people are resistant to accessibility, they're frustrated. They got stuck. And they're like, I don't know how to make this thing work with the keyboard and I just, I don't wanna do it anymore. I'm just stuck. Let's skip it. If you know how to help them, reach out and help them. Be a teammate, be a friend. That's really how to do it right, is make yourself a part of it and make yourself available. And then you can be an ally warrior without going to war. And there's some free stuff. Sorry, I don't have like a T-shirt gun or anything. But there's some great resources here. I'm gonna post my slides so you'll be able to get to them. But webaim.org is, I'm not affiliated with any of these except for Accessibots. I'll say that right now. Webaim.org is just a treasure trove of resources. There's articles, there's code demos, there's everything you could ever want to learn how to do accessibility. Allyproject.com, awesome place to go. W3.org, you're gonna get all your web accessibility initiative information. I think Section 508's broken down on there. Tons of great information for you on there. You're here at DrupalCon. You wanna help out with accessibility? Drupal 8 is the most accessible Drupal yet. It is fantastic. If you wanna help make it even better, join in groups.drupal.org accessibility and Accessibots. That's Lullabot's accessible working group. You can tweet ads on Twitter. If you have questions, we will help you. We won't charge you unless you need a whole audit. But if you have a quick question, we're happy to help. As am I, my Twitter handle is Ms. Helena Sue. I'll put it up there, but I'm always around. I'm helpful, I'm nice. I won't bite you. Thanks for listening. Thank you. Oh, and I had one more cool little tool I wanna show you guys. Hold on. Oh, look at that messy screen. Geez. So we shouldn't prepare for this at all. Okay, so there's this program called Color Oracle that I think is really cool that I'm not affiliated with but really enjoy. Sometimes the best way to learn about the people that we're working with, or working for, is to put yourself in their shoes for real. So this shows you what things look like on your screen as if you were different kinds of colorblind. So you can say, okay. Oh, look at that, green deficiency. This is what it looks like. Give it the green deficiency. Now we have this one. You can say, oh, here's what it'll look like with a red deficiency. All right. And we can check it out with blue deficiency. So you can kind of see what things look like in other people's shoes, which is really neat and it's free. It's called Color Oracle. And there's also the Wave toolbar. It used to be an in-browser thing. I think they scrapped that. Now it's just a toolbar. But it's free and it's awesome, so check it out. And this one I use all the time. When you're doing your hierarchy in websites, hierarchy is really important. Headings are not decoration. They have a use. They are to structure as an outline the content on your page. With this great plug-in called Outline, you can click that and you can actually see the outline of the page as it's structured. So that's a great way to quickly check your work and make sure that your outlines are done properly. And now that's it. I just wanted to show you guys that as well. Actual ta-da. Did you guys have any? Question. For contrast checking, I usually use the Wave tool. Yeah, it has its own little tab in the thing for that. But for color checking, I like to use Color Oracle. Huh? Wave tool. Yeah, it's a free toolbar. Yeah, it's awesome. Hi. OK, let me repeat that back just for prosperity. What you'd asked was, why aren't we as a web community driving people toward tracking accessibility and building in tools, especially for that? I think it would be very difficult to track who's using a screen reader and who's not browsing with a mouse. As much as I would love that data, I'm a data nerd. I would love that data. But it would be very difficult, I think, to track that, unfortunately. But the good news is that we actually do do that a little bit. Media Current just posted an article that they made a toolbar for one of their clients that is exactly that. It's an accessibility toolbar. And how it works is if you need accessibility, you can click on there and there's a high contrast design. And when you click on that, it goes into high contrast mode. There's a large text mode that makes all the text really big. And there's a dyslexia mode that changes the entire site into a font that is very easy for dyslexics to read. So that's being pioneered, which is really exciting. I hope more people do things like that. And check out Media Current's blog. They put all the source code and everything for you to check out how they did it. So Mickey over there does a lot of really cool accessibility work. So it's happening. That's why I'm here, to shove you guys into it. Come on, do it, do it, do it. It's awesome. It's happening. Anybody else got a question? Yeah. The Wave tool will do a lot of that for you. It's free. It's not as good as a person. No automated testing will ever be as good as a person, because a lot of the things, you need a human brain to really do it. But the Wave tool will get you a lot of the way there. It's a good first skim. Let me see. Do I have it on here? I'm trying to remember if I have this on my Chrome or