 Welcome to our presentation today. Accessibility leads to opportunity. And without further ado, we'll get started. I will say Fran and I are quite comfortable being interrupted. So if you have any questions, if there's anything that you'd like further clarified as we go through the presentation, please feel free to either drop a note in chat or come off mute and flag one of us down. We're happy to answer any questions, but we are expecting to leave a good 15 to 20 minutes at the end of this presentation for more in-depth questioning, specifics that you may have and some issues that you may want to address. I will also say that I'm not the best at watching chats when I do these presentations. So I will defer to Fran and some of our other team members to flag me down if I'm missing what you're trying to say. So with that, we'll move into the introduction. So my name is Jay Van Arden. I'm the Director of User Experience and Research here at Northern Commerce. Been with the organization for 10 years. I have about 25 to 30 years of experience in corporate communications, media, both sides, both from the media side and from the working with media as a public relations standpoint. I've been involved in the web since very early days and a strong advocate for accessibility. So I'm also Chair of the City of London's Accessibility Advisory Committee at the moment. I'm on a couple of provincial boards for accessible employment. And it's something that's both a personal and professional passion of mine. We're very, I'm very excited to be sharing this with you. But Fran, introduce yourself. Awesome, thank you Jay. So hi everyone, I am Fran Wiley, a technical lead and accessibility specialist here at Northern. I've been with the team for about four years now. My background is in tech. I am a developer by heart. So all things accessibility, I am passionate about and making our web an accessible place. And also, sorry, I will note also that I am an international association, professional certified web accessibility specialist. And the Northern team, myself in particular, but a number of us on the team are also Nielsen Norman Group certified. We believe that Nielsen Norman Group is the pinnacle of user experience research and user interface designs. So we bring that certification and really as we go through this presentation, you'll see why those are relevant. So who is Northern? Some of you may remember us or have experienced us. I'm noticing on the call from our digital kid in the years. Northern Commerce is actually an organization built up of three companies now all working together as one or under one banner. We're located in London, Ontario, office right downtown on the corner of Wellington and Horton Street. We have about 150 specialized employees in various locations throughout Canada. You can see London, Toronto, Ottawa, Moncton and Vancouver. We've provided a brief outline of some of the recognitions we've received over the years. We are a frequent and repeat member of the best workplaces in general. We've also been recognized for best workplaces for mental health, for women, for youth and for giving back. We're also proud of our diversity and equity and inclusion efforts. We are a rainbow registered organization and a certified diverse supplier. Today's agenda, we're gonna talk about what is digital and universal accessibility? Guidelines and legislation. So we'll get into a little bit of the more technical legislative parts of it just to set the foundations of what we're gonna talk about here. Then we'll get into the reason why you're all here. The value of accessibility and its business benefits. Part of that comes into some of these topics where we're talking about how we're gonna align with how people actually use the web, not how we may sometimes expect them to use it. Testing for compliance is gonna be an element we talk about. And then of course, we'll explain how Northern can help you. And if you're interested to reach out to us, we'd be more than happy to have further conversations with you. And as I mentioned, we're gonna wrap up with a question and answer session. So let's talk digital accessibility. Digital accessibility means that websites, tools and technologies are designed and developed so that people with disabilities can use them. When we talk about digital content, it really does focus on a variety of applications in the digital ecosystem. We have websites, obviously, but there are applications, digital files, video games are an element of accessibility, media, both traditional and not. We see digital applications everywhere you go. If I look out the window from our office right now, we've got a big giant digital sign on the overpass at Wellington Street. So those are ways that we're broadcasting information. We wanna make accessibility core to what everything is done because it's not just about people with disabilities, there's so much more value, and so much more value you can bring to your organization. In some cases, when we're looking at people that have accessibility concerns or disabilities, they may be accessing your content with the help of assistive technologies or devices. And we wanna make sure that we're providing the framework so that all users, regardless of their point of origin, are able to access content and use it to the most effective way possible. We're big believers in the concept of universal accessibility, and this takes a number of forms. When we look at universal accessibility, one word that I tend to avoid using is that concept of accommodation. Accommodation often has that connotation that we're doing something special for somebody. And we really wanna believe and promote the fact that accessibility is about giving people the tools, resources, and