Doing accessibility right

[Jessica:]
Hi, everyone.

Today’s webinar is Doing Accessibility Right. I know. Bold statement, isn’t it? We have a number of objectives we’re going to be covering today. So we’re going to start by talking about how to get people to care. Then we’re going to talk about automated testing, manual testing. Going beyond the standards. User testing. Fake silver bullets. Culture change. And then we’re going to wrap up. And with any luck, we’ll have time for Q&A.

So about me. I’m Jessica Chambers. I’ve been at Silktide for 11 years now, and I’m an accessibility specialist. My one claim to fame is that I was immortalized as a minor character in a video game. For those who were wondering, it was World of Warcraft.

So let’s talk about getting people to care.

I believe that there are three main cases you can make for accessibility, right? So we’re going to start with the ethical case. This is one everyone thinks of, right? It’s the right thing to do, right? It is. And honestly, it’s because everyone should have agency. We should all have access to the same information. We should all be able to make our own decisions and carry on in the world in an equitable way.

Right. But let’s face it. While this works on a bunch of us, it doesn’t necessarily work when you get out into the world. The business case is one that focuses on the company and its goals in hopes of using that as the leverage to get them to participate in making things more accessible. The reality is when you improve your accessibility, generally speaking, you automatically make your SEO in UX better.

It just works that way.

Sorry, I just saw for a second there was a hand up. If you need something, let me know. Otherwise put it in the chat and we’ll come back to it. Legal compliance. That’s more of a thing these days. The European Accessibility Act is coming into force. The US government is actually starting to crack down on it. And generally in the world, there’s an expansion going on of making it a legal requirement to make your website accessible.

The Purple Pound is it’s a concept that when you look at people with disabilities and the households they live in, that there is a large amount of untapped funds, right? If your website is accessible, more people can get to it. And these people have money and could be spending it with you, instead of someone else. And the last one, and this is the one I tend to drone on about is brand reputation.

So CSR in parentheses is corporate social responsibility. And I know it’s a bit like [worried noise] but the idea is that like people are starting to pay attention and care, right? And being able to say that we are the kind of company where we’re cutting down on our carbon footprint or we’re making your sites more accessible, or we hire people with disabilities.

Right. Like, those things make people like your brand more and I think it’s one of the ones that can really work. Hard to define, but… And my favorite one, the selfish case for accessibility. And every time I see this, I am reminded that my designer put the figure that looked like me on the selfish case. The thing that I want you to think about here is that you can motivate people with a couple of different things.

Right? Being in accessibility, there is job security, right? It pays decently. You get to participate in social justice. You get to make the web a better place. You get to wake up every day, and when you go to work, you know what you’re doing matters, right? And the reality is it’s going to happen to you right? Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow.

But we all age, right? So at some point, almost every one of us is going to experience a proper full time barrier to our access to things like the Web, you know. So there is a point where it will directly impact you and when it comes to finding ways to get people to participate, sometimes that one works.

One of the other things that works is gamification, things like the Index, right? So we give you rankings, we give you scores, and we give targets and milestones. I think they’re introducing badges soon. I like the idea is that we can give you things and compare with your peers and do benchmarking and all those kind of things to bring more of a dopamine hit to make it something that’s a bit more exciting.

And honestly, like, it’s Skinner boxes. But when we’re looking for ways to make people care, sometimes we need to think outside of what has been the norm. If it isn’t working, we need something new. So when we talk about doing accessibility right, I want to talk about the different ways you can do the testing. We’re going to start with automated testing, obviously what Silktide’s known for.

So I want to talk about the pros and cons for a minute. I’m taking a really broad view here because the reality is there are a lot of free tools to do one page at a time and things like that. And your mileage may vary depending on which tool or platform that you’re using. The functionality it has can be wildly different.

On the pro side, we’ve got it’s a quick way to get started. And it is, you know, it’s fast. It’s a low barrier to entry. It’s relatively inexpensive per page. It can it can cover your entire web estate. If you use a product like Silktide or some of the others, whether it’s 100 pages or 100,000 pages, we can whip through all of it and help you understand what’s going on.

And honestly, it may help you maintain compliance because you’ll be aware of things like if the new page shows up and it’s got issues, maybe you need to take a closer look because I do use other tools. I know that they often use really technical language that can be hard to understand. It’s important to know that, like it oftentimes you can’t test mobile, right?

