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[Music] all right i think we're at uh two o'clock so let's uh get going again uh thank you everybody that's joined uh so far and taking some time out of your day to join us for this webinar i think this is going to be a a really interesting topic uh those of you that uh are clients of of tech 42 already and have had their experience with me probably know that i have quite an extensive background in web and software development spent many years leading a team to do that uh but this topic about ada compliance in the web space is kind of something i never really had been brought to the forefront of my attention uh until recently through my interaction with our guests today and i just thought it was really important topic to bring uh to our region and to our client base and uh so uh our guests today are anthony and jonathan vlad a subpoena i i did i get that right anthony are close yesterday a little bit oh thanks uh and they um they work uh run a a company very similar tech 42 based on long island and i'll give anthony a moment uh to introduce himself in just a second and tell us a little bit about his company uh but this is something they kind of specialize and learned a lot about so i wanted to bring them in kind of as the the experts uh to share uh i'm gonna give anthony a moment to kind of introduce himself and tell us a little bit about their company and then he's got a about a 20 or 30 minute presentation he's going to take us through and kind of educate us on this topic uh and then just see uh everyone is aware we will have a question and answer time at the end zoom does have a q and a functionality where you can type out your questions so i'd encourage if there's something that pops up through the course of the conversation go ahead and pop your questions into there and then we will spend some time uh reviewing those and and doing our best to answer those at the end of the conversation today but with that said thank you again anthony and john for being with us today i appreciate it so much you guys taking the time to present this topic and uh why don't you uh just tell us a little bit uh about your company and kind of how this became an important issue for you yeah thank you michael for the uh nice introduction um hey uh i'm uh anthony bonaspina from uh li tech advisors we're located in new york on long island specifically basically i've been doing ada work uh for about 10 years now you know again i have an i.t company very similar that michael has uh do a lot of uh different schools and so on but um about 10 years ago a technician from out of out of state technician contacted me over the phone and was saying hey i need some help can you offer me up you know i need some hands and boots on the ground to go after one of his clients and do some work stuff that he cannot do and i said you know absolutely for him what's up uh what do you need he goes well i'm blind and you know i do remote support for them and that stopped me right and i did that tracks i said wait a minute you're blind and you're doing remote support how are you how are you doing that you know and he then told me about a screen reader and how he was able to use log me in at the time and actually it was accessible and and so on i was like amazed that this guy has these clients and he's working with them and working them remotely and he's totally blind um so i went out you know did the work he needed and required because it was a lot of hands-on moving servers and so on and so on and he took it over from there he did the remote in and and now what happened was that after that i went over to had you know he's at a family party and one of my my cousin um you know went over to him he's been totally blind for uh i don't know about maybe 15 years now and he was a schoolteacher in new york city and he ended up getting a mold spore um ended up with meningitis went to you know got you know in december went into a coma woke up in january totally black couldn't see a thing uh you know i went up to him you know he have to you know he's been that way for many years at this point and i said yeah hey you know you know anything about accessibility i said because i had this guy from out of state contact me i said it really interested me how he's able to do that at that point my cousin punched me and said what do you think of course i know you know um so he then tended to introduce me to screen readers and so on and i got hooked at that point i was at you know i dove into this and started learning everything i could about it and i was able to assist him in his effort uh because he had his own a non-profit organization and you know to this day and he's still very successful with it um it's called my blind spot and basically um he's an advocate for people with disabilities in general not just blind but people with disabilities so he gave me some very interesting statistics and so on so that's what made me go into this and as of a few years ago i was one of the first to get what they call that because at the time there was no kind of degrees you get in school about this uh very few people it's the best hidden secret that i've ever known about all right um i learned about uh basically what happened was that um we had you know we went in and um you know as i was learning this i realized that again a lot of schools don't know about this they're not teaching it and um basically i became a a cpac certified uh professional accessibility core competencies as soon as that um you know certification became available through the i uh wap um it's it's an organization international organizations for people with disabilities um you know basically it helps major companies or members of this to help uh pretty much make the world a better place um by making digital interfaces websites apps and so on software accessible people with disabilities and you know so i ended up working some very major companies um where we made their websites and so on accessible and and so basically um what we are doing now today is going through and i want to show you what this is all about why it's important um you know why it's the right thing to do why it's important so you don't