[00:00:20] Nathan Wrigley: Hello there, and welcome once again to the WP Builds podcast. You've reached episode number 427 entitled, Exploring Ally, a new plugin for web accessibility from Elementor. It was published on Thursday, the 3rd of July, 2025. My name's Nathan Wrigley, and a few bits of housekeeping before we get into the interview portion of the podcast.
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Okay, what have we got for you today? Well, I am talking with Daniela Soibelman all about a new plugin from Elementor. And you might be thinking, hang on a minute, they already have a plugin, it's a page builder. Well, this is not that.
This is a plugin called Ally. It's pretty much brand new, and the idea is that it will enable you to make your WordPress more accessible. You may be thinking that this will just be for Elementor users, well, that also is not the case. This really is for any WordPress website.
So we get into the background of the plugin Daniela's approach to this, how she got involved in that project. We talk about the fact that obviously Elementor is expanding beyond just page builders.
Then we introduce the Ally plugin. What does it do? How does it help you with the compliance landscape all around accessibility? What are the features that are there at the minute? What are the features that are coming in the roadmap? And so much more. And it's all coming up on the podcast, and I hope that you enjoy it.
I am joined on the podcast by Daniela Soibelman. Hello.
[00:04:30] Daniela Soibelman: Hi Nathan. How are you?
[00:04:32] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I'm really good. dear listener, this is Daniela and I having a second try at this podcast.
'cause a few days ago we had a first try and all the gremlins, all the technical problems that could happen happened. And so I'm very appreciative of Daniela giving up yet more time to talk to me on the podcast. And I'm sorry about all the technical gremlins of, no, I don't think either of us know really what happened, but stuff happened.
[00:04:59] Daniela Soibelman: Yeah, looking on the bright side, I got to talk to you twice, so it's fine by me.
[00:05:05] Nathan Wrigley: You are very kind. Daniela's joining us from Elementor, but guess what? She's not gonna be talking to us much about Elementor because they've launched a new thing, completely separate from the page bowler that many of you know and love. And, so that's gonna be the enterprise today. So before we get stuck into that, Daniela, just one minute or something, do you wanna just tell us a little bit about you and how come you've worked at Elementor?
What's in your past,
[00:05:34] Daniela Soibelman: Yeah, so actually I've been to Elementor for the past four years. I am, product mar. I'm the team lead for product marketing. started off by actually launching Elementor hosting back in the days. And then, I went on maternity leave and and then I got back and gave birth to image optimizer via mentor.
Not quite the same birth, but exciting.
[00:06:05] Nathan Wrigley: very different.
[00:06:06] Daniela Soibelman: Yeah, less painful, but yeah. and then we also launch site mailer. And now we recently launched Ally, which is the web accessibility plugin, bio mentor. While doing all that, I gave birth to another baby boy. so yeah, I'm a mother of two and, in charge of three of the, new Elementor plugins. And, my background is in, in actually in, in marketing, in e-commerce, Amazon, eBay, not whatsoever WordPress. I got to know WordPress and the entire world of building a website through Elementor. actually when the recruiter from Elementor called me, I was like, I went to my husband and I said, I don't know.
I got a call from Elementor. Do you know them? And he was like. Remember the website I showed you yesterday I built, that's Elementor. So I actually had Elementor right back at home and didn't even know that. And that's, my journey with WordPress started four years ago, and it's really very impressive, incredible to see Elementor evolving, WordPress evolving and myself in that area of understanding a very new world.
yeah. And so launching products into it is very exciting.
[00:07:40] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. So to summarize, you're quite busy, so there's quite a few plates being spun there and balls being juggled. Wow, that is a lot. And overseeing many launches inside of, Elementor. And, actually it raises an interesting question that. I wonder how many people listening to this podcast only know that Elementor do the page builder thing.
You know that's their experience with it. Because I know that it's a lot of people, I could be getting these numbers wrong 'cause I'm gonna summon them up off, out of my head. But my recollection is that Elementor is something like 26 or 29% of all WordPress websites. closing in on it's, over a quarter.