It can’t cover all the WCAG requirements. That’s just a reality of automated testing, is that, you know, honestly, they get about 40% at best. And while that’s really awesome, it is not going to get you all the way there. And based on using some of the tools that are out there, there’s a big risk for false positives where it’ll tell you something’s wrong and you actually have to dig into it to figure out that actually it isn’t.

So I want to give you an example to kind of illustrate the point I’m making here. So this is the homepage of Fake Wine Barrel. If you’ve ever seen Silktide, right, this is a website we build with intentional accessibility errors so that we could use it for demo purposes. No one likes having us rip apart their website, so it’s good to show them something that isn’t.

What I want you to notice here is three things, right. Up at the top where we’ve got probably the main navigation, you know, about wines, vineyards, right? There is kind of a semi-transparent layer behind it that’s called the scrim. No one knows this word, but it’s really useful. And once you know, you can use it all the time, but basically that bit behind it to make it so that you can actually read the words, even though it’s on top of an image.

That’s an important thing. And you’ll see it all over the web. Below that, it’s really hard to read it, but it says New New Zealand wines available now under that big “WINE SELECTION”. Right. So you can kind of see how it’s awful to read that, like without that screen behind it. And at the bottom, we actually have a form.

It’s really hard to see it, but it does say “YOUR EMAIL” with a subscribe button. So I ran these through a couple of tools so that I could see what other things we’re picking up versus what we would pick up, right? So I made this quick little like, you know, color coded bit because some of it’s the invisible stuff, right?

Documents having a title element, a HTML element must have a language to find, right? And all three of us found that stuff. The second one got a bit deeper, right? It found a missing form label and there was a click, and you go somewhere else on the page and it didn’t work. Right. And it found that too. And I was like, cool.

But it also said there were low contrast errors and it’s because it can’t, like, see the scrim, right? It couldn’t tell that that was behind it. So it looked at about wines, vineyards, blog, contact. It was going all of these are broken and it had an issue with redundant links. The reality is, Silktide picked up all of these things right?

But we picked up a lot more too. Y’know, this is what I mean: your mileage may vary, right? They’re not all the same. They use different technology for even pulling the page down, let alone doing the accessibility checking. So you’re going to want to make sure that you take one that does what you need. Right.

Manual testing. This is moving away from your computers and getting a human right to sit down and look at your website and figure out what’s wrong. The best thing about manual testing in my world is that it covers forms. You come to my webinars, you know, I drone on about these things. The reality is there’s a ton of things a human can find that a computer can’t, right?

So I’m just going to quickly run through a couple of things so that you get an idea of what I mean. So diving into the form here to make it a bit simpler rather than using that like whole full web page thing. One of the things you need to think about is screen magnification. So far I have not seen anyone figure out a way to effectively like make this something you can automate with a computer.

But the thing is, it’s really common. And if you turn it on right and magnify the screen for me at least, it was hard for me to see it the other way around, right? Like it was like, wow, this feels like a really small area of the page that I’m seeing, but I couldn’t like, reverse it and be like, It must be this section,

once I was back to the page without magnification. So I really like this because for me at least, it helped me understand how small that window actually is. Not WCAG but important and humans might pick up on it. When you have to consider things like screen magnification, if you were filling out this form, you might not even realize that there’s a whole second column going on in the page.

Right? There’s nothing here to make it clear that it’s there. I am a big proponent of single columns, so please, everyone. Single columns, especially with your forms, there’s no need to make them complicated, especially because then they actually match up nicely. When you’re on mobile. It looks the same. It kind of helps. There are things that cannot be found in forms without someone actually filling it out and experiencing the form.

This is something that happened to me, and it annoys me enough that I like to talk about it now. I filled out a form. It was quite long. It was longer than this one. And when I got down to the bottom, I started to hit the next button that was like, “Off we go” and nothing happened. Like, literally nothing happened.

It just stayed right there. So I hit it again and again and again, at which point I was like, Is the page broken? But here’s the thing. There was an error message, but it was further up the page, right? And it didn’t move me there. There was no way for me to see it. It didn’t put anything above like the “Next” so that it was clear that there was a problem.

It just didn’t do anything. And what bugs about this is that, like, depending on how this is coded, this might not be a WCAG failure, because the only thing they’re looking for is whether or not there’s some sort of alert or ARIA live regions that a screen reader would tell you there’s an error message and what it is.

Right. The fact that without a screen reader, I couldn’t figure out what was going on, not covered and I think it’s important that we consider things like this because the experience was really not good for me. And as I said, I’m still angry.

