[00:00:00] Matt Cromwell: Hey, everyone, and welcome to WP Product Talk. Again, this is WP Product Talk, the place where every Wednesday we talk about the business and workings of owning and running and managing and, um, Sometimes even failing, uh, and succeeding at, uh, the pro the business of, uh, WordPress products, uh, and owning them.

[00:01:11] Um, and I'm Matt Cromwell, I'm co founder of GiveWP and director of customer experience at StellarWP.

[00:01:19] Katie Keith: And I'm Katie Keith, CEO at Bantu Plugins.

[00:01:23] Matt Cromwell: And today's topic is how and why to make your WordPress products accessible.

[00:01:29] Katie Keith: Exactly. And I think it's an interesting topic because it affects all of us and yet we don't always pay the attention to it that we should.

[00:01:37] It's sort of something we should do, but may not necessarily see as compulsory, but probably we should. So we should talk about it.

[00:01:45] Matt Cromwell: Absolutely. It's one of those things where it's like, this is the right thing to do. And why aren't I doing the right thing? Uh, it's odd, but we wanted to bring on an expert. Um, I will admittedly say that I'm not an expert in this area.

[00:01:58] I don't know how you feel, Katie.

[00:02:00] Katie Keith: Definitely

[00:02:00] Matt Cromwell: not. Yeah. So we want to bring on an expert and, uh, Leslie Sim is going to introduce our guest today.

[00:02:08] Leslie Sim: Hi, I'm Leslie from Newsletter Glue and co host of Glam That Plugin. I'm really excited to introduce Amber Hines for today's WP Product Talks. Amber is the CEO of Equalize Digital, a certified B Corp specializing in WordPress accessibility, maker of the Accessibility Checker plugin, lead organizer of the WordPress Accessibility Meetup, and co lead organizer of the WordPress Accessibility Day Conference.

[00:02:35] I've personally been educated by Amber on Twitter and also on the post data Slack, and it's always a pleasure to learn more about accessibility from her. So without further ado, here's Amber.

[00:02:49] Matt Cromwell: Hey.

[00:02:50] Amber Hinds: Hello. Hey.

[00:02:52] Matt Cromwell: Thanks for being here.

[00:02:54] Amber Hinds: Yeah, I'm excited to be here. Especially the day before, um, Global Accessibility Awareness Day.

[00:03:00] Matt Cromwell: Exactly. Tell us a little bit about Global Accessibility Awareness Day.

[00:03:05] Amber Hinds: So Global Accessibility Awareness Day is an event that was started about, um, I want to say three years ago, four maybe? Um, and the goal is to get as many people talking about accessibility and learning about accessibility, um, but especially talking about it and sharing about it on social media so that other people in your network who maybe haven't thought thought about, um, ways that they can help support people with disabilities or how accessibility might, um, impact other people, whether it's physical or, uh, digital accessibility.

[00:03:38] And so that is tomorrow. If you go to accessibility. day, you can see there's a ton of events all day long that are all free different webinars, um, and some in person events that different organizations are putting on.

[00:03:54] Matt Cromwell: That's awesome. Thanks so much. Um, If you have a link or whatnot, um, if you could drop it in the, in the chat for us, that'd be super useful.

[00:04:04] Um, cool. I'm excited to talk about, um, accessibility today and we're going to change it up a little bit. Amber actually gave us a nice little heads up on a subject that, uh, that we think is super important. So later during story time, Katie and I are going to kind of like be like, ah, this is our tiny little experience with this and give the rest over to Amber.

[00:04:27] Um, but, um, The first thing is that we always want to discuss is why this matters so much, why this is so important for every WordPress product owner to be aware of. So I'd love to hear everybody's take on that. Katie, what's your take? Um, like you personally, why have you felt like it's important for you?

[00:04:44] And why do you think it's important for all WordPress products?

[00:04:47] Katie Keith: Well, accessibility is vital for moral, legal, and business reasons. So it's definitely something worth thinking about. I mean, everybody in the world deserves to be able to access your products regardless of their abilities. And there are legal requirements underpinning this.

[00:05:04] And recently, and Amber will know more about this than me, more and more cases are being brought to court over this. And, uh, also the more products, people that can access your products, the more sales you're going to get because your market is wider and you're not excluding people. So there is a business benefit as well as a moral benefit.

[00:05:23] and a legal, um, reason. So it's definitely an important topic to think about.

[00:05:29] Matt Cromwell: Absolutely. Yeah, same for me. I have, um, looked into it quite a bit, um, here and there, um, and not as an expert, but as somebody who's felt like, I really want to make sure I'm doing my best, um, to, uh, put my best foot forward whenever I can.

[00:05:43] I put code into the world in one form or another. Um, and I think, um, we actually chatted with Amber, me and Leslie actually on glam that plugin, which is an episode. It's not live yet. I need to get that out there. Um, it's a really good one. Uh, Amber made a really good case of what exactly what Katie was just saying, that like, there is a large.

[00:06:04] percent of the population that does have some sort of disability in one form or another. And if your site isn't paying attention to the types of ways in which your content is difficult for people, whether it's flashing for crazy reasons or animated too much or just not enough contrast on items or just like, you know, hiding content in weird, funky ways, um, all kinds of things like that, then you're Doing a big disservice to them.

[00:06:31] Um, and you're missing out on them being part of your audience because, um, they don't need to take the, have the patience to deal with you. Like, why should we expect that of them to jump through so many hoops just to be with our product? Um, we should be catering to them, not them catering to us. So, um, I hope everyone.

