358 – Exploring web accessibility: a conversation with Gen Herres

[00:00:00] Nathan Wrigley: Hello there and welcome once again to the WP Builds podcast, you have reached episode number 358. Entitled exploring web accessibility. A conversation with Jen Harris. It was published on Thursday, the 25th of January, 2024. My name's Nathan Wrigley, and I'll be joined in a few minutes by Jen, but before then, a few tiny bits of housekeeping, if you're into what WP Builds does, we would really appreciate it.

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Okay. What have we got for you today? Well, as I said at the top, this is episode 358, and it's a conversation with Gen Herres all about website accessibility. Gen is a person that you should really take seriously. She spent a lot of time exploring and educating herself all about website accessibility. And in this episode we put a spotlight on the importance of this to all users and all creators of websites, whether or not you have a target audience of accessibility.

We talk about the importance of this going forward. Not just because of legislation, but because, perhaps it's the moral, and correct thing to do.

We talk about how your website can be impacted by making accessibility improvements. We talk about the career opportunities, which might be available for accessibility experts. And we also get into a project, a tool that Gen has created called easy ally guide. And we talk about how that will help you discover all of the different bits and pieces that you may need to know about websites that you're building.

There is an offer code mentioned in the podcast. I'm not a hundred percent sure if that will still be working. We recorded this episode a little while ago, and it was due to expire in 2023. I guess the best thing to do would be to contact Gen. You can find all the details in the show notes about where to get in touch with her, but I hope that you enjoy it.

I am joined on the podcast today by Gen Herres how are you doing, Gen?

[00:04:00] Gen Herres: Good. How about yourself, Nathan?

[00:04:01] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Good thank you. Gen and I have been having a lovely, chat prior to this recording, all about accessibility. And accessibility is indeed going to be the focus of the podcast today. Gen has got a lot to say. She's got a lot of experience and, some things that she's been building.

That she wishes to talk about as well. We'll have a more general chat about accessibility also, I guess prior to that, it's a, fairly bland opener, but I think it's important given that you are gonna be talking about accessibility, people are going to be listening and hopefully taking you as an authority on that.

The, opening question is give us your bio, tell us about you and, how come it is that you are interested in and authoritative about accessibility online.

[00:04:46] Gen Herres: All right, Nathan. So I started getting into WordPress development more than a decade ago, and at the beginning I made all the mistakes that everyone else makes, those horrible carousels, all sorts of. Arguably unreadable text and whatnot. And then around 2019, I met, Amber Hines and started to get a little interested in accessibility and what her company Equalized Digital was doing.

And I found that it was a rabbit hole and it was a rabbit hole that branched off in all different directions and. One of the things I like is going down random rabbit holes that branch off in all sorts of different directions. So I started learning more about it, started incorporating it into my processes, started discovering that it is really hard to get started in this. there are very few good checklists out there. There's checklists that say, here's the criteria, check each of them off. Okay, but how, and then you go down a path to find the understanding documents and you discover they're written at a PhD reading level and it's still not quite clear. So I, I started getting more involved.

I run the Baltimore WordPress meetup and I started, bringing in some guests onto there. I had, Colleen from. Oh, I can't remember the name of her company at the moment.

[00:06:24] Nathan Wrigley: It's okay.

[00:06:26] Gen Herres: but she came on and did an accessibility talk. I started to get involved in the WordPress accessibility Facebook group and just learned more and got more passionate about it.

And I've since become an equalized digital referral partner and. I have started doing a number of talks myself on the topic, including I just got back from speaking at, word camp US on accessibility and bringing it towards the beginning of the process so that it doesn't have to cost an obscene amount of money or cause dozens of hours of rework.

You can actually bring it forward and save yourself huge amounts of time, effort, and headache. So.

[00:07:15] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[00:07:16] Gen Herres: That's a little about me.

[00:07:17] Nathan Wrigley: Thank you. That's really interesting. I'm gonna ask you this question, but you feel free to decline to answer it if you wish, but I'm gonna ask it anyway. Did, this interest, was it spurred on by, something perhaps in your own life, maybe yourself or a relative, or was it literally that you were just fascinated by it and the, whole topic and the interest of it was?

Was just something that you found yourself captivated by as opposed to something that you needed to learn for your own personal, life, family member or something like that.

[00:07:50] Gen Herres: So it's, more of just an interest, but definitely some of the things that I've learned have, for example, helped my mom. She has, the muscles in her eyes are not the same lengths. So this can cause a twitch for her. If she, for example, were to use a poor quality computer monitor, literally she'll get a splitting headache, bordering and a migraine from having used that for even just an hour.

so some of the things that I've learned, I've been able to show her and for example, the select to speak, it's included in most browsers. You literally just select a block of text, right click and say, speak. And then the computer will speak it out to you. So I showed her how to configure her computer to pick out a voice that she liked, a speed that she liked, and she's loved it because it's, literally as simple as she selects a block of text, right click speak, and it just speaks it to her so she can just close her eyes and relax more.

