 Welcome everyone to Web Accessibility 101. Thank you all so much for joining us today. Before we get started I'd like to make sure everyone is comfortable using ReadyTalk, the webinar platform we are using to host today's event. You can chat in with us at any time throughout the webinar in the box at the lower left side of your screen to let us know if you have questions, if you have any issues with your audio or video feed, or if you need any assistance from us. We will keep all lines muted so that we can get a clear recording for you to refer to, watch again, and share with your friends and colleagues. If you lose your internet connection go ahead and reconnect using the emails that you would have received when you first registered, or if you were registered earlier than today, the reminder email that you got an hour ago. Attached to that email on the right side of the page you can download today's slide presentation and anyone who has confirmed their registration just in the past hour you can also find the slides attached on the right side of your email and download those if you'd like to follow along. Most of you are going to be hearing the audio play through your computer speakers today, so if you are hearing an echo you may be logged in more than once and will need to close any additional instances of ReadyTalk. If the slides in the audio fall out of sync at any time feel free to dial in to the toll free number by Skype or phone at any time throughout the webinar. That toll free number is available to you at any time if it's more convenient for your use today or if you have any issues with the streaming audio. We do record these webinars and we'll make it available on TechSoup's website at techsoup.org slash community slash events dash webinars. You'll find this webinar as well as all of our past webinars archived there and you'll also see the list of upcoming events where you can register for any that are of interest to you. You can also find this within the next day or so on the TechSoup video channel on YouTube and you'll receive an email with this presentation, recording, and any links within the next few days. If you'd like to tweet with us today you can tweet us at TechSoup with the hashtag TS webinars. You can also tweet at Nobility K-N-O-W-B-I-L-I-T-Y and we'll chat that out to you as well. Again my name is Becky Wiegand and I'm the Webinar Program Manager here at TechSoup. I'm really glad to be your host today and have been with TechSoup since 2008 prior to that spent a decade working with small nonprofits in Washington D.C. and Oakland California where I was the accidental techie trying to figure out how to make our organization's technology work better as part of one of my many hats that I wore including talking about issues of how we can make our website and our emails and our technology at our organization more accessible to everyone. I'm really glad to see this topic come up in our library of webinars again because it's not often enough we get to talk about how to make our content more accessible for everyone. I'm really excited to be joined today by two esteemed experts in this field. The first of which is Sharon Rush who's the co-founder and executive director of Nobility, a leading authority on web accessibility since 1998. Since 2007 she has provided expertise to the Education and Outreach Working Group of the WAI, the Web Accessibility Initiative of the WC-3. We're really happy to have her on. She's also been recognized by the Clinton White House, the U.S. Department of Labor for excellence in employment practices for people with disabilities. She's met with President Obama's special advisor on disability issues and she's been named community tech champion by the Congressional Black Caucus. In a number of other accolades that she's received she's also co-authored Maximum Accessibility. Joining her today is Jessica Looney, the community programs director at Nobility where she joined the staff in July of 2014 to oversee their marketing outreach and fundraising efforts. She has 20 years of experience in the nonprofit sector including two years as a volunteer and events manager for the Austin Children's Museum. So we're really glad to have both of them on the line with us today to share. Really we're looking at the high level, the basics, the bare minimum that we want to be working toward to make all of our websites accessible to everyone. You'll also see on the back end assisting with the chat Susan Hope Bard, TechSoup's Education and Training Manager. She'll be on hand to help you with your questions and any technical issues. Looking at our objectives we hope that you will walk away today with a high level understanding of web accessibility, what it is, why it matters. Remember this is Web Accessibility 101. We don't plan to go super deep and technical on you today but we hope that this will inspire you to go out and make further changes and improvements to your own websites and equip you with the resources to go find the answers of how to do that. We will also then review essential techniques to increase your website's accessibility. You'll learn a bit about what's next with Nobility's Open Air rally that's happening this fall and some opportunities for nonprofits to be able to get their websites built by people from an accessibility standpoint so they can come out with a brand new site with meeting all of these standards that can help us make our sites really available to anyone who comes to it. And we'll take time to answer your questions. So really quickly just to get this out of the way at the front end if you're not familiar with TechSoup we are everywhere on this map that's blue which is just about everywhere in the world. And we would invite you, our participants on the line to chat and to let us know from where you're joining us today. We have right now about 225 people in the room and that number is sure to climb in the next few minutes but we really welcome everyone who's joined us and I've got folks chiming in that they're from Michigan, Washington State, Alameda, California, Maryland, Oregon, North Carolina, Iowa, Louisiana, Florida, Maine, all over the place. We've got folks from Canada as well. So welcome to everyone. We really appreciate you being here. If you're joining us from outside the United States I do recommend that you visit TechSoup.Global and choose your country from the drop down to see what technology resources are available to nonprofits, public libraries, foundations, and churches in your area. Looking at our impact as part of TechSoup, I was a user of TechSoup Services long before I became a staff person here and I'm pleased to be part of the $5.2 billion in technology, donations, resources, and funds that we've helped facilitate to nonprofits in the social good sector around the world. Now the topic at hand for today, what is your role? And this is you, Elaine, this is you, Dan, Karen, Karen, Kelly, Marianne, these are you individuals. I'd like you to say what is your role in ensuring accessibility for your website at your organization? Are you someone who maybe updates content on your