444 – Accessibility made easier: Natalie MacLees on Aaardvark for agencies and developers

[00:00:20] Nathan Wrigley: Hello there and welcome once again to the WP Builds podcast. You've reached episode number 444. Check it out, four four four. Accessibility made easier: Natalie MacLees on Aaardvark for agencies and developers. It was published on Thursday, the 6th of November, 2025.

My name's Nathan Wrigley, and I'll be having the interview with Natalie in a short while, but before then, a few bits of housekeeping.

The first thing to mention as I will be doing for the next few weeks is that, well, you know it, Black Friday is around the corner. In the WordPress space things hot pretty quickly. By now, you are probably thinking about all of the different deals that you are going to line up, the different purchases that you are going to make. But maybe you're a little bit confused about where to look to find all those deals.

Well, if that's the case, I've got the answer. It is wpbuilds.com/black. Once more, wpbuilds.com/black. It's our dedicated black Friday Deals page. Over there currently we've got in the region of about 200 deals, which have been sent to us. All of the deals are currently active. They will disappear from that page when they become inactive.

But if you go there, there's a little button as you scroll down, and if you invoke the search and filter button, you'll be able to get into more detail. So for example, organize things by category, and price and percentage off and that kind of thing. So it's a real good place to go in the run up to Black Friday. Bookmark it, wpbuilds.com/black.

If you would like to add your deal to that particular page, so let's say you've got a plugin or a block or a theme or something like that, there is an add a deal button on that page. Click that and we will add your deal for free. That is of course how all the deals that are on there currently got there.

If you would like to be pride of place and really featured on that page, you'll notice that there are some black cards at the top. They are our sponsored sections and they occupy a dedicated section at the top of the page. There are some buttons underneath each of the available cards, and if you would like to get your product or service really noticed in the run up to the busyness of Black Friday, click on the button, fill out the form, and we will get you on that page in a spot. Really, really, really featuring you and whatever it is that you have to offer in the run up to Black Friday.

If you would like to have your product or service embedded into the podcast, and you're about to hear from a few companies that have done just that, head to our advertise page, wpbuilds.com/advertise, and we will make sure that people know about your product or service. We have a fairly large WordPress specific audience, and they will certainly benefit from hearing about whatever it is that you have got going on.

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Okay, what have we got for you today? Well, today I'm chatting to Natalie MacLees. Right back at the beginning of this podcast, so episode, I don't know, 10 or something like that. I chatted to Natalie and her companion, Nathan, what a great name, all about a different product. And today she's telling us all about a SaaS service called Aaardvark. Aaardvark is your one stop shop for helping you understand what it is that you need to do on your WordPress website or any other website for that matter, to make it more accessible.

What the tool is intending to do is peel back the difficulty, make it so that people like you or I who haven't dedicated a significant proportion of their time into figuring out accessibility, well make it easier for them to understand.

So we talk about Aaardvark, why it was built, how it works, and also we talk about an English language version of accessibility guidelines, which Natalie has created to make it really easy for you to understand the complicated language in the accessibility space. Really interesting episode, and I hope that you enjoy it.

I am joined on the podcast by Natalie MacLees. Hello.

[00:05:45] Natalie J MacLees: Hello. Thank you for having me.

[00:05:48] Nathan Wrigley: You are very welcome. Natalie was on the podcast Oh, 400 years ago or something like that. In fact, Natalie, I think you were possibly with your colleague Nathan.

you might even have been the first interview that I ever did. And, and yeah, I think so. I think so. I was using, your Simply Schedule appointments plugin, and because I was using it, it just felt like the perfect way to, to inaugurate. doing interviews on the podcast. If you weren't the first, you were definitely the second.

You were right at the beginning. So, you're back.

[00:06:22] Natalie J MacLees: I'm back.

[00:06:23] Nathan Wrigley: yeah. Are you still, following up with those things? Are the tools that you had back then, so simply schedule appointments and things like that. Are you still doing

[00:06:31] Natalie J MacLees: we still have that and we still have draw attention, which is our oldest, plugin, which is 11 years old this month.

[00:06:38] Nathan Wrigley: Wow. Yeah. You're a real, yeah. Yeah. you've got a, you're a real o old timer in the WordPress space. That's lovely. so I was lucky enough to bump into your colleague, Nathan at WordCamp US just a few weeks ago, and he alerted me to the fact that, I dunno if you're doing this with Nathan. I'm assuming that you are or are not.

You are nodding currently. you are.

[00:07:02] Natalie J MacLees: Yeah. Yep. Nathan? yeah. Nathan and I are both partners in, a couple of new ventures, but we're here today to talk about

artwork. Yeah.

