Why Website Accessibility is CRUCIAL for Your Business.

Mike, I'm lucky enough to be talking with a huge fan of PDFs. I know that's, this is something that you're not opening this up again. Are you, it's part of our world. Mike PDFs have become okay. They're everywhere.

 Welcome to the marketing team of one podcast, where we have conversations about the issues one person marketing teams face when trying to meet their goals with limited time and budgets. Now, here's your hosts, Eric and Mike.

I want to get your initial reaction. That's what I'm really going for. I love this.

I want to, I'm going to set it up, but then the real magic is going to happen between you and this camera. Magic appears in all sorts of different ways. Yeah, you never know. I'm struggling here. Oh, what are you looking at here? Did you bring the wrong glasses this morning? Hold on a minute. This is, I don't know, take a look.

What do you think of this? Help me out here. Oh my God. Is this a webpage? This isn't a PDF.

I struggled. Oh my gosh. This, this is like, they saw those big five ads from, and they're like, you know, what would be great. Let's recreate that as a webpage. Yeah. Here's another one. That was just shocking to me. I mean, from a code perspective. Yeah. Maintaining that must be a nightmare. Oh, that magical grid.

I don't know how that, I don't even know how you would do that. I mean, I have decent vision and I'm still having trouble making out what all these different things are. We should ask people for, uh, their submissions of what the worst website they've ever seen. This will win all of those, I bet. The one that really was shocking to me, and

this is, this is a professional school of art. But I want you to give me a little gander there. Well, there's some things here that are very germane to our conversation today. It's aggressive, but I take, we know their market, right? People who want to go to art school. So right there, you've already got a demographic that's younger and has better eyesight and can, you know, react positively to that brutalist website design for an art school.

There's a shocking lack of art, the dissonance between the design of the website and the goal of this. They're gonna make you pay. It's sublimely bad. In so many different ways. I've never seen a website name names of who's responsible for, um, for that. Oh, look at this. You can edit the page. It's dynamic content.

Can I do, hold on, I'm gonna try that. Oh, I have to log in. Oh, darn it. I was going to try and fix that monstrosity. Do it all on my phone. You can see a page history. Is that available to everybody? The fact that I'm looking at this in landscape mode tells you a lot. This defies categorization. We're here to talk about accessibility.

There are things in here that tell me that they talk about it. But when I look at this, I'm like,

I think they're missing a big step on the accessibility like Well, let's, let's back up. What do you mean by accessibility? What does that mean? Well, accessibility is that what you're putting out there, it can be seen by people who need assistive technologies, don't have perfect eyesight, um, maybe have no eyesight, right?

They might have motor skill problems and making sure that the content you put on the web can be consumed by them, by people of all those things. That's what's been great is there's all sorts of adaptive technologies now that are out there that enable people with all sorts of. Disabilities and handicaps to access the web and consume it much like we do.

Just with this new technology. So when you said it's interesting to think of even clicking a mouse, that not everybody can do that. Like there's technologies out there that help those people as well. I used to work with a guy. He joked around and he was, he was a whiz on the keyboard. And I asked him one day, I'm like, how did you get so good at the keyboard?

Like he didn't use his mouse very often at all. He said, Oh, well, when I was a kid. My parents got mad at me because I did something wrong or whatever that and to punish me they took away my mouse and he said I learned a lot about how to navigate using only a keyboard and That I think about that conversation a lot because that was something It was forced on him, not because of a disability or anything like that.

And so he would be really quick to point out on websites back then, common things he would want to do. Well, some sites would be broken. It'd be very hard. And then he'd have to resort to using his mouse. It's a good thing to keep in mind when it comes to accessibility, that not everybody is going to be using it the exact same way that you think it is.

There's a lot more consciousness around. Accessibility. My main concern right now is that I think a lot of people, they're scared of it. Why fear? What's so scary about it? Um, I think the big one that I hear with a lot of people is their biggest fear is they see a DA regulations out there. They fear risk of litigation.

A DA is Americans with disability acts. Yeah. That put into play a lot of regulation around how people experience life. It goes all the way to. Handy hit parking spots and things like that. It's all over the, but now it's big in the web world. It's extended. Um, there's a set of rules called the section 508 is a government thing where they are, They are requiring certain websites to meet certain accessibility standards.

