 I'm here to say one thing and my goal, my agenda, is for everyone to have web accessibility in mind. If there's one thing you take away, that's all. That's it. Very simple. Now share this story with you. I met my husband when I was in uni many years ago and we've been married for over 10 years so I'm still 20 by the way and there is a favourite couch. We have this L-shaped couch in our house. He likes to sit and we have countless pointless arguments like many married people do about him sitting on that couch because he wants to sit on the L-shaped place and I'm like you get to put your feet up and have countless arguments and then one day he said to me why do you think I like to sit there? I'm like because you're selfish? You're not Sheldon. I'm like you can't own the couch. I paid my half. This is an independent family. Anyway, my husband has a bad hand so he had a vaccine when he was a child and he lost the use of the hand so he does everything well so it was just never in my stream of consciousness and he was like babes, I have to lean my hand somewhere. That's why I sit on that couch. I've been together. And if there are three things I want you to take from that story is one, people with disabilities seldom ask for help. Two, we all want to be independent, valid members of society and that's why they don't. And three, we can't let them do all the work. We just can't. It needs to be in our stream of consciousness and I'm not here to kind of shame anyone because there are unconscious biases and if something is right, it's not there in front of you, it's just not there. So why should we care? Now, the digital industry, we love a course. Like literally just go on Twitter, you would know that we love a course. But there's so many things that we campaign about that we can't change. And as I get further and further in my career, I constantly ask myself, what can I change? Like what can I really influence? There's all these things I really care about and don't get me wrong. It's all good. But there are things that are right in front of me that I have influence over that are within my control that I do absolutely nothing about. And that's what leads us here. 61%. So Web AM, AIM, did a research where they did an accessibility check on the top 1 million pages in the UK and they found out that 61% of all home pages have accessibility errors. Now, half of this where links that take you to other pages that were not accurately labelled. And the one third of these have like questionable old text and repetitive old text. And we've all seen things like this where we're like, oh, that's the last priority on the technical audit list. That's the last priority on everyone's list because there are other things that we deem as important. But these are things that are within our control. And if we claim as an industry to care, if we claim to be at the forefront of social justice, then why are we creating more barriers to people who have enough things to worry about? I mean, people have lists and we have conferences and talks about dev relationships. And that's really important. It's really important because we have all these things to do. But this, you can go into your CMS and fix yourself and you do nothing about it because it's not important. And that's just why I'm here today. If you take anything away, web accessibility, front of mind, every time, that's what I'm here to say. Okay. Now, one of the things that stakeholders argue about and one of the things that make us prioritize things like this is because people feel, oh, you know, how many people actually use the internet to have a disability? They must do things in other ways. Now, there are 61 million people in the U.S. alone with a disability. One in eight. So that's someone sitting around you here. And 12 million people have a visual disability. If you think about the way we perceive the world, the first thing we do is see. A lot of us have had this experience is where you see someone and instantly you can tell whether you like them or not. Instantly, that's because 80% of everything we take in the world is via a site. Now, there's a popular shop in the U.K. I don't know what the equivalent here is called TKMAT. And they sell discount designer clothes. And I can never shop in there. Never. Because every time I walk in there, my brain just goes, ooh, this is so overwhelming. This is not, because they sell this, it's not like when you walk into a typical shop where you have wide dresses all in line and that's really easy for my brain to, because I am slightly dyslexic. But when I enter a shop like that, instantly my brain goes to meltdown. And I can't cope. And this is the way the world is for a lot of people. They enter a place, they step into your site, they load that page and they just go, where do I start? Because a lot of times we think of people with visual impairment as blind or not blind. But there are a lot of differences. There is call of blindness, there's visual obscurity, there's a lot of in-betweens. And they're just people who the world is so overwhelming for. And when we look at it, 70% of the people who responded to that survey said that they regularly used the internet. And the age range for those people were 21 to 60. So this is not even, oh, it's an ageing generation problem. These are people who have everyday lives. People like you and me who are going into work coming up, they're earning money and yet we're creating barriers for them to spend their money. Now, what was even more surprising about that research is that people with a higher degree of visual difficulties profess to have a higher degree of internet proficiency. And we just assumed that people give up. But everyone is fighting for independence. Everyone wants to have agency. Another thing which would have been irresponsible of me today. I know I say it's your civic duty. But again, we're marketers, we're reporter stakeholders, we are losing money. 