This is another thing that like, I can’t think of a way you could automate it. But I find it fascinating about the way that WCAG works, right? I entitled this “Who’s got the button” right? These are buttons. See how they’re like, you know, long and a bit rounded like pills. These are buttons, long and rounded like pills. That’s not a button. That’s not allowed.

You can’t set people up like that where you set an expectation of this thing that looks like this functions in a certain way, and then use that same thing that looks like that and have it not function in the same way. And I think, again, these are things we definitely need to be considering. The consistency of behavior is a really big deal.

As a visual user, like maybe you wouldn’t notice, maybe “More to come” you wouldn’t necessarily think it was going to do something, but I don’t know. Like I might think that I could click on it and would actually preview me what’s coming up. And that’s what humans are for, right? So pros and cons of manual auditing. In the pros column, manual audits use human judgment and testing tools.

Right. They’re going to get out the screen readers, they’re going to get out phones. They’re going to do all of that stuff. Yeah. And usually a single person will whip through all of it on a limited set of pages. Right. Excuse me. They can engage at all stages of development. This is so important from first concepts and wireframes.

Right. Automated testing has to have a page, right? It can’t say, look at your Figma files and be like “I already see a problem”.

And they’re able to test interactive products like e-learning and games. So far, these are really hard to automate, but a human can dive into it and actually get you actionable information. On the cons side of things, real people do manual audits, so they take time. Right. I mean, half the joy of automated software is that you’re like fire and forget.

Right? Like, I’ll come back when you’re done! And it can be really fast if you need to retest a page, in Silktide tastes like 40 seconds or something. It’s relatively expensive, especially in comparison to automation. And the reality is you can’t do it every time you make a change. Is that a new email template, I see? Do you know if it’s accessible?

Sometimes it’s presented as something that’s a bit secretive or special, right? And that it’s not for mere mortals. And that always really gets on my nerves because it shouldn’t be something that’s locked away from you. Right.

Obviously, I’m here. I believe in sharing information whenever possible. So when I think of automated versus manual testing, a lot of times people actually say which one is the right one for me. I think of it this way. Automated testing is really broad, but really shallow. Right. Whereas manual testing is really deep, but really narrow. And the reality is you should do both.

The image is a screenshot from El Dorado and it says “Both is good”. If you have a larger web estate, particularly if you have a larger web estate, don’t trust anyone who tells you that you don’t need both. We’ve always been an automated accessibility testing company here at Silktide, right. I’ve been here 11 years. Like this is what we do.

And I personally have said repeatedly the elephant in the room is that while automated testing is awesome and I love it and I will sing its praises until the cows come home, it can’t cover everything. And it’s not a guarantee that your website is accessible or compliant. To harken back, this was slide number four from my first Socitm webinar, which I’m talking about

full WCAG compliance will always require manual testing. But don’t worry, I’m never going to stop talking about scores. I love manual testing. I love automated testing, I love scores. I love all of it. But so much of the time it needs context. So if you decide to pursue manual audits or automated testing, ask questions. Do your due diligence.

Right? Especially when you’re looking at things like bringing in someone to do manual auditing, ask about their track record, ask about their methodology. How do they do this? Talk to them. Consider whether you feel comfortable. Are they using plain language instead of technical jargon? And most importantly, are they empowering you or are they making you dependent on them?

You determine the kind of relationship you want. So was this a one off contract? Is this a partnership? Maybe you want to offload the responsibility. Totally valid, but maybe you want to enact cultural change in the business. Is this relationship going to help you get there? And please be wary of grandiose claims. One of the anonymous tools I was using was prompting me to upgrade and pay the money, and it said, “Did you know that automatic scanning only covers up to 57% of your accessibility testing?”.

I don’t know where that number came from. It’s way too high. And then it says, “With our semi-automated, intelligent guided tests, you can get to 80% or more”. And automated testing: this is what we do. We don’t say things like that. So be wary. That’s going to come up a few times today. Auditors are not created equal, right?

The reality is, just like you, if you’re just coming into accessibility, it takes time to get further in right. It takes time to build the knowledge. And we’re all in different places. So this is what I mean about talking to them and asking questions and things like that. Part of it is that you need to define what you need, right?

So some auditors come from multi-disciplinary backgrounds with training, professional and lived experience of accessibility and assistive technology. Right. But at the end of the day, this is an expensive skill set. It’s a lot of training, a lot of time. And yeah, so some auditors can deliver for non-technical users, like if that’s something you want, make sure you focus on that.

