Good for Users, Great for Business: Accessibility

Music

Sandra: Hi everyone, and welcome to another episode of Greyd Conversations. And this one will be all about accessibility. Accessibility is a topic that is kind of omnipresent in the digital world, not just because the European Accessibility Act is now in effect, but also because digital inclusion just isn’t optional anymore. But still, a lot of agencies and probably also among our listeners are still struggling with making accessibility part of their everyday workflow. There’s several reasons for that. There’s some uncertainty about tools. There’s confusion over regulations and or certifications. And overall, there’s also a lot of concern about the additional workload. We will talk about all of that. And I’m thrilled to have two exceptional women with me here today. Welcome to the show Anne Mieke Bovelett, international accessibility expert and also our expert accessibility consultant here at Greyd. And Jennifer Zhang, Director of Accessibility Programs and Innovation at RaLytics, one of our amazing clients. Welcome the two of you. Thank you. And by the way, this is our very first all women episode. I’m super happy about that.

Anne: Oh really.

Jennifer: Oh. That’s cool.

Sandra: So, guys, before we dive into the topic, I would kindly like to ask the two of you to introduce yourself. Tell us a little bit about who you are, what you do, and what your roles are in terms of accessibility. Maybe let’s start with Jennifer.

Jennifer: All right. So because I am a Asian woman in accessibility, which isn’t that common, I do like to give a visual description to make sure that diversity is included. So, I am a Chinese woman with shoulder length hair and glasses, and I have anxiety, which is a non-apparent disability. I started in accessibility almost 15 years ago as a software tester, transitioned to Development, transitioned to Product Management, then taught myself design. My friends were saying, just call yourself a designer, which was really flattering. And now I’m a Director. So kind of shifting left throughout my whole career. I’m most proud of my work on mental health and neurodiversity design while I was at Microsoft. A little bit about RaLytics, which is the company that I work for. We are a service, disabled, veteran owned small business, so we ground ourselves in that lived experience. Most of the team, almost 100% has disabilities. The founders had a project around digital accessibility, and they did a really good job with it for what they had their user audience, that it was the most accessible app they’d encountered at work, which is, you know, with that early success, they wanted to build out a bigger accessibility effort. So they brought me in. And where we are now, we’re not a full service accessibility house, so we won’t do your testing and your fixing and everything for you. But we do three main things. So one, maturity, growth to a reasonable, sustainable level of accessibility, investment training that’s engaging and thought provoking, and then improving processes and procedures, making sure that accessibility is embedded in a reasonable way in any organization.

Sandra: Amazing. Thank you. Anne, your turn.

Anne: Oh, I just wanted to say first, embedding accessibility in a reasonable way. I’m going to steal that sentence from you. Go for it. Yes. That is amazing. Yes. Well, yeah. I’m Anne-Mieke Bovelett, I’m originally Dutch, i mean, you could probably tell from my accent. I moved to Germany in 2019, and in 2020, despite having built websites since 1998, I discovered that I was creating digitally closed doors for people. And, there’s a whole story to that. You can find it on my website, in my blog, because this is a bit of a tear jerker. I don’t want to talk about that right now. And like Jennifer said, okay, for the people who cannot see, who are curious. Okay, so I’m blond. I have short curly hair, I have blue glasses and very red lipstick. And, yeah. So, in 2020, I went nose down deep into the subject I had already learned about it, but I never took it very seriously. So I was very well on the superficial side or not too deep. You know, I was thinking about heading structures. And what does a page have to look like? How does it have to work? Can someone to access it by by keyboard, but nothing else. And then I went down deep and then all the way. And that is part of me.

It comes with, with what I’m like. I have ADHD, and I tend to go into a subject nose-deep when I really am interested. And, one of the things that is really nasty about having ADHD is that after a year, you usually get bored with something. And this has never stopped boring me because accessibility touches on so many aspects on design, which is my original specialism on development, which I now know a lot about. But it’s also about processes. And then I discovered that it is possible for a large group of people to learn how to test for accessibility, to do the technical test. And just to make things clear, I’m talking about web accessibility in this case. Right. Because it’s goes way beyond that. But I discovered also that there is, quite a small group that actually takes up the sword for all these testers and for all these people inside of companies. They are burning out by the dozens, especially now with the European Accessibility Act coming into effect, as if the ADA in America wasn’t already putting on a lot of pressure as it was. Which is a good thing, actually. I mean, nothing against that. But, they usually come from a background where they are part of the target group. I’m part of the target group. I have dyslexia, I am easily distracted, you know, so it’s an unexpected thing. People always tend to think like, oh, this is only for people who cannot see or cannot see well. And so, I decided to become a consultant that actually coaches companies through the process of learning how to create an accessible experience digitally. And so I’m not giving people any fish. I am teaching them how to fish so I can go on holiday, and I know they will continue doing the right thing.

Sandra: Amazing. Thank you very much. The two of you, there were already a couple of things about that. I’m sure we will cover later in this episode. You both have your accessibility journeys. Both have, like, a personal aspect. This might also be one of the reasons why others probably struggle, with the topic if they don’t have just a personal approach like it just said. You already mentioned, some new pressure through new legislation. I think we’re way past a point where we like, need to give like general explanations on what accessibility is and why it’s important. But I do want to dedicate a few minutes to inform our listeners about the status quo, especially when it comes to, legal requirements. Anne, could you please quickly summarize what happened this year with the European Accessibility Act? To whom does it apply? What exactly does it say? And how does the situation outside of Europe look like?

