Episode 456 WP Accessibility Day With Amber Hinds and Joe Dolson

---

---

Show Summary

Rob Cairns talks to Amber Hinds and Joe Dolson about WP Accessibility Day.

Show Highlights:

• What is WP Accessibility Day?
• When is WP Accessibility Day
• Why does your website need to be accessible?

Show Notes

Rob Cairns here and in today’s podcast, we’re going to talk about WordPress Accessibility Day with Amber Hinds and Joe Dolson. How are you both to you today?

Doing great. Thanks for having us. Yeah, thank you.

Now, such a pleasure. Amber’s been on before. For those who listened to the podcast, and it’s always a pleasure. It’s always pleasure to meet somebody new. I take it, Joe, just looking, you’re a bit of a reader. Do I get that sense behind you or?

I mean. I do a lot of reading. I’m not sure where you’re getting that information from them. Now I’m curious, your bookshelf. Ohh. I see you’re looking at alright. Yeah. OK, fair enough. Yeah. You’re looking at my background.

Your picture.

We we need an audio description of Joe’s background, which is that.

Behind Joe is a bookshelf containing 6 shelves of books. It’s about four and a half feet wide.

Yes.

That are crammed in very full, not just spaced out.

And Full disclosure.

Are you comparing? That to my one shelf of five books.

And Full disclosure, that’s only. A. A through M.

OK.

M through Z is in the bookshelf that you can’t see. That’s on. My right if.

Hmm.

There’s any consolation. I’m an avid reader and I’ve got a believe it or not, a hockey book collection that’s sitting at about 430 titles on its own. So.

Mm-hmm.

Not much better so.

And. The other four bookshelves that are in a different room.

Tell me. Yeah. So I’m going to say as a response to you, rob, that’s your answer to tell me you’re from Canada without telling me. You’re from Canada?

Right.

Oh for sure.

No.

And I grew up actually in Montreal, so I live outside of Toronto now, but I I saw in Montreal’s like hockey crazy. So there you go. So strong. Mind you, I’m. I’m gonna talk about WordPress accessibility day. We’ll start with Joe. How did you before we get into the conference, how did you get into accessible?

So I got into accessibility very early when I first set up my business doing web design and development, it was 2004. And I. You know, I was living in Rochester, NY at the time. It’s a depressed economy. It was very difficult to get any kind of work, which is why I decided to just kind of go out on my own. And then I had to sit down and say, well, what do I know? That gives me any kind of a unique differentiator because I would be totally honest. I was a mediocre designer and an inexperienced developer, but one knowledge base I did have was accessibility and that came from growing up at home where my mother was the executive director of a nonprofit that it did arts programs for people with disabilities. And so people with disabilities were just table talk growing up. It was something I already had knowledge about. Out and just understanding conceptually, the needs and experiences of people with disabilities gave me a huge leg up in figuring out what I needed to know to become skilled with accessible web development. Now, obviously the world. Was extremely different in the technology. Of 2004, I mean, there’s so much different now. You know the things we do, there’s so many more possibilities. You know, that was the time when when you said no, we can’t use JavaScript because it’s not supported by screen readers. It’s like, well, that’s thankfully not in any way true at all anymore. So yeah, it it’s it’s. Really what? I kicked off my business with it was my unique selling point right from the beginning. And it’s been great. It’s it makes me feel satisfied in what I do. You know, I don’t but. Just kind of boring marketing sites and I never have. I build things that are meaningful and help people and I feel good about that.

I love that. And Amber, I know we’ve talked before, but how’d you get an access building?