Clients and people I talk to, am I at risk? of litigation. That's one way to look at it. Like as a designer, you don't want to be doing things that make what you're putting out there hard to consume. Like, like the example of the website we were just tearing apart, right? They were prioritizing art over Communication.

Right. I've never thought of myself as an artist. Always thought more as like a graphic communicator and like using graphics and design to help simplify the message and everything. Communicate, yeah. So, I think a lot of accessibility things are in that same vein. When I hear people say they're worried about The risk of litigation.

Forget about litigation. Why wouldn't you want this to be accessible to everybody? I try and talk to people through that lens. And, and say, well, it doesn't have to be scary. A lot of it is grounded in, Really solid design principles. There are some that probably come at it more from the art and design side of things that might think some of those things are limiting are these like shackles that they have to be tied to.

But I think you do have to change your mindset to get away from that fear. So as I'm now filled with fear, um, after this conversation, uh, maybe we need to put a disclaimer out there that you work and, and help, uh, Websites become compliant. Yeah. We're going to talk a lot about that stuff on this podcast, but we're not legal advisors and we're not going to say that we are going to provide you with bullet proof advice that will get you through some sort of a lawsuit.

Here's the other thing. Don't come at me, bro. But if you're getting 50 people to your website a month, I don't think you need to be too worried about the risk of litigation. Well, that's what I was going to ask about is like, what's the level of risk that we're talking about and where does it kind of click in to where it needs to You know, I would imagine there's probably even some of these huge websites, you know, that are always doing everything.

Yeah, I think there's a scale like I, I've, I haven't really codified it into like a graphic or anything like that or a list or anything, but there's a scales of importance of having your website accessible. So certain people could probably see themselves in their website on this scale a little bit on the one extreme where you should be.

Absolutely accessible for everything would be government website, something where you're providing a public service transit, you know, websites would be a big one, right? Those are well, federally mandated, first of all. So you definitely need to do be. aware of that. Not because you're being told you need to do it.

The reason you should do it is you're providing a public good. You're providing a public service. You should be inclusive to all of the public, all of them. And you've got the bigger, I mean, I would say large companies, the, you know, I think one of the famous examples was Target was, um, was sued because of their accessibility issues with their website.

that's another like non-negotiable. Like if you're providing this to it, there's probably a business sense to make it too. Mm-hmm . Like if, if people can't. Access your website to buy their goods or they're, they have problems with it. They're going to go elsewhere. They're going to go where there's less frustration.

So there's a business case to be made there. They're more non non commerce. You're talking big commerce sites. It's really critical because there's money being exchanged too. So that adds another level of risk as well, but in there, there are more, it's not being told to do it. It's just the right thing to do, and you should do it.

And, but there is a, there's a business case to be made to do it as well. I think as you get further down, it's like a graduated scale of how popular is your website? Who is it for? What are you doing? The lines get a little grayer. Like if somebody came to me and said, should I be making my website, um, accessible?

A lot of times I'll ask them, well, why? It's usually the risk. the risk of litigation. No one comes into like, you know what? I, I heard from somebody that they had trouble reading something on my website. I'd love to fix that. Yeah. As you get down that graduated scale, I think you just got to look at your audience and there's a bare minimum.

I would say none, none, nobody on the scale should do nothing. There are some basic things you could do that are covering. A lot of bases. Well, let's get into that a little bit. Are there multiple different types of standards? What are those standards look like? There's a common set of guidelines called WCAG, WCAG.

I don't know. I don't, I don't know how trips off the tongue WCAG and there's different versions, there's like 2. 0, 2. 1. And those it's an evolving standard of things. Those are, um, agreed upon by the web in general, set of standards. meant for accessibility and the federal government under section 508, they have recommendations based on those.

And so at the current, you know, 2. 1 level, there's a lot of very strict guidelines that you, that you need to follow for, um, how you build your website, how it, how it's perceived, how it can be used by people using assistive technology, um, um, When I say that it's like screen readers or other things that help help them consume that.

So if you're visually impaired, a lot of people will use a screen reader to read the content of the website. And so there's a lot of guidelines on how to make that not a frustrating experience for people. The federal standard is going to be, is the tight, is the tightest. They want that 2. 1. You want to make sure you're hitting all of those.

Um, Those hitting all the checkboxes for that. Okay. So in the past, we have gone in and when you've worked on websites, we've had this discussion and it sounds like there's the WCAG 2. 1, which is the set of rules. But within that, I do remember having conversations about A, AA, AAA, there's levels within that level of compliance.