Anne: Well, the European Accessibility Act became enforceable on June 28th, so, a bit more than six weeks ago. And it applies to most digital products and services offered to EU customers, including that from non EU companies. So this is a very important point. And we’re talking about business to consumer. It’s actually to protect the consumer and micro-businesses or micro-enterprises we should say have to comply if they for example, sell products or have an online web shop. And they are if they have more than ten employees or it’s not and, OR they have a revenue of more than 2 million, they have to comply. And that means that their website has to be accessible. And now it’s going to get technical folks, according to the guidelines, mainly guidelines, based on WCAG and in Europe it’s also the EN, the European Norm called 301549. Okay. So that was it for the very, very dry stuff. The exemption for micro enterprises, for companies that are smaller than a micro enterprise, it comes directly from the European Accessibility Act, but it’s not mirrored in every country as far as I know. I know it is in Germany and in Dutch law as far as I know, because I am not a lawyer. Right. So, I’m losing my thread. This is a typical ADHD thing, by the way. So can you can you give me a hold back and tell me where I am?

Sandra: Yeah, sure. I was asking. I mean, you, as you said. To whom does it apply? What exactly does it say? It means your websites have to be accessible. According, to the WCAG we will talk a little bit about that in a minute. You also mentioned that it’s not just applicable for companies in the EU, but also for, for example, companies in the US with EU customers. What if that’s not the case? What if it’s just probably – Jennifer, this is a question for you. What does the situation, the legal situation, for example, in the US look like do you have like a similar, act to the European Accessibility Act?

Jennifer: Yes. And actually, you know, there is actually a lot of pressure now that the EAA gives to US companies just because of what you said, which is that it’s not just companies that are based in the EU. US companies that like, you know, like Microsoft or Apple or Google, anyone who sells anything in, Europe needs to also have this. And I kind of view the EAA as strengthening and solidifying on top of what the ADA, says, section 508 for the US. And the US has also had recent changes to cover more websites, because websites are where people get information, in kind of a public square type of way so that, anything that’s on a website should be accessible to everyone. And I’m also not a lawyer, so, take that with a grain of salt. But there are some wonderful lawyers who do have a lot of opinion papers out there, to cover those kinds of things. I will say, though, that even if you’re not in the EU or the US or a place that has regulations right now, I think, the world realizes that this is an important thing because there are so many people with disabilities, and so the regulations are just going to get stronger and more countries are going to join in. So I think to me, it’s grounded in the technical skills and don’t worry about the laws and the policy because there’s so much rich skill, and depth and accessibility that’s like. And so she hasn’t gotten bored. I learned something almost every day. So I think grounding in that is, to me, going to probably have more impact from individual to individual basis than worrying about the policy and the laws.

Sandra: Understood. I’m still going to ask, Anne, I think just very quickly, superficial. What happens if you don’t adhere to these laws? Are they actually any legal consequences or consequences, or is it more like a reputational kind of risk?

Anne: Oh, no. They’re real, real legal risks. Right. Currently in France, a disability organization has, sued four of the largest supermarkets. And I understand because they finally have some, some firing power. And I know that sounds negative, and we’re always trying to come from. Yes, but can you imagine you would from a situation where you have no idea of what it feels like, right? You just bring your kids to school and then every day, every morning between bringing them to school and going to your work, you need to go and do your shopping. You need to because you know, otherwise you won’t be able to cook dinner at night. And every time you get there, there’s something else. The door is not open, the people are on strike. Whatever. You just can’t access that supermarket. Now, that would be annoying if that happens to you. Now imagine this happens to you every single moment of the day. Everyone can go shopping online except for you because you depend on a screen reader or on voice control or something like that. So, they are going after that. Then there are the governments, several countries, several governments have appointed several bodies. They call it, I think in English that have to, check in to the accessibility of several companies. And in some countries it’s the fines are extreme and I do not want to talk about the height of those fines. Because that to me is a very negative thing. It’s like what, what Jennifer said, but it’s not coming cheap. It’s not like you going to recover from that in five minutes. It’s it’s huge. The one example I want to call and I know is, is an extreme in Ireland. They are threatening you with jail time too.

Sandra: Well, I didn’t know that.

Anne: Okay. And why am I mentioning this? This is not the goal, of course, to put people in jail. And it’s probably going to take a lot of legal steps before you even get there. The fact is that these measurements are this strong and this strict because accessibility is not new. This this has been around for more than 20, maybe even 25 years, if I’m correct, and nobody ever paid attention. We don’t know why, but they did. So yeah. And then of course there is the reputational damage. And by the way, if you have a webshop or even if you are, a hosting company, let’s let’s stick to our bubble. Right? We are all working on the web, we’re creating software, we’re creating apps, and, even a hosting company, if they are from outside of the EU, if you can, as a private person, you can buy an email address or a domain name, and you’re doing more than 2 million in turn over and you have more than ten employees. You have to comply. And that is at some point the governments aren’t going to be able to shut you down by IP. And one of the things I’m personally looking forward to, I know it sounds really nasty, but you know, all these horrible Chinese fake shops, there’s so many fake shops and you’re buying something and you’re paying and you’re getting no news. They too can be shut down under this regulation just by IP. This is what I understood from that. So yeah.