Like when I said about technical language and jargon, or are they using plain English, right? Some auditors can do things like VPATs for you if you need them. Some may offer consultative services, and partnerships. Right. They’ll work with you. Maybe they’ll come and help you in your business in that change. Some can help you go beyond the minimum requirements.

We’re all different. Right. So a lot of this is thinking about what you need. You and finding the right person for you. In some ways, it’s kind of like dating. So when I talk about going beyond standards, I’m only going to mention a couple of things here because you can actually go watch Beyond WCAG if you want more.

I think it’s in the Socitm… I’ve forgotten what it was called! But yeah, they’re library of webinars and things. [audience member] Resource hub. Thank you. I was hoping I was like, Please. Someone jump in and tell me what it was called. It’s not in the chat, right? So one of the things that I find often and not covered by WCAG is directional language.

Right. This is a screenshot from the Captain America running around in Avengers. He’s saying on your left. Right. That’s the thing, I see often where it’ll say, like, fill out the form on your right. Right. And like, that’s not going to work. Someone might need to zoom in on the page. And reflow is part of WCAG, so it might rearrange the layout.

Right. If they have a smaller screen that you use, if they put it on to their phone. Right. There is no guarantee that up, down, left, right, any of this below or above is actually going to be correct. So please don’t use directional language. And I call this one the fine print. There is no actual standard in WCAG for the minimum font size that’s required.

And I was on my phone and I use a little itty bitty one. Right. Like, I have small hands. So I used an iPhone 12 mini, right. And this is actually the website of a fairly famous accessibility specialist. And I was like, squinting at it and thinking, oh, my gosh, I actually can’t read those links. So I grabbed screenshots because I was like, Well, that’s going into a deck, you know, because we should talk about it, right?

So it’s another thing you need to think about. It’s so easy to overlook these moments. Right. And things like this, because they’re not in WCAG are not in most automated platforms.

And I wanted to give you one dark pattern example, because I think one of the better things I can do for the world is tell people about dark patterns so you can see them and go, “Oh, hey” you know, and not get caught out as easily by them. This is Socitm. So most of us are in the UK, so GDPR explicitly bans this practice, right?

You can’t have, tick this box to “I don’t want to receive emails about MailChimp” right? They’re like, you don’t get to do that, or untick if you don’t want the updates. That’s cruel. You should be doing things like optional tick box to email me, right? You will find this a lot, particularly outside of Europe, but it’s just one of many things that all fit dark patterns where they’re trying to quietly get you to do what they want.

And honestly, it’s a bit shady. So if you’re paying attention in the beginning, you might have noticed that user testing was separated out from automated testing and manual auditing. A number of people have asked me why? Why is this separated out? It’s because user testing is really not the same thing. And yet it’s really important. When you’re doing user testing, you need to focus on tasks, right?

This is less about like, am I WCAG compliant, right? This is things that your website does, right? You know better than anyone what your website’s for, right? It does things right. People come there for a reason. So you need to get users to perform the actions, right? Maybe it’s paying their rent, or maybe it’s compare and buy a washing machine.

Right. Or to sign up for a subscription or book a Disney Destination Holiday? Yes. They were running ads. I can’t help myself. Yeah.

The image, just to be clear, says, “Would you kindly?”. It’s from BioShock. But you need to get people from different walks of life. Right. And different— who have different impairments. Western society tends to focus on deaf and blind when we think of disability. Right. That’s what we all go to. But the reality is there’s a lot of different things to consider and you need to think about friction.

People have dyslexia. People are colorblind. People use screen readers with a mouse. People use voice navigation. Accessibility is a beautiful thing.

Onto fake silver bullets. I have a note here that says, they might not protect you. It might even be that some of them are lightning rods that will attract the wrong kind of attention.

So I’m not going to dig too far into this topic. But one line of code is not going to fix your website. Not yet anyway. I have two links here for you. One is “should I use and accessibility overlay dot com” because it’s the world’s longest URL, and the “overlay fact sheet dot com”.

The image on this slide is a sticker that was surprisingly popular at CSUN this year. It says friends don’t let friends use overlays. Automated PDF remediation. Adobe’s working on this but just like with so much of the rest of this, it doesn’t do enough yet. Right. Will they get there? Maybe. But I suspect it’s going to be them and no one else.

Magic beans, obviously. Do you want to sell your cow? That was a Jack and the Beanstalk joke. Just so you all know. This image is the panto for Jack and the Beanstalk from one of my local theaters. Christmas Pantomime is so magical. Speaking of magical things, automatic alt text. I was really excited about this, to be honest. I thought this might be cool.