[00:07:10] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. okay, so the intention today then is to talk about, Natalie and Nathan's tool. There's a few prongs to it, but broadly speaking, we could classify, if we were to apply taxonomy to it, we'd call it accessibility, the first thing I'm gonna do is read into the record the URL and as I often do is just say.

Pause this now. If you're at a computer, then pause it and go to the following, URL. So go to aardvark accessibility.com. But there's one little quirk. the aardvark, which normally has two A in this case has three as I'm Wonder I kind of intuitions as to why that might be. but, so it's avar aaa accessibility.com, all as one word.

The links will be in the show notes and there will be another URL following later, which, I might as well just say that one now as well. So it's the same URL, but if you append to the end W CAG plane. English, again, links into the share notes. Go and have a poke round there and then come back and you'll be, well versed in what we're gonna talk about today.

Natalie, it's a tool about accessibility. Would you just lay out the groundwork about you and accessibility, because I feel there's a few things online in the WordPress space that I, we need to know that what you are doing in this. Arena. So just tell us about your history with WordPress, but more specifically with accessibility.

How has it captured your attention? How have you upskilled and, just basically indoctrinate us with your, chops, regarding accessibility.

[00:08:50] Natalie J MacLees: Okay, sure. Yeah. So I've been a developer forever and in the year 2000, so 25 years ago, I had a job working at a university and I was building websites for the chemistry department. And it was like the sites that would have the study notes and all of those kinds of things for the students. so they could prep for their exams. And a few weeks into this semester, I got a call from the disability services office letting me know that some of the students couldn't use the sites I was building,

[00:09:26] Nathan Wrigley: Oh

[00:09:27] Natalie J MacLees: and I had no idea what they were talking about.

[00:09:29] Nathan Wrigley: yeah. '

[00:09:30] Natalie J MacLees: cause I was like, what do you mean these sites work perfectly fine? And they had to explain to me about accessibility and how some students couldn't use a mouse, some students couldn't see the screen, et cetera.

And that I had to code the sites to work with that. So they gave me lots of training and how to do it, and all the students could use the sites. So happy ending for everybody. Then I took that knowledge with me to future jobs and was shocked and appalled at job after job where nobody was doing anything about accessibility because I had come to think of it as just how you did things, and at a lot of places it wasn't.

So I just became. The defacto accessibility advocate at every agency, every startup, everywhere I went, I was always the one training my colleagues and trying to convince the managers that accessibility was something that we needed to do. So that's my history with accessibility, but doing it ever

since.

[00:10:35] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Okay. Is it a field which has changed a great deal? obviously web design and development has changed a lot, but I don't know if accessibility has changed a lot. I know that, the legislation in place, all of that. Is constantly in flux and what have you. But if you were to drill down into the bits and pieces that you need to implement on a website in the basics through to the most complicated things, has it changed or does the knowledge that you acquired in let's say 2005, does it still broadly map to what you'd be doing in 2025?

[00:11:12] Natalie J MacLees: in broad strokes, definitely, the, basic building blocks of the web, just HTML, paragraph tags and link tags and things like that are still the same, and a lot of the rules are still the same, but then other parts of it have changed, of course, because technology has changed. New browsers, new devices, all of that available.

The web itself has changed, and I think people just as an audience have also changed. Like our expectations of what a website can do in 2025 are very different from what we expected from a website in 2000. So there are some things that have moved on and I hope they've gotten better. I hope that we're able to be.

Build websites that are more accommodating now than we could before. But sometimes things are so complex it's actually pretty challenging to make sure that they're accessible.

[00:12:05] Nathan Wrigley: I think the, interesting thing from my perspective about the internet is how pervasive it's become. So in, let's say 2005, I was doing very little online. most of it was just entertainment really. I'd go to a news website or something like that, but fast forward 10 years and now suddenly I'm starting to book things in my local environment through, through the web browser.

I may be buying groceries through the web browser. I'm certainly able to buy, more or less anything and have it shipped. And now increasingly with the advent of the mobile phone, it's more really, it's. Almost everything. banking, taxation, hospital appointments, doctor's appointments, really all the necessities mostly can be done online.

And so whilst the bedrock of it, the bits and pieces inside the HTML may not have changed, feels like the necessity, both moral, and we may get into it legal. Is very much more the case. Now, you, this is not something that can be left behind it. There wasn't really a question in there.

I didn't know if you wanted to respond to that though.

