ADA Title II: From Rules to Results

[Webinar begins. Screen share of a slide deck, starting with an image of The Capitol Building with a United States flag, and Taffy the Siamese cat looking over towards it. Jessica speaks]

Welcome everyone to ADA: From Rules to Results. I’m Jessica Chambers, I’m an accessibility evangelist here at Silktide. So today we’re going to dive into what the ADA digital accessibility changes actually mean and what you can do about them without spiralling into a panic. This is going to be practical, plain English and hopefully even a little bit fun.

There will be no legalese, no guilt trips. Just what’s changed, who’s affected and how to start fixing it.

Ben from our support team is here. He’s awesome. He’s going to keep an eye on the chat.

Right. About me. As I said, I’m Jessica Chambers. I started making websites back in 1996. I love teaching tech. I actually got my Microsoft Certified Trainer back in ’97. Yes, this means I old. I would like to think that it’s not that obvious. I have over a decade in accessibility now, and I’m basically a huge nerd.

I look at my role as being a rabble rouser. I want to change hearts and minds, and a lot of times I do that by trying to come at things from a different angle.

Fun fact about me is that I was immortalized as a minor character in a video game. And before anyone asks, it was World of Warcraft.

I always open with this because, if you’ve seen this and didn’t recognize it, there are 13 letters in the word accessibility. So if you take A, 11 letters, and Y, you get A11Y for accessibility. It gets used in hashtags. It will be used in slides. I can almost guarantee you I’ve used it in this deck without thinking about it.

Now you know. And fun fact, that is a numeronym. It’s a word that uses numbers and letters. Most of them are terrible, but this one is kind of cool.

So I always try to begin with our objectives to talk about what we’re going to talk about today. So we’re going to talk about what has changed. We’re going to talk about what counts. I’m going to give you a plan that won’t break you. We are definitely going to talk about what not to do. There’s a section for: How about today? I’m going to give you a bunch of resources. And then with any luck, I will get through this in a reasonable amount of time, and we will do Q&A.

So, what this is. Before we dive in, let’s talk about what this presentation is and what it isn’t. So this is going to be straight talk with no jargon, no theoretical frameworks, no academic papers. Just what you need to know. I’m going to give you clear steps. You’re going to get a roadmap you’re gonna actually follow. And no guilt. Look, the reality is your digital stuff probably isn’t accessible right now. That doesn’t make you a bad person. You’re not failing your community. You just haven’t had the right information. And that’s going to change today. Also on this slide is an image of a big no symbol over a very thick book labeled The Ultimate Thesaurus, which I’m pretty sure is my designer making a joke at my expense.

Okay, everyone. I want you to take a deep breath with me.

I know this stuff can feel overwhelming. You’re probably thinking about your website, your PDFs, your online forms, wondering how you’re going to tackle all of it with your current workload and budget. This is normal, and we’re going to handle it. This is Master Shifu from Kung Fu Panda. He knows that inner peace comes from having a plan. So if right now you’re feeling like everything’s on fire, we are going to get you to the zen place where accessibility isn’t a big scary thing.

It’s just going to be part of how you do your work.

So let’s begin.

What changed? So the simple answer is specificity. For 34-ish years now, the ADA has said “Be accessible” and they’ve never really defined what that meant for digital. It’s a bit like being told to drive safely, but you don’t know the speed limit. So, now we know. They’re defining it as WCAG 2.1 AA.

That’s the speed limit. So it’s actually still kind of the same law with the same requirements, but now there’s no guessing what accessible actually means. Now you may be thinking, what is WCAG?

So here is a bit of one of our videos. There are a bunch of these on YouTube. And before anyone who’s an accessibility nerd comes for me, this video is from April 2022. So 2.1 was the latest standard.

[Video begins, Jessica recorded the voice over]
Wuh-cag, W-cag, W-C-A-G… The way you say it varies, but the rules are universal. Did I say rules? They’re actually guidelines. Insert a witty pirate joke here.

[Visual]
A written screenplay of the video we’re watching. Barbosa from Pirates of the Caribbean crosses out “rules” with a red marker pen and writes guidelines instead.

[Voice over]
The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines are a list of rules, (just go with it…) for making the web available to everyone. This may seem daunting at first, but I’m going to walk you through it. You’ll often hear or see things like “You must be compliant with WCAG 2.1 AA.” But what does that even mean? Let’s break it down a little.

WCAG has a standard like 1.0 or 2.1 and a level that’s A, double-A, or triple-A. Here at Silktide, we like to say that A is must do, double-A is should do, and triple-A is… reaching for the stars. So when the legal requirement is WCAG 2.1 double-A, it means it’s using the latest standard, 2.1, and level double-A, the middle one.

Double-A is tougher to master, but still well within the reality of the web today.

[Video stops. Back to Jessica]
Well, I guess the video continues on from there, but I thought you didn’t need any of that. So let’s talk about what counts.

In a nutshell, and the simplest way to think of this is, if it’s public facing and digital, it counts. Period. This slide has image of Taffy, our Siamese cat that we use on lots of stuff, and he’s looking nervous because he’s seeing a PDF, a word doc, HTML, a video. And when I say digital, I mean all of this stuff. Your website obviously, right? But also those PDFs everyone’s ignoring, your customer portals, online forms, especially the ones that people need to fill out to get services, videos that don’t have captions. Mobile apps, learning management systems, those kiosks in the lobby.

Even embedded tools like chat bots and calendars. Basically, if it’s got pixels and the public touches it, it counts. I know, it’s a lot.

But I want to talk about why this matters. Because… I told you I’m a rabble rouser, right? I don’t think this is about compliance checklists or avoiding lawsuits. Right? It’s about whether people can actually use what you build. When someone can’t navigate your website with a screen reader, they can’t apply for that program. When you only offer inaccessible PDFs, they can’t get the information they need.

You’re not just talking about legal trouble. You’re preventing people from accessing services they need, and that matters.