Then I started using it.

If you’ve come to my webinars before, you know the curb cut effect is something I droned on about often. So I grabbed that image, which I love so much of the lowered curb and all the people who are positively impacted by it being there. Vital for wheelchair users, but useful for people with strollers or skateboards or anything. But the automated, like, generated,

alt text I got from Microsoft was “Cartoon of people walking in a park with a curb” and I was like… “Not really helpful”. I went to a place called alt text dot AI, and they gave me “a cartoon of people with wheelchairs and a man walking”. I’ve looked. There is only one wheelchair. That confused me even more, to be honest.

If you were going to use things like that, you are definitely going to have to be checking it, right? You can’t just trust that it’s going to give you something that’s useful. Of course, I put a graph through it. Graphs, charts, graphs need all text or they need captions. They need something to explain what the important details are.

And unfortunately, I grabbed this one off the web, shoved it into Word, and it gave me “a graph on a white surface”, which hurt my feelings a little bit, to be honest, that it’s just so unpleasant. The alt text of the website gave me “the UK’s stuttering GDP recovery”, all in lowercase, which I thought was a bit odd, especially because a screenreader seeing something that’s in lowercase is going to try to pronounce it as a word rather than seeing three letters in uppercase and thinking it needs to read them out.

So that was some of the text in this image, right? But it still doesn’t tell you anything about what’s in the image. Graphs are a thing, and I don’t think we’re anywhere near getting to a place where AI can take care of it. I mean, maybe. Right! And this one, so you can see because I screenshotted it quick enough.

The alt text that was generated was “a person wearing a blue hat and blue coat”. I think Queen Elizabeth The Second is someone that would be pretty much universally recognized. But this comes back to what I say about alt text all the time, right? It’s an interruption. So is that useful? Is it providing any kind of context that would be helpful to someone who couldn’t see the image?

Or would you be better off just not recognizing that the image was there at all? Right? Interestingly, alt text dot AI gave me “Queen Elizabeth The Second sits in the House of Commons”. I have no idea how it knew that. Maybe it’s already seen this image. And so it was like, oh, you know, that’s in my database and I have something decent to tell you about it.

I could’ve told you that was the House of Commons, so I was kind of impressed. Yeah, the reality is we’re just not there yet. And we’re going to keep saying things like “a person wearing a blue hat in a blue coat”. Moving along. Let’s talk about culture change.

Shift left. That’s the big message, right? When it comes to culture change. We start here, we go: shift left. You’ve got to do accessibility earlier because there is nothing worse than doing the analysis, the wireframe, the design, the development, the testing and launching, and then trying to do accessibility at the end because, oh my word, it’s hard, it’s expensive, it’s really time consuming.

So do it earlier, right? Uh, and I find most people think, well, I’ll just move it to like stage two, right? We’ll do analysis, we’ll do accessibility, and then we’ll wireframe and develop and test and launch. But the reality is accessibility is going to be in there every step of the way, right? This is the way and this is the part of the reason that manual audits and having an accessibility consultant you know can be so useful because they can step in at wireframe and design and kind of steer you away from the cliffs, you know

what I mean? That way, once you get into development and all that other stuff and you can use automated testing and do all the other stuff, you’re already starting from a much better place. Yeah, because this one has launch and beyond, because I don’t know of most products that you’re like “And I’m done”. Unless you’re making a widget and you sell the item, you’re going to keep changing things, right?

You’ll be adding content to your website, you’re doing blog posts, maybe you’re making videos. That email templates thing I mentioned, that’s going to keep happening right?

Culture change is hard. It really is. Trust me, if it was simple, we wouldn’t all be here. This is a meme from The Wedding Singer. It’s Adam Sandler yelling “Once again, things that could have been brought to my attention yesterday!”.

I use this meme because I’m about to give you some tips that I think would have made things a lot easier if I had just known them in advance. Things I wish I had known earlier. You need to get buy in from the very top. Top down works faster and really well, especially in comparison to bottom up. You can use your colleagues from other teams, areas like the diversity, equality and inclusion or— it’s DEI and inclusion.

Shame on me! To advocate for accessibility. Right. It’s also their area, but so many don’t recognize that it is, right? Like they’re so entwined and it often isn’t something they’re considering. You need to remember that accessibility is in everything for everyone. That’s your presentations. It’s your documents, it’s your emails, it’s your online meetings. Right? Whether it’s internal or external, again, email templates, you change it.