[00:08:58] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that's really interesting, isn't it? Because I think a lot of people. really do, my main conduit for reading these days is the internet. It's very rare that I actually pick up a physical book or a newspaper, an actual physical newspaper. And, and I genuinely, until you told me about that, about eight minutes ago, I didn't even know that was a feature.

And yet there it is built into the core of all, I'm gonna say, all browsers or

[00:09:26] Gen Herres: Pretty much all browsers have it

[00:09:28] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. And it's just a fabulous feature, isn't it? really interesting the idea. You just highlight a piece of text and get the computer to read it in a voice of, your choosing,

[00:09:38] Gen Herres: Yes.

[00:09:38] Nathan Wrigley: depending on where you are in the world, you may have a preference as to what you want to hear, spoken back to you, but, okay, so that's really interesting.

So that although it wasn't necessarily for a personal need, it very quickly became apparent to you that there were. People in your immediate environment who could benefit from that. One of the things that I always think is really challenging and I realize that we could probably spend the next six hours answering the next question, so we're gonna have to do some fine cherry picking and pick off some low hanging fruit or some use cases which are typical.

I wonder if you could give us some information about the kinds of things that accessibility covers. So maybe I'll rephrase that question. I approach the computer, I have full use of my hands, my eyes work, my ears work. I can get myself to the computer using my own feet. What I'm basically trying to say is I have no. There's just nothing about the internet, a computer, a mobile phone, anything which I struggle with. It's all available to me with great ease. So I thank myself incredibly lucky for that. But what are the scenarios that people are facing, which are different to that? And maybe we could just pick two or three that you've found to be possibly the most persuasive given that we're gonna talk about why you need to adapt your websites.

[00:11:01] Gen Herres: Yes. So the first thing is who benefits from accessibility? And this is basically the business case for making a website more accessible. And the answer is everyone. For example, you have probably encountered a website that had light gray text or yellow text on a white background, and you went, wow, this is so hard to read.

that's a violation of the WIC a G or web content accessibility guidelines. Poor contrast text is not permitted. when we fix the contrast of the text, we just made this website better for everyone. Everyone instantly benefited. Another example is someone who like yourself, fully able. What happens when you go take your smartphone outside on a bright, sunny day?

[00:11:59] Nathan Wrigley: Oh yeah. Yeah.

[00:12:01] Gen Herres: it can be a really, there are some websites that I've tried to look at on my phone when I'm outside and I'm like. I just can't read this. I, just can't, and I have 2020 vision. I have perfect color vision. I don't have any visual issues, but I literally can't read that on my smartphone.

And what happens when I can't read it? I click the browser back button, I'm gone. So the basics of accessibility really help everyone. As we start to get into more specific people and more specific issues. In the United States, about 79% of adults, which is the target market for most people. 79% of adults need some sort of vision correction, and that means that there's a time during the day that they remove that vision correction.

And what happens when someone who's farsighted. Doesn't have their reading glasses on and tries to look at your website and you have little tiny text. They can't read it. It's that simple.

[00:13:11] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[00:13:13] Gen Herres: what happens when someone's just tired at the end of a day and they have a headache and. You just have a poor user interface and they just can't find what they're looking for, and they just wanna order pizza for dinner for crying out loud.

They just need food. And it's confusing, like they're, done with, effort for the date. they just want in front of them. Make it simple. By using a lot of the accessibility guidelines and the accessibility principles, making things just significantly easier to use you, you help the person who has a headache.

You help the mother of a screaming toddler with an ear infection, figure out how to get the medicine the doctor told her to pick up at the drugstore. you help people when they are not perfect because. People aren't perfect. People don't live in a perfect world. People don't live in perfect situations.

They have challenges and struggles, and if you make it more accessible, if you follow more of the guidelines and more of the principles, you make the internet better for everyone, including the imperfect people in the imperfect situations.

[00:14:32] Nathan Wrigley: I've never heard it described thus, and I really like. That there was something incredibly powerful. There was a sentence and I was desperately trying to hold onto it, but then I started listening to what the rest of what you had to say. But there was something about 30 seconds ago that you said, and it was really, it was perfect.

something along the lines of

[00:14:50] Gen Herres: People aren't perfect.

[00:14:51] Nathan Wrigley: yeah. But, also, it, yeah. it, that's just such a great, elucidation of what we're talking about. That's some of the low hanging fruit. But you, talked about, the fact that there's, WCAG guidelines, and maybe we'll get into the whole, the, legal framework around this, because I, feel that's quite important.

So 190 plus countries in the world, each doing their own thing. we've obviously got some guidelines which are intended to be more international. By the way, I will link to these all in the show notes, but, you are looking for basically a w cag, W CAG. You could probably Google that and see where it gets you.

but. I'm just wondering what the, compulsion is here. One of the, one of the lovely things about using WordPress is that anybody can pick it up and start designing a website, and you don't have to have somebody who is a air quote pro sitting over your shoulder. You can do it all by yourself.