site but perhaps didn't build it? Maybe you didn't build it and you don't actually maintain it either? You're just interested. Are you the webmaster or web producer on your team? Are you an accessibility pro just looking to polish your chops or maybe see what other people are presenting about accessibility? Are you a decision maker? Maybe you're the executive director or a board member and you're trying to determine how much is needed and required for your organization to do on this topic. Are you someone who advises others on how to improve their websites? Maybe you're a consultant or maybe you volunteer for organizations and you want to help them improve. Maybe you're a legal counsel and you're hoping to make sure your organization complies. Maybe you don't have a specific role but you're just interested in learning more about this. And if there's some other role that you may have in this, feel free to chat in. Jeff Comments, he's the clueless guy who needs to redo our website. Believe me, I've been there. I felt that way. Aaron Comments, I'm the webmaster but did not build the site. Clifton Comments, I build and maintain our website. Co-administrator of our Facebook. Peter Comments, I'm the IT coordinator. I need to make current websites better for mobile apps. Christine, I'm the accessibility nag. We love that because we need people to really be advocates and champions for this within their organizations and outside them. So thank you everyone for chiming in on that. I'm going to go ahead and show the results. Most people have taken the moment to vote. And by voting it just is clicking on those radio buttons and clicking submit. But to show the results it looks like about almost 40% of you update content but didn't build your websites. And the next is the webmasters and producers. So about 23% of our audience are those web producers who are actually updating the content and maybe building the site or adding to it and improving upon it. So that's really helpful for us to get the background of who's joining us today. And again, keep in mind this is going to be one-on-one level so we don't plan to get into the hard detailed technical specifications of how to do all of these things today. But we do plan to have you walk away with a higher level understanding and some concrete essential things that you can do and strive to do to improve your website's accessibility. So with that I'd like to go ahead and bring on Sharon and Jessica to take us through the process. What is web accessibility first off to make sure everybody is understanding what that means in real words and real terms because I think sometimes people don't always understand the definition the same way. And then to talk to us about what are those things we can all strive to do, what can we be aiming to improve, and what are those resources we can rely on to help us do it. Thanks so much for joining us on the program today. Jessica and Sharon, we're really glad to have you. Thanks Becky. We're really glad to be here. This is my name is Sharon Rush. This is one of our very favorite things to talk to people who are just getting started or who might have questions and just help you understand that we've all been there. We all had to kind of understand what the issues are and take those first steps. So thanks for coming and figure out how to make out the slides. Our goals, now we figured out we're working out our technology. Our goals for today, so I know Becky mentioned some of them. We're just going to take a snapshot of web accessibility and talk about what it is and why it matters, identify some techniques that you can pass along to the other folks in your organization, and then talk about the program Open Air, one of our community programs, and then of course we'll answer any questions that you may have following the presentation. And you've already heard about who we are. I thought that was great. Thank you. You just sang my phrases so highly about what you should know about whatever awards I may have had just because I've actually been in a movie. She's actually more famous than I am. So yes, it's true. So how do we do this? We just hit enter. Okay, so we're going to start with just talking a little bit about what the web was meant to be in the first place, so to transcend barriers. So regardless of any differences, the web was created with that purpose to connect people to one another. And so in that sense, we all use assistive technology. So when we design systems of communication within or upon the web, we want to create great human experiences. So I want everyone to be thinking about that as we go through this today. And the fact that accessibility is actually part of what is the most fundamental about the web. The web was meant to bring down barriers. It was meant to overcome any distance or language barriers, or if we're talking to each other in different formats or on different browsers. The web was meant to transcend all of that. And the founder of the web, Sir Tim Berler-Lee, he famously said that access to the web regardless of disability is an essential component of the web itself. And so when we advocate for accessibility, we're advocating for the very basic principles and vision of what the web was meant to do. Talking about accessibility, what does accessibility mean? So I wanted to bring up just from my perspective doing marketing and outreach that I hear a lot of people talk about how, well, the web is accessible. You know, I can access it at any time, anywhere. But really what you want to be asking is, can it be accessed by everyone? We often talk about accessibility in terms of adherence to standards, but it's good to remember that accessibility is about inclusive design for real people with human needs so that they can produce and consume the content that is available to them just like everyone else. Part of this universal design is something else. Accessible design translates into improved performance in many other areas which can include mobile technology, browsing devices, improved search engine ratings. So just as we have like sidewalk ramps for wheelchairs, we need to have the same with our design when it comes to the web. And so you think about who uses those ramps, those curb cuts on the sidewalk. It's not just wheelchairs. So in the same way when you build accessibility in, you're making systems work in ways that you may not even have anticipated. And it really supports your customer base too, which I think is good to point out as well. So we have another poll question for you here. Are you aware of your legal responsibility around accessibility? And this is yes or no if you have maybe a cloudy gray version of that. If you think there's some requirements but you're not exactly sure what, that's okay. You can still say yes or no. And we didn't really include it maybe here. So we really want to get an idea of how much people already come equipped knowing about what's legally required or what their responsibilities are to their community around accessibility because we are going to talk a little bit about that. Those curb cuts make a difference, like they said