 Hello, work camp, Elfast, I'm Marissa Goldsmith. Hello. As introduced, I'm actually a digital analytics expert. I live just outside of Washington DC in beautiful northern Virginia. And I am a freelancer. But that's not what I'm going to talk about today. But if anyone wants to talk about Google Analytics anything or Google Apps Scripts in spreadsheets as plugins, I'm good to go for that afterwards. But today, we're going to talk a little bit about accessibility. So I'm going to start, I'm not going to tell anyone how old I am. I'm just going to start talking about how I became involved with the web and how I became a web developer. And it's going to load. It's loading me. It's horrifying. This is a stress case. This is a stress case. Yes, this is my Google slide. You know what? I don't need it. So what you would be seeing here would be a picture from the movie Independence Day, which was what came out when I was assigned to do my first website. I went to the University at the George Washington University in Washington, DC. And that year, they started letting departments start making their own websites. And I was a work study student in the Women's Studies Department. And so what happened was I was a student at the Women's Studies Department. And they asked me to build their website. However, the only classes that were available were HTML for professors. So I was 19 years old. And I was registered as Dr. Cynthia Harrison for an HTML class. By the way, Dr. Cynthia Harrison is the United States foremost expert on the constitutional status of women. And so I would go and I would talk and I would learn to HTML. And I made their website. So by the way, Heather made me put this in. This is everything I knew about Belfast before two days ago. I'm a big Van Morrison fan. I also like the cranberries. My kids like the cranberries also. And I'm probably perhaps the only American who knows the difference between Belfast and Belgrade. So there you go. Now let's see if we can turn. Is it going to do this every time? Well, this is the slide with, there we go. I don't know why that didn't like that slide. So anyway, this is how I made the first website. This is a web editor called Pico. Or Pico, I'm not sure how you're supposed to pronounce it. And that was how I would browse it. It was in links. And that was how I learned how to write for the web. So I moved on. I was a Russian major in school. And I wound up working for an educational organization that put language lessons online, specifically in the Russian language, but other languages as well. And then one day, I'm sitting in my office. My boss comes into the office. And she says these words. Exactly our site may need to be section 508 compliant. Fix it right now. This was an online learning system that we had developed on our own ad hoc. So for those of you who don't know what section 508 is, it's part of the 1973 Rehabilitation Act. And what it says is that federal websites must be accessible to people with disabilities. It's just federal websites. It's not anything else. But it might, depending on your interpretation and what you're doing, apply the website that received federal funding. And some of our websites did receive federal funding. So at this point, I go about learning about the law. I go about learning about how everything is. And then I walk into my boss's office for lawn, sat, iced down. We have a really big problem. This website is no way near section 508 compliant. And that's what she said to me after that. Oh, you were still doing that? By the way, I spent about a good two weeks figuring this out. We don't actually, this doesn't apply to us. This doesn't apply to the website we're working on. It's the federal funds towards that website. We don't really need to be compliant. It's legal enough. Now, my mom is a special education teacher. My dad is a civil rights attorney in the United States. I was born, I was raised by two certified hippies. And this absolutely broke my heart because I was raised with a sense of inclusiveness. And here was something that I had been working on for two or three years. And I spent two weeks going over it, realizing that it was not inclusive. If you were blind, if you were dyslexic, if you had mobility issues, you could not use this website. I mean, hands down, it was useless. It wasn't for you. And so I did what I could. Every once in a while, I was able to convince people to do a few things. We changed it so that red and green didn't mean right and wrong all the time, or there were some other signifier. But I really didn't get to do much. So I did eventually leave that job. And I wound up working at a digital agency. And at that digital agency, I made sure that I was the advocate for accessibility. The web aim lists serve, which, by the way, I'm still on to this day. And it is lists served without the E because they use the software. And to treat it like a discipline, that it was something separate, it was something that was important, and that you needed to know. And whenever I learned, I would take it and insert it into my work whenever and wherever I could. So here I was at this digital agency, and they