That of course, means that you may put the pale yellow on the white background because for some reason that's a color combination that is just lovely for you, and it all works out well. But. I do wonder what the legal constraints are. I feel that if we went back 10 years, there were probably almost none.

But I feel that in 2023 when we're recording this, litigation seems to be starting up. It seems to be that there's a bit, of ambulance chasing, if you know what that phrase means. all of that going on. So just paint the picture of maybe the legal imperatives of why this

[00:16:27] Gen Herres: In terms of the legal aspects, what has happened is that in the us in the late 20 teens, the US Department of Justice stopped prosecuting, websites for lack of accessibility. At the time, they had gone after some very large, big enterprise sites, so this left it to the civil suits. And so in the US.

These civil suits have gone up hugely since about 20 17, 20 18. They have gone up and they have been steadily, increasing. And these civil suits started out with the largest, biggest, fortune 500. And then they have been moving to smaller and smaller websites, leaning more towards e-commerce than just brochure.

But this is pushing accessibility. The US Department of Justice is also pushing forward some rules, which will hopefully come out soon. That will affect not just federal websites, because in the US federal websites such as White house.gov, or the US Department of justice.gov, those websites need to comply with certain accessibility rules.

Then the new set of guidelines is going to be directed at state and local, so that is going to affect a whole bunch of websites, and I am desperately hoping that they will finally fix the Maryland income tax website so that the cancel button is not in the bottom right, just as big as every other button, so that you don't accidentally click it all the time. Not that's ever been a problem for me. So then we moved to, what has happened with the civil suits in nearly every civil suit in the past couple of years. We're talking, basically 20 21, 22, 23 when something has gone to a settlement. Or a judge. What has happened is that the website has to agree to become compliant with wic.

A G 2.1 level double A. That is basically considered the standard, and coming out at the end of 2023 will be WIC a G 2.2 level aa. And these are the standards that are maintained by the W three C or Worldwide Web Consortium. Going to Canada, they have the, Ontarians with Disabilities Act, and that is focused on accessibility in Canada, and that actually does require certain compliances, depending on the size of the company.

It's a little confusing. But, then over in Europe, the eu, EAA. Will be coming out in 2025, and the member states basically all got to write their own rules and publish them somewhere. Although it's been a bit difficult to get information on what each country has written as there are so many countries and so many languages, and there's no central repository.

But in 2025, those laws will all go into effect and they will specifically focus on, private sector, e-commerce. And they do also include an exemption for very small businesses. If I remember correctly, it's 10 employees is the threshold.

[00:20:14] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, so it's a different picture depending on the part of the world that you're in. Some. Countries, it sounds are more at the vanguard of this and are pushing it more heavily than others. It sounds like. Europe is. I guess if you are in a particular country, it may be relatively, more straightforward, shall we say, for you to track down the information about that.

But somebody's, somebody like you who's trying to paint a bigger picture, it's difficult to figure out what, I dunno, I'm just name a couple of countries what France are doing as opposed to what Germany and Poland and Estonia and Latvia, they're, they've all got something slightly different and I guess that makes the whole.

Puzzle a little bit more difficult. Then of course the, there's the international component as well, isn't it? Let's say, for example, you're over in Europe, but you're selling products to the USA. Let's use that as an example. That muddies the water a bit more because presumably the USA, the rules in the USA would also be needed from the site coming out of Europe.

[00:21:16] Gen Herres: Yes. because most countries in Europe have a legal agreement framework with the United States. People in the United States can sue people or companies in those other countries that are selling to the us.

[00:21:30] Nathan Wrigley: So how, realistic is the threat of legal action? We talked about ambulance chasing and all of that earlier. is it a growing problem? Do you have any data to point to the fact that, two years ago it was X through one year ago, it's y. It does it seem to be on the rise.

[00:21:48] Gen Herres: There, it is on the rise in terms of how likely are you to be sued. The odds are definitely much higher. If you are an e-commerce site. About 80% of the lawsuits are against e-commerce websites, so definitely your odds are higher for e-commerce, it's mostly about are you low hanging fruit or not.

The lawyers are literally giving lists of websites. That they're getting from all sorts of different sources. And they're saying, okay, here's a list of websites. Go through the list and tell us which ones are good candidates for lawsuits. So which ones have tons of errors and problems. And then they create the lawsuits and going after those sites with tons of errors and problems.

And for the most part, you're looking at companies that are making a million dollars plus a year, but. Small little b and bs in Iowa have been sued, so you're not totally safe, but the odds of you getting hit with a particular round of lawsuits is extremely low.

[00:23:02] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Okay. So that's interesting. And maybe that habit from the lawyers will ramp up, maybe it will go in the opposite direction. We don't know. But certainly, there, there's a chance. It doesn't matter where you are in the world, there is a chance. Okay. Given that obviously, We're not trying to scare anybody into doing this because there's an actual, there's an actual need for it to be done.