What are some of the differences between all those and why are they so important? The, the, each level is, has more and more things you need to be checking and being cognizant of, right? A is the minimum. Some of the minimum things that are built into there are color contrast of type on the background.

Providing alternative text for images you put in there. There's a lot of these kind of, they're, They're usually really easy fixes, the level A, that's when I talk about like bang for the buck and really like all people should be doing that, that's the standard that I think no matter what everybody should be doing, because in a lot of ways, they're very controllable by people with, um, who don't have a web developers.

Skill set. Okay. Double A builds on top of that. And the triple A is even more strict with all the different levels. The illustration I think was once told if it's supposed to be triple A, there's no pictures, black text on a white background, 15 point size, no. Huge vari. It was like just, it's extreme. Um, but some, I don't think, and I don't think it's, I think that's the kind of like pessimistic view of it.

I've seen some that would be very aaa. Yeah. The big one from a designer's per perspective, and the thing that we see a lot, and I have to tell a lot of people in the design side of things is it's this color contrast thing. You can have some really odd color pairings as long as there's a contrast, uh, that meets certain ratios.

One example I saw that was really innovative and it It's not something I would have thought of but it was like this really light yellow color And then they had this dark purple on top of it. So if you look a lot of like government websites They're using navy or black text on white background and everything as long as you're maintaining a contrast between the two the background and the foreground colors You can, you can still hit that triple a and it doesn't have to be boring.

We're talking a lot about the visual aspects of it and readability, but there's also a navigational element to that because you had talked earlier about the assistive technologies and using maybe only a keyboard or some sort of other device for navigating a website. What are some of those? And I'm assuming navigation is part of this as well.

Huge, huge part of it. Yeah. What are some of the examples there? And this is where you start getting into like the HTML behind the scenes of everything. Usually in a navigation standpoint, you're marking that region as being a navigation element. If people are coming. To it with some assistive technology.

They know that this is our, this is my menu of navigation. These are the links that are available. This is how I can get off of this page and onto the next page. There's some code things you put in the HTML to signify that that's an area for navigation. There's like a underlying structure that you're providing in the HTML that.

Guides people through it or the screen readers or whatever you if you're just navigating by via keyboard There are different things you can do to like hit the tab key to jump from one that one link to another is saying Okay, this is our header. This is our main navigation. This is the logo for the website There's all these clues that are put into the HTML and you might not see it as a browser of that website But though that there's that stuff there and that's part of the standards as well You Is that you have to clearly mark those areas behind the scenes.

And it gets even deeper as you get triple, get into the AAA. There's a lot of other things you need to be aware of. I'll be honest, I'm not a hundred percent expert on where each thing is at each level of compliance or everything, but other common things are excessive movement, especially on. Artists, websites and everything, or people who are really into like adding motion design into things, a lot of uncontrolled motion.

It can trigger, you know, seizures and, or make people disoriented. You want to make sure that the person using the website is in full control of those. If you're, if you aren't visually impaired, but maybe you have some motor skills or something like that, that you're working around, you're still doing something to move that page, right?

Now, if you've got other things moving in and out and sliding in from different things, it can be really disorienting. You have to be very aware of that. If you're, if you're looking at everything through an accessibility lens, that You don't just want to throw effects in there just because it's cool.

Like I, I've never been a big fan and there's a big, as web tools matured and like WordPress plugins were throwing in these things where you could animate things that like different sections of content and one would slide in here, one would slide in here, one would slide in here, or they'd slide in at the same time while there's a background video going.

Just because you can doesn't mean you should. Yeah. If you have like a background video and you can have a background video, but you need to be able to have something that allows people to pause that. Yeah. What about like things like accordions? Like you see FAQs, you push it, boom, it comes down. Yeah. And then side scrolling, like you'll scroll down a website and then all of a sudden you got to scroll to the right or scroll the left.

I could probably rant for a whole podcast episode. I know you love to put that on your website. Yeah. No, so accordions, I think there's a, there is a way to make them accessible. That's not as big of a concern. When you talk about like side scrolling thing, the first thing I'm thinking of, and I think everybody's been to one of these websites, but if you've got your little scroll wheel or you've got your, your mouse with the scrolling, right.