But it might not be quite a third, but Elementor single-handedly is responsible for a very, large amount of WordPresses
[00:08:36] Daniela Soibelman: A vote,
[00:08:36] Nathan Wrigley: growth over the last decade. I don't know, I think Elementor, what's it been going? Maybe eight years or something like that now.
[00:08:43] Daniela Soibelman: From 2016,
[00:08:45] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Oh, so yeah, A little bit more. Nine years or
[00:08:48] Daniela Soibelman: yeah, we'll be shortly celebrating Element's ninth birthday. And yeah, we are approaching, very high numbers of, WordPress, websites, built with Elementor
[00:09:02] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.
[00:09:02] Daniela Soibelman: and probably will reach the, 50% more, very shortly. I believe so, because, we are evolving and we do have, users and.
Large community that trust us and trust the product. So I believe it's, going there.
[00:09:23] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah. It's, phenomenal. I, remember back in the day, nine years ago before Elementor came out, and then, so there were a bunch of page builders at the time. There was Beaver Builder and Diviv and a whole load more, an Elementor came onto the scene and, it had. An arrangement of things, which made it competitive.
But what it, what I think gave it that kickstart was the fact that they had this really massive free offering. So they were, giving away for free, what most of the other page builders at the time had locked away in their pro version. An Elementor had a pro version and obviously people were willing to get into all of that, but it was that.
It was that real pivot into, we're gonna give you most of what we've got for free. And obviously that built the user base. That user base over the last nine years has become more and more wedded to the product and understands the product and so on. But as I said at the beginning, that's not what we're here for today.
We're gonna talk about. Another product. So you mentioned that there was an image optimizer. You mentioned that over the years there's been hosting thrown in by Elementor, but now we're talking more, let's call it May. 'cause it basically is, we've got a couple of days until May, 2025. I. And, the launch of a brand new, thing, is called Ally.
I will link to the most relevant post in the show notes. So if you go to WP Build and search for the episode with Daniela Sobelman in it, you'll find the link in there 'cause it's easier to click on a link than it is to say it. But, It's got nothing to do with the page builder, but everything to do with accessibility.
So do you just wanna give us your elevator pitch for what it is, what it can do, and then we'll just get stuck into the weeds of it all.
[00:11:09] Daniela Soibelman: Yeah. actually. I, was thinking about, telling you a completely different, story about it. But, when you said that the Elementor started off as a free, plugin helping you to build your website, and then over the years it grew, and I think that Ally is coming from the same direction, the same point of view that, Ariel and Yoni, our CEO and, CTO came from.
Just wanting to, share what they had with the community and make it better and easier for, people to, actually build websites like they did. And I don't think they knew the volume it will get just by, I. Approaching the, same thing that like with the USB that we just talked before we started recording, where we got to know that everyone has the same problem.
You try it once, it doesn't work, you flip it, it doesn't work, and then you flip it back and then suddenly it works. So you resolve the same problem that millions of people have, and did just that with the plugin. Saying we are constantly building the same code over and over again for the, for any website.
And it's not that easy to write it every time, and you can just. Create a code and have a UI inter interface in the front and just make it easier for, the designing part, to be on their own. So that's how Elementor was born. And just spread the word, not thinking about the dollar sign at the end of it.
And I think that Ally is coming, from the same direction because we did create. A plugin that is completely free. Okay. Eventually it will be limited to, to amount of pages, the widget can be, in and we will just talk about the, features in shortly. But, and we will limit the amount of scanning and remediation that, that, and the fixes that, that you can do just because.
You, you cannot do it for free for every, page. It does cost us, money and
[00:13:31] Nathan Wrigley: I was about to follow up with something along the lines of just everybody gets that if it costs a business money to run something, you can't give it all away for free. even though the AI companies are pretending to do that at the minute that runway will run out.
[00:13:47] Daniela Soibelman: Exactly, so I think that we are just. by re by reality, like what happens in real life are limited to, to offer something that is fairly and truly unlimited for life. And that's the reason why the, free version of Elementor is also the same. It's there, it exists. You can build a website with it.