49 billion in the US is the income after tax for people living with disability. In the UK there was a study, for those of you who work on international sites, on the amount of money people are losing from people who have disabilities clicking away. And that's £17 billion. So people should stop saying that there is no money involved. One in eight people have £490 billion, sorry, I forget, to spend. And we are walking away from that. We're being asked that organic growth, revenue growth. At the end of the day, all marketers are tasked to do is make money. And we are walking away from money. And people with disability in that study says that they have really strong brand loyalty. They would rather pay more. The same way I would rather pay more and walk into a shop that has arranged things in a way that my brain can absorb. It's the same way that people with disability have responded that they would rather pay more for a site that caters to their needs. Now, the good thing in the US, you have a law, the American Disability Act, which says that every site must present equal opportunity to everyone. And yet there's still 10 lawsuits a day in 2021. Do you know if anyone can remember the lawsuit that went, I think it's pizza hot, where someone tried to order on their website and their app and the person could have accessed the site, and then pizza hot argued that he could have picked up a phone and like, why? I want to do it this way. So things like this are still happening. This is because a lot of people are using tools and people are not trying to work in someone else's shoes. Now, I just want to remind us, and this is really simple, this is something that should be front of mind, but if someone doesn't say, you don't instantly think about it, the kind of tax that people are trying to do that we are setting up barriers for them, managing personal finance. Imagine going to work every day and you can't manage your own finance and then you have to open that up to someone that's leading, someone can defrod you. These are things that we need to bear in mind that this is not just, oh, someone wants to shop. There are things that are essential to everyday life, monitoring health. Imagine if you're a teenager, just starting out in life and then someone has to check your reproductive health. School work. My friend's daughter is a game designer and I spoke to her because she has a degenerative eye condition where she's gradually going blind. She's in school now, second year game design. I spoke to her, I was like, what are some of the barriers that you face? I was like, oh, for this, you know, how do you do, and she was so upset. She was like, the gaming industry doesn't cater for me and yet I'm a game designer. She was like, one of the things I do to access the web is I have to put a DAX screen on and if you do that in any game, it just distorts all the images and that made me feel so sad. I think another thing I asked, I was like, oh, which news website do you go to? And she was like, no, I access all my news via YouTube because none of the news websites are accessible and I really felt sad because we know the amount of misinformation that's out there on YouTube and that is someone's primary consumption of news. Again, dating, shopping, etc. Like she said, oh, I can go to a website, I can browse, but I can never check out because the form input labels are always missing. Basically, we are contributing, stopping people from being independent members of society and this is what we should always have at the forefront. Whenever we're doing any audits, whenever someone says, oh, it's just an H1 text, think about how is a screen reader going to prioritise if you have multiple H1 text on your page. Now, how do we rectify this problem? There are some of it that's technical, but there are some of it that we can get started on and do ourselves. Now, these are links to checklists. The web accessibility guidelines, they have a checklist that covers the four areas that you need to. It's a very good checklist. You can just download it, create your own Excel sheet and walk your way through. Now, the first thing is that your website needs to be perceivable and that's because the first thing people do, first sense is site. Everyone must be able to access the information in a way that makes sense and I reached out to our community, I put tweeters like, what are the problems that people still face because I wanted to hear from every day people and it's the same thing. It's mostly about that perception. All text not being used or where they're used in videos, people don't let it stay enough and then it disappears, people using captures or people just using automated video text generations and things like that. And it says the content should be in a meaningful sequence and that's where the H1, because I see this a lot, it's like, oh, we don't care about the H1, it doesn't really matter. We have the keyword in the page title, but think about the way a screen reader will work. How would it skip to the content if you have like 10 H1s? So content must make sense, you know, captures, I can see, I hate captures. I don't know why people still do them. Again, there's especially new sites are so guilty of this or affiliate sites that have all these ads like there's decorative content that you can still click to and you can't skip. Again, do you not use an interface that people can't use? I think all the things that was really interesting for me with this is this message that Chloe sent, because I'm guilty of this and I'm sure loads