not only for people in a wheelchair, which I've been in a number of times in my life, but also for folks towing a wagon to sell their Girl Scout cookies or using a stroller. So how can we improve things for everyone? What are we legally required to do as well? So it looks like the great majority of our audience that's responded so far does not know a whole lot about the legal responsibilities. So this is really good that we can review some of this. And for those of you who do, feel free to chime in in the chat to share experiences about how you've come into compliance or where you're at in trying to meet those standards and requirements. And we can share those back out with our audience because we know you can't all see the chat that happens on the back end. So go ahead and take us through what are those legal responsibilities around accessibility? So this little cartoon of the guy on the soapbox, I think those of us, the person who answered the thing and said I'm the accessibility nag internally, I think sometimes a lot of us feel that way that I'm the one who's going around talking to everybody. And you kind of have to have different approaches when you do that. When you're the accessibility nag or as we prefer to say the accessibility advocate, then you might take a few approaches and we're going to look at what some of those might be and give you some ammunition for all of those approaches depending on who you're talking to. So the legal one seems to be the big stick. That seems to be the one that gets the most attention, that gets the most cloud and increasingly we see it showing up in courts and that's when people pay attention. You know, we'd like to think that our market reasons and the technical operability, interoperability, internationalization, the humanitarian and visionary reasons were just as strong and for some arguments they definitely are. But we're going to start with the legal requirements and look at what the UN convention on the rights of people with disabilities told us just a few years ago. This convention has been ratified by almost every nation in the world by now. It was pretty much based on the Americans with Disabilities Act so it enumerated all the different rights that people have. But a big difference with the fact that in the UN convention on the rights of people with disabilities it explicitly references technology access as a basic human right. And so as a result of that many nations have now used that as the basis for incorporating accessibility laws, accessibility practices, requirements of government agencies. And so we're seeing it implemented more and more around the world based on global standards of accessibility that are accepted by everyone. Here in the United States for many years we've kind of relied on Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act which has been an imperfect method because actually Section 508 is only strictly to be applied to federal government agencies, people who get money from federal government agencies. So states have kind of adopted those and tried to enforce them on a statewide basis. Some municipalities have done the same. But increasingly the Department of Justice, and I think this is a really interesting approach that they've taken. And this is particularly true in the last five years. The Department of Justice has said, you know what, even though it's not explicit and we didn't know how the Internet was going to be used when we passed the ADA clearly the intent of the American Disabilities Act was to include people in public spaces. The Internet is a public space and so they are in fact investigating and prosecuting more and more under those very provisions. So if your agency says we conform to the American Disabilities Act, that's a good thing to bring up. Well you know the Department of Justice thinks the ADA includes Internet Accommodation and Internet Accessibility. And then we've also started passing some laws that are very specific like the 21st century video and the Video Accessibility Act. Looks like I left the video out of that slide. But that's what it is. It's the Video Accessibility and Technology Bill and it was signed into law in 2010. And that's kind of why you've seen so much action around captioning and audio description of media content on the web. Jessica's going to talk about she's our marketing queen here at Nobility so she's going to talk about the argument for why you should think about disability and accessible outreach and electronic communications because of the size of the market. Sure. I mean the market is huge. I mean nearly 20% of the U.S. population has a disability. So regardless of what type of organization you are in or you oversee, you are eliminating an entire market that you could be reaching if you are in fact making your website accessible. We have some of the numbers. It's a 1 trillion annual market. There's 2 billion in discretionary spending. 55 million Americans and 750 million worldwide. And of course that population increases as it ages. So it grows as quickly as technology is growing. You know I love the fact that this statistic came from Fortune Magazine. So it didn't come from a disability organization that's saying oh come on you guys let us in. It's coming from Fortune Magazine saying hey if you guys are smart you're going to want to access this market. I mean Nobility is a nonprofit too. So our favorite reason why you should think about disability is because of the absolutely astounding and amazing things that the people with disabilities who get access to technology actually do with the technology. And you know this is just a little collage here of some of our favorite people. You probably recognize that one in the middle, Stevie Wonder. He's got an audio described video that came out about three years ago that's just totally astounding. I mean it just gives you the whole sense of the video of the you know the whole, isn't that what they call them when they do a video promotion of their song. Yeah it's so nice. And then the girl in the purple shirt here is Delia. She started a whole movement at Gallaudet University which is a depth university for it's been around since the 1800s. And when they hired a president that the staff and the students didn't think was appropriate, they mounted an entire campaign on YouTube that changed the mind of the administration and got them a new president. And the adoption of that technology was really early and really well done. You've got kids in school who make so much better progress when they're given the right assistive technology and accessible curriculum products. We've got Desiree Sturdivant who's the mother of three. She homeschools her kids. She's blind. She's an accomplished musician. And she blogs for us as well as doing testing and reporting. So those are just some of the people and some of the amazing things they do. And I think as you get to know people who just like the rest of us want access to this technology and see how well and how imaginatively it's used, it's also another inspiration to make sure that it's all really accessible. We're going to show you