equitable access to the content and services that they need so they can execute their jobs, live their lives, and be a part of the community to the fullest degree in an equitable manner with everybody else. When you start putting up barriers whether they're intentional or unintentional, you start getting to a position where you're choosing who gets to fully participate with your content, who gets to fully participate with your community. And most importantly, this is not a niche group. As we go through the presentation, you'll see this is really something that impacts all of us. We wanna make sure that we're building an environment, whether that's a physical or digital environment that is designed to meet the needs of all those who wish to use it. The concept of universal accessibility is something you may already be familiar with. When you look at the things that are on the screen here, say captioning, the push button doors, or the curb cuts, these are all things that were initially designed to support the needs of people with disabilities, but they are things that are universally beneficial. If any of you have been in a train station or an airport or any sort of environment where it's really loud and you're trying to kill time by watching the news, those captions come in very handy because you really can't hear what's going on, but you can see it and it complements and allows you to get more involved with the content that's there. Got bags of groceries, in your hands, those push button to open the doors are extremely beneficial. And the curb cut, although they were initially designed for people in wheelchairs, if you are a senior with mobility challenges, if you are somebody who is pushing kids in a stroller, those curb cuts have tangible benefits to your life, regardless of the fact of whether or not you have an expressed or hidden disability or not. And I'll pass it to Fran. Great, so let's talk a little bit about how we actually make our websites accessible. We do so by following the WCAG or the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. The goal of the WCAG is to provide a single shared standard for all web content accessibility. At the end of the day, these are just success criteria, so they're always updating and improving and we really just want to use these to align with how people are using the web. The WCAG is then broken down into four different main principles that we like to call poor. Poor stands for perceivable, operable, understandable, and robust. Simply put, this just means our users can identify our content, they can navigate our content, comprehend it. And finally, the way that we are building our technology and our content is in a way that people using all different assistive technologies and devices are able to access it. So here's some examples of different success criteria under the WCAG, just to get you thinking about all the things that WCAG covers. So we're gonna have to top meaningful semantic markup, enabling keyboard navigation, alternative text on all your non-text content. So thank all of those images across your sites, having sufficient color contrast, captioning and transcripts for videos, motion and clickable elements on time-based elements, clearly labeling our forms, that's a big one, and using clear language in our content. And of course, there's many, many more. This is just a small snippet, just to get you thinking of all the different ways that the WCAG covers your sites for accessibility. Now, let's talk a little bit about the actual most common WCAG failures. So these are the most common issues across all the web. If we're looking just at home pages, these are the things that come up most commonly. So off the top, a familiar one, missing alternative text on images, insufficient color contrast, improper heading hierarchy, so our H1s, H2s, H3s, lack of a navigation structure, that one is super important for users to be able to actually navigate through your site and access your content, and missing our form labels, non-descriptive links. So think things like 10 links that simply just say, read more all across your site. And finally, insufficient keyboard navigability. So right now in the state of WCAG, we are living in WCAG 2.1. But in the upcoming months, they say May, so fingers crossed for that. They have a tendency to push it out and push it out. So hopefully in May, the draft for WCAG 2.2 will be officially published. Right now in WCAG 2.2, it includes new considerations for things like target size minimum, so the size of your buttons and links, having a bold focus appearance for people navigating through keyboards, enabling dragging movements or an alternative for dragging movements, consistent help and accessible authentication. And there's a couple revisions to existing guidelines and changing the priority of some as well. But we are looking hopefully very soon to see that published. And then looking even further to the future, we have WCAG 3.0. So this one's probably not gonna be set to published for a couple of years, but it is in the working phase right now through the community. And it is basically a full revamp of WCAG 2.0, 2.1, 2.2, with this new release of 3.0, we're gonna see a lot of great things. The main goal for WCAG 3.0 is going to be that it is easier to understand for all of us not in the development state or in the accessibility world. I know WCAG and all the success criteria can be pretty confusing and not exactly an easy thing just to dive into. So making sure that the success criteria and the guidelines themselves are easier to understand for the everyday user or site owner is going to be a big goal for 3.0 that personally I am excited for as well. And of course, they're going to cover more user needs. Specifically