 Rai, ddweud, ddweud. Rydyn ni'n ddechrau ar y ddweud y bydd yng nghymru, ac mae e'n gweithio panel i'r adeiladau. A'r adeiladau o'r gwneud hynny'n ddweud. Rydyn ni'n ddweud i chi i ddweud ychydig o'i gofod sy'n credu i gweithio'r adeiladau. A mi ychydig, iddynt i'r ddweud, maen nhw'n gweld yn Nic Scarlett. Roedd yna ein gweithio'r adeiladau. Rydyn ni'n gweld yn y ddweud y bydd y gweithio. I've also now branched out into being an advisor to business, how to make their entire business model accessible, which has brought me into contact with the idea of making the web accessible. Because many of my customers will be worrying about how to make a building that they own accessible, how to make the office space that they have for their staff accessible, how to make the shop floor accessible. But one of the things that they seem to think goes without saying is that their online presence will be accessible. It's not something they even ask for, they just imagine that the web is magically accessible. So it's great that the WordPress community are making strides to try and improve what is still quite a tricky situation for some users. I'm going to just give you a few facts that there are in this country, in the UK, 2 million blind or partially sighted people. And there are 8 million plus people who are deaf and hearing impaired, which means that of course all video content needs to be subtitled and audio content needs to be subtitled in some way. 70% of disabled people have issues with walking and with mobility, and that can also mean with using their hands. So of course that means that quite a large number of people may have issues interfacing with keyboard technology. Of course 1% of wheelchair users, but we don't talk about that because we're quite an annoying bunch. 3.3 million people have difficulties with memory, with concentration and with learning. So the talk earlier about UX is quite important because a lot of people will have difficulty remembering where they're meant to go on websites. So if a website is easy to understand, then you've made it accessible too. 10% of the UK population are dyslexic, and 4% are so dyslexic that they cannot read. So they have to use reading technology, assistive tech to allow them to read. Now that's all figures and facts, but one great figure is that disabled people have annually disposable income, and this is facts by the government of £212 billion. So we are a massive, untapped resource. That's my little bit. That's the kind of thing I tend to do when I go up and talk to bosses and try to tell them why they need to be accessible. I hope that's made a little bit of an understanding for you. I'm now going to hand over to our panel to introduce themselves, and then we're going to kick off with some questions. So panel, introduce yourself. I'm only doing this because I'm very lazy and I should introduce you, but instead I'll let you. Hi, my name is Gary Jones. I'm an independent web developer. I've got a small team of subcontractors, and we build WordPress solutions for clients. My interest in accessibility is wide-ranging, and obviously the web accessibility side of that is important too. I don't tout myself out there as an accessibility consultant. I think it should just be done as part of our everyday solutions, the same as responsiveness. I'm sure we'll come onto that as well, but that's Gary Jones. Hi, my name is Richard Senior. I work for a company called Blue Points. I do basically design and development for that company. I'm the founder of WP Bournemouth, a meet-up group in Bournemouth. I've been doing websites since about 2004 on WordPress, but it's only last year at this contributor date, where I was fortunate enough to sit with Rian and Gary. Since then, my interest with accessibility has grown, and strangely enough I was freelancing at the time. My motivation was to attract more business, but with that, it's the empathy and understanding and treating people not users as people. That's what you're building websites for, and that has grown. So thanks to these guys that are some here. Hi, my name is Angie Vale, aka Purple Baby Hippo Web Design, and I build WordPress websites for small businesses and nonprofits. I became interested in web accessibility about two years ago when I was asked to build a website which was accessible. I thought I understood what that meant, and doing some research. I found out what I needed to do to make a website accessible, and I was actually shocked to find out that most websites didn't have these features, and they weren't accessible. So since then I've become really interested in the whole thing, and it ties in with the whole user experience. For me it's thinking about the end user, no matter who they are, how old they are, so that they can easily use your website. So that's kind of where I'm coming from really. Hi, I'm Rian Riedveld. I'm from the Netherlands, in case you couldn't tell. I'm self-employed. I've got a small company and I built accessible websites in WordPress. That's my niche. I do that because it's very profitable in the Netherlands, because in the Netherlands much websites need to be accessible, so I make a good living out of that. I'm also part of the make WordPress accessible team, and we try to make WordPress core more accessible, do research and help by discussing and making patches. So that's what I do. Well, thank you. That's our panel. Now, I'll let you have that, because I've got my own clip on one. Which means they can't shut me up. They're just going to push me off the stage. We've already agreed that. I