354 – How GREYD.SUITE is tackling website accessibility

Interview with Jakob Trost, Anne Bovelett and Nathan Wrigley.

On the podcast today, I have a conversation with Jakob Trost and Anne Bovelett, as we expore GREYD.SUITE, and its philosophy and commitment to website accessibility in the products they offer.

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Jakob tells us about GREYD’s approach to website development, emphasising the company’s dedication to providing a complete suite of tools for professional websites. The discussion revolves around GREYD’s innovative “hub” for website management, which allows users to administer and manage multiple websites from a single interface, simplifying the process even when the websites are on different servers and WordPress installations.

The conversation moves into the intricacies of managing multiple website projects simultaneously, highlighting the importance of understanding your team’s strengths and weaknesses, and the ongoing challenge of keeping up with updates and compatibility.

The origin of the company’s name, “GREYD,” is also explored, with Jakob explaining its connection to the combination of “gray” and “great,” reflecting the company’s ethos and aspirations in the industry.



The competitive landscape of the Block Editor space, and GREYD’s strategic positioning in the market are further examined, shedding light on the company’s enduring value amidst the evolving WordPress ecosystem. Jakob’s perspectives provide insights into GREYD’s commitment to innovation, and adaptability in the ever-changing digital landscape.


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Anne joins in with her passionate advocacy for accessibility in web design. She shares her journey in making websites fully accessible, highlighting the prevalent misconceptions around accessibility and the ongoing work required to create inclusive digital experiences. Anne’s vision of developing a plugin to guide users on accessibility levels and design alternatives is also discussed.

The conversation expands to the importance of proactive accessibility integration, with Anne and Jakob emphasising the significance of automated accessibility, semantic HTML, and the profound impact on user experience and overall website profitability. Their focus on ensuring the accessibility of various website elements, such as popups and forms, underscores GREYD.SUITE’s commitment to inclusive design and user-centric development.

This episode is a great testament to one company’s journey towards better, accessible-ready, tools for website builders and developers. It’s lovely to see a WordPress product which has gone ‘back to the drawing board’ to see if they can make this matter for them, and therefore you too!

Mentioned in this podcast:

GREYD.SUITE website


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Transcript (if available)

These transcripts are created using software, so apologies if there are errors in them.

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[00:00:00] Nathan Wrigley: Hello there and welcome once again to the WP Builds podcast, you've reached episode number 354 entitled how GREYD.SUITE is tackling website accessibility. It was published on Thursday, the 14th of December, 2023. My name's Nathan Wrigley, and I'll be joined in a few moments by Anne and Jakob more on that later, but they're going to be talking to us about GREYD.SUITE.

But before then, a few bits of housekeeping. The first thing to say is that if you didn't listen to the previous episode, which was episode 353 entitled bye-bye, I have a bit of sad news. David Waumsley is no longer going to be joining me on a fortnightly basis on the WP Builds podcast. He's decided that it's time for him to move away from WordPress.

But wait, hold fire. We recorded our last episode a few weeks back now, and it wasn't long before David was emailing me saying he wants to do another podcast all about websites, but not about WordPress. And so we're going to be starting a new show. So it's kind of bye bye, but not bye bye. I've got this idea that I'm going to actually plumb it in to the WP Builds feed for a few weeks, maybe 3, 4, 5, 6 weeks, something like that. So you can get some idea of what that podcast will be like.

So although it's bye-bye to David, it's kind of not. We're going to be having a brand new podcast. It's going to be all about website development, but more about standards based building of websites. We're going to be thinking about the W3C and doing things with CSS and HTML rather than a CMS. But fear not, WP Builds will carry on. I've got some lovely new plans for the new year. So stay tuned. It's just changing a little bit, but everything, broadly speaking, will be carrying on as normal.

If you've got any comments about that, I'd love to hear them. You can head over to this post, go to WP Builds.com. Search for episode number 354, and give us a comment there.

I'm actually going to be taking a couple of weeks off. This is the last episode until the new year. So we'll be back in 2024. If memory serves, I think the first episode we'll be back in January, on January the fourth. I think that is Thursday, January the fourth. But yeah, hopefully you understand the fact that I, like you, would like to have a little bit of a holiday as well.

By the way, if you're into what WP Builds do. We're doing a load of new live shows. You can find everything that we're doing live over at wpuilds.com forward slash schedule. There's a calendar there, and you can add the shows that we're doing to your calendar of choice. If you just click on the event, there's a little section at the bottom of the modal that pops up, and you can add those bits and pieces to your calendar, be that Apple or Google or whatever it may be.

We're doing currently, webinars. We've got a webinar all about WonderSuite. We're doing a live show with Piccia Neri. We're doing a live show with Sabrina Zeidan. There's all sorts of coming up. So yeah. WP Builds.com forward slash schedule.

Also, we had some awards announcing this week, and I'd like to say, thank you very much to everybody that voted for us. We picked up an award in the WP Awards. Greatly appreciated. I hope that if you voted for us you are satisfied with all the other choices that you made as well. Thanks so much.

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Okay. What have we got for you this week? Well, we've got Jakob Trost and Anne Bovelett, both of them representing GREYD.SUITE. GREYD.SUITE is a gigantic, and very impressive suite of things that you can do on your WordPress website. You may be familiar with them with their blocks suite, but there is so much more to what they do. They really do have a suite which encompasses almost every point that you might like to touch on your website.

And so we explore that, but specifically we explore their suite of products from an accessibility point of view. We delve into what it is that they've been doing recently with Anne's help to make their products more accessible. And I have to say it's rather a lot.

So if you're into GREYD.SUITE, if you've never heard of GREYD.SUITE, but if you're into accessibility, this episode will be of interest to you. And I hope. That you enjoy it.

I am joined on the podcast today by Jacob Trost and Anne Bovelett. How are you both doing?

[00:06:04] Jakob Trost: Oh, I'm doing great. Thank you. Thank you for having us.

[00:06:06] Anne Bovelett: Yeah, me too. Absolutely. Fabulous.

[00:06:09] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, lovely. we've got you on the podcast today. We're gonna be talking about, one thing, but in two different ways. the real enterprise of the podcast, I think is to talk about accessibility, but we're gonna do that via the interface of a, product, which Jacob has been working on for a long time.

And I know that Anna's joined forces with Jacob to, in air quotes, improve that product from an accessibility point of view. Before we get into that, let's just have a quick, two second, five second, 10 seconds, something like that, bio from both of you, so that we both, so that all of us know who you are.

let's go to Jacob first, just tell us a little bit about yourself and the company that you have built.

[00:06:49] Jakob Trost: two seconds, is probably a bit ambitious, but yeah, I'll make it quick. yeah. I'm Jacob. I studied interface design Nuremberg, and, I've been working in the WordPress world for several years now, and actually been working at Greyd for. Four and a half years now. And yeah, we built the Great Suite, which is a product.

Yeah, we will discuss that later. But yeah, that's pretty much what I'm doing.