in 3.0, they're going to be focusing on cognitive disabilities, which I think is super great. And of course, making it more flexible to address different types of content, whether that be web, apps, specific tools and organizations. So as I mentioned, 3.0 has a bunch of similarities to the previous versions 2.1, 2.2 with the overarching goal of providing guidelines for the web content. And also, it just fundamentally being specific to the web accessibility requirements and setting those as the one place that all of these guidelines live in. But of course, there's going to be some major differences, mainly being the structure, so how things are actually organized and grouped and even worded within the guidelines and success criteria themselves. And another big one is the actual conformance levels. So right now, when we're looking at our guidelines, it's basically a pass or fail system. You either meet this guideline or you don't. But as we know with accessibility, a lot of it comes down to context and can be interpreted a bunch of different ways by different people. So to accommodate that with 3.0, there's going to be a release of a new conformance model. So our guidelines are going to be scored on a bronze, silver or gold level. Of course, this could change as time goes on, but this seems to be something that is pretty set in stone. So hopefully it shall be good. We'll see how that works out. And of course, I brought a scope beyond just web content, as I meant to let the top there to address app, stools, organizations and such. And so how does this actually play into the real world? Of course, we need to follow these guidelines and as there are guidelines, there is going to be laws and legislations that go along with it. Right now, across the world, most laws and legislations are all based on either WCAG 2.0 or 2.1, the current state that we're living in right now at level AA. For us, we are in Ontario. So we have to follow the accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act or the AODA, which mandates that we follow WCAG 2.0 at level AA. Of course, different regions have different laws and some are even being put into place or being actively worked on. For example, here, I know in Canada, in BC, Nova Scotia, they have some pretty in-depth new legislations going into place as we speak. So it'll be interesting to see how those play out for sure. And of course, even in the States, they have federal and regional legislations as well, like the ADA in section 508. And with these, of course, there is also some potential fines in place. In AODA here, it's pretty strict where you could find up to $100,000 per day for organizations. I will put a big caveat on this and basically say that with AODA, their goal is really not to be punitive, more of like a collaborative approach because most of it is going to be complaint-based. So it's all coming from the user's end. So as long as you are showing that you are putting in the work, making accessibility a top priority, that is really what is most important for us. But of course, I'm going to say, I am not a lawyer. So research your own local laws, legislations. This is just a trend of what we are seeing. So no matter where you are, I'm pretty certain there will be something that applies to you, so yeah. All right, so the reason you're here, the business benefits of AODA and our accessibility in general. And one of the things we've been very adamant about since the early days when we started getting involved with this we didn't want to should people. We never wanted to promote the idea of you should do this because you're a good person, a good organization, a good corporate citizen, or you should do this because of whatever reason that is not beyond business. Because we've found not just within Northern but the provincial work we do with businesses, that's not a compelling enough argument. It's easy for people to look at accessibility, especially when they put it on a spreadsheet to become a ledger item. It's easy to argue that away. We found much more success with the appreciation that a commitment to accessibility and the following the fundamentals of accessibility actually provides tangible business benefits. What is that? Basically it's accessibility and the fundamentals of accessibility aligns with some key elements of user behavior and how people interact with content. And ultimately, if people can find your content and interact with it and understand it at a much quicker pace and a much higher level, there's much more likelihood that they are going to embrace it. As soon as you create any friction in your experience, as soon as you align to non-intuitive mental models, you're starting to put up unintentional barriers that can prevent people from accessing your content and engaging with your content. And in many ways, that does translate into perception challenges where users translate that negative experience to their impression of your organization or your brand. Accessibility leads to the expanding of opportunity in a number of ways. By aligning with best practices with search engine optimization, you're increasing the likelihood of findability of your content for users. When you look at how content is structured on a page and how people actually interact with the web in general, which is probably less time than you think, it increases that opportunity for scannability and comprehension. And for mobile development, we know that about 60% of web traffic globally is coming through mobile devices. So this is increasingly the preferred source of users. If you have an accessible experience that aligns with those mobile development best practices, you are going to increase the likelihood of people having a positive experience with your