And let’s not talk about the negatives and the reputational damage. Let’s talk about the reputational glamor and the great things when you hear I mean, even in Germany, everybody knows Bayern München. Yeah, the football club, they have been working on accessibility real hard. And they are speaking about it. They’re talking about it. And, there are so many supporters that are so happy that they can now access the site and that they can access they went much further, I think, than just the digital accessibility. But this is you’re making so many people happy. And as you know, a rule of thumb is if someone is angry at you, they’re going to tell 13 people. If they’re happy, they’re going to tell three. But among the disability community, they’re going to tell 300.

Sandra: And I would go even further. I mean, I had this question in for later, but it fits quite good because we talked a lot about like the negative consequences if you don’t do that. But it’s also not just about doing the right thing. It’s just also a smart business decision because, confirm me, tell me if I’m wrong, but, as far as I know, accessibility overlaps a lot with, for example, SEO, usability, conversion optimization. So there’s a lot of situations if if you do the accessibility tasks right, you will also win. And all these other sections. Right.

Anne: You want to take that one Jennifer, or shall I? Because I know…

Jennifer: Yeah, I have some anecdotes. So for for SEO and security, some people think that having a top level heading one on a page is ugly and redundant because it takes up space and you already should know where you are because you chose to navigate there. But one headings are part of the formula for SEO because they highlight what’s important about your site. And two, that’s a security issue because the heading is like an authentication in your brain that you’ve gone to the right place. So it’s one piece of the security puzzle. If you click on a link and the heading is not the same, then you’re like, oh, okay, maybe I’m in the wrong place, right? And something bad happened. In fact, my friend Jen Smith who is Design Director at Visa has been really digging into how accessibility and security intertwine. And it’s fascinating, on usability, which is another factor. I’m a mother to two young children, and they need a lots of attention. So sometimes after, you know, children take a lot of attention. Yes. And I love them so much. But sometimes after a hard day at work and playing with the children and helping them with homework, technology gets harder to use because I’ve spent all my focus already, so. And and you probably know this from ADHD, right? But I get incredibly frustrated when trying to pay bills online when there are inaccessible forms, if there’s no visible focus indicator. And I’m trying to type in billing information and I’m like looking at paperwork and then coming back to the computer, I might get so distracted and not remember which field I was filling in.

And that’s where accessible design is good  design is good usability. So those things so much overlap. And then one more, for conversion rates for business and click through. According to the 2025 WebAim Million report, a 45.4% of the homepages of the top 1 million websites had empty links. Now, if you don’t know where a link goes, yeah, that’s a huge stat, right? If you don’t know where a link goes or what it does that affects conversion. So I’m not going to click on a link on an e-commerce site when I don’t know if it’s going to auto buy the things in my cart that I’ve put there for, maybe I’ll buy later, right? I’d rather stop using that website and go to a different website if there’s a better one, or go to the store if I can. So those are just some examples of SEO security, usability, conversion that all tie together with accessibility.

Anne: Oh yeah. And I’m going to hop on to the SEO one, by the way, because I go into discussions with companies, you know, first they’re they’re like moaning, oh we have to be accessible or they’re going to tell me, oh no, I don’t have to be accessible yet. And then I’m like, oh, so you are planning never to be successful then? Yeah. So and that that turns their mind around. Now there’s this thing where company owners tell me we’re going crazy, we’re paying thousands and thousands to our SEO agency, but the bounce rate is not going down and they cannot explain it. And they did everything. And we did everything they told us and, and and they don’t know. And just one look at their website. And then I see it’s impossible to use for people who are suffering from colorblindness, hangover, ADHD. I’m not even talking about the assistive technology yet. And, and then these SEO companies and they celebrate a click through rate of 0.5%, they’re going like, yay! And then I’m sitting there and I’m like, why are you so happy about a rise in click rate of 0.5%? If it could be five, even ten if you educated your content creators alone? Yeah. So that’s a great example. So. I can talk about this for hours.

Sandra: Yes, you can, I know. Right. Jennifer, you did some talking with Anne before, a couple of weeks ago. The two of you did an interview, and one of the things you mentioned, one of the reasons why you joined RaLytics was that you wanted to work somewhere. Works is it really was more than just a checkbox. And from what I see, I think this is actually one of the reasons why so many agencies still struggle to embed accessibility into their daily workflows. They know, or they want to build accessible websites, and then they go like, okay, what do I have to do for that? And that’s the moment when I realize that this is not something that can solve by throwing some plugin on their side or handing out some new guidelines to their designers, because accessibility actually involves the entire team, it involves the content people making sure like the sales are correctly images have alt text, the videos are captioned. It involves the designers heavily checking for color choices, font sizes, contrast choices, and all these kind of things. And it also involves the developers taking care of all the technical aspects of accessibility, making sure it’s compatible with screen readers or ARIA labels and all these kind of things. So it’s a lot of a lot of work. How can agencies wrap their head around this? How can they get started without feeling completely overwhelmed?

Jennifer: Yeah, it’s a hard question. I mean, accessibility, there’s an ocean of information out there. And how do you kind of dip your toe in without getting dragged in and just like, oh my God, I can’t handle this. So. Well, first of all, accessibility should be baked in by default. As an agency, you shouldn’t be selling an accessibility package as a separate thing, you should be baking it in. And I know that can be a hard sell for some people because clients will say things like, well, I just want to ship it now. Like, can we focus on accessibility later? And I would say part of that is having the right conversations to get buy in. So I’d say everyone has their accessibility lever. For instance, there’s a skills lever. And I talked a little about skills before. I think developers and designers and content writers who are skilled in accessibility are technically and actually better developers, designers and content writers than those who don’t know accessibility. And there’s a certain pride to ship in good code. So on an individual level, if you’re just starting out, like look at where your skills are and go, maybe, you know, maybe I can learn some stuff here and become a better, better developer, better designer, better content writer with more transferable skills. I can go out and get any other job.