But let’s talk about when this needs to be done. It does depend on the size of the population you serve. I have fallen down a rabbit hole on this one. I’m hoping most of you know. It’s about the size of the entity you’re associated with. So if you’re, say, a library and you operate in a town, that municipality might be an entity, and it’s about the population of the entity.

So if you have more than 50,000 people, you’ve got until April 24th of next year. I know, that’s like seven months. If you are under the 50,000 population threshold for the entity, you get until April 26th of 2027. So this has come up on my side because, I know I’m American, but I’m living in England. And they kept saying, why did they pick such random dates?

They’re not. They’re the last Friday in April.

So here’s what we’re going to do about all of this. I’m going to give you a roadmap. It’s six steps that will get you from where you are now to where you need to be.

It isn’t theory. This is the same process we’ve been using with our clients. And it works. And you’ll all be getting a copy of the full roadmap guide when we send out the recording. So what I’m going to do is kind of walk you through on a higher level, and then there is a 25 page or so PDF that has a lot more detail.

And we will be sending that. These are just some previews, so you can get a little feel for how it might look.

So, six steps. That’s it. Inventory, audit, plan, fix, train, and sustain. Each step is meant to build on the last one. You don’t really want to skip around. Trust me. We’ve seen people try and it generally doesn’t end well. But if you follow these in order, you’ll get there. Honestly, train and sustain can kind of be moved around a bit, but you’ve got to get the beginning done properly.

So, step zero. Yeah, I start at zero because this is the step everyone wants to skip. You have to know what you’ve got. All of it. You cannot fix what you don’t know exists. And I guarantee you, you have way more digital assets than you think you do. Even dealing with it here at Silktide, I was like, how did we end up with 200 pages in this section?

You know, it happens.

While we’re still talking about inventory, I want to talk about how you’re going to deal with it. There are four things here. List it, group it, assign owners, and tag the risk level. Let me break that down a little bit. You’re going to start with everything digital and public facing, right? But you should group similar things together. So like all of your PDFs can go in one bucket and all your web portals need to go in another, right?

Then you’re going to work on identifying who owns what.

You’re going to want to check your contracts and your SLAs. You need to know if your vendor is responsible for accessibility or if that’s on you, because spoiler alert, it’s on you anyway, but you might be able to get them to fix it.

And in a way, the most important part is to tag everything as high, medium, or low risk. High risk? That’s your main website, your online application forms… Anything people need to access services. Low risk might be that archived newsletter from 2019.

I don’t want you to overthink this part. A rough cut is enough to get you started, right? You can refine it later.

So step one, now that we moved on from step zero, auditing. This is the goal, right? Find the problems. All of them. You can’t fix what you don’t know is broken. And just like you probably have no idea how much web real estate you actually have, there’s almost definitely more broken than you know, yet.

So let’s talk about how to do auditing. You’re going to do three things: automated scanning, human testing, and you need to document everything. I can’t stress that third point enough. So if you run automated tools first, they’ll catch the obvious stuff fast, right? And that’s great. You need a place to get started. But you really can’t stop there.

You’re going to need to get human eyes on it too.

But you need to write it all down. If it’s not documented, it didn’t happen. That’s a rule that the salespeople have taught me. If it’s not written down, it didn’t happen. Trust me, six months from now, when someone asks, “Didn’t we already check that?” You’re going to want the receipts.

Then we’re going to start talking about planning, right? Because you need to plan. This is the goal. We are going to organize the chaos, right? Because in this stage, you’ve got a giant list of broken things. And let’s face it, that’s not actually helpful. You’re going to need to turn that mess into an actual plan.

So let’s talk about how we do that.

I’ve got three priorities for you: impact first, then assign owners, then set milestones. So you’re going to start with the stuff that matters most. The things that keep people from getting services they need. Then you’re going to assign someone to own each of those pieces. I can’t stress this enough: not a committee. Not a department. A person with a name.

It’s going to matter. And you need to set real deadlines with real milestones. “We’ll get to it eventually” is not a plan.

So step three. Fix what matters and fix it well. You may note here I didn’t say fix everything. I said fix what matters. There’s a difference.

If you recognize this meme, you may know where this is going. It’s an excited character with her arms in the air and a broom. This one reads, “Fix ALL the things!” This is what everyone wants to do when they see their audit results. You want to fix everything at once. Like, let’s just do it. It’s awesome. Right?

That’s the goal, right? Make everything accessible. Simple.

But here’s the reality version. This is the same character but crying with the text, “Fix all the things?” with the question mark. This meme is actually entitled. This is why I’ll never be an adult. It was about cleaning. But the point remains. You can’t actually fix everything at once.

You’re not going to have the time, the budget or the people. So you have to make choices.

When you find something that’s not accessible. You have four main options. You can fix it and make it accessible, and that is always the best choice when you can do it. You can archive it or restrict access. If nobody really needs it, take it down. I’m a huge believer in like, when it comes to my PDFs, look at my analytics.

Is anyone looking at this? Does it actually provide necessary information? If the answer to those things are no, nuke it from orbit. Right? [Laughs] You don’t want it. You can offer an accessible alternative. This is a tough one because, like, to some extent, I am on board with this. But the reality is, you can only really do it if fixing the original is truly impossible.

As an example, we strive to make our PDFs as accessible as possible. And we do the work that needs to be done for, say, the guide that we’ll be emailing you guys when we send out the recording. But we always, when making something like an e-book, provide an HTML version, because not only does it give you options, like it’s much easier to read the HTML version on your phone, for example, but it’s a way to guarantee that PDFs, which could be made somewhat accessible, it’s not the only option. The last option is to claim undue burden. Right? I see this a lot, and I’m just going to give you a heads up now. You better bring receipts. It is an exceedingly high bar to clear. Like everyone thinks you can just say it.

That is not how it works. But there are times when this may actually be something you need to consider.

So when we’re talking about fixing, we need to talk about who’s going to do what.

So you’ve got four main teams that need to be involved. Dev, content, design, and your vendors. Right? So developers are going to handle the code stuff. That’s your focus order, your keyboard navigation fun, your form labels… Content people are going to fix the words, like alt text, using plain language, captions, and transcripts for videos.