referred to me as their accessibility expert because of the work that I had done prior, that two weeks sitting in a hole realizing that my website was not accessible. I like feeling like an expert about something. It makes me feel good. But at the same time, there were people whose whole job was accessibility. And I sort of felt a little bit like an impostor as they would parade me out in front of their clients as their accessibility expert. But I would do what I could. And I was what they called a functional consultant. Has anyone else been a functional consultant in their job? I don't know if that's a very, okay. The way I tried to describe it is I'm the middle technologist. Like, I'm not a designer. But I could go into Photoshop and fix the buttons and change the colors. I'm not an engineer. I don't make themes. But if you needed to tweak to the theme, I'm not so afraid of PHP that I couldn't figure it out. I do a lot of work with JavaScript as well. So that's about where I was there. But mostly I did usability, Q-Ray, analytics, wireframing, that sort of middle of the round. I did a lot of CMS configuration. And I would take what I would learn and insert it wherever I could. So again, I would evangelize the accessibility to anyone who would listen. But if it wasn't a priority, I would slip in the background. I didn't really have the guts at the time to say, no, we're not gonna do it this way. It's not the thing to do. And accessibility often got pushed to the side in the name of good design. In 10 years I was at that agency, I might say I had one client who really cared. Who really cared about accessibility enough that it became part of the process and part of the design process and who would let us make decisions against design in favor of accessibility. Luckily we had a front-end engineer who was really passionate about accessibility too. So if you were to Alan's talk yesterday where he talked about process, our problem was never the process in the beginning. We started out with a really solid code base and people who really cared. Our process problems were towards the end as the client or other people would start tossing things at us, saying, that is actually not the right shade of blue. We needed to be this blue. I had a client who made this really tiny, gray little font and it had to be that font that was their branding font and that was their branding color and it could be nothing else. And so a lot of these down the road decisions hampered a lot of my efforts. And then I had one time a client who would, this is a client that was working in developing countries on disability issues. So this is a disability nonprofit working in developing countries when I told them that their donation form had some serious accessibility problems said, well, those are our clients, they're not our donors. Coincidentally, I quit that job about a few weeks later. But it was really heartbreaking to hear something like that. So there was a lot of compromise. We'd make a lot of token decisions in favor of accessibility. And then just it would sort of drop. We could say we had done our jobs and we had picked the right color scheme or the right font, but not really test anything else. We never had any budget, any time to spend on doing any sort of testing to make sure that the sites, the past, we had no QA, we didn't know QA for accessibility. We did it once for a site that had federal funding. And even then when it failed, we didn't fix what failed because we were told it was not the right color. The years go by and I keep working and I have my first child in 2009. Again, I feel like I have these little successes and I do keep making compromises. So I have a baby and I get into this groove like I was working mom and I'm killing it and it's all going great. In 2011, I became pregnant again and this is what happened. My daughter was born two months early. Very suddenly, no preparation. One day I just woke up in the morning and I was in labor and an hour later she was born. And within six months, we figured found out she needed glasses. My favorite thing is when you take a six month old out with glasses and they say, did she really need those or just there for fashion. We forgot that once or twice. And of course, my favorite joke is how did you know she needed glasses? And my husband would say because she couldn't read the eye chart. But those were the six months. She had vision problems and then at 10 months she wasn't developing at a regular pace and so they did an MRI and they found some brain damage from birth as she was diagnosed with cerebral palsy. For those of you who aren't aware of it, it's got a large spectrum on the disability scale and no one really could tell us what it was gonna mean. We didn't really know. But over time, things would happen. This is a picture of her. We went to Hyde Park, which is Franklin Roosevelt's home and I got her a quotable Eleanor Roosevelt book. She's one of my heroes so I thought that was good and it was a board book so she could tear it apart and it really wouldn't matter. So this is what it means, but her muscles are extremely tight. The work we call it spastic. I say, if