Got to get someone to look at it. A bit more of my advice. Sometimes it’s hard, but you need to accept that not everyone will like the idea of accessibility and they’re going to push back and they will find reasons not to do it.

You need to get others to understand that not all accessibility is about the obvious impairments and they don’t actually know who is and is not disabled. The assumption that you don’t have any people with disabilities in your staff, that you don’t have any in your client list is pretty unlikely. It’s just that they might not be telling you and you need to expect that you’re going to make mistakes, right?

You’re going to have false starts, but you’ll get there. Keep going. You know. This is why we talk about the “Are you hauling rocks or are you building a cathedral?”. So wrapping up. Accessibility is a continuous journey. It’s not a destination. And everything is changing all the time. Just like SEO, right? You know, you are but one person. So keeping on top of best practices and being an advocate and championing organizational change is hard.

But you need to remember that every step matters, right? Every journey begins with a single step. And as you go, building empathy, working on culture change, doing the testing, right, getting users involved to make sure that they can do what they need to on your site. Y’know, all of this adds up to a thing, right? Every bit you do is forward progress, is momentum, but if you need help, we can work together.

So, gonna tell you a little bit about us. Silktide believes, and honestly, I find this to be the best way to describe us, we’re here to guide, not judge. We all start somewhere, and we know that accessibility is a journey, not a checkbox. So we’ll support you in making meaningful accessibility changes. We don’t sell quick fixes, right?

There’s no silver bullet, right? It would be nice if it was. We teach your team to understand that accessibility is not a quick fix, but it is achievable with a defensible, ongoing process backed by expertise. I know that’s a lot of language, but the idea here is simply that, like, if it comes down to it and there’s questions about what decisions were made, how you change things, you’ll know why you change things, what you did, and be able to take a stance.

We take a holistic approach, right? When I asked, I said earlier that you need to think about like, are they empowering you or are they making you dependent on them? Our belief is that we should empower you with the skills and knowledge to address accessibility on a daily basis. Right. We do automated testing. It’s awesome. You need us, right?

But we want you to be self-sufficient. We want you to be awesome to do the things you need to do yourself. And not be reliant on someone else. So we will help you get there if that’s what you want. And lastly, we practice what we preach, and our own website reflects our commitment to accessibility. It’s built by a marketing team who took the time to learn the key principles of accessing accessibility and applying them, even when it’s hard, even when they hate me because I say “No, you can’t do that cool thing you saw somewhere else”.

So we’re doing it right. We believe in it. We do it. And if you need help, you can talk to us.

Last thought for you. We’re on YouTube. Please like and subscribe. And seriously, watch the Don’t Be Afraid of playlist. I made a lot of those videos and the more views they have, it gives me clout with my boss

so we can make more, because they take time.

Right.

That wasn’t so bad, was it? Let’s do Q&A.

So really, over to you. Leah. I’m seeing notes in here. It isn’t 16 pixel standard. There is no standard. It’s literally not defined. I mean, it would be good if it was defined, but unfortunately, no. Alexandra, I love you. Especially because you use the word pedant.

If that was the House of Lords and not the House of Commons, that’s even funnier to me. They got it wrong.

And I’m impressed. Like, how did you know it was the House of Lords? You totally need to get back to me on that.

I think there was a hand raised for a second, and—

[Audience member:]
Yeah, I have my hand up.

[Jessica:]
Hi!

[Audience member:]
Hi! This is really interesting first of all, so thank you. I work for the consultancy arm of Socitm so I work for Socitm advisory and I do quite a lot of website reviews, user research. And as part of that, I do, you know, a bit of WCAG, I’m still learning. I call it wuh-cag, double-you cag…

[Jessica:]
Everyone pronounces it differently!

[Audience member:]
Yeah. And I have a few different resources that I use and Silktide being one of them. But the first resource I found a year or so ago was the Sitemorse. And no matter which website I’m reviewing for a client, Silktide and Sitemorse have completely conflicting results, like if it gets a really good score on Silktide, it’s a really bad one on Sitemorse.

And I’m just wondering— I’ve never been able to figure out why, like, why is that always never the same answer. It’s always conflicting. So… I just— it might be a bit of a contentious thing to ask on here in front of everyone, but I’d love it if you could answer that for me.

[Jessica:]
I will try to give you a political answer and then we can totally have discussion outside this.

My email address is Jessica Chambers, my name at Silktide dot com, because it would help to see them. Right? Because then I can tell you exactly what’s going on. So one of the things that goes on with platforms and I’m going to say this generally, I am not picking on them, is that we actually all use different technology to pull the website, right?