And you're scrolling down a page and then eventually you're scrolling downward and then it decides to scroll this way. Or you get some of the other ones where you scroll and it zooms into something else. Oh, yeah, yeah. Or it fixes something, one part of the screen, and then you've got something else happening over here.

Apple. com, maybe. Yeah. Apple probably does a really good job of making sure that is accessible. Yeah. There's a term for that they call scroll jacking, overriding the default behavior. It's preventing me from getting, where I want to go. A great example, you can have a website prioritize the things that they think are most important in their main navigation, which I think everybody should do, right?

That's not a bad thing, right? But let's say I know what I'm looking for when I come to the site, and it might be something like contact information, Where's their address? Where do they go? A lot of people, they're not going to put that in the top, nor should they. But it might be at the footer, right? If I'm scrolling and then you hijack my scroll and make it slower for me to get to the bottom of the page where I want to go, I, I get just, I don't have a lot of time for that.

There's accessibility. There's usability. All these things are super important to me when it comes to websites. And sometimes I just, yeah, come on, man. I don't have time for this. There was a time there when that scroll jacking An expression that, you know, artistic people or design people really got into.

We're going to change your thinking on how to navigate a website. Like, you know what? At this point, I don't need to be rethought how that works, right? It's going to be annoying, because if it doesn't work the way I'm used to it working I probably sound like a man who's at least 15 years older than I actually am talking about this stuff, but Well, that will put you well into your hundreds, Mike, so I don't know.

Mike, I'm lucky enough to be talking with a huge fan of PDFs. I know that this is something that You're not opening this up again, are you? It's part of our world, Mike. PDFs have become Okay. They're everywhere. I don't have to worry about those. If I have PDFs all over my website, which I know you encourage all the time.

No, he doesn't. Sometimes you have to though, right? You have to put documents, maybe it's board stuff. Maybe it's an annual report. Do you? Oh, nice. I like where you're going here. Yeah. That's a different episode. It is a totally different episode. We can go back to that. I think it's episode number two. Yeah, you got right into it.

Like as soon as we started the podcast, I'm like, I need to talk about this. Yeah. It's really probably one of the main drivers of why we have the pod. It's why I get up in the morning.

Destroy man's intent to make one less PDF per day. And I'm making a difference. It's just, that's, that's it. All right. Well, unfortunately there still are PDFs on the internet. I don't have to worry about those though, right? Those are PDFs. You absolutely do. Oh, darn. Okay. I mean, one of the planks in my I hate PDFs pillar.

Planks, pillars, I'm mixing things. I like it. Is that PDFs aren't accessible. I, you know, by, by and large, a lot of the PDFs are not default accessible. I default not. Yeah. Like we've, I mean, I think it's unfair to say that we've made a good amount of money at page design by mm-hmm . Fixing PDFs to make them accessible.

Yeah. As much as I wanna rid the world of unnecessary PDFs mm-hmm . There are some that are necessary. Okay. And, but those do need to be accessible as well, because those are read by the same. Accessibility tools as a website. Let's talk a little bit about the PDF accessibility thing, right? If you've got information that's in a PDF, Right.

My first question is, why isn't it on a webpage? And the reason being that if you have, if you're using accessibility features on your computer, you're going outside of the website thing and now you're switching into another thing. When all you really might want is the information that's in that PDF. Yep.

The PDF is my PU. Even harder for them to consume. It's hard to make changes to a PDF to make it accessible unless you're thinking about it ahead of time. Yeah. You edit the PDF. You literally have to go back through it once again and re do the whole thing again. For some of these things, let's, let's go back to the accessibility thing of a PDF.

Right. So let's say somebody has their phone. This is one of the big rants that I have about PDFs and mobile devices, that they're not, they don't fit well together. It might not be that somebody's visually impaired. The motor skill thing, right? Like, I don't think it's kind. Like, I really don't, I don't think you're like, you know, I don't think it's malice.

I don't think it's anything, but I don't think you're being Considerate of who's consuming that. Those tools exist on the phone. The readers, the assistive technology, they do exist. They, but you're code switching in a sense. Now I downloaded my PDF, now I'm on a different set of tools. Now I have to go through it this way, doing, which is annoying.

But I'm, I'm, I'm even, I'm, I think access, when we talk about accessibility, A lot of times we think about someone who is blind or somebody who is using a lot of these like assistive technologies. I, I think accessibility exists at a level where it kind of mixes with user experience work where we're not talking like, let's use the example of somebody who maybe has lost their arm and they have to navigate this web page on their phone with one hand.