[00:13:14] Natalie J MacLees: Yeah. I think one of the things that I find most frustrating about the lack of accessibility on the web and general numbers are that somewhere around 95 to 98% of the internet is not accessible, is because of that ability that we have to do everything. We can interact with our government, we can do our banking, buy our groceries, we can do everything online, and that is That has potential to be so helpful to people who have disabilities, who maybe have a really difficult time going out to the grocery store or carrying home a big bag of groceries and getting them into the house. There's so much potential there to help those people. But then when we build those services and don't make them accessible, that potential doesn't get realized and everybody is just as locked out as they were before.

And I think that's really unfortunate.

[00:14:07] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, there's a curious sort of, it is often not thought of in those ways, but that's really curious because the internet literally. Could be the single best invention ever for somebody. Oh, I don't know who has, issues with their site. Let's say, for example, they may not be able to drive and go to the grocery store, but the internet suddenly provided an option to have your groceries delivered and so on and so forth.

So dangled in front of. Everybody was this marvelous kind of carrot, the internet, look what it could be made, available. But then I suppose it's a little bit akin to, I don't know, coming to the, public library in your wheelchair only to discover that Actually, do you know what? We just took all the ramps away.

sorry. But there's no ramps. We just didn't get around to doing the ramps. So you'll, you're not coming in. which is just so peculiar when you think about it. one can understand how the internet, the pace of development and what have you got away with itself. And satisfying the pixels on the page and making it so that sighted people and people with hearing could use it.

You can understand how that evolution happened, but in the year 2025, that retrofitting is I would say do rigor these days. Yeah. Anyway, there we go. so it's obviously very important to you, and let's go to the first URL that I mentioned earlier. So again, aaa avar accessibility.com. I'll just read the, sort of the, UVP at the top, if you like.

So it says, find, fix and monitor accessibility issues across every website you manage. And then this, sums it up perfectly, the following sentence. The access accessibility testing tool designed for big, busy digital teams. So it sounds to me then like you've developed a tool which will help people who don't have the capacity like you have managed to find the capacity to upskill yourself in this area.

Is that basically it? You've tried to build a tool which will help people who have been unable to keep up, maybe they've got good at JavaScript and CSS, but the accessibility stuff left behind, is that kind of what it is?

[00:16:22] Natalie J MacLees: Yeah. Developers unfortunately don't typically learn anything about accessibility as part of their training, and they're not even made aware that's something that they need to be thinking about. a lot of them go into their careers without that knowledge under their belt, and then later they find out, oh, I'm supposed to be making all of these things accessible, but nobody ever told me how to do that.

So that's where hardware can come in, is we can help you learn how to build accessible websites. You can get, our target audience is mainly web developers and freelancers and small web agencies who are building sites for clients. You can get all of the client sites loaded in there. It will run automatic scans and identify issues and then also walk you through the manual testing part.

So there's quite a lot of tools on the market that will do the automated, accessibility testing part, but that can only test for between 20 to 30% of the accessibility issues on a site. The rest of them have to be found through manual testing. And so we'll help guide you through and figure out how to do that manual testing so that you can identify issues on your site, hopefully before it's launched, before it impacts any users.

And we'll walk you through also how to get it fixed.

[00:17:43] Nathan Wrigley: just to be clear, then, we're dealing with a SaaS platform. So it's software as a service. It's available. you don't need a WordPress installed to make this happen. You, subscribe in some way. We'll. We can get onto all of that in a minute. And then in the dashboard you would, I don't know, allocate the URLs that you've got, the latest, greatest project that you've been working on.

You can put the staging environment, URL in there and then click go, I'm guessing, and then your tool will go out and discover some of. The, how does it begin? Actually, that's interesting. Do we go for low hanging fruit first? The interesting, easy stuff that there is to fix? Or do you just throw the whole gamut at us and see, present us with a, the, red screen of death that kind of indicates, oh, we've got a lot of work to do.

[00:18:30] Natalie J MacLees: Yeah, you can do it either way. So by default, a free account just lets you scan one page, which should be pretty manageable if you wanna dive in there and start doing fixes. And then you can add all of your pages at once. If you, If you wanna go ahead and do that and get a complete picture, you definitely can.

Or you could slowly add more pages of the site over time and work on, get the first 10 pages in good shape and then add 10 more. And I will say especially since I think a lot of the audience will be familiar with WordPress, if you have, for example, a site where you're a really active blogger and you have a thousand blog posts.

There's really diminishing returns from scanning more and more of those blog posts. They're all using the same

template.

[00:19:15] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[00:19:16] Natalie J MacLees: So you don't need to scan, if you've got two a thousand blog posts, you don't need to scan a thousand blog posts around 10%. Generally, if you've got, a WooCommerce store with a bunch of products, scan about 10% of them, a bunch of blog posts, about 10% of them, that's all you have to do, and you can swap out which ones those are from time to catch any issues that might be in the content itself, like you added an image and forgot alt text, for example.