Yeah. So ours really started with we had a client, Colorado State University and here in the United States, universities are required to have accessible websites. And so we started working for them and they said that was a requirement of building websites for. Them. So those were the first accessibility websites that we built and they have a committee that does audits of your websites before they can launch. At the university, so we got external reviews and feedback and it was a little trial by fire. I always like to say and then. But what really got me into it and interested in it was we built a portal or web application for uh. A A state agency here in Texas called Workforce Solutions, where if you’re getting food stamps or you’re getting childcare systems so you can work or unemployment funds, you have to go through this organization to get help with your resume and some other things in order to receive those government. Benefits and they. Wanted us to build the portal. We’ve been doing some website accessibility things for a while, but we said on that project we need to budget for people with disabilities to actually test our work, not just US testing our work or, you know, an accessibility specialist like we saw at the university doing it. We want actual real users because. It’s vital, right? If they can’t onboard to be able to get unemployment or whatever they might need that that is really a challenge. So seeing. Those individuals that we paid to come in and use their screen readers and the speeds that they were listening to things at and really getting to watch them work on our work put almost like a face on it, I. Guess which sounds. Horrible, but I feel like that’s what really for me was very motivating and made it feel not just like this is a. A checklist item that we’re doing. And and it made it feel like, OK, this is who benefits from this? This is who needs it. This is their real experience and This is why it’s important because it is personal. And so that’s really what motivated us to say no, we really want to do this full time because we we like it like Joe said like we want to feel like our work has meaning and we have. Impact in the world. Beyond just helping someone sell widgets and and so, yeah, that’s kind of how we got into it.

Yes, Sir. It’s actually a legal obligation in many States and in many places in Canada. You work with the government agents and I’ve done contracts with the government agencies. So I I know that routine. But it’s also, I believe, a moral obligation. We have to make the web accessible and usable by as many people as we can.

Countries.

And that means accessibility matters.

Yeah, I mean, increasingly if we think about all the things that we do on the Internet, just as a typically abled person.

100%.

But like ordering food, we don’t even go grocery shopping. We order our groceries, and then we drive over there and pick them up, and they load them in our car because we don’t want to walk up and down the aisles. Takes a long time. When you have to shop for six people, you know, like all these things that are just experiencing the world and being able to live the kind of life that we want to. Why? Why would we not want to make that available to everyone and see? No, that’s only for me. But you don’t get this and. And so I just feel like like you’re saying it really is. It’s it’s about allowing people to live their best life.

And we go ahead.

Well, and I think. You know, people complain about the difficulty of making a website access. Disable. But the reality is making a website accessible is the easy thing to do. I mean, compared to making a building accessible. I mean, in order to take a building that was built in 1850 and make it accessible, you know, you’ve got to shut the building down, rebuild huge portions of it. You can’t use the building or parts of the building for a significant part of time while you’re doing this website. No, you can. Clone it, repair it, ship it back up. You don’t lose any of your existing use. In the mean time, there’s no good reason not to do something like that. It’s just going to improve the experience for everybody.

And you, you both know that there are certain things that accessibility brings that impact SEO and other things and you should be doing these things anyway like honestly like I I’ll share with you. I I took over an ecom site this year. And I took one look and one of the things the owner was complaining about was SEO and stuff like that. And I took one word and there wasn’t 1 alt tag on 600 images filled in and it was like, ah, there we go. And not only that. It’s not good for accessibility. You’ve got older clients, your demographic. In his case, it’s probably 55, this older and you know, people are getting into, I say problems at that point. People are getting into other issues. And we and we have and we were talking about this before we went there. We have hidden disabilities that people never see that impact how they see and process stuff, right. So we gotta we gotta think about that.

Yeah, a lot of my early clients were actually SEO companies. I did a lot of technical audits and audits for search engine specific research and one thing I used to always tell people is that you, you are maybe creating a model on an assumption about your client. But your assumption is. Your your assumptions should be based on who is going to ultimately receive and use your product, not who’s going to. Buy. It and the example I would always use is grandparents buy video games.

MHM.

Your audience is not necessarily 19 year olds. Your audience might well be 75 year olds. Because people buying are not the people who are using it in all cases.

Yeah. I mean that’s that’s a great example. So, but I mean, there’s so many like that where the audiences and the audience changes. As you were saying, Rob, no, we’re all aging into some need of assistive technology, whether those are glasses or, I mean, I’ve looked at my grandma’s phone screen, it’s she zoomed it very far in in order to be able to read things. Right. And and if you think too about. Our generation especially, I have, you know, some people in my family got old and they just said I don’t need a computer anymore or whatever. It doesn’t matter. I don’t envision me ever saying that. I don’t think any of the three of us, right or most of the people listening to this podcast are ever going to do that. We’re going to. Die with. The device in our hand, right?