a video now that is one of ten videos that were one of the hats I wear is co-chair of the Education and Outreach Working Group at the Web Accessibility Initiative at the W3C. That's out for the students for you. But recently we've done these outreach, very short outreach videos that link will take you to those. There's like ten of them. They're wonderful, wonderful ways to advocate and explain to people in non-technical terms. What are the issues and what does it matter? So Becky, I think you're going to play this for us, right? Yep. I'll go ahead and play it. And I did also just chat out the link to where you can find all of these in case the audio doesn't come through your speakers the way it should. You can go to that link that I chatted out and watch it on your own time as well. So I'll go ahead and hit play. Web accessibility perspectives. Keyboard compatibility. Not being able to use your computer because your mouse doesn't work is frustrating. A man drops his computer mouse off the desk. The computer mouse no longer works. Many people use only the keyboard to navigate websites, either through preference or circumstance. Whether it's temporarily limited mobility. A woman with her arm in a sling is typing on a keyboard, but the website requires the use of a mouse to select a date. A permanent physical disability. A man with a wheelchair is using a mouth stick to type. Or simply a broken mouse. The result is the same. Websites and apps need to be operable by keyboard. He switches to a different website that allows typing the date. Web accessibility. Essential for some. Useful for all. Visit w3.org slash wai slash perspectives for more information on keyboard compatibility. W3C Web Accessibility Initiative. Copyright 2016. Great, and I think that's just wrapped up. And before we move on to the next topic with this, we would like to get another opportunity to hear from you, our audience on what you think the biggest barrier is to equal access for your website that you have to address. And you can click as many of these options as you'd like. Is it meeting the technical requirements of meeting the standards that have been set out there in the web world? Is it getting the developers to understand and build it? Is it that you need to build a whole new website? Because what you have is just so outdated that it's really impossible to equip. Is it getting buy-in from your leadership or your board? Is it just having the money to implement and improve or rebuild your site? Is it that you have legacy software that's really limited? Maybe you're using a content management system that's really old and restricted. Or maybe you don't have a content management system at all and you're just not sure how to do it using hard code HTML. Maybe you don't know where to begin at all. And that's where we're going next with this presentation is where you can begin and some of the key principles of how to reduce those barriers. Maybe it's all of these things above. And if there's something else you can go ahead and chat into us. We have some people chatting in that they're just not even sure what those technical requirements and standards are. Another person chatted in, RD chatted in, convincing my peers that it's doable and that they have a choice. Lori chats in technical requirements that are easy to understand for a manager, not an IT professional. It can be a little overwhelming if you're not somebody versed in web developer IT language. Let's see Cheryl comments knowing what is required and what the cost will be. And Elaine says, I'm not sure what's not compliant yet. So how do you even know what's not working right on your current site? So a lot of great things are being chatted in. Some of these Ellen comments time to implement. So a lot of different barriers out there we know and we hope to help you reduce some of the fear and overcome some of those as part of this event. So I'm going to show the results just to see what the biggest barriers are that people loaded on. And it looks like we've got kind of a three way split here between money to implement, improve and rebuild, meeting the technical requirements and I don't even know where to begin. So I know we've all felt that way. It can feel a little overwhelming if you're not an IT person and you're not on the site yourself and even if you are it can feel very overwhelming. So let's walk through what some of those principles of accessibility are and those high level things people can be looking to improve in simple ways, really tangible ways. You're right, you're very correct Becky that not knowing where to begin can be overwhelming and I will tell you right now do not start with the WCAG standard. The WCAG stands for Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. They were developed and maintained by the W3C, you know, the standards makers for the web. But if you start by reading the guidelines you will just, you know, you'll just decide okay this is completely impossible, I can't do it. So that's one thing I never ever recommend for people to start with the guidelines or start with those technical specifications. What is most useful to start with are those principles of accessibility to understand because all of those technical specifications that get down and gritty and very overwhelming are based on these four principles of what you're trying to do with web content. So what you're doing is you're making content that is perceivable which means that any person can perceive that content regardless of how they perceive whether they perceive through vision through hearing or maybe they don't hear or see and they use braille outputs. They've got these really cool braille output devices that look into computers. So perfection is the number one and then all the technology specifications that relate to that are organized under that principle. The second one is operable so I want to be able to, you know, do I use a touch screen? Do I use a keyboard? Do I use a mouse? Do I use voice input? However I decide I'm going to interact, you want to make sure that your website is responsive and is able to accept those commands and allow operation by different kinds of users. Understandable is, you know, so I've got a form and they're trying to complete my taxes or whatever, register to vote online. Can I understand what I need to do? Are the instructions clear? If I make a mistake do I get a clear indication of what the mistake was and how to recover from an error state? How to correct it? So understandable is the third principle. And then finally the principle of robust mostly has to do with the fact that you know here we are with the web of things. Everybody's interacting on the internet. Can your content be flexible and adaptable enough for phones, tablets, huge big blown up screens? All the different ways that we might decide that we want to display or interact with content. So those are the principles and then we're going to get into the we're going to get into some technical stuff a little bit here but again we're going to keep at a high level and if you don't exactly understand what each slide is talking about