[00:07:11] Nathan Wrigley: Thank you. Yeah.

[00:07:14] Anne Bovelett: I'm Anne originally from the Netherlands. Something you can hear in my, in my accent, obviously. I started creating websites of whooping 25 years ago. And only three and a half years ago, I discovered that I didn't know anything about accessibility. I was that person that knew alt text. Yes you have, I'll text, you have to do that.

Headings should be in order. But that was it. And then I read this very emotional tweet from someone saying that her father was deeply saddened by the fact that he's as a blind person, he can't navigate the web on his own. And then she said, if you are now wondering if your wife, if your website is accessible, then it's definitely not. And that hit me so hard. And then I found this is my passion. This is what I'm going to get into. This unites everything I've dealt with in the past years websites, design content, HDML and CSS and, a little bit of scripting, but mainly HT M1 sees it. And, a great love of community and people and to motivate people to do good and still make money.

[00:08:34] Nathan Wrigley: Nice, nice. thank you for that. We now have an intuition on both of you, both your roles and what you do. let's turn our attention to, to Greyd suite. So first of all, it's a, an interesting spelling. If you are, if you're a native English speaker, you're probably imagining that this is G-R-E-Y-E-D.

it's not, it's GREY. Skip the E, so just straight to the D-G-R-E-Y-D. The URL is Greyd de go and maybe pause the podcast there. Go and have a poke around and you'll get an intuition as to what the product is and what it does. But Jacob, I'm gonna hand this one to you. Feel free to promote. Pick the best bits.

What's the UVP? What is the thing that Greyd suite is? Let's get into that.

[00:09:21] Jakob Trost: Oh yeah. Thank you very much. great Suite does a lot of things. So we start off making the Block editor more professional and actually suitable for professional websites. So what we are trying to achieve is that you are able to build professional websites inside the Block editor. So we totally focus on the block editor and we use it to make it more usable for professional website, but that's not really that special.

But we're more focused on building a dynamic infrastructure and really having a, architecture for not only building one website, but building hundreds of websites. Because as an agency, as a WordPress professional, you should think about optimizing your time, not building one website and throw it away and build the other one from scratch.

But more of, if you're building hundreds of websites a year, a month, whatever, if you're a larger agency, you could think about how can I optimize this process to build, the hundredth website, in a more efficient way that I can reuse everything I've did before and I've done before. And I can reiterate that process.

And that's what we're trying to do. And we're trying to solve that with Grapee.

[00:10:23] Nathan Wrigley: Are you squarely then in the agency stroke enterprise space where reusing stuff? Or would you say that there's utility for Greyd suite if you are just building your own site or just a handful of sites a year, something like that. Is it still useful in that, regard, or is your product more aligned to rinse and repeat?

Repeating, repeating,

[00:10:43] Jakob Trost: definitely, usable as well if you're just a small freelancer. most of our customers, just from a size perspective, most of the customers we have are freelancers, but they think about how can I, at the end of the day, I wanna make money and I wanna make more money, with my time.

And they think about that and they want to use the block editor, obviously the block editor comes in handy. and we extend the block editor and think about that. And we, how we are doing that is by, for example, separating design and layout and content in different assets. So everything inside your website can be stripped down to an asset, to a wire frame, pretty much.

And then the design just wraps around it and you fill in the content later on. And we think about that and that is actually suitable for a freelancer as well. So because of the block editor and because everybody can use the block editor and a lot of people are now actually. Using the block are aware of it and its features, we are able to, to even, target freelancers as well.

And lots of freelancers come to us and say, okay, the block editor is not, I like it, but it's not quite there. how can I use it to build this and this and we show them and we extend it and have a lot of functionalities inside our product. And then, but then afterwards you think about, okay, now I need to reuse it and re reiterate that process

[00:12:00] Nathan Wrigley: I've got an intuition that many people have heard of Greyd suite would, liken it to a suite of blocks. So they're thinking, you can think of the commercial rivals that Greyd Suite has. There's a whole bunch of them, you, you download that package and you get a bunch of blocks, maybe some templates and things, but you are doing a.

Boatload more than that. go to the, website and you'll see right off the bat, it starts with, all WordPress one suite and you can keep scrolling and you get to the visual builder and this stuff is all very familiar. Global styles, full site editing, all of that sort of stuff.

But then we get to the template library again, we've seen that before, but wait, dear listener forms, what the heck? so now we're doing forms, but then if we keep scrolling, we get to the Greyd hub, which I guess speaks massively to what you were just saying, where you can, I'm guessing store all of your assets.

I'm still scrolling Greyd popups. So you take care of that as well. User management, good grief. and global content. That's where I'm gonna end off. So the promise is much more than a suite of blocks. And I really just wanted to make that point. You really are doing a lot more heavy lifting. And the bit that's curious to me here is this hub.

Piece. Could you explain more about what that is?

[00:13:18] Jakob Trost: Hey, you described it actually perfectly because we start off giving you blocks, but then we take care of the entire process around. So our philosophy is more of we give you everything you need for a professional website, but of course you can extend and make it even crazier. so we give you popups, we give you post types, we give you, custom fields, we give you, forms, for example, and we give you management tools like the hub.

The hub is, so usually we, most of our agency customers work on multi-site or some. Different multi-sites. Multiple multi-sites. we can discuss about that for ours. but the Hub is an interface that lets you administrate and manage all your websites. So you can see all the websites from one page.

They don't even have to be on one place. They can be on different servers, different WordPress installations, and you can, migrate them, download them, make backups, update them whatever you want, and download the design, download the content on its own, whatever you want. And yeah, that's just a good example of what we do for you as an agency to even manage all those be because if you build hundreds of websites and you wanna make that more efficient, you have to keep track of them and yeah, manage them because there will be an update and there will be something that you need to fix in the future or need to, build on top of it.

So yeah, we keep track of that as well and build the hub. That's just a good example of a feature that we deliver as well.

[00:14:43] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, and you threw in something that I forgot, which is you handle custom post types as well, which is, another piece of heavy lifting. It feels to me as if you are, basically rolling up into one product and I, I don't know if the pricing reflects it as one product. We can get to that in a moment.

But the intention here is what do you have on a website? you've got pages, we've got blocks to make those pages. What do you also need? You need form. Okay, we've gonna take care of that. What do you typically need? Probably some kind of custom post type to handle fields and data and display and all that.

We're gonna take care of that. what if you've got more than one site? we've got the hub for you, so you really, it's kind of Greyd suite trying to do all the things that are typical. Website might do. I, don't know if there's somebody else doing as much of this. Maybe there is, but I haven't come across 'em.

So firstly, Bravo, bravo for that. And, how, easy is it to keep all of these balls, these plates being spun at the same time? Are you managing to push the boundaries? Is each of these things or is it, is it you work on one thing for a few months and then move on to something else and concentrate on that?

[00:15:52] Jakob Trost: when you come to the hub, for example, or post types or custom fields, those. Those features in its own are pretty much, finished. when you can, because we think of, okay, we, give you everything you need as a starting point. every time you build a professional website, you have to use custom fields and custom post types at some point.