No, no. I’m going to move to the woods and and just live in a cabin with no running water or electricity, I mean.

Hello.

Obviously, Hidden Williamson did something kind. Of like that I.

Guess I don’t know. True.

But but I just think you know, I’m also thinking about building for my future self, right. What do I want? And there’s a lot beyond the SEO that accessibility. Maps with broader usability, which is why I think use like the user testing sessions that we do through my company are so interesting because sometimes they flag accessibility problems, but sometimes they also flag things like the word that you thought a customer was going to search for in order to find X product is not the word that most people search for. Right. And. And so there’s a lot of overlap with just good UX that impacts everyone and can help with conversion optimization.

Yeah. So.

Yeah. I mean, I’ve learned so much from working directly with people who are using a screen reader, things that I. Might have been able to figure out from a technical perspective, but never really thought about like the impact of line breaks in the code. You know the fact the simple fact that having a line break in your code? No, not even a BR take just having line breaks in the actual text can change the way a screen reader reads the line when doing a line read.

Of the artifact.

Which can be a significant problem if, say, you’ve got a heading that you’ve broken into, like 4 lines matching the code to the visual appearance and.

It results in.

Now you have 4 separate words.

It’ll say like HH24 items and.

Right. It could be really weird.

Then we’ll read. Item one and and then read 1 and item 2.

And I’m just like, you know, it’s not something I would have thought of without actually having user testing go and go through. That and go. Oh, that’s horrible. Now, I will admit I’ve never done that because in my. Mind, why would you do that? But I’ve certainly seen it many times. People do strange things.

How you make every different thing a different color sometimes with span tags can do weird things too.

Yeah.

So let’s.

But that’s why we started WordPress Accessibility Day to help get some of that education out there. You said you started. I didn’t start it. I shouldn’t.

Say we. That’s true. We started it. That is, you know, I I was one of the founding people to start it in 2019 when we decided in the WordPress accessibility team to put this event on and. And. We ultimately, I mean one of the main reasons we broke it out of being organized by the team was actually it was so much work that it blocked the team from being able to do. Core work for a chunk of time it was, it was actually. Yeah, it really did slow down our actual ability to get things done for WordPress, so now it’s external. It’s a separate event, but that’s a it’s a way of getting a whole different group of people to help organize and volunteer who maybe. For whatever reason aren’t able to or interested in contributing directly to the project, or just don’t feel they have the right skill set for that. Organizing is a unique skill set.

I’m a tough skill set, anybody any, and I’m sure you’ve organized events to Amber. I’ve organized in person events. It is a tough skill set and it’s funny because every time I’ve done an Advent, I’ll look at an event it when it’s done. And say. So I’m gonna say ohh it went great and I’ll say no. I can point out 50 things that went wrong that you never saw. Right. Like we we’ve all been there and I just stand there and I just named them and they’re like really. Rob. We didn’t see any of those and that’s kind of, you know, you hit the nail right.

We’re all our biggest critic.

Yeah. Yeah, for sure. And I’m going to say right up front that I do not have the organizing skill set. That is amber. Amber has the organizing skill set, and without her deciding to push me to restart this in 2022, we wouldn’t be having this. Well, so it’s a lot of that is owed to her.

Well, thank you.

And thank you for doing.

I am very good at figuring out tasks.

Happening and thank you for doing that job because I think it really matters in the Community, especially with the world being in the state. It’s in right now and it’s appreciated one, let’s talk about. So first of all, if somebody wants to sign up, when’s it gonna happen? How’s it gonna happen? And where did they sign up?

Well, it starts at 9:45 AM central time on October 9th. It will run for 24 hours and 15 minutes. At 9:45 is because we have opening remarks that come up right before our fabulous keynote speaker, Laney Feingold. And you can sign up on our website at 2024 WPR accessibility dot DAY. There are links to register scattered all over the place. The principal 1 is in the header saying register to attend, but you can also register in the content. We want to make it as easy as possible. The event will entirely be run through zoom as a zoom webinar and so that registration is necessary in order to get. If you access to the webinar, we have good reasons for not doing it as a meeting, one of which is scale. Well, this event has grown significantly. Last year we had what was it? 2600 registrants.