wonder, does anyone have any questions to start off with about accessibility? Right, no. So I should ask some. Well, I think one of the key ones is, do you think there are any benefits to making websites accessible that brings to your creative practices? All right, we always talk about what we're doing for the user, but how does it help you? Well, for me, it's really helped me actually think about user interface as a whole thing. So rather than just happily just building a site and not really thinking about the end user or just listening to what the client wants, it's made me think always about the person that's actually visiting the website, and that doesn't necessarily mean that they have a disability. It just means everybody, and actually making a website kind of a lot simpler and putting the content first, which is what you should be doing. It makes it accessible for everybody, so it actually kind of has made it easier for me, and it's also easier to explain it to the client, because when they start to ask for fancy sliders or, you know, different gimmicky things, I can always say, well, we need to think about the end user. That's the most important thing. It's the experience that they're going to have when they visit their website. That journey needs to be as simple and as effective as possible. I agree totally with Andrew. It's a win-win. Once you start digging into it, you realise that accessibility is judged not just on your HTML code, it's the content as well. It's the whole thing, and looking at the words you use, making the words smaller easy to understand, is probably a good idea to think you're writing content for a child, because some people have trouble reading, and that simplifies things, which works well for mobile. I find it really helps you focus on what's really important about that page, and it makes it easier, I find. Richard said about using smaller words. I can't remember the exact name of the society out there, plain English society, or something named like that, who encourage not to use technical jargon, as well as making it easier for those who struggle with either reading longer words or comprehending technical jargon. Just having that in mind means that the content out there is generally simple to follow. I'm not a designer. I have no design skills whatsoever. When I'm considering the output that the back-end code might be putting out there, I'm not thinking about the visual. I'm not thinking that a download button might just have a down arrow on it. I've not got to that stage. That's for somebody else to consider. All I'm thinking is, is it clear from what I'm outputting within the HTML that this is a download button, or some other interface? How you then pretty that up, as it might be for the front-end side of things, is a second stage. By considering the breaking down into the two stages, you end up with something that is more accessible by default. The other thing about creating process and talking about the content is accessibility, or having a website that caters for accessibility isn't just the technical aspects, but it's also the content within that page that caters for the users that need that accessibility information. The WordCamp London page, or the website, we've got a couple of posts on there, and pages on there that specifically address the information that certain groups of people might need. It might be where the disabled toilets are, or the fact that there are disabled toilets, where is accessible by wheelchair, where is the nearest accessible tube station, because it's not the local one. Being aware of that, the fact that there's hearing loops in these rooms, and catering for that, that we're accepting guide dogs and dogs for the deaf, and catering for other groups in a similar sort of manner, is showing an awareness of your audience, in this case it's the physical audience who are going to turn up to the event, but likewise you can also cater for an audience who would be turned up to a shop, or otherwise use your physical services. Do you want to say anything, Rhiann? I'm not going to say anything. One of the things you were saying was that, Rhiann, in the Netherlands, it is legally obliged to make websites accessible. For government, yes. Because it's interesting for me, because obviously I deal a lot with business, I meet a lot of business customers, and under the Equality Act in England, we have a situation where if you provide goods or services since 1996, they should be accessible unless there is a reasonable reason why not. I think that's why a lot of my customers are under the impression that websites are automatically accessible, because to them they're thinking that I can't change my building because it's going to cost me hundreds of thousands of pounds. What barriers are there to making a website accessible? Why do you think it's moving so slowly? Because it's very hard, and a lot of developers don't know what to do. I don't know how it is in England, but in the Netherlands, the education of web developers don't include accessibility in their program. All the new programmers who are coming out of school don't have any knowledge about accessibility. When I come to an agency and I tell about keyboard accessibility, just try yourself if you can access everything by keyboard only. Really? Oh, is that the way to test it? So they just don't know. I'm doing reviews for themes to see how accessible they are, and experienced developers still use tables for layout. That really surprised me because that's really old-fashioned and it's not accessible. So