get sued and also how it's a you know it's an important uh marketplace that people overlook okay so with that i'm gonna dive into this uh so a short little presentation i have here uh just to give you an idea of what this is all about um all right that's uh my little background which i kind of already went through um now a brief introduction to digital accessibility like eve like 10 years ago when i learned about this um i was like i had no clue um what this was all about and starting after the basic things um that you know we a person that cited takes things for granted like using a mouse on a screen um you know a person that's blind it cannot use and uh move a pointer so they have to use the keyboard um a very simple task sometimes can take hours for a person with disabilities when it doesn't have to so that's what this is all about is trying to make uh the world you know more accessible for all people not just people with disabilities um and again accessibility is intended for all users regardless of accessibility disability really i mean think about even closed captioning on a tv that's very important because that helps everyone you're in a bar and you want to watch tv you can actually see what they're saying late at night with kids and so on you can mute everything and just and see what's going on but that's a side benefit of that accessibility feature that was put in for the people that are deaf um also uh you know pretty much um i'm gonna go through uh here's the next screen here um there we go like i said i said before about having um you know your world at your fingertips it's fine assuming that you can see the mouse on the screen hear the audio and so in other words uh not having a disability of any kind um the types of disabilities there are you have visual auditory mobility and cognitive now visual typically covers about 90 of the um spectrum as far as accessibility goes if you're blind and you're trying to make a website accessible you've pretty much covered about 90 if you make it accessible for somebody that's visual uh impairment you've done a good job um but you know there's other accessibility like mobility paralysis and so on you tend to use you can see but now all you can do is you know use a maybe a clicker or so on to basically move through a menu and so on so that needs to be addressed as well because you want to be able to see where you're at on the screen um you know there's something they use it's called a keyboard switch interface for that you know they can actually click through um okay i am jumping too fast on these slides but here we go uh to give you an idea here's another thing that startled me when i first entered this arena um how many people are really affected by this i mean in this country alone there's 25 million people that are have a severe visual impairment you know basically blind macular degeneration losing their eyesight in some way or another um when you're talking about like as far as like how many people you're dealing with worldwide that's 350 million people now that are visually just visually impaired that's not encounter including all the other disabilities when you add them all together you're talking about a billion people that's a lot of people it's basically the size of china okay the other piece of it too which i tell businesses all the time i said you know it's this is not just doing the right thing or avoiding a lawsuit it's also a marketplace i mean you're dealing with a marketplace that has uh eight trillion dollars disposable income uh and also you have to keep in mind too that these uh people with disabilities have friends and relatives and so on it adds up to about 2.3 billion people i'll give you a quick uh analogy on that one my um father-in-law for years you know was in a wheelchair and we used to go to restaurants and so on it only could accommodate him bathrooms are large enough um the uh you know the staff was uh you know empathetic towards him and so on and you know to this day he passed away several years ago and we still go to those restaurants you know so when i say it affects the 2.3 billion people that's the friends and relatives all right so um going on to the next slide here i'm a little bit uh delayed on my computer okay um to give you an idea of some of the assistive technology out there this is what um you know get me into understanding how a blind person can actually see the screen quote unquote what they're actually doing is you're watching um it's uh speech to uh text technology basically you're excuse me screen reader go back one the screen reader allows you to uh see what's on the screen by having it announced to you what is on the screen so if you're on a website it would actually read to you and using the keyboard allow you to navigate that website that's what a screen data reader does and a couple of screen readers like one is called zoom um excuse me jaws and mdda and then there's something called zoomtext which also blows it up that's for people with macular degeneration losing their eyesight a little but jaws itself is one of the most popular ones and that is you know there's a cost to that could be anywhere between 700 and 1200 dollars for a person with disability who's on limited income as it is to purchase nvda is a really neat one it's free and it was designed by two individuals young kids that were blind and they put it out into the marketplace for free and if they somebody want to make a donation they're very appreciative um it's limited but it really does a great job the other one is screen magnifiers again if you have like macular degeneration you're getting older like for example we told one of the major um stock brokers uh brokerages firms that you know eighty percent of your um uh you know clientele or low vision people that they have a difficult time to see what's on the screen so you got to make your site uh meanable for them so that they could use maybe something like a screen magnifier again it's a matter of just designing this into the website the other piece of it is speech to text that's basically where you can speak using a microphone um using dragon speaks and so on into the computer narrator um so that you can actually speak to the