So we always need that, so we give it to you. But if you need a more advanced version of this, obviously a CF is a wonderful tool, for example, you can also always go ahead and use a CF for that, but we deliver you as a starting point with everything you basically need. So you don't really have to rely on that many plugins anymore.

And we have a lot of opportunities to really fuse them into other features and fuse them into the blocks and fuse them into core blocks and then reuse them to iterate. and that's, one of the philoso philosophies. we have, so now I lost track of your question. Can you repeat it

again?

[00:16:47] Nathan Wrigley: really it was, so firstly, you did answer the question in the majority, but it was whether or not you, had to concentrate one of these different things. So you've got post types, you've got blocks, you've got forms and all of these. Do you, work for a little bit of time on one and, then go back to another project?

How do you keep the whole thing going forwards? 'cause I can imagine you could do Monday forms, Tuesday blocks, Wednesday the hub and

[00:17:10] Jakob Trost: Yeah, we have a lot of features that integrate or new, feature requests that integrate with a lot of these functionalities, but at the end of the day, we, yeah, you have to keep track of all of those, but every team member has their strengths and weaknesses. So there are team members that don't know a lot about forms, but not necessarily about popups or the hub or whatever.

and so every team member has their strengths and weaknesses, but when it comes to staying up to date and yeah, developing on those features, actually our own features are not the problem. The, most challenging thing is keeping up with the blocker and making sure that nothing breaks and, everything is always compatible and uses the latest features and the core releases.

And that is like one

[00:17:52] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah. Oh yeah. It's hard even just keeping up the talk about it, let alone keeping up with the code behind it. But it does seem that you offer a fairly robust wraparound solution for anybody who wants to build a website and doesn't want to get involved in buying a license for this thing over here and buying a license for this thing over here.

You've just got all of that wrapped up into one silly question. I know, but why, where does this word Greyd come from? G-R-E-Y-D. What's that all about?

[00:18:19] Jakob Trost: So actually, our founders of the company they founded, before that, they had the web agency, pretty classic web agency, and it was called in German Al, which means like Office of Great, like the color. Great, great. and from this color gray, then, okay, we wanna build a great project product, product.

So G-R-E-A-T. So a great product. And then, okay, let's make gray and great a word and then make it a bit crazy. And yeah, that's pretty much, and one of the co, one of the co-founders actually called like vice sport, which meet like white. Spread. So white and black means gray. And that's that's what led, into the name and that's what it, where it came from.

[00:19:01] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Thank you. Yeah, thank you for, hu humoring me on that. That was not necessarily a pertinent question, but nevertheless, how are you finding it, Jacob, in this marketplace? 'cause it does feel, I know you've got, as a company, you've got a lot going on there, but if, we were to just focus in on the blocks piece, which is where you directly compete with a lot of other companies, how is that getting noticed and staying relevant in that marketplace?

Because, the emails drop into my inbox. I see people doing webinars all over the place about various different other things. Is it a difficult, increasingly difficult marketplace? Are you finding it interesting to keep your head above water and be noticed?

[00:19:40] Jakob Trost: it is obviously challenging. in the first place, the, development and the, grow, the growth of Yeah. Popularity and with a block editor enabled us to go out there and spread the word about us as well. And now we see it from a perspective. Obviously there are a lot of challenges now, around the business and extending the block editor, which is why I, in the second sentence I mentioned that it's not that special to extend the block editor and give more professional features because at the end of the day, we see the path that WordPress is going to be at the end of the day.

You can build, you have a page biller there. you can call it a page bill, or cannot call it, can call it a content editor, site editor. It doesn't really matter. At the end of the day, you can build pretty much every website with it. So I think this environment is challenging and obviously staying atop and getting the word out there is challenging.

Yes. I. But at the end of the day, WordPress will at some point be the site editor and block editor will be that mature that you don't necessarily need us to build a website. You need us for some custom blocks maybe, but you can also use whatever is out there. Maybe you like this plugin more or that plugin more.

Where we come in handy is more on the architectural stuff page. So we, yeah, obviously enhance some blocks, but at the end of the day, we separate continent layout and sync those across hundreds of pages and make them as a template and distribute it to the next page and build your next project on top of it.

And that's where we think we have our biggest strengths. And that is nothing we see, at least so far we, don't see that many players doing this thinking about how can we make the process of building good hundredth website more efficient? We see a lot of block extender, so we.

[00:21:26] Nathan Wrigley: So the sweet spot, really, you said you made it very clear that if you're a solopreneur and you're just doing one or two sites a year, there's still utility here. But a really, use, useful use case for this is if you are doing significant amounts of work in the WordPress space, lots of websites, pull everything into the hub, you can share the assets, you can share the templates across all of those websites, and thereby share, save yourself a boatload of time.

[00:21:50] Jakob Trost: And you not necessarily have to create all those websites all the time. Like for example, some of our big biggest customers are like, the agencies are our biggest customer and they have projects, for example, franchise systems out there. They have hundreds of websites that they all need to be like sing.

The design needs to be the same, but the content needs to be the same in some places. Other things should be, should be independent locally and everything. So those are the use cases and we see and hear a lot of enterprise use cases that actually really are desperate need of those types of features.

And that's where our biggest strength actually are in building this dynamic infrastructure and reusing, sharing assets across sites.

[00:22:29] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, dear listener, go and check it out. Greyd de or you could probably just Google Greyd suite. So we have covered very quickly, but I think we did a, reasonable job. We've covered what the product is and what the use cases for that are, but honestly, just go and check it out. You, will be quite surprised at the breadth and depth of what's on offer.

I will just point out some unique pricing going on here. this is fascinating. So normally we get a, I don't know, one site. Per year license or you upGreyd and you get five sites a year or something like that? no. Not for you. you get, you get a monthly pricing model here, which is interesting.

So yeah, $99 will carry, will do the normal one-time payment. You get, one website, but then this is where it gets interesting. you, can pay 69, it's euros, not dollars. that's what I'm looking at, least anyway. one site a month, and then you can step up and you can do three websites a month or unlimited websites a month.

So you are keeping track in the backend there of projects that are launched there, there must, do you have some kind of, way of tracking like how many websites are launched? Do you have a button which people have to press in order to go live or something? What's, how do you keep track of that?

[00:23:45] Jakob Trost: as a, you buy a license key so you can start buying a single one and deliver a single website, and you can al always have one of the subscription packages, which gives you. A website a month, three websites a month, doesn't really matter. And usually you have a little watermark and you don't have all the features in the basic version.

as soon as you don't have a license, you are, stripped down in features and have a little watermark. And as soon as you want to go live, you wanna get rid of the watermark, you wanna make sure everything is connected and everything. Then you include your license key and hit activate on that website.

And yes, the license is linked to your ERL, so to your machine, pretty much, you can call it. And yeah, those are limited in some kind of way. So once a month, three month, whatever.