what I think is we need to educate developers. That's why we are here, what we do in talks. I think we need to say, this is how you do it. Because it's sometimes just easy things, like when you have a keyboard, where you navigate by keyboard, sometimes you don't see where you are. Because in the CSS there is a hoover change, but not a focus change. Just if you have in your CSS a hoover also add a focus. That's just one line extra, and suddenly someone who accesses a site with keyboard can see where she is. So it's a question of educating. It's very interesting because it's exactly the same for architects. Most of the architects I know have got their REBA degree, they've got their qualifications on architect. The access module is an extra module that you don't learn it as part of the course. So it's very interesting that the web design is the same because it does mean, as you said, that people don't even know where to start. But I think that's one of the reasons why WordPress developers have got something to be really proud of. It's the fact that you are, as a group, really proactive. There's a much stronger drive here to do something about this than there is in the architects world. Don't quote me on that, folks. So how do you test a site to see if it's accessible? What tools are there to use? Your keyboard. That's the first thing. Everyone has a keyboard. Try tapping through your site and see if everything is accessible by keyboard. You can use a tap, you can use the enter, you can use the arrow keys. With those, you should be able to access all essential functionality. If that works, it's a huge part of the accessibility. If that works, it's done. So that's how you easily test. And there are different kind of tools like Wave. That's an extension for your browser who gives all information about what can be wrong. So maybe you have other tools. Anyone else got any tools they use? There's another Chrome extension as well. Accessibility developer tools. Those of you familiar with the Chrome Dev tools, there's an extension for Chrome that adds an extra panel. That will look at what the screen reader text would be when you select an element in the Chrome Dev tools. It also has a built-in colour contrast analyser. One of the issues for accessibility for some users is the difference between the foreground colour and the background colour in that there's very little contrast between the two. So often you might see light grey text on white. Design-wise, it's probably fantastic. But accessibility-wise, it's really, really bad. So being able to see the difference between the foreground and background colour and within the WCAG specifications, there are contrast levels, algorithmic levels, that you can calculate. That has that value that it will work out automatically. So that's one extra tool. One simple thing is to disable your style sheet and look at the raw HTML and validate your HTML. That's not only good for accessibility. The Google webmaster guidelines recommend that. That could possibly improve your SEO. So there's some really simple things you can do. There's sort of a low-hanging fruit of accessibility, but they go a huge way. So if anyone's new to this, I would start with these. Make sure you work with just the keyboard. That's very important. Then the structure of the HTML, your heading tags are very important for people. So that's where I would start. Then it's a practice. You learn a little bit, and you can start digging into deeper issues. But like Gary said, the colour contrast is very important. As you get older, you, like me, I'm approaching 50, and I had excellent eyesight when I was young, but now I wear glasses on the computer. A lot of people are like me, and your boss or the client is possibly my sort of age. So increase the font size. Not many people will complain that your font is too big. So it's simple steps that anyone can learn that. Then you start learning a bit more. Also you can use voiceover software. There's a Chrome extension, just like a browser voiceover, and I use voiceover on my Mac just to basically read what's on the web page, and that's actually quite good for your copy as well, because if you think it all makes sense, and then you shut your eyes and you actually listen to your website being read back, and you think, wow, that's really confusing. That's not what I meant to say at all. So that's quite a useful thing to do. Right, let's see. He's in the audience. Yes, we have a few now. Let's go to Graham, because we'll make sure he's a super expert. We'll get nervous now. Thank you very much. My question is, I haven't been as active in the Make WordPress Accessible team myself recently, but I know that Rian and the team have been doing a lot of work with testing key parts of the admin functionality. I was going to ask where you see that going next and whether also part B of that question is whether or not there's been any testing with regard to Calypso yet, which is, I believe, the new admin interface or potential admin interface. I want to start with Calypso. Calypso is WordPress.com. That's something from Automatic, and that's not something we want to contribute to. Sorry. I think how it's going with WordPress.org, just the core is very good. I'm very optimistic. Lately, we have added to the standards, to the core standards, WCAG 2AA accessibility. So who knows what WCAG is? I was just going to ask that, but please tell us for those of us like me. You have the W3C web standards. That are the standards for your HTML. So your HTML is properly. You also have the