as we go through these just kind of file it away and take it to your tech folk and say well here are some basic principles and some approaches and techniques that might be helpful for you as a technician who's trying to implement this. Right so as Sharon was saying there are, we do have some barriers that we're going to look at and these are the ones we're going to look at today as she said at a very high level. Don't be overwhelmed just that you will be able to take it back and we may be able to help you in the future too when I get into talking about open air. So we're going to review some of these common barriers starting with structure. So the structure of a page this is to help users orient themselves on pages. So a heading is a good example as Sharon kind of gave me this example as if you were to take a block of text and make it huge and bold that still would not solve the issue that it's a heading and you wouldn't call it a heading. We need to know that it's actually a heading itself so it needs to be defined that way. You want to consider your page sections or styling and the hierarchy the way things are laid out on a page. And basically that just means that if you make your text big and bold that's not going to tell a screen reader or somebody who doesn't see it that this is a heading. So as a sighted user I'll look at that big bold text and think okay that's a section of a page. But the really gorgeous thing about HTML which is the basic language of the web is that it includes all these semantic structures that can in fact tell the screen reader hey this is a whole section and you've got different ways to define the sections and then the assistive technologies which is what they call anything that a person with disability uses to make the web easier to use. The assistive technologies are often able to be navigated using keyboard commands that will jump from one heading to another just like the sighted user kind of skins the page and finds the headings and oh yeah this is what I'm interested in. So that's what we're talking about when we talk about page structure. The reading and focus order is something that is not always considered by people who don't rely on keyboard access or assistive technologies but the order in which the code appears in your code source is the way in which both assistive technologies interact with it. So what you want is a reading order that translates to assistive technology in the same way that a sighted user goes top to bottom, left to right and reads in that particular order. That's a very simple and straightforward thing to do. The default code order does that. You just want to not get too fancy with your disk and moving them around so that it disrupts the tab order. You also want to provide page titles that are meaningful. I don't know how many times I've been to a website where every single page has the same title which is the title of the organization but the first thing that a screen reader hears when it lands on a page is the page title. So if this is your donation page you want that right up there and clear to your blind user set. You are where you want to be. You're on the donation page. You want to make sure keyboard focus is always visible or highlighted text and follows logically. So someone who uses the keyboard for everything should be able to navigate through a page with the keyboard alone. And to know where you are so that if you hit the tab key and you can do this on any website, just hit the tab key and go through and make sure that as you do that you can absolutely identify where am I on the page and what are my options. Usually it's just a technology. You use the tab key. You use the safe bar or the enter key as the mouse click and you use the up and down and right side arrows to navigate within certain levels. That's the one that most people have become aware of. So here on this page it says example of all text was a box of chocolate. Well in fact where I found this particular image was on a bank website and what they were doing was making a link to a page that said you have many choices when it comes to mortgage rates. So box of chocolates would be the absolutely wrong alt text in that case. Now I'm not sure Becky can I actually link on this link or is that we don't leave the slide. Right it doesn't leave the slide. But people who have the slides open from the reminder email or the confirmation email, you can click those links within your PowerPoint presentation and we can also open that up and chat it out in the chat window right now. Okay so there's a number of different approaches to what's good alt text. And what I love about this tutorial at the W3C is that it takes you through that as a decision tree. There's that link. Is it doing this? Is it doing that? And then it will tell you within the tutorial what is the proper alt text and that is one of the things that people who said I don't even know how to talk to my tech people about this. These way tutorials are just terrific places to start to get good examples to get code. And the decision tree is one that's a really good example of how helpful those things are for people. And so then with color and contrast so if someone has trouble with low contrast or high contrast it's good to use color. I mean we say go ahead and use color but also use an additional redundant feature to highlight it. So for instance if first name is in red you want to also underline it just so that that gives it even more or put an asterisk or something like that. So another redundant feature to help with the contrast. Contrast is another issue and you just want to make sure that none of the meaning of your site relies on color alone and that your contrast is 4.5 to 1 or higher. And those are kind of your basic rules of thumb around color and contrast. Link text is one that we've made some pretty good progress with here lately because for years and years and years we're saying don't use click here because what does it tell me? If I am blind I often will use the capacity of my software to just pull all the links out of the page. So then I'm browsing this whole list of links to say what are my options for the next steps as I'm exploring this website and then I get this list that says click here click here click here or read more more more learn more more more. Well that's not really very helpful. So what you want to do whenever you're thinking about what shall I call this link? Think about where it goes, what it does and describe that rather than learn more. Now some people will have this whole library of things that says I want you to learn more about this topic, this topic, and this topic and they're all lined up next to each other. That you can do that, you can still do that and that's where an ARIA label would come in and allow you to still leave that learn more on the page but by giving it an ARIA description then the screen reader gets to learn more about what without disrupting your design on screen on the page. And there's lots more about that again in those tutorials and on the way resources that we're going to share with you. A lot of questions about