But yeah, you don't have to scan every single URL

[00:19:48] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Yeah, because obviously, for example, if, I don't know, maybe there's something that comes up with the navigation on the very first scan. I guess if you fix that in whichever, in, you could be using a page builder, you could be using Gutenberg or whatever. If you fix it once, hopefully you've fixed it across the board, so that one can be ignored.

But the blog posts themselves with the images and so on. So how, what is the measure of. how to describe it, what level of wagg guidelines are you going in at here? Because obviously there are some things which it's essential to have, there are some kind of nice to have. There are some things which may even be like in w a's future.

I'm interested to know where you pitch this because accessibility, retrofitting accessibility into a website always feels like a journey, not really a destination. it's hard to imagine that you'll ever get there, but making a start. At least gets you through the initial hurdle and you begin.

So where, how, where do you pitch it, at what level are you, of wagg? Are you, using to, give your data back to me? The, client?

[00:20:55] Natalie J MacLees: Yeah, so we're using the most current version of WCAG that is finalized, which is, WCAG 2.2. AA

[00:21:04] Nathan Wrigley: Yep.

[00:21:05] Natalie J MacLees: what we use on the site. And most of the accessibility laws around the world are related to wagg, aa. so that's a basic. Pretty basically accepted standard of what we mean when we say a website is accessible is that it meets 2.1 aa.

In reality, that does not mean that your site is 100% accessible. There's no such thing. There will always be some kind of barrier on a site to someone, and the goal is to just reduce those number of barriers as much as you can.

[00:21:38] Nathan Wrigley: And do you, so let's say for example, that I go in and, let's imagine that I've got a very simple website, just five or six pages, simple brochure thing, and you've, given me five or six suggestions. Is this, does the tool enable me to I, for want of a better word, bookmark. Let's go with that.

Kind of, say, okay, I'm gonna tackle this one today, but I wanna be in the back of my mind in inside of the tool. I wanna know that those four things that I haven't touched are still available for me. In other words, is there a way that I, like a checklist? Can I go through and say, okay, I've got that one tick, right?

Don, move on, then come back another day a week. 'cause it's, you're not gonna sit down and do six weeks of accessibility. You've gotta be doing the work, the other work to keep The, the devil from the door, if So can, we have that approach? Can we go back in and tick things off and so on.

[00:22:28] Natalie J MacLees: Yeah. Yeah. so you can assign issues. So if you want to assign them to yourself or to someone else on your

team, you can assign them, but you can also keep them unassigned. So if you wanna just keep a backlog that's not assigned to anybody, you can definitely do that in there. And you do have the ability to mark them as fixed.

Then they'll disappear. You can have just your list of what the open issues are. you can go see the ones that are pending and. When you say in aardvark that something is fixed, we don't just take your word for it.

It will always get marked as pending. And if it was an issue found in an automated scan, aardvark will automatically double check it next time it runs to confirm that it was indeed fixed.

If it wasn't, it will reopen it and send it back to you. And if it was an issue that was found manually, like somebody was manually testing the site and found the issue will go back to the person who found it to confirm that it was fixed manually.

[00:23:25] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, so there's a couple of things that have come out of what you've said just there. So the first thing was you've obviously got some sort of permissions model in there, so you can assign various different team members. So that could be, I guess if you're working in an agency, it could be, I don't know, developer X over there, but also presumably you could onboard some SEO, sorry, not SEO, some accessibly consultant or somebody who.

Maybe you are just helicoptering in to do work on this website. You could assign them inside the tool and give them the tasks and what have you. so firstly, have I got that right? Permissions are all built in and you can assign things to various other people.

[00:24:00] Natalie J MacLees: Yeah, and we have roles that have permission to do things. So like a developer role, for example, can say that they've marked something as fixed, but they can't confirm the fix because developers are not to be trusted. So the accessibility tester is the one who can confirm the fix and close an issue.

[00:24:18] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Thank you. And then the other thing you mentioned, you seem to draw a def distinction between an automated thing and, a human thing. So the automated thing, I'm guessing the tool itself will create those. Let's call them tasks. I don't know actually what you call them, but it will create those tasks.

what's the human bit then? So presumably I can go in and if I spot something because I'm bright enough to know that there's something, I can add that in. Okay, this is fixed. So in other words, it's like there's the to-do list, there's a bit of human and the tool itself.

[00:24:52] Natalie J MacLees: Yeah, they're mixed together and you can tell, it will say, we call them issues. so each issue will say it was either found in a scan and on what date, or it was found by a person and on what date.

[00:25:04] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Got it. So first of all, how confident are you in the reliability of your automated bits and pieces, and what's the sort of technology that you've got going on in the background there? in the world that we live in now? The word AI just pops up in all sorts of interesting and curious places.