WCAG standards. There's the web content accessibility guidelines, and they say, okay, then your web content, your HTML is also accessible. So then you have three levels of accessibility. A, AA and AAA. A is basic accessible. AA is standard accessible. Most countries in the world have WCAG 2AA as the accessibility standards for their websites. So then you have AAA, that's for just dedicated special applications. That's not done for a real website. So everything that gets into WordPress core, new, and everything that's been updated, has to comply with WCAG 2AA standards. So everything gets more and more accessible. Each time WordPress is updated, all new features, everything gets more and more accessible. So I'm very, very hopeful for the future. And also, if a non-accessible feature gets in, or someone wants to get it in, we can say, no, that's not according to core standards. So now we have something to say about, okay, that's not according to standards. So I'm very hopeful for the future. Was that your question? Thank you. Next there's one over there. I have a question. There he is. Where is it? There you go. Can you stand up please? It makes it easier for us to see. Of course, not if you can't. Don't want to press anyone. I was in the sun last week saying I haven't got a leg to stand on television. So I've got to be careful what I say. I was just going to ask two questions, really. Firstly, are there any kind of groups or forums or whatever where people collaborate on accessibility and projects working towards improving accessibility? And secondly, my question was about how you go about testing accessibility with different groups of people with different disabilities. For example, learning difficulties. I think lots of us understand some of the issues that people with partially sighted or perhaps deafness have. But I have a daughter who has learning difficulties. So how would you test for groups of people of learning difficulties in those types of disabilities? Can you... The first question was... Well, in WordPress.org there is a Slack channel and we have a channel accessibility. And we have a weekly meeting at Monday. And then we discuss things that need to be done, tickets that we are working on, we are writing documentation. So we are discussing what to write on the documentation. So now you are reading that. I was reading that all the time. You are awesome. I kind of wish the letters were sideways so I could read the questions and then you could read my answers. And if you are part of the Genesis community there is also an accessibility channel in the Genesis Slack. Various countries have their own Slack channel and they have accessibility channels just like the Dutch Slack channel for the WordPress community has an accessibility channel. There is a lot of information on Twitter. A lot of people are tweeting about accessibility and you can ask them questions and the hashtag is hashtag A11I. Is that I? Why? Why? Okay, A11I. If you have a question on Twitter there is always someone who answers that. Any other channels? Not necessarily in channels but I know that individual plugins for instance are taking an interest in improving the accessibility that they can offer. I know that easy digital downloads opened a ticket on their GitHub repo and it basically just said fix everything for that accessibility. I think part of the issue we kind of mentioned it earlier about how do developers know where to get started is the fact that everything that we are labelling with this banner of accessibility actually does cover a wide range of completely independent issues. So you might fix everything that really helps a deaf user but you haven't actually touched anything to do with somebody who's got mobility issues. So when you just kind of get a ticket that says fix all accessibility they're kind of missing the point. I think you do need to break it down into we are going to need to fix everything but we're going to break it down into let's fix issues with a certain type of accessibility and then this one and then this one and this one. It might be done all at the same time but having that finer focus is what's needed for developers to do that. So if you can kind of get into one of these support forums be it kind of a theme specific or a plugin specific or even just talk into plug-in authors educating them about the fact that just fixing it for the one thing that might know about won't fix it for all the issues. They can't claim to be accessible ready or accessibility ready without having to address every sort of issue. I'd like to say that one of the things that I think is a really good idea is to contact wherever you're based contact the local disabled people's organisations so DPOs because basically what you're doing then is you're going straight to the people the end user and they will be overjoyed because they desperately want to make sure that they are involved in the process we're a big fan of nothing about us without us and so it's very great if you can get during your design process especially during your testing process go out find your local disabled people people's organisations ask them to get involved they will give you fantastic input they'll give you great ideas but haven't occurred to you straight off the bat and if you can do that my advice would be do it in the design phase just say with a tweet out put a call out on the internet loads of different places even just go online and google local disabled people's organisation contact them and say I'm looking for people that might want to help