It's just that other features. Cannot be free as the same as we started. So Ally, ally is exactly that, and where we just want to help our builders build a more inclusive website with ease because it's such a complex field and topic. People fear. and with justice, right? Because you, can step in and you don't know how you'll step out.
And if you create websites to other people, then the owner will have expectations. And then if he got a, if he gets a lawsuit, then you are part of it because you build the website. So a lot of people find that intimidating and not a lot of people know exactly what. What is needed? there are not a lot of tools out there that exactly say what's, what's exactly the accessibility issues your website is running to, just say you are fully compliant.
We cannot say that also, because, There is no tool ex, including Ally, that can guarantee full accessibility compliance as of today. And that's because the current technology is simply not enabling you to detect every possible accessibility issue automatically. Some problems will require human adjustments.
Some will re require manual testing or involve a context spec content, specific decision that automated tools could. Starting today, as of today, sorry, not starting as of today, cannot do that and might miss that. So any company that says that once you run their accessibility tool, your site will be fully compliant, is either misleading or checking a responsibility they cannot handle.
And on the other hand, maybe they have a 80 people legal department that can reassure that. And that's a different topic and I don't think it, it can be for free.
[00:16:25] Nathan Wrigley: No, it's interesting as well, because WordPress allows you to chuck whatever plugin you like into it, and that who knows what that is outputting, and there's 60,000 of 'em in the repo. There's probably a similar number of. Pro plugins out there as well. So let's call it a hundred thousand plus plugins that you could download and put on your WordPress website.
Nobody can know what that is gonna do to the front end and therefore what the accessibility piece of that is. However, given all of that you've, Elementor of. Thrown their hat in the ring, in the, accessibility space. As I said at the top of the show, it's called Ally. And that kind of gives a nod to the A one one Y that we often hear so much of.
on the post that I'm gonna link to, which is called Introducing Ally, the new web accessibility plugin by Elementor. It says, we're thrilled to announce the launch of Ally, our new widget plugin, marking the first stage. So that's an important thing. This is just the beginning, the first stage of our journey towards supporting web creators with innovative accessibility tools.
None of that sounds like dramatically new. There's lots of things like that out in the world. accessibility tools that claim to be able to do this, that and the other. Just tell us what this does do at we, and we realize that this will go stale quickly. 'cause the, plugin will be updated and there'll be new featured adding in, add it in.
But for now, what does it do right at this minute? What can, we hope to achieve by, downloading it?
[00:18:03] Daniela Soibelman: Okay. we went out at first phase with the, usability widgets, just because that's something that is very familiar to our, audience of website builders. But that's also, misleading because people think that once you have that widget, then your website is accessible.
And that's very far from it. On the other hand, we made sure that in our widget you do have some, features and capabilities that are truly about, accessibility and our requirements by the wog, laws. and. For example, the screen reader and the contrast and the radius, those are things that are required, to have in an, accessible website.
And also we, we wanted to bring to our, to, to our users' attention that. Every website is required to have an accessibility statement where you state that these are these issues that you have and you are working to fix that. And in most of the lawsuits, spec specifically, we know that accessibility law is very strong in Israel and in Australia, and we know that in Israel, most of the lawsuits are just for not having this accessibility statement.
So we wanted to go out with something that is very easy for you to do, just three clicks, and then you have an accessibility statement that is approved and will, meet the check mark for this requirement. And, we had. Previously, a plugin called OneClick Accessibility that was not owned, by Elementor, but by, our CTO and one of our employees.
So it was not branded Elementor, but it was created by Elementor, people. And we just, figured out that what we are providing our users is a very low. Scale product where you don't get to customize anything. It looks very outdated and. Really not user interface correctly. So we wanted to change that and go out with first phase and just accept the ownership of this, plugin, rename it, rebrand it, and put it out there.
And we are immediately working on the, accessibility scanner where your pages can be scanned and then detect the issues that you have. And then we will have a re remediation flow where at some point we will. Tell you, you can fix that by doing this, and that at some points you will be able to use ai, for example, for out texts.