link text. Just examples but you just gave one. What are ARIA described by? Can you give an example? Well ARIA described by is just a code. That's just something that you would put into the code. And ARIA is a methodology for communicating with screen readers or assistive technologies that at all change the visual default view for cited keyboard users. So ARIA is the secret code that the accessibility community developed to speak to assistive technology about very dynamic elements, things that are changing on the screen, top up windows. And so you'll see ARIA used kind of behind the scenes that says okay the screen reader can't keep up with this AJAX generated widget. So we're going to use ARIA to kind of whisper behind the curtains and tell the screen reader what's going on so then the screen reader can catch up. I hope that was helpful. Somebody says it's an HTML page. There you go. Yes. And I just went ahead and one of our participants thank you Elena shared out a sample of what the ARIA tag looks like. So I went ahead and shared that back out for anybody who may want to bring that to their web developers as an example so they can know what to look for. But I think we had people asking questions in general about what would you use instead of click here. And I gave an example of instead of click here you might want to embed the hyperlink on view the why homepage and that would be where your embedded link would be or something that's more descriptive so people know where they're actually going when they're clicking on something because they may not actually be clicking it depending on what they're using to view the screen. And that's a great point Becky and the fact is that the assistive technology doesn't need you to tell it that something is a link. It doesn't need to know click here. The assistive technology when it encounters something that is hyperlink it announces link, way homepage, link, more about media, link, whatever it is. So the assistive technology has the capability to tell the user that something is a link so if you just use that descriptive text you're way ahead of the game. Yeah I would say link click here but that doesn't make any sense to somebody who's going do I want to click on click here? I don't know what click here is. If you think of it from that perspective one of our participants, Jane had commented that that makes her crabby when she sees people right click here and now on how this works I feel very much the same way after many years of figuring out how that really impacts people. We don't want today to be crabby. Exactly. One of our other participants just chimed in Linda just said these recommendations are good for optimal SEO too so for search engine optimization click here doesn't tell anything to the Google bots that are out there helping your website float to the top in search engines too so you help your organization get found better the more you describe those links. So moving on to media we all think most of us use media at this point in our website because it's such a great tool but we want to make sure you have video captions for hearing impaired and audio descriptions for the visually impaired. I think we have a video here as well. When you want to shake up the accessibility of your media player as well. We'll go ahead and play this again. I know one person had said they weren't able to hear the audio last time so you can view this video as well on that link that we shared out earlier. I'll chat it out again once I start play or hit play here but hopefully this should play for you. If the closed captioning is not embedded in this it's because ReadyTalk strips some of that out but they are closed captioned in the actual posted videos on the WAI website and also on YouTube and a number of other places where these have been shared. Web accessibility perspectives. Video captions. Video isn't just about pictures it's also about sound. Without the audio you would have to guess what this film is about. Frustrating isn't it? Not knowing what's going on. That's the situation for everyone who can't hear. Captions make videos accessible. Which is also handy for people who want to watch video in loud environments. Or where you need to be very, very quiet. Web accessibility essential for some, useful for all. Visit w3.org slash wai slash perspectives for more information on video captions. Great, I think that one's all wrapped up as well. Really great tips here that you can take back and we'll talk more with Sharon and Jessica about what to do going forward. Yes. Next up with your organization there are some online resources. I want to talk just a few minutes about that. Terrific community program we have where you might want to participate, especially those of you who need new websites, because we have some teams lined up who might be able to help you with that. There were so many people who said, man I'm overwhelmed, I just don't know where to get started. And the w3.org slash wai is the web accessibility initiative at the home of the World Wide Web itself there at the W3C. Again, it's also possible to get overwhelmed just going there because it's a pretty extensive site. But some of the most recent things that we've done I would highly recommend for those of you who said, well I don't even know what's wrong with my website, but I don't even know. There's a tool called Easy Checks and it takes you step by step by step through some of these very basic things we've talked about, page titles, structure, alt text, and it'll show you here are some free browser based tools. Here's how you use those tools and here's what you do and here's how you judge your results. So Easy Checks is one great thing. There's a guide for, an interactive guide for planning and implementing accessibility. We have some quick start tips for different roles. If you're a designer, a developer, a content provider, a project manager there's a set of quick start tips. We're still not getting anywhere near those ugly technical specifications. We've got plain language, good examples. So please do check that out. Feel free to drop me a line if you get in there and say, now where are those quick tips that you were talking about or maybe with the follow up Becky we can just send a list of some of these things I'm talking about right now because in the last couple of years we've really been trying to make useful tools that people can apply right now, use right now, and put immediately to work regardless of technical expertise. So I just wanted to put in a big strong plug for that and then Jessica's got some good news for those of you who need a new website. Thank you. And I've seen some other questions as well about whether or not Nobility tests websites and those testing and then gives you some guidance. And we do in fact do that as part of our organization on the consulting side. But as the community programs director I oversee a program called OpenAir which is the accessible internet rally and actually the way that Nobility was founded originally was based on this program. And this is a competition where we pair web developers and designers with