computer and uh uh have it you know give put up the text it's the same with a mobile device like with using siri and uh voiceover um we also have things like braille displays now here's the kicker is a few years back okay why does the ada pretty much apply to websites all of a sudden the ada has been around um since 1973 okay and again um you know it's well known it's a federal anti-discrimination uh act that was placed um in uh you know it pretty much uh like in the american food disabilities act was excuse me 1990 the rehabilitation act was back in the 70s it became the america american disabilities act 1990. now um the whole thing about this is that the in 2018 department of justice sends the letter to congress stating that the ada now applies to websites they are now considered basically in a nutshell uh places of a public accommodation um which is uh you know pretty much like their brick and mortar now once that hit that the ada kicked in all right just same way when you put up a building you have to have handicapped spots you have to have curb cuts you know you have to have basically accommodations uh in place for people with disabilities you now have to do that with websites so um that's where the litigation started again the litigations typically are you know on the state and local levels um and you see a lot of plaintiffs at that point bringing lawsuits even attorney firms bringing lawsuits uh you know with a plaintiff to um you know against a specific business or a suite of businesses for example there were um on long island here about 26 27 wineries uh that was sued uh one of them was my client by the way um and uh for two years i've been telling them hey this is the thing you gotta you know fix your website he thought it was a passing phase it ended up putting him out of business because uh he got hit with that and then you know he still the site still wasn't accessible the other piece of it too is that they uh there were like 40 some odd winery and that wineries excuse me art galleries that were also sued because attorneys at least in new york uh have been going after it's almost like ambulance chasers uh you know going after certain industries and um you know it's basically each state kind of stands on its own but you know they have their own anti-discrimination laws but they are being used now to um you know launch lawsuits now um there are different uh the worldwide web consortium this w3c you can actually school it go to their website and learn a little bit about what this is all about um there's different uh there's web con content um accessibility guidelines that were created there's a few different versions of it but we always try to go with the latest version i think we're running around 2.1 right now 2.2 is coming out soon but basically these uh guidelines of what um a good web designer should follow when designing a site from the ground up if you're designing a site from the ground up okay if you follow wik 2.1 for example there's different levels as a double a aaa guidelines we go with the double a typically um you're you're going to end up designing a very accessible uh very rich graphically rich site just like you would normally um but the only thing is the and part is that it's going to be accessible people with disabilities now keep in mind this is the key part of this if you do it from the beginning the cost to do this is negligible okay the problems come in is after the site has been developed and you have to go back and fix it this is true and michael will attest to this software custom software you write it and you don't have a good idea of like far as what this thing's supposed to do to go back to fix it it's going to cost you a hundred fold now this is what happened for example one of the big chains here target for example um department stores they're uh they were sued for six man and it cost th
m like 21 million dollars to fix their site um because it was a very involved and you know deeply in green site so that's why it's important when you're designing if you're a simple site you're redesigning it always building this from the beginning make sure your website um designer knows about this you know has this in their back pocket that they know what it's all about and that they can build this in and more importantly after it's built to maintain it and when something goes up that they make sure it's put up there with accessibility in mind now because of this you know litigation so and we basically have um one lawsuit happening pretty much every hour now this date is a couple years old now but the average lawsuit uh settlement has been you know again it is for smaller companies between like 10 and uh fifty thousand dollars actually um what that means is that somebody would come in you know a play with a attorney firm with a plaintiff come in sue uh you know send you a letter request some money and then go away you know and then expect you to fix the site now it's very important that you start immediately remediating and fixing the site and making it accessible because 25 of all sites that were sued will get sued again the same year all right because if you're not compliant and then every time you get sued you get the requirements combat can become stricter okay so it's very important to um you know evaluate your site and this is not just restricted to like the huge sites anymore this is not the big box retailers and so on these are even little mom and pop stores now that are getting hit um now as soon as saying before about 25 percent of all lawsuits you know happen again if you don't act fast um so you need to uh you know make some you know take some action at that point the main targeted states now again all the states and even worldwide this is a thing okay it's not just the united states that has this happening um the the every uh entity after every uh country and so on has their own um you know criteria to fall back but a lot of it goes back to the w3s seeing the wick you know 2.1 double a guidelines now most of the target states having california new york florida and new jersey texas and it's a and the time is around 63 of the cases but you're seeing it pop up in other states now so it's important to even