not. Yeah, I do. Look at that. Sorry, I'm not picking on New Orleans. It's just the one that I have open. But I've got my Wave tool here, and it'll tell me exactly what I've done wrong and how to fix it. So see, I've gotten here. It's saying, hey, wait, you've got this. And then you can hover over it. You can hover over it. Yeah, here we go. Usually you can hover over them. Oh, yeah, but you can hit info, and it'll tell you exactly what that error means, how to fix it, the algorithm in English. It's really a cool feature. It'll show you all of your errors and alerts. You can go into a contrast mode, which we were just talking about, and it'll show you your contrast. Like it's saying, oh, hey, this is a little light on contrast, or these colors don't quite work together. So it doesn't like this purple on white here. And it's not going to give you a percentage. You are 12% accessible, or you are double A accessible, but it's a really good first skim. If you stick it in the Wave tool and you don't see a lot of flags come up, you can be like, okay, this is probably not super broken. So it's a good first start and it's free. So hi. Yeah, sure. Drupal 8 is doing things much better than Drupal 7. Drupal 7 had a lot of great things for accessibility. Drupal 8 is awesome for accessibility. The skip links actually work out of the box now. If you're using Drupal 7, don't just believe that skip link works. Actually test it because it sometimes maybe doesn't. But Drupal 8 skip link is pretty reliable unless you rip the template apart and then make sure you didn't break that. But yeah, Drupal 8 has done a lot of great things. Mike Gifford, I think he's in a buff right now, but he has done a lot of great work on Drupal 8 accessibility. Oh, and I'm wearing a shirt from his, he's up in Canada and they have Ally Ottawa. They have a great conference every year. He does a lot of fantastic Drupal 8 accessibility work and definitely check them out. But Drupal 8, even in the UI, like for developers who are blind, it's not just our clients, it's our developers too. As developers we have disabilities because we're people too and we have the same diversity. And the back UI for like working as a blind person building a website has been really shined up nicely. So it's nice that we're not just including our end users, we're including our developers too. Hi. Yeah, what you asked is how often the style guide impacts accessibility massively. Because before you start building, you reference that style guide. That's what's gonna guide you through the entire website when you're building it. And if you're choosing colors that aren't accessible for people with low vision or color blindness, I mean we've got 8% of men are some form of color blind. So that's a good chunk of people that that's potentially impacting. So I would say it's definitely worth it. I'm gonna rip off the accessibility session I saw yesterday from David and Catherine because David said something really impactful. Like I got chills and now I wanna tell you guys in case you missed it, but he said, yes, accessibility does limit your design options. It throws out the bad ones. So if it's not accessible, don't build it. Hi. Yeah. Oh, what you asked was is it an acceptable solution to have a button that says go into high contrast mode? Yeah, I think it's better to have a site that is just accessible all the way from the get go for everyone. Because accessibility is nice for everyone whether or not they actually have a disability. But in the web development world, we don't always get to pick our comps. Sometimes we compromise with our clients because they really love their design and they don't wanna budge. And this is a great way to compromise and say, okay, yeah, we'll use your color palette, but can we put in this high contrast mode for people who might need that? It's a good compromise. Anybody, yeah, no, no. I don't know of anything automated that will come through a thousand web pages for you, but if you have a human being auditing, I would say your best tool is to not use a tool, turn your monitor off and use your site as if you're blind. And yeah, yeah. Hey, where do you work? Do you have an article on that? I'd really like to read that. Okay, I'm gonna hunt you down later and get in touch with you and give a chore to one of my backend guys because that's really cool. I wanna hear more about that. Yeah, that's awesome. But yeah, for accessibility testing, if you have a Mac, you have voiceover. You have a screen reader built right into your computer. You just, oh, nope, that's not it. Boop, I'm just ham fingering all over this. Oh, because I have color oracle. It's stealing that key. Get out of here, color oracle. Get out of here, wave tool. Right, yeah. It'll always surprise me. I'll turn it on and I think I turned it off and then I didn't and I'm like, ah! Yeah, but you've got voiceover. It's a free screen reader and you can use it and test your work and see how things sound. Let me see if I can. We've got voiceover. That's free Z's with your Mac. If you've got Windows, you've also got a free screen reader. So you can use those to test and you don't have to pay for anything. Jaws. Anybody else? It's a lunch. Thanks everyone. I really appreciate you coming. I'll be at the Lullabop booth in and out today. So if you wanna say hi, grab a business card. I'm here.