Yes.

Mm-hmm. Yeah, we had a big number.

So you know, it’s a lot.

And well, and the first. So the first year it was just live streamed on YouTube and it didn’t have live captions, which was great. Live captions are very important, but with our second year, when we brought it back, we decided that we wanted to also add American Sign Language interpretation. For thoughts.

I think we actually only added the ASL in the third year.

I don’t have it.

Unless you’re it was the second year that you joined.

Yeah, well, OK, I don’t. Know. But, but that was part of the motivation. I thought we, no, we had it. It just went through stream yard, but it still went. To. YouTube and there were a lot of challenges with how we would position the site. Cleaners. And and putting them and the speakers and the slides when you only have one screen and the benefit of us using zoom webinars now and zoom has really done a lot, they are or report to be web content accessibility guideline 2.1 AA conformance.

It’s hard.

I mean, I know they have done a lot with accessibility, but they have separate views that are available for sign language interpretation, so it can be opened in a whole nother window and there’s a lot of accessibility features that exist in zoom that we just can’t. Yeah. So that is part of why we do, you know, say, go register. You’re gonna get invited to. It’s actually gonna be 4 different zoom webinars that we do in the sequence.

And.

And I think it’s important to say that all of these are user controlled. So you get to decide where you are going to put the captioner you get to decide to decide. I mean where you gonna put the signer? You get to decide how large that window will be. You get to decide what your priority is in terms of what you see. With stream yard we had very few options. We basically had to do a preset and it was the best we could do with what we had. And let me just tell you that sometimes when you have, you know, 3 speakers and slides and a signer, the best option was terrible.

Everyone. The best. Yeah, OK.

I’m sure I’m.

It was ohh now we can’t see anything. Well, great.

But there’s a little bit of a technical issue and zoom just handles it better so and I.

I mean, by leaving it in the user’s hand, I mean that is honestly a huge part of what makes it good.

Hmm.

Yeah. The other thing you’ve done really well, we were talking about before the show was you’ve been very inclusive. When you’ve done this and I was kind of scanning down the list of speakers and one that popped up along that. Simmons is Christina Workman’s gonna talk about inclusivity, which I think is really important, but your speakers are. All inclusive as well. Do you want to? Speak to that please.

Sure. I I can talk to that. Yeah. We. So this year we have speakers from 12 different countries, which is one more from last year, which was exciting because we have a goal of not just making this the speakers from the US and Canada and the UK or Europe. So you know we’re we’re spreading out. Which is good. We have four people who are first time speakers for any event, not just for WordPress accessibility day, but for any. The event and we have 36% that are non white identifying we have gender breakdowns of 38% male, 55% female, 7% non binary, 17% LGBTQ and then the really big one that we always look for with our speakers from a diversity standpoint is that. 24% of our speakers identify as living with a disability. There’s more about this, and perhaps you can link it in the show note in. Our posts but. As organizers, we all feel that it is really important that you cannot have an accessibility conference. Without having voices of people who are actually impacted by accessibility on a daily life on people who have lived, experiences are going to have things that the rest of us don’t know. Even as advocates, you know, I’m I’m very good at testing things with the screen reader, but the way I use a screen reader is not the way someone who uses a screen reader. Every day is going to engage with the website my. Testing approach is very different from how a user might experience a website. That’s not to say what I’m doing is is bad, but it’s also not. A full picture, right? So so we work hard to have diverse speakers particularly on this and Joe has led the speaker team for the past few years. So he could probably talk more about the process there. Ryan Bracey is our speaker team this year. But I know Joe, you’ve got a lot of the history.