if you're not in one of these states just really get ahead get jumping in front of the train get in front of this and uh put it behind you as far as that goes yeah here in pennsylvania i think you know we we tend to follow new york and new jersey a little bit because we're like right next door but it's not it's often times you know within you know 18 24 months after like something's trending there we start to see it i think trending out here so i think that's very relevant for us yes it's like i said it's important to get in front of this um now and the other thing too is again keep in mind when you're designing a site and so on get in front of this by you know early on if you design a brand new site implement accessibility right the get-go and minimal costs involved in doing that now what happens if you don't do that in the course of non-performance number one you're going to be paying the attorney's fees on the opposing party the award to the plaintiff because again it was a state or local lawsuit um and then you may be mandated by the courts to conform to higher accessibility standards which you really don't want to do um and then again the average settlement is between 10 and 50 000 now that's what i've been the last uh one of the last go-arounds uh from that i heard uh some of the companies here in long island um now just to give you an idea how easy this is uh especially if you're baking it in from the beginning you bake in accessibility from the beginning is like for example you pop up an image on the screen um the thing is with except with the ada you need to put um a description on that image if it's a you know a person walking a dog along the beach you describe that all right and that's it um if it's a a home with a driveway with snow on it you describe that so users know what they look you know what that picture entails if it's a picture like just decorative and has no meaning you actually have to put a null um you know tag on it so that screen readers skip over it because it's decorative it doesn't have any information to uh give the end user the other piece of it too is um like keyboard access you have to make sure that you're using the keyboard you're not using the mouse and typically you can be using the tab key the enter key the arrow keys and as you're doing that um you should have a visual indicator to show where somebody is on the screen um and also that the logical uh fields that you're jumping in the right order sometimes what happens you're jumping from last name instead of from last name to first name or you know address one address two it's going from last name to address one and then the city and then back to first name you may have to make sure you're in logical order okay um and that's part of the requirements it just also makes it better for everybody i mean i tend to use the keyboard wherever you know i can uh because the mouse i think slows me down in general um also things like you have a contact us form the labels on it it's very important that the in the input labels all right are tied to the inputs not just visually so what you're seeing on the screen the field actually has to have that name embedded behind it so that when a screen reader hits it it says the name of the field that was just to give you some ideas i mean it's a little more than that okay but to give you some ideas as far as you know what what the we're looking to do as far as making the site accessible um oh let me get back to this too as far as like you know your tags and your your labels and all that you got to keep in mind too as you're doing this what you're doing is making your site like seo friendly uh like on steroids because you have to keep in mind google's blind google doesn't see the site it reads the site all right so by doing that google has this thing as like a health meter at how healthy your site is um like for example our site i came back from my marketing guy that actually came back and says you know your google health is like off the charts it's really high i said yeah well the accessibility adding that in baking that in helped that and also from an seo standpoint you're giving and you're describing things it makes google so much it makes it better for the search engine as it parses the site's code it knows exactly what your intentions are and what where things are and so on um so again this other side benefits of uh having and baking this in from the beginning yeah that's really interesting because you know that's from a software development standpoint i would consider that just good user interface design but it's it is amazing how often we walk into stuff and it's like you are you're hitting the tab key to go to the next field and it's just like it just doesn't go where you expect it to go and and then so it's not just you know for ada it's like that's really just good design to make a website really usable and user friendly but yeah very important but accessibility benefits everyone even the curb cuts i mean they were put there for a few wheelchairs and so on but now you've got um you know mothers pushing their kids around in baby carriages and so on strollers they could use those curb cuts delivery people they don't have to go up the sidewalk anymore they can use those cars i appreciate them when i'm riding my bike too yeah so side benefits but generally that's what happens when you you're making it accessible you just make it easier and better for everyone and here's another thing it's a very important piece of it eighty-five percent of everybody that's disabled that's out there got that way after they were born okay i mean and your life can turn around in a minute suddenly you're in a community that you had no intention of joining so you're by having these tools available like my cousin even says to today he says if he was to go blind this is the time to do it if it was a hundred years ago he'd be on the corner selling pencils oh yeah wow you know so now is the time he's he's extremely um functional and active and he could type and dictate an email uh faster than i can ever um and he he would respond to emails immediately i mean he's amazing so um you know the tools are there now and it's a matter of making sure that