Or, right, they might not use the sight impaired accessibility tools and everything. They might just be using it like you and I do, but they only have one hand to do it with. Right, right. Right? Why would we make it harder on them to do that? Yeah. But I don't think there's an awareness of all those types of considerations.

I think the shame is that everybody thinks that, am I going to get sued? Yeah, yeah, I know, because it, your approach to it is really, Healthy because it's it's design centric in a way. I mean, it's very much around just making good clear design and by default A lot of those accessibility issues will be taken care of.

Yeah. Yeah. They have to be accessible. You do have to do some steps to make sure that they're labeled correctly. And a lot of those go into, they're not necessarily code, but there's a, there is overlap between code. Code practices you would do on a website that you need to do on a PDF that you would get, and that is accessible reads, right?

I think one of the main issues that I saw with those, because there will be readers that can read a PDF. We're not denying it's just, what is that experience like? And it's very unfriendly if you just roll it out as a default, here's a default export PDF, the reader will read it and just go through it.

kind of in an unintelligent fashion. It's like recoding the PDF to where the reader then reads it in the way it's supposed to be experienced. Yeah. I mean, further to that point, I think what a lot of people do, especially, let's say you're doing a one page, um, thing in InDesign or something like that, and you've got a bunch of different text boxes and everything, right?

So you would take texts that was maybe originally written in one nice long flow. in a Word document, but you're copying and pasting this line and put it in a text box here. And then you're putting this text box here. Oh, that didn't work. I deleted that one. I created a new one, but that's the, that's the last box I created, but it's the first thing you read.

It may be text box 47. But it's the first thing people want to read. That's where you have to go into the PDFs, and it's something that I don't think we think about, is the flow of reading those things. So the default reader would go, look for box one, which may be down in the corner, and read that first.

Then go to two, then three, then Yeah. The last thing it reads is box 47, which is the headline, which you should be reading first. Yeah. And so there's, there's some of those considerations that you need to take into account. Um, there's labeling, like if you have a table on there to display some tabular data, you have to hint at that.

People who know HTML CSS have been living and breathing for a long time. But if you're a designer who's spending all your time in InDesign or Canva or something like that, you're not thinking about the underlying structure of these things. But that underlying structure is super important for accessibility.

Table's got to be a challenge. You'd be, you need to be able to click through them. I mean, yeah, charts, graphs. Sometimes you need to, if it's really complicated. Providing alternative texts for images is a big one, right? If I've got some, um, and that's a basic, like that's the do it. Everybody should do it.

Some of those are for decoration and actually there's, there's allowances for when you're designing things to highlight images as this is decorative. There's serves no content. Purpose. So it would kind of go away from the experience, but you need to be able to flag you need to, as a builder or whatever, you need to be able to flag those things.

So they aren't a speed bump for people who are reading the web, the web page. It sounds like a pain in the butt to try to get all this stuff compliant. I mean, is there tools? I mean, what's the process look like? I mean, I'm going to just design something and it's going to be cool, but surprise. I have an opinion.

It really, it's not like you, the journey they take is. I heard about this website where someone got sued because it wasn't accessible. I'm worried about it. I want to make sure that my website is compliant. And the first place they go is for this, um, set of tools that are called overlays, accessibility overlays.

Overlays, there's a number of them. There's there's a lot of software companies out there that are trying to create a product To solve for that need like my website's not accessible. I want to make it accessible as quickly as possible So they have a set of tools that you can buy and install on your website If you browse the web for any matter of time You probably see a lot of these websites and the telltale sign is they've got a, you know, like a person in a wheelchair or, uh, something icon that floats somewhere on the website.

If you talk to any accessibility experts, they. are vehemently against these. I have my own reasons why I was, I was against them. The main arguments against it is it's creating a separate interface than people are used to using. So imagine you're using a bunch of sites that are built to be compliant from the beginning and you're used to using your certain tools and everything.

This creates a whole separate version of the website with different navigation tools that you have to. One, you have to activate. Oh, so it's not by default, you have to activate it. And then there's a different navigations way of going about these websites. It's definitely treating people who need those tools as kind of like a second class citizen on there.

The one thing that really made me mad about it when we, when we tried to put it on a couple of sites is it slowed everything down and not just for the people who needed it. For everybody. You're adding something on that treats certain people as second class citizens. You're slowing down the website for everyone.