[00:06:50] Generally speaking, I kind of hope everyone understands that point. Um, One thing, Amber, I'm curious about is if you get pushback sometimes on stuff like that.

[00:07:01] Amber Hinds: Um, we do. I feel like it's, it's hard. Like nowadays, all we do is accessibility. So most people who come to us, they're looking for accessibility. So it's not like we get major pushback on that, but we do sometimes get pushback on tools.

[00:07:16] So this is a question that I get a lot from clients who tell me, okay, this is a color contrast issue, but I want to make some decisions or limitations. I think we had a client who their brand colors included a very light blue and they really liked having light blue buttons with white text and we're like, yeah, we can't do that because it's a color contrast issue.

[00:07:32] And so, you know, and when the client And we work with very large companies that have established brand guides, which can be good, but it can also be really frustrating, right? Because you have to go through so many levels of people to just approve making a color change. Um, so we do occasionally still get pushback a little bit on that.

[00:07:52] I think the area related to products where I've seen some pushback is I've had some hit or miss. Success when I go on like WordPress support forums and I report accessibility bugs in plugins Sometimes the the plugin developer will sort of say Uh, oh, well, thanks for your feedback. We'll think about it.

[00:08:15] Um, which Sometimes when it's a not a monetized product, it's one person like you understand, like, who even knows how frequently they're doing updates. It gets a lot more frustrating when it's a large company with many developers that monetize their plugin. Um,

[00:08:33] Matt Cromwell: Do we want to be super controversial and you can name names or like?

[00:08:36] Amber Hinds: Yeah, uh, I don't know if I want to do that. But I think, I mean, I think the thing you had that number one and four up, um, which is really good. That's that number is pretty good. From the CDC in the United States, one in four U. S. adults, um, the World Health Organization says 1. 3 billion people in the world.

[00:08:58] So I think the big thing to keep in mind with accessibility, if you're a product owner and you're trying to decide how much do I invest in this, if I have to refactor a lot of code, like obviously that is an investment of time or money. If you're paying staff to do it, uh, is that it really isn't just a small number of people is a very huge portion of our population and these aren't just And these are people who have money to spend.

[00:09:22] There are people who work in day jobs and maybe they work at a business that could choose to buy your plugin or maybe they're a person who is a consumer that has money to come shop on the int store that's going to use the product.

[00:09:36] Matt Cromwell: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, internally, often we have have like a bare minimum metric of like, are we going to put effort into this thing?

[00:09:45] Well, is it going to impact our revenue by at least 10%? That's kind of like a bare minimum that we always have in mind. Is it going to impact our revenue by 10 percent or more? Then we should at least consider it in one form or another. If it falls below that, it's kind of like, it might be a nice to have.

[00:10:01] Well, that makes

[00:10:01] Katie Keith: sense for a feature request, but accessibility, you could argue is different to that, that it's like an absolute or something, and particularly where it comes into the legal requirements.

[00:10:13] Amber Hinds: Yeah, I mean, the other thing too is like speed, right? Like performance is one of those things where it probably does increase revenue, but maybe not like directly in the same way where, where you're like, I'm going to add this feature that a lot of people have been asking for.

[00:10:32] And if I add it, I know more people will be motivated to buy. Like behind the scenes, like, or like cleaning up technical debt or improving conformance with WordPress coding standards. Like those don't necessarily, you can't say I did this and my revenue increased, but overall it will help like the reputation.

[00:10:53] It will increase like the ability for, you know, if you're doing performance, right? Like higher traffic websites to be able to use the plugin, which increased. Byron pool, like there's, there's a lot with accessibility. I think that falls under that can't directly tie it, but it will have an impact.

[00:11:10] Matt Cromwell: Yeah, absolutely.

[00:11:12] That's interesting. Yeah, Katie other takes what's any other thoughts on why this is so important for folks?

[00:11:20] Katie Keith: Um, I think we've kind of covered most of the reasons But I'd be interested to learn more from Amber about the legal consequences because I've seen a few random references like tweets and things about people being sued recently, including some very small companies for large amounts of money.

[00:11:38] I was wondering what the truth was behind that and whether we should be all getting more worried from a legal perspective.

[00:11:46] Amber Hinds: Sure. Yeah. So it really depends on where you're located in the world. Uh, in the United States, the lawsuits are typically happening under the Americans with Disabilities Act. Uh, and the way that law was written is there's no fine from the government if you violate it.

[00:12:03] It's written in a way that the only enforcement comes from people with disabilities, which is a whole nother, like, is that really the right thing we could have as a conversation. But the only recourse is to sue, and I know it can be frustrating for website owners. Or business owners that have a physical storefront and they get sued because they don't have a ramp to come in the door.

[00:12:21] But, but the way it's laid out is that if people don't sue, they don't, their change doesn't happen and that's sort of what has built and helped to improve and strengthen some of the supports for them. For people with disabilities so they can have equal access to things, um, outside of the United States, there are laws that have, um, fines associated with them, Ontario with the accessibility, Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act.

[00:12:51] AODA is actually one of the strongest I've seen, which can have fines of, um, 50, 000 per day that a violation exists. Um, and, and that can, and it's not just the interesting about that law is they can find the business, but they can also find the executives of the business. So the individual who is running the business and making the decision could be held responsible.