all the technology that's out there is designed in accordance with just the guidelines and um so that everybody can you know take benefit of it um okay so now what proactive steps can you take you give you an idea um you there's a lot of automated tools out there okay there's one of them it's called the wave accessibility tool and by the way this uh slide deck making available there's a link on it and michael could share that out but the wave accessibility tool um it's from uh webaim basically it allows you to do is it does a quick check of like the home page and like a subsequent one page at a time doesn't do the whole site you know because it's a free tool but it does a quick check to give you an idea of how bad the site is and again when you do yes like would you i'd like to call the litmus test all right but the bottom line is it's going to give you the accuracy is like 40 to 50 percent is false negatives false positives and you really need somebody that knows what they're doing um preferably a cpac certified accessibility expert um you know look at it to tell you if you really you know something you should worry about or not um the other thing too is most lessons start uh they start with the lack of understanding of assistive technology and this holds very well true on the front line the people that are answering the phones at your company the the equality um insurance people the um you know anybody's interacting with the public there was a hotel chain that had recently put up a job application form that job application form was not accessible now what happened is a blind person called uh up um that hotel chain and say listen i'm trying to apply online and the you know i'm having a problem type in every i don't know where the fields are just labeled like you know edit one edit two edit three i don't know what's what the person at the other end instead of understanding and saying yeah let me help you out what they said instead was wait you're blind you can't apply for this job double lawsuit okay big mistake that's why training is so important so make sure people on the front line understand hey yeah a blind person can use a computer can use a phone iphone is one of the most accessible devices out there it's amazing uh you just have to turn accessibility on i still i'm not you know disabled um depending on who you talk to but basically um you know as far as uh you know blind and so on i'm cited but i have all i have most of the accessibility features turned on because i'm aging all right and um you know as you know i'd like to be able to do a triple click and blow up what's on the screen periodically and or sometimes i even use um you know like the voice over you know and it's siri is great also for when i'm driving the car to dictate text messages so i take advantage of all those tools but my point is is that um you know the pearson answering the phone needs to be empathetic towards the person that is having the problem because that could have been 180 180 degrees turned around by the person answering the phones telling the person you know i said listen i understand you're working on fixing that site just so you know we do are aware of it let me i could take your information right now with the phone and enter it for you and that you know most again that's not really compliant but the thing is the person out there and you're dealing with people they'd be more very appreciative that you fact that you even spoke to them here and you're helping them out okay so it's very important that you have good consumer customer service on the front line there um okay all right here's the other thing what happens if i get this question all the time i got served a letter all right got something in the mail uh we tend to look at those letters um we ask for them also typically un um marked up you know sometimes they get crossed out with the name we need to see the whole letter and a lot of a lot of times it's just a letter you can you know um take some steps simple steps towards remedy you know taking care of it other times it's something you need to call your attorney on but um you should always have or speak to an attorney that's familiar with these types of cases all right if you do get a letter you have to create a remediation plan all right and part of that remediation plan is putting on your website and accessibility statement at least that right off the bat tells whoever's coming to the site that you're working towards the solution that you're aware of the problem okay so accessibility statement very important um we also have to carry out the remediation as quickly as possible and and show progress in your accessibility statements that we did this we're still working on this and so on and if the person coming to the site has any problems here's a phone number uh you can call with a trained person at the other end we'll help them through and or maybe a contact email address um and again very important train your staff um also after all said and done you have to make sure your website gets tested regularly all right so you either have somebody on staff that's been trained or somebody that is who is ever doing your website development um be trained on this but sometimes you have it where the designer i mean you may have a blog somebody entering a blog that's a part of your company when they pop up an image there you gotta make sure that they know that they need to take that image all right all right i always get this question too who's exempt very few things this goes back to the rehabilitation act 73 basically private clubs and religious organizations and their entities uh controlled by them that's it that's the only two uh uh entities that are um exempt from this uh ada requirements at this time uh now here's the cpec certification this is there's links on here and so on i highly recommend if you do website design yourself or if you have a um website designer and so on you get them uh certified or tell them this is what they need to do if they don't want to do it then get yourself another website designer but this is again it has to do with websites apps on phones as well as even software one of the things we help do is make intuit quickbooks which