me with the project then they will give you ideas because we tend to end up in a situation normally where solutions are given that normally tend to be very very big and we're always like all we really needed was something really little like Gary was saying we don't need a big whiz bang we just need the contrast to be better with the font it's that simple and with learning disabilities and difficulties there are a standard for easy read and it's really good if your content providing content in any way google easy read and there are set formats of how to do that most information now should really be provided with an easy read alternative so a lot of government documents have an easy read alternative and what that tends to be is it gets the basic information broken down into a really easy to read format and then pictures next to it to allow someone to understand so say you're talking about using the bus it will have a picture of a bus and then it will have the basic information you need and that's really useful if you're going to make something don't over complicate something if you understand easy read it means you can make your content entertaining fun very short and easy for everyone to understand I wanted to add something about the testing if you want to have user testing it's very difficult if you have very many different type of disabilities to get good tests and you have to have very specific questions to those people if you say okay look at my site does that work that doesn't work you have to say can you find the telephone number it's a very specific task you have to give them and then you get really information on how people find things or not find things or go behind them and say okay go to the contact page and then your don't say anything so don't say don't put a button so don't give them very specific tasks and for the WordPress core we have about 70 testers with all kinds of different technologies and it's very hard to ask them exactly what you want to know so it's hard to get really good user testing there are also disabled software engineers and WordPress developers out there another thing you might want to try is exactly connected but a group called Drake Music designer assisted technology specific to music but a lot of the people involved in that are also software engineers web designers and they are very much in the process of designing very focused systems so you know kind of thing like a sound bin to play music can also be used to operate technology so there are people out there that are kind of very proactive in this field a lot of these people are actually designing the next generation of interface so what works for us will eventually work for everybody any other questions let's go to you I mistakenly put my hand up before they go could you stand up please just to show off it's two questions because the second part of the question is to answer my first question the first question is is there a theme that's designed that meets a lot of the accessibility standards that anyone knows of and and then I was thinking about that it's nice to have your kind of normal design for most case scenarios if there's any WordPress developers that know is there a way for the user to change the theme while they're interacting with a website so you could have a disability accessible theme and then your own style theme and when they just press a button that actually changes the theme that would be an interesting concept okay so there are quite a few and a growing number of accessible WordPress themes now 2016 the latest WordPress theme is accessible if you search in the repository under the tag accessible or accessible accessibility ready you'll see a number of you'll see the websites that do meet the standard also Genesis framework which some of us up here use to build websites is now accessible has it built in so all Genesis child themes are accessible if you activate that part which is now part of the core Genesis any others there's a good plug-in by Joe Dawson WP accessibility and that will genuinely improve and you've got various options to set and like a toggle I think the contrast and font size on the front little widget thing so that's very good the contrast of that is that all theme developers if they have the education the change they need to make to meet that accessible ready tag isn't that tricky the functionality that the WP accessibility plug-in is doing can be done within the theme it's not one of these things that should only be done in plug-in specific I think it might be a couple of little bits about editing the tiny emcee editor for H1 and so on but it's not a massive amount so the number of accessible ready themes is improving and that will only get more and more Matt Mullenweg mentioned it in the state of the word he specifically addressed the accessibility within WordPress core and he was asked questions about that and I think slowly we are getting towards that critical mass where enough developers and designers appreciate the issues around it the accessibility and that will increase so if you can't find something that completely fits your client need at the moment it won't be long thank you I want to say in the repository there are themes accessibility ready that doesn't mean they are way too accessible way too accessible way too AA is more than accessibility ready accessibility ready is just fixing the big issues but it's not as good as way too AA so don't say ok I've got an accessibility ready theme now my site is way too accessible that's not true so please remember that it's