Despite the lawyers, we, I guess most people would prefer it phrased that way. So gi,

[00:23:29] Gen Herres: There's a business need

[00:23:30] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Okay. That's a, nice way of putting it. Yeah. So there's a business need for it as well as a moral, need for it. Gi, given that, and given that these lawyers may come after you and they've got a whole cavalcade of things that they can, check on the tick box to see whether you've done or you haven't done, what are some of the, what are the, some of the low hanging pieces of fruit, if you like?

that you could implement relatively quickly. Let's say that you allocate a few hours each week. What are the kind of things that a, novice coming to this would be, best spending their time on?

[00:24:08] Gen Herres: So number one is try to hit things that affect a lot of people. And the number one thing that affects a lot of people is, your web website legible? Are you using fonts and colors that are actually readable? You know the example of going outside in the bright sunlight? Can people actually read your website when they, take their dog to the dog park?

Because guess what, they're playing on their phones when they're there. So the first thing to do is definitely fonts and colors and make sure that your website is actually readable. I happen to have, a site and I happen to have some pretty easy to use DIY tools to set up your colors and fonts and help you pick those out.

The number two thing to do would be make sure right click works. The reality is there's a ton of useful, helpful tools that are available via right click and disabling that. Is a disservice to your customers. Then

[00:25:18] Nathan Wrigley: lots of websites do that, then That's curious. I'm

[00:25:21] Gen Herres: There are quite a few websites that do it. It's really very annoying.

[00:25:26] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that's peculiar. Anyway, sorry I interrupted you. Carry on.

[00:25:29] Gen Herres: then, move on to doing some, what's called keyboard testing.

This means use a keyboard and put your cursor into your little address bar where you have your URL, and then hit the tab key and you should start going through your site. It should give you a very clear outline showing you where exactly you are, so that you can visually see where you're at, you should be able to activate.

Links, for example, with the enter key on your keyboard, you should be able to use shift tab to go backwards. You should be able to make it through your forms. Even people who don't necessarily use keyboard navigation will commonly use it on forms. We have learned that you hit the tab key to move through your form,

[00:26:20] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[00:26:20] Gen Herres: and so that brings me to the next one.

Fix your forms. Let's say you have a form, it needs to have a label on top because. For example, I have been partway through filling out a form and then my dog barked because a package got delivered and it was of course her toys. So we had to open the package and we had to get out the new toys, and then I come back to my computer, after all that.

And if I don't have a clear label on each of the fields, I have no idea what I was doing.

[00:26:53] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Interesting.

[00:26:55] Gen Herres: the other thing is put all of your descriptions or your helper text above the input field. There are a bunch of form builders who by default put the description or the helper text below the form field.

[00:27:10] Nathan Wrigley: Oh

[00:27:12] Gen Herres: I use a, like many people, an autofill tool.

it helps me to not have to retype my entire address or my name. All those other things. what happens is the autofill always drops below the field, so if you have a description right there, it just got covered by your autofill. So that description is not remotely helpful to me at the moment.

it's a lot of those, simple things going through and hitting some of those. If you have an e-commerce site, make sure that you can make it through the whole e-commerce checkout process without using a mouse.

that, those, are the biggest, things you can hit early. And typically they're not massive undertakings.

[00:28:04] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that's really common sense stuff, isn't it? And thank you for doing that. So there's bound to be people listening to this who are really on the road with this. they know what you are talking about. Everything you've just described makes perfect sense to them, and there'll be other people who are, I've never really given this much thought at all.

So let's talk to those people. what's the kind of, I don't know if it's more of a sliding scale, but. could be that you are facing a cliff edge, you've done nothing. You're standing at the bottom of what will be the beginning of your accessibility journey. And right at the start, it looks like you've got a ton of things to do.

So you mentioned, okay, I've gotta update all my forms. I've gotta maybe fiddle with my fonts and color palette choices and all that. And, as we know, there's a lot more to it than that. Is there a, is there an amount that you should regard as well? I've started, I've, done something I, and I don't know what the legal stuff around that is.

if you can demonstrate that you've begun but you haven't quite finished. And I'm guessing this is a bit of a never quite finished job. It's constant tweaking. Like the

[00:29:12] Gen Herres: It's like SEO.

[00:29:13] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, the question is that really how much is enough? And there may not be an answer to that, but anyway, that's the

[00:29:23] Gen Herres: So the generally established, standard of what you quote unquote should be doing would be the WIC a level double A. So the current version is 2.1, but 2.2 will probably drop by the time this episode has been published. That's considered the standard, the bar to aim for. Now if you miss a couple of small things, will it probably matter?

Probably not. in terms of how much of an undertaking is this? it's a lot like SEO. If you bring an SEO professional in and ask them to do, one day of SEO, they will probably do a lot of work and. there's a decent chance that they will do a whole bunch of technical SEO. It'll be behind the scenes, but that will start to show rewards over time, even from just that, that one day of focused work.

If you, as someone with no experience in SEO were to try to do one day of work, you would basically spend the entire day learning.

Yes. If you were to bring someone in and have them do one day of work, for example, I do one day builds and I have literally, I built, the Canadian Blind Golf website in a day.

Yes, blind golf exists. There are people who are blind and golfing,

[00:31:01] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Nice.