[00:13:19] Um, in Europe, uh, there are more strict things coming in June 2025, is sort of the deadline with, um, some of the laws, which would have some fines related to them. Um, very similar to, if you want to think like Germany in particular, I think has put some really, um, Um, intense things on privacy and they're going, they're going to be doing the same thing with accessibility.

[00:13:44] Um, so the lawsuits happen. I, I hate to say like. Don't do it because you're afraid.

[00:13:54] Katie Keith: Like

[00:13:55] Amber Hinds: that's not a great motivator. And it's not the only

[00:13:57] Katie Keith: reason. Yeah.

[00:13:59] Amber Hinds: And in my experience, people who do it cause they're afraid are like frequently looking for the cheapest or the fastest way out or like a quick fix, which doesn't actually result in the best user experience, um, with however you resolve it or doesn't, you know, it's thin and it's service level accessibility, but not really usable, which is a whole different thing.

[00:14:17] If you get into, um,

[00:14:19] Matt Cromwell: yeah. Yeah. But I think another kind of like objection or soft objection I hear from WordPress owners often is that there are really small business. They don't have a lot of development, um, like the things you're asking for are going to require, you know, X amount of hours to work on.

[00:14:39] And we've got other things to work on. Like, how do you address that kind of feedback?

[00:14:46] Amber Hinds: Yeah, I mean, like with anything, and I'm right there, my plugin does not support itself, right? Like, we, we have client work that pays the bills.

[00:14:59] Matt Cromwell: You're saying your plugin is not accessible?

[00:15:01] Amber Hinds: No, it doesn't support itself financially.

[00:15:03] Oh, it

[00:15:03] Matt Cromwell: doesn't support itself. Okay, got it. Like, it

[00:15:05] Amber Hinds: makes money.

[00:15:06] Matt Cromwell: Yeah.

[00:15:06] Amber Hinds: But it does not pay a full developer salary every year. Right. Let alone multiple developer salaries. And we have more than one person on our team who works on this. Well, so like I'm right there, like we have to make those same choices about, you know, how are we going to prioritize new features or coding time?

[00:15:25] And how does that relate to the things that are actually paying our bills? Um, or even if the plugin is self fully self funding. Right. Um, and, and so I think you, you just have to, you know, Look at it as what is really critical. Um, what are the major roadblocks that would really stop someone from being able to use the, the plugin and then, um, prioritize those first over maybe some of the fewer things that are like, this isn't, it's not a true problem, but it really could be better from usability standpoint, but just thinking about, like I mentioned, like it's part of quality code and, and if you're, and if you want to have the least amount of technical that, because a lot of.

[00:16:09] Not to go too far down the weeds of code, but a lot of accessibility is just using good semantic HTML. And in the long run, if you don't make everything a div, like, Your product will be much better. And then thinking about, you know, maybe you can use that as a marketing tool too. I mean, Gravity Forms is a really great case study on this.

[00:16:29] They decided to invest in accessibility. They put a lot of effort into accessibility. They hired an outside consultant to come in, audit their tool, and they improved the plugin. They also added guidance in and they use that to market a lot. And I think which we're going to talk about later, like that will open the door for them to now sell their product to government websites, for example, or other entities that are legally required to have accessible to only by accessible software.

[00:16:58] Now, they have the ability to expand expand their reach in a way that another form plug in that maybe hasn't done this work. Can't do.

[00:17:08] Matt Cromwell: Yep. Yep. Another one I hear sometimes, um, that I feel like has changed. This is more like five, six years ago. Um, I would hear, um, objections that it's just so. Complex and complicated to know whether or not I'm accessible or not.

[00:17:24] Like I can work, I can tweak my code for forever and I still won't be accessible. I feel like, and you should help confirm. I think that like the actual specifications and HTML, HTML markup itself has matured to a point where, where it's a lot more obvious. Is that true?

[00:17:45] Amber Hinds: Um, yes, I would say generally there's a lot that I can, when I'm looking at.

[00:17:52] a website, um, there's a lot that I can tell just by reading the HTML without even having to tab through or screen reader, because I can tell whether or not they're using semantic markup or whether they have appropriate ARIA specs. Now, of course, I've spent a long time studying ARIA, so I just know that.

[00:18:10] Um, so I think if you're just getting started, there is definitely a, a learning curve to it. There's some really great resources. Uh, WordPress accessibility meetup, I will pitch that, uh, but, but like, yeah, I think, I think part of it is just, even if you aren't an expert and you don't have to be an expert, knowing that I don't think we're going for 100 percent perfection, right?

[00:18:37] We're going for progress. Like how can we improve things? So you can, there are bite sized things that can be done. Like, for example, you could just go and hit the tab key. Um, on the output of your short code or your block or your page template or whatever it is that your thing is doing and see if you are able to focus, shift your keyboard focus to every control or interactive element.

[00:19:05] So if you are a plugin that has a carousel and it has little left and right arrows. Can you go to it with the tab key and can you hit the spacebar or the return key in order to trigger it and move the carousel? If you can't, then you know, Oh, okay. It's probably because these aren't coded as buttons. Um, so like you could choose a small thing like that, which is we're going to make sure everything can be getting.

[00:19:28] can be got to with a keyboard alone. I noticed, and I'll note too, we haven't talked about this too much, but I do want to touch on it is like backend WordPress accessibility is really important too, because there are people, a lot of people with disabilities who build WordPress websites. Um, and if you want them to be able to buy your plugin or use your free plugin, then the backend has to be accessible.