I’m just going to say this. We’re in 2025. We have generative AI. So I think there’s no excuse for not having transcripts. Y’know? I know it’s not a requirement. It’s a triple-A reaching for the stars moment. But we have the technology now to generate transcripts. And they are really, really, really useful for people to be able to interact with videos. So I actually think it matters and it’s something that we should be doing more of.

Designers tackle the visual stuff. So that’s your color contrast, your focus states, and layouts that make sense. Your vendors, well… they should be fixing what they broke. But that assumes you can get them to cooperate. So that’s something you need to be aware of.

You are responsible for all of the content that you put onto your site. So even if you’re using like a third party widget for chat, that’s on you if it’s not accessible.

I put this one in because, if you might have not noticed and you’ve come to any of my other presentations, you know I might have a thing about PDFs. So this is “fix” for documents. Can’t fix a PDF? Replace it. Look, I know. We’ve always done PDFs. Everyone loves PDFs. Sales loves PDFs. Like, look, sometimes you can fix a PDF, but the reality is that most of the time it’s going to be faster and cheaper to just convert the information to a proper web page.

Right? Print style sheets have been around for decades. And, you know, I’m actually going to include a link to a webinar called “That Doesn’t Need to be a PDF”. The US government actually hosted it like, last month. It’s really good. Make sure I give you guys a link to the recording because it was awesome. And let’s face it, these are our people.

Fundamentally, use HTML wherever possible. Providing that alternative, it should often be viewed as last resort because you’re looking for pairity, right? You want the experience to be the same.

Also, as I say a lot, when it comes to PDFs, just open one on your phone and tell me that they’re the awesomest thing ever.

Step four is going to be teaching, right? You need to train your staff. You need to teach everyone who touches digital, So this isn’t just your web team. I know that’s what you’re thinking, you’re like, ah, but we talked to those people! I mean, anyone who post content, uploads a file, creates a document, or manages any part of your digital presence, needs to know the basics.

Procurement, too. Can’t stress that enough. If they know it, they’ll spot things.

Because here’s the thing. You could fix everything today, right? You could be perfect. You could have the most accessible website in the world. But if people don’t know how to keep it accessible, you’re going to be back to where you started in six months. Right? Wish I could say I haven’t seen that happen, but it does happen.

It’s really easy to just kind of backslide if people don’t know. It’s not malice, right? It’s just that if you don’t know, you wouldn’t be looking out for it.

And step five, the final one. Sustain.

You need to bake it in. Automate, track, and repeat. This isn’t a one time project. It can’t be a one time project. You’re going to need to build accessibility checks into your workflow. You’re going to want to set up automated monitoring. You want to track your progress and make it part of how you do business.

Because the Department of Justice isn’t going to check on you once and then forget about it. This is your new normal.

So in my objectives, I call this the “What not to do”. But I do want to talk about common traps, right? So before we get into some more practical stuff, I want to warn you about the mistakes I see people make over and over and over again. Partly because these traps slow you down, waste your money, and sometimes they even make things worse.

So, trap number one, making it all about screen readers. Now, I know there’s probably a sharp intake of breath going on from everyone sitting in front of their computers right now, but I’m not trying to tell you the screen reader experiences don’t matter. They absolutely matter, and I’m going to talk about that briefly first.

This is an example I actually pulled from Reddit this week. They were discussing using emojis in their social media posts. Like this visual layout, right? Especially because if you use something like LinkedIn, you probably know you can’t put bullet points in it very easily. It’s really annoying, and I think that’s part of the reason we see so many emoji bullet points.

Right? But I’m just going to stop for a moment here, and for all my visual people, I want you to think about how much you’re actually noticing those little emoji icons, and maybe even how bad the contrast on that bottom one is in dark mode. But what do you think a screen reader user is hearing when they encounter this?

Because this is what they hear. “Tear-off calendar Date 1st January 2026.” “Clock face 3 o’clock Time 5:30 p.m. 7:30 p.m.” “Round pushpin location: My house” “Dollar sign Cost: $5. Entry fee.” That clock face 3 o’clock thing gets me every time. It does matter. We need to be thinking about it. Every emoji has a description built in, and it’s coming from the operating system.

Right? So, the thing is, you don’t have a lot of control over that, and it’s really kind of awful. So ask yourself, is it really adding anything? Is there something else you could do? When I want bullet points on LinkedIn, I use hyphens. Look, it’s not great, but it’s a lot better than knowing that I’m creating this kind of experience for someone else.

But my point is, if you’re only thinking about screen readers, right? Your developers might be overlooking, say, voice navigation users.

So say what you see. I want you to think about what would you call this icon?

I will describe it briefly by saying, it’s what you would find in an e-commerce website to signify that’s where you’re putting your items into a container, so that you could look at it before checking out. Now, is it a basket? Is it a trolley? Is it a shopping cart? Y’know, there’s a surprising number of words for what that icon looks like.

So if your developer gives it an ARIA label like “basket” right, but there’s no visible text, voice users who are shopping will be in a situation where maybe they say, “Click cart”, and are stuck because the accessible name is now “basket”, right? So the screen reader user gets “basket” but the voice user has to guess.

If you use visual visible text and you make the accessible name match, everyone wins. So screen reader users get clear labels, voice users can navigate by what they see, and everyone is getting the same experience.

Moving on to trap number two: vendor trust. This is the sarcastic “Sure, Jan” meme from The Brady Bunch. Your vendor says their product is fully accessible. They might even have a VPAT, that’s a Voluntary Product Accessibility Template, that says it is. But here’s the thing about VPATs and as somebody who is helped fill them out for others, they are self-reported.

So it’s a bit like asking someone if they’re a good driver. Of course they’re going to say yes. I don’t think I’ve met anyone who doesn’t think they’re a good driver. So trust but verify. Test it yourself, because when the DOJ comes knocking, they’re not going to care what your vendor promised you. They only care with the experience for your users is.

Trap number three is the PDF sprawl. This is a meme from Toy Story. It’s Woody looking distressed as Buzz Lightyear points off into the distance, smiling with the text, “Inaccessible PDFs, inaccessible PDFs everywhere”. Fundamentally, PDFs multiply like rabbits.