content. And as I said, if you make it more findable, easier to understand and easier to interact with, you're going to increase your opportunity for whatever transactional conversion that may be. And it's not just about dollars as a sense. It could be understanding, it could be contacting, it could be knowing what step to take in the process next or what information is relevant to that. So there's a tremendous amount of opportunity that accessibility offers. And it benefits more than those with disabilities. Again, oftentimes when we're interacting with organizations or some of the counter arguments we hear about a commitment to accessibility is that it really is a niche group. And the reality is it isn't. When we look at who accessible design supports, it really can be anybody. We give you some examples of real world, curb cut style, things that impact people of all abilities. But when you look at our increasingly aging populace, seniors have mobility, possibly responsiveness challenges. I don't like to roll the next bullet into the seniors because I've got cheater glasses myself here. But so Presbyopia, as we get older, our eyes change and our ability to read at closer distances becomes a little bit more compromised. We need to have a little bit more support because the muscles change. We have an increasingly diverse multicultural society. For many people, English isn't even their first, second, maybe even their third language. So a commitment to universal accessibility and linguistic accessibility is going to open up avenues for those people for greater comprehension. We often refer to Google as the ultimate blind reader. So if you're aligning your content for accessibility, you're aligning for arguably the most dominant search provider in the world that's going to support your findability of content. And then as I mentioned, we do talk about the mobile responsive development. Those fundamentals overlap dramatically with accessible web design. And as we move more and more to a mobile environment, you're going to see the benefits from that. We don't like to define people with disabilities as a uniform group. Building your website accessibly is not automatically going to make it that every person with a disability is going to come to you or purchase from you. But if we want to look at the hard and fast numbers, nearly one in five people on the planet has some sort of disability. By extension, when we look at the people with whom they interact, their family members, friends, colleagues, people, the pool of people who are informed about or impacted by disabilities is even broader. An inaccessible website is going to make it harder or even impossible for visitors with disabilities to buy your products and use your services. And this doesn't just impact people who have long-term disabilities. There are people who have temporary disabilities either because of an accident or a condition or a surgery or something along that line that we want to make sure that we're supporting. And from a purely numerical standpoint, when we look at the 2020 Global Economics and Disability Report, 3 quarters of those with a disability that have a negative experience or find that your content is inaccessible will take their business or take their interest elsewhere. So you're losing not only that immediate opportunity, but you're learning long-term opportunity. And you may be losing out on referral business because if they're talking about that negative experience on your site, it may impact their friends' family. It may impact their friends' and colleagues. We look at diversity, equity, and inclusion. This is also a core concept for many organizations now of a commitment to expanding their organizations, reach an impact on creating inclusive communities. From a business standpoint, whether you have a higher education site or in the e-commerce site, we consistently hear from people who say, I want to see myself or people that look like me reflected in this content. That extends to people with accessibility. Little tangent, when we look at what we talked about from the Accessibility Advisory Committee, we prefer to use the term ableism and systemic ableism because really what we are doing is creating or perpetuating discriminatory policies against people because of a certain defined characteristic. So when we look at it through that light, it absolutely fits into the diversity, equity, inclusion, attendance, and the many organizations hold. And it is a reinforcement of that commitment to DE and I. And we do know that customers of all stripe, from students to people attending, you're looking for hospital information to people trying to buy products, do value a commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion. And from SEO, you could be the best solution for your customers. You could have the best products, you could have the best infrastructure, you could have the best facility, but if your end users can't find that information or they don't know about it, does that really matter? So by focusing on accessibility and aligning to those best practices, you are, as we've said, really aligning to search engine optimization, it's getting the right content to the right people in the way that best meets their needs. And then by embracing universal accessibility, users can find your content in a way that aligns with their expectations and their behaviors. And it's much easier to get people where they are and using the terms that they're using, as opposed to trying to force them into your ecosystem, using your jargon or your expectations of how they're gonna interact with content. As I said, from SEO standpoint, many of the principles, and you're gonna see a duplication here, proper alt text for images, heading structures. So