 I'm going to talk to you about web accessibility, something that's really important and really significant, but is often overlooked or thought of as an afterthought. It's going to be really high level, because 10 minutes is not a lot of time to really get into such an important topic. I'm hoping to just get you thinking a little differently about ways that we're designing and developing our websites. And I know that there's a talk tomorrow that's going to be a lot more in-depth about how to actually build these sites. So I'll get into that a little bit, but like I said, it's going to just hopefully give you a new way of thinking. And this is also going to be bringing it back to some fundamentals, building blocks of the web that I think are really important to take a step back and kind of revisit these things and make sure that we're putting the right things in place at the beginning of our process, as opposed to thinking about accessibility in the end and trying to refactor code or redesign a site to fit that. So why is this so important? Today it's really next to impossible to perform daily tasks without using the web. This is a form from Expedia, so being able to go online and book a flight, seeing different durations, prices side by side, and making those comparisons is really great. If you've ever had to call an airline, you probably know the horrible customer service that you have to deal with, so having this convenience is really important. Something like Instacart, you can have groceries delivered to your door. So this not only helps somebody who like me lives in Philadelphia, I don't really drive my car ever, I ride a bike everywhere, so it's really convenient to be able to go online, put a grocery order in, and tell them what time I want them delivered. This could also be really beneficial for somebody who's in a wheelchair. In Philadelphia specifically, we have about 130,000 people with ambulatory disabilities, and I think there's about six taxi cabs that are wheelchair accessible. Our public transportation system is not great for people in wheelchairs, not all of our subway systems, not all of our subway stations, thank you very much. Stations, thank you very much. Like I said, it's a long day. So not all of our subway stations are wheelchair accessible, a lot of times when they are, the elevators are out and people can't get on them. And this could also really benefit somebody who is blind and maybe needs that extra help getting to the grocery store. But if we're not developing these sites that are usable by people like this, then we're failing them. So Instacart actually is a really good example of a site that's not accessible. If you go to instacart.com, you get to this landing page where you put in your zip code. If you're using a screen reader, you can hear that it's asking for your zip code and then as soon as you hit enter and are taken to the next page, you're taken to a form and if you use a screen reader and you can't see it, you have no idea what the form says and at that point you're completely stuck. So Instacart is failing its users, it's also losing all that business. A few other things that, just a reminder of conveniences that we have online, you can fill a prescription, you can do online banking, something like Capital 136C here has very few physical bank locations. So it's the convenience of being able to deposit a check and again, not having to rely on transportation to get to a place to do that. If you live in Philadelphia, you're probably familiar with the parking authority. This is actually a really great example if you've never used a screen reader before. If you have a Mac, it's Command F5, it's built into your computer or you can install something like ChromeVox which is a Chrome extension, it's free and it will give you the experience of navigating a website with a screen reader as a blind user. So I highly recommend doing this with your sites and seeing the frustration of trying to navigate around a site that wasn't built with accessibility in mind. So the parking authority is a great one because they have this huge navigation that you can't skip pass and you just have to tab through a million different items and then when you get to the page that you wanna get to, you have to do the same thing over and over again. And then finally, services like Lyft and Uber again are really great. Lyft and Uber do have pretty accessible sites but are struggling with actually providing accessible cars so that's really the other side of things. So just to give you a little background, in 2010 the US Census Bureau reported that there are 57 million people in the United States living with a disability. This is also five years ago and only people that self-identify as having a disability. In 2003, which is now over 12 years ago, Microsoft did a study finding that of all computer users, 22 million have a mild visual difficulty with 11 million being severe. In that same study, they found that 24 million have a mild dexterity difficulty or impairment with seven million being severe. So this would be somebody who doesn't use a mouse and would need to tab through a site. So what are some different types of disability? There's visual, which includes somebody who's blind or has low vision, also somebody who's colorblind. Hearing disabilities, anybody who is deaf or