[00:31:03] Gen Herres: but. I had them, they tested it afterwards and they didn't have issues and they had people from legally blind to completely, absolutely no vision at all. go through the website and they were not encountering issues. Does it absolutely meet 100% of WCAG perfectly?

No, it does not. But when people can actually use it and they make it through, then. Generally it's, good enough when you have a couple of people running through and testing and they're not encountering problems, and they're not encountering barriers to actually using the site. That is what most people will find to be good enough.

[00:31:49] Nathan Wrigley: I have a, question. given what you've just said about the fact that you were building that particular website, I'm curious as to whether you, since you've made this, a significant part of what you do. Has I. Has that paid off for your business? What I mean is have you managed to become, I dunno for want of a better word, consultant, is there consultancy work here?

In other words, in the same way that you can hire an SEO, and you can hire people to speed up your website optimization experts, is there a career path for somebody who is a, air quotes expert at accessibility online?

[00:32:32] Gen Herres: Yes, there definitely is. It definitely will be. You'll have far more opportunities if you can do, if you can say how to fix, if, you can just test. it's a pretty narrow market. There's not a lot of work. You would have to be working for a company that had a significant amount of work coming in.

But if you can say specifically how to fix, like this is what you have, this is what it needs to be, so that it works, right? There's a larger market for you. If you can go all the way to, I can actually implement it all for you. Then you have the, larger market and then there's one more step and that is accessibility monitoring.

So there are companies that are, being paid thousands a month to do accessibility monitoring, and that is very much out of the realm for. Average businesses, they, can't afford thousands a month for these kinds of services, but there are some new players coming in such as e qualify and I actually work with them on reporting and building more reporting systems.

We have some betas coming out, hopefully by Q1 of 2024. That we'll be able to help you have reports that are similar to SEO reports, so you'll actually be able to see your accessibility coverage and see that coverage over time. And that also does include some things, like some AI tools to do testing for your accessibility in addition to some of the existing products like the AX product and the Wave product.

[00:34:28] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, so you mentioned equality and there are hopefully the price point for that will be a little bit lower than the several thousand dollars that you mentioned. yeah. We'll wait, I'll link to that in the show notes. The, thing about that is, is that a, is that like a plugin inside a WordPress or is that like a SAS app, which is pinging your site and giving, scraping the data and giving you metrics about what you've done well or what you haven't done?

Well, I.

[00:34:53] Gen Herres: So right now it's available as a SaaS app, and it's also available open source, which you can install on your own server and do your own customizing with. Obviously, most people will not be in the position that they can install things on their own server and work with it, but the SaaS app will be coming with more features and more reporting, which will be available to wide range of people at, and their goal is very much to have.

An affordable price point so that small businesses are paying less than a hundred a month for this service and to be able to monitor and see what's going on with their websites. The United States Department of Justice is currently working on some rulemaking and in their initial notes, so this is not, dogma yet.

This is, their initial notes. They have said that showing. That you have an accessibility program and that you've been tracking and remediating over time may actually allow you to meet the Americans with Disabilities Act.

[00:36:01] Nathan Wrigley: Wait, hang on. That's interesting. okay, so you don't need, so my question earlier was about how far into that journey do you need to be to, be compliant? So that's, quite an interesting step change, isn't it? so long as you can prove that you are on the journey and that journey isn't stagnant.

It's not like you did something four years ago and then never did anything again. If you can prove that you are in the process and this continual endeavor to tweak things and monitor things and be alerted and then take action on them, that in itself could unhook you from the

[00:36:36] Gen Herres: So this, is not, this is their initial notes. This is not written into law yet, but we are very much hoping that this does get written into law as this would provide. a very good way to show that a website is committed to their accessibility, and it would also really deter the ambulance chasers from having a case.

[00:37:00] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, because you can begin tomorrow and do a bit, and then continue not this giant cliff edge as I was describing, where you've got so many things to do if you can prove that you're on that journey. Oh, that's really interesting. You mentioned SEO plugins before. I dunno if you mentioned SEO plugins, but certainly SEO got mentioned and we've all been to those plugins before where you, where you get the, sort of traffic like its effect of, on this particular page, your, your SEO endeavors are.

Probably not gonna bear you any fruit. It's red. But this page green, you're doing a great job over here. I dunno if there's any tooling like that you can Yeah. Interesting.

[00:37:39] Gen Herres: The, planned features for the e qualify will have a, basically more of a percentage done. So you have passed this percentage of tests, so you'll be able to see, even small amounts of progress going forward. Then there is the, Accessibility Checker plugin from Equalize Digital.

It is in both a premium version and a free version from the WordPress repository. They recently got some money from nasa, which is the United States Space Agency to make front end identification of errors. So they now have a front end widget, which will highlight on the front end where exactly the issue that they're currently flagging

[00:38:32] Nathan Wrigley: To you, the logged in user not

[00:38:34] Gen Herres: To you, the logged in

[00:38:35] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Okay, great.

