The Accessibility Show #6 – Can Joe find menus in the menus of restaurant sites?

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Hello there and welcome to this the sixth edition of The Accessibility Show. I'm joined as I always am, by Joe Dolson, who's over there. Hello, Joe.

[00:01:40] Joe Dolson: Hello. I'm really glad to be here again.

[00:01:42] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, thank you. This is a subject which is close to my heart, but I don't really have a great deal of expertise.

Honestly, I'll be honest, I don't have any expertise. And so it's very nice having Joe on the show. Not only is he a thoroughly nice person, we talk for quite a long time before we hit record, and I think it's fair to say that you and I see eye to eye on quite a lot of things, which is really nice.

But yeah, his area of expertise is accessibility. But don't take my word for it. Let's let Joe explain to us what it is that he does. Give us your bio, Joe.

[00:02:16] Joe Dolson: So I am a website accessibility consultant. I work with companies, nonprofit organizations, individuals to help them make their websites usable by people with disabilities.

An awful lot of that is me telling them what they've done wrong, which can sometimes be a difficult experience. But the reality is it's all about serving the user and making the website better for everybody.

In the WordPress space, I'm a Core committer for WordPress, and I do a lot of work on trying to improve the user interfaces inside WordPress to increase the accessibility for every user.

[00:02:54] Nathan Wrigley: That's absolutely fabulous. On the screen, if you can see, it is Joe Dolson's website. It's as you might imagine, joedolson.com. It's D-O-L-S-O-N, joedolson.com.

If you go there, you won't only find Joe's accessibility credentials. He has a calendar plugin as well, which you may like to go and look at. What, it's called, My Calendar and My Calendar Pro, if I remember correctly.

[00:03:17] Joe Dolson: Yes, that's correct, yes.

[00:03:17] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. So if you're in the market for a calendar, go and check that out as well. Little plug. Okay, so the endeavor of this show is to go through and try and find a variety of websites, usually from the WordPress Showcase. And then we pop those on the screen and then Joe has a look. And we just wanna say always at the beginning of this show, the intention here is never to point the finger and be all kind of judgmental, but some websites have to be put on the screen and so we pick WordPress ones from the showcase, or Joe did.

And and so if you've been in any way, shape, or form involved in the project, please don't take this as a, as an assault or anything like that. It's just meant to be in the spirit in which it is delivered. We're just showing, what might be, and obviously Joe's got a lot of expertise in this area.

And so with that, shall I put the screen on and we'll have a look at the first one.

[00:04:11] Joe Dolson: Go for it. Let's just get right into it.

[00:04:14] Nathan Wrigley: Okay.

[00:04:14] Joe Dolson: So today I'm going to take a look at restaurant websites. In most of these I've taken a look at one very narrow feature. And in this case I'm being a little bit broader. It's more about the user journey of how people get into a website for a restaurant, and what they're going to figure out, what they want to find. And I usually break that down to three things, because in reality, the user journey for a restaurant is pretty straightforward.

[00:04:42] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[00:04:43] Joe Dolson: They want to know where this restaurant is, when it's open, and what it serves. So those things in mind, we're just gonna take a look at these websites, these WordPress Showcase sites, and see how are they presenting this information, and what are they doing, and how might that impact user with disabilities in terms of being able to figure out whether this is a place for them.

[00:05:07] Nathan Wrigley: Okay.

[00:05:08] Joe Dolson: So the first one I'm looking at here is, this place called schulhaus.tirol. Now, the first question I have here is basically, okay, how do I find the menu? Where is it? And tabbing through, there is some focus here. And one thing I notice here is that these images are all linked. So I'm gonna guess that Essen & Trinken is going to link to the food.

However, I do note that the actual text is not a link. And so I'm gonna take a look at this image and see if it has any useful alternative text, which I see it does not. It has no alternative text. So it's like for a screen reader user, what this is there's text Essen & Trinken, and there's an image that has no alternative. Hopefully that goes to the menu, but it's gonna be a tricky one for somebody to find.

[00:06:07] Nathan Wrigley: Okay.

[00:06:08] Joe Dolson: I'm gonna go ahead and click through and we'll see what we've got. Alright, so this is complicated, a lot of images. It's big. I feel like the canned food is a kind of a strange presentation for restaurants.

[00:06:23] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. There you go.

[00:06:24] Joe Dolson: No comments there.

[00:06:25] Nathan Wrigley: No.

[00:06:27] Joe Dolson: And so I'm just gonna scroll through and I'm gonna okay, what am I finding here? Okay, so we've got these sections here. There are Handwerk, Fisch, Regional, Wein. Those, to me that seems like it must be some kind of menu thing. So they are animated.

[00:06:44] Nathan Wrigley: Oh yeah.

[00:06:44] Joe Dolson: They go away. I'm gonna say right off I do have, prefers reduced motion turned on. So this animation is not respecting that, which is no real surprise.

But what I'm also noting is that there are no links here. There's nothing to click on. This is not the menu. So I haven't found that yet. These seem to all be the same thing. So I'm gonna just go ahead and move on.

I'm now well below the fold, but here's something. Okay, I found a link for Wein, that's presumably the wine list. Helpful, not what I'm looking for. Keeping going.

Okay, more links. Oh, hey, there it is. Buried in the middle of the page, well down the, beyond, below the scroll. After many, many images, I find a small text link that says, download the menu.

[00:07:40] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah,

[00:07:41] Joe Dolson: I'm gonna be honest, while this is available, somebody can find it, the path to get here was definitely unfriendly. You first had to click on a link that was only an image and had no text. So screen readers, user's having some trouble. And then this other link, while if you're using a screen reader and you are tabbing, you'd actually probably find it pretty quickly, because there's very little on this page that's linked. If you're actually scrolling through as a sighted user trying to find it, it's very easy to miss.

When I was previewing this, before this, I actually scrolled right past it twice before I finally found it, because I was looking quickly.

[00:08:27] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[00:08:28] Joe Dolson: Which is honest, in all honesty is something people do a lot with restaurants, they're trying to get this information quickly.

Now, of course, there's the menu itself. Now, obviously this is a PDF download.

[00:08:40] Nathan Wrigley: Interesting.

[00:08:40] Joe Dolson: We all know that PDF downloads are, at their best, a poor experience from accessibility and usability. I do know why a lot of organizations do that, and it's obviously because it's easy for them to maintain without having to actually change things much on the website. Just upload a new version. There you go. It's done.