you did a thousand lunges right now that's what her legs feel like every day. So she's gonna use a wheelchair, probably the rest of her life. At age three, she had her first teacher and developed epilepsy. She has what we call cortical visual impairment. That means there's really nothing wrong with her eyes. What is wrong is the way her eyes communicate with her brain. She takes a lot of medications and those medications, I don't know if this is a proper slang, they make her loopy, is that okay. She takes medicines that make her tired. She takes medicines that make her hyper and it's all in between that control the tightness of her muscles and her epilepsy. She has fine motor difficulties. She has stomach aches all the time her DI tract is not what it should be. And she's recently been diagnosed with ADHD. She has a really hard time paying attention in school. We don't know if that's because of how her brain works or if it's because of all the medicines that she takes. We're not really sure, but we just need to, she can't stop taking the medicines. So it's a diagnosis we have to deal with. So what this means is accessibility is no longer some abstract concept that I care about because I was raised by hippies. It's now something that I care about because it impacts my daughter. This is a picture, early intervention program. So once she was diagnosed, the state is supposed to help give us, it's supposed to give us help, it's supposed to give us therapies and all sorts. And in June, they just ran out of money and they just stopped giving them. And so this was our little protest that an organization had us all take pictures of our children with signs to fund the shortfall. And so now this advocacy isn't just about doing right, but it's about doing right by my child. So you say, that's great, but this is a WordPress conference. And you're right, this is a WordPress conference technology conference, but it's not a software conference, right? This is a community and it's a very inclusive community. And so I want to make sure that everyone in the community understands how accessibility can impact the individual. And I think this is the right place to do it. I'm probably preaching to the choir here, but I'm going to keep going. I'm not going to show any of these videos, but when I, is there probably not going to load anyway? But when I hand out the slides, I'd like you to see them. Technology is transforming the way people with disabilities can interact with the world today. If you read Alan's talk today, you could see the use of a screen reader, but here are some other examples about a child with autism who was non-verbal, who turned out to be like a literally genius, like he has, you know, and he could talk and he can use the iPad to give himself a voice. The one in the middle of the child using Ivy's technology to talk and to surf the web. The one on the right is a child who uses switches. Now switches can be on anywhere. There are these, we call them jelly beans. She can use her head to turn her wheelchair. She can use her head to hit those buttons and surf the web. And I have seen a lot of people who can use that switch technology to do some pretty advanced stuff using four switches. So I want to talk about the three different kinds of disabilities that we look for. So we have the visual disability, physical impairment, and then cognitive disability that we all should be thinking about and designing for. So this is my daughter. Again, she's not blind, but she has problems with her fields of vision. She has problems with really crowded spaces, image, text over images. It might as well not even be there. And so her special education teacher spent a really long time trying to figure out what combination they could use to teach her to read. And I don't know if everyone can see that, but the answer is comic sans at 80 bold at 28 point kerning. Do we have any designers in the room? So how many people would have liked to have designed something in comic sans at 28 point kerning? And so it's not gonna look nice and it's not gonna look pretty, but that's actually what a lot of people really do need to learn, to read, to be able to comprehend. You had talked about yesterday about the dyslexia font. There are a lot of people who, with dyslexia for whom comic sans is easier to read than whatever font they're gonna put out before them. And so it's really important when you're designing to not just design for visual disabilities that are gonna be read by a screen reader, but all kinds of visual disabilities. Well, you're not crowding the field where your colors have high contrast when there's sufficient spacing and specific kerning. I'm gonna show a picture of a website. I don't think it exists anymore. And this was found on a website. I found this website on a website called the best parallax design sites. So someone put this down as one of the best sites. Now I don't know if anyone here makes or has a parallax site and someone will apologize in advance. I don't like parallax sites at all, but parallax sites can literally make someone sick. There's some interesting articles out there about people with vertigo