[00:38:37] Gen Herres: to two administrators. Administrators get to see this, but this, and they do have a scoring system to show you that you ha that on this page you have passed this many of the tests.

[00:38:52] Nathan Wrigley: So we're really, I'm just getting the sense of a really maturing. industry built up around this. And we were saying a minute ago about how you in particular have discovered that there's, work to be had here. but it also seems that, in the future, in the same way that we are gonna be looking for SEO plugins for our website to improve all of that, these kind of tools, it qualify that you mentioned, and the, the, things from Equalized digital, the plugins that they've got, these kind of tools are gonna be there to help you, because.

Because there's, an industry growing up around it, and that all seems to be, that all seems to be really healthy.

[00:39:30] Gen Herres: Yes. Yes it is. And part of what I focus on is a lot of the, earlier stage parts, because as we all know. If you have already baked the cake, it's a lot harder to change the ingredients. But if you're at the early stage and you're just picking out your ingredients, it's really easy to change the end result.

So I work, my, my focus with the Easy Alley Guide is to bring it forward. Bring it forward so it costs less. And can be done much faster and more predictably with, tools and also checklists. So it takes me on average, less than half an hour to pick out my fonts, pick out my colors, grab a basic wire frame and a few example sites, and send it off to my designer.

I can do that now in less than half an hour

[00:40:33] Nathan Wrigley: Let's, dig

[00:40:33] Gen Herres: and have them build a homepage for

[00:40:35] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, let's dig into the weeds of that because you've just, you've alluded to it, but I don't think we gave it a proper description, really. So you've been working on something. Again, links will be in the show notes, but I'm gonna say it as Ally just 'cause that's the way I say it.

easy Ally. So easy. A one, one y. guide.com. So easy, a one one y guide.com. This is, an endeavor of yours to make it trivially simple for people. And it sounds like you've aimed as squarely at the, okay, you're in the process of building a website. You haven't baked the cake and all of that. So just rehash that again.

What, is this tool? What kind of things does it cover? maybe even get into things like pricing, whether you've got a pro or a free or all of

[00:41:19] Gen Herres: Yes, so the whole purpose here is I wanted to build a better mousetrap. I had tried a bunch of different tools that are out there, and maybe they let me compare one color to another color and get a contrast. But it didn't really tell me in words that I easily understood, pass or fail. gave me a score and then I had to read into it because they were talking about font sizes and points.

But of course on the internet we do font sizes and pixels, so you had to do the translation. It, they just, they weren't easy. So there were a few other tools that maybe allowed me to compare six colors with six colors, but great. The colors aren't really labeled, so I don't remember what I was trying to use these colors for.

And again, if you've actually built a lot of websites, which I have, you end up with a couple of different background colors, sometimes two, sometimes five. Then you end up with different fonts. You have a heading font color and a body font color. And frequently you have those little different from each other.

You have a button color and a button hover. You have, icons and what different colors those are. You have a lot of colors

[00:42:50] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[00:42:51] Gen Herres: on a given website and these, tools they all had, at most six. And I'm like, I need more than six, and I also need to know what they're for. And even if I use that tool and I get those six out and I finally get them to match, okay, now I gotta copy every single one of those and put them into something useful that I can use later.

So I was like, I need, a tool where I can select my backgrounds, select all my different foregrounds, my heading Text link, link hover, border accents. buttons, button hover. Put all of that in. Get an easy to answer. Is this okay or is this an issue? And then have an easy, quick copy out my CSS variables and put them wherever I want them to be.

[00:43:47] Nathan Wrigley: It's ingenious. I love it. So if you go to, if you go to the URL that we just mentioned, then forward slash quick dash colors, s spelled in the, the American way without the U, then

[00:43:58] Gen Herres: just go to the DIY tools and

[00:44:00] Nathan Wrigley: Oh yeah, Okay. Yeah. So you go to the DIY tools in the menu, and there it is. Yeah. quick colors, and you do exactly that.

You just pick background color, one there as a color picker, background color. Two, there's a color picker and you go through the process, heading colors, text color, link color, border color, bottomed, blah, blah, blah. All of these things. And then it presents you with whether or not they are, whether you know that.

The contrast ratio and then helpfully gives you the dumps out, the CSS for you to just copy and paste as well, which is great. what a great idea,

[00:44:32] Gen Herres: Yes. And then I did similarly with the fonts. So I've got one page, which is just font examples. It's just a whole page of font examples. And I've used, a number of pan grams. Those are sentences with every letter on the alphabet. So I put those in, I put in all the symbols because people were saying, okay, but I need to see all the symbols for a

[00:44:57] Nathan Wrigley: there are literally all the symbols there. They all are.

[00:44:59] Gen Herres: So in the end, bold and italic so that you can easily see like a real block of text. And I also really avoid using Lium ipsum because when I've worked with clients over the years, one thing I found is if you give them Lium Ipsum, they will never read it because they can't. But if you give them text that they are unfamiliar with and requires them to actually think about it and process it sentences, they don't expect.