I do feel, you know, this is a showcase website. This is a fancy website. It's surprising to me that they couldn't put enough work into it to be like, okay, now we have an editable menu.

[00:09:15] Nathan Wrigley: An actual menu with.

[00:09:16] Joe Dolson: I'm not going to look at these menus themselves, because in all honesty, this isn't about PDF accessibility and I don't wanna download a bunch of PDFs for restaurants I'm unlikely to go to.

[00:09:29] Nathan Wrigley: No. Could I just derail this just for a moment?

[00:09:31] Joe Dolson: Absolutely.

[00:09:32] Nathan Wrigley: If I was to be on my desktop computer, the downloading process is much more straightforward to me because, in my case I set the browser to ask me where I want it to go. But were I to visit the site on a mobile phone. How is, the whole download and retrieve documents. So nothing to do with PDFs, but just documents. Do iOS.

[00:09:55] Joe Dolson: It's highly variable.

[00:09:57] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Really? Because I can never find the things I've downloaded on a phone.

[00:10:01] Joe Dolson: And it so much depends on which apps you have installed, right? What type of device you're on. Some devices will just download them to a general folder, and not even really notify you anything's happened.

I know for, on my phone, for example, if I download a PDF, it just does it invisibly in the background and I frequently don't realize anything has happened. So I download again. And then at that point, it gives me a prompt that tells me, would you like to download this again? And a link to the file.

[00:10:35] Nathan Wrigley: Right.

[00:10:35] Joe Dolson: If I click on that link to the file, it will open it. And I am, in all honesty, I've never looked because I'm lazy. I'm not in fact entirely certain whether I have downloaded it a second time, or whether that link is to the original one I downloaded.

[00:10:52] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[00:10:53] Joe Dolson: What it does do, however, is it enables me to get to the file.

[00:10:56] Nathan Wrigley: A complete aside, and I'm sorry about that, but it just struck me that mobile OSs and downloading things is fraught with drama. It's fraught with drama for me, but it, I'm imagining if you are, I don't know, struggling to navigate the file system and the notifications is all you've got, that's tricky. Because that whole file system is hidden. Anyway, apologies. That was completely.

[00:11:17] Joe Dolson: No, I mean I think it's a, it is a good observation because the simple fact is this is, it's a death by a thousand paper cuts kind of scenario.

[00:11:26] Nathan Wrigley: And I was wondering if the moment.

[00:11:27] Joe Dolson: Every single step, that's a little bit harder.

[00:11:29] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[00:11:29] Joe Dolson: Another change of context. Yeah. It just makes things a little bit worse.

[00:11:34] Nathan Wrigley: So the, mere fact that it's download a PDF might be all that it takes to just, for somebody.

[00:11:39] Joe Dolson: Yeah, a lot of people it's oh, it's a PDF, I'm just not gonna bother.

[00:11:42] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah.

[00:11:43] Joe Dolson: Either I'm gonna, either, maybe they're just, stuck going to this restaurant, so they're going anyway, but they're gonna just have to figure it out when they get there. And I will say one thing about menus, especially for people who are blind and using a screen reader, is there's a huge amount of value to having that digital copy. Because when you get to the restaurant, what is the likelihood that they have a braille copy of their menu?

Are you going to have somebody read it to you and then you have to pick. That's a tedious process. You can't be independent. You can't just go through things. People might skip over things 'cause they're like, oh, I don't think he's gonna like that.

[00:12:22] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. That's really interesting.

[00:12:23] Joe Dolson: I absolutely, if I'm going out to dinner with my partner and she's driving and I'm trying to tell her what's on the menu, I will absolutely skip things I don't think she will like, because it's just more efficient.

[00:12:36] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah.

[00:12:37] Joe Dolson: You don't have time.

[00:12:38] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[00:12:38] Joe Dolson: So I think these are all things that kind of can reduce independence, and they can make things worse. So I think all of these are important.

[00:12:46] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. So anything else on, Schulhaus?

[00:12:51] Joe Dolson: The one thing I notice here is it's like I haven't really seen anything on here that makes it obvious, like where the restaurant is. I can go to their hours here, Öffnungszeiten, and hope. This does actually tell me it's an Austria, so it gives me an address. So I found it. It was a little bit buried. I feel like location is something that it's nice to have right up front at the top. But yeah, it's findable. It's not uncommon that those sorts of things are under like a contact link, or under open opening times. Oh, those are the same page. They just have different links. I see.

[00:13:32] Nathan Wrigley: My sort of intuition with this is that you'd be, the restaurant's purpose really is to get the telephone ringing. The website's purpose is to get the telephone ringing, making reservations, or at least making contact in some way.

So you would imagine that the menu would be linked somewhere in the main menu navigation structure right at the top, as would the telephone number, yeah.

[00:13:54] Joe Dolson: This site doesn't really have a main.

[00:13:57] Nathan Wrigley: No, it doesn't. No, it really doesn't, does it?

[00:13:58] Joe Dolson: This really, it has these links at the top that are not obviously links. They don't have any hover state. They don't really look like links. So they're all there. It's just, they've gone more for design and less for user friendliness. Which, different restaurants have different needs. I don't know anything about this restaurant. If it's a high profile, high-end restaurant that if you know about it and you know about it, maybe they don't need to get people in the door.

[00:14:29] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah.

[00:14:29] Joe Dolson: But I'm inclined to think that, right now in the way the world currently operates, restaurants have been struggling a lot. A lot of restaurants are going out of business. So maybe that's, that should be more of a concern. I don't know.

[00:14:42] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[00:14:42] Joe Dolson: I'm not gonna judge them on the basis of their business needs. I'm just going to say that as an experience, this is difficult.

[00:14:50] Nathan Wrigley: Indeed.

[00:14:51] Joe Dolson: And now I'm gonna go ahead and move on to the next one.

[00:14:53] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. The next one is called, now let me get this correct. It's Lamanna, Lamanna Bakery.

[00:15:02] Joe Dolson: Yeah. I would say Lamanna, I don't actually know. But they, certainly have embraced a large text.

[00:15:10] Nathan Wrigley: Oh boy, that is profoundly big. That's the word big is really big.

[00:15:15] Joe Dolson: Yes. So of course, you know this one, to me the biggest thing about this is.

[00:15:24] Nathan Wrigley: Animation.

[00:15:25] Joe Dolson: The animations. They're really intense. They're really distracting. They're really huge. It's got a little bit of all of that.