So when we pull it down, we’re using a headless browser and some of them are catching up to that. We’ve been doing that for years. So we’re loading the page and we can see it like a user sees it, right? It is fully there, which is why we can do things like say you don’t have focus states have good enough color contrast because we can see the focus state and be like, those colors are not good enough, right?

We can see scrims, like you have no idea how hard it is to like identify layers in CSS and figure out like how far back can you go before it gets weird, you know, to see if they have done something about the image the text is on top of. Yeah. So in the midst of all of this is some funky things that come up, like speaking of focus states, right?

If, if you used one of the newer ones, is it focused visible? Like is it— I think newer in CSS, but like they introduced it within the past few years or something and that one we didn’t see it first and we recognized it was a thing. So now we do, right? And like it’s about being on top of the changes, right?

Like the— this is what I said. Like it changes all the time, like SEO, right? The web is changing all the time. And the way people build websites is changing all the time and they introduce wild things or, you know, they make really bad websites. I’m just going to say it. Some people have bad website code like and that can create a weird problem, right?

Like we might get different results because we see something differently, right? Or we’ve set the test to look for something else. Right? And as an example, I can think of right off the top of my head, we get weird problems. Like when we started introducing 2.2, right? So we built checks based on the draft for WCAG 2.2. I’ll admit,

it’s still a draft, right? But we thought it might be helpful to get people ahead of it by being like, you know, here’s tests, and in the Index we just scored you because we’re mean. But in our platform, we set it in a separate area called the Preview. It didn’t affect your scores, but it was there so that you could see, right?

And I totally understand why other like some tried to get ahead of it and make tests and some didn’t because they were like, it hasn’t been finalized, so why do this? But I don’t necessarily think it was a bad thing to do it because it helped introduce people who look at the Index and, you know, who use our products to see, you know, that something was coming, you know, and it is different.

And being able to flag it up and say, here are some things that you need to know because this is going to become the standard soon. I mean, what are we, two years overdue now? But the reality is, like some automated solutions use software that we started with too. Look, I’ll just own this, like we used AChecker at the beginning, right?

I think everyone does. It was open source, it was decent, but we found really quickly it couldn’t do everything we wanted and we realized we just had to throw it out and start over and that’s how we got to where we are now. But the unfortunate reality is AChecker isn’t supported anymore by the people who made it originally.

So it’s a bit out of date and keeping— This is what I mean about keeping on top of all the changes. So like if you build your website a certain way, like it might not see it at all and they’re doing automated testing just like we’re doing automated testing. And then the cherry on top of the entire thing is scoring and the weighting things are given, you know, like what we consider really important,

maybe they don’t. There is a joke in accessibility that if you give a website to five different auditors, you can get seven opinions. And I think some of that is showing up in the different platforms because like, they think this is more important, we think it’s not… You know, we’re like, this is more important. That should have a higher weighting and therefore pull your score down more.

And to be perfectly honest, I think some score harshly. Yeah. Like it’s a decision whether or not you want to like be really mean. You know or you know be a bit more like “Well…” You know? Does that help at all? [Audience member:] Yeah, it does. Thank you.

Oh, Alexandra, you are a history graduate. You are cool.

I like people who know things.

It’s neat, I especially like people who know things that I don’t know.

This is why this slide says “No, really, over to you”. AMA is Ask Me Anything. So if you guys have questions… The European Accessibility Act. Right. Key points. It doesn’t affect the UK, but it is coming into effect in 2025. If you remember the cookie law, it’s the same principle, right?

They’re like, we need you to put in place your own laws that will enforce that websites need to be accessible. Germany, as usual, has gone first. The monetary fines are kind of extreme. You know, it’s an “up to” obviously and there’s this up to of… I’m blanking on the exact number, but it’s per instance of violation of the rules so… Whew. It could be bad fast, but they seem to be aware of the fact that this is a thing.

Right. To suddenly tell everyone in Europe, you know, even with a year or two of like warning, your websites need to be accessible. There aren’t enough professionals to help them. Honestly, Squarespace and all the rest of them, right, anywhere you can go and just have a website built. They are not necessarily accessible, unfortunately, even if it says the template is accessible, maybe it was.

But then if it lets you change anything, maybe it isn’t anymore. And that’s a really hard thing. And I’m not 100% sure yet how they’re going to deal with that. But in a nutshell, it’s taking at least 2.1 AA and it’s going to make it the requirement across Europe that websites need to be accessible to everyone. And before they had a lot of— a lot more leeway, you know, like really small businesses and things like that, it was less of a thing, you know?