When I work with customers, I also try to find their lever. It sometimes takes a bit of work. You know, because there are different types of levers. There’s the legal lever, which we’ve been talking about a bit. There’s a business impact lever in terms of, you know, conversion rates or sales impact. So it really depends. And I encourage agencies to have a few talking points that they can pull out, depending on who you’re talking to, even down to the industry that you’re talking to. So talking to the energy sector versus in e-commerce or other things to have those kind of proof points or stories because I think people do resonate with those stories and go, oh, I hadn’t thought about it. Maybe we should do some more accessibility and invest in that. And, you know, it takes time and money to do accessibility. Well, it also takes a lot of time, more time and more money to redo it all later. And so that, that that’s really something that I try to emphasize. Oh, and there’s a personal note on this as well, where some people need to be selfish about it and have that personal benefit lever.

So one anecdote of many that I have is dark mode, for example, helps reduce migraines. And it’s also good for everyone for reading in low light conditions, like in your bedroom where you’re not supposed to take your phone that everyone does anyway. But you know, so many people go, oh yeah, I use dark mode. And so that kind of starts a conversation. And then, okay, so if you’re interested and you’re actually benefiting from it, maybe you can build that in more and then see how you can get your organization or your customers to embed those types of things in.

Sandra: Absolutely. And I also think, I mean, it is a lot of work. You just confirmed that, but also with the right tech stack. Ideally a lot of like the basic accessibility task just work by default. And also if your designers and developers are trained and are getting used to what they should, watch out for, what they should focus on, it gets easier as well. And in an ideal world, we are getting to a point where accessibility is just the default. You do. You don’t have to to sell it anymore to your clients. Just as like I always compared like, mobile responsiveness. There was a time when people were always or, when agencies were selling mobile responsiveness as a feature. You couldn’t do that anymore today because people just expect you to offer mobile responsiveness.

Jennifer: Yes. That’s a great example. Yes. And I would say, with the tooling and the tech stack, I mean, that’s why we’re all here. Greyd is really doing what it can to have a good tech stack so that some of those basics are already accounted for when you’re using those design components, insights. But I’m sure we’ll talk more about that now.

Anne: Yeah, I will actually. Yeah, I’d like to. I’d like to say something about that, but maybe I’m coming in and breaking down your whole your whole…, –

Sandra: No, no, don’t worry about my script.

Anne: You know, I’m the consultant that Greyd attracted to support them and coach them in accessibility. And one of the, conditions I set is I really like you to do this in public. You know, write about your small wins, your bigger wins. And at some point, other people are going to write about it or speak about it, and they’ve been through a lot. And, Sandra can confirm it, you know, and and the thing is, it is I know it’s hard to find concrete information about accessibility online that is digestible because we’ve been talking about WCAG. And in case someone would like to know, it stands for Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. Right. And we’re also talking about A11Y. Every now and then you see this short thing like a11y. It’s a memorandum for lazy people saying accessibility. And I say lazy these days because we do not have to write it in short, on Twitter or etc. or whatever you want to call that platform, in full, you can write it in full, Anyway, it’s hard to find information. And one of the reactions I get everywhere, including from the people from Greyd, which was fully understandable, I chased them. And I said to the developers, do your own research because you need to learn how to fish. And then the response was – and this will answer your your question again, like, how can agencies approach it? – They would like go like, but we’re using this framework or are we using this or that. And it’s the largest framework in the world. So because of that, I think we can expect that it is accessible. Now, accessibility is the one thing that turns your world upside down because none of the anything, none of what you assume is right. And even I run into this and I know accessibility specialists that have been doing this for 25 years that still are like, wow, I didn’t know that.

And what is interesting now with the EAA putting so much pressure worldwide, is that now the quality of information is actually increasing. Yes. And so, never assume that’s what I want to tell agencies never, ever assume. Just go and dig and dig and dig and dig and keep asking questions. And, I know it sounds a lot like reaching for my own for my own choir. But hire people like me or Jennifer or others who who work in this business because we know what you run into. We can put some realism into you. And, coming back to what we did, at Greyd, they learned how to fish, and they’ve been fishing hard, and they’ve been coming back to me and saying, can you check this? And can you check that? And the realistic thing is, it is progress over perfection always. We tend to think, oh, we cannot ship it until it’s perfect. Sometimes you think it’s already perfect and you’re shipping it, and then six months later, now with more and more information coming to the surface, you realize like, hey, I still have to do something to make that better. And what’s important is that you make sure that your internal processes are ready for that, for the iteration, because you will always have iteration. And, this is something that the folks at Greyd have done very, very, very well. I’m incredibly proud of them. I always get a little emotional when I talk about it, but that’s that’s just it.

Sandra: Yeah. Thank you, thank you. You did actually break my script a little bit because I wanted to talk about Greyd later, but since we’re here anyways, and I, you you just told, as it just said, you literally were the one who kicked off the accessibility journey at Greyd. We talked a lot, a lot about details already, but would you mind sharing that, how this first conversation with Thomas went. When You got your first demo of Greyd and then you asked a $1 million question. Is this tool accessibility ready?