Okay? So you'll be able to have AI that will generate the text that you need for that image if it's missing, if that's the issue with detected. And at some points, you will be able to change, the code or whatever necessary. So if it, can be fixed with ai, we will provide that option.
Otherwise you, will be able to do it manually, but it's not an overlay. Okay? It's inside, the code. The text lives there forever. So if you decide to deactivate the plugin, then the accessibility changes and fixes that you did are still implied, in your website. So that's how we differentiate ourself from other, tools out there We think.
Again, it's from the mission that we want to be able to help web creators to be easily build websites that are accessible, that are inclusive, that include. People with disabilities, that is much more important. and of course it's beneficial for, the site owners and, everything. They gain more, customers that way, that they improve their SEO rankings.
and on the web creator side, we wanted to make it easy because as we said, it's a very complex issue. It's, it requires you a lot of time to do that, and we wanted to enable that, so that every website will be able to be accessible easily, quickly, and you won't have the, excuse of why not doing that,
[00:22:36] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah, I guess that's, yeah, that's a, big part of the problem, isn't it? Is that there's just a load of work in this. and interestingly, a lot of the stuff that you talked about, there was roadmap features about being able to do scans, for example, and figure out, okay, this needs attention and that needs attention.
But where we're at right now, I think you mentioned a couple of things, and the first thing was the access. Ability, compliance statement. So rather than have to go out and Google something like that, you are gonna, in a number of clicks, you are gonna make some sensible suggestions, which I presume.
If they don't quite match up to what it is that you are hoping to put out there, you can modify and edit and, I don't know, maybe get your lawyers to look at it or whatever that might be. But you are gonna, you are gonna get people a lot of the way towards some kind of compliance document. And in the year 2025, in fact, very soon, June, 2025, the European Accessibility Act will become, part of the eus.
Law. And and this is gonna be fairly profound, I think, these kind of accessibility statements are gonna become much more mandatory and presumably with that it will spread across the globe. So it will do that. But also those that were listening very carefully to what I said at the beginning, will have heard me say the word widget because it says, we're thrilled to announce the launch of Ally, our new widget.
Plugin. And I think maybe this is something that people haven't got. They might be thinking, okay. It's a plugin. It will do the accessibility for me. And actually a big part of this plugin is putting in front of the end user things that they can modify for themselves, if I've understood it correctly. I'll be able to install the plugin.
Obviously, I'll have a bunch of settings. I'm the administrator of the website. I can go in and tweak the settings as I wish. And then the ally plugging will offer up to the end user, the person. Browsing your website, a kind of like little panel, a little bunch of boxes, things that they can interact with.
So an example, I'm looking at an image on the post that I'm going to link to. So for example, there's a button for, increase text size, speaks for itself. I'm sure that if you click that button, it's gonna increase the tech size, increase the line height. Text the line, I'm guessing, center, left and so on.
readable font, gray scale, contrast page structure, site map, reading mask, and a, a bunch of others, hide images and so on and so forth. So that's, I don't know that I've seen that elsewhere. This like little panel which pops up that gives the user fairly granular choice as to what they wanna modify, we've seen things in the browser that I can increase the font size. That's great. I can do that in the browser, but you can't typically do things like increase line height easily. and it might be that you can't change the text alignment, but this will allow the end user to be staring at the website, click a few buttons and, ah.
That's where I need it to be. That fits me, that fits the way that I see and the way that I prefer things to be, you. So that's really neat. And I guess if you are the administrator, you get to make choices about which buttons go into that panel. Have I got that about right?
[00:25:57] Daniela Soibelman: you got it exactly right. Yeah.
[00:26:00] Nathan Wrigley: That's the first thing in the year, 2025.
[00:26:02] Daniela Soibelman: Yeah, so well, if you say so, I believe you. so yeah, all these capabilities came from real, user, focus group that we understood what their needs are. for example, the screen reader, we know that a lot of people with disabilities have their external tool, and we just wanted them not to need to create, like they can, easily, read any text, hear, any text in the website.
So everything that is. Out there in other tools we have, and then we top that on requirements. That's why we also created the, widget analytics where you can see what your audience is required.