[00:15:36] Nathan Wrigley: It's almost like a Monty Python sketch, isn't it?

[00:15:39] Joe Dolson: Yeah, it really is. So it's just overwhelming.

[00:15:47] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[00:15:48] Joe Dolson: There is eventually a button down here that says menu.

[00:15:51] Nathan Wrigley: Where's the button? Oh, that's the button, is it, that rotating star? Yeah.

[00:15:55] Joe Dolson: It's a spinning, rotating star thing. Yeah.

[00:15:57] Nathan Wrigley: Okay.

[00:15:58] Joe Dolson: Honestly, this one to me is, it's just it's so overwhelming. It's painting an experience, and it's a lot. Now as far as what this actually is, if I inspect it, it's a link. It opens in a new tab. It doesn't disclose that at all, so that's not great. It's, but on the other hand, I might be eager to get away from this page.

So, it's straight up. It's a link. it could be worse, but like I'm now navigating using the keyboard, and it's tricky to do. Here I am at the top. You can see the shop merch. Then it goes to the logo. These are reasonable, order online, now it just jumps.

[00:16:47] Nathan Wrigley: Wow. Straight to the.

[00:16:48] Joe Dolson: And now I can't see what I'm focusing on. What am I focused on right now? I have absolutely no idea. Can't really tell. I've just gotten to this slider, but I don't know what I was focused on before it. It's very unclear. I'm probably focused now on view menu. Just guessing. Don't really know. Let's find out. Yes, indeed I was.

[00:17:17] Nathan Wrigley: Okay.

[00:17:18] Joe Dolson: Now, conveniently, they're actually using an external service for their menu, which given how overwhelming their actual website is, I see as a benefit. So this is actually pretty straightforward. I can just load sections, tab through things, and build things and whatnot.

I haven't reviewed this in detail. This is not a WordPress website. This is some external service.

[00:17:48] Nathan Wrigley: It's like a SaaS app, isn't it?

[00:17:49] Joe Dolson: AI or something.

[00:17:51] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. You would hope it would be optimized.

[00:17:54] Joe Dolson: You would hope. I would doubt it. Let's see what Wave says.

[00:17:58] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Yeah.

[00:17:59] Joe Dolson: It doesn't report any errors, but a lot of low contrast. Oh, I see, it's that red. It's a somewhat nominal contrast thing, but it's, it is below.

At any rate, the actual experience there of the menu, it could be a lot worse. But the experience of the website is likely to just be so incredibly distracting that it's going to throw people off.

Now, of course, I'm wondering like, so where is this restaurant? There's no menu here. So the first things here are shop and order. Scrolling, scrolling, scrolling, scrolling, scrolling. It's in Toronto. That's way, way down at the bottom. And because this is such an intense website, personally I would hesitate to scroll that far, but it is there.

Now, whether it's open or not, this is not on the website anywhere, not directly. There's nothing about hours at all. If you go to the menu, which is actually what all of these order online things go to as well, you can find that. It's down here in the middle of their stuff. It'll give you the hours. It's a kind of involved process. Oh, actually this went to chat. Why did this go to chat?

Their hours are communicated via chat. Okay.

[00:19:31] Nathan Wrigley: What.

[00:19:33] Joe Dolson: Just a little bit of a what? Yeah. I don't know what they're thinking there. Is it that hard to just put some text on your website?

[00:19:42] Nathan Wrigley: I literally have never seen that.

[00:19:44] Joe Dolson: No, I haven't either.

[00:19:45] Nathan Wrigley: That's such an overuse of.

[00:19:46] Joe Dolson: Auto chat.

[00:19:47] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. That's insane. Okay. Sorry about that. I was overdoing it. But that is profoundly.

[00:19:54] Joe Dolson: I was not expecting that.

[00:19:55] Nathan Wrigley: Honestly, unnecessary experience when you could literally write the hours down.

[00:20:00] Joe Dolson: So anyhow, it's a lot. This website is a lot. Without the animation, I actually feel like this wouldn't be that overwhelming. It's very colorful. It's very ornamental. But it doesn't respect my prefers reduced animation triggers. At least I hope it doesn't respect them, because if this is what is reduced animation, then I don't wanna know what it looks like otherwise.

[00:20:29] Nathan Wrigley: No.

[00:20:30] Joe Dolson: But it's just, yeah, it's overwhelming.

[00:20:32] Nathan Wrigley: Okay.

[00:20:34] Joe Dolson: That's the main thing. My comment in our prep document for what it's worth is Oh my eyes.

[00:20:38] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I saw that. There's a lot to take in. Yeah. I mean if you saw this in a magazine layout, if you were a magazine reader, a glossy magazine, I get it, but it's.

[00:20:50] Joe Dolson: I get the design. I think actually the design is reasonable. It's just that it's so overwhelming and for whatever reason, they've obscured their hours in this complicated way.

[00:21:00] Nathan Wrigley: Curious. Very curious. Okay. Are we done with Lamanna?

[00:21:06] Joe Dolson: I think we're done with this. These are all gonna go fairly quickly because ultimately I'm not looking at the fine details of the accessibility. I'm just looking at how does this work.

[00:21:16] Nathan Wrigley: So now we're on relaisdechambord.com/en.

[00:21:20] Joe Dolson: Yeah, so this is actually a hotel.

[00:21:23] Nathan Wrigley: Gosh, look at that.

[00:21:24] Joe Dolson: It looks like it would probably be pretty swank place to stay.

[00:21:28] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[00:21:29] Joe Dolson: And so the first thing you'd have to do here obviously is try and figure out where is the actual restaurant. Now this might be more of a thing of interest to people who are actually staying at it. So they already know there's a restaurant. They maybe aren't so concerned about the location, because they're already there. So I'm not gonna focus too much on that. But so where is the information about hotels?

I'm not getting a lot of focus visibility here. So as far as navigating by keyboard it's a bit limited. Let's see where I am. Okay, so I'm right there. Oh, that's interesting. So I'm fairly confident that those offset lines in the corner are a menu.

[00:22:18] Nathan Wrigley: They look like a menu, but it just gets right past it, didn't it?

[00:22:22] Joe Dolson: They are being skipped. Yeah, they are. I can get to lots of other things, so let's just take a quick look at that. Yep, yep. C'est burguer icon. Because that's how we spell hamburger in French coding.

[00:22:43] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, maybe.

[00:22:44] Joe Dolson: But yeah, so it's just a div. There's no actual button there, so this is going to be a pretty big starting point of, hard to get to, because you can't open this.