of people, if you go into your Google search console report, you will see that mobile report that says content too small for screenwit and she was like, I have a bad hand and I have to use my dominant hand and I can't expand things and everything on mobile is just too small and I was like, oh my God, I'm always thinking about speed. I see these things and I'm like, oh, I can see it's fine and I just ignore. So everything must be accessible from a keyboard, easy to navigate, allow, time caption for media, understandable. The interface must not be beyond the user's understanding. I know sometimes I work with web designers who try to reinvent the wheel and I'm like, can we just make it that the menu is in a way that someone knows is intuitive, you know, the content on your site to be intuitive. People should be able to look at you and understand that this is where I need to go. This is what I need to do. Again, it must be robust in a way that it is accessible to screen readers, assistive technology, that kind of stuff. Now, you don't want this kind of thing. Does anyone remember this? If you've been in SEO long enough, you will remember this. Now, I know I've talked about plugins not being the only way to go, but the way of accessibility, the web AIM, they have an accessibility plugin. They have extensions that you can use and that can be a starting point. It's really good because what it does is that it tells you where you have low contrast. It gives you recommendations for how you can fix that, although I'm sure that most of us will have fairly decent ideas. Things you can do yourself. Again, missing all text, you fill, skip links, you take to your devs and say, hey, can you put this in the area? Good news is there's an API. If you're good at coding, if not, where you can do bulk pages at once and then you can start fixing things. If you have what press, there's always a plugin. Lighthouse as well. You can do this in Lighthouse where you use the accessibility tool, but again, just be careful with tools. Because tools only detect 25% of accessibility errors. That's why I said before that most of the sites that we're sued, they have the accessibility checklist because they're only using tools and overlays and not real human experiences. So how do you try a real human experience? Now download a screen reader. There are loads of them, but you can start, I mean, you can start with a free one. Most of the really good ones are paid tools. A screen reader works with this. It's very similar to schema. It's called an area label. Your developer will probably have coded your site in a way that it has that, and then it makes what we call an accessibility tree, and the screen reader reads through. You can view your accessibility tree in Chrome Dev Tools. Now, I've committed the cardinal scene. I have included not just one, but two videos in my presentation because I wanted to demo how a screen reader works on a good slide. Fingers crossed I get asked to come back next year. Probably wouldn't say. This screen reader is going to, you'll see how, just watch how it goes through the content. There's no option to skip anything. There's no logical way. Discounts. List with tenide. Tick tock. Llyw swim. Soaps. Llynclis died. Abbage. Puzzle. Login. Privacy policy. Feedback. 12 p.m. 27 degrees Celsius. Previous slide. Button. Go to slide three. Button pressed. Nothing happens. Next slide. Button. Go to slide three. Button pressed. List. Mail online. News. Sport. List. I couldn't skip through. I just had to keep going. I didn't take me. No jump links. Nothing. Took me back to the privacy policy. Into taking me back to the article. So frustrating. So frustrating. No wonder she said she doesn't access any new sites. I mean that was so, I had to skip through 15 menu links. Took me right back to the start. Took me to the weather. Weather was already on the content. Now this is slightly better. So there's the jump link. Jump the content. Internal link. Right label. Back to home page. Contribute. Subscribe. Login. List with 14 items. List item. List item. List item. List item. List item. List item. List item. List item. List item. Amazon Prime Open Search. Button. Toggle between international editions. Button. List with three items. List item. Sunny Braverman as our next PM. Be afraid. Be very afraid. List item. Defiant to the bitter end. How Johnson. Defiant to the bitter end. How Boris Johnson became Britain's Trump. Be independent. Jump to content. Internal link. Cool. So you can see how frustrating the web can be. Like I cheated massively because I could see. So I could move around and just try to make it go faster. But imagine if you didn't have that ability. If you just had to wait and keep pressing tap, tap, tap, tap, tap to just get to the next stage. It can be really, really frustrating. Now web AIM. They have a long list of things. 161 accessibility tools that are specialist tools for detecting things. But as you can see, the best thing to do is download a screen reader and go through your page. Even things like full stops and commas and stuff. It really makes a difference. The way that most web pages are laid out is that you have this hero banner and you'll start with best dresses for sale. And then underneath it there will be buy best dresses and then the best dresses. You can see and so you can just ignore all of that noise and escape to the dresses that you want to see. But for someone who has to go through all of that, all the person sees is all of this noise. And as SEOs we are so guilty. I mean we've come such a long way. Content is no more about keyword stuffing, but oh my god. I can't even think of what the old days must have been like. Again, I'm just going to go through some of the most common errors that were found of that study. 