It's expensive. I just don't think it needs to be that way. It sounds like it might work really well as a WordPress plug in. Is this the episode where we call back to our other greatest hits of my rants and everything? I think they do. And the other thing, and I'm just going to put it out there for everyone.

Mm hmm. I don't, I've been sold by a couple of these companies to try it, try it. And I don't necessarily like their tactics on trying to sell it because they're preying on the, you, you have to do this, you, there's risk of litigation. We don't want to treat people as second class citizens. We want to make this site accessible to all.

We want to do the right thing for the right reasons. And what do you do? Well, I mean, I think you really need to be able to, like, take an assessment of your website and look at it, and I understand that my way of going about this might be more expensive in the short run. There are a lot of tools out there, I could name a bunch of them in a little bit, that will give you an assessment.

So they, they just scan the site, highlight these red zones, yellow zones, green zones, okay, do this stuff here, make suggestions, is that what really their end up doing? A lot of them are like, okay, here's all the things. So I've probably analyzed over a hundred websites with these tools for accessibility and everything.

And there are a lot of common things, a lot of things that get flagged. by any of these tools regularly. They're pretty easy things to, that you can do. Look at the color contrast and the type on your website, right? If you wear glasses all the time, a great test is, can you read it without your glasses on there?

Like make, make the text bigger. It probably should be bigger. A lot of times the text size is too small. A lot of times the contrast isn't good. Maybe you're 24 years old and your site is as good as mine was at 24 and you don't see it as a problem. Go to the old heads you've got around who can like look at it and say, yeah, well, that's really hard to read.

Yeah. Anybody needs help with that. I can't read much of anything anymore, so I'm probably, I will, I will look at it too. Yeah. I'm useless without these things. I could hire myself out. It's the guy without glasses and that could be a service we add on. Let's, uh, I think we got a new landing page for our website.

The guy without glasses. I love it. Just me staring off into space. I love it. Yeah. Adding alternative text to any images that you have on your website. That, that's And it doesn't have to be a lot. It could be gorilla sitting on rock. I mean, really, right? Yeah, totally. It's like, just describe what's there instead of image underscore one two, which is what ends up being a default for logs or whatever that file name was Ends up being the default.

It doesn't describe what that is. It's not helping anybody by doing that So every tool that you build websites on has this ability to do that. So you have to take a look Yes, it's a little bit more work, but you have to make sure that you add that At that information in there, a very common thing to do is to say, here's all this stuff that we're doing about this thing.

And you have a link that drives to that page that describes in further detail using. Non descriptive text in the links is another one that gets flagged all the time. So if you're saying click here, learn more, those don't provide any context to what is on the next page. There's multiple benefits to putting more work into doing something more than click here or learn more.

So you're saying it's beyond just the copy inside the button. It's when they hover over that or their, whatever their tool is, goes to that link. It says, click here to go to X, Y the page about. Is that what you mean? No. I mean, like whatever language you're using to prompt people to go to the next page, that language should be descriptive of where you're going.

If you have a bunch of links that say, learn more, and I see, you see it a lot. You might have, have like five little boxes here. You describe what's going on. Then there's a learn more link. There's no differentiation between all of those. As far as the screen goes, learn more, learn more, learn more. And so there's the accessibility side of that where.

That's not helpful at all. There's also, if you, if you're more business driven and you're worried about like your SEO rankings, that's a very good place to be making changes to, you can provide context to what you're linking to, and that helps improve your SEO as well, because that link text is important for ranking.

Click here to get the tools. Is that an example maybe? Or what is it? Sometimes it's yeah. Like it might be like. Download our, um, accessibility checklist here. Oh, I see. Okay. So you're providing context about what's at the other end of that link. So that's another really important thing you can do. Side scrolling.

You mentioned it earlier. That's another one. If your site is built in a way where there's some like things overflowing, and this happens a lot on certain website builds where when you get on a mobile device, they haven't been truly responsive. And so there can be some like. Minor like scrolling side to side you want to cut that out because it's a It's a motor skill thing, right?

That you might start scrolling sideways when they want to scroll. So you want to make sure that that can, um, that's fixed. I think most people are familiar with like heading structure from tools like word or Google docs or something. When you go up to your main like tools of editing things, um, there's heading one, heading two, heading three.