and similar illnesses where when the motion of the site goes, it's really making them ill. So we'll start with parallax sites being a problem in and of themselves. But look at all this light. You can tell it was done by a print designer. Very light gray. Little light gray icons on the sides with no words associated with them. And all sorts of parts. I don't know where to click. Nothing visually tells me where to go. And this was on a top 10 best design sites. And so, and it is pretty. And if you go to the contact us page, there's no, like the form fields or the labels are in the form fields, but there's certainly no coding around it to tell you where it goes. All just visual. Now I actually pulled this up and I know we've been having intimate difficulties, so I don't know if it's gonna fry us, but we're gonna try. So this is my daughter playing a popular American game called Connect 4. And she was probably five years old at the time. And if you had told me she would be able to do this at all, I wouldn't have believed you. But you can see that she has some fine motor problems with her hands there. Sometimes difficult to getting it in. She is talking too, but I don't have the volume up. And you'll see why in the next, in the future. So that's her playing Connect 4. So Heather told me to go big or go home here. So the next thing I'm gonna show you that could be an issue with physical disabilities is this is the website of the EU, which checks off every box for accessibility. It's supposed to be fine, it's supposed to be perfect. I'm gonna show you an example. So now my daughter has not needed to browse the website of the EU just yet. But we're trying to teach her how to use the internet and how to use a computer and how to use a mouse. Some of the problems she has, let's do this. Right, there we go. Oh, it's gonna go now. It was a EU by topic. And when I put my mouse over here, the internet is slow, you saw that flash really big. Just a second ago, we're gonna get a big, big list of all the topics. Why isn't it? Cause I'm on it now. Well, that's another topic I got there. Yep. So well, here's what I'll show you. So there is a big, big topic here. Now what we have taught her to do, visually she could see something like that. She'd be able to see it and she'd be able to find it. But then she's gonna have this really big list and she's not gonna be able to hit the target with the mouse. So what I would tell her to do is this. But here, what just happened? Everything's gone. The menu that she was just on is completely gone. It's in a different place. And now if I click on this menu, that dropdown menu is completely gone. And those options aren't even there anymore. And so not only has her physical visibility stopped here, but she also has some cognitive issues and it could be quite jarring. And it is for me personally quite jarring when I sometimes, I have bad eyesight and I'll make a sight bigger and it suddenly goes into its responsive mode, which is entirely different experience than desktop mode. And then she goes to this EU by topic and we can't see it from what happened before, but it's actually, this page is actually organized differently than the dropdown menu. And so the thing that she was looking for now is much harder to find. And this is a website, like I said, that checks all the boxes, but it can still be difficult for someone with disabilities. The example I had before this was actually my county, I guess it's the equivalent of a council website or a county website was absolutely unusable for people with disabilities. Which by the way, our county website included the office for people with disabilities. Oh, it's gonna do that again. There we go. She also has cognitive disabilities. I mentioned that she has epilepsy. I call this, is everyone familiar with Pat Benatar? This is the post-EEG Pat Benatar hair. And EEG is when they try to scan your brain waves and so they have to stick all of these little electrodes on your hair with this really sticky glue. But they don't give you anything to take it off with when you leave the hospital. So she left the hospital looking just like that. Exactly. I'm gonna open this website. This was the website that was open when you walked in and I tried to figure out where that annoying noise was coming from. This is a website called PBS Kids. If you're not familiar with what PBS is, PBS is the public broadcasting station in the United States and they are renowned in the US for children's television. Sesame Street, although Sesame Street is known by HBO. And the thing is, I have done this presentation twice. I have reviewed it before I came here twice and I can always guarantee you that this site is gonna annoy the crap out of anyone who goes to it. And it pains me because I love PBS. So it didn't start now, but it's gonna make noise. I turned off the sound. But the first thing it does is it starts making noise. Oh, here we go, now it's gonna be very loud. It starts making noise. It's not showing up here, but something big and bright and flashy is gonna come up in the start spot. Everything moves. Everything moves. It's post-automove. The text is sideways. It's