Fran talked about the H1s, H2, H3s and having those an intuitive pathways. All of these elements, not relying on JavaScript, providing transcripts and captions for video, all of these help people find content and more importantly in some ways, helps Google find your content and surface it in a prominent location so that people who are looking for relevant topics, hopefully in the language that they're choosing to search in, they're gonna find what they look for for you and that increases your opportunity to provide a positive experience and ultimately have some sort of transaction. Great, so as Jay mentioned at the top of the section, 60% of the traffic that we're seeing to our websites is coming from mobile devices. So it should be no surprise that WCAG does have inclusions to cover mobile applications and the mobile web best practices as well. So that covers things like touchscreens, small screen sizes and a variety of different input modalities. So think like speech, 3D touch on your phones, all of the above. And so by aligning with these standards in the WCAG, we are improving our experience for peoples that are using phones, tablets, TVs, smartwatches, your car dashboard, you really name it. WCAG covers it. And again, as Jay said on the previous slide with SEO, so much is overlapping between the actual, all of the benefits with all of the WCAG guidelines. So by involving accessibility and following these guidelines, we are improving all across the board. Talking specifically about mobile design, how we can improve that. If we look at for design improvements, we can improve by including a readable font size, having a high color contrast for all of our elements, positioning form elements in a readable way. And as I mentioned earlier, a larger target size. So think on your phone, if you ever had to press a really small button and you just kept hitting the wrong thing or couldn't quite get it, all of this is included in design for WCAG. And also in the build as well. So in the more development side, allowing for zoom and magnification, allowing the use of an external keyboard or support for various different touch gestures and even dynamic screen orientation. Again, this all supports different, not just your typical mobile experiences, but all of the internet of things. So accessibility is a core concept of great user experience and a great user interface. And to understand or to achieve that accessibility, you have to understand the technical and physical limitations of your users. You need to understand their behavior patterns, their desired behavior patterns. And you need to understand and then determine how the underlining code can help empower your users to complete the tasks or get the information they want in the way that best suits their needs. We're strong advocates of research. Focus groups and surveys can help establish the baseline upon which you can build your structure, understand what people are actually looking for and how they're choosing to interact with your content, what their needs are so that you can prioritize it and identify any unintentional barriers that you may have created. We often refer to those as pain points. Some of those are just in terms of content access, but some of them are related to accessibility. It's also important to do validation research and that can take the form of moderated user testing, it could be prototype tape testing that can help identify any barriers you may have created unintentionally. One example I will give you is we were working with a client on the development of an app and one of the elements of the app from an authentication standpoint was that they wanted the user to be able to take a picture of themselves with their phone that would then serve as their login. We were doing some testing with a group that had accessibility challenges and one user said, that's a great concept, but I have tremors. So I cannot use my phone to take a photo of myself because I cannot stop the tremors enough to be able to allow that to effectively render. And those are things that in theory we build the website, it does follow the WCAG protocols but without that experiential knowledge there is a challenge or there is a risk that we may miss some things that can become very significant challenges for users. I know we're talking accessibility but when we also look at some of the other aspects of technology, there are significant barriers to access when we look at historically marginalized communities, when we look at economic development. So again, that concept of universal accessibility and building a foundation that everyone can access really does increase your opportunity to reach a number of audiences that may be priorities for you. We also think it's important to align with people, sorry, with how people actually use the web, not how we want them to use the web. In many of our engagements, the expectation is that people are reading multiple pages and they're going through long lines of text and they're spending minutes if not hours on the website. The reality is in many cases we're looking at people that are coming to a website, they're spending maybe two minutes at tops, they may be looking at two or three pages and ultimately they're being driven to content through search and they wanna make sure it's relevant to them. You don't have a lot of time, you don't have a lot of opportunity to get your message out. So by using accessibility, you can align with how people are actually using the web and improve your ability to A be found and B be consumed. Findability is a huge one. So when we look at that at universal accessibility, when we look at using semantic markup like proper header tags, so that content flows in an intuitive way. When we're