 Ladies and gentlemen, it is my pleasure to introduce you to Natalie McLeese. Alright, so we're going to get started with a pop quiz just so I can make sure that you're all awake. Ready? True or false? Accessibility means making the web usable for people with disabilities. Raise your hand if you think it's true. Raise your hand if you think it's false. Why is it false? Accessible for everybody? Anyone else? No other reasons for false? Alright, I think this is false and we're going to talk about why. And the first thing that we're going to get started with is people with disabilities. Who are these people with disabilities that need to use our websites and the products that we build? And we're actually going to get started by talking about disability. So each one of us has a unique capacity, both a physical capacity and a mental capacity. And that's unique to everybody. And it's important to note that capacity is a spectrum. If we look at physical capacity, on one end of the spectrum, we would have somebody who had no mobility to someone like the author of The Bell Jar and the Butterfly, who wrote an entire book by blinking his right eye because that was all he could move. And at the other end of the spectrum, you might be thinking, oh, me, me, I'm at the opposite end of the spectrum, but no, I would say you're not because can you do this? If you say yes, I'm going to make you come up and do it. Or this. Or this. And this is Roger Bannister running the four-minute mile. So the actual opposite end of the spectrum from no mobility is athletes whose bodies are capable of doing things that most of the rest of us can't do. And most of the rest of us find ourselves quite happily here in the middle of the bell curve for both physical and mental capacity. And what we have done as a society is we have kind of just arbitrarily decided to draw a line. Somewhere on this spectrum. And we've decided, well, if you're to the left of that line, you're a person with a disability. But it's important to note that that is just a societal decision based on what we value as a society. It's got no basis in medical information, no basis in scientific information. It's completely arbitrary. And that line could just as easily have been drawn here or even here. We have several different kinds of disabilities as well. So we have permanent disabilities. Once you have this kind of disability, you're stuck with it for the rest of your life. And these include some really common things that we don't always think about as a disability. So I'm looking out in the room and I see lots of people wearing glasses and probably even more are wearing contact lenses. That's a visual impairment. That's a visual disability. For which you use assistive technology of glasses or contacts to extend the natural capacity of your body. We also have lots of other really common conditions like color blindness, hearing impairment. I myself am actually almost completely deaf in my right ear. So that's another really common one. Things like arthritis, back pain that we all have, migraine headaches. I also have bad news for you. Every day when you wake up, you're a day older. And probably if you haven't developed a lot of disabilities yet, you probably will, most of us do. We also have temporary disabilities. And these are usually injuries and illness. So you break your ankle or sprain your wrist. That impedes your physical capacity for a period of time until it heals and gets better. And we also have things like, it could be illnesses as serious as things like cancer that might impede both physical and mental capacity for weeks, months, or even years. Or it could be something as simple as a bad head cold. Because if you sat on your computer and tried to solve a difficult design problem or coding problem on cold medicine when you can't breathe right, there's definitely a little less mental capacity than normal. It's definitely challenging. Another temporary one, insomnia, like trying to, we all have times when we can't sleep for hopefully not more than a few nights in a row, but there's definitely mental capacity is diminished after a few nights of not having any sleep. And then we also have situational disabilities. And these are things that we kind of move in and out of all day long that we don't even think about. So if you think about how having to carry a big heavy box, how that impacts your mobile capacity, you're going to get tired faster, you're not going to be able to move as fast, and getting, like being rid of that is the simplest setting down the box, but it's still a situation that you have to navigate at the time. If the sun comes out at lunch, and we're out at the food trucks and you try to use your phone at lunch, there'll be very little contrast on your screen. It'll be hard to see things, so that's a situational visual impairment that's going to make it difficult to look at a screen under bright sunlight. If you try to share your favorite YouTube video with your friend tonight at the after party, they're not going to be able to hear it in a loud crowded room, so we have a situational hearing impairment. And then another one you can think about, holding a feverish screaming baby in one hand while trying to desperately find the phone number for the doctor with the other. So not only do you have physical capacity diminished by your hands both being occupied, but there's also the mental capacity being diminished by stress and worry and probably a lack of sleep. So who are these people with disabilities? They're every single one of us. So our statement now becomes accessibility means making the web usable for everyone. I still don't really like this though. I think there's still a problem. So let's talk about accessibility. And