Anne: Oh, yeah. Because I was I was maybe some background information. So I was using the currently biggest page builder in the world. And at that time this page builder was having trouble with accessibility and, yeah. And then I met Thomas. And it was a fun conversation to begin with because on his phone over, he looked like, almost 60 year old big old man to me. So I was thinking, I’m going to run into the quiet type I’m expecting. And this is again, like assumption assumption is really bad. Expecting some very well settled designer in a big agency. And I’m going to show you my tool And then, Thomas appeared wearing his cap. And he is, for those who met him. He’s very energetic and he’s incredibly open to points and suggestions. And then he was showing me the hub, and I got dollar signs in my eyes, because this is part of of the Suite, for the people who are listening, who don’t know what Greyd.Suite is, you can manage dozens, hundreds, even thousands of websites with it. And you can export import, you can do user management. And I was seeing this as the ultimate process optimizer ever for any serious web agency, especially if you’re really ambitious. And so I had these dollar/euro signs in my eyes. And then, yeah, I did ask him, like, you’re making me fall in love with your product. He even showed me the block editor. And when I saw the block editor, I was making cross fingers, you know, like, go away. I do not want to deal with the block editor. This is this is horrible. This talk ends now. You’ve wasted my time. I was really angry. And he said, give me ten minutes and I will show you. And he was showing me around. And I had this emotion for the second time. I’m like, I get it, I get it, and this is so much nicer than the 5 million choices and options that you get in this visual page builder. Oh, is it accessible? And Thomas was like, what? And I was like, no no no no no no no no no no no. Don’t get my hopes up man. Don’t do it. But the fact that he was so honest about not knowing what I meant and really people, when you’re listening to this, it’s not a shame if you don’t know this. Really it’s not. But once you know about it, you got to be ashamed if you don’t do anything about it. Right? So I said, okay, Thomas, let’s go to your website. At that time, the Greyd website looked completely different. And I said, now take your keyboard, use the tab key and see if you can get to this in this menu item. And he’s like, nothing happens. And I’m like, and you,  you built this, right? Yeah. And you wrote the CSS. Yeah. Well you completely CSS the door shut for anyone who spends on visual navigation. And then he wanted to know and then I gave him the $1 million speech. I’m like it’s, it’s if you make sure that you are going to be accessibility ready, I want to be your customer. We even made a deal back then. He gave me a couple of months to try and he said, I want to talk to the team about this. And then I said, okay, then I will be your customer. And I kept pestering and pushing and, and and then and I drove people mad and I forced them into slack and I forced them into other means of communication. And that was hard for them. And then at some point they decided, let’s go do this all the way.

Sandra: And that’s the reason why I was asking you this, this question. I mean, we are a product company, but a lot of our listeners are agencies. But I think, you can see it from the same, from the same angle. From our point of view, accessibility, just like mobile responsiveness, for example, never was something that was suitable to work as a USP. Jennifer, you also said before, you shouldn’t sell this as, as an option or an app. So this should be your baked-in default. So from our point of view, this was just something that we had to get done. Same as we had to make sure the code output is clean. And, we offer the options to make, your websites mobile responsive. Because what usually happens with these kind of features, there might be a couple of months now or years where you can actually promote accessibility readiness as a feature. But then it will definitely become a so-called hygiene factor, which means basically customers just expect all good solutions to be accessibility ready, but they’re not prepared to pay any more for that.

And when we started working with Anne on on accessibility, we’re we’re at probably exact the same point where an agency might stand that says, okay, we want to offer accessible websites, but there’s so much to do. But how do we approach that and what do we decide? And back then was you could either, like, develop for months behind curtains and then have a big announcement. Okay. Now we have the big solution here. It’s it’s it’s super, super cool. Or you just get started and don’t have, don’t want to be perfect right from the beginning, but also like take your customers with us. So for example, RaLytics is one of our customers. And, Jennifer, you can probably tell people about that. But I think when when you first started exploring Greyd, it wasn’t that we were like fully accessibility ready and we checked all the boxes. That wasn’t probably what, stood out to you and what, convinced you to switch to Greyd, isn’t that correct?

Jennifer: Yeah. Greyd responded in a really good way to what we needed. So, kind of tell you the story of how this came about. So when I joined our company, we had Builder One, which was a big builder, which our developers liked, and we quickly realized that it would be a reputational issue to sell accessibility services on an inaccessible website, and we needed to completely redo it. You know, it’s kind of optics really bad. So we did some research and our dev found Builder Two that he liked and thought was accessible. At that time, we were lucky because the, someone came out with the WordPress page builder accessibility comparison, and it tested a bunch of the top builders, and Builder Two is clearly not going to work for us.

Then a friend who pays attention to trends in WordPress accessibility suggested Greyd. Now, one thing that stood out Greyd wasn’t on that analysis. So I was like, Okay, well, let’s take a look at this. So one of the things that stood out was that our dev liked how easy it was to work with with the block editor and the configuring multiple sites. So he made a copy of our website in Greyd for us to test. And then he also made a site with all the components that Greyd had. And we tested those because we were trying to figure out what kinds of components do we want on our website, what’s going to showcase the accessibility the best way, and, Anne actually told me recently that those bugs were timely because you’d already started those conversations with, around some of those areas. And here we were, a real life customer who was asking for accessibility in real time to prove that it was needed.