Like these pan grams, jaded zombies acted quain, but kept driving their dizzy oxen forward. People have to think about reading that, but the reality is their customers have to think about their content too. Their customers are seeing this content for the first time. They're not familiar with it.

They need to actually read it I also have the Quick Fonts tool, which allows you to quickly pick out your fonts, your sizes, your weights, and I add spacing because spacing can make a font that's a little difficult to read. For example, I find the aerial and hellvetica fonts to be a little. Tight and squished, especially in large blocks of text, especially when you have

[00:46:24] Nathan Wrigley: what you mean.

[00:46:25] Gen Herres: words like billing with the ILLI, it's really squished, but when you add a little bit of font spacing to them, you're like, oh wow, this is so much easier to read.

And I even showed, some people, for example, like open sands, they were like, oh, I love open sands. wait, that sentence is actually hard to read. Oh, wow, I didn't realize that. Oh, we add font spacing and now it's easier

[00:46:52] Nathan Wrigley: it's back. Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

[00:46:54] Gen Herres: So it's, just a lot of these, little tricks. But I spit all of that information out so you have it for you so you can use this interactive tool, and then it gives you the sample with.

You know what lists and links and block quotes and headings and tables and buttons, what they all look like in your font choices so that you can make a much more informed decision. And, also have screenshots. You could just make a screenshot of a section, hand that over to a client so they could actually look at it.

But again, using. English text, but with sentences that are unfamiliar to them, makes them work to read it. And that's where you want your clients to be. You want them to work to read the content so that they experience it just like their customers would

[00:47:49] Nathan Wrigley: So you've got, You've got some further resources as well. So you've got those three free tools, which are really worth checking out. That's, they're really nice. Then you've got the, you've got a learn section where you're presenting articles and video presentations of things that you've done in the past, and you mentioned some of the events earlier.

but you've also got this, this item called Don for you, done for you tools. What's that or

[00:48:13] Gen Herres: so what this is, a, builder where basically you'll be able to use a simplified set of inputs. So what you frequently have from like a brand guide where you would have a font and. You would have a couple of brand colors to use and then just input a couple of things. Then it will build out. A whole big complex of fonts and colors, working with both light backgrounds and dark backgrounds so that you'll be able to have information for both.

Because how many times have we had a website where most of the content has a light background, but then you have a few called actions with a dark background. Maybe the footer has a dark background. you, end up with a, mix of both light and dark. It's really common. So then you get the full list of the contrast grid, and then I give it to you as a website sample, so an actual hero sections and content sections and call to actions and tables and forms.

So you actually get to see it as a website, and then finally you get all of the variables out at the end.

[00:49:32] Nathan Wrigley: Nice.

[00:49:34] Gen Herres: And then. And the other tool I have, which will be informational I'll have is the guides. So this is a done for you guide. So these are what I literally use when I delegate out work to people who don't have a familiarity with accessibility.

So I use, design service and the designers. S don't have a significant accessibility background. And the reality is 99% of designers don't. But it's specific instructions laid out in a nice, clear checklist. Do this, you're not allowed to do this. And it also then can be used once the designer or the copywriter finishes, you can go through the checklist.

Did they do the things they're supposed to, did they not do the things they're not supposed to? Just really simplifying out the process so that we're not trying to ask these people to do a hundred hours of learning. We're asking them to follow a checklist.

[00:50:38] Nathan Wrigley: If, if what Gen has been talking about resonates with you and you fancy poking around the site and you end up being curious about the, the paid for subscription that is on that website, I'll just drop in that Gen was kind enough to, to offer a hundred. Dollar off coupon for the year 2023.

So if you're listening to this in 2024 and beyond, caveat mTOR, it may not be available, but during 2023, you can get a hundred dollars off the, subscription, yeah, the annual subscription for the, service that, Gen just described. And the coupon code, as you might imagine, is, WP Build. So enter that case insensitive.

It doesn't really matter. But, if you go for all lowercase, you probably, probably it should work. But that's during the year of 2023. yeah. Thank you for that. Now, just one thing I wanna clear up because, 'cause I hear this all the time, you've decided to call this Easy ally guide and you've got this sort of done for you, Monica, that you were talking about there.

This brings to mind everything's easy and super easy and, it makes me think of these, the. Overlays that we've been hearing about over the, the last few years. But it is easy. you just install this thing and bit of JavaScript will have you, have you on your way. No problem at all. So this is, that's, I wanna be clear that's not what you are about, is it?

[00:52:00] Gen Herres: Correct. That is not what I'm about. one of the, questions I always ask when someone brings up an overlay is if I install one line of JavaScript, will your website SEO be done for you?

[00:52:17] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, it's tricky.

[00:52:19] Gen Herres: No, it won't.

[00:52:20] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[00:52:22] Gen Herres: the reality is, most automated tools can test for about 30% of the guidelines. Now, that covers about 50, sometimes up to 60% of typical website content. There are some guidelines that quite frankly, almost never apply, but. To, to a, to most of the common websites, especially brochure sites.

There's just some guidelines that rarely ever apply. So typically it, it can cover about 50 to 60% of your errors that it can identify now exactly. How well do you think it's going to do at fixing problems that can't identify?