You fix one, three more appear. Someone uploads a scanned document. Someone saves a word file as a PDF without thinking about accessibility.

That’s my lived experience, and it seems to be somewhat universal.

But frankly, the solution is not going to be to fix every PDF. The solution is actually to stop making so many PDFs. Because as I’ve said, most of the information should be on a proper web page anyway.

And when you make those kind of decisions, I always call it stopping the bleeding.

PDF remediation, if you’ve never done it, is time consuming and honestly can be a bit painful. [Laughs] Most accessibility people I know think it’s one of the worst jobs that we have. But fundamentally, you need to say, like, from this point on, all of our PDFs are going to be as accessible as possible, or we’re going to have an HTML version or whatever, but you’ve got to draw a line in the sand and say it stops today, right?

Because if you’ve got someone who’s remediating them and there’s just adding more and more and more, right, you’re never actually going to get away from it.

Trap number four is inaccessible portals. So this is a joke from the internet. The text on it says, “Google: requires three forms of authentication when logging in. Me,” …And this is an image from Lord of the Rings with Sam saying, “It’s me, your Sam. Don’t you know your Sam?” You spend all this time making your website accessible, and then you send people to a third party portal that’s completely inaccessible.

It’s like building a ramp to your front door, but then having stairs inside. So check your portals, all of them, because that’s where people generally do business with you, right? And if they can’t get in, you’ve got a serious problem.

The biggest trap of all is definitely the, “We’ll fix it later.” This is another famous meme. It’s a dog sitting in a burning room and he is smiling and saying, “This is fine.” This fix a later thing is basically everyone’s favorite plan; we’ll launch now, we’ll fix accessibility later. What could possibly go wrong? But here’s what goes wrong.

Later never comes. The budget gets cut, the priorities change, new features take precedence… And meanwhile, you’re excluding people from your services every single day. Plus, fixing accessibility after the fact costs like ten times more than building it in from the start. So congratulations. You’ve just made your problem more expensive and more urgent. I always say, do it right or do it twice.

So enough with the warnings. Let’s talk about what you’re going to do. Here’s your checklist. This is the same six steps we just walked through. You could potentially print it out, put it on your wall. But remember, the first four, 0 to 3, really have to be done in order. You can’t skip ahead. Definitely don’t try to do everything at once.

You need one step at a time. Four and five, you know, you could be bringing them in earlier, frankly.

If you’re feeling overwhelmed and you don’t know where to start, I call this the mitigating risk starter set. Here are five things that’re going to give you the biggest bang for your buck. Start with your high traffic pages. That’s going to be your home page, right? And whatever your most visited pages are. That’s going to be unique to each of you.

Your broken forms. If people can’t complete your forms, they can’t get services. And that is what got the Department of Justice’s attention in 2020. It was a form on Rite Aid’s website.

The required PDFs, you know, the ones that people actually need to access your programs? Y’know, there will be lots of them. “Oh, it’s a newsletter!” It’s still a PDF, right? But there will be some people (who) have to interact with (them). Those have got to be looked at.

Captions on your videos, especially if you’re posting informational content. And remember, AI is here to help with those things. I mean, even LinkedIn will add automatic captions. Are they perfect? Eh… But the reality is like there’s a lot of options out there.

Some of them are built in. It doesn’t have to be a thing you have to do by hand.

And logins. I know I keep droning on about logins, but the reality is, if someone can’t get into your system, nothing else really matters. And log ins are surprisingly difficult. If you focus on these five, you’ll address the most common complaints and the highest legal risk.

Right? You’ve got to prioritize. You’re not going to be able to do everything. Even though we all wish we could.

So when I said, what about today? This is where I want you to start.

Not next week. Not after the next meeting. Today. Pick one page. Maybe it’s your home page. Maybe it’s something else. You’re going to run a scan on it. You’re going to tab through it with your keyboard. I’ll explain that in a moment. And with any luck, you’ll make one fix. That’s it. One page, one scan, one tab test, one fix. You will learn so much from doing that.

And because I’m talking about tabbing and telling you that you need to do it, let me explain why.

[Video begins, Jessica once again recorded the voice over]

[Jessica, voice over]
Imagine you’re browsing a website on your computer.

[Visual]
A human hand moves a computer mouse around. We see they’re browsing the Catbook website, a social media for cats.

[Voice over]
I bet you’re pretty reliant on your mouse for clicking on things. I know I am!

But what if you couldn’t use a mouse… How would that work?

Like this!

[Visual]
The mouse cursor disappears. We now see a red highlight box, starting on the Catbook logo in the top left of the screen, working its way through the page.

[Voice over]
This is keyboard navigation, sometimes called “tabbed browsing”.

The Tab key steps through every part of the page that can be clicked on, and the Enter key acts as a left mouse click.

Sounds simple, right? It can be, if the site is designed with this type of user in mind.

Here’s a common problem:

[Visual]
The Catbook homepage, only there’s no red highlight box to be seen, despite the Tab key being pressed repeatedly.

[Voice over]
Can you tell where we are on the page?

[Visual]
The Enter key is pressed, and suddenly we see a webpage full of dogs. Nothing but dogs. Barking loudly.

[Voice over]
Well, I wasn’t expecting that!

The box around the clickable item should be obvious, so that users who are navigating your site using their keyboard can see where they are.

[Visual]
We return to the Catbook homepage, and the red highlight box reappears over a link that says “Give me dogs!”

[Voice over]
Now, you may be thinking: that box is UGLEH! It does NOT go with my site design!

Do not worry. It will never be seen by anyone who doesn’t need it.

[Visual]
A character with a skeptical look on their face turns to the viewer, question mark above their head.

[Voice over]
… It’s true!

When you move your mouse over an element, you get the hover state. You’ve probably seen this a lot.

But that highlighting box isn’t hover, it’s FOCUS. You can only see the focus state and that highlight box if you Tab to it using your keyboard.