I mean, it matters, right? Everyone should make their websites accessible, but they were giving a lot of leeway and kind of let go because it was theorized that it was a huge burden to ask them to make changes. And the way it’s moving now is they’ll all have to do it. We are talking about it now, but it’s not like they haven’t been talking about it for a bit, right?

It’s just that 2025 suddenly seems lot closer than it did a year or two ago. You know, with everything that was going on, it wasn’t like we were all like, “Oh, hey, that’s a problem”.

And I think they’re going to try to do things to ease this road for all the website owners, or at least I hope they will, because, you know, it is a huge change. But we should be glad, you know. As an example, in the UK, the only websites that are required to be accessible are the ones run in the public sector.

So your universities, your government websites, councils, but newspapers or banks, you know, online supermarkets, there’s no requirements, none. Yeah, and a lot of them are kind of terrible. So to me it matters. I think every step that’s taken by governments or, I don’t know what you call the EU, legislative bodies, it matters. I mean, yeah, it’s tough, but I think that if you… I think we’ve tried not legislating and I don’t think it works.

You know, we all try to appeal to people’s better natures and like I said, corporate social responsibility, you know, and all these things to try to make a business case for why it’s worth doing, you know? But sometimes you just got to force the change, you know, And I think that’s what’s happening in the US as a comparison point because of COVID, there wasn’t… Like Boots, a pharmacy, right?

They were doing free vaccinations, but you had to fill out a form to be able to get an appointment and the form was completely inaccessible. And the Department of Justice came down on Rite Aid like a ton of bricks and suddenly the US government cares if your website is accessible. And sometimes it’s like, you know, that flash point moment where something changes, or sometimes it’s more like the EU where they started with privacy and are now pushing over into more things like accessibility to be like, we need to be more fair and equitable.

But even then, as I said, it’s not going into effect until 2025. So, you know, there’s still time because you can’t really just be like, “Oh yeah, now.”

That’s a really good question. Lisbeth, hats off to you. That’s one of those questions that people really need to ask.

Are there ever accessible solutions that works for one group of people and not for another? And how do you manage that? That happens all the time. That’s one of the wildest things when you start getting into accessibility is you’re like, oh, I’ve totally fixed this and it’s awesome. And then you’re like, oh, but it’s not with that use case, is it?

The problem is that you can make a site that adheres to every bit of WCAG, right? And you will still find people who aren’t covered by it. Right? This is part of the reason that I think user testing is so important because you can find yourself in a situation where, yeah, your auditor was like, tick, tick, tick, tick, right.

Like you’ve done all the things. Go you. Stamp of approval, you know, here’s your certificate to put on your website saying you’re awesome, right? And yet I’ll give you an example where I will try desperately not to name their name, even though I really want to. Right. There is a clothing retailer where we were just poking around websites and whatever.

Other people from our inclusion team sent me a message because if you want to get to the log in right to log into your account or to create an account or whatever, which at an e-commerce clothing retailer, you would need, right, it’s in the top right corner where you expect a log in to be, right? No problem. So far, visually, everything seems fine.

Then I use the tab key on the website, which I tell everyone you should do. Load of your website, hit the tab key. You see your focus states. You find out if you have “Skip to content”, you’ll find out lots of things very quickly right. There was no skip to content which caught my attention, but then their menu, like the top navigation menu, was horrifically large and I used a cool little free Microsoft product.

I will totally plug them. It’s called Accessibility Insights For Web and it has something called a like tab order, but it’ll show it to you as you go. It was 194 clicks to get to log in. That’s not acceptable, right? It doesn’t violate WCAG at all. That’s the thing that really got me right. This is not a violation.

It’s not considered inaccessible. But if they had done the thing that was required, like skip to main content, think about whether or not you want “Skip to log in” or “Skip to search” or “Skip to footer”. Right. Think about what is useful in your website. This is what I meant about, think about the tasks. Think about what people might need to do on the site and then get people to do it so you can see where the friction is because you might stumble on to something where it was totally okay by WCAG standards, but for real people it isn’t.

It’s 2 p.m. So thank you everyone for sticking with me through all of this. I hope you found some of it useful and enjoy the rest of your day because it’s Friday. Yes!

[Audience:] Thank you Jess for a great session. Thank you everyone for joining today. Have a lovely weekend.

[Audience:]
Thanks very much.

[Jessica:]
Thank you! Go forth and be awesome.