[00:19:49] And that was something that was a big thing I got really excited about. Last year, advanced custom fields went through and they fixed all of their keyboard issues in the settings panel because you couldn't use advanced custom fields previously unless you were able to use a mouse. So like just thinking if I turn my mouse off and I stick it in a drawer, can I still do everything in my plugin that I would want a website builder to be able to do or that a front end user.

[00:20:20] Matt Cromwell: That's a really easy, uh, test. Yeah, and

[00:20:22] Amber Hinds: even, even just testing that and fixing that is like, like that is, that can be a huge improvement.

[00:20:30] Matt Cromwell: Nice.

[00:20:31] Katie Keith: You know, it sounds like a big part of the problem is trying to retrofit accessibility. And obviously, if you've already got a product and website, then that might be necessary, but I would say that the goal should be to train yourself, train everybody, the people who, you know, Do the design and the UI stuff in the first place, the developers who implement it.

[00:20:53] Everybody should have some level of training in accessibility issues so that that becomes integral to their work. And then it's not seen as a separate project. And it's also not seen necessarily as a burden that increases the development time. It's not something they have to budget for, but obviously if you haven't always done that, and even if you have, you should still check it occasionally to see what you've missed.

[00:21:16] Amber Hinds: Yeah, no, I think like that's a really good point, Katie. Um, it really, it is a lot more challenging to retroactively fix something that wasn't coded accessibly in the first place. Um, so we call that an accessibility, like shifting left, trying to get it as early in the process, which can even happen before development.

[00:21:34] If you have a designer who is building out what the short code output is going to look like, like designing it in Figma or something, or, Even your admin settings screens. I've seen some where I'm assuming they're spending time, like designing these in a design program before the dev team is actually building out the admin settings page.

[00:21:54] Um, there's stuff that can happen during design, like looking at color contrast, um, checking to make sure that links in like paragraph, things like that are underlined, like that. Style choices that impact accessibility. And so if you do it then, and then as a developer, um, if you're doing a lot of JavaScript, there are some linting tools.

[00:22:16] So axe, uh, AXE from DQ, they have a linter that integrates with GitHub. Uh, it doesn't do PHP, unfortunately, but it'll do like all the JavaScript, um, and HTML and that kind of stuff. And so if you could set up a GitHub action, when you submit a poll request, that checks for accessibility problems and flags them, right?

[00:22:41] So there's a lot of sort of automated testing that can happen earlier on. And then, yeah, I mean, my big thing is I really want developers to Don't think about, Oh, I'm going to build this thing exactly the way it is. And then someone's going to test it and then I'll fix it. We try to be proactive. So as you're building, just like you might make your window more narrow to make sure your mobile styles work well, tab through, right?

[00:23:06] Turn on a screen reader on your computer. Um, voiceover, if you're on Mac, if you're on windows, there's a free one called NVDA that's open source. Um, and listen to it with the screen reader. As you go. Just like you would with mobile design.

[00:23:21] Matt Cromwell: Interesting.

[00:23:23] Katie Keith: And I really like what you said about automated testings.

[00:23:26] Like we have automated tests for all of our plugins functionality. Um, not, I'm not aware that the development team's talked about doing automated accessibility tests, but that's really useful to know there's a tool for that.

[00:23:40] Amber Hinds: Absolutely. I mean, you could even build out unit testing that is related to accessibility so that if you know, you're changing a major feature in your plugin, you know, you You might run unit tests to make sure that that code, nothing else broke.

[00:23:53] Like you could have unit tests related to accessibility as well.

[00:23:58] Matt Cromwell: Nice. Well, let's jump to our next segment. Um, and really briefly, um, Katie and I are going to share some of our limited experience with this subject. So, um, Katie, do you want to jump in first?

[00:24:11] Katie Keith: Okay. So, um, we're very lucky that our website developer is very passionate about accessibility and he's implemented a lot of improvements.

[00:24:21] Um, even things like higher contrast focus states to make it more obvious rather than just a little shadow on buttons or something like that. And he's adjusted some of our colors to meet the, um, guidelines, but linking back to something Amber said earlier, our, our fundamental button color is not quite accessible and we are really aware of this and we've looked at all sorts of different colors.

[00:24:48] and they just don't look good, and we have not done that, um, but you know, when we rebrand, we need to think about that as the whole color palette, and this is also a great example of how it's important to bring accessibility in at the design stage, because if we'd been alerted to that when we were, doing the very first sign off of the homepage design, which then became our brand, then we would have more color contrasting buttons.

[00:25:15] So it then created all these issues that we discovered later on that the button color was just a bit outside of the guidelines. So that's frustrating. Uh, we've also made plug it, made differences in our plugins, made changes because of course, if you're a WordPress product company, it's not just your own website, it's your products as well.

[00:25:36] So we have to look at it from all angles. So one good example is our WooCommerce fast cart plugin, because that brings a cart and checkout into a pop up. So we've had to make sure that that is fully accessible and can be used, uh, without, uh. Um, just with a keyboard and without a mouse and so on. So we've made actual changes to the plugins as well, but it's an ongoing process and, um, we need to formalize that more like most people.

[00:26:05] Amber Hinds: Yeah. I mean, it's a journey and right. We always say accessibility is a journey, not a destination.

[00:26:11] Matt Cromwell: Yeah.

[00:26:11] Amber Hinds: So you just keep working on it and improving over time. And that's what makes it a difference.