Right. Those provide structure and. intelligence onto the format of this document. You got to think about behind the scenes, structuring your headlines in a way that's sequential and provides context into the structure of the page. You don't want to skip numbers. So you don't want to start with a heading four and then do heading one.

Think of it like an outline. Heading one is the top one. Heading two is the next one. Heading three, heading four. And one trick I do, I use Google docs all the time. I love having the structure. On the side, you can see like an outline of your document. If that looks like it makes sense, you're on the right track.

That's what I was going to suggest is like Word and Google Docs really help enable you to create the content perfectly right out of the box. Yep. Copy, paste, and it's kind of built into it already, right? Yeah. Skipped headlines or non correct order. And those are things that you can just do. Anyone managing a website can do most of those things.

Yeah, now it seems like it's kind of built into a lot of the way, like I know Webflow kind of already helps you structure it that way when you're building with them, they have a little pre flight thing built into that. Yeah, they'll highlight issues. Yeah. And what's actually in speaking of Webflow, they've got a very good checklist we could put in the show notes.

Um, It's an accessibility checklist and you can go through and so if you're wondering when you're building your pages What should I be aware of and everything? It's one of the better lists I've seen out there back to the main question You've got a website you want to do the right thing? Well, we found we've there's usually some global elements like things that are built into your templates that you need to fill out Need to correct and we love those because usually you can make that fix once and it applies to everywhere on the site The hard work comes into fixing all using like a news site or a blog is an example right usually you have a big area where you've been in control of Figuring out the headline structure writing the content putting in the images and everything in the past That was where all the remediation time is in place Is spent you you take care of all the global elements, you know Those are taken care of and then you're going through page by page and saying, okay, what's the outline structure?

What's how many images do we need to add all text and everything and that's where a lot of time can be taken What about navigation elements? Like what if there's what about those super menus you see what about? Some of these crazy solutions that you see maybe on some of these more complex websites.

That's Devland. I guess you'd say that's your coder, coder, whoever's built that thing. There's a lot of considerations you need to make and a lot of that's behind the scenes type stuff. Is there other tools that you've seen out there? What, what, other than just going in and Rebuilding or refining it.

There's been a few that I, I kind of go to, if you use Chrome, Firefox or something like that, there's some extensions that you can do. And these are really good for like a spot check type thing. One's called like the wave evaluation tool, because you can pull up your webpage and then click that, that button.

And then what it does is it puts a sidebar over there and it highlights all the different issues and it also highlights them as, you know, Blatant errors as issues you might want to look at they also highlight the things you did, right? You know highlights the things on the page, too So you've got a sidebar that lists out the details of it, but it's also got Lizzy little hotspots on the page There's another tool that I like to use is called accessibility test org and what's great about this one is you Can put in the URL for your website and there's an option to scan a single page or you can scan your entire site when you do that It'll run through not just one tool.

It runs through four different like industry standard tools to assess your Website and give you a score and so at the end it'll show you an overall score and then it'll have like a green Yellow red to kind of give you an idea where you stand on things But also you can dig in and see what are the items that got highlighted by each one of these tools So it's a really good, quick, easy way to get an idea of how your entire site's performing.

Like the, the Wave tool's great for single pages. Okay. This one's really good. It's free you, it'll run through and you can get an idea of where you're at. Does it give you like the ab, aa Yeah. AAA kind of ratings? Yeah. So it'll show you which one some of these issues are. That's helpful. Especially Wave.

Wave does that really well. It'll tell you which one, what stand. It gives you a, a switch where you can say, this is what I'm aiming for. Mm-hmm . And then it'll tell you what. What to address. If you're running a big organization, it's called site and proof, but it's really good about scanning your entire website and you can go in, get a dashboard of all the pages that you need to address.

You can look at the pages, dive in and, you know, Highlight the areas and fix them. Another tool that I've demoed, I haven't used, I don't have a lot of firsthand knowledge is called Silk Tide. I preferred their interface for things that a lot of times they'll talk about this being a compliance issue. Like a lot of these tools talk about being compliance.

They want to make sure that everything's accessible. They're meeting some SEO standards. They tie in a lot of SEO content stuff as well as yeah. It's like you want, you have a big web presence, you want to make sure that everything is all, um, in good shape. Another one I use a lot is a thing called My Web Audit, and it's not necessarily, I don't think it's sold as a accessibility thing.