So I'm guessing there might be some bit of that in it, but I don't know. Maybe not. Maybe you're doing something slightly different. What, what's going on? How, can we be safe in the knowledge that what you are telling us needs doing does in fact need doing?

[00:25:37] Natalie J MacLees: Yeah, so under the hood we are using, a package called PAI that I think a lot of people in the accessibility space will be familiar with. It's PA one, one Y, and it. Helps you to build automated scanners and it has different engines that run under the hood. And so we have three of them. palate automatically comes with ax from

the queue and.

[00:26:01] Nathan Wrigley: Yep.

[00:26:03] Natalie J MacLees: HTML code sniffer from, I think it's Squiz Labs makes that one. So we have those two. And then we recently built our own. We in incorporated IBM's equal Access Accessibility Checker into it as well. So we have those three different engines that are available and then we. Just recently released our first AI feature.

So those, checkers, they're all just JavaScript, so there's no magic there. It's just JavaScript. one thing that all of the checkers struggle with is color contrast issues. When you have used any kind of opacity, a background gradient, a background image, they can never tell if the text has sufficient contrast with the background.

And on some websites, because of their design. People would run a scan and have literally thousands of color contrast issues flagged, and it was, they would be marked that this needs manual review. The tool wasn't saying this is an issue, but it was saying you have to go manually check this. So we built an AI tool that will do that.

Checking for you. And close a bunch of those issues. So it will check it samples points around the text because every single pixel of text has to be sufficient. Contrast with the background. If even one letter of your text doesn't have enough contrast, it needs to fail. So our AI checker will check that for you and close a whole bunch of those false positives and save you a lot of

time.

[00:27:38] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, great. Yeah, that's really curious how you've done that. That's interesting. Okay, so let's say for example, I've got my five page website and you've highlighted 10 different things. How, do you display to me that the things need to be done? I can imagine a, checklist. So there's some text which tells me that there's something that needs to happen, but.

I'm curious as to how you might show me, for example, where that is on the page or where that resides in the dom. So just describe the different ways that you can see, and get your hands dirty in it. And then in a minute we'll move on to suggestions for actually how to improve things. But how do you actually tell us where to go looking for the problem?

[00:28:19] Natalie J MacLees: Yeah, so we have a couple of ways of doing that. So first we have, like what we call our text list. So it's just your list of all of your issues and each one has a screenshot on it with a red, highlight drawn around the issue that has an issue, that has a problem. For people who can see the interface, they can obviously identify it that way.

We also provide the HTML selector, and we even have a little snippet of JavaScript that you can go and paste into your console when you're looking at that page in the browser. And it will, I go to that element and highlight it. And then we also have a completely separate visual mode that will load up your website in the browser.

Just the way as. Just like it would look if somebody were visiting, and it puts little markers everywhere on the page that there's an

[00:29:12] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, that's neat. Yeah.

[00:29:14] Natalie J MacLees: And then you can click those to get more information about what the issues

are.

[00:29:18] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, okay. So I don't know. I'm going to my homepage or something like that, and there's several different markers on the page, and I go and click on those and I get the information about the whatever, whatever it is that I'm worried about. Okay. You've really run the gamut there. That's interesting.

And I, think many of those would be immediately obvious. Although we can't see them, we're an audio podcast. I think we can gauge exactly what you've done there. That's great. Okay, so we've gone through the alerting piece. We've gone through the n If you like, you, you're on the naughty step now because you've got all these problems with your website.

what I want to know because of my capabilities here. What, how do I even fix these things? So it's all very well being told, here's a problem. Here's another one. Look and here's another one. And 15 items later, I'm starting to feel terrible about myself. How do you alert us to how to go about fixing things?

So ignore the WordPress side of things. Just let's imagine we're looking at the dom. how, what do you do? How do you tell us how to remediate the problems?

[00:30:24] Natalie J MacLees: Yeah, so every single one of our issues has a little section at the top of the page that will tell you. Explain what this issue is and why it's a problem, so that you understand that. which, groups is this problem impacting? And then we have suggestions for how to fix it. And that information has all been written by hand by me.

[00:30:48] Nathan Wrigley: So in just like in plain, pros basically.

[00:30:53] Natalie J MacLees: Yeah.

[00:30:54] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, nice. Okay. That's great.

[00:30:57] Natalie J MacLees: simple instructions on here's what this means, here's who it impacts, and here's how to fix it. And then if you need more information, we link out to our resource WCAG in plain English.