[00:26:17] Matt Cromwell: Some of us are marathon runners. Some of us are snails. I'd like to not be a snail on this department if possible.

[00:26:26] Um, I mean, I think

[00:26:27] Amber Hinds: the biggest thing on that too. And then I'll let you tell your story was, I think, you know, like I mentioned the frustration I felt when I've had, you know, product owners say, okay, whatever, you know, or not respond or not give me update. Like I'm enabled person and I'm finding that doing testing, but could you imagine if I was a person with disabilities, like how demoralizing that could feel?

[00:26:50] And so I know like, like we all have our own paces, but maybe like if somebody who has disabilities reports a problem to you and they're saying, I want to use your product. Like, that's a good time to like say, okay, let's move faster on this thing because this is a way to show our customers that we care about them.

[00:27:10] And then maybe, you know, you go back to slower pace, right? Like your pace might change a little bit, but, but for sure, like if someone reports something like. Don't just set it aside.

[00:27:22] Matt Cromwell: Yep. Absolutely. Yep. Yeah. My, my experience, um, my most prominent experience came through Amber, actually. Um, she invited, uh, uh, plugin owners to, uh, have their plugin, uh, on, uh, her accessibility meetup and to get audited essentially live by Alex Stein, who is a wonderful person, um, who is, uh, who is blind.

[00:27:48] And, um, he, uh, basically, uh, I volunteered, um, like a

[00:27:54] Amber Hinds: silly person.

[00:27:56] Matt Cromwell: Um, and, um, Man, it was so painful, um, because Alex was, Alex got through, I think he got through pretty much everything, um, for the most part, um, but it was so challenging to watch him, um, try to find everything and say, and, and have to guess sometimes, um, and say, Oh, I think what's going on here is, is, uh, there's a button, um, but I'm not totally sure.

[00:28:21] Like, um, and, um, also just when certain things would. Crop up, um, and, um, our cursor wouldn't land in the right spot. For example, like, um, you would click on, uh, an interaction and, uh, something would pop up, but the cursor wouldn't change. And so then we all knew that something had showed up, but he didn't, um, because it was further down the DOM or things like that.

[00:28:45] One interesting, one part of the reason why I asked the question about, uh, the maturity of, uh, Semantic markup and things like that is because the question of iframes comes up with give WP we do have our forms in an iframe because of the challenges of the WordPress environment and the last thing we want is for donations to break because your jQuery plugin is breaking your donation form.

[00:29:12] And I know that a lot of people say iframes are not accessible, and I know that that's also not 100 percent true. And so the iframes are a sort of shadow DOM, and the shadow DOM is accessible in certain Ways and certain, uh, because Alex was able to get into our form, um, successfully and was just

[00:29:33] Amber Hinds: the context changes.

[00:29:35] So it throws them off is more. I think what it is like if you had fully accessible content, just in an iframe on a page, I don't think it would be a problem. It's just, it's not an experience. Effected interaction for most of us. We don't even know we're in an iframe because it's not like you have the border in the scroll bar Right, but but he it gets announced by the screen reader and then he's like, wait a minute What happened and he's like am I supposed to be in this am I not?

[00:30:00] I mean, that's a that's the thing about those. So yeah, I hope it was was painful because In a positive way, and not because we made a pain point.

[00:30:09] Matt Cromwell: Oh, absolutely. Like what was it? I want everybody to go through that because it's 1 of those items where you don't actually recognize the situation. Somebody else is in until you.

[00:30:22] Witness it until you're there until you like have this compassion for Alex and are like, Oh, I want this to be so much better for you than it is. Um, I, I think so many folks, uh, live in a vacuum when it comes to this subject. They're like, Oh, I guess, I guess some folks can't access our site. Oh no, no, no.

[00:30:39] Like some really kind and dear people want to access your site. And if you watch them try, I think you'd feel a lot differently about this. You know, it's, it's just one of those human experiences where Unless you see somebody struggle because of code that you wrote, um, you, you just don't understand. You know what I mean?

[00:30:58] Uh, it was a positive experience. It was just challenging and difficult because I want it to be so much better for Alex than it was. wasn't terrible either. It wasn't like I have to say give is great. Like we did a decent job, um, without even being a 100 percent intentional. Um, so, but since then, and I did promise at that time that we have pivoted and have a lot more focus on that overall.

[00:31:24] So our new forms are coming out really soon. Our, um, next generation donation forms are coming out and they're incredible. Um, and they're awesome.

[00:31:32] Amber Hinds: I think on the story front, like what you said, like seeing a person is really important. Um, I remember when I first got exposed to accessibility, it was because we got work for Colorado State University, which university is because they get federal funding, have to be accessible.

[00:31:51] And we didn't really think about it. We're just like, Oh, we're going to build a website. And then we're like, Oh, okay. And we need to do some accessibility on it. Um, and then at some point, you know, they audited and they came back to us with feedback. We fixed it, but it wasn't until the 1st project I had where we said, we're going to add.

[00:32:09] In our project fees, like budget for user testing that I got to see a real person do it. And now, of course, like, I have a lot of, because I'm in the disability community, I have a lot of friends with a lot of different disabilities and, and I always like, it's so personal to me, like, you'll notice in post status.

[00:32:30] I put alt text on my images when I post them in Slack, and it's because I know Alex is there. And I love Alex, and I was like, if I'm going to post an image, I want Alex to know what this image is too, you know? I actually didn't know that you

[00:32:44] Matt Cromwell: could do that in Slack. I did not even know that was a thing.