nonprofit organizations. And over the course of about five weeks the developers are trained in accessibility. And currently we have a group of expert advisors who are building a game and a training online so that the developers can then go in and take these trainings. And then once they've trained they then build a website for the nonprofit either of their choice or one that we pair them with. And a lot of times we're pairing them based on time zones because we've been so fortunate as to have countries all over the world participating. And last year we had Australia, India, Columbia, Africa, Canada, the UK, and coast to coast in the US. And so the program continues to grow and it's a really wonderful and fun way to learn about accessibility and to also then get a new accessible website. It's one of the really pro people. I say experts because they really are. And we appoint mentors, accessibility mentors to the teams so that they can learn from them. And then we also have added a training component for the nonprofit organization on how to maintain their accessible site once it's handed over to them. So a lot of nonprofits these days are using WordPress, sometimes Drupal. There's different content management systems that are being used. And we have some people on staff who have been trained in those particular platforms and can help the nonprofits learn about how to maintain sites and keep them accessible moving forward. So it's a really fun way to learn. It's a community effort. It's a lot about outreach and getting the word out about accessibility and the importance of accessibility. And we do these big events as well. So we have local events here in Austin but then we do virtual. The events are all virtual as well. So we're asking everyone to be registered by September 15 because it kicks off on October 11 at Google Fiber here in Austin, Texas and then we end with an awards ceremony and an accessible casino night on December 8. Yeah, we're trying to figure out how to, we're trying to find a web sharing platform that includes a beer tap. Yeah, we haven't located that yet. We've been working on it though. But it's a lot of really fun people and for someone who's worked in the nonprofit sector for many, many years but never in this particular area. I've only been here as mentioned in the beginning for a couple of years. People who work in accessibility are some of the best people I've ever met. So I think that it's a lot of fun. And so any of this stuff that may seem a little bit technical and scary, it really isn't because we have a lot of fun doing it. So this is a great opportunity for any nonprofit that's interested in learning more about what we've talked about today, just getting a little more involved. And this Air Rally's website here, this link I guess it's not going to be able to link there. We did chat that out a couple of times as well. And it will be available in the slide. So we'd like to take some time to answer some questions because I know there were. And there was a couple I know that I saw. And I think there's one in particular I was going to answer because I knew how to because I saw it. I've come across recently, someone mentioned the CANVA, this new graphic program that's out there where you don't need Photoshop. It's great for graphics. It is not accessible. I can tell you, and we have been working on that in my department. And so when you're using CANVA, it's not to say not to use it, but you will have to do checks and a text alternative because it does not do that for you. And WordPress is another question that came up and Sharon may have something to say on this too, but with WordPress it comes with some basic accessibility features. And there are plugins that you have to use for WordPress for different accessibility features. Now one of our staff members, Bobby Brooks, who is very familiar with WordPress, explained to me that it's not super simple. It's a bit more complex because you have to do some phishing in order to make sure that you are in fact being fully accessible and compliant. But if you download the accessibility plugin, it just does something across the board but it doesn't fix everything for you. And no matter what tool you use, we do have people, sorry to interrupt you there, we do have people asking about Wix and Wild Apricot as well, WordPress. Any tool that you're using is only as good as you actually filling in those fields for some of the features. So if you just get the alt text then the alt text is going to be empty. So you need to make sure you're actually putting the time into educating your staff and anybody who's updating content on the site. Same with Jumla, somebody just asked about that. I've used Jumla, WordPress, Wix. I've used a lot of these CMS's SharePoint. Many of them come with basic forms that you can fill out that include things like asking about alt text and they include heading codes and kind of a standard CSS so to speak based on how it's designed. But if your designers design it poorly or if you don't fill in those fields then it's still not going to work for you for accessibility standards. So you need to make sure you're doing at least those bare minimum things that are open fields and filling them in and not filling them in with click here but filling them in with something that's actually useful and descriptive to a universal audience. And because a lot of the nonprofits will have CMS's content management systems for open air that's going to be part of our training is talking about the accessibility in those particular platforms as well. Great. And we have some people asking would standard HTML code be better if somebody doesn't want to use a CMS? I mean I think it could but you'd still have to take the time to fill that code in. Well you know I'm a big fan of HTML. I like building websites from scratch. I'm just as happy to avoid the issues of the accessibility of the CMS. The problem is you have to have somebody who maintains your website and who knows how to update the HTML pages without the aid of a CMS. So that's one of the questions if you decide that you wanted to participate in an air program for example you would tell us I need a CMS or no we have a web guy and we don't need a CMS and that kind of helps us figure out how to team you up. But yeah if you've got the expertise on staff where you can build and maintain HTML from scratch that's awesome. Are there resources that you know of through WAY or maybe through an ability site that can help people train their staff who are updating content but not necessarily designing or building sites? How to improve what they're putting into those open fields if they're using a CMS? For updating on a CMS I mean we do have resources that we use in the context of the air program for exactly that kind of training. The WAY site does not really deal very much with CMS issues right now but the basic tutorials I mean in some cases those tutorials can be sort of adapted to your so I'm using SharePoint or something and I'm putting up a new page. I want to think about heading structure just the same as I would in HTML. List structure, the