like this. And if you wanna go to a show, you gotta find the picture of the person you want while it's spinning around like this. Could you imagine a six-year-old in general being able to find anything on here, much less someone with a few cognitive disabilities for whom focus and concentration is really difficult? And like I said in a second or two at the site, loads are gonna start hearing noises. It's gonna start going bloop, bloop, bloop. And it's really frustrating. And then I'm not gonna load it because it's gonna be really slow. But oh, this will start moving and changing. But if you go to the website, if you go to the page for all the shows, it loads a thumbnail for 200 shows and it just scrolls, it scrolls, it scrolls. And if you're on a slow connection, you'll never see anything and there's no alt text. And so it takes a really long time and it makes me really sad because I actually really do like 2DS kids a lot. Their app is not as terrible. And so that's what I'm thinking is that they put all their development time into the app and not on the website. So this is the most adorable child you've ever seen. And when you have kids, you ask yourself, like what can my kid be? You know, you see your kids doing things and you're like, okay, my kid can be a chef or my child can do this or that or something else. You know, and far be it from me to push her into the family business. But you know, I'd like the idea that my child could, you know, do work in technology one day or be a chef or be an author or be whatever she wants. And it's really hard to see that with the technology that's around right now. And so it's important to all of us to create not only front ends that are accessible but back ends that are accessible also. And so you can also stop accepting the excuses that I accepted when I was at an agency. People with XYZ disability aren't even in our target audience but actually even designed for them. If a person is blind, deaf, whatever, they're already used to things being messed up so ours doesn't have to be okay. And the work that we're doing is too important. We can't miss the deadline. We can't do the accessibility stuff now at the end. Design's okay. And the other thing I'd like to say is that, and I think you brought this up yesterday, and things you do for accessibility are good for everyone. Ready? Everyone say it. If I do it for accessibility, it is good for everyone. Thank you. And it's not just the web. I mean, think about curb cutouts and think about closed captioning. How many of us sit on the metro or sitting at work and using closed captioning because we don't want our boss to hear what video we're watching? Everyone uses it. There's a really popular show in the States called The Daily Show. And one day I read an article that said, I always wondered how they found all of these obscure clips of congressmen doing really stupid things on the floor of Congress because it's really long and drawn out. They actually used the closed captioning search software. They got all the text from the closed captioning and then they could search it. So think about all the joy all of us Americans had because closed captioning was required. So I also think it's very important to think beyond blindness, a lot of designers and a lot of developers develop code so that it passes through screen readers but it's more than that. And conduct diverse user testings in all my 10 years at that agency. I don't think I ever saw a person with a disability come through who we user tested with. And learn about all the assistive technologies. Go on Google, look at those videos about how people use things. I mean, those are three examples. There are footmouses. There are switches. There are two switches. There are three switches. There are people who can do seven switch. You know, there's a big variety in the ways that people can now browse the web. Graciously accept feedback and criticism. Chances are there's something inaccessible at this presentation right now. And I will accept, if you tell me, I will accept it. I had a friend who told me what was inaccessible about it was I put it in Google's live. Which is true. I probably should have downloaded it into PowerPoint given what happened today. Don't, the expression I use is that don't able explain to someone that you know this site is accessible and they're the ones using it incorrectly. There are a lot of disabilities and even the same disability manifests differently in lots of people. And don't disable browser customizations. It's harder and harder to do now. But like the right click, people who disable right click, it's just don't do things like that. Don't make it so that my daughter can't look at your website in Comic Sans. She wants to look at it in Comic Sans. It's her God given right. And test everything in the WordPress community. Test your themes, test your plug-ins. And as much as you can, test them not only for front end, accessibility with back end as well. WordPress is probably the most accessible CMS that I've ever seen and we can ever use. And so let's keep it that way. And Joamby, the WordPress accessibility team. So we thank you.