using contextual links, so as Fran said, we're not just saying read more, read more, read more, but we are actually providing those links. Those are strong indicators for Google to help in the search engine ranking. If those align with how people are actually searching for their information, and if you're looking on the phones, chances are you're using casual text, long tail search, you're gonna have better success. And that increases the findability, especially if you're aligning with user expectations and mental models. Once they get to your site or to your content, you wanna make sure that you're promoting the comprehension, findability, and scannability of content in a way that aligns with what they're using. So people look for visual anchors, they're looking for your title tags, they want those to be descriptive. They wanna scan through your content and be able very quickly to get a sense of, is this something I'm interested in? Is it relevant? What are my next steps? Header tags are important, and using those appropriately so that if you have them present throughout different parts of the site, that they all render appropriately and provide the information you need. Contextual links we've referenced, alt text, clear labeling and directions, making sure that people understand what they have to do next. Not necessarily saying click on the square button, which can be an accessibility barrier for certain people. And then the captioning and American Sign Language on video. So expanding your audiences, yes to people with disabilities, but as we referenced before, there's a lot of people who do read content or read captioning in certain environments. So you're expanding your opportunities there. We live in a rather well-educated society, but the Conference Board of Canada, the last numbers we have, I do appreciate their 2012, but our community as a whole has a average literacy skill in the C level. That's the amount of, or the ability of people to understand and partake in everyday tasks to a high degree of efficacy. When we look at new Canadians or are changing demographics, there's a quarter, almost a quarter of our people who have an other mother tongue other than English and French. This is not any way, shape or form to suggest that these people can't comprehend content. But when English isn't your first, second or third language, the easier you can make it, the more you align with plain language, the less you send somebody running to a dictionary or a thesaurus, the greater opportunity you have that they're going to be able to comprehend your information quickly and be able to apply it to what they need. We like to define people as skimmers, swimmers and divers. And unfortunately, the majority of websites, or we'll say a lot of websites, I don't say the majority, are built for the divers. It's this concept of everything's got to be on the homepage, everything's got to be on the page, and it's got to be a wall of text and people need all that information upfront, otherwise they're not going to be able to interact with the content. The reality is, as I said, they're spending a couple of minutes tops on your entire site. They may be spending 30 seconds on your site. So 70% of our traffic we see are skimmers. They're just glancing over the content, they're looking for those visual anchors and they want to get in and get out as quickly as possible. Another 20% are those swimmers. So they've started skimming, they found something that peaks their interest and then they're going to take that next step. They may read the next paragraph or two. They may follow a referral link as long as you're continuing to provide value to them. And then divers are those people that are reading the terms and conditions on their cell phones or they're reading, you know, they want to have every bit of information on a medical report that you're presenting. They don't want just the abstract, but they want the full methodology and all the details. Unfortunately, many organizations invert the focus so that 90% of their content focuses on that 10%, and that can become a barrier to a number of people. So by using accessibility, using the semantic markup, using the tools at your disposal to really support scannability of content and comprehension of content, you're increasing the likelihood that people are going to take that next step. When we look at how people actually interact with content, they follow, you know, some people say it's a layer cake. We look at it as an F pattern where really they're going across the top and then coming down a little bit, looking for those visual anchors. Those could be header tags. Those could be contextualized hyperlinks so that they can look at the link and say, oh, this is interesting to me. They're not fully reading all the information, but rather they're scanning across, looking for those visual anchors, and then jumping down a little bit more to see if there's something else that catches their attention. This behavior is actually amplified when we look at mobile development because people are scrolling and scanning, and they're looking for really highly prominent visual anchors and highly relevant visual anchors that's going to stop them from scrolling and take that next step. And with that, I'm going to pass it back to Fran. Wonderful. So let's talk a little bit about how we actually test the compliance to accessibility on our websites. So right off the bat, first thing everyone thinks of is automated audits. So these automated audits are super helpful tools that we can use to get an overview of the general accessibility of either a single page or our full site. These are great because basically without a click of a button, you're able to audit either all of your pages or even