semantics, I want to think about alt text and make sure my form fields are labeled in the way. As you get to know your CMS you'll know how do I do that within this environment but the principles of what you're trying to do are going to be the same. Did that answer your question? Absolutely I just wondered if you have something, a document or anything like that that we could point people to that have some of those key principles that we want to make sure people think about. I know we covered some of that in the topic today on high contrasts and headings and alt tags and things like that but like a cheat sheet that somebody could have at their desk in front of them to remind them when they're adding content to the site be sure to think about these things. One of the best cheat sheets I can tell you about is on the WAY website is the one that's called Getting Started Tips for Developers. So there's one for developers, one for designers, one for content providers and it's got a nice little checklist for these are the most highly prioritized items to be thinking about when you're thinking about accessibility. So that might be helpful. What I can do afterwards once we're wrapped up here I'll try and get the link to that and I'll include that as a resource that we point to in the follow-up email for anybody who's interested in digging deeper on that. We have just a couple minutes left so I want to just wrap up with one other question that I think is valuable here. I mean there's lots of other questions but one that I think that's particularly valuable for organizations that may have documents that they share online and who are considering what's the most accessible format to share documents. And they asked particularly about PDFs and this came up actually internally at TechSoup today where we asked should it be a PDF? Should it be an HTML file? Should it be a Word doc? What is the most accessible if you have to attach documents and allow people to download or open them from your website? You know to give them their credit the PDF folks at Adobe have been working really hard on accessibility and have made vast improvements. So I don't run screaming from the room in the way I used to do when they talk about PDFs. They can be made accessible. It's a more time consuming enterprise to make it accessible and there are still serious limitations for people with low vision or contrast issues. I mean there are some things. PDF was meant to be a print format so it doesn't scale. It doesn't reflow. It doesn't do some of those things that we define as basic accessibility principles. So you can make PDFs that are interactive with screen readers. It takes quite a bit of effort. You can't just hit the accessibility checker and think you've got there. So all that said it can be done if you have a commitment to PDF. There are now more options though. I think HTML is always a great one. There are so many accessibility features in HTML. Word Documents Microsoft too has been making a lot of effort in that area so Word Documents can be if you don't care if your audience changes it a little bit then Word Documents might be a good bet. Do Google Docs as well. I think there are accessibility possibilities in all of those formats. You just have to be alert to them. Train your staff to think about them and make sure you've got common practices. There's another question about contractors and there's a whole section on the way website about procurement and how to write accessibility language into when you're procuring third party software or third party. We should go on all day. We do have more questions that I know we didn't have time to get to but we really appreciate all of them and we hope that this has given you our participants a lot of great resources to take back to your own organizations, websites, planning and help improve what you've got out there and help your staff learn more about how to increase the accessibility so that everyone can access your website. We would love it if you would chat in one thing that you learned today during our webinar that you will take back and try and implement. Maybe it's that you're going to compete in the open air rally or maybe that you're going to check out, easy check, and try to see where your website needs improvements. Maybe you learned not to use click here. Let us know what those things are that you learned that you're going to take back because that helps us know what was the most valuable to you. We would also encourage you to tell us that you will share this information with your colleagues within your organization and outside of it who may benefit from learning more about accessibility too. When we close out of this webinar in just a moment we'd also like to ask that you complete that post-event survey to help us to continue to improve our webinars for you. Before we wrap up I'd like to just go ahead and highlight what's coming up on our webinar calendar. We have a webinar coming up on office productivity in the cloud. We'll be talking about moving off of Word and Excel or maybe using with Word and Excel but doing it in the cloud using tools like Amazon's web services or using Google Docs or other cloud productivity tools. Then on August 23rd we'll be talking about training your staff on technology. We have a whole new curricula that we are a curriculum that we are opening up and this will be an asynchronous at-your-own-speed curriculum that you'll be able to log into our new learning management platform that will be opening up pretty soon. And take this course and so we'll have a webinar to show you many of the training resources available to you and your staff as well as the full curricula in our LMS. And then we will have a webinar for libraries on how to get a grip on your social media numbers, how to understand those metrics. And then going into September we'll have a series of webinars focused on one grant station which is a big grant writing database and also one on how to write powerful grants and develop your strategy for the next 12 to 18 months. We hope you'll join us for those events. Thank you so much Sharon and Jessica. Really excellent information. And I think we should do this more often. We should try and make this an annual event so that we can talk about this more of a priority and be the champions that we want to see everybody have within your own organizations to serve accessibility for everyone. We would love that. Like Sharon was saying we could talk about it all day. Or she could talk about it all day I know. I mean we could get into some really details there but it's extensive. It moves as quickly as technology as you know. So we were really happy to be here. So it was great to spend the time with you all and thank you for joining us. Thank you all. And again please take that post event survey and thank you to ReadyTalk our webinar sponsor for giving us this platform to use to present today's webinar. Watch for the post event email. We will include closed captions and transcripts and all of that as well for anyone who needs it. So thank you so much for joining us today. Bye-bye. Thank you. Bye-bye.