Hover and focus are separate, and can be set to be completely different in your website’s code. So make sure your focus state is really obvious with a bright contrasting colour. It won’t change what you mouse-using visitors will see, but it will make your site a lot more friendly to those who are using their keyboard.

[Video ends, back to Jessica]
So, now that you understand the concept, tab moves you forward. Enter clicks on things. Shift-tab moves you backwards. So when someone tabs through your page, they should move through it in a logical order, So what we have here is an image of a fake website. Right? Without anything put on top of it. Then the one in the middle, that’s what happens when you don’t really think about focus order. As you’re tabbing through, suddenly you’re at the bottom of the page, then back at the top, and then somewhere in the middle, and it’s a bit like a scavenger hunt nobody asked for. The one on the right is showing you a logical focus order. It starts with the skip link.

Then it’s the top left logo to go home. The hamburger menu. The big first call to action button. The form fields go in sequence, right? It makes sense, right? That’s what you’re going to be looking for. You’re going to hit the tab key and you’re going to look to see is it moving around in an order that seems logical based on the layout of the page?

While you’re there, you can look for your focus states. As a general rule, I would tell you that they should look the same across the page. But when someone taps to an element, you have to be able to see where you are, right? So all of these examples work, right? Frankly, it doesn’t matter that much what it looks like, as long as it’s visible and really obvious.

Because you shouldn’t make people guess where they are on your page. The rule I always say is that if you want to check this, load up your website, close your eyes, hit the tab button repeatedly, and open them. Because if you can’t figure out where you are on the page within a couple of seconds, your focus states aren’t good enough.

This one that’s at the bottom that’s like black-white-black, It’s jokingly referred to as the Oreo cookie focus state, but it is universal. It’s from a guy called Erik Kroes, he’s amazing, and the code for that is actually included in the roadmap PDF we’ll be sending out to you guys. So if you want to use it, he’s put it out there for the world.

And we’re trying to tell everyone about it because it guarantees you that you tick all the boxes. Right? Because the black-white-black gives you the correct contrast no matter what it’s on top of. And speaking of contrast, color contrast needs to be obvious. Your text needs enough contrast against the background so people can actually read it.

This does apply to icons and other things too, but fundamentally, we generally start with text. So the standard is 4.5 to 1 for normal text. But higher ratios are always better. 21 to 1, which is that top one. These are done by having two different colors. There’s a cat on a background. So 21 to 1 is black on white.

That is the highest ratio that’s available. But what we’ve done here is show you some examples. So there’s one that’s kind of orange on blue, that’s a 4.7 to 1. The lime green on black, which, believe it or not, is 11.9 to 1. And white on a darker gray gets you the 4.5 to 1.

You don’t want to go below the minimum.

4.5 to 1 is generally what you want to aim for. There’s some exceptions that take you to 3 to 1. But the thing I tell people is squint at your screen, because if the text or the icons disappear, that means your contrast isn’t good enough. Like, I know it sounds wild, but it really works.

When you squint, you’re like, oh, hey. But you don’t have to do all this stuff manually, right? You’re going to want to use tools. So use tools everyone can use. You know, the best tool is not going to be the fanciest tool. It’s the one people actually use. So if it requires a three hour training session and a PhD in regret, it’s going to gather dust.

I’m looking at you, Google Analytics. [Laughs] Don’t overcomplicate this. Yes, enterprise level accessibility scanning tools are awesome, I work for Silktide, but you can start with free tools your whole team can actually use right now.

Today. Like our tool bar. It’s free and it works. This will make your life easier. This is a Chrome browser extension, so it can be used in Edge with the right permissions.

It’s free. It catches a ton of obvious problems from missing alt text to poor heading structure. Dodgy link text, color contrast is automatic, and it has an eyedropper tool. So you can, like, pick that pixel and that pixel and compare and make sure they’re okay. So if you install it and run it on your pages, you can fix what it finds.

If you liked, say, that WCAG video, there are help videos in this like that. Now here’s the thing. It doesn’t keep a history. It doesn’t help you with reporting. It’s not a project management tool, but it really is a perfect way to start today. Because you need to keep going. You’re going to start where you are and then keep going.

I know how overwhelming this can feel. But the secret is you don’t have to be perfect on day one. You just have to be better than you were yesterday. So if you pick that one page and you fix that one thing, and then you pick another page and you fix another thing, it’s progress over perfection.

And if you decide you want to help, we are here. At Silktide, we offer automated testing for every day checks and team-wide visibility. We do manual audits to dig deeper, and uncover the stuff tools can’t catch. We offer expert consultancy to guide you through strategy, fixes, and culture change. And we do training. If you have liked any of this or my sense of humor, you have me.

We have other people who are more corporate. Look, no jargon, no scare tactics, just actual support from people who care and who get it. Y’know, because this stuff matters. And we believe you can do it. One fix at a time, one page at a time. And if you need backup, we’re just a click away. As I mentioned, we’ll be including links for the ADA digital A11Y roadmap.

That’s the detailed version of what we just walked through. Right? But in addition, we have things like, Don’t Panic, our new beginner’s guide that explains accessibility without jargon and lots of cats. And the ultimate guide to web accessibility, everything you need to know in one place. That includes a full run through of WCAG with cats and easy to understand examples.

And we’re updating it this month, so there will be some changes. It’s all free. It’s practical, and it’s designed to actually help you get this done. If you don’t want to wait, you can find all of these and more in our resources section. So this is silktide.com. What I’m highlighting here is the free accessibility checker because that’s an easy way to get to it.

The ADA roadmap. There’s even a field guide for screen readers. Give us 45 minutes and you’ll never look at your phone the same way. If you remember, I said I was all about changing hearts and minds and, like, that’s what our free resources are all about. Empathy.

There’s nothing like using your phone to scan some QR codes and experiencing the screen reader for yourself.

My final thought for you is that I want to leave you with a quote from Steve Krug. He wrote a book called Don’t Make Me Think. He’s like one of the early people for UX design. “How many opportunities do we have to dramatically improve people’s lives just by doing our job a little better?”