[00:31:09] Nathan Wrigley: Do you know, we'll come to that in a minute. Do you know, you've just said something and you may not realize how profound it was, but you've the, bit that's there. Is, you've described who, I can't remember exactly what you said, but how it impacts people and that's the missing bit of all this jigsaw puzzle, isn't it?

If you have Perfect, I'm doing air quotes. If you have perfect sight, it will be very, hard for you to truly ever know. Like you might have this sort of academic knowledge in the back of your head, oh, that's gonna be an accessibility problem, but you won't really know. And so having it pointed out like, here's the, list of people who would find this difficult, I think that's really powerful.

Like morally, it helps you to get there, to understand who it's impacting, but also on a case by case basis, you pointing out. Who these people are and in what ways they will get, a poorer experience. So I, I don't know if you've ever dwelled on that, but that's, that feels like a bit of a secret sauce that you've got there.

That's fascinating.

[00:32:15] Natalie J MacLees: Yeah, I think that part of accessibility education is actually really important because I feel like otherwise accessibility professionals just feel like cops like yelling at everyone all the time. But I think if you can help people understand like, here's the actual impact of what you're doing, it makes the why so much easier to understand.

And then you don't feel like somebody's just yelling at you to do something and you don't know exactly why.

[00:32:44] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, so I'm thinking of two other fields which have a, similar kind of retrofitting to your website field to them. And they are SEO and performance. And you go through a series of automated tests and you figure out, oh. Terrible SEO on this website. And you do the same thing for performance.

Oh, terrible performance on this website. But there's really no, there's really no moral bit there. There's just, there's just, there's just something that you need to do because I don't know, you need to be more productive. You need to have a quicker website so that you do better in Google, so you make more money.

There's no moral component. if, your website is slow, you'll probably, I don't know, not do quite as well in the SERPs. Maybe it'll, tick people off for a little while, but you're not probably gonna exclude people from your website. So it really is unique in. In that regard, and you spelling it out in that little modal or whatever it is that you've got in there, I think that's really important.

You say how this affects the people. that's fascinating. I'm, really pleased that you said that. That's, a really cool bit of the tool, I think. okay, so then how do you, so do you then explain literally step by step what you might do to improve it? Because If you are handwriting these examples, you can't exactly hand write it for the exact situation that's on the website.

'cause every website's gonna be different. Is it more generic or Yeah. How does that work?

[00:34:11] Natalie J MacLees: Yeah, it's a little bit different from issue to issue because some of them are very straightforward. if you have an image that's missing alt text, that's very straightforward and hopefully you're using WordPress or another tool that makes it very simple to go in and just add that alt text. The image.

Others, are a little trickier. Like when you start to get into interactivity, things like tabs and

accordions,

[00:34:36] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Yeah.

[00:34:37] Natalie J MacLees: it gets a little bit trickier. So the best I can do there is give you an example of what this should look like, what the HTML markups should look like and how it should behave, because that's another thing a lot of developers aren't aware of.

Because they themselves are often can use a mouse and a keyboard with no problem. They're not even aware of all of the keyboard interactions that a keyboard user is going to expect to be there. And so just to make them aware of what those are, here's how this should work, here's what the HTML should look like, here are the interactions that it should support.

You should be able to press the space bar to activate. This, for example, is something that gets missed a lot and we just explain like. How that should look and how it should work.

So we can't give a specific

fix in

[00:35:25] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I, wondered, actually, if WordPress gets in the way a lot, because if you are just writing, I don't know, JavaScript, C-S-S-H-T-M-L, maybe a bit of PHP in the background, but if you didn't have a CMS and you were creating your own, Dom, in effect, you really have the capacity to get this right.

Perfectly. your suggestions could be implemented fairly straightforwardly, but in the modern era where everybody's using, I don't know, a tool in WordPress, they've got a plugin, which I don't know adds a tab, block so that it can, you can have tabs by dropping in a block, you've got a page builder.

Goodness knows in the future what we're gonna be doing with AI and what have you. So I wondered what your thoughts were, whether, whether something like WordPress actually messes up or models up the canvas, to some extent. Again, that's a very not very formulated question, but do you understand where I'm going with that?

[00:36:24] Natalie J MacLees: Yeah. Yeah. And for WordPress core and things like Gutenberg blocks, there is the WordPress accessibility team, who are trying to go in there and ensure that if you're using some kind of Gutenberg block that it is going to be accessible. If there's a problem and it's not, then you can file a ticket.

Somebody will get to that at some point. Obviously there's a lot of them, so it might take a while, but, and then if you're using, a different page builder or a plugin or some other kind of tool and you come across that their tool is actually not accessible, I'm a huge fan of filing a support ticket to let them know about that.

Because I think if they all start hearing from all of us that we want and expect their products to be accessible. They're gonna have to start listening and fixing things.