[00:24:27] Nathan Wrigley: I am gonna have to check that out 'cause I, don't fully understand how that works, but I, we get it. we understand what's going on, but the technicalities of that, I would have to have a poke around in the back

[00:24:37] Jakob Trost: Yeah. At the end of the day, the license needs to be activated on your site and in order to be activated on your site, we, keep track of the URL as well. So pretty much if you hit the button, activate you, we get an, little, our server gets a little notification. Okay. This key with this URL wants to be activated and then yeah.

[00:24:54] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Thank you very much. There's a, there's an agency license as well, for 449 Euros, and you can you check that all out at Greg suite, slash just go and click the bottom on pricing. Let's, let's bring Anne back into the conversation. Anne is here. accessibility, as she said in her intro, is her great interest, her passion at this point.

Ann, you've joined the, Greyd team. What, why, what, was there something that you noticed that they weren't doing at the time, or is this

[00:25:24] Anne Bovelett: it's, it's an interesting story actually because I was contacted by Thomas k Kwi, the one of the founders on LinkedIn, and he said, I'm a designer from Munich and I'd like to do some exchange stuff with you, and I see you do a lot of elemental, I find that interesting. Let's talk. And I'm like, okay, I'm always up for ex for a good exchange.

So we did, and then he started showing me around Great Suite. My first response was, oh gosh, no, that's the block editor. I am not into the block editor yet. I, just didn't get the block editor because I was a typical page biller user because I thought that's more efficient. I know how that goes. I can do that really fast.

but then he was showing me around in Great Suite, and within 10 minutes my mind was blown because I love software that facil facilitates me to take on bigger projects, better projects to grow, to spend less resources, to spend less time, to not have to install a gazillion plugins because it's all there.

And then he showed me the way around the block editor. And the thing is, someone asked me recently, are you all against page builders now? And then I'm said, no, I'm for accessibility. So I stopped Thomas at some point because my, I was like dancing inside. And then I thought, oh, I'm going to be disappointed if I get a bad answer for this.

And I'm like, Thomas, is the output of your product? Is that accessibility ready? And he honestly said. I don't know what you mean. And I found that so refreshing because oftentimes I get another response, I'm, a bit blown off. It's people don't know. And he's can you show me? So I made him tab around their own website, created with Great Sweet.

And he said, I don't know where I am. And I said, yes, exactly, because you said the outlines to a setting that it's not supposed to be. And then I gave him the $1 million talk that I always give, like why accessibility is important, but also why accessibility is important for your conversions and for your sales, because you get a bigger audience.

Simple as that. And so he, took that back to the office and he spoke to the team. And to make a real long story short, it became a, digital love affair. And, yeah, this year I joined them as their accessibility coach. So I'm guiding them and, I just love it because I sat down with Jacob and instead of getting a lot of resistance that I usually get, we were running through the site with a screen reader and every time it got stuck, Jacob was like, oh, let me look in the inspector.

Oh, that's where it gets stuck. Oh, nice. Oh, that, oh, that's not so hard to solve. And

[00:28:43] Jakob Trost: which actually it actually taught us a lot,

[00:28:45] Anne Bovelett: yeah.

[00:28:45] Jakob Trost: to be honest.

[00:28:47] Anne Bovelett: And this is a dream to work with a team. That is so open to this and so willing to work on this and has such a brain because like I said, I am H-T-M-L-C-S-S girl, but I'm not a hardcore developer. And, Jacob sometimes has to put the brakes on me and says, you don't have to find us all the code and you just have to tell me it's getting stuck here and you need to use this or this AR area label or whatever, or use another one.

So that's, a very, joyous job. And there's something I'd like to say because, recently some people said to me, oh yeah, the site from Greyd is not, accessible yet, not fully. And I'm like, yeah, because they're working on the product first. They're doing it good for their customers, and now next comes their new website, which is going to be fully accessible.

So that's great. We're working on that. And

[00:29:52] Nathan Wrigley: is? Sorry, I apologize,

[00:29:54] Anne Bovelett: no, Go ahead.

Ask question because otherwise I will never stop

[00:29:57] Nathan Wrigley: oh, I see. Okay. Okay. In that case, I will, ask a question. Was this a question then of, iterating back to them? You've obviously now joined forces and this is an iterative process. There's not this, okay, it's a hundred percent or nothing.

It's let's do what we can, let's take advice from Anne's gonna keep looking, digging in, finding the problems that we have, got, and, then do them one at a time. criticism where criticism is due, but not, look, it's not a hundred percent, so it's not worth looking at. It's more, okay, we're gonna work on this

[00:30:31] Anne Bovelett: It's always a work in progress. This is something a lot of people do not understand about accessibility because all they see is this wall of trouble coming towards them. because. This is something, we inherited in the WordPress community. it's a trauma actually, because we learn you can buy a theme and you can create a website even if you don't know what you're doing, you fill in the content and it's perfect.

So we live in a all in one culture, which is, really sad because accessibility really proves that this is, represented in several disciplines. And just like Jacob said before, if it's technically accessible, which is the accessibility ready state that some themes get, in, in the repo for example, it is still the user that has to be a alert that he's or she's not making that site inaccessible again by either choosing the wrong colors or, thinking like, oh, I really like this very tiny, thin font because I'm 22 and I can see everything.

or, yeah.

[00:31:48] Nathan Wrigley: Where are you?

[00:31:49] Anne Bovelett: Yeah. Or yeah, or these people who, think a lot of animation that looks really professional, which like chases off about 10% of your visitors and they don't have to be even be impaired. It's just irritating. yeah. And then they asked me one day, what do you want?

You've been helping us so much, what do you want? And I said, I have a dream. I dream of a plugin inside your product that if anyone installs great suite, it's going to ask you. So what we're gonna do today, I. WC level, AA or wic, CEC level aa, or do you want a mix between both? aaa, wherever we can, we are still developing that and that it's going to guide you because there's already the accessibility checker from Equalized Digital, which is fantastic for checking your content and helping you with that.

but if you are designing a website and you're dragging in a slider that plugin is going to tell you, oh my, you want to drag in a slider? Are you sure? Do you know there are alternatives to that? You could do this and this and this, and that was my dream. And that dream is coming true. building

[00:33:22] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. This story could have had such a boring end if you'd said, oh, and they decided not to. They

[00:33:28] Anne Bovelett: I don't, I'm, you know, what, Nathan? A lot of people, think I'm really fast in my brain, but I rarely, recognize sarcasm. So I'm also not very good at sarcasm myself.

[00:33:41] Nathan Wrigley: But I'm, pleased about that. But let me just, take you back on that journey then. when you were looking at their, product and you saw the bits and pieces that needed to be done, and we can get into this plugin, which, is gonna prompt you for the, Wagg 2.2 2.0 or 3.0, guidelines and what have you.

But if you were to be in, let's say that I go to Greyd Suite and as a customer, okay, yes, there's the accessibility of their website, but let's just put that to one side for a moment. Let's imagine that I've bought the, suite of plugins. I've downloaded them, I'm using them to build websites for me and other people.