also important to remember that the rules on what an accessible website is really challenging because around everything is challenging more we want to create an industry that understands that digital change, technology change is a lease of the user's change that so will require that change and as we unsit the standard accessible format is not fully accessible the standard is just the beginning of accessibility and that's very much like the use of the new buildings once by time you can build a ramp like that and you can't but you see what I mean so it's really worth it so I was wondering is there cultural differences in accessibility as well for example in Asia that you would need a different set of rules than in the US or in Europe I wake at 2 is world-wide accessibility accessibility and accessibility and it's not as good as accessibility it's not as good as accessibility and I wake at 2 is world-wide I have not a clue if there are different requirements that you will be designing for but it's quite interesting when you come to the legislation because wherever you're based you would be covered by the law that you were working under your national law and maybe for the Netherlands we have and for the Netherlands if you build a government site they invented the fifth principle to make it extra hard I personally think that's not a good thing to do but they in their and wisdom decided to do that so it's very hard to make an accessible website for the Dutch government and I hope they will drop that soon Certainly in the UK as an equivalent to the WCAG there's also a British Standard the British Standard Institute have come up with their guidelines that pretty much match across BS 8878 I think it is so that is something obviously UK based other countries might have their own standards whereas the WCAG is meant to go across all the countries as well and as Mick said the different laws will vary between the different countries as well Not any questions anymore we've got one over there if you could stand up for us please sorry to be a pain, thank you I wanted to mention a tool that I found recently which might help some people in here with making their content more accessible which is on GitHub and it's called Clear Text and it only allows you to use the 1,000 most commonly used English words so it kind of forces you to simplify your writing a little bit so that might help someone in here but I suppose to follow on from that a question would be are there any sort of standards or principles that you should follow for making your content more accessible so when for example when you're doing a new static page or a post on your blog then you should make sure that the content within that is semantically marked up correctly so you should never use H1 for example because that's either the site title on the homepage or the page title throughout the rest of the site so where you have in your graphical editor you can mark up the headers in your content you must do that correctly so you'd start off with H2 for example and then if you then had a subheading that must be H3 so you mustn't jump it has to be semantically correct so that will definitely help accessibility I actually meant in the context of for people with learning difficulties and things like that for understandability of content to be honest there is the easy read standard however a lot I write a lot for websites I do a lot of content and my editors basically tell me to keep the words down 500 words is probably maximum for an item if you want to make it easy to read and basically just to read it through make sure it flows keep all your sentences quite short make sure you don't if you refer to if you're referring to a complex idea try to break it down imagine you're trying to describe it as we said earlier to a child and that's not in an insulting way but you're trying to you're trying to get across an idea you want someone to understand your content you want someone to enjoy your content so it's I know myself I'm quite guilty of finding myself writing very long is my microphone gone again? because I won't shut up basically these guys have got me to shut up I find myself writing very long sentences so you have to stop and it's very much like doing comprehension at school you have to make sure you keep your sentences short keep your ideas easy to understand and try to make it enjoyable to read and that's basically it also it helps to divide your content with the headings short paragraphs, bullet lists if you have images give it an old text to describe such on the image if you do that then it's readable and understandable for everyone also just maybe get someone else to read it after you've written it I mean you can get kind of wrapped up in your own thing and just get someone else to read it and see if it makes sense to them I've found a great tool that Claire uses in Claire's talk yesterday Hemingway app it's an app or it's an online version but that will tell you if your sentences are easy to understand and help you keep your words concise and even if you do do all that and you've got really short words simple sentences, bullet lists, headings and so on if the typography is poor you may find that dyslexics just can't easily follow the letters jump around all over the place if you use all block capital letters that makes it trickier to follow if you've got poor colour contrast that can affect kind of dyslexics as well so it's not just about the content it's how you present that content irrespective of everything else that we've talked about today Thank you