[00:37:19] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it's interesting. just a few weeks ago we had, somebody that I think you'll probably know, Amber Hines. And she, she did a, fairly long, an exhaustive study of the different components that various page builders and block suites can bring to bear. so if you miss this one, it's, it might be apropos to.

Put that one in the queue as well, because it really does show you, at this point, I think it was August, 2025 we released that episode, or maybe, yeah, about August. it shows you which of the companies have really tried hard at, this moment. And there are definitely few, there are definitely a few companies which are leading the charge on making all of their tools as accessible, as possible.

yeah, it's interesting. I, think WordPress sometimes. Would definitely get in the way there. okay, so you, I'm just gonna move on to this other thing, this other resource that we've got, which is, your, it avar accessibility.com and then I, as I said earlier, it's slash wcag f. Dash, plain dash English.

What's this? It's like a human readable, set of well instructions for kind of everything really, if you wrote this by hand, firstly, Bravo. Secondly, when do you ever sleep?

[00:38:39] Natalie J MacLees: Yeah, so that wasn't just me. I had, my team helping out with that as well. But yeah, we went through all of the success criteria that are part of Wge. There ares. 78, I think total in WCAG 2.2. And just wrote out what is this? What does it mean? Who is impacted again? 'cause I think that part is important and then how to implement it with some examples, with some very cute little illustrations I

[00:39:10] Nathan Wrigley: Yes.

[00:39:11] Natalie J MacLees: are throughout there.

Yeah.

[00:39:13] Nathan Wrigley: it's, it basically runs through the whole smorgasbord of the, accessibility. I'm gonna say malaise really, but do you know what I mean? The, sort of the problems that you might encounter. They're really all there. and so I will drop the links into the show notes. you've just gotta click around.

Really. There isn't a great deal of benefit in us describing what's going on the audio podcast, but if you go through, you can click into. So it looks like you've just got this bunch of cards, but then in each card there's a view details blue button, which will open an entirely new page. And that page will have, in many cases, hundreds and hundreds of words, alerting you to what the problem is and how to you can remediate those kind of things and what have you.

So just where kind. 35 minutes, so I'm keen to wrap it up fairly soon. But just before we do that, I'm also keen to talk about the, sort of legislative side of things. I'm guessing that although this isn't the ideal reason, one of the reasons that people are taking accessibility more and more seriously is because of the, the, carrot and stick, the carrot being the kind of moral argument and the stick being the legal argument.

And in the year 2025, we have the European Accessibility Act, although it doesn't. Appear at the minute to have a great deal, in terms of teeth. You were telling me about some French company that has actually fallen foul of it and probably is going to regret what they have not done. so with that in mind, do you, offer, I don't know, any kind of accreditation or certification or anything out the backend?

So if I'm a subscriber and I go through all of the. The range of checks that you've got, is there something that I can print out or stick on the wall to say, look, we did it, or hand over to the client to say, look, we've begun the work. We can, keep the, legal people at bay for now.

[00:41:05] Natalie J MacLees: Yeah, so there is no, real certification of a website to say that it's accessible. that's just something that doesn't exist. And that kind of goes back to what I said earlier where there's no such thing as a 100% accessible website. Even if you have tried very hard, somebody is gonna come along and hit a barrier on that site. So one thing that you can do is something that is called a VA or an a CR, which would be you'd hire an accessibility professional to go through your site and write up a report on the state of accessibility on your site. The issue with that for websites is they're outdated as soon as you've made one change on your website, and websites change all the time.

V PPAs are from the time of Installable software where they could write a VPA and give it to you with the disc, right? And it was good until you went and got a new disc

[00:42:03] Nathan Wrigley: those were the days.

[00:42:04] Natalie J MacLees: to sell a new version. And so it's really outdated in the age of web apps and. Websites that just change all the time. What you do often need for the European Accessibility Act and for similar laws that are here in the US is what they would call due diligence, which is they're looking for some kind of proof that you have been working on improving the accessibility of your website over time.

[00:42:32] Nathan Wrigley: Okay.

[00:42:33] Natalie J MacLees: Yeah. So if you can have, if you have proof of that, that yes, we're aware we have accessibility issues on our site. Here are the 50 we fixed last month, here's the 30 that we're gonna try to fix this month, and here's the proof that we've done that. That can really be helpful for you. So artwork provides that we can provide reporting over time and we have complete history tracking on all of the issues that will say who opened it, who said it was fixed when it was reopened.

We'll have the whole history there and you can comment on the issues. And so you have that, that you could present, to show that this is something that you've been working on and making progress on.