Yeah, I mean we’ve. Our our main goal in selecting speakers is while we want to start with a content first bias, because obviously you know we want to get the best talks we can. We think it is incredibly important that we have good diversity, so we do a kind of a ranking system where we vote and everybody on the committee, usually 5 or 6 people, gives a ranking to every single talk submitted. And then we look at those top rankings and start to select from that point, they’re completely anonymous at that stage. Yes, that’s good to mention. We try and we have somebody who’s not on the speaker selection teams strip out all personally identifying information. That’s never perfect because the reality is.

Anonymized might be good for there.

You sometimes see a topic and you’re like, well, there’s only one person who’s going to talk on that. So sometimes there’s dead giveaways anyway, but we do as much as we can to anonymize it. And then after we’ve done all of that ranking with it being anonymized. Then we put back the original information. We now know who is submitting everything, and we make sure we have good diversity and we have to do that at a certain level because we. Have selected more than once more than one talk by the same person doing that anonymized things we don’t know. We did once, in fact. Select three talks by one person, and it was clear we were not going to have the same person talk three times. Well, that is something we’re simply not. To do. But we also want to make sure do. We. Have a good balance of gender. Have we? Do we have good representation from people with disabilities? And if we don’t, which thankfully hasn’t actually happened? Then we need to make changes.

I think.

It’s I think it’s been effect an effective process.

Yeah, that. That’s amazing that you you even think that way, but that’s the type of conference it is. So you have to and you know I was just looking down the speaker’s list and like what an amazing power talks everything from legal to how to do it to how to organize the team. And then one popped out at me. Amy June, Highline is gonna do a talk about captures and as a web designer. I have to tell you that something I I personally don’t think a lot about this captures. We just stick them there and we’re done with them. And I know in myself I curse them every day. I hate them and we know why they’re there. And I just think to include something like that. It kind of opens some eyes a little bit.

Well, I mean, one of the things is that captures our really incredibly ineffective. I mean we talk so much about AI and how powerful bots are getting because of AI, and then we pretend that they can’t solve the captcha, which is. I mean, there’s lots of documentation that that’s not the case. And I’m I’m looking forward to that talk. I think that’s. Probably the type of thing she’s going to talk about, but obviously we don’t know. We don’t. Actually screen the talks themselves this far in advance. That would be. Ridiculous. I’ve had to submit talks months in advance. In fact, I’ve had to submit a talk on AI months in advance, and that was interesting.

Because it changes over and that’s hard, yeah.

Yes.

Does are all your talks live show any and amber or are they taped?

They are all live this year in the past.

The. Yeah, as far as we know, somebody might at some point request to do 1 pre recorded and we have accepted that as a on request kind of thing because there are some things that do benefit from pre recording if you’re doing a lot of screen reader demos which is as. Being distinct from being a somebody who’s a screen reader user and you’re using it just as part of your interaction, you’re actually demoing screen reader. That if you want to demo something effectively, it is extremely helpful to have prerecorded it because they can be very difficult to.

Yeah.

To pinpoint exactly the thing you’re trying to demo and not have it masked by all of the other speech that’s happening in the course of the process. But in general, the goal is for them to be live and we do request, even if this the talk itself isn’t live, we expect the speaker to be present.

Good.

To be able to answer questions and do that portion live.

Yeah. OK.

Yeah. So the the actual talks, so the if anyone isn’t in, please go check out the schedule. But it is a single track. So you’ll get one talk at a time each talk is scheduled to start at the top of the hour. There’ll be a little introduction and then the top will run for about. Fortyish minutes. And then we’ll do about 10 minutes of Q&A that is live with the speaker. So of course, you know, they may be able to also answer things after the fact if they don’t have enough time, but we will definitely get some audience Q&A. So when you tune in, you’ll be able to engage. You know, with that speaker, right? Here.

Right. Well and and any Q&A after that live Q&A period would have to be done during chat because that 10 minutes in between from 50 to the hour is our break time for our captioner and our ASL signers. And that’s a really important thing that they need to have a break.

The other talk that really pops out at me looking at the amazing list that talks is the one that Johnny Albert’s gonna do and that’s about designing with accessibility in mind and I think. Part of the problem is designers treat accessibility as an afterthought. Let’s build the website. Let’s figure it out later, well, and then we’ll do worse. We’ll jump into an AI tool, we’ll get AI to fix it all, and we’re done, right, Amber? And it’s like that. Doesn’t.

