 Hello everyone. Welcome to Raising the Bar, how to ensure a consistent standard of accessibility. Just a quick question, who here thinks they know accessibility? Who implements accessibility from the beginning of their projects? A few people. So my name is Tom Bamford. I'm a developer at Anatec and I've become the sort of accessibility advocate. You probably know all of that from an old slide. It's not really relevant at the moment. But I've been doing Drupal for over 14 years. In fact, my 14-year anniversary was just last week or something. I said, I missed it by a day. Never mind. So I started No Accessibility Without Disability. So I'll just quickly run over some bits about disability, how it is not rare. That's the idea we get. There's obviously over a billion people worldwide who have with some form of disability and nearly 80% of older adults, especially over the age of 85, are disabled. 80% of disabled people acquire disability later in life. So it's not something that we're born with. The majority of people will develop it in life at some point. And there's often confusions and all these myths that people think that disability just means a physical impairment. Because the biggest, most prominent disability is depression, because that is one of the most common things. Estimates the 5% of the global population suffer from depression and that is a serious issue with concentration and difficulty in cognitive load. And yeah, not all screen readers users are blind. Just looking at disability in Europe, it's growing all the time. About one in four of European adults have a disability. And half of those with a disability aged over 65, and that number especially is just going to grow because we have an aging population. Disability will affect us all at some point in our lives, be it a temporary or a situational. And the big thing about depression is it negatively impacts your cognition. So your ability to understand things and that is very similar to what you'll get from stress, anxiety and tiredness. So when we think about people with neurodiversity or learning difficulties, they experience more complex issues, but it is similar to what you will get in temporary or situational positions when you're extremely stressed or tired. So accessibility. Yeah, what is it good for? Absolutely everything. So it is the inclusive practice of ensuring that everyone has equal access to information, functionality and experience on digital platforms. That means that no barriers prevent interaction with or access to digital products by people with any type of disabilities or traits commonly linked to disabilities. So including physical disabilities such as hearing loss, vision loss or mobility issues, neurodiversity conditions, including autism, attention deficit disorder and dyslexia. But we often forget we should also include socioeconomic discrimination. So it impacts anyone with disability, which is about their poverty levels and things like that, access to information. And that sort of type affects people in the US at a rate of two and a half higher than people without disabilities. So I mashed that one up a little bit. And just a little background is we don't talk about disability enough. I have several disabilities. I have narcolepsy with cataplexy and I've had functional mobility disorders in the past. My partner is dyslexic and has ADHD and also has issues with hypermobility and has joints problems, which really affects working with computers and interacting with mass and I have issues with tiredness, which affects my cognitive load and ability to concentrate at times. So, ain't misbehaving. There's common reasons for accessibility issues in deliverables. So these are just the sort of common failures, which usually come out of the web aims of one million home pages annual review. So it'll be things like low contrast text, focus indicators are completely missing or poor, there's buttons or links, which have absolutely no text in them, missing labels or at least visual labels that aren't communicated programmatically, link areas that are really small, poor broken keyboard navigation, so you have drop-downs, which you can only use with a mouse, and then there's sort of nondescripted text for links. We all know those that read more, read more, read more, read more, read more, read more, read more, and then sort of labelling where it uses icons, but there's nothing communicated and of course the improper use of headings where it's not semantic headings, it'll be just visual headings, so there's no actual structure communicated. So why are these sort of things introduced? And often it's a complete lack of awareness of disability barriers or of implementation techniques. The organization has no accessibility requirements in their processes, so at the design stage there's little understanding of what they need to communicate to development or clients as to what needs to be checked or considered. Maybe the coding review and the methodology doesn't consider these in the slightest and at the QA step, they're unaware, they just simply look at what the UAT or the card requirements are and there's no consideration for these aspects. And a lot of the time it's time and project pressures. Limited resources, deliverables have to be done to a deadline, so it just gets ignored. And the biggest one is probably there's no buy-in from leadership or the clients, so it just gets overlooked. So I'm hoping you're a believer, so I'm going to start. So where can you start? So the biggest problem with accessibility, the biggest barrier, which makes it difficult to implement, is people not caring, not giving a damn. And once you can overcome that, you're already a big part of the battle is done. So start with you will want to find or promote someone to be the accessibility advocate, be it a team or an individual, and you need someone that's