[00:32:47] Amber Hinds: It's really buried and super annoying how buried it is. But you can even do it after you've already published the image. You can like edit it and it's like in the edit the metadata on the image.

[00:32:58] Matt Cromwell: Um, I do it on Twitter. I always am. I'm careful about my Twitter images.

[00:33:04] Amber Hinds: Yeah. Twitter is nice. Cause you can go turn on in your settings, a reminder.

[00:33:08] Matt Cromwell: I

[00:33:09] Amber Hinds: had forgotten that that was a thing and that I, I just thought I did that for everyone. And I was like, why are these people ignoring it? And then someone was like, don't you turn that on for yourself? But it reminds you can turn on a prompt. They'll be like, are you sure you want to post as well? If you forget to fill it in.

[00:33:22] Um, but I think, yeah, like I would really recommend as much as possible if you can't. If you don't have the budget to have someone test your plugin, I mean, of course we do it for free during the meetup, but we only do for a year because otherwise that'd be all we'd be doing at meetup. Um, but like, at least watch someone test someone else's plugin, like watch a recording or something like that.

[00:33:43] Um, or, you know, potentially, um, At a WordCamp, you can find somebody who knows accessibility. There's a lot of people in the WordPress community that are on the accessibility team around the world to go to different WordCamps. Um, but I feel like if you can put a face on it, it really does help. Was saying like, this is why I'm doing this.

[00:34:04] This is who I'm doing this

[00:34:05] Matt Cromwell: for. Is our, uh, is the give audit live somewhere? Um, yeah, yeah, I can get,

[00:34:12] Amber Hinds: I can get a link. Hold on one sec. I'll throw it in there for you and then you can share it. Yeah. We have all of the recordings for meetups on, um, the it's equalized digital. com slash meetup redirects to this much longer page.

[00:34:31] And then you can see all the recording. The most recent one we did was for, um, paid memberships pro. Yeah. I've read that. That was

[00:34:39] Katie Keith: really interesting. Yeah. So

[00:34:42] Amber Hinds: there's a video, but there's

[00:34:43] Katie Keith: a transcript, which is really good because it's not just about people who can't watch videos. I don't want to watch a video.

[00:34:50] I'd rather read it. So that's really great how you appeal to different, um, learning styles or whatever.

[00:34:57] Matt Cromwell: We disagree about coffee, but we agree about that.

[00:35:01] Katie Keith: I like to do things on my own time, not the pace they set. Yeah.

[00:35:05] Matt Cromwell: Yeah. Why would I do that? Why would I? Give me a transcript.

[00:35:10] Amber Hinds: I pretty much, you know, I started doing this when I started using screen readers more because I have screen readers.

[00:35:17] That's all the recordings and you can share that, but I'll find to give one. Um, I have my screen reader set faster. Certainly it is not the pace a native screen reader uses at all. But since I've started like with screen reader testing, um, getting used to hearing things faster. Now, when I watch videos, uh, I frequently like I'll, I'll do the, this.

[00:35:38] But I do it at like 2x speed. It only takes me 30 minutes instead of an hour. And I can like listen to stuff much faster.

[00:35:46] Katie Keith: Yeah.

[00:35:47] Matt Cromwell: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, exactly. That took a little longer than I was hoping, but that was good stuff. Um, we have a special segment where, uh, Amber needs to educate all of us a little bit on some, uh, documentation items and VPAT in particular.

[00:36:05] Amber Hinds: Yes. So this is something that as we were talking about the show, I was thinking, um, Most people may not have heard of a VPAT, which stands for voluntary product accessibility template. Um, we have a link that we can share. Um, what it is, is it is a template that you fill out and what you end up generating from it is an accessibility conformance report, which is normally just called an ACR.

[00:36:37] Um, and It's an international thing that pulls in you can have different options. If you go to the link, you can see there's different versions. Um, so why this matters is because in Europe in the United States, there are laws that say that any publicly funded I. T. So, uh, which includes websites or software that is used on websites.

[00:37:06] Has to be accessible and it bars the federal or the European Union. I don't know what you call the countries, what you, do you call them federal governments over there? Um, from purchasing inaccessible technology and in the United States, if you want to sell your plugin or your theme or in EU for use on a higher education website, On a, like a federal government website, some states here also have laws.

[00:37:35] Uh, it has to be accessible. And how do you prove that? Or document the level of accessibility? Because sometimes it's like, mostly these things are all accessible, but this one isn't, and here's why. Um, that's what a VPAT is, essentially. It's an official recognized document that, um, you can create or go through the process.

[00:37:57] Um, we have one as an example on our website, if anyone wants to look at it, because, um, we had to create one for, uh, some of our customers, they said, Hey, we, we need this, or we cannot buy your plugin. Um, And and so it is we ended up deciding, even though the customer who's buying it is, um, federal a branch of the federal government, um, in the U.

[00:38:24] S. We decided we'd do the international V. Pat. Um, and the reason for that is, is we're just thinking broadly, like, let's put more effort in, but basically. You can do just a Web Content Accessibility Guidelines version, or if you do, you could do that in Section 508, or you could do that with also the International, which follows the European Union's accessibility requirements for public procurement standards.

[00:38:50] And basically you go through each, it has a list of each guideline or success criterion, and then you have to say, do we support this? Um, partially support, Or does not support or it's not applicable. So like, um, like for example, in WCAG, there's having, having captions on live audio while we don't have any live streams in our plugin in WordPress.