[00:22:56] Nathan Wrigley: Oh boy.

[00:22:57] Joe Dolson: Now within it, I already know in advance the focus change doesn't happen. That's fine. We're gonna go to dining, 'cause dining seems to like the likely place to find information about restaurants.

[00:23:10] Nathan Wrigley: Okay.

[00:23:12] Joe Dolson: And indeed, restaurants and bar. So pretty straightforward. We've got these three links to three different restaurants. Again, really no visible focus here. Not getting a lot of assistance if you're a keyboard navigator. But let's go ahead and click through to one of the restaurants and see what we can learn about it. Nice. I like this.

[00:23:44] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it's nice and uncluttered.

[00:23:46] Joe Dolson: Hours are just right there. Right there, right at the top. This is when we're open. This is what we reserve. Here's where you go to book a table. That's very helpful. And then down below menu. Now in certain ways, this is very similar to what we saw on Schulhaus Tirol in that it's basically a text link that's nestled in with images and paragraphs at the top, not prioritized in a menu or anything.

But it's also, it's been offset by a significant amount of white space. It's got this surround that draws attention to it. It's going to be a lot harder to miss. This page is fundamentally uncluttered, and so you can just find that link.

So what is the link? Okay, it's another PDF.

[00:24:34] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, okay.

[00:24:35] Joe Dolson: It's yet another site that's going with the PDF route. I just find it very fascinating to look at all of these pretty high powered restaurants and see that they're using a PDF as their fundamental basis for these.

[00:24:46] Nathan Wrigley: Because it's a menu, like a restaurant menu is basically a table in most cases, isn't it? It's just structured information.

[00:24:54] Joe Dolson: Yeah, basically. There are essentially three pieces of information you need to present in any given section. You know it's gonna be, this is what we call the dish. This is maybe the ingredients description, and this is the price, right? If we choose to disclose that, which is optional.

[00:25:12] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[00:25:13] Joe Dolson: If you need to ask, you can't afford it.

[00:25:16] Nathan Wrigley: Right, yeah. We've all been there. Yeah, but it does, HTML webpages do lend themselves remarkably well to this kind of data presentation.

[00:25:27] Joe Dolson: There's an awful lot of very easy ways to present a menu in HTML. I think what this ultimately comes down to is the people who are maintaining the menu are extremely separate from the people who are maintaining the website.

[00:25:42] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[00:25:43] Joe Dolson: And so they maybe are setting it up so that when you want to swap out the menu, it's just really easy to do.

[00:25:48] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[00:25:49] Joe Dolson: That's my gut feeling about it because otherwise I just don't see how this is very justified, it should be much easier to do. And every restaurant is different. Maybe this is a restaurant that changes their menu every day. So it's a lot of labor.

[00:26:04] Nathan Wrigley: Yep, but you would imagine that it wouldn't take too many attempts at fiddling with the HTML to figure that out. And obviously, you've got to redo the PDF each time, and then upload that to the website there. There's a.

[00:26:19] Joe Dolson: I do think a lot of these types of websites, the menu is potentially the only thing that changes regularly.

[00:26:27] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah.

[00:26:28] Joe Dolson: There's literally nothing else on here that's going to change for six months.

[00:26:33] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[00:26:34] Joe Dolson: So you can easily see that like, they've wanted to keep that as simple as possible. It's just that it's to the detriment of users.

[00:26:43] Nathan Wrigley: Okay.

[00:26:43] Joe Dolson: At any rate, overall for this website, the website as a whole has accessibility issues. You know that navigation is not accessible. It hasn't got any good focus, navigation. It's using a PDF for the menu. But the basic information, things like when is it open and how do you find the menu, are at least relatively easy to get to.

[00:27:08] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, yeah.

[00:27:09] Joe Dolson: So you know, that's got some, it's got some pluses. At least from a general usability standpoint, it's an improvement on some of the other things, even if it still has all the same accessibility problems.

[00:27:22] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. So that was relaisdechambord.com/en. Now we're gonna go to something more easy for me to pronounce, timberyard.co, I believe is the next one. Is that right? We got that one.

[00:27:33] Joe Dolson: That's the one, Timberyard. So.

[00:27:37] Nathan Wrigley: No text on that screen at all apart from the.

[00:27:40] Joe Dolson: Nope, there's just the name.

[00:27:42] Nathan Wrigley: Okay.

[00:27:42] Joe Dolson: There's nothing at all. If you scroll down, it suddenly changes completely. And if you scroll back up, it doesn't restore, which is interesting. It's like some kind of a thing that's just being cleared. It's very sparse information and it moves oddly. There's some kind of semi animations in here, which might mean that it's actually respecting reduced animation. Because reduced animation doesn't mean no animation, it just means less animation.

It did tell me right away that it was in Edinburgh, so at least I know.

[00:28:20] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, you've got the, they've got the city.

[00:28:22] Joe Dolson: Like I know the general information about where it is.

[00:28:24] Nathan Wrigley: That's right.

[00:28:24] Joe Dolson: So I know at least if I'm currently in Glasgow, I have, it's not a place I should be looking at. But I'm just trying to find any information on here that doesn't just require me to continuously scroll down.

[00:28:40] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[00:28:40] Joe Dolson: It's interesting that I've gotten to an extensive section on wine, before I've gotten to any information at all on food.

[00:28:48] Nathan Wrigley: It's really, do you know what this reminds me of? Like a car advert where they just show you the car and how sleek it is, and how the interior looks great. And here it is driving along with beautiful people in it, who have a wonderful, do you know what I mean? It's just, they're just trying to.

[00:29:03] Joe Dolson: I do. Yeah. They're really giving you a vibe, and you a feel for it.

[00:29:06] Nathan Wrigley: Right? Yeah.

[00:29:07] Joe Dolson: Now, down here at the bottom, I have found there are open times just written out in text. And their address written out in text. And this one actually is linked. So if I was navigating using tab, I would've probably found it fairly quickly.

Looking at the code, this is, there are no headings here. There are six headings on the page. Four of them are city or countries, which are all of the locations of wine, which tells me one thing, which is that they are 100% using headings for visual effect.

[00:29:49] Nathan Wrigley: Right.

[00:29:49] Joe Dolson: There is no structure to this page layout at all. The last one is weird, if you can see that.

[00:29:56] Nathan Wrigley: Yes.

[00:29:57] Joe Dolson: It says lunch tasting drinks, list wine, list.