Yeah.

You’re laughing at me, but you, you.

I think I think. I think that’s something we’ve tried really hard to do is have talks that appeal to different people and different job roles because as you said, like design, it’s not just for developers or just something that should happen in QA or accessibility. Sorry. It’s not just for developers or something happened in QA and and designers have probably way more control over accessibility. And they realize because. As. A lot of times the choices they’re making, you know the obvious one, we all think of is color contrast. But there’s a lot of choices that they make with how they layout fonts that sometimes a developer who doesn’t know might choose the wrong heading level just because of what they’re making assumptions there or they might make decisions about functionality. Or I’ve seen designers. Over notes about motion animations that they want to see on their designs, along with the designs and and so if a designer isn’t aware of accessibility best practices and they’re not following these, then it can cause a lot of problems. So yeah I think. The the design talks are always really interesting because it’s it’s very much at the heart or the beginning of the project and that’s how you know, if someone any of your listeners are trying to figure out how can we make accessibility easier to achieve, how can we make accessibility more affordable for our company to achieve that I would say. Come to these kinds of talks because these are the kind of talks that are going to help you figure out how to what we call shift left right in that build process.

And and I think it’s it’s also it’s really important to recognize that your developers will tend to build what they. Given the average developer is not going to build anything that they were not given in the design docs. And that means if you don’t design a focus state, you don’t design A hover state, then you don’t get a focus or a hover state, and in fact in some cases that developer might explicitly exclude them. Because you did not provide one. Therefore they assume it should not be. There. So it’s really important that whole design process needs to be complete. I know this is a a constant struggle in, you know, it’s certainly a struggle in WordPress core and and there’s so many so many subtleties like. Order of buttons where are the buttons placed? Where is the panel that opens in relationship to that button? You know it’s it’s very complex.

That’s an issue and the other thing again in the list of talks, one of them and I’m glad to see it is you’re focusing on. Accessibility and woo commerce, and I think that’s really important because a. Other people who have accessibility issues, hearing, sight, hidden disabilities more are actually ordering online because it’s easier for them. And if the tool that they order online, woo is not accessible or made to be accessible. Then they might as well just pack up and Burrow out the store that they don’t want to go to in the 1st place, right?

Absolutely. Yeah. I mean that’s, you know, so much of what this comes down to, so much of what makes. The web an advantage for people with disabilities is being able to conduct their lives, and that means doing all of the basic tasks which are, you know, banking is obviously very important. Healthcare is extremely important. Those have got laws surrounding them. But then General book commerce, like buying your groceries like Amber.

Very much.

That earlier these are critical things. And you know, we are constantly building software that can be used to enable those very important tasks and make those so much easier. Let’s be honest, transportation is difficult for a lot of people with disabilities getting to that store is a major barrier. If you can instead just order it and have it delivered. Wow, that’s just amazing if it works.

Yeah. And I also think, you know, for people who are following some of the laws, I think the the lawmakers are realizing that this is an an area where it’s really important for accessibility to exist in e-commerce. And this is where we’re seeing a lot of laws around that. So you know, of course, we’re always interested in. Having talks that are topical, but I feel like I’ve seen a lot. More conversation around accessibility and e-commerce in the last year, a lot motivated by the European Accessibility Act. So. So for sure, if you have any commerce or you definitely want to attend. That talk, yeah.

You want to talk? Amber, do you have looking at this amazing list of speakers? And I hate to single talk, so we’ve talked about a couple of them. I’m going to anyway cause I can’t. Do you ever talk that really excites you in there to where you think if somebody has been doing this a long time, you’ll really benefit from.

Oh, man, that’s that’s really hard. I will say I’m I’m super interested in scarlet. Isabelle’s talk about is your page builder actually accessible only because this has been sort of a side project that I spent a bunch of time on over the last few months testing the output of, but only very specific.

Put that.