[00:39:19] Um, and so you can see if you go down a little bit where it shows the different things that can be included, um, the standards guidelines. This is where you would choose. You could do just a WCAG one if you wanted, which takes less time. If you are thinking globally. Um, then, you know, you probably want to go for the international version, which does help.

[00:39:40] Um, if you're just in focusing on the United States, then section 508 would be important to include as well. Um, but you go through each one, and at the bottom, there's an actual Google doc that lists, this is like our summary explaining ours, and if you click the link to the Google doc, Um, then you get a full document that has the date that it was tested, um, the description, like the version of the plugin.

[00:40:06] So ours is about a year old now, so obviously this is not the current version. You don't always have to update it all the time, and you would notice that if you went to look at like Adobe, for example, they have a lot of these for all of their software products. Um, So, you know, maybe we talk about creating one, updating it maybe annually or every couple of years, depending on how much is changing.

[00:40:26] But, um, then you can go through and you sort of see here, you know, we're saying this is the guideline and the things in the left column, you don't have to fill in that's already there. And the central column is where you say, if it either supports or partially supports, so you see, I have a partially supports like, and then on the right column, we have notes about.

[00:40:49] What it does or doesn't do, like where are some areas of weaknesses. So the process of this is you first have to have an accessibility audit of your product, and then you either decide to maybe fix things that you don't want to say does not support, um, or you, or you say like, okay, we're going to put these on a roadmap, we don't have time to fix them right now.

[00:41:19] And you just document. What the standard is, um, and then and then that way you have this available for a federally funded website

[00:41:31] Matt Cromwell: in the

[00:41:31] Amber Hinds: U. S. or Europe.

[00:41:33] Matt Cromwell: Wow.

[00:41:34] Amber Hinds: And we just we just had a conversation. We're in the middle of. We just came on to start remediating a community college in Illinois website, and they are under mandated remediation with the Office of Civil Rights in the United States because they had complaints filed against them.

[00:41:52] It's a WordPress site. And one of the conversations that we had today, Yeah, if you go to that link, there's basically it's Word docs that you can download. Choose your version and you download it. And so we had conversations and what's going to end up happening is there are some plugins where they're going to have to go to the plugin owner.

[00:42:15] And because they sat down, she said she actually last week had a meeting with their person from the office of civil rights. And they said, what do we do? This is a third party thing. And that person was like, well, technically under the law. You are not allowed to buy this if it's not accessible. So they have a certain amount of time to remediate.

[00:42:31] So they're going to have to contact that plugin owner and say, here's the list of things that have to be fixed. And this is the deadline that the office of civil rights gave us.

[00:42:40] Matt Cromwell: Or

[00:42:41] Amber Hinds: We are going to stop paying for your product.

[00:42:44] Matt Cromwell: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely.

[00:42:46] Amber Hinds: And

[00:42:46] Matt Cromwell: so, but I

[00:42:47] Amber Hinds: mean, again, it's, there's the negative of you can lose business, but there's also the positive, which is that if you are interested in selling like enterprise licenses or sort of going beyond that 99 a year kind of price point, having this kind of documentation is, is probably really important to that Those that enterprise licensing, especially if you're interested in converting your product to a SAS or including SAS aspects in your product, this would be something you would want to do.

[00:43:20] Matt Cromwell: Yep. Wow, man, this is a lot, um, and really good. And actually, I love how detailed it is. Me personally, I love more detail, not less. So this is super helpful. And I mean, full disclosure folks, Amber is for hire. So,

[00:43:35] Amber Hinds: yes, we do VPATs. Yeah. I've also actually, I've had people, we have had people ask for VPATs for websites too.

[00:43:45] So it's not just for products. It's typically more for like software products, but, um, but we also have had them for websites.

[00:43:54] Matt Cromwell: Interesting. Katie, any other thoughts or ideas there? What's, what's your take on the VPAT issue?

[00:44:00] Katie Keith: Yeah, just, it's interesting, I've never come across that. Um, we have one plugin in particular, the Document Library plugin, which quite a lot of government organizations use to create a document library and, They have a lot more hoops to jump through outside of accessibility.

[00:44:17] Things like doing purchase orders and getting to be formally approved as a supplier. And I'm like, come on, it's a 79 plugin. I don't want to apply to be a supplier. Just buy it on our website. You know, there's a real clash between our business model and their expectations. Um, but I didn't realize. I

[00:44:36] Amber Hinds: think that's where I think that's where that like enterprise stuff can come in.

[00:44:42] And maybe you have on our website, this is our 79 version. And then here. Oh, you're an enterprise organization. Contact us. They get higher pricing that maybe also includes like feature requests or, um, like an SLA, if something breaks on their website related to their plugin, you'll respond. Right. And then that also helps to justify you putting the extra time into the procurement process and probably all the extra conversations for sales, right?

[00:45:12] Cause you don't want to do that for 79. You could just be like, at this point, you should just not buy my plugin. I don't want your 79, right? Like, so that's what I

[00:45:22] Matt Cromwell: think. Yeah, I'd like having like a pricing level of like, get to the front of the line pricing, essentially. I mean, we have so many folks too.

[00:45:29] I'm sure Katie, I'm sure you've had it too, where they're like, I've paid for this plugin. Now you need to do the feature requests. It's like,

[00:45:36] Amber Hinds: sorry, man.