[00:30:00] Nathan Wrigley: That is peculiar.

[00:30:03] Joe Dolson: Which is to say what it is, it's an H1 heading. They're using line breaks to separate the words, so that all of these things are in one heading. It's lunch tasting, drinks list, wine list, but it's all in one heading.

I didn't actually see that text, so I don't actually know where that is on the page.

[00:30:23] Nathan Wrigley: I don't recall seeing that either. See if you can find it.

[00:30:26] Joe Dolson: So I'm a little puzzled. Unusually now I have a menu at the top that wasn't there before.

[00:30:32] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, okay. Yeah, that was not there before. Okay. That's curious.

[00:30:38] Joe Dolson: But I'm not sure exactly when that appeared. There, one thing that I would say about this, so this is, this website to me is fundamentally very simple. There's not a lot to it. What there is though is a lot of over-engineering to make things fancy that is actually making it noticeably more difficult to understand.

[00:30:57] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I mean it feels like from the design of it, that it would've been ripe for brilliant accessibility because.

[00:31:05] Joe Dolson: There's yeah, because it's so simple. There's just not a lot to it. So there's no focus states. So I'm gonna turn some on, so that I can see where I am. So now here we are and there's menus. Now that of course, this is linking to something called sample menus. So this is not going to that H1 heading that I found before. So I don't know exactly what I'm gonna get.

Ah, that's that H1 heading. So that H1, it was visually hidden.

[00:31:34] Nathan Wrigley: And off canvas.

[00:31:35] Joe Dolson: So that's probably why it still showed up in the headings list. If it was visually hidden, but not actually hidden. Now the focus hasn't moved, so I'm still up here in the upper right corner in terms of my actual focus position. So I'll see if I can find this menu. There it is. It's at the very end of the page. So I had to get through the address first, and then I got to this menu.

[00:32:02] Nathan Wrigley: Okay.

[00:32:04] Joe Dolson: It's there though. I did get to it. And these all download PDFs.

[00:32:08] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, okay. So we're back to that whole chestnut.

[00:32:10] Joe Dolson: It's another one that does PDFs. Now, let's see if I can close this just outta curiosity. And the answer is no. I cannot focus on this close thing. Ah, but it does a close using the escape key.

[00:32:22] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, something.

[00:32:25] Joe Dolson: You know this, this was kind of a mess. This website just was very difficult to navigate. It was just confusing what was going on. Like, why did this thing disappear? Why did this thing appear?

[00:32:39] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[00:32:40] Joe Dolson: What is this heading that I can see? Why are all of these things in one heading with a whole bunch of links inside it? It's just sloppy code. It's definitely somebody who did not really comprehend anything about HTML semantics. Knowing what the HTML actually means is really important to communicating that to people with assistive technology.

[00:33:04] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[00:33:04] Joe Dolson: Since that's, that is the foundation of what assistive technology interacts with. It has to look and say, what is this code, and what is it telling me about how this website works? And if you just break those rules, then everything's out the window.

[00:33:18] Nathan Wrigley: Very beautiful. Very nice to look at.

[00:33:21] Joe Dolson: Attractive.

[00:33:21] Nathan Wrigley: But very difficult.

[00:33:23] Joe Dolson: Yeah.

[00:33:24] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, alright.

[00:33:26] Joe Dolson: Now, because there's so little text on it, I think somebody would find things pretty easily. I should look and see whether these images have alt text.

[00:33:35] Nathan Wrigley: Okay.

[00:33:36] Joe Dolson: And one of my reasons for that is actually this will be, they're pretty decorative, and this will be a much faster thing to read through if they do not have alternative text.

[00:33:48] Nathan Wrigley: So this is a scenario where the text, it's not important to have the alternative.

[00:33:53] Joe Dolson: So this has the text, Timberyard. So I will say, you can make an argument that these images should have alternative text, because describing what's in it could be a value to somebody who's trying to learn more. That one also has alt text, Timber Yard. What they are however using this for is, I guess it would be a branding version of keyword stuffing.

[00:34:19] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[00:34:20] Joe Dolson: Of we just wanna make sure that Timber Yard brings up our business, as opposed to some local lumber yard. Eh, that is definitely not useful. It means that for somebody reading this in a line reading, on a screen reader is going to get something like, set in an authentic warehouse dating back to the 19th century when it was built as a props and costume store. Timber yard. Timber yard. Timber Yard.

[00:34:48] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Over and over again, yeah.

[00:34:49] Joe Dolson: Timber Yard. Timber Yard. Timber Yard, blah. Oh my god. I know where I am.

[00:34:54] Nathan Wrigley: We've got it. We're at Timber Yard. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:34:56] Joe Dolson: I get it. It's okay. You know, it's possible to get the information out of this. It's not a lot of fun. This link to menus effectively does nothing for a screen reader user, because you've clicked it, you don't get notified anything has happened. You don't know what's going on. You've just clicked something.

[00:35:21] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Honestly, these things look so profoundly well done, don't they? But in this very important regard.

[00:35:28] Joe Dolson: It's one of those funny things about just the visual nature of what goes into so much web design.

[00:35:34] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[00:35:34] Joe Dolson: How it's all looks first, and function and feature is secondary.

[00:35:41] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[00:35:43] Joe Dolson: So I'm gonna go ahead and move on to the next one.

[00:35:44] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. this one?

[00:35:51] Joe Dolson: No, you skipped one.

[00:35:52] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, I didn't I? You're quite right, thank you. Yeah, fabricagroup.fr.

[00:35:57] Joe Dolson: Yeah. So this is another French, this is actually a group of restaurants. I'm gonna be pretty brief on this one. It's got very similar issues to the last one. You can see there's no focus state. It kind of moves around unpredictably. It's got all of these images that move as you're going, and are unpredictable.

[00:36:23] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, look at that, gosh, that is.

[00:36:25] Joe Dolson: It's very unpredictable. I don't really understand what exactly is triggering some of these changes.

[00:36:31] Nathan Wrigley: No.

[00:36:31] Joe Dolson: I think it's actually, yeah, it's a hover state on these links, but these links extend all the way to the sides, so that they actually trigger a little bit unpredictably.

[00:36:42] Nathan Wrigley: So they get triggered if you are even if.

[00:36:45] Joe Dolson: If you're anywhere in this horizontal band. Yeah. And they're a little bit much. Not something that I would enjoy. We've got this navigation menu trigger here, which is in fact a button, and is labeled. So that's a nice novelty. But figuring out whether you've gotten to it is a little tricky.