[00:43:14] Nathan Wrigley: So the current state of play is your, the, best that you can do really. There isn't a certificate to say we've done. the idea really is keeping a track of what you've been doing. and I guess as a sort of something in the background so that if somebody was to come and, they were trying to, I don't know, force lawyers on you or something like that. You could say, look, here it is. Here's the evidence of what we've done. We've got this tool and it has been keeping a track of all the different bits and pieces, and I guess the more you've done, the more likely you are to be left alone and so on, but you keep an activity log for want of a better word, of the different bits and pieces that.

Have been done. Is this tool then, are you aiming this, I think you said it at the beginning, are you aiming this squarely at the kind of the agency owner or the agency? Not necessarily an agency owner. So is that kind of where you are targeting it? So not necessarily as the person who's got the one website, but more, I don't know, we're an agency, we've got 15, 20, a hundred, whatever it may be.

Is that your target market? It.

[00:44:18] Natalie J MacLees: Yeah, for sure, because it's gonna be really hard to keep track of accessibility across the whole portfolio of client sites. So we give you a way to do that. And then a way to identify and prioritize any accessibility issues that are on those sites. So if you're an agency owner, it's a great opportunity for selling a maintenance package where you can just chip away at those accessibility issues every

month.

[00:44:41] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah. Okay. And do you have a way of, reporting to the client? my guess is that with the best one in the world, many clients probably want to be left out of the loop of this kinda stuff. They would, they want to know that it's been done, but not necessarily the minutia of it.

But nevertheless, it's a feather in your cap if you can do it. And some clients may wish to receive that kind of correspondence that, okay, we've tackled these things. We knew that we had a hundred things to tick tackle, and we've done 30 of them. Do you have that kind of telemetry as well?

[00:45:13] Natalie J MacLees: Yeah, so if you have a client who really wants to be involved, we do have a client

role that you can assign to a user that is read only. They can't do anything except see what's in there. And then we also do have exportable, PDF, and CSV reports that you can give over to a client and the PDFs can be, customized with your own logo.

[00:45:34] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. okay, so I think we probably, I'll ask you the question. Do you think we've covered broadly what it is that you do, or is there any like obvious gaping hole that we never did tackle just then?

[00:45:45] Natalie J MacLees: No, I think we got it.

[00:45:47] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, that's perfect. In which case, the, sort of thing which obviously everybody wants to know is, how do you price this?

What's the, the different bits and pieces as you'll expect? You're gonna go to the, url, which I've mentioned many times, forward slash pricing, but you just wanna run through how it works.

[00:46:05] Natalie J MacLees: Yeah, so it's priced based on the number of sites and pages that you wanna scan. So it's not the number of pages in your website, but just the ones that you wanna test. And we do have a free forever account that will let you scan, with a homepage of one website. And then, if you wanna add up to a hundred pages, I think that's the $49 plan.

[00:46:26] Nathan Wrigley: That's what it says. Yep. A hundred. Yep.

[00:46:28] Natalie J MacLees: And then you can increase the number of sites and pages. And again, the that number of pages is how many you're scanning and testing, and not the total number of pages on your site.

[00:46:37] Nathan Wrigley: Can I, so yeah, I'll just quickly go through. So there's the free one and then a hundred pages. $49. $99 for a thousand, 3000 for 2, 4, 9, and it goes off. up and what have you, so you can cherry pick the, different bits and pieces that you'd want. One quick thing, which I forgot to ask, which has just occurred to me, can I have this going on a sort of rotating basis.

So is it possible for me to say, I don't know, because our site is a WordPress site and we know that there's an editorial team and they're constantly going in and they're constantly fiddling with things. Is it possible for us to revisit certain pages, I don't know, on a monthly basis and other pages?

Which are less likely to be fiddled with maybe the contact form or something like that. We'll just do that once every three months. Is it possible basically to just automate the thing so it will keep me alert and I don't have to keep setting it up?

[00:47:27] Natalie J MacLees: Yeah, so you can run a scan to run either every day or every week, and if you pick every week, you can choose the day of the week. It does scan the whole website and not just certain pages, but.

can do that so that it's running automatically and it will send you a report if new issues are discovered so that you're

[00:47:43] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Got it. So you can set it up on a month, a weekly, or a daily basis. Okay, that's it. In which case, one last little plug. so it's aardvark accessibility.com with triple A at the beginning, aardvark accessibility.com. Natalie Cleese, thank you very much for chatting to me today. I really appreciate it.

[00:48:01] Natalie J MacLees: Thank you so much for having me.

[00:48:03] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. That's all we've got time for this week. I hope that you enjoyed that. If you did head to episode number 4 4 4 on the wpbuilds.com website, drop us a comment there. We would really appreciate hearing what you thought about that particular episode.

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