And, Sandra, I love what you said about it being just part of hygiene. I think it’s about time that it should be just part of hygiene. It should have been for years. But, you know, if we can start doing that now, then it it’s a huge improvement. And the thing that stood out about grade was not that you had fixed all those bugs and that were, that there were no problems. Because I will say that in working with dependencies in the past, some of the places that think they are the most accessible and don’t want to listen are not accessible enough. And they’re not only not fully accessibility ready, but they’ve kind of closed their ears to feedback and they don’t really strive to do the above and beyond best practice, beyond compliance stuff that can really make a difference for, usability and just really pleasantness of use, and grade. You’re such a good dependency. You didn’t give me excuses. You just did it because you realized it was important. And we’re happy that all of your users will benefit from us finding those bugs. Because with the lifting, although it’s right if if it gets fixed for us and then all of your customers can use it, that’s really good for all your clients because then they have more accessible websites. And not all dependencies are like that. So I want to applaud you all for that really, really responsive partnership and something that, you know, I’ve had a lot of experience with people pushing back that accessibility. Even though there’s laws and a lot of impetus behind it, there are still people who I would say are bad actors because of knowledge or other things like that, and they will push back. But you all did not. And that was such a breath of fresh air and so refreshing and so, so wonderful to have. So thank you for that.

Sandra: Thank you for the feedback. And I think this is also, some advice that I’d like to give to, to, to the listeners out there who have agencies and even no matter if you’re just starting with accessibility or you already have been offering accessible websites for quite some time, there might be a situation when a client reaches out and says, hey, I’ve run into a major accessibility issue, you need to fix this. Then what happens often, like the natural response to such criticism is like to do like this. Oh no, that that’s not our fault. Is this is here or yeah, you did tested incorrectly or whatever. Like all this does push back. Instead of just being open and and seeing this as an opportunity for you and your team or your product, whatever side you’re looking at to become better. And what what worked really, really well from, from our perspective, is exactly having these kind of, conversations in relationship to your customer. If they have feedback, great. It’s an opportunity for you to improve. So take them with you on the journey. Don’t expect them to bring the solution, but be thankful and grateful for them to to raising these issues, bringing them to your attention, and then start working on that. And that’s what really worked for us. And, and, and and for us it was a really good decision. To not wait until we felt like we had the perfect accessible solution and then launch it, but to take our customers with us on a journey and also as an asset. When we started working on making our suite accessibility ready, there really was not a lot of good documentation.

So the reason why we also decided to make our accessibility journey public and not just, talk about our achievements and promote them, but also talk about the hurdles we were running into and then share with others how we solved them. For us, it was a way also to to give back to the community and also to, to help other product owners to improve their products because like I said, we don’t expect accessibility to be something that we or anyone else can solve for a lot of time because it will, and it should become a hygiene factor that people don’t pay extra for. It should be the default. That’s how we see it.

We talked a lot about tools already. Which is probably a good time for a little section that I’d like to do, which I call Toolbox Time. There are a lot of different tools and plugins and solutions out there about accessibility. Someone very helpful, some less so. So what? I would love to hear your thoughts on what kind of tools agencies should be using if they want to do it right. Feel free to recommend any specific solutions, but my intention mainly is to talk about the type of tools that are out there and your general recommendations on what to use and what probably to avoid. For example, just just to give you an example, I know there has been a huge discussion whether or not to use, accessibility overlay plugins. So Anne, I know that’s a faible of yours. So go ahead and start with that one.

Anne: Yeah. Well I think you could actually have this question answered by me and by Jennifer. Different things. We have in Dutch, we have this expression that says surgery went well, patient died anyway. You have to show that to me. Yeah. You do. So, it came from Wellington. An overlay plugin for people who don’t know what that is. In general. You know, when you land onto a website and you see this clear disability symbol, sometimes it’s someone in a wheelchair. Lousy symbol, by the way. There is another symbol with a little person that stands out with arms and legs like that. But usually, that is an overlay. And this overlay, you can click it and then it’s going to give you all kinds of functions that you already have installed on your computer. If you know how to use them. So you’re driving a car when you turn those on. And that’s like putting a steering wheel on the passenger side of the car as well. And then you’re both going to steer this car, your computer and the passenger. And, and then it’s going to collide. So overlay plugins intend well,  but for assistive technology they are most of the time very horrible. I’m not going to mention any, but there are several of these companies that had to make a lot of money because creating overlays is expensive. And then these same companies and this is where it’s more of a two edged sword. These companies also create software that help you audit your code live. Now, so this is something they have something good and they have something not so good. Let me put it nicely. Right. So then they will tell you the overlay plugin can be used like a stopgap until you are fully accessible. Well sorry folks, not sorry. This is not going to help you in any legal problem that you get from here on with accessibility. But worse, even if you don’t have to comply, if your web shop runs something horrible like that, you’re missing out on revenue turnover at the cost of, what, 100 bucks a month? You’re going to walk away from thousands of turnover a month. Anyway. Oh, that’s that’s the thing. And I think Jennifer can say some things about that. I want to name one tool that is very specific to WordPress because, I’m a very WordPress specific person, it is the Accessibility Checker created by Equalized Digital. They have a free version. You can install it in the back end. It runs on your own server. There is no voodoo talking to US servers or whatever. And then when you install it and you are writing new files or you’re creating new pages, it is testing  for you live what it can and tells you, hey, listen, you have, unclear links or you forgot an alt text or your color contrast is is off, or it tells you all kinds of things. What do you have to know? It can catch like a maximum. I think currently it’s 35%, Jennifer, or did that. now even get better because…

Jennifer: No, thats correct.