[00:37:12] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[00:37:12] Joe Dolson: With that lack of focus state. And all it does is bring up information that is basically the same as what was on the page. Because these links are the only information on the page.

[00:37:26] Nathan Wrigley: Gosh. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:37:28] Joe Dolson: So okay, there is a menu, but did you really need this menu? And of course then there's, this is, the contrast here is pretty, pretty lousy.

[00:37:40] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. I'm actually struggling. I've got, the sun is coming in, but the sun is coming in onto my screen and so I'm combating the sunshine, and I literally could not see those menu items when you had, yeah.

[00:37:52] Joe Dolson: I mean this grey is really faint. The red against black is always.

[00:37:57] Nathan Wrigley: The red, the tiny font. I can't see any of that. I have to literally hold my hand up to prevent the sun getting in.

[00:38:03] Joe Dolson: See what's the actual. Let's see. I have all these.

[00:38:18] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, too many tools. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:38:22] Joe Dolson: Too many tools. Too many tools. And then I have to remember which browser I'm in.

[00:38:31] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, you are in Chrome by the looks of things.

[00:38:33] Joe Dolson: Wait, where did ask AI come from? I don't remember ask AI. That's a new one.

[00:38:37] Nathan Wrigley: Is this Brave? No. No.

[00:38:39] Joe Dolson: Why am I not seeing the, I don't understand why I'm not seeing the accessibility inspector. Did I change something? I don't know. I'm not gonna worry about that this point.

[00:38:51] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. nevermind.

[00:38:53] Joe Dolson: Regardless, the contrast is not good.

[00:38:55] Nathan Wrigley: Even I can tell you the contrast is not good. Yeah.

[00:38:58] Joe Dolson: Nathan is sitting there and can't see it very well.

[00:39:00] Nathan Wrigley: I literally can't see it.

[00:39:02] Joe Dolson: That's what matters. So that's really all I wanted to look at with this one. It's just another website that just makes it very difficult to get to things. When you do actually click on the restaurant, you get to a similar looking page, and goes through it. You get their hours. Menu is, you want to take a wild Guess what these do?

[00:39:24] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, I'm gonna guess it's a PDF.

[00:39:26] Joe Dolson: Hey, guess what? You're right. It's a PDF.

[00:39:28] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, no.

[00:39:29] Joe Dolson: Yeah. So far we've done five outta six, and five outta six, download a PDF.

[00:39:36] Nathan Wrigley: I'm, guessing our six outta six, maybe, maybe, let's see.

[00:39:42] Joe Dolson: Let's go on.

[00:39:44] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, so I've got the right link now. I think. Momofuku.

[00:39:48] Joe Dolson: Yes, the restaurant group you should definitely pronounce very carefully.

[00:39:53] Nathan Wrigley: Yes, be careful. I'm, yeah, that's, all we need.

[00:39:56] Joe Dolson: So this one, this is another, this is a restaurant group. It's not just a single restaurant. So I'm gonna actually pick one to look at 'cause they each have their own thing.

Now this menu is really hard to use, this navigation menu. Like it opens things a little unpredictably, and then, I don't know if you watched that carefully, but I didn't get through the whole menu and then it closed.

[00:40:26] Nathan Wrigley: No.

[00:40:27] Joe Dolson: So I don't have any idea what they think they're doing here, but, so I, this time it skipped reservations and went straight to restaurants. Now I'm navigating in restaurants. Noodle bar, Bang Bar, Bar Kabala, Kabala Momofuku. It closed before going to the last one on the list, and opened the our company menu. So this is just confusing.

[00:40:50] Nathan Wrigley: That is very confusing.

[00:40:52] Joe Dolson: I don't know what's going on here, but it's very strange, and definitely not something that they probably want. My guess is it's actually hardcoded triggers that they actually have a, they have a trigger that's going to, when you exit Momofuku in Las Vegas here, it closes the menu, but then they added another restaurant in Los Angeles and didn't change the code. That's my guess.

[00:41:20] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, yeah. That makes sense, 'cause it was the second to last item. I see. Yeah. Yeah. Okay.

[00:41:25] Joe Dolson: But it's still, it's just one of those things where it's like, well, there are much more clever ways of doing that same thing. You can add that event to whatever the last item in this container is, rather than the specific item.

[00:41:38] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, the nth child or whatever it might be. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:41:41] Joe Dolson: So that's messy. But let's just hypothesize that we've successfully gotten to one of their restaurants. I did look at this in advance and almost all of them used the same design. They all look like this.

[00:41:55] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, that's hard to read.

[00:41:57] Joe Dolson: Yes, that is very hard to read. This is a classic problem of overlaying text on top of an image, and the simple fact is images are complex. They have lots of different colors in them. It is very difficult to put text on top of an image like this and be able to read it reliably.

[00:42:20] Nathan Wrigley: In many cases there though, we are looking at white on white, and the the shadow on the font is the only thing giving us hope.

[00:42:30] Joe Dolson: Yep, and it just makes everything confused. And even with the shadow, like there's maybe technically a direct contrast between the immediate pixel. But there's so many other like interfering lines of similar colors that it just gets to be quite difficult to read. It's just extra work.

[00:42:49] Nathan Wrigley: I think what's interesting there is that the picture isn't doing enough heavy lifting for me for it to justify not being a more grayed out, if you know what?

[00:42:59] Joe Dolson: I would agree. It is a somewhat average image.

[00:43:02] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yep. Yep.

[00:43:09] Joe Dolson: Now navigating through this. So there is a focus state, it's not much. And not all links are included. So like you see this shop Momofuku Goods, which has horrible contrast, and also has no focus state because they presumably set up their focus dates, and then they did an override for shop Momofuku, and didn't also add a focus date from that.

And then these are just very subtle, the actual brand logo doesn't have a focus date. The menu works though.

[00:43:43] Nathan Wrigley: Nice.

[00:43:43] Joe Dolson: I can tab through this. Okay, so that's something.

[00:43:46] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[00:43:47] Joe Dolson: So let's go and look at this menu.

[00:43:49] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Some kind of fade going on. Ooh, oh, I see text, actual text.

[00:43:55] Joe Dolson: It's a menu. Yes, this is the one that actually has a menu.

[00:43:59] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, good for them.

[00:44:00] Joe Dolson: Now it has what look like headings, and links, and stuff like that. So maybe, I can use those to navigate around and get through things. Now what it doesn't have is a skip to content link, so I have to tab through the whole menu.