97% of home pages had accessibility errors. This is the window to your shop, your front of house. This is a page in any website that everyone's super concerned about. Everyone has a stake in it yet no one gets it right. Low contract text. And I have to say I'm guilty of this because I use the WordPress template and there's this thing now. Everyone likes a white on grey. My website is guilty of this, so I have to change it. But this is the kind of thing that makes it really difficult for people to see. Again, we've just seen a demo of what happens when there's an empty link. It said button on the daily meal site. I clicked it. It took me nowhere. I was wondering where I was. And again, if I couldn't see, I would have been lost. Missing form input labels. If you ask someone to fill a form, people who can see would know that's the name. You have to label the form and actually say input name here. And this is an example of what that code looks like. Empty buttons. Again, we saw that empty button where I clicked on it. Nothing happened. Or on a website, it's really easy for you to put like a red button and say sale. And if you don't give it a label in the area code, people just don't know it's a sale button. And my personal favourite, which we can all do something about tomorrow, missing all text. Now, one of the key things that people forget when creating all text is that they're different functions. So there's the functional one, which is to initiate actions, which is like print. And we need to make sure we label it with things like this button prints a page. Because imagine if it even opens in a new browser and you are navigating a page and all of a sudden you're like, oh, that's reading out a new URL. And you just get so totally confused because you don't know where you... It's like being in a house and you turn and you're in a room and the door is locked and there's no way to get out. There are decorative images. Now I worked with an affiliate site where they had to display the logo of all the clients they worked with. This is meaningless to... It's an authority signal. It's meaningless to the screen reader. And no one asks the screen reader to skip it. And you can just go through... And literally you have to sit down there and press logo one, logo two, logo three, logo four for 30 images. So remember that if something is not useful, make sure you put a null value so that the screen reader can skip it. And again, where we have images that convey meaning, we need to put accurate description explaining what the images are. Now, speeding up the process with Python. I'm not going to go into what any of the script means. I mean, there are links in there. You can do your research. But these are all Python libraries that deal with passing and structuring data and processing images. And this is my personal favourite. This is the library that is used for image recognition. And what it does is that it breaks down images into different pixels and it tries to predict what each pixel means, puts it together, makes a hole. Now, I have put all of these together myself and my developer with written script. All you need to do is upload, click run, and download. And whilst this will not give you all of the all text you need, at least it's cotton out the admin by 50% at the very list. Please create a copy because it takes so long to fix these things. This is not my full-time job. I have two full-time kids and a part-time husband. So please, when you email me that something's broken, just be patient. Okay, cool. Now, just simple, create the file, upload it here. Now, I tried to make it the first time I shared the script. I tried to make it that you can run unlimited URLs, but it kept breaking. So I've shortened it now. You will see within the code. And it's really, the code is written up really clearly that you can reduce it to 100 URLs. So just try reducing to 100 URLs and run it there. Come and change it, run. So you can upload a file with like 5,000. It would just keep changing 100, 200, 300 like that, just so that it doesn't break or time out. Click here, run all. Once it runs, it will go to your download file. And this is what the predictions look like. Now, I can't see from here, but see a chair and a dex in a room. So it's pretty good, some of the time. So a living room, a plant with a bookshelf, and it gives you at least five of them, and you could choose best out or you can just read and refine. This is like a bed in a sitting room next to a window, a living room at a television and a couch. Now, sometimes it goes cuckoo. So a close-up, blue and yellow. So what I found out that it's doing is better at predicting larger image, which makes sense, because what the master CNN does is it breaks it down into pixels, and it tries to, so the smaller the pixel, the harder it is for it to break down. So try and make sure that you upload larger images. What I'm working on is to see if I can get a script that makes it enlarge the image to a certain size, but then again that might not work quite well because then stretch, but I'm working on it. So recap for the script so you don't break it and spell the phone for everyone, create a copy, run only 100 URLs at a time. Once it finishes, check your download folder. It should automatically download. The file name is called captions.csv. This is what it looks like. It will download the five captions, and then you can review, pick the best, optimise whatever you want to do. And I leave you with this. Any of us, any of us, could lose the freedom, the abilities that we have in an instant, and we should never forget that. Bear that in mind, and always keep web us's ability in mind. These are some of the sources I shared.