Anne: Right there. 35%. Yeah. But it’s also the 35%. It’s also those things that really do the worst to a website for anyone. So Jennifer, onto you.

Jennifer: Yeah. I’ll, I’ll add with the overlays. That anything that sounds too good to be true is probably too good to be true. And overlays kind of they use AI on the background, so they subvert the intention of the design in the development, where they will if you don’t put all text on something, they will choose alt text. And so there was a website that I saw on a demo where it was a woman was running her hand across this luxurious looking set of clothing, and, the AI had detected it as a woman folding clothing, which then you’re kind of, you know, you’re changing the intent of the design to show luxury, and that will affect conversion for anyone who’s getting that battle text. So, yeah, overlay is not good. From a testing perspective. And I love the image and equalizers at all because they were the ones who did the WordPress builder analysis. So thank you for that reminder. They do good stuff. On the aspect of once you’ve fixed all the bugs in that accessibility checker, you can also, use, integrated CI, CD, accessibility checkers in your code. You can use dev tools to browse the accessibility tree and do a code inspection to look at accessible names and other things like that. And then I also test at least once a quarter, or once a major release on more than one operating system with different assistive technology. So like switches or voice input. You don’t have to do this every time. It’s just a good idea to have a regular cadence here and there, so that you don’t forget to test that, because I have my regular test script, and then I like to break out of that every once in a while to do some more fun, other kinds of testing. And yeah, just again, avoid overlays, avoid, avoid. They’ve done some very shady mean stuff to some really good accessibility experts too. And, and the promises they they say we guarantee that you won’t get sued, but we have lawyers just in case. And so clearly, you know that that just doesn’t make sense. Yeah.

Anne: Yeah. And I’m going to talk about another tool or two actually the most unexpected tool I give people is your index finger. Because you take your index finger and you put it on the tab key and you keep tapping, and when you’re tapping through, you will see if you get from link to link to interactive element. A button, for example, is an interactive element.

Sandra: In and also out, right? Like pop ups for example.

Anne: Yes. And then you can try and use more fingers, you know, and use the escape key or you use two fingers at the same time when you use shift and tab and then you go backwards. So yeah, and I know I make a joke of this, but it is really it is true. And then there is something else I absolutely want to talk about. Of course there is AI. I get a lot of questions about AI: Anne, what do you think? What is happening? And listen, I dream of a world where AI fixes all this stuff so everybody has equal access to the web. I dream of it, and more and more stuff is coming and it’s getting better and better and better. And if we want to talk about tooling, I’m going to preach for a company that most people wouldn’t expect, because just yesterday on Twitter, I saw Atarim. Oh yeah, I’ve heard about that too. Vito Peleg, the owner of Atarim, they are launching this new AI team product and and I’m looking at that with big eyes like what are you doing folks? Because I love Atarim. And then they took Apple and suddenly I saw it was also giving accessibility feedback. And I’m like, oh God, guys, I love you so much for doing this. Because agencies working with that tool, they do not only save, a magnificent amount of time, but it takes this into account and then it becomes a hygiene factor because, hey, it’s harking about accessibility. And also what I think they are doing really great,

Sandra: And we talked about like, the lot of work that that there is to do in like all these different departments who have tasks in terms of accessibility. So what I really liked about Atarim, is that they have these different agents, and only one of them, for example, is an assistant accessibility agent. To have a lot more the accessibility agent like automatically screens the site and tell us like here I found an accessibility issue. And then with just a click, you can automatically turn that into an actual task that you can assign to somebody. And it will be in all your in your dashboard with all the other tasks on that website, like for example, client feedback or whatever changes need to be done. So and then general, I think, I was going to ask about AI anyway. So so thank you for mentioning that. We had an AI episode, before this one. And, and one of the things that stood out is AI probably won’t replace creativity or humans entirely, but it will definitely. And it offers us the opportunity to replace all these manual, recurring tasks. And I think there’s a lot of, these kind of tasks also with, with AI and then, with accessibility. And while at the moment, agencies who want to focus on building accessible websites, I see, okay, what I have to do, this extra task and this extra task and make sure of this. I think AI might probably, enable us to, to automate a lot of this stuff and automate the testing. Also probably automate a lot of, the tasks themselves. But I agree with what you shared, Jennifer. You also have to be very careful about that. Like for example, you mentioned, AI generated auto generated, alt text for images. You also have to be very careful and not just things like, oh, okay, I can now solve this and okay, we’re done.

Anne: Yeah, yeah. And another hygiene factor. And I’m gonna leave that one up to Jennifer. This here is the magic word. User testing.

Jennifer: Yes. Absolutely. User testing. The lived experience of users. I would say I understand a lot about accessibility and a lot of user perspectives. And also, every time I talk to users, I learn some other nuance of how important it is to really talk to the users and get their real perspectives. Because I make a lot of assumptions based on the literature, based on WCAG, based on other things like that, and talking to users really makes it clear what the pros and cons are. What could be a better practice than than just the minimum, right? They’ll talk about things that they like this. They’ll say on this one website, they did this amazing thing, and I wish everyone would do it and then know, like, okay, I’m going to do that on everything, because that was such a good nugget. Yeah. So user testing is is incredible. And we, we do a lot of user testing. And also, Anne said this earlier, hiring people with disabilities, like I said, most of my team is people with disabilities. And that makes the lived experience and the nuance on my team so we can deliver better.