[00:44:16] Nathan Wrigley: Whole menu. Oh gosh.

[00:44:19] Joe Dolson: Here I get to this. Okay, so there are these, I'm now in that sublist on the left, which unfortunately does not have any focus states, so I can't really tell where I am. But I can select something.

[00:44:33] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, what just happened? Okay.

[00:44:34] Joe Dolson: It just loaded a new page. So this is not anything dynamic. It's just jumping you to a new page that has that, that special thing. Fried chicken and caviar is what I went to. That sounds.

[00:44:47] Nathan Wrigley: Wow. Wow. Okay, alright. That's so.

[00:44:50] Joe Dolson: Novel.

[00:44:51] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah. No kidding.

[00:44:54] Joe Dolson: So apparently this is not a, really a menu. It's actually just like a subsection, like a special menu that they do on special events or something. It's a particular meal which costs $600 to serve two to four people. I might not book that anytime soon. But it's interesting.

I'm gonna go ahead and, jump back to the main menu just so I can look at that itself. Now what I'd really want to do here is navigate it by headings, because each section here is clearly visible as, like you've got appetizers, we've got noodles, we've got add-ons, we've got their address and location, we've got their hours. These all seem like they're nicely well broken out.

If, however, I look at. The headings, there are two H1 headings. One of 'em is the main site logo, the other one is the page header. There's nothing breaking it down. So it's just a read through the whole thing to figure it all out, which is disappointing. But at least it is available in text, like the information is present.

Now, however, because I did do a little advanced prep, I'm going to go and look at it. One of the other websites.

[00:46:09] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, so that was, that the good one?

[00:46:14] Joe Dolson: It's more that they're all a little bit different. So they all have the same basic idea, but they're all done slightly different.

[00:46:26] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, they are.

[00:46:27] Joe Dolson: So this one, for example, does have subheadings.

[00:46:31] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Okay.

[00:46:32] Joe Dolson: This one has a section for food and then beverages. Those are separate headings. For some reason there's a heading that says menu changes daily that is hidden.

[00:46:44] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Okay.

[00:46:45] Joe Dolson: And then this entire block of text is one heading. So it's a heading that says Dinner Sunday, Wednesday, 5:00 PM to 10:00 PM Thursday plus Friday.

[00:46:53] Nathan Wrigley: That whole, okay, that bit at the top.

[00:46:55] Joe Dolson: All of that is one heading.

[00:46:56] Nathan Wrigley: That's a nice heading. Yeah.

[00:46:57] Joe Dolson: Yeah. So that's a little bit much.

[00:46:59] Nathan Wrigley: It's to make it that size right.

[00:47:01] Joe Dolson: Oh, there's the menu changes daily thing, it's way up at the top. And the headings are out of order and they're not really consistent. So they exist, but they're not like super useful. But it's interesting that it just tells you that they do have a common frame, like they're using the same basic theme for all of these sites. But they have different content managers who are different doing things in different ways. Like this one is really well set up for having headings.

[00:47:29] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, they're all right there. Look at them.

[00:47:32] Joe Dolson: They're just not doing it.

[00:47:33] Nathan Wrigley: They're just not done.

[00:47:35] Joe Dolson: Like it would be super helpful and I would 100% show up to have the candied walnut lobster and shrimp, because that sounds delicious.

[00:47:45] Nathan Wrigley: It just begs the question, what interface are they using to construct that text? What? Like, how is that being built within the WordPress site? It's, so.

[00:47:56] Joe Dolson: I'm gonna say it's just cut and paste from somewhere. Wow, that's creative.

[00:48:03] Nathan Wrigley: It isnt it?

[00:48:03] Joe Dolson: It's got paragraphs with non breaking spaces inside it.

[00:48:08] Nathan Wrigley: Wow.

[00:48:09] Joe Dolson: Yeah, ugly.

[00:48:12] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Yeah, there was an awful lot going on there because.

[00:48:15] Joe Dolson: Oh, okay, I recognize this code. This is using a page builder of some kind. It isn't it?

[00:48:23] Nathan Wrigley: mb, what would mb be?

[00:48:25] Joe Dolson: Ooh, this is old. As soon as you see.

[00:48:29] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, it's got the, it's got the, oh, the ie7. Oh.

[00:48:32] Joe Dolson: HTML tags. You're like, oh, okay, this is not a new website. So looking in the header, see if you can, yeah, so.

[00:48:46] Nathan Wrigley: Origin. Origin trial, that said as well.

[00:48:50] Joe Dolson: I did see Origin trial and I'm wait, does that mean you're not using the premium version?

[00:48:55] Nathan Wrigley: Yep, maybe.

[00:48:57] Joe Dolson: I feel like a website.

[00:48:58] Nathan Wrigley: Wasn't there something called Site Origin back in the day?

[00:49:01] Joe Dolson: There it is, there was, yeah.

[00:49:02] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[00:49:03] Joe Dolson: Custom theme. Hey, they're using my plugin. Look, it's right there.

[00:49:11] Nathan Wrigley: Really?

[00:49:12] Joe Dolson: Yep, that's WP Accessibility.

[00:49:16] Nathan Wrigley: You have an in. You have an in to modify this site. That's fascinating. That's, oh, that's at least somebody trying to give it a.

[00:49:27] Joe Dolson: Yeah unfortunately, I'm not sure that they have any problems present that it's really gonna be able to do much about unless, it would, if they turned those options on. But they haven't, so it's irrelevant. So that's what I have to say about restaurants. The really telling thing is that, and this is a stereotype really about restaurant websites, is that they're heavily focused on look and less focused on getting people the important communication that they need about the restaurant.

And I think all of these sites prove that out. That that hasn't changed. Websites, they're glossy, glitzy, attractive, but if what you wanna know is where you're going, when you should be there, and what you're going to eat, you've maybe got some work cut out for you.

[00:50:18] Nathan Wrigley: What, I think is really curious about this is I'm, okay, I don't know the data, I'm just gonna make things up here. But my expectation would be that people with the assistive technology needs, they would like to eat out just the same as everybody else. It'd be a nice thing to do. You'd save up the money. You'd go out and treat yourself.

[00:50:39] Joe Dolson: I would actually even argue that for if, assuming you have the resources to eat out, you actually have more desire to eat out.

[00:50:49] Nathan Wrigley: Interesting.