If they do have a really good accessibility scan, that's kind of fits in the middle between these like single page tests and the very expensive, like compliance tools. So needless to say, the go to the show notes. We're going to put all these links in there because there's a lot of really good resources I think you talked about on this episode.

Another thing, like I mentioned, Silk Tide, if you're really wanting to know more about web accessibility, they have like the ultimate guide on web accessibility. It's a really, it's an attractive and very informative resource that I would recommend. There's a whole industries and experts that are working on this.

basing their business around this. There's not a magic wand that you can wave over things and make them accessible. People should want to do it because it's the right thing to do and not feel compelled to do it. Just think about the things you're creating and who, who's it for and what, how are they going to use this?

If you think about that and that can help steer you towards the right direction. Cause it's about communication. We're building communication tools here and you want. As many people included in that audience as possible, not that you're excluding them, but you're just trying to optimize it for that ultimate experience.

And by default, then you're going to include a lot of the success ability things into that process. Yeah. Yeah, let's just all do better. We can all do better. I think we can agree. Yeah, not because someone's gonna make us pay if we don't All right Okay, Eric, I feel like I've dumped a lot on you today a lot of knowledge going on here, right?

Very okay Yes, could you look at this website and tell me what you would do to make it? Like what, based on what we talked about today, what are some things you would do to fix that website? Oh, this is kind of a live test. It's a little, yeah, I'm actually, it's a pop quiz. It's a pop quiz. I didn't know there would be a quiz, but that's okay.

Um, well, the, for one, the links on the page are unreadable. The contrast is terrible. Yep. Your first point Ding! All right. One for one. Okay. It also has scrolling issues. I can't seem to scroll in a very effective way. So there's some sort of a Utility. Yep. Yep. Any issue around this? I don't know. Is there anything else that you see that maybe I just need, you know Yeah, move into my Expertise here and take my glasses off and really.

What do you see? fanwithnoglasses. com Sign up now. Well, I can't read the logos and stuff up in here. Yeah. Do you think this types big enough? Type's not big enough. The type's not big enough. No, and there's It's bold, right? And you can't And it's bold, and when you try to zoom in, it shrinks itself back smaller.

Yeah. So it even It's even more of a punch in the face. Yeah. Than just, hey, oh, you wanted it bigger? Here. There you go. How's that, smart guy? Oh my gosh. This is such a great test case for something that looks It's not complicated. No. They weren't They were not trying to overcomplicate things. This is white text on a black background.

As you pointed out, looking at this, there's, there are multiple accessibility issues. This is a cry for help, Mike, isn't it? This is, there's no way they put this out there. When you look at the name of the organization, that's why I think it's a test. It's part of their tests. It must be. Okay. So they're just pranking us.

Yeah. Oh, okay. Full on punking people. Thank you. Right? If I could read it, I would maybe get to the point at the very end where they're like, Psych! Sucker! But I don't even want to get that far. It's too hard. I think it's probably helpful to think about accessibility kind of like helping your parents use a computer.

Have you ever helped your parents try and use a computer? Every time I go visit, I need to bring my boot disk and patience. How frustrating is that? If you've ever tried to help anybody who's not computer savvy navigate the web on things or help to sign up or something, there are so many hurdles they have put in front.

Like, when you're doing a website, think about These people who aren't on it all the time, who aren't using it all the time and keep them in mind. Hey, test it with your parents or your grandparents. Hey, can you check this out? Does this work? Yeah, that's a good tip. Actually, there's a lot of things you can do within reach.

I mean, my whole thing is like, I don't think people are aware of Any of the things we've talked about today, and the general public, or many people who are responsible for putting things out there, are aware of all these things. I would like them to take the oath. I, state your name. I solemnly swear to keep, um, all Website users in mind when creating content and make sure that I exclude no one.

We have some sort of a blood pack now. Well, thanks Mike. I have been enlightened. I've appreciate all the new knowledge on this stuff. Thanks for the tips and the insights. I'm glad to share. I think it's just. spreading awareness about this and letting people know that it doesn't have to be scary. It's more about doing the right thing than being scared of something or scared of litigation or something.

That's why we should be doing it. And so hopefully this helps. Right on. All right. Thanks. Yep. See ya.

Thanks for tuning in. For more information and other episodes, subscribe to the Marketing Team of One podcast on YouTube, Apple, or Spotify podcast networks. You can also chat with us on the r slash Marketing Team of One subreddit or visit marketingteamofone.com to learn more.