That's the bit that I think most of the audience will. Care more about is what do I see? So what are the things that are gonna become or are available to me in Greyd suite, which potentially didn't exist until you got your, way or gave your advice. What are the kind of things that we're seeing?

What, are the boxes, what are the options that are in there now that, that bring it towards accessibility, compliance?

[00:34:43] Anne Bovelett: I love this question because you shouldn't see those.

[00:34:47] Nathan Wrigley: do you know that I, I did wanna frame the question that way, but then I thought, how would we, yeah.

[00:34:53] Anne Bovelett: not

[00:34:54] Nathan Wrigley: keep going on that, then

[00:34:55] Anne Bovelett: because accessibility should never be optional and it's under the hood, the accessibility readiness is something you do not get to influence as a user. This is what the, developers do. And there, I know there is only one, one thing in Great Suite currently, and this is because of backwards compatibility.

And that doesn't need to change because we don't need to go nitpicking. It's from the old days, the old text, I recently released a blog article about that, where I wrote Great Suite improved on Old Text because for years, customers have asked Great Suite, man, our SEO people are yelling at us because we didn't make any old text.

Can you automate that for me? And it had been automated to, be the file name. And this is an honest, this is

[00:35:53] Jakob Trost: this, the, last FBE is the file name?

[00:35:56] Anne Bovelett: Yeah. But this is such an honest, mistake because. There are so many developers out there who don't know this. And, I wrote, I, write so many articles. I wrote another article about that.

I wrote an article that says, there is no shame in having an inaccessible website. there is if you know what accessibility is and that you should do something about it, but until you don't know you're getting punished for something you don't know. I don't know what that was like for you in school, but I had a kid next to me in school who would pull all kinds of crap and then he would make a stiff face when the teacher was watching and then everybody thought it was me and I was put in the corner.

I hated that feeling and. We should be coming from the positive. It's so hard, to, stay inspired. If people come to you and say, ah, you're so stupid. You're making mistakes. You should know this and you should know that. But fact is that about 96% of all websites currently in the top million, they tested, I think they tested it in top million, but I think it's all sites is not fully accessible or, in German, they have a nicer word for that.

I don't know the British or English equivalent for that because we say, you have free of barriers in German Barre and we can say Barra arm, it means as few barriers as possible

[00:37:33] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, we'll go with that. Sounds about right.

[00:37:36] Anne Bovelett: because 100% accessible doesn't exist. It

[00:37:40] Nathan Wrigley: So the in, so sorry. So the intention then is to. It's to have this happen automatically. So if you're building your website and you're using Greyd suite, you okay, you are making some assumptions as a user of Greyd suite that this is being handled on the backend. But, if you are conscious of accessibility and you want to know that this has been handled, which I guess everybody would like every bit of software to handle it automatically for you, what are the bits and pieces?

And this could go to Jacob or it could go to Anne. What are the bits and pieces that you have taken care of, which are happening automatically? And is there a communication to somebody on the backend that this has been happened? That has been done on your behalf? Or has the automation just been completely disguised and so

[00:38:27] Anne Bovelett: it's just that. So, would you like to tell, say something about semantic, HTML Ja, Jacob, or should I,

[00:38:35] Jakob Trost: Oh, you can go ahead.

[00:38:38] Anne Bovelett: there is something called semantic, HTML. Okay. Now, this may sound very, very aggressive, but, if I call out the group of script kitties, okay? The young people that do not go to school to learn about this, who just learn about this by themselves, they're doing the best they can, but they're not walking into the info of accessibility.

And then they start using frameworks that are not accessibility ready, and then they start using divs and spans. Now inaccessibility, there is the, semantic elements or elements like header, footer, main regions, article, all of that, and those button, for example, same thing. Those elements are the roadmap for existing technology.

Okay?

[00:39:34] Jakob Trost: that's actually what Anne really told us because at first we thought, okay, we, we are probably good when it comes to accessibility, but we never really knew what it meant to be accessible. So Anne really went ahead and, teach us like, okay, you have to do this and that and see when you're using a screen reader, if you using the keyboard only just to navigate through your sites, what you have to do and what, where are the points where you actually have to be able to see where you are and be able to hear where you are as well.

Like all these different things. And that's what. Teach us. And then we went ahead and optimized all our blocks, all our output, everything that is output on the front end is fully accessible already. So we made sure that all the aerial labels were correct, that all the semantic HTML WA was correct.

Actually, we didn't do too much because we were all right. I would say, we were not great, but we were all right. and then we went ahead and built all that. And now everything that is output on your website is accessibility ready. But at the end of the day, you still need as a user to give.

Accessible input because if you type in colors that are white on white or green on red or whatever you wanna do, then this is not accessible. And in the block editor out of the box that these color countries, might be hard to see, for example. And you can always go ahead and change the diff element, the semantic element of your groups.

You can go ahead and type in your area labels if you want to type in them manually, but we take care of everything out of the box. But if you're not, if you're not, filling in your alt text of your images, for example, Ann mentioned that earlier, then I. This image will not be that accessible anymore. we automated that in the past by having fallbacks, having the title attribute and having then at the end of the day, the file name, which was really great for, s se SEO.

a lot of our customers told us, ah, great, we're getting way better results. And everything has an alt tag. Yeah, great. Okay. And yeah, but at the end of the day, that was actually terrible for accessibility because if the file name is called like screenshot, from 12th of September of 2022, that doesn't really say

[00:41:44] Anne Bovelett: And, it's bad for SEO it was only good for percentages. there is this, is a horrible psychology, right? You know about site speed. Everybody's trying to get their sites to a hundred percent, absolutely nuts. and the same is with these SEO tools that say, oh, your SEO score is now 68, because there are alt texts missing.

But, those tools do not look at the quality of alt tax. And if you have a web shop and you put in a ton of T-shirts. And the file names for the T-shirts is one dash XY whatever serial number dot jpeg, and the screen reader is seeing that. So is Google. Google is blind.

[00:42:33] Nathan Wrigley: So, you've, so this advice came from Anne. It went over to Greyd suite and you, instead of having a button, which was, I don't know, a diviv with a background color applied to it or something like that, you've gone and you've made it a button. You've made all of the bits and pieces, all of the blocks that you can throw in that are part of Greyd suite have appropriate given how they're intended to be used.

They have appropriate semantic, HTML, obviously you could misuse them

horribly if you wish, but that's on you. but it's semantic. So somebody, for example, with a screen reader can go on their journey through that page and hopefully be able to discover that. Okay, this is in fact a button.

This is an image, and I have some intuition now about what that image has, in it, and so on and so forth. So all of that has been handled in the backend. But if you were to, if you were to want to hijack one of your blocks, you still provide the fields so that you could, for example, change the area label or something like that.

If you wish. Those options are available, but you don't necessarily need to use them in a typical use case.