I'm going to go through a series of statements that I have had colleagues, co-workers, clients, bosses make to me about accessibility over the past several years of working in the web industry. The first thing that I've heard is accessibility is an act of charity for marginalized edge cases. Something we do because we're nice. Accessibility is a business decision. There must be a return on investment. Only developers have to think about accessibility because it's all about how things get coded. Accessible websites are boring and ugly. Making a website accessible is expensive and difficult. Accessibility requirements stifle innovation. And accessibility isn't that important because it doesn't impact very many people. So those are all things that people have said to me outright. So clearly accessibility has a PR problem. There's a lot of baggage, a lot of misunderstandings, a lot of misconceptions about accessibility. We could try to reclaim the term and make people realize what it actually is. But I'm actually in the camp that it's actually just time to rebrand. This isn't just me. There's lots of people across the internet calling for this. And if there's one thing that working in the web for 20 years has taught me, it's that if you want something to catch on, give it a good name. All right, Ajax, responsive design. So let's start calling it inclusive design. And let's look at those myths reframed as statements about inclusive design. So instead of accessibility as an act of charity for marginalized edge cases, we have inclusive design as a civil right. That means equal access for all. Instead of accessibility as a business decision, we have inclusive design as an investment that always returns dividends. Instead of only developers have to think about accessibility, everyone needs to think about inclusive design. And I do mean everyone. Content, UX, marketing, project managers, designers, developers, everyone needs to think about inclusive design. Instead of accessible websites are boring and ugly, inclusive design is both beautiful and usable. And instead of this idea that making a website accessible is difficult and expensive, inclusive design is just built into your process. It is true that if you go back to a project that was built without accessibility in mind and try to make it accessible, it can be challenging and expensive. It could cost as up to as much as it costs to build the website in the first place. But when you do it from the very beginning, the increase in effort is really minimal. So we have three levels of accessibility. A, AA, AAA, with A kind of being the bare minimum you can do to call something accessible and AAA being the most inclusive. With A level, I would say there's actually no increase in effort. And with AAA, even AAA the most challenging one to get to, you're looking at maybe only 15 to 20% extra effort when you do it from the very beginning. Instead of accessibility requirements, stifle innovation, we have inclusive design encourages innovation without barriers. And instead of accessibility isn't that important because it doesn't impact very many people. We have inclusive design benefits everyone. Some other benefits of an inclusively designed website include better usability, faster page download times, better cross browser compatibility, easier content management, and better SEO. Does anybody not want those things on your sites? All right. So going back to our statement, instead of accessibility means making the web usable for everyone. We have inclusive design means making the web usable for everyone. We all on board? Yes. So how are we doing? How are we doing at making the web inclusive? Not very well. Not very well at all. Let me share with you the results of a couple of reports. April 2nd, so just a few weeks ago, a research firm named OVM released their results of reviewing the websites of the Fortune 100. Nowhere in that report does it say how many of the 100 had accessibility issues. I even gave over my personal information to download the complete white paper. It just doesn't say anywhere. But reading between the lines of the report, I'm going to go ahead and guess it was all 100 because they found 815,600 accessibility issues on those 100 websites. So an average of over 8,000 issues per site. Now you might be thinking, all right, but that's the Fortune 100. There's red tape. There's bureaucracy. I'm just a little independent. I don't build that kind of site. Okay, then. Let's talk about the WebAid Million. This report came out February 27th of this year. WebAid is a nonprofit organization focused on web accessibility. It stands for Web Accessibility in Mind. They reviewed the top 1 million home pages across the internet. And a million web pages is a lot. You can go to the page of the report and do a domain search to see if sites that you know and work on are in there. Several sites that I have worked on are in there. So if you've worked on a project that gets any kind of traffic at all, it's probably in this report. And what did they find? 97.8% of them had accessibility issues. So here's the thing. If I'm up against a deadline and I make a decision one day, I just need to get this done. Right? And I make the bad decision to make something be done faster instead of building it the right way. That's just me having a bad day. Even if I do that consistently, right, and I put out an inaccessible website after inaccessible website, that's just one bad developer. But here's the thing. 