And that’s what this is really about. It’s not compliance. It’s not avoiding lawsuits. It’s about making sure everyone in your community can access the services they need. And that’s worth doing right.

So let’s do Q&A.

[Ben]
Hello. Got a couple here. One that just came in. Can you point to a resource that can be shared with leadership that explains the business risk if you don’t respond to the deadlines for big and small entities? AKA: Any tips on communicating the need and urgency to leadership?

[Jessica]
That is a good question. I’m actually going to have to come back to you on that one. I’ve done a bunch of things about how to talk to leadership. But I need to find you one that is more about this, right? Because fundamentally, you’re right. You need buy in from the top. Y’know. And, let me have a look, and I’ll try to include something when we send out the recording.

[Ben]
Another thing here. Do you know how people overseeing this will all be evaluating government agencies? Just curious that there are some issues that we’ve assessed with automatic tools that we’ve followed up with tests with actual assistive tech users, but have proved non-issues.

[Jessica]
Hah, the false positive problem. To be honest, I’m not 100% sure how they’re going to do it. I have a lot of experience, unfortunately, with how they do it here in the UK. And the answer in the UK was that, and from what I can tell, a bunch of Europe, is they start with automated tools and then they get accessibility professionals to go look at it, you know. Because they are concerned about things like false positives and false negatives.

Y’know. And part of it for them is that they want to make sure that what they’re complaining to you about is real. It’s not very helpful, as you said, if you’ve got a false positive and they come at you going, hey, you need to fix this, and you’re like, but I don’t, because we know it’s fine, that is a waste of everybody’s time. So I suspect they’re going to take a stance more like what I’m seeing here. Y’know, where there’s a human element involved. Because, like, honestly, if you just wanted, you know, like automated testing, that’s a thing. We offer it, you know, we do the Silktide Index, but I don’t think that’s going to get you there.

And a lot of what they’re going to be looking for is going to be things like how your forms work. And it’s very difficult to test everything a form needs with an automated checker.

[Ben]
Another thing we have: Can you provide any example websites that are doing it right?

[Jessica]
I will put them in the list. Off the top of my head, like obviously I’m like, “Oh, us!” The thing is, when I said things are going to change if you don’t keep on top of it, look at Apple. I mean, one of our UX people wrote like a whole rant today about the updates to… Is it macOS? I always get confused about which one’s iOS… Windows user, sorry. But she’s updated and it’s changed a bunch of things, and some of it’s blurry and some of it’s just weird, you know, and there’s a lot of questions about like, why would you do this? And Apple is held up as like THE people for accessibility.

So like, they’re putting me in a position where I can usually go, oh yeah, just check out the Apple website, right? It’s always awesome. But it isn’t. Y’know. And people make mistakes all the time. So it’s a tough one because unless your website is truly static, it’s going to be hard to say that website is awesome and they’re doing it right.

And then know or at least feel confident that six months later, it’s going to be still true. Which I guess is a little bit depressing now that I’m saying it out loud. [Laughs] One of my biggest problems is that I’m like, oh, I’d love to be like, [Unintelligible gushing] but then I’m like, oh, but I don’t know, that was three months ago. You know what I mean? So give me a moment. I’m going to reach out because I know that, like, we all have our little pet sites. So I want to see what everyone else in the company is like, oh I’ve been looking at these people and they’re awesome! Because let’s face it, we should be happy and promoting people who are doing it right.

You know, like, that’s a beautiful thing.

[Ben]
Another one we have here, and I’m going to combine with the second: Does this apply to federal government agencies? And someone earlier also asks, do government social media accounts fall under these rules?

[Jessica]
They do. Right, because everything you do is now representing you. So it’s a weird one because I think the social media is going to be a gray area because you were posting on someone else’s platform, but you were still like, representing your people?

So there’s going to be questions. As an example, do you bring your Twitter posts, I guess it’s X, but do you bring your Twitter posts onto your website? Do you have like that little feed thing? Because that’s actually going to be on you even though Twitter made it. I think it is going to matter because there are things you do have control over, like using emojis as bullet points.

Right? But realistically, it’s going to be a question of where can you get the information, right? I’ll give you an example. It’s a snow day, right? Do I hear it on the radio? Do I find it on social media? Did you email it to me? I need to know that I have an accessible way to get that information and like that, that’s going to matter.

I’m sorry. I got fixated on the social media part…

[Ben]
The first part was does it apply to federal government agencies?

[Jessica]
Oh, so this is where things get really hinky, isn’t it? Because, like, we’ve got Section 508, we’ve got Section 504, y’know, which I was surprised by how many people had never heard of. And then we have ADA title two.

Right? And like, 508 is about federal stuff. Right? But 504 is, do you accept money from the government? That’s like… And then there’s the ADA for title two. So it’s actually going to come down to what kind of entity you are, where does your funding come from… Like, I know this is wild, right? The thing I’m going to say is this, though. There is a bill in Congress right now, that they are talking about where they want to set a universal like, this is the standard, right? You know how we’re moving to WCAG 2.1 double-A right now for title two, that has been the standard for 508 for some time, right? So there’s a bill that’s coming through where they want to just say, no matter what it is, this is the standard.

Right? And like that’s going to matter because it will impact 504, the Ada title three, like all of it. It’s not necessarily a bad thing, right? It might be a good thing to have like a measuring stick that isn’t just used by the courts, you know, but one that’s actually defined.

But I think it’s going to be one of those weird ones where, like fundamentally, every one of those rules was there to tell you that you needed to make your digital assets accessible.

But which one applied to you was a bit hinky.

[Ben]
Another here that we’ve had some discussion internally on as well: Our web vendor has strict handling of many of our elements/widgets, including CSS headers, footers, and array page. We expect our vendor to be proactive to ensure these features are accessible, and also recommendations to prompt them, which a few resources from ADA.gov were shared there, but didn’t know if you had any further…?

[Jessica]
Yeah. I can’t stress this one enough. That’s why I said you need to look at your VPATs that they’ve given you, and you need to look at your service level agreements. Right? It may be… And if you’re not doing it yet, in the future, you’re going to want to talk to procurement about adding in rules and say anything you provide us has got to be accessible.