[00:43:35] Jakob Trost: Exactly, and it goes way further. buttons and images are the, most basic things, but if you want to include popups, pop over dropdowns, some, clickable bo boxes with a lot of content in it and everything, you have a lot of issues when it comes to accessibility. And we learned a lot digging through the pages with screen readers, together with Anne, and then iterated on that process and thought, okay, this is a way to build it better.

Okay, this is accessible in that case, but not in this, yeah. And when it comes to forms, for example, we discussed forms earlier, but when it comes to forms and we have a lot of. Custom functionalities, inside forms, you can make some little image tiles. Then you can select like a radio button. We have custom multi-select dropdowns.

and you have to make sure all those are accessible because at the end of the day, those are not native, not necessarily native, HTML elements that are already there in every browser. You have to build them yourself. You can build them with JavaScript, but you have to make sure that they are accessible and that is the

[00:44:32] Anne Bovelett: that is.

[00:44:33] Jakob Trost: or we build.

[00:44:34] Anne Bovelett: yeah. And when you extend, they love to extend what they have. And and then they start ex extending and as soon as something gets extended, it has to go into review. And because it's not, oh, how do you say this in English? Jacob ish.

[00:44:55] Jakob Trost: No, I, don't know the word in English. I'm sorry.

[00:44:58] Anne Bovelett: It's not.

[00:45:00] Nathan Wrigley: I can't help.

[00:45:01] Anne Bovelett: Okay, I'm going to say this nice. The assumption is the mother of all problems. Okay, let's do that. Nice. My friend. She's usually a little more rough than that, but you know what I'm getting at? So a block is extended and then a new developer works on it, maybe.

And, he's, he or she's maybe not looking at how it was done originally can happen. We're all human, and then it goes into review, and then maybe we find something again that says, oh, this extension is really cool, but check it out. Look at this and this. Because it's always a work in progress.

It's progress over perfection, always.

[00:45:44] Nathan Wrigley: Anne, how would you rate the progress of what, your endeavor is at Greyd three? Are you still working on the low hanging fruit here, or are we really like digging into the edge cases now?

[00:45:55] Anne Bovelett: We are now. We are now. We are now getting into digging into the edge cases. Yeah.

[00:46:02] Nathan Wrigley: And

[00:46:02] Jakob Trost: we're trying to build and we are now building the tool, and told you about educating the user because the first step was to make sure that everything that is output is actually accessible. But as I've told you, if the input is terrible, then the YE output probably is not accessible at all.

So now we are taking one step further and educate the user as they build their website or setting up everything. To maybe not do it this way. For example, like one of the best examples is sliders. If you wanna build in sliders on your website, then you probably just shouldn't. from, an accessibility standpoint and honestly from a designer perspective as well, we are in 2023.

so maybe get rid of the sliders. but anyway, you can educate the user while they're trying to, input the slider and maybe just show them examples. for example, you can alternatively just fit in a query loop and display randomly one of the most read posts, for example, instead of just having five posts because nobody's looking at the, second, and obviously not at the third

[00:47:07] Anne Bovelett: Yeah. Or get it to change on reload, for example.

[00:47:10] Jakob Trost: Yeah, that's what, I mean. Like randomly changing it on reload to having one of the most read posts up, up there, for example.

[00:47:17] Nathan Wrigley: How will that, sorry, sorry to interrupt. How will that, in interact with you? So let's imagine that you've got Gray Suite installed, you've got Ann's, plugin, I'm calling it Anne's

[00:47:28] Anne Bovelett: that's a lot of honor.

[00:47:30] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. That plugin. That plugin. Yeah. how will it inter, how will it interact with me, if I'm about to drop in a slider, how does it say, whoa, steady?

where, how does it do that?

[00:47:42] Jakob Trost: Yeah. First of all, you have to decide, so what we're trying to build is we have to decide at the start what you wanna do. You want to be accessible, but if it you want to, don't wanna overextend it or you wanna make sure it 100% has to be accessible. Like

[00:47:56] Nathan Wrigley: So if you're, like, if you're like a government website in the uk, you're

[00:47:59] Anne Bovelett: can I step in here just quickly? Just quickly. you can throw the government website out the window. As of June, 2025, the European Accessibility Act is going to be, enforced, in, in, in a form where if you have a shop, if you build a new WA shop after 2025, it has to be fully accessible.

All right? I'm not saying AA accessible, but AA standards, there's three standards. There's a, it is the minimum. AA is, so a, if, your website is not even a. It's unusable. You can put it on fire and torch it and throw it out the window. if it is aa, it is quite accessible. AAA is a standard that is incredibly high.

and people often say, oh, those are the most boring websites, Yeah. The government websites, the tax office website. but AAA is, has a lot more, rules like also for language and these things. But the best way to go about it when you create new websites or shops or do a relaunch, and really, I hope a lot of people will do a relaunch because they will be in a lot of trouble in 25 if they don't.

is, I'm totally lost my thread. Welcome to A DHD people. Hello.

[00:49:30] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Okay. let's go back to Jacob. In that case, he was talking about how this, I was calling it Anne's plugin, about how Anne's plugin is going to interact and get in the way of you making, blunders. So you'd got into the point where you pick how accessible you wanna be, and then Yeah.

Go from there.

[00:49:49] Jakob Trost: we will make sure to have Anne's name as an

Easter X number

[00:49:52] Anne Bovelett: no.

[00:49:53] Jakob Trost: code, but at the end of the day, it should be a native functionality of Greyd C. So you're trying to decide first of what you wanna build. So pretty much I wanna be accessible, but not too hard, not overextend, or I want to make sure to be accessible.

And if you select the first option, then you are, as soon as you try to include a slider or try to link an entire box or something like this, which is usually terrible for accessibility, then a prompt, shows up there says, okay, you should maybe do this better. Here's an article to describe how you can do that.

And then we make block transformations in the block literature to easily convert your link box to a basic group with a link in the bottom, for example, or to convert this slider into a default query loop with, which only shows one post, but randomly sorted. And just once every time you reload the page, for example, so you can automatically.

Click, okay, I want to use that alternative. And then it transforms you. It transforms the content into the alternative, display of it. And the second,

[00:50:53] Nathan Wrigley: oh, no, you please carry on. Carry on.

[00:50:54] Jakob Trost: Yeah. And the second alternative is when you want to go really accessible, and then we just get rid of the options. So you cannot

[00:51:02] Nathan Wrigley: Right.

[00:51:03] Jakob Trost: insert a slider.

And if you already have, then we make sure the frontend output is not a slider pretty much.

[00:51:09] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, okay. So that's interesting. That's really fascinating and it makes it really straightforward. when you were saying all of that, I, dunno if you remember those cartoons from like the 1950s where there's a little angel standing on your shoulder and it's just whispering in your ear. This is like your website accessibility angel, which is just going, wait a minute, what the heck?

So every time you try to do something where there's an opportunity of going in the wrong direction, it's gonna say, okay, here's some advice as to a better way to do it. But if you toggle on the, I want to be aaa, it's just gonna be, I'm sorry, that button doesn't even exist anymore.