motivated. It can be someone from outside that you bring in. I've got a little link there at the bottom about how to kind of hire your digital accessibility roles and how to bring in someone from the outside. Now, of course, this will only work if you've got complete buy-in from leadership and that they are supportive of you. Now the three items that an accessibility advocate will be working, motivated to do within the organization, is supporting every stage of accessibility. So supporting developers, learning and designers, understanding how they can improve, promoting accessibility, promoting work-agrequirements, and then empowering everyone to sort of learn and get better. There's, we need to discover existing understanding and knowledge within the organization, so polling everyone to understand what the skills are in the organization. You may have someone that's really knowledgeable but hasn't expressed that. So you'll have someone that's completely hidden and hasn't wanted to advertise that fact and could really feed in and help push the change within the organization. Bearing in mind that just doing a poll that says, do you know about accessibility and everyone saying yes, yes, yes, you need to actually validate those against guidelines and to understand whether it's true knowledge or just assumptions of knowledge because I suspect for a lot of you in the room you sort of think you know about accessibility and then as soon as you start digging you realize how little you know about accessibility and it becomes quite a shock to the system. The biggest place to start is empathy and awareness. And this is a theme that needs to carry through the whole process of change management because it's not about penalizing people. It's not about saying you've been doing it wrong all this time. It has to be about understanding where people are coming from that they didn't have the awareness beforehand and it's giving them the empathy to relate to the disabilities, to the barriers that people face every day and using our digital products, our digital platforms, our websites. And the way to do that is to set up empathy labs. Gov.uk have a great sort of virtual empathy lab setup where with some crime profiles and you can just get people to experience that. The W3CE have some perspective videos that are really short that you can show to people which just sort of show examples of how accessibility can help and the barriers they have. You can run your own in-house workshops where you just sort of show various videos, examples of people struggling and even people within the organization if they're willing to share and explain the barriers that they have every day and using digital products. You encourage people to attend events, be it Meetups or the Global Accessibility Awareness Day every year and Inclusive Design 24 which starts in eight hours which is 24 hours of Inclusive Design Accessibility presentations online. Just go to that page and it's a YouTube channel and you can either watch live or just re-watch from last year. Now is this going to work or just... I may not have time for this but it's... Never mind. Where's my mouse gone? Yeah, of course. It's not going to work because of the sound. But that's a witch video, a blind person trying to book a flight and basically you see it's quite experience. So I'll try and skip. Oh, God. Sorry about that. There we go. So you've built event awareness. What next? So the first is training. There's all sorts of formal training. There's university courses, specialist providers like TPG, Tenon, DQ, one of the biggest ones, level access. There's some in the UK, there's WebAIM, there's LOTS which will do group training or individual. There's self-paced learning. There's a number of online platforms. EDX, do one that's partnered with W3C. DQ University is great. And then of course internal discovery and training. And there's different levels of training. There's the empathy workshops which we've already touched on. You can introduce things gently with discovery where you explain the common issues and the WCAG requirements gently. Then there's really about how to recognize issues and the barriers that people face. And we'll start gently with some manual testing. So a simplified step, things like just tabbing with your keyboard. And then we can look with developers and designers on resolving common problems. Then you might move on to complex patterns and area patterns. And that's where the accessibility advocates are sort of supporting people in their learning. And then there's finally manual testing which is in-depth. So a lot of screen readers have different methodologies and basically for compliance with WCAG. And the second biggest thing you'll need especially because that will help support the training is documentation. So even if it's just general accessibility information and curated links. So you're not overwhelming people and providing training options, good recommendations if they're doing it in their own spare time. Examples of accessible code patterns and best practices. And something we're doing now at the moment is particularly looking at the legacy issues that we have from older builds and the best solutions to basically just replace them. So that any developer that's now understood how to find these problems can actually just go to our documentation and see, okay, it's chosen JS. This is really badly inaccessible and unsupported anymore. How can we just, okay, I just take this pattern and I swap it out and we've already fixed the issue. And the bigger one is who to ask for help, who to ask for support. Checklists and processes, one that have really helped. So having checklists in every stage of the delivery process. So ensuring that items are checked for barriers for low contrast, all of these things and they are communicated. And the process adjustment in that sense is thinking