Yes. So basically as you, you got it exactly right, saying that you can decide. From your perspective, building the website, which of the capabilities will be available for your users?
But if you use the widget analytics, then you know what your audience is requiring. And then to fit that to be perfectly. Aligning with your user experience on, on site. So you can have a test, running for, I don't know, two weeks, a month, whatever the amount of traffic that you have on website.
Have all the capabilities out there, see which one were most used, and then show them and make it easier for your audience specific to use. What's mostly used.
[00:27:38] Nathan Wrigley: I guess that could be a sort of like an ongoing discussion with designers as well. like we, we've, noticed that almost nobody engages dark mode. Everybody's happy with it being a white background with light text, but every, 20% of anybody that uses this widget is making the line height a bit bigger, dear designer, could we just make that modification across the site?
Permanently and then we've got that button there if people wanna change it backwards or if they wanna make it even bigger. Okay. That's really interesting. The, I didn't know there was analytics thrown into it, so you'll get some data back about usage and I guess that data will be useful as well. I. For, compliance reasons.
I, am no expert in the law, but I imagine a big part of something like the European Accessibility Act is it's not a destination, it's a journey. So you're not trying to get to this perfectly accessible website. You're, trying to demonstrate, look, we've taken, we've, we're, we are doing the steps that we need to do.
We're not trying to get to the finish line. We're just doing some things. And here we have data. We have data to show that, we've offered line height adjustment, we've offered contrast adjustment, and you can switch animations off and so on and so forth. So that's really interesting.
So you've got that. Now I know what everybody's gonna be thinking. they're gonna be thinking this works with Elemental, but won't work with anything else. And you are shaking your head.
[00:29:03] Daniela Soibelman: I am
[00:29:05] Nathan Wrigley: so does that mean this'll work with WordPress, not just Elementor and WordPress?
[00:29:11] Daniela Soibelman: Exactly. not only Ally, we built Image Optimizer, site, Miller and Ally Am talk. I'm grouping them because. They are all for, more of running the website and not the, phase of, running, actually running the website and not, the building. It, of course, it's, it happens while you do that, but for all of them we just said.
Why should we only do that for Elementor inside the editor for the users? We can do it for any WordPress website. That's the beauty of our ecosystem. Not everyone needs to, enjoy Elementor and build websites with Elementor, but they can enjoy and, and, use other elemental products because we know WordPress so good, and we know our users, we know the web creators, we understand the pain, and we want to outreach everyone and not limit ourselves just to the elemental builder because maybe you will want from us just ally.
Just to make yourself more inclusive and not build with us. Or maybe you would like the free version of Elementor and then Ally, be because you, use any other plugin just to build your website. We don't want to limit you because WordPress is an unlimited code, CMS, right? That's the purpose of everything.
And not only that, when you create inside Elementor things. Take time because it's a very complex editor and platform and that a lot of people, we are trying to every time reach out and create more and more relevant features and new capabilities inside the editor and takes time because it's a very complex code.
And once you do it separately from Elementor, you can run faster.
And reach more people to help with the same problem that everyone faces. So that's the, idea and concept behind these three plugins. So Ally as well, we will enable them on any WordPress website, including, the upcoming scanner and remediation flow.
It will be for any WordPress website.
[00:31:36] Nathan Wrigley: So even though
it's, yeah,
[00:31:37] Daniela Soibelman: wanna enable WordPress websites to be more inclusive easily.
[00:31:42] Nathan Wrigley: Yes. Sorry, sorry to interrupt there. so Elementor is not a requirement. It's not like an extension, an add-on to Elementor. This could be used with a block editor or another page builder. And, hopefully it'll do the work. It'll, sit in the background. Now, another question. I do a show, every so often with a chap called Joe Dolson.
it's called the Accessibility Show. and every time we come on, we. We've done several episodes now. We share the screen and he, we go to our WordPress website and he looks at it from an accessibility point of view, and I am constantly amazed by, things that he discovers, not just because they're there and it's shocking, but also because I didn't know that was even a thing in many cases.