97.8% of the top million homepages having accessibility problems, it's not just me. And it's not just some of us on some days. It's all of us all of the time. After the Web A Million Report came out, there were lots of really good articles published by people all across the web industry. And here's a quote from Winston Hearn's article called Perpetuating Harm. Some of us who build the web collectively decided that we could ignore some people's needs so the work could be done faster. I've done this. I've done it. I'm sure lots of you have too. But we have to think about what we're doing because our lives are digital now. We depend on the internet for everything. We use it for keeping in touch with friends and family. We use it for getting our news, for doing our grocery shopping, for having food delivered. We use it for banking. We use it for learning. We can do whole degree programs completely online. We buy all kinds of things for ourselves, for our homes, for our family and friends. We use it for work communications, for time tracking, for interacting with our government, for sending messages to your representatives, and getting information that we need to vote. And we are leaving people behind. Another quote from Winston-Hern's article. The web industry has collectively exercised its power to state that disabled people do not belong here. I don't think that for one minute, anybody in this room ever said, I don't care if people with mobility issues can use this. Like, I don't think anyone made that decision. Or anybody ever said, I don't care if blind people can fill out this form. But it doesn't really matter what your original intention was because the message that we're broadcasting is you don't matter. You're not important. And I think we have to change that. We have to step back from the individual websites and products that we're building to ask ourselves, what kind of world are we building? Because what we're seeing is the Internet had so much promise to be so inclusive and so accessible to everyone, but we're slowly building into it all the same barriers and biases that we have in our physical world. We're also so proud to be part of the WordPress community and know that WordPress is one-third of the Internet. But I think with that kind of power comes a lot of responsibility to pay attention to everyone and to lead the way and set an example for the rest of the web industry. In addition, if you're somebody who is really passionate about social justice and civil rights and you participate in marches and hold up signs and contact your congressperson and do door-to-door canvassing and participate in social media campaigns and you believe in equality for all in equal access, inclusive design is something that you can do in your job every single day to increase the amount of access, equity and justice in our society. Like, this is a way that you can contribute just doing your job every single day to making the world a better place. In addition, we also have in addition to the responsibility to the end users who use the products and websites that we build, we've got a responsibility to our clients. Have you thought about what you're going to say to your client a year or two from now when they come back to you and say, hey, you know this website you built for us? We're being sued because people can't use it. There were 700 web accessibility lawsuits filed in 2017. There were 2200 in 2018 and there will be even more in 2019. The people that were leaving behind are fed up. They're not going to put up with us anymore. So we have to start doing things the right way. Right? You might have heard about the lawsuits against Dunkin' Donuts, Target, Beyonce, Domino's, those were all big ones in the news. But the ones that don't get a lot of national coverage are the family owned winery in upstate New York or the solopreneur in Florida who opened a little online shoe store and found themselves getting sued because people couldn't use their websites. It's starting to happen to lots of businesses of all different sizes including single owned enterprises. A quote from Eric Bailey many business owners would be livid to find out that the technology choices their teams are making are actively incurring legal liability. So make sure that you are informing your clients about their legal responsibilities to have an accessible website. Make sure they understand the consequences of deciding against that because they absolutely won't sign on to it. You need to have them sign something that you're not responsible if anything happens. So, where do we go from here? How do we make things better? I've got a few tips that all of us can work on together. So the first one is to start thinking about websites in terms of what they ask of people. Does someone really need to download and execute a meg of JavaScript out of form with 10 fields? Just make sure that what you're asking of people is commensurate with what the experience is that you're providing. Number two, commit to learning about inclusive design. There's very little about it that's particularly difficult or challenging but there's a lot to know. It's easy to feel overwhelmed but just commit to learning something about it. Learn how to do one thing better. Ethan Barcott, who coined the term responsive design, wrote in his blog post on the web a million that we should aim to do one thing this week to broaden your understanding of how people use the web and adapt your design or development practice to incorporate what you've learned. So not just to go learn it but now make it part of your process. Build that into your process so that it becomes just something you always do. Also in the interest of learning more about web accessibility tomorrow morning there's a talk here 10.50 am web accessibility made easy for WordPress you should go to it. There's always accessibility talks at word camps and there's always a lot of empty seats in the room and that shouldn't be the case because we all should be learning this we