You can't get to that block anymore because we know that this is fraught with problems.

[00:51:52] Jakob Trost: Yeah. trip AAA depends on a lot of other things as well. Like you have to really transcript every video and everything, and we cannot really make sure of that from a website

[00:52:01] Anne Bovelett: but rule, of thumb is try to make some, if you would choose, say, okay, I want to be into level aa. any element that could be made aa like color contrasts, for example. It should be aaa, but this is something the tool has to guide the user on, and this is why it would be so great to use this in conjunction with the accessibility checker from Equalize Digital, for example.

And the goal is to keep people coming from Yes. Not from, no

[00:52:35] Jakob Trost: Yeah. If you, yeah, we're really trying to educate Instead of having a test after you build a website that just says, you're wrong there, Which is frustrating, and we're trying to educate and say, maybe if you build like this, it is not the best way. Maybe you just build it like that.

[00:52:50] Nathan Wrigley: That's why I use the little cartoon angel analogy, because in those cartoons there's always the angel on one shoulder, and then there's the devil on the other shoulder, and the devil's the, you don't want to hear about the devil's doing your head in. You don't want to hear about that, but the angel saying, ah, this would be nice.

How about trying this way? And here's some helpful guidance as to how to do it. I'm guessing, given that, it's interacting on a pretty technical level with the, suite of things that you've got, I'm guessing it's gonna be bound in with Greyd suite. It's not gonna be something which you could install alone.

Yeah.

[00:53:22] Jakob Trost: no. We cannot achieve everything. Like we cannot convert every slider plugin out there to be a basic query block. that's, we could, but we don't have the resources to hire a million

developers

[00:53:35] Nathan Wrigley: yeah. Good. Good

[00:53:36] Jakob Trost: No. But like with everything we know, and we are focused on the core and on all blocks, and we can make sure in all of these blocks and all of these outputs, we can make sure that it's accessible.

[00:53:47] Nathan Wrigley: wait, so you said core blocks, you're gonna, it's gonna, it's gonna map to those

[00:53:50] Jakob Trost: Yeah. Oh, I haven't mentioned that yet. But, we always trying to use the core blocks wherever we can. So we are, instead of creating, for example, a custom headline block, we trying to use the core block and giving some more options,

[00:54:04] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, so you augment

[00:54:05] Jakob Trost: then we, yeah. Yeah. So we have the, obviously that's hard to, like cha it's challenging to stay,

[00:54:13] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, is

[00:54:14] Jakob Trost: and ahead of whatever, every feature that comes out because you for example, a year ago to having margins in a headline was something we built on top because you needed margins.

But nowadays it's, yeah, it's there, but you have to make sure that you're always like, compare, compatible with what the core does and everything. But we trying to use it because at the end of the day, if you are getting rid of our product, you still wanna keep your content and your content should be as core and as close to the core as possible.

And that's what we always trying to do because as I. Talked in the beginning and spoke, in the beginning about that. We are thinking the core at some point will have all those options that you need for a professional website. So we don't, you don't need us for that much on this part of, building your websites.

You don't need us for that, that much anymore. So if we are now focusing on core blocks, we have the possibility to just get rid of our custom extensions because at the end of the day, we don't wanna do so much custom extensions. We wanna focus more on delivering and managing hundreds of websites, and we don't wanna focus on giving the headline a margin option.

that's not really what accelerates your

[00:55:20] Nathan Wrigley: yeah. Okay. That's really interesting. 'cause that gives me some sort of intuition as to what the company is as a whole, okay. That's brilliant. The, the, whole piece that you just said about keeping up as well. Yeah. If you've got your own suite of blocks and core blocks are just getting better and better over time, it does seem like a.

Kind of a bit of a race to the bottom there, doesn't it? You're just constantly trying to iterate on what somebody else is already trying to achieve. So one thing that an Anne mentioned at the beginning, and I'm curious, and this'll probably given the time constraints that we got, this will probably have to be the last thing, Anne, in her introduction, she ended it off with.

Something along the lines of, and you can make money from your websites. And I'm curious about this because if you were to rewind the clock five years, forgive me Anne. I think what I'm about to say is true. Nobody was talking about accessibility and if they were, it was really edge case. there were maybe a handful of very quiet chats somewhere online in the dark corners of the web.

Now it's a massive thing. Ann just mentioned that in 2025, legislation, across Europe is gonna come in, compelling you to do things that you perhaps have not been compelled to do before. And so that brings to mind the question of money as an agency tools, which enable you to say. Okay.

Accessibility. We are on it. They're gonna become more and more valuable in your arsenal of things that you are gonna use. So I, dunno if we want to, I, I don't really know where that goes, but just let's talk around that. The fact that this is going to become an increasingly important thing for you as a person selling your services, but also from the purchaser's point of view, the person buying the website, they're gonna become more and more interested in asking the question, will my site be access

on the day you ship it?

So let's just get into that. Whoever wants to take it.

[00:57:12] Anne Bovelett: Oh, I would happily take that. Happily. Let me start off with another, with another anecdote. it's the one that is on the front page of my website. It's this British supermarket, that invested in accessibility. And people were telling me, oh, accessibility. That's woke. I hate that word. It's woke. I, let's not go into that, but they said, oh yeah, this is this modern thing.

We never heard of this before. And then I tell them, there's this British supermarket that invested 35,000 pounds into an accessible web shopper to making it more accessible. And it got them 13 million pounds additional revenue every year. And they didn't even do the whole thing. They only, optimized towards a certain audience, visually impaired audience.

Now, I love to whack people in their face with that case when they say, like, why should I make something accessible? Or if a web store owner comes to me and says, my people are telling me I should talk to you about accessibility, but why would I do that? My web shop is doing fine. I'm doing 1.2 million a year.

And then I tell him, my condolences. And they're like, what? And I said, okay. And I'll ask them, go ahead and try and buy a product on your own website, just using your keyboard, just using tab and shift tab and space bar and enter, because that's basically all you need. Maybe your arrow keys, Yeah. You, need your arrow keys as well.

But that's it. And I'll happily repeat that. Tap key shift tap to go back. Space bar and arrow keys. Okay. Remember, I'm a kid. I was born in the seventies, in the eighties when we started playing with computers, we had to do everything my keyboard, remember?

[00:59:16] Nathan Wrigley: Oh yeah.

[00:59:17] Anne Bovelett: Yeah. But the new generation doesn't know about that.

Now, I will ask a web shop owner who's just been bragging me about the one point so much million, turnover he or she's making. I'll say, okay, go buy. Go buy a product by keyboard. And, I, can't, I don't see where I'm at or, whatever. They will usually get into trouble. I said, the percentage of people that need to use a keyboard because they broke their arm because they don't have arms, because they have an inflammation, because they have a tremor because they're old.

I know people our age, Nathan, that don't know how to use a mouse still. we're always assuming that these people are not visiting our website, but they are. And the same is with people using screen reading technology and assistive technology is not just about screen readers and keyboard. There is so much assistive technology out there.

just two days ago I got a demo from Fel from the Alley Collective. She showed us how you can navigate your website just by voice on the Mac.