As government entities, we’ve been dealing with that for years where they’re like, you have to guarantee us that this is going to be accessible or we can’t use you, y’know? And I thought that was actually really smart. And I wish they did more of that here in Europe. I guess they’re doing more of it now.

But like, the only, this sounds awful, but the only leverage you have is the same leverage that I’ve advised local government here in the UK to do, which is that you guys tend to use the same tools. Right? There’s a surprising amount of overlap, right? So I was like, look around, talk to your neighbors. Find out if they’re using the same tool.

Because if a bunch of you band together and say, fix this or we’re going to find another provider, y’know, they’re going to fix it. But it can feel like when you’re the lone voice that they’re just like, they don’t care. You know, you’re small fish, big pond, they’re like, “Eh…” And I know that sucks.

It really does. But they have had success by finding others who are all using the same, like… literally the same chat widget, the same cookie banner, the same whatever it is, and realizing that if like, you know, 20% of the local government in a country uses it, you know, and they all say this is unacceptable, they listen, in a way they didn’t when it was just like one saying, this is a thing, because… You know, there’s solidarity in numbers.

[Ben]
Another question here, do you have any tips on how to train staff who are less technically inclined to create accessible content?

[Jessica]
Yeah, that’s part of the resources I’m trying to direct you to. If there’s one thing I love and try to specialize in, it’s newbies. People who don’t like accessibility or are afraid of it and are like, oh, it’s going to be terrible.

“Don’t Panic. It’s Just Accessibility” is a book. It’s new. I think we put it out last month? It’s there to be as gentle as possible, right? To just talk you through the basics and focus on concepts and empathy, y’know, and understanding how this impacts people. You know, like, I think it’s scary if you get into code or remediation or how these things work, right, like I’m not going to tell them like, hey, let’s sit down and use a screen reader. Right? That’s not… I don’t think that’s a good idea. I don’t feel like that helps people embrace it. Right? There’s only so much unknown that you can kind of handle at any given time, you know? So, like, if you’re accessibility professionals listening to me right now, one of my biggest bugbears is that you should teach keyboard navigation separately.

Right? These are your buttons, this is how it works, let me walk you through a page, right? Then walk them through the page with a screen reader, because then they’ve got an idea of what’s supposed to be there. Y’know? Like, you’re not teaching them to be like someone who uses a screen reader every day. You’re trying to get them to understand how it functions and what they should expect.

So that is what I would say.

Some of the stuff that we’ve done is just meant to be gentle, right? It’s meant to be fun and to make you laugh and to help you learn. So especially with someone new, I would be looking at giving them the Don’t Panic book and the Field Guide because like I said, there is something amazing about having your phone and like, you know, a printout.

You can do it with the HTML version. It’s got the QR codes, right? But the idea being that, like, it’s there to kind of walk you through it and be like, here is a page, that doesn’t have a skip to content link, right? So like this is the experience. Here is the same page, but we’ve added the skip to content link.

Do you see the difference, right? And we do that by putting in a joke, so you have a reason that you want to get to the rest of the page? And like that kind of thing to try to help people understand and have some empathy? I think the gentle, like, holding your hands and showing you that it is about people, you know, and then sometimes just pointing out to them that fundamentally like, this is going to happen to you.

It’s not just that you are like one bad trip and fall away from, you know, a traumatic brain injury. If you’re lucky, you’re going to age and your hearing is going to go and your vision is going to get wonky and like, sure. You know, you could be my mother-in-law who is 87 and has perfect eyesight somehow.

And perfect hearing. But like, I’m already in my 40s and I don’t have those things. You know, the reality is like it’s going to happen to you. But I really think the empathy side and like, getting people to experience some of these things for themselves, helps them to not be able to unsee it. Right? Like, I can tell you what a skip link is and what it’s for, right?

But it’s way different if you actually experience it and you’re like, oh, now I see why that works that way. Now I get in like a visceral level why it matters.

But, you know, that’s just my take on things.

[Ben]
We do have one that just come in that, someone said, “It’s not a question, I wanted to say this is the best webinar I have ever attended. Jessica makes it fun, engaging and informative, so there’s a little boost there, as we go on. Someone did ask—

[Jessica]
I love you, whoever you are! Write nice things in the survey! [Jessica laughs]

[Ben]
We do also have, “Where can I go for resources regarding converting/reworking PDF forms into a more accessible means?”

[Jessica]
PDFs are rough. Depending on… Yeah, I’m just going to say it. Look, depending on your budget, there are actually really good solutions. There are companies that will do it for you. There’s one of my favorite places, and I keep trying to get it here at Silktide because they want PDFs and I don’t… Equidox. The reason I like them, I found them through Cornell University, so, like, you know, they have some chops. Is that they give you kind of like, a double paned effect and, like, you’ve got your PDF and it’s building your HTML. And for me, I was like, this is the kind of thing I want, you know, where, like, it’s just going to do it for me automatically so I can be like, that’s my HTML page.

Because I was really fixated on like how I got both with less work, because you know how it is. You’re like, I want an HTML version, and they go, oh, that’s so much more work, you know, that was a double the effort. But, yeah. PDFs are rough. For what it’s worth, I’m talking to my designer about this because I’ve asked him to do, like, a blog post where he details out how to do this in InDesign, because if you take the time to set up a bunch of things, I’m not saying this is like a five minute job, but if you set up a bunch of things like your headings and your styles and all these other things, right? You can save that and use it on repeated documents, and like, that takes so much of the work away because you’ve done that formative thing so that when you’re going through and going, this is a heading, it actually knows it’s a heading, right?

Like… Again, so much of this is awareness, right? Like if you can get someone to make you that or get your designer to do that and then hand it to the other designers, right, like you can cut so much work out of it. But like that initial knowledge, you know, of how to do it, you know, and what needs to be done… That can be the barrier. Right? And this is what I mean, like, it never comes from a place of malice, y’know? It comes from a place where they just don’t know, and it doesn’t have to be painful.

[Ben]
Only a couple more, here.