is a 30 year old program accessible for people with disabilities it's been that way for about eight years now um and what happened was that they we worked with the uh the engineers from over in india worked with them very closely they very um helpful and uh very encouraging to get this but bottom line is we put about 500 accountants back to work because of this and all their clients are very appreciative they you know it's again it's again making people um that have the the knowledge and expertise giving them the tools to succeed and the last thing here was the um wik guidelines and so on this is where you can go learn a little bit about the w3c and so on um these are some of the lawsuits and there's a little outdated there but um it was 5 000 lawsuits anyway that slides give me a hard time there's about five thousand listed since 2019 but there's a lot more since then um and that's it i if there's any uh questions at this point you can type them into the uh q a section of zoom be more than happy to answer them so i i you know while we're waiting you know i just couple things you know kind of just struck me and popped up uh you know one was you you talked earlier about uh you know just you know the you know expanding your marketplace as a business and i know it just it kind of struck me and i know we had that conversation last time but even just we talked you know about the importance of having a website uh because of how many you know people pre-qualify businesses d
esn't matter what your industry is anymore like i i even went you know i was looking for uh you know book a hotel to for my wife's birthday next week and i looked at three different places and i picked the one that had the nicest website because you know i'm pre-qualifying based on the website and and you know that just you know really struck me how you know people you know people with disabilities are going to pre-qualify businesses as well so if if they can't get to your website if it's not you know accessible um you know you're gonna you could be getting cut out of the running for what could be a very you know profitable client uh so yeah that that really that struck me and i know we got a bit of work to do on our own website that we've started into um one of the you talked a little bit about you know things that exempt and don't exempt and you know and your list was very short there but does it you talk though also about how in some cases the the level of compliance goes up if you've been sued or haven't done things have you seen it all where like the level of compliance requirement alters based on the industry like if i'm selling product on my website does my need for compliance go up or down or if i'm offering certain types of services or just pretty much seem like it's static across just you've got to be compliant yeah the answer to that is yes depending on the industry like for example the airline industry was hit very hard department justice came down on them very hard and they actually had to have people with disabilities doing the testing uh that was one of the requirements instead of just having a cpac certified accessibility expert look at this site and and building that they actually had to have like for american airlines united airlines they actually had the requirement was that people with disabilities go in and test the site as part of the remediation plan so yeah they were hit um harder uh there are generally though uh if you are the more consumer uh facing you are um you have the same requirements but the thing is you're opening yourself up to a larger audience that you need to make sure your compliance for makes sense uh we have uh i i just noticed in the uh in the chat there we had a request to put the five steps back up but uh i saw you you provided the link so uh anyone who wants to see that any part of the presentation i just encourage you to grab that uh was there any questions about the five steps that anthony presented or anything uh around that or was it just you were just looking to have them in general and so i'll put that back out to the to marcy who asked that question um i got another question that just came in i am far from a web designer but was tasked with maintaining our site after the design vendor handed it over to us i'm positive it was compliant at the time but i've since made updates naturally i want to audit our site where do i start yeah um that is a good question you know as far as where you need to start if you are the uh person in charge of this all right you really should start by looking at the standards um going to the w3c um and actually you know learning the wic tag standard yourself and if you want to even become uh you know a cpac certified accessibility expert go for it um education is never a bad thing but you could start with the automated tools i mean we have the wave for example that i have the link towards there are others out there as well that are free you can do some quick checks again they're about 50 accurate but it gives you an idea uh the other piece of it too is that you need to have an idea of um like if you go into the wic tag requirement the guidelines uh for example you start learning about um you know image tags uh you start learning about heading you know as far as your headers go the how to um basically put them in in the right sequence if you start just learning that i mean once you've learned it you can apply it all right so if somebody sends you an image or a blog post you know right off the bat okay i gotta take that image all right so once you know your site is compliant as you're putting stuff up you have to make sure that stuff is uh the content is compliant as well yeah i i would i would further that uh kate just by saying uh we're you know tech42 we're certainly not any kind of experts at this right now but we do understand uh you know a lot of what anthony's talking about here in the underlying structure how the html and how it's built and how to help look for that stuff now that he's educated so it's something we can definitely at least assist with and if there's remediation that needs to be done uh we certainly have the ability once things are identified to do the remediation uh and beyond that