hard of hearing. Physical disabilities, which can include anything such as MS, ALS, paraplegia, quadriplegia. Cognitive disabilities, any sort of learning disability, dyslexia, low literacy. Another one that I group under here is English as a second language. Not that that's a disability, but if you lessen the cognitive load, then that's gonna help somebody who doesn't speak English as their first language. And finally, seizures, specifically photoepoleptic seizures, which can be caused by flickering images or really high contrasts on a site. Another thing that I like to think about are temporary or situational disabilities. Usually when we talk about users with disabilities, it is those users that have permanent or more severe disabilities. But there are tons of situational disabilities such as aging, anybody who's getting older could be suffering from dementia or Alzheimer's, cataracts, low vision, mobility, or loss of fine motor skills. Broken limbs, if you break your dominant arm, you're gonna start using a computer much differently than you would without that. Sleep deprivation and chemo side effects cause a lot of the same side effects such as short-term memory loss, blurred vision, and also anybody who suffers from migraines and headaches will be visiting your site much differently. This was a tweet that I saw that kind of goes into the situational disabilities again. So going from permanent to temporary to situational, there's somebody who is missing one arm, somebody who has gone through arm surgery or has a broken limb, and then also a new parent who is holding a child is gonna use your site sort of in the same way. In 2014, the US Census Bureau reported that there were 76 million baby boomers in the US, so adding that on to the 57 million people that self-identified as having a disability, that's even more users to think about that are gonna be using your sites differently. And that can even includes people who just aren't willing to adapt to new technology. So just thinking of keeping our site simple and usable to create a good user experience. So why are we excluding so many users? My slides got messed up. So a few excuses that I've heard are it's too hard, it's too expensive. Some people just say that they're lazy, and I think a lot of the times we just don't realize that we're doing it, which is why I think it's really important to keep talking about this and having this conversation. So when people say it's expensive, it can be expensive, but not if it's built in at the beginning, not if we're thinking about it beforehand and making sure that we're doing things right the first time. It's similar to a contractor building a building and not thinking of installing a wheelchair-accessible ramp. If you have to go back and add that, then it's gonna be expensive the same way if you're going back and refactoring code and adding new functionality to a site after the fact, then yes, it's gonna be expensive. It's hard, it's really not, and these are a few really easy steps to get started. Like I said, the talk tomorrow is gonna go a lot more into depth about this, so if you are interested, I would definitely recommend checking that out. But these are eight easy tips to keep in mind. One is using alt text properly. You wanna make sure that the picture is providing content. If it's something like a background image and it doesn't need alt text, make sure that you're using open quotes and then that will instruct a screen reader to skip it, otherwise it will read out the file name of the image. Link text, making sure that the user knows where it's taking them. If the link is opening in a new window, then let them know that that's where it's going. I am running way out of time, so navigation, making sure that you're providing the skip to navigation so that you can get to the main content, providing enough contrast and color, not relying on color to signify a link or anything like that. Giving keyboard focus, don't remove the focus outline that this helps people who are gonna tab through a website and are not necessarily using a mouse. Building accessible forms similar to the Instacart example, writing semantic HTML, using headers in the proper order and providing video captions or transcripts. So the unintentional part, hopefully, this talk and I know that there are three other accessibility talks and obviously WordCamp is thinking about accessibility, providing transcripts and things like that, so we need to be leaders in our community and make sure that we're building sites that are accessible. If we work on a team, make sure that we're letting other people know if they're doing something that could potentially be harmful to our users. And then I will tweet out a link to my slides afterwards, but these are some tools and extensions that I really like that are really easy to get started with to do audit for accessibility on your sites. A few other online resources that have a lot of really great tutorials and examples there. And then WordPress specific resources, there's a WordPress accessibility team which is really awesome, they're on Twitter. There's a tag that you can check to make sure that you're using an accessible theme. This is just an example of one particular theme and then there's also patterns for creating accessible, ready WordPress themes. So thank you very much.