about accessibility from the start, ensuring that everyone has an understanding of the level that you're looking for. Obviously you need leadership adoption and encouragement for these changes to happen so that if anyone has pushed back for these checklists or can I just ignore it? No, you can't, have you checked it? No, because I don't know how to. Okay, let's get you ready to know how to check these things. And something also is the building into tenders, defining the fact that you will be building to an accessibility standard and that this is a requirement and expectation. This is a promise that you're making so you have to live up to your promise. And of course not forgetting your own tools and processes. So to make sure that they are minimum accessible, that they do the job in case to everyone. And the last bit is guiding clients. So getting them trained about accessible content and delivering them, giving them tools to make sure that their content is accessible. There's a module for Trueport called Editorially, for example, which can show some simple issues that they have in their content to mediate those themselves. Going back to testing and review, there's different levels of testing as we looked at it as quick checks, automated checks, manual testing simplified, and then the more in-depth. So you need to define the methodologies that you are going to set up because they're adapted to your team and have clear objectives and learning resources. And I have early there. So I'm guessing that was meant to be start early and get it written above, so never mind. The biggest thing is review openly. All of your testing, so be it on MRs or PRs, make sure that everything is transparent. All the communications are clear so that everyone can learn, especially during the process of change. Because often that's what we're doing now. We have a channel where everyone can ask, can someone help me with this issue? I want to make sure it's accessible so anyone can dive in. What will happen is two or three other developers will jump in saying, oh, actually, yes, I've got to do something like that next month or next week. I want to join that call to understand how I need to build it. Review is a group. Sharing support goes a long way. I'm running out of time, so I'm going to have to quickly run up. Open communications. As I said, we've got an open channel where we can all basically ask questions and someone can come and support each other. So it's really where often new resources get posted. For example, Workout 2.2 is coming out at the end of the year, and that brings in some new success criteria, which changes some aspect, how we need to approach focus styles and links. So that's sort of, we're posting the updates to that, and that gets so, it's clearer. Designers are updated so they know, oh, okay, this is coming along, so that we're ahead of the curve. We're thinking about it before it's even a requirement. Spotting, you know, posting some nice, quick articles to read, or at least providing summaries so that they can get a nice understanding. Optimizing engagements and aspects that you've given quick, nice resources. And then if someone has an issue, just encourage video chats, and you encourage more people to join so you can, they get awareness of the issues and understanding of how to resolve these. So all the impromptu meetings are great. I'll just run through a quick few tools because just overview. There's design tools which are available so that you can do accessibility annotations, contrast checkers, things for Figma, for Sketch. There's all sorts of great things. There are contrary modules for Drupal, like Editorially and some others that you can plug in to help you provide some extensions. There's all the online services and browser extensions. We're talking Axe DevTools, accessibility insights. There's IBM's accessibility checker. There's many things that will just help you get a foot up, although they are, give you a limited. And then there's manual testing. There's some great number of bookmarklets and browser extensions that really help you get ahead of the game in terms of introducing things. So, Mr. Blue Sky. Empowerment is key here. So there's three foundational elements to change management. So this is where leadership has to sort of feed down and build within the organization is promoting enabling engagement, so ensuring there's effective communication, keeping everyone informed and ensuring that it goes both ways. So to make sure that everyone feels heard and, yeah, running out of steam. Oh, I'm over time, I think. Yeah, the sponsor, Building Trust, creating bridges for acceptance. So really supporting the initiative so that everyone feels that this is something that's definitely happening, something that's sustainable, that is continuing. There's some clear expectations at the end for every change that is happening to our processes. And getting feedback and, again, the regular open discussions about how well we're going and having that sense of ownership and participation. There's a great article by Sherri Bernhaber who does the accessibility guide for designers, which the link is on the previous slide. But I won't go through these, but this is something where she do have an anatec in terms of leadership, which has sort of been great, and this happened on our previous anatec day, where it just made clear that accessibility is a priority. It is something that we're moving towards and we want to make a standard. And, yeah, the article is really worth a read because she goes into details about all of this. And Be A Goldfish is a Ted Lasso thing about, you know, don't dwell on your mistakes, move on, forget about it, don't worry about it too much. Right, I'll leave it there. Questions? That's all right. It's just automatic. I'll just read the slide. I'm on time. I'm one minute over. Well, too much.