I'm like, oh gosh, really? Okay. That's, interesting. And, very often that's from the point of view of somebody, let's say for example, who's using a screen reader. They'll go into a menu and the screen reader will speak to them, what the menu is telling them is there. And very often it's just chaos.
it'll say menu, navigation, menu, and things. It's just a mess. and so having an expert. Who knows, accessibility inside and out would be, I would've thought, a fairly crucial part of the build of Ally. And I'm just wondering, was there that consultation that happened? did you, get outside experts who know their stuff, like very specifically in this field, prior to building it because.
With the best will in the world. Somebody like me who has functioning eyes, functioning ears, my hands work, all the internet works for me as it, and I'm doing air quotes as it should. it's just, it's, painless for me. But somebody who does not have that experience, you wanna know that the people who are building this stuff have taken those views into account, have taken the experts who really understand.
What's going on there? That's a long-winded question. Basically I'm asking, did you get experts to help you build this?
[00:33:46] Daniela Soibelman: Yeah. as I told in the, beginning, it took me, four years to get to know WordPress through Elementor. accessibility as an entire field, an area of expertise that I'm not pretending, to know just because I read some articles or started to create a product that needs to, comply there and.
The, Waka requirements are so complex and you can just, go get lost so easily and, you can fall on any very small issue and, the scanners that are out there not detect every issue. Unless you have someone that is dedicated for that and an, an expert in that, field of interest and, works for that every day, you will not get anything, done.
And that's why we. are constantly working with experts, currently, working with, the founders of Sensit,
[00:34:55] Nathan Wrigley: Okay.
[00:34:56] Daniela Soibelman: that are many years in the field and are developing an automated, tools that will be able to not miss, all the issues. Of accessibility and we will gain from that as well. And they have years of ex experience and they walked us through everything and did workshops and they worked together with us.
And if you've seen our articles, our blog posts about, any topic, regarding accessibility, you'll, see their, stamp of approval that they went through the content. Because, especially today with, AI involved and you can add to GPTA request, create me a blog about access, web accessibility, and you won't know if it's correct or not because it will sound perfectly written.
And I don't want to get any, a wording out there that I don't sign and say I know what I'm talking about. So we have their stamp of approval and they went with us from day one. And not only them, but we are really, being supported from a lot of experts in the field.
[00:36:12] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, so hopefully, when the product launches, we will see the, fruits of that. The fact that, you've got some experts on that. That's basically what I wanted to know. it wasn't just a. Bunch of people in the Elementor office who were told get on with the accessibility thing. It's more okay, get on with the accessibility thing and here's some people who are gonna help you because they spend their lives in the weeds of all this.
putting a, widget, sorry, you carry on. I interrupted.
[00:36:38] Daniela Soibelman: No, it's, fine. you will cut that part off the interruption.
[00:36:43] Nathan Wrigley: yeah. It's okay. I can do, so yeah. Yeah. Got it.
[00:36:47] Daniela Soibelman: Actually. we, in Workcamp, Europe, which is, coming, we will have, an dev, one of the founders of Sens in a one-on-one consultation in our booth. In our Elementor booth. So yes, we are a joint hand in hand with experts and we are bringing that, to our, community of web creating WordPress, and we are proud of it.
So expect to see that as well.
[00:37:14] Nathan Wrigley: Nice. Nice. if we're gonna put some widget on our website, I guess we don't just want. It to look like, how it might out the box. I'm guessing there's an option to, I don't know, modify it in some way. Change the color palette, change a variety of different things so that it looks a little bit more like our branding.
Because I see on the post that I'm going to link to a lot of blue is in use and maybe my color on my website is orange or yellow or whatever it might be. do I have options there? do I have options to style it so that it looks more like my thing?
[00:37:48] Daniela Soibelman: Of course, yes. you are able to, that's the change that we did from one click accessibility, you are able to change the color, the size, the template itself where you can do a round or square. and it always. Maintains the correct accessible contrast of colors. So we won't, enable you to do something that will harm your accessibility on budget itself.
And we are also launching, I think in the next print that we have, more fixes because we heard, the users that are currently using Ally. requesting, different things. the ability of sharpening the sides or, stuff like that. So we will be, enabling that as well. And also, in the premium plans, we are enabling what we call white labeling.