[00:53:09] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I'm guessing the answer is almost zero.

[00:53:12] Gen Herres: It generally breaks it. there was a lawsuit, against a company called Eyebobs, which sold glasses. This is an e-commerce selling eyeglasses. So let's just go out in a limb and guess that most of their customers don't have perfect vision. so the lawsuit basically said a whole bunch of issues.

But one of the key issues that was identified in the lawsuit was that they used an overlay and that overlay completely broke the screen reader on mobile devices

[00:53:51] Nathan Wrigley: Yay.

[00:53:52] Gen Herres: when they, when the overlay was off, the website could be used on a mobile device using the screen reader, but when the overlay was on, it completely broke the entire experience.

The website. it literally locked them in an infinite loop and they could not break out of it, and they could not use the website at all.

[00:54:15] Nathan Wrigley: Ayo. It's like literally the antithesis of what you want from that tool, isn't it?

[00:54:20] Gen Herres: Yes. and I, have seen it, I have seen many websites where the overlay tool literally broke things, like menus. It broke things like whole CSS layouts. It, broke a lot of stuff off. And do you again, do you, really expect that one line of JavaScript will magically fix all your problems?

Especially those that it can't identify.

[00:54:49] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. I think what we've learned is a, that there's, a compulsion to do this, whether that's legal or moral or business. There's a compulsion to get yourself on this train and start to learn this. B, it's not an easy journey necessarily, but c. Are there are tools and services and people like Gen out there who are making this hopefully easier than it was last year and next year, hopefully a little bit easier.

So just once more. Gen's website is easy. Ally Guide, A one one y. guide.com, easy ally guide.com. You can go there and check it all out. just another quick thing to mention is I know that this will be stale at that point, but if you've subscribed to the, the page builder Summit, Gen is gonna be, presenting there.

She's got a presentation called the Best Builder Elements for Accessibility. That will be fascinating. I'm really looking forward to that, but also I know. And we'll have to keep this very brief. I know that you wanted to give a plug a shout out, for an online event, which is very WordPress specific.

The WordPress accessibility Day. It's it. By the time this episode comes out, the 2023 version will have come and gone, but there will be, captioned, I'm guessing videos of all of the different bits and pieces

[00:56:10] Gen Herres: the way WordPress accessibility Day works is it's a free event and all of the previous days have been recorded captioned transcript and posted online for free. So it is all about people being able to learn and it goes into all sorts of different kind of niche topics within the.

Accessibility space. For example, I will be talking about theme accessibility and what things to look for in a theme for accessibility and what some of the known issue spots are in themes. So that'll give you a little better idea of testing themes and knowing which one's a good choice and which one's a poor choice.

[00:56:56] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, so it's all available. the. The URL, the base URL is WP Accessibility Day. What a fabulous URL they've got there. and you can pre-end that with the year, so 2023. And then, if you're listening to this in 2024, at some point hopefully that event will take place. So that's there as well. So I just wanted to give a shout out for that.

Anybody who's listening to this, Gen though, who would like to connect with you, maybe that's to ask you for some advice or, I don't know. Let's hope maybe somebody will offer you some. Additional work. That'd be nice. where would we, find you?

[00:57:31] Gen Herres: so you can reach me on the easy alley guide.com. I've got my contact info up there. I do, I, I host the, Baltimore WordPress meetup group, and if you go on meetup.com and look for Baltimore WordPress, you can find me pretty easily. I host, every other month I do an ask me anything, which is literally anything WordPress, it's a.

I just come ask, I get all sorts of interesting questions. I don't guarantee answers, but you can ask me anything.

[00:58:04] Nathan Wrigley: Nice. Yeah.

Yeah.

[00:58:07] Gen Herres: yes. So tho those are the easiest places to find me.

[00:58:10] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. thank you. Honestly, really interesting. I feel that we probably could have gone on for an awful lot longer, but,

[00:58:16] Gen Herres: there's an entire day

[00:58:18] Nathan Wrigley: time and tide and all that. That's right. It's an entire, yeah, that's right. So go and check all of the different resources out. Links will be in the show notes. Go and check it out on the wp builds.com website.

Gen Harry, thank you so much for chatting to us today. I really appreciate it.

[00:58:32] Gen Herres: Thank you, Nathan. It was great to be here.

[00:58:34] Nathan Wrigley: Well, I hope that you enjoyed that. Always a pleasure chatting about website accessibility, and I hope that you agree that Gen Herres certainly is somebody who has the credentials to talk about it. Interesting tool that has been created. You can go and check that out. All of the links will be in the show notes, head over to WP Builds.com. And search for episode number 358.

Please, please, please. If you've got any commentary, why not do it on the fabulous commenting system that WordPress has built in? Go to that episode and leave us a comment there. If you have any questions or thoughts about what Gen said today.

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Okay, that's all I've got for you this week. Hopefully we will see you at some point during the next week. I'm going to fade in some cheesy music and say, stay safe. Bye-bye for now.