[01:00:25] Nathan Wrigley: Oh wow. That's

[01:00:27] Anne Bovelett: That is just whoa. That's so cool. And then I'm going to ask people, if, I will ask, one in 12, born male is colorblind, one in 12, that's 8%.

Now you have this big web shop with all these beautiful boy stuff, boys' clothings, men's clothing, colorful stuff. And then I'll put on, an app. I, it's called Sim Dalton. You could also do this in your browser by the way that shows them what the experience is of someone who is colorblind.

And then if you web shop, if your color filter relies on color alone and not, doesn't have the text for the colors written on the, on those swatches,

[01:01:16] Jakob Trost: For example, if you have a, if you have a small form on your website, you check out after you, if you wanna buy a product and you check out and you just didn't fill in a required field, and the only thing that actually prompting you is a red, loud line, and you're colorblind that. And yeah, okay, what do I need to do?

I cannot click the button. It doesn't work. So you cannot actually see, you cannot actually see what you did wrong. And if you're not thinking about this, then you're losing customers. And actually 30% of, what age? and you told me the fact another couple of days ago, like around 30% of males about above, the age of 50 are having this, these kind of issues.

you're losing a lot of your target group. And for example, if you're selling, I don't know, Harley-Davidson, for example, the target group's probably not 22. The target group is way older than that. And if you're not thinking about that, you probably losing a huge chunk of your customers.

[01:02:10] Nathan Wrigley: One sale

[01:02:11] Anne Bovelett: Yeah. So that is common. Common, sense. And I could, this is actually a guest I can really recommend you to invite you podcast one day. His name is Vic. And, Lazar is the first blind speaking coach in the world, and he's also working on accessibility testing. and Lazar wanted to change banks.

Lazar is born fully blind now, like people think blind is, if you say blind people don't see anything, but the number of people that is born without vision, without light in their eyes at all is not that big. Okay? But he was born that way. And so he's been relying on screen readers ever since he was little.

He's much younger than we are and he's used to do, to race around on his Windows machine, and he can do so many things on the website, you won't believe it. And he was filling out this form and he wanted to move his whole stuff to another bank and he couldn't get the last. Checkbox to

check the last checkbox.

My bank here in Germany, I'm not going to name their name because they're gonna sue me, decided to change their banking app. Really fancy. Absolutely great. And I didn't know what they had changed. I was just a user at that moment and I wanted to make a monthly payment. And I was like, oh, the button got a lot bigger.

That's nice. And it didn't do anything.

It didn't do anything. I was like, what's this? It took me a couple of days to figure out that they had made this into a swiping button.

[01:04:03] Nathan Wrigley: A what

[01:04:04] Anne Bovelett: Yes. It was a swipe. You had to swipe it

[01:04:07] Nathan Wrigley: the heck? I've never even heard of a swiping bot. I know for to switch your iPhone off or

[01:04:14] Anne Bovelett: Yeah.

[01:04:14] Jakob Trost: Comparable to

[01:04:15] Anne Bovelett: Yeah,

but can you imagine, I'm working on the web, I am guiding people on creating apps on the functional designs of those, and it would never occur to me to make a swiping button

[01:04:26] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that's

[01:04:27] Jakob Trost: they probably did. They probably didn't have, you end to review their,

[01:04:31] Nathan Wrigley: That's

[01:04:32] Anne Bovelett: no, they didn't. Oh, that's not, no, that's the last thing I, would love to say is the, revenue from investing in accessibility will always be bigger, than your investment. Always. And one of the most important things you should never forget is to do user testing and pay your users. pay them.

Don't go around asking your deaf friends or your visually impaired friends or, whatever. can you do this for free? I'll give you a sandwich. that's bad practice.

[01:05:09] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Okay. We're, rounding up onto an hour now, so we'll, we'll have to knock it on the head there, but, yeah. Thank you so much. So my, my lasting shot here would just be, if anything that you've heard gives you, gives you the warm and fuzzy feeling that, Greyd suite are doing the right thing about accessibility, why not go and check 'em out?

Why not go and go to the URL Greyd G-R-E-Y-D? De go and check out the product and and yeah, know that in the back of your mind, the accessibility piece is being taken incredibly seriously. So it only remains for me to say, Jacob and Anne, really appreciate you being on the podcast today. Thank you so much for joining us.

I'll put your contact details into the show notes. Cheers.

[01:05:58] Anne Bovelett: And thank you for having us.

[01:06:01] Jakob Trost: Thank you.

[01:06:02] Nathan Wrigley: Well, I hope that you enjoyed that. Very, very nice chatting today with Jakob and Anne from a GREYD.SUITE, and learning all about the really substantial efforts that they've been putting in, to bring their entire platform inline with modern accessibility standards.

If you have any comments about that, please head over to WP Builds.com. Search for episode number 354. I'm begging you, please use the WordPress commenting system rather than going over to social media. It's lovely, given that we've got all of this fabulous commenting system in WordPress, please feel free to use it over there. That would be great.

The WPuildl's podcast is brought to you today by Omnisend. Omnisend the top rated email and SMS marketing platform for WordPress. More than a hundred thousand merchants use Omnisend every day to grow their audience and sales. Ready to start building campaigns that really sell? Find out more at www.omnisend.com.

And by GoDaddy Pro. GoDaddy Pro the home of managed WordPress hosting that includes free domain, SSL, and 24 7 support. Bundle that with The Hub by GoDaddy Pro to unlock more free benefits to manage multiple sites in one place, invoice clients, and get 30% off new purchases. You can find out more at go.me/wpbuilds.

And sincere thanks go to Omnisend and GoDaddy Pro for their support of the WP Builds podcast.

If you would like to support the WP Builds podcast, it could be you, your product, or your service. Head over to WP Builds.com forward slash advertise to find out more.

Okay, as I said, at the top of the show, we're having a couple of weeks off for Christmas. We will be back on Thursday, the 4th of January, 2024. But don't forget head over to WP Builds.com forward slash schedule, and you can see that we have a lots going on prior to Christmas. Every single thing that we do that's live can be found at wpbuilds.com forward slash live. Don't forget the calendar enables you to put the bits and pieces into your calendar of choice.

So really that's all I've got. I hope that you have enjoyed the podcast over 2023. There is a tear in my eye, as we say goodbye, kinda, sort of, a bit, to David Waumsley. But as I said, we'll be back in the new year with a new show, which I'll put in the WP Builds feed so can get a flavour of what all of that's about.

But I hope that you have a lovely holiday season. Take care. Bye-bye for now. Here comes some AI generated cheesy music.

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Nathan Wrigley
Nathan Wrigley

Nathan writes posts and creates audio about WordPress on WP Builds and WP Tavern. He can also be found in the WP Builds Facebook group, and on Mastodon at wpbuilds.social. Feel free to donate to WP Builds to keep the lights on as well!

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