just a single page that is super important. So that will give us a good snapshot of where you are at. But of course, all good things must come with some cons. There is pretty limited success criteria that can be audit by these automated tools. I believe something like 30% of all the success criteria are things that can be actually automated with these tools, simply because they are machines and a lot of accessibility depends on context and it's very user focused. So these automated tools are able to scan things like our semantic markup and really anything that's already built into the site with the actual structure of it. And of course, there is the risks for false positives. As again, it is simply a machine, it is not a human. So these tools are really just not enough. So in addition to these automated tools, we also need to do some manual audits. So that involves getting an actual human in front of it. This is where mainly the role that someone like myself plays at Northern. So actually looking at our sites that we create and ensuring that we are checking all of these boxes for the different WCAG guidelines that really are dependent on context. The things that the machine and the automated tools can't test for. So I've got a great, great example on the screen here of something that comes up all the time that would fail our automated scans, but looking at this as a human, we can see that it would actually fail. So something that I've talked about a couple of times in the previous slides is that having sufficient color contrast. So if we think about this get started header here that is actually on a background image, the machine and the automated tool is not able to tell that we have that dark gradient overlay to improve that contrast there. The machine will simply look at this and say, oh, that's an automatic fail. You have an image with text on top. Doesn't work for me. But if we go in and we can see this and do the manual test or what we like to call the human test, we can see here that we have put something into place to ensure that the contrast is good. So manual audits at the end of the day are how we ensure accessibility. And a couple other steps in the auditing process of things that we look for are ensuring that we can navigate the site fully with just a keyboard or just a screen reader. And what about if the site fully functions? We can fully access everything. We can read everything. Nothing's getting cut off if we're zoomed all the way up to 400%. Ensuring that things like a skip domain link exists. Again, all of our color contrast actually passes the minimum even if the automated tool says separately. Empty links with no content, semantic HTML. And that big one that alt text on images making sure that it is actually contextual to what is in the image or if it's just a decorative image if it should just be skipped with an empty alt text. But arguably most importantly of all is actually involving people with disabilities because at the end of the day we are building our websites for people to use. So we wanna ensure that we are implementing solutions that are working for the people. As Jay gave a great example earlier as the person with the tremor is not able to use the specific feature that was implemented. Although this feature that was implemented may have followed all of the WCAG guidelines. This is something that at the end of the day comes down to context and how people use our sites. So we really want that to be the focus when we are building our sites. So how can you more efficiently implement accessibility? So right off the top, I just wanna say accessibility is really, it's not a bandaid. It's not something that you can just throw on at the end. I guess technically you could try but as someone who has tried that in the past it does not work well. There's much more efficient ways that we can do that by using the principle of shifting left. So using accessibility throughout the whole process of our project build. So starting from day one, even in the planning phase thinking of accessibility, keeping that top of mind through the design phase, through the build phase and then all the way right to the end keeping accessibility at the forefront is the most efficient way to do it as far as time and money. So how can Northern help with that? Here at Northern, we have a bunch of different service offerings from one time to ongoing accessibility audits and reviews all across a variety of platforms. We have our accessibility checkup which is a simple cost effective way to uncover your website's level of compliance. As little as two weeks we are here at Northern we can provide you with a report detailing how your site compares to others in your sector. What inaccessible content exists on your site that could potentially leave your brand vulnerable? What are some easy wins? So some small things that you could improve quickly as well to show that you are making these improvements and you have committed to making your site accessible. If there's any opportunities to future proof your site so thinking about those new guidelines that are coming in place with WCAG 2.2 in the coming months and even longer term with 3.0 if there's any specific failures on your site that would be covered under those new guidelines. And finally, what next steps you could take to improve your site's accessibility overall to unlock all the great opportunities that Jay and I have discussed so far. If this sounds exciting to you and you already have a contact at Northern feel free to reach out to your account manager. You can also check out this page on our website northern.co slash digital accessibility services with a dash in between each word there to learn all about our accessibility services here at Northern.