uh we're gonna you know have some ongoing relationship with anthony's company to assist us on some of the stuff we're also gonna look over time to try to uh get some of our staff a little more up to speed on this because i think it's just a very useful thing and very important thing uh in our community so we're going to try to make sure that's something we're able to offer as a company down the road as well and i'm going to put that slide up again and also jonathan man i know you have some uh things to add here especially this is more into his um wheelhouse i'll put that i'll find that slide with the five points and then john you want to fill um in on your the end of it as far as getting started if you're taking over a website i would start with the automated tools like anthony stated wave is a very good one wave.webaim.org and you could run this test on any of your pages you start with your home page contact page whatever it may be and see what kind of issues it flags or you know what kind of issues you have on that page and read about them these tools usually give you some explanations as far as what the issue is and how to fix it and i would start just learning about the issues you have um attacking those fixing them and then get heavy into the the wic hack guidelines so you can learn everything that you need to be aware of as you're designing or fixing the website and once you start getting into it you realize most of the guidelines are just sort of common sense for any you know competent web designer making sure links are descriptive and not vague such as click here or more or read or anything like that making sure the color contrast of the website that the text is readable against its background you don't want you know light gray text on a white background that's not many people are going to be able to easily see that you want to make sure that the text stands out and everybody can see it um you also want to keep in mind so some of the low hanging fruit that you could attack right away you know when you get off this webinar and you go look at your site images if it's an informative image does it have an alternative text so if somebody can't see the image they would need a description of what's visually depicted things like that those are the low-hanging fruits you could attack right away as well as headings um anybody who you know uses headings uh knows it's it's h1 to h6 h1 is your your major uh heading of the page and then h2s are like major subsections h3s or subsections of those subsections and you want to make sure there's a logical hierarchy being used in order to convey the structural organization of the page and and that's basically how i would start with just sort of the low-hanging fruit the easy to understand ones and then as you uh address the issues and become more comfortable with the accessibility and the guidelines you can you could start looking and uh looking for other other issues and addressing those as well the more complex ones john also mentioned about you know having you know some of those accessibility plugins the uh both sides of the point on them so when it comes to plug-ins on a website there there are two different types of plug-ins there's um plug-ins such as like shopping cart things like that chat widgets whatever it may be that that are not geared towards accessibility um and those still need to be accessible even though the web designer does not have control over it it's a third party well if it's inaccessible and it's on your site to the end user you're in control of that you've chosen to put it on your website so you are responsible for it uh so the best thing you could do is is ensure that you're using accessible plugins for say your forms your shopping carts whatever um and if not then you would need to either find one that is accessible and you know get make sure you speak to the manufacturer the maker of the widget or the plug-in to ensure that they have been tested and that they are compliant before using it and putting it on your site and the other side of the coin is plugins that claim to address accessibility issues now there are a number of these out there on the market some i've seen are free some are quite expensive the thing with these is that like the automated tools these really only get about 40 percent of the issues some things these plugins are very good for such as increasing the size of text you know at the click of a button sort of thing um but no plug-in out there now or anytime in the near future we'll be able to make an inaccessible website fully accessible it's just not going to happen you need to do that at the native code level and you do that for the website itself you can't you know uh just use a plugin and and claim accessibility uh because the way i always think about it is what if that uh plug-in somehow stops working you know even if you're using it to claim accessibility what if it stops working and then in that interim where it's not working somebody comes to your website sees that it's inaccessible and just like that you can get sued so i would not rely on anything third party for your accessibility that needs to be in-house baked in from the start and it needs to be under the web designer's full control yeah and like what john was saying too you have like if you have a wordpress site wix site now those two uh like uh you know companies have pretty much made dedicated and said statements that they want to make their native structure accessible is where ever possible okay the minute you start adding things like jonathan said about you know third-party plug-ins and so on those that's where the problems may come in or even if you put your own content up there you got to make sure it's accessible because even though the template is accessible what you're putting up there is not is maybe isn't so that's what's important about um you know making sure that's there also like wordpress has accessibility plugins that will help you make things like a little bit you know easier to add tags and so on but those aren't the fix those are you know they're tools that allow you to make your site more accessible i think it sounds like it's like just about anything in the it world there's