[00:50:50] Joe Dolson: Because the mechanics of cooking if you are blind are challenging. How do you know that you've got something on the right temperature? How do you know, so many cooking instructions are things like, it's done when it turns a light yellow, or something like that.

[00:51:11] Nathan Wrigley: That's right. Yeah, yeah. But that's a really good point.

[00:51:14] Joe Dolson: There's a lot of visual cues that are really helpful. Yeah, you can, you can test whether a teak is done by pressure, by seeing like how much pressure do you put down on it, and that will give you a sense of how done it is.

That said, when it's actively cooking and hot, that can be a little tricky to do. So color and all that sort of thing are helpful cues. So cooking can be difficult. So it's not something you can't do. Yeah, there are absolutely people who cook very heavily, cook a lot, and there are ways to get around that.

[00:51:52] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, where I was going with that was that it does seem every business is in a desperate struggle to maximize profit. And it does feel that if you put the effort in on the accessibility side, you are opening it up to, and again, I don't know the numbers, I'm sure they're more in your head than they are in mine, but this proportion of the buying public, who would benefit from those kind of abilities within the website. To easily find the menu. To not have it as a PDF. To find the telephone number quickly. To be able to scan through a menu by using the tab key, and so on and so forth. You feel like you're leaving money on the table.

[00:52:35] Joe Dolson: I think that is the fundamental thing for accessibility all the time. Because you know it's not so much about looking at the numbers of how many people could you gain. It's what is the benefit to you of cutting some people out.

[00:52:50] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, yeah.

[00:52:52] Joe Dolson: Who are you helping by saying there's a subset of the population that we are not going to allow use our website.

[00:53:01] Nathan Wrigley: It is interesting as well. I had some intuitions when I was looking at that. Those websites, they didn't really speak to me as me, because they looked in, many cases, to be incredibly expensive. When you said $600 for this, I'm wondering if it's more of a sort of shop window. It's not really there for anything other than.

[00:53:21] Joe Dolson: Sometimes that's true, yeah.

[00:53:22] Nathan Wrigley: Look how glamorous we are. Look how.

[00:53:24] Joe Dolson: Now I'm gonna actually look at one of these websites and see, what are the prices at?

[00:53:28] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, okay. Yeah, okay. Back to the screen, quickly. Let's have a look. Let's see.

[00:53:35] Joe Dolson: Because I think, it isn't untrue that some websites, some restaurants, they are truly only catering to very expensive markets. And that's just the way it is.

[00:53:47] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, and look at that is a the purely text-based document. It is literally one line followed by another line.

[00:53:54] Joe Dolson: Oh yeah.

[00:53:55] Nathan Wrigley: Followed by another line. It's not a lot that one is it?

[00:53:58] Joe Dolson: It's also not particularly expensive.

[00:54:00] Nathan Wrigley: That's what I mean, yeah.

[00:54:01] Joe Dolson: So this is the Austrian restaurant. So this is going to be in Euros. But 20 euros for baked trout.

[00:54:13] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, that's great, oh.

[00:54:15] Joe Dolson: With hazel nuts and I don't know, Kurkuma, but.

[00:54:20] Nathan Wrigley: Some Kurkuma.

[00:54:21] Joe Dolson: Sounds tasty and not an unusual, not an out of line price.

[00:54:25] Nathan Wrigley: No.

[00:54:28] Joe Dolson: Clear beef soup with frittaten and, I think that's leeks.

[00:54:35] Nathan Wrigley: Okay.

[00:54:35] Joe Dolson: 10 euro.

[00:54:36] Nathan Wrigley: I defer, but the point being it's not outrageous, is it? And it does feel like the old adage of leaving money on the table in this particular case.

[00:54:45] Joe Dolson: Yeah, that seems very reasonable. This is a place where anybody would just casually go.

[00:54:49] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. So what I've, the conclusion that I've drawn from that is that from the six websites that we've have seen, that is a, there's a lot of frustration there. There's a complete inability in many cases to get anywhere, and order anything, and find out when things are open, and what the menus are and how much they cost. And yeah, a complete dead end in most cases, yeah.

[00:55:12] Joe Dolson: In most of 'em I'd be like, yeah, it's hypothetically possible for somebody to find that information. In all of those cases there would be frustration and barriers. And in most of them it would be enough that I would expect somebody to just give up.

[00:55:31] Nathan Wrigley: And that's the point, right? I think you're being very charitable. And you obviously have a, we're doing the show, we're recording it, and so you persevere and you want, right? Yeah. The reality is that's, we talk about you've got three seconds or 1.8 seconds or whatever it may be in order to get somebody to stay on your website, what are we expecting here? Like 15 minutes to find the appropriate link, to find the menu. And then go through the whole process of, okay, I've got a PDF now what?

[00:55:58] Joe Dolson: And I think that's one of the really interesting things to always remember about the process of doing accessibility testing, is that in doing accessibility testing, your goal is to find out the problems, and find out this routes, and find out how this works, and how you can do it.

That is not the role of somebody who's coming to use your business. Their goal is to decide whether or not they're going to shop from you. And they only need 30 seconds of frustration and they're like, nope, screw it. Whereas as a tester, okay, I spent 20 minutes figuring out how I can use this complicated widget. And I'm like, okay, if you do this, and you use this keyboard combination, and you turn off this feature in your screen reader, now you can use this. So what? Nobody's going to.

[00:56:49] Nathan Wrigley: No, I, think that's really interesting. A really interesting observation. But also curiously, an industry where style is paramount. That whole thing of, we want this place to look utterly unique. We wanna really show off the tiny portion, which looks amazing in this fabulous. And in many cases I feel that they've spent a lot of money on things like photography and graphic design and what have you. So we can see where the dollars have gone to put those sites together.

And it's a lot of photography basically, it felt like in those cases, but yeah, that's very frustrating. It is. Yeah. Okay. There we go. So there is episode six of our Accessibility Show. who knows what we'll get to on by episode seven. But one more time just before we go.

If you want to find out what Joe can offer, this is obviously something that he's an absolute expert in. You have seen it. Head to joe dolson.com, J-O-E-D-O-L-S-O-N.com, to find out more.

Joe, once more, thank you very much for joining me and showing us, in this case, how not to find menus.

[00:57:59] Joe Dolson: Indeed, yes. Thank you so much for having me. I'm really glad to be doing this. It's just a lot of fun.

[00:58:06] Nathan Wrigley: It is. I appreciate you. Thank you so much for doing it. Take care.

[00:58:09] Joe Dolson: Take care.