all should know it. Number three, be an advocate and a gatekeeper. So a few weeks ago I was in North Carolina to go to word camp Raleigh and I attended a really great talk by Lisa Lynn Allen called We Are the Gatekeepers and she pointed out that as the people who actually do the kind of physical work of building a website we're the last ones to really touch that before it goes out to the public and that there's actually a lot of power in that position right? Like she said we can hold your fingers to the keyboard and make you code something a certain way and that we can use that position to become an advocate for the end user and an advocate for inclusive design we can just refuse to do work that's not that's not inclusive we can also make sure that our clients are getting informed and that they're aware and then if you're in a position where you hire people to join your team and help you out either on a permanent or temporary basis you can start demanding knowledge of accessibility and inclusive design because it's only when we all start demanding that that people are going to start paying attention and learning it the next thing is to broaden your thinking about diversity so a lot of diversity and tech efforts get a lot of a lot of flack for being secretly just efforts to hire more white women able-bodied white women but we really need to expand diversity to include everyone and I think that we'll really see huge strides forward in inclusive design when we stop thinking of it as something we do for people with disabilities and instead make it something we do with people with disabilities so consider hiring people with disabilities on your team and finally don't be paralyzed by the huge amount of things there are to learn just pick something and do something even if it's not the perfect thing just keep moving forward aim to make every project that you build more accessible than the one before it and eventually you'll get to a place where somebody asks you for AAA compliance and you're like no problem got this, no exactly what I need to do you can get there and we're all in it together we can all help each other out thank you so much does anyone have any questions yes so what he said is there was a web development agency that got sued directly by somebody who couldn't use a website because they had the little thing in the footer this site built by and the person who couldn't use the site was smart enough to go around the business owner directly to the source who built the site I had a question for some specific things you can do with your site I mean there's all tags there's all the different text formatting things like that do you have any specific things you can talk about or a place where you can find more specific ways to make your website accessible actually if you go to either the OVM report or the web a million report they have both listed out the top 10 accessibility issues that they found I think they were about the same between both going and looking at that list and learning how to solve those 10 issues is probably going to knock out 80% of accessibility issues on a site that you're working on that's a great place to start it's the 10 most common and I'll tell you already they're 10 of the easiest to fix ironically the 10 most common ones are 10 of the easiest ones to fix so that's a great place to get started 10 most common let me bring you a microphone so you had mentioned that the best time to start is when you're first starting out developing a website so if you've already started it just a little bit do you still have hope oh yeah definitely and to be honest WordPress and most WordPress themes give you a leg up it gives you a lot of accessibility out of the box the WordPress accessibility team is very hard working is an advocate for accessibility and WordPress in general so yeah I would take a look at those 10 most common things and just check your site for those that's a good place to get started anyone else who's that oh someone in the back sorry does the web aim site does it list tools that you can use for accessibility testing on there too yes web aim makes accessibility tools but there's lots of other people who make accessibility tools too there's a company called DuckQ that makes a pretty nice browser extension called axe and then there's a newer version called axe coconut that are really nice to use there's another one called wave that's really nice and actually if you use firefox there's an accessibility checker built right in yeah yeah yeah the accessibility checker's already there you don't even have to add it built right in sense 61 I think yeah who's that thank you Natalie that was really good can you write a book about that so I can give it to my co-workers I was going to ask you what would you suggest for people that you work with that are kind of resistant to this or like yeah we'll get to that we'll get to that thank you I would say to emphasize the effort saving and then the budget and time saving of doing it from the beginning instead of trying to bolt it on after the fact because it's a huge difference it's a huge huge difference because if a project costs like ten thousand dollars it might cost eleven thousand dollars to make it accessible from the beginning but it might cost twenty thousand dollars to go back later and do it and a lot of frustration and a risk of being sued yeah oh here yeah let me bring you a microphone go ahead thank you excuse me for not taking notes but could you repeat the is it web aim million was that the name of the site yeah I think if you do a google search for it it should just come up it's just web aim dot org slash project slash web aim million I know is the URL thank you you're welcome anyone else thank you so much