[00:45:36] Matt Cromwell: There's a lot of folks. You

[00:45:37] Amber Hinds: paid for what already exists. Yeah. Not for new things.

[00:45:42] Katie Keith: Actually, Freemius have a really good article on their blog about selling plugins to enterprise and how it's a whole different scale.

[00:45:50] And I read it and thought, I'm not sure I want to go there. That's like being an agency again. And I've moved away from that to become a product company. But. It makes me wonder when you get these people asking for all these complicated processes and signatures and legal documents for a 79 plugin, um, that it's like, you're acting like it's a different level that we don't provide.

[00:46:13] Maybe we should, but that's another project. But the accessibility is a whole nother and probably more justified rather than just bureaucracy, which is what we normally face. There are reasons behind that at least.

[00:46:28] Yeah,

[00:46:29] Amber Hinds: yeah. I mean, I think, I think there's cases, right? So, for example, this community college, like, they just built their website. So they didn't ask for a VPAT like they were supposed to. They didn't do all that stuff. So I'm sure there's lots of instances where government websites that are technically supposed to have asked you for this, or only have bought things that are accessible.

[00:46:48] They just don't. But I think increasingly with the directional legislation is going, it's going to come up more and more. And I would not be surprised if some of these really big players, like maybe some of the plugins under your umbrella, Matt, over there at Stellar are going to get asked, start getting asked for these.

[00:47:05] Like I can envision the events calendar is used on a lot of really big websites.

[00:47:09] Matt Cromwell: Yeah. And definitely nonprofit websites too, for sure.

[00:47:14] Amber Hinds: Yep. And section 508 applies if the nonprofit is getting federal grants.

[00:47:18] Matt Cromwell: Yep, absolutely. Fascinating. Well, we like to wrap up generally here with our best advice. Um, go around the horn and say, what is our best advice for new product owners when it comes to the subject of accessibility?

[00:47:33] I'm going to go first this time because my best advice, if you're brand new and you're building out your product for the first time, Is that you hire Amber. That's what my best advice is. Oh, thank you.

[00:47:46] Katie Keith: How much is she paying you for this? I know. Am I going to get an invoice

[00:47:51] Amber Hinds: after this?

[00:47:55] Matt Cromwell: Probably not.

[00:47:57] Definitely, like, be able to, because, I mean, I know how I felt when I was starting. It was like, oh, accessibility, we have no idea even, we're just shooting in the dark. We had no idea how to get moving in that direction. So rather than shoot in the dark, reach out to an expert like Amber, uh, make sure to get the right advice, uh, so that it's actionable for you.

[00:48:15] Because the last thing you want to do is just start guessing and be like, well, I tried. And it didn't work out. And now I'm done. Uh, well, no, you can get, do a VPAT like this and get detailed feedback on exactly where you need to improve and, and, um, and how to improve, um, and, uh, and go from there and, and then treat it like a journey.

[00:48:33] Like you said, like it's not a once and done like, um, uh, that, that to me, I think is a really good, uh, uh, idea as well. So, uh, Katie, what about you? What's your best advice?

[00:48:44] Katie Keith: Um, I've got two that are sort of separate, but related, which is to hire someone to test the accessibility on both your website and your product products on a regular basis.

[00:48:56] So not just a one off, but keep doing it. And the other is to more generally ensure that your team are trained in accessibility best practices so that it becomes part of the culture of your company to do that in your day to day work and not just as a one off injection every now and then.

[00:49:14] Matt Cromwell: Excellent advice.

[00:49:16] Absolutely. Amber, about you?

[00:49:18] Amber Hinds: Yeah, so my advice. Um, is to just start testing. Um, try it you, so like, even if you don't have a budget, like you can find things that, that you can fix. Um, I, I said this and people thought it was hilarious at, uh, word Camp Phoenix, but learn HTML deeply . Mm-Hmm . Everything is not just supposed to be a div or a span.

[00:49:41] Uh, there are other tags out there that you should be aware of and you should use. Um. And yeah, I think involving users where you can, but even if the testing is just you yourself, or you're using automated tools, total shameless plug my free plugin, test unlimited posts and pages, go put your shortcodes on a page and use my free plugin.

[00:50:02] And you can scan and get some feedback, or you could use a browser extension, like wave, that's totally free. It won't find everything. But it will find some things, which is a great place to start.

[00:50:12] Matt Cromwell: Excellent. Wonderful. Well, this was a great and informative session for sure. Thanks so much, Amber, for being here.

[00:50:19] We really appreciate it.

[00:50:22] Amber Hinds: Yeah. Thank you.

[00:50:24] Matt Cromwell: Uh, next week we have a bit of an exception. Um, we're gonna be on Tuesday next week, right, Katie?

[00:50:30] Katie Keith: Yep. But, uh, someone we would definitely make an exception for, uh, the man who needs no introduction is, uh, Yost himself is coming on next week. He's gonna be talking about what makes for a great WordPress product brand and why you might want to rebrand now.

[00:50:46] So he obviously has huge experience in that, both through the. Brand and other WordPress brands. And I'm also interested to catch up with him about his new ventures, because you probably have heard that he's recently stepped down from Yoast and is moving on to more of a shark tank kind of, um, improve, uh, accelerator, uh, supporting other product companies to grow.

[00:51:11] So I'm interested to learn what he's doing more generally.

[00:51:14] Matt Cromwell: Yeah, absolutely. Um, so excited for it and thank you everybody for being here and we'll see you next week.