[Jessica]
I like this! People are engaged.

[Ben]
We’ve got a lot. One was, you covered emojis. What are your recommendations on icons and logos? I know we had the example of, like, a shopping cart icon and accompanying it with a text label. So anything else about icons and logos being used?

[Jessica]
Okay. Those are two different things to me. Logo: top left, takes you home, whatever. That’s the thing, right? Logos actually have a special category in accessibility, right? Because we allow for a lot more for logos. Icons, this is where it gets rough. I like Font Awesome icons. Like, I don’t… As much as I say I’m a hater, right, I like emojis in the right places. I like icons, right? But icons have got to have proper names. And maybe it’s the kind of thing where you have to make sure it has a tooltip, right? The thing is about whether or not it’s something that someone needs to interact with, and how they interact with it.

So whether that’s like putting the visual label on it to say like this is “basket” instead of like “cart” or whatever, you’re going to want to do some testing with users.

Right? Because some of this is going to— this is going to sound wild —but some of it is going to come down to like, familiarity and culture. Like, you wouldn’t necessarily say “shopping trolley” but Brits do! You know, and figuring out like what works. The main thing I say is that, if you look at something like, Don’t Make Me Think, that was written in something like 1998.

But the reality is like, he was talking about something called “mystery meat navigation” right? Where even back then, people liked to use icons for things, and they didn’t necessarily make any sense, and there were no there were no rules, right? Like the web was a Wild West, you know, and one could argue it still is now.

So like, the main thing is whether or not it is communicating effectively. That, and you need universality. If you decide that you’re like, “you can hover over this to get more information” is a question mark in a circle? Don’t change it. That has to become the thing you use everywhere. People get really used to the way your site functions, right?

So like you need to make sure you keep it that way. There is something beautiful about the comfort you find in consistency. And to me that’s almost more important than like, do we use icons? Can we use icons? You know, you can, you know, it’s… I think it comes down to usability. You know, and seriously do things like, if you have icons and they are interactive, like, do things like use your tab key.

Right? Because if it’s small and then it’s like wrapped in a box, you know, like if it’s making it even harder to discern what it is, that’s actually a problem. You’re looking for whether or not people can use this and whether it intuitively makes sense. Yeah.

Sorry, I get a bit… [Hand puppet gesture]

[Ben]
No, it’s all great. Are there any AI tools that are available in the marketplace to help with accessibility?

[Jessica]
Tons. Although I’m just going to put a shout out for what I really like: Descript. I know it’s kind of weird, and it cuts off. You know, IPT, Descript. But we use it for transcripts.

Like, if you have a video, this is fantastic. If you have a video, it puts up the text in front of you and you can, like, cut the text and then it cuts the video. It’s kind of awesome, actually. Frightened me a little bit, to be honest. But like, things like that can be really powerful.

And they’re, like, less than $20 a month. I’ve been astounded at some of the stories I’m hearing. Like, I know no one likes it when I say I’m not a huge fan of image generation, because I work at an AI company, right? But fundamentally like… a friend of a friend, you know, thought he was never going to be able to paint again.

And now he’s using AI to generate art. And is it a different medium? Yes. Does he still feel like he’s creating something? Yes. And I’m still trying to make sense of that. Know what I mean? Knowing that Be My Eyes is using AI because, if you haven’t heard of this, it was a service. It’s an app on your phone.

And people who were visually impaired could hold up their phone and connect to a human being who would explain what they’re seeing. Right? Whether it was helping you pick out clothes or do your grocery shopping, things like that. It was actually really cool. But it was all human volunteers, right? And they got a partnership going, and now you can choose to use AI.

And I know some people are going to say this is bad, but fundamentally it gave them their privacy back. Right? Because like, you know, like say you’re having a hard time writing a check, you know, like, do you really want… Or filling out a medical form. You know, if you have to show that to another human being to get them to help you, you know, you are losing some of not just your autonomy but your privacy.

These are things I spend way too much time thinking about. As far as testing is concerned, I think the AI is coming along. I think there’s going to be a lot of changes, and I think there’s going to be a change in how we interact with the web. Like I’ve been joking about, like… [Jessica laughs]

Some of the times I give away how old I am. I’ve been joking about, Starship Troopers. Right? “Would you like to know more?” And I’m like, oh, I want that, right? I tell everyone I want The Librarian from Snow Crash, where you could just have a conversation with an AI and it could, like, collate lots of information and go, oh, yeah, I can make that logical leap with you, right?

How exciting. And to me, that’s what I’m hoping for is that we’re going to get to that place, but I think we’re getting there in a very weird kind of roundabout way where the way we interact with the web is going to change. I think we’re actually going to have more conversations. When I started hearing about that, I think it’s called “Liquid” thing that Adobe was doing, you know? And talking about, “You can talk to your PDF.” And I was like, oh, we are heading in that direction. You know what I mean? I think it’s going to be a transition. I think there’s going to be a period of time where we have everything running in parallel, but I think that’s kind of where we’re going.

I guess time will tell if I’m proven right.

[Ben]
Last one we have here, and I think it’s pretty fitting to end on, will the slide deck be available afterwards?

[Jessica]
I can make the slide deck available afterwards. So, yeah, I’ll let the team know and we’ll see if we can’t include that when we send out the recording, and the other stuff. You can see my copious slide notes. [Jessica laughs]

[Ben]
I think that covers everything we’ve had in the Q&A.

[Jessica]
I just want to thank everyone. You guys all stayed late. I’m sorry. I do try to, like, end, but I am a talker. So, I hope you found this useful. We will be sending out the… I keep calling it the companion guide, but the reality is, this presentation was based on the guide I wrote for ADA.

So hopefully they do actually work nicely together. And you’ll be like, oh, yay! This is exactly what I needed. And if not, you can feel free to email me, JessicaChambers@silktide.com and y’know, ask questions or provide feedback, like, look, I’m open to it. I really want to make things better. When you leave here, it will send you like a three question survey.

Be honest, we’re trying to improve that too. So, thank you, everyone, and go be awesome.

[End of transcript]