So you can lose the, ally by Elementor and just brand it your way and don't have us on your site if needed. So that's also part of it.
[00:38:53] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, so as of this moment, it's a, the, Ally plugin is offering you the ability to create some compliance documentation and also to put a widget on the site. Now you've mentioned that, in the future there are plans to do. More remedial work, caretaking work. So you have plans, although they don't exist yet, but it sounds like they're underway to figure out, okay, this needs attention.
This needs attention. And we might be familiar with this in, I don't know, the SEO space, for example, where you install an SEO plugin and within five minutes, it's done some sound. Some kind of scan, it's figured out, this is really important, here's another thing, and yet another and another, is it gonna be a bit like that?
it'll just scrape your site, scan your site in some way, and offer, offer things that need to be done. But also will it stray into the bounds of, will try to fix it for you as well? Or is it more, here's the problem, go figure it out for yourself.
[00:39:51] Daniela Soibelman: Okay. So it will have a combination of both.
[00:39:54] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, nice. Okay.
[00:39:55] Daniela Soibelman: yeah, because, as I said, we, want to not, we don't want to only provide an overlay of accessibility, so we do want you to be involved and take control of it. So you will be the page will be scanned and you will have an audit panel where it says.
What the problems are, and for each one we'll explain either how to fix an and offer a solution based on AI or what you need to do actually a code ri writing or whatever is needed in that specific, issue or, and let you manually adjust it or let us just, do the work for you as you wish.
[00:40:39] Nathan Wrigley: Okay.
[00:40:39] Daniela Soibelman: But you, in every step it would be guided and you will know what was fixed and what was changed.
It's not something that will go in the background and you wouldn't know, and then you will, you wouldn't have the control of if it's removed or if anything breaks or whatever.
[00:40:57] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I understand. 'cause if you automate everything and suddenly you spot that, oh wait, I didn't anticipate that. how do I get it back? Okay. So having a, log of things that have been modified, that's, yeah. Okay. we know what it does now we know what is coming in the future. You mentioned that there was gonna be, so there's a free version, which is available right now.
You can go and test it and give valuable feedback to the Elementor. Crew. but also it sounds like you've got some paid options. What you alluded to there was that there was gonna be an ability to white label it, but beyond that, was that more the sort of scanning part? What, what's basically gonna be the difference between free and the premium version as you see it at the minute, obviously that might
[00:41:43] Daniela Soibelman: Yeah, that exactly it might change, but for now, what we say is that because we want to, enable. Web creation for everyone. then we, will enable the scanning and the remediation also in the free version. Of course. it will be just limited to the amount of pages you can, scan and if you want to use.
the remediation flow with ai, then it will require credits. Okay. but as of today, in the paid plans, you also have the ability of using screen reader, white labeling and the widget analytics that I mentioned, those are all paid plans. And in the pay plans, you are, able to, activate the plugin on multiple websites, whereas in the free version, you only have one website.
But again, we are not limiting the amount of activation, so you can download the plugin and activate it in each and every one of your websites for free. it'll be, the same.
[00:42:46] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, I understand. hopefully. That has given you, dear listener, a bit of an insight into what this new ally plugin from Elementor can do. Obviously, it feels like the hot button topic of our time, especially in the year 2025 and going into 26 and beyond, it does feel like, accessibility has gained quite rightly an importance, which it didn't have a few years ago.
And, if this is not really in your skillset and it's. Not really your wheelhouse then, maybe, having a look at the Ally plugin will get you where you need to go. thank you very much Daniela for chatting to me today. Honestly, really interesting project. I wish you and the elemental crew all the best with it and I hope that it's a, great success for all.
Thank you very much for chatting to me.
[00:43:34] Daniela Soibelman: Thank you, Nathan. It's been a pleasure.
[00:43:36] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, that's all we've got for you this week. I hope that you enjoyed that. If you have any commentary on that, head to wpbuilds.com. Search for episode number 427, and leave us a comment there. We would be most grateful.
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