One thing about AI, is that I think there’s underrepresentation. There’s not enough accessible code out there for LMS to train on or differentiate from inaccessible code. As the hygiene gets better and that gets better, I, I really hope that that will change. But that being said, there’s also potential to gain efficiency, as you said, in some of the compliance areas. So natural language processing could check the accuracy of the WCAG success criteria, bug tagging, for example, to speed that up. But I also will say, you know, I mentioned at the beginning that we invest in training at RaLytics and, creating training for others because we believe that AI is meant to assist people and not take over their work. So people need to understand if AI input is reasonable and understanding the fundamentals, being trained in those is incredibly important. So that we can keep accuracy checking whatever AI outputs, because it’s not always going to be perfect with that output.

Sandra: Thank you. Yeah, I think that’s that’s actually very good. Very good section to follow up with the wrap up because I’ve enjoyed this conversation a lot. I could go on like probably for at least another hour, but we’re actually already, reaching an hour. So I would like to wrap this up with some final thoughts from each of you. Anne, you already shared one wish that you have for the future. Is there, one more thing that you’d love to see change, either in the WordPress or in the agency space? When it comes to accessibility in the next couple of months?

Anne: Yes. The tone of voice. And with that, I mean, is this this is essential. I’ve been thinking you gave me this question before to chew on, and I have been chewing on a lot, because of course, you can talk about assess your providers, assess your products, assess your stack. We’ve been talking about that. It’s not so hard to assess your stack. You just search and search and you’ll find us. And but one of the things that makes it hard in accessibility is that many of us tend to know,  tend to say no, they’re coming from a frustration or point. And so, if if anyone wants to report an accessibility issue to a product team or you as a product team are using someone else’s stuff integrated in your product. Come from yes. And don’t say you did that wrong. Well, because don’t we all know it? Whenever someone talks to you like that? Hey, the windows go shut, right? It’s like, okay, you’re behaving like a nasty person. I’m not going to listen to you. So when you are learning about this or when you’re teaching about this, don’t say your color contrast is wrong. Let’s say if you make the contrast higher up to this. I’m sorry, I just hit the microphone. That’s probably very loud for you. If you if you heighten the contrast like this, then it will work for the compliance. If you heighten it a bit more, then it will work for your users. And remember, if you are going for compliance only, you’re going to be like a four star restaurant with four star prices serving food on plastic plates. Right? And that’s an excellent metaphor.

Sandra: Thank you Anne. Jennifer, is there anything that you would like to see happen in the near future?

Jennifer: Yeah. And actually, can I, I’m going to first touch on what, Anne said, because when you receive a report like that with the, like, scolding, you did this wrong and this wrong and this wrong and this wrong, like  First, yes, you can you can change the tone and be softer. But I think it also at that point, it’s an inflection point for the person who’s receiving that feedback and that report, that can really come with a lot of change management needed to improve accessibility and embed it into the definition of done. I’ve spoken extensively about how to bring people, along with the elephant and rider change management analogy and how that applies to accessibility improvements, where you really have to speak to both the rider who was the logical and the elephant, who’s the emotional and all right now, still, sadly, people are emotional. Like, I’m scared of accessibility. I don’t want to do that. And they’ll say like, we don’t have budget, we don’t have time, etc. And so when you get a report like that or anyone who’s listening to this who does reports, you know, maybe frame that and couched that in a yes, this is the state of things, but here’s how we get to a place where it doesn’t feel so bad. And then, to answer your question, stop delaying accessibility. That that would be the thing I’d like to see in 12 months in the next 12 months, because, any builder that doesn’t exist doesn’t support accessibility, is not accessibility ready, is doing a disservice to the agencies and who are then put in a position to do a disservice to their customers, especially things with EAA, you don’t want customers angry, and in trouble because of you. So, you know, as a builder, make those accessibility authoring guidelines make it easy to be accessible. Follow Greyd’s example.

Anne: Yes. There’s one last thing I want to say. I totally forgot that. Okay. Like, I don’t know what percentage in general. I mean, WordPress powers 43% of the web. There are other open source systems that power the rest. There are people working in there that inaccessibility that need sponsoring to keep going. And and if it’s not, sponsoring is contribution. So this is something I would like to see in the upcoming year that someone decides to sponsor an Accessibility First LMN that only talks about accessibility and then knows about design, about development, about content. And that’s going to take manpower, that’s going to take bright minds in our business, in WordPress, currently, there is a team, led by Joe Dawson and Ryan Rietveld, who are working on accessibility documentation. And this is what I hope to see in the next year, that that companies realize this is for us and for the greater good. Contribute to your open source software companies or groups or communities that do invest their time and their knowledge in accessibility because they make your life, and that of your customers a lot better.

Sandra: Thank you so much. the two of you. That’s a great sentence to to end with this episode. Thank you so much for taking the time discussing this very important topic with me. today. It was a pleasure. I hope the listeners out there have enjoyed this episode as much as I did. To those of you who haven’t already subscribed to our YouTube channel, please remember to do that in order to not miss out on any future episodes. And again, Anne and Jennifer, thank you so much for being with me today here. Thank you so much.

Anne: Thank you, thank you.

Jennifer: Yeah. Thank you. Bye.

Sandra: Take care. Bye.

Music