nothing where you set it and forget it everything has to have a certain level of review and introspection and somebody that knows what they're doing otherwise you're you're you're heading for disaster after fashion because it's just you just you've got to have someone who knows what they're doing looking at it periodically to make sure you're safe yeah that's why you know we've been doing this for a little while now and kind of giving a blessing on sites and some other ones say look you gotta you know fix this uh we've also been doing a lot of videos lately um because even videos need to be uh closed captioned as well as also uh voice over all right so you know to be accessible jonathan's been working on that i've let him uh talk about that yeah so for videos if i asked you to name five websites i guarantee one of them will be youtube right out of all the websites out there as we go on in time and as technologies advance videos are a huge huge part of our daily lives on the internet a lot of people consume information strictly through videos now and just like everything else multimedia audio and visual need to be accessible and how do we do that well let's take a video for example uh synchronized audio video well we would need captions obviously for for persons uh who cannot hear the audio uh we will need a text transcript uh for those who either can hear the audio uh cannot see the video to interpret it and also those who just simply prefer to read text versus watch a video and we'll need audio descriptions for blind or low vision users whereby the action that is taking place in the video is described things that are strictly visual uh you need to have it in an auditory fashion so that blind or low vision users can understand what's happening in the video these are all things with the multimedia audio visual uh experience that they need to be taken into account when creating and posting video for for instance i will be uh writing a text transcript for this webinar a little later uh so that that will provide a blind low vision users uh deaf hard of hearing users etc the ability to consume all the information we're putting out there so that's something to keep in mind as we post more and more videos on our sites blogs uh informational stuff about our services our goods whatever it may be so videos are a huge portion of the internet now uh so we have to keep that in mind as we're creating this i'll um thank you so much for that uh john jonathan uh the other thing i i was just gonna just kind of reiterate i think uh anthony had kind of touched on it briefly but i know in our experience we we have not worked in ada at this point uh but we've done a fair bit in other compliance regulatory areas you know with hipaa and pci and the one thing that we've learned over and over again with any kind of auditors or any kind of legal process is if you can show that you've thought about it you've showed that you've built a remediation plan and you're actually working towards it you're always going to end up better than if you've totally ignored it and that's saying you're going to get yourself off the hook uh but auditors and anyone from a legal perspective is always going to give you uh you know a little bit more of the benefit of the doubt if you show that you've tried and and i have a plan maybe it's going to take me six months to accomplish the plan you know based on costs and what i and how big the project is but i'm making increments toward it and i have a plan always plays so much better with those entities than having nothing at all uh so i would encourage you from that standpoint too is you know at least make a start you know even if you can't do it all at once exactly all right gentlemen uh anything john anthony anything else you want to add i think this has been absolutely terrific but don't want to cut you off if there's something else you know you're thinking you gotta say i could add in one last thing um and this this will this will definitely help ward off uh like anthony was saying those drive by lawyers which we all hate um but it also make a great impact on your website is one of the first things i tell any of our clients to do is put up what's called an accessibility statement and essentially this means uh you're telling the end users all your your visitors to your website hey we're aware of this thing called digital accessibility uh we are actively working on making our site compliant um and if you have an issue here is how to reach us we want to hear your feedback that way you know you could bring issues to our attention and we will address them or assist you in any way you know you need to be assisted uh i usually tell our clients to to house this on its own separate page dedicated uh web accessibility page on their site and have a link uh in the footer of every of every page on the site usually where you put like the terms and conditions or privacy policy link things like that just put a little accessibility statement link there and just so you're you're essentially extending the olive branch to the end user who may or may not have an issue but you know for for persons with disabilities i know for a fact this is something a lot of assistive technology users look for immediately upon going to a website they've never been to before
and again it's just a good thing to give your end users even if you are not 100 compliant even if you're not 50 compliant it just goes to show you're aware and you care and you're actively working towards making yourself accessible and it's just a positive thing to have all around no no negatives to it it's really good thank you all right well i you know we're a little longer than we thought but hey guys i think the content has been so terrific it's been really informative and educative uh thank you for all of our attendees that joined us today uh and for those ask ask questions uh thank you so much uh and and just one last time john and anthony uh thank you so much i appreciate your time today appreciate your expertise and sharing it with us and uh this has been uh just super valuable and um i'm just gonna say uh goodbye to everybody and uh thanks for attending have a great rest of your afternoon [Music]