Components of different page builders, so I’m really interested to hear what someone elses explore. Mission of page builders has yielded, and sometimes they’re surprising things right, because I was listening to the women in WordPress podcasts a couple months ago and they had a guest on there who’s Italian and she’s blind. And she was talking about how Gutenberg and the block editor is actually much more accessible to her. And she’s. Better able to write blog posts than she ever was when it was the classic editor. Which is interesting because sometimes you hear a lot to the other side, so I’m looking forward to this page builder talk to see what someone else’s take. On it is.

And I will also note that Elena is also giving her talk for WordPress. Today. So she will be doing that talk about Gutenberg for our event as well. So that’s going to be very interesting. I I am particularly interested in in the talk by Femi Tau.

Yeah.

I probably butchered that name, but on digital accessibility laws and standards in Africa and that is 100% because I know absolutely nothing about the laws and standards in Africa and so like.

Hello.

Me too.

You know anything said in that talk is going to be news for me and I’m really looking forward to that when we’re reviewing the the talks, you know we were kind of like we already knew at that point that Laney was our keynote. So we were like there were quite a few legal talk submitted. We’re like oh, well, it’s going to be pretty hard to take most of those. But then we saw this one was like, oh, but that one is unique. And I’m pretty, I’m pretty. Excited about that?

Yeah, I think I think what you almost gotta do with the conference like this is take a look at the agenda, cause it’s hard for a lot of people to pull away for a whole day, right, and choose to. You want put them in your Google Calendar. What’s your calendar beep at you and just kind of pop in and out and learn something and share and and do some networking and meet some people. I think that’s the value of it is the people involved not just the ohh. I’m gonna go watch a talk right.

Oh, absolutely. And of course, all of these talks will get professionally recaptioned transcript. Typed and published on YouTube and on the the sites archive so they will be available indefinitely for anybody to to watch. It’ll take a few weeks because the process to edit and caption and get them all online is not trivial, but. They’ll be available. As soon as we can get them.

Amber, is there anything?

Well, and the other thing is I I want to shout out for a moment here. We had someone step up on our organizing team this year. Her name is Joni Halabi, and she has started a translation team, and she has a team of volunteers who have been working to translate. You can find some translations. On the 2023 archive now and our plan is to have translations for these talks into different languages after the fact. So yes, even if you can’t, TuneIn live. If they will be there and she has been doing an amazing job with helping to get that information out in other languages that are not just English, that is very cool.

Yeah, it’s a great project. It’s it’s slow going. It’s a lot of work, but she’s done a great job in running that program and getting it started.

His language can be a barrier as much as sight or ear or any or hearing or anything else. Right, you’ll know that.

I mean, it’s one of the reasons I know nothing about the laws and standards in Africa. I don’t even know how to search for them.

Sure.

Similarly, I don’t really know much about them in China or Japan or.

I guess.

It’s the difficulty.

Even close by, I gave a talk at work Camp Canada on Canadian accessibility laws, and I spent a lot of time. Research thing. Then you know what? I had a harder time finding was all the laws in Quebec because they’re all in French and I was doing English Google searches, right? So yeah, I am also very interested in that African laws talk. It’ll be neat.

It’s really hard.

Me too, Amber, there’s one thing you want to leave our listeners with going into this. What would you say?

So WordPress Accessibility day is totally free. You can go register right now on our website that that is probably the top thing, But what I would say from a broader accessibility standpoint is that accessibility is a journey. It’s not something you achieve overnight. I don’t think any of us that are accessibly. Have kids? Expect that you make your website perfect tomorrow or next month or even 3 months from now. If it’s a massive site, right? What what I think? I hope people take away from a lot of the education that we put out there as WordPress accessibility day. The the conference is that it can be a step by step process and there you can learn and grow and make improvements over time and that’s really what matters. You just have to get started. And so coming to the conference. You know, like we talked about Captchas. Maybe you go to that talk and then you say ohh the CAPTCHA solution I was using was not as accessible as this other one that she recommends in her talk. And you can just go change that one thing on your website that day or later, you know next month or whatever timeline works. And that one thing will be better, and then you figure out, OK, what do what do I do next? Right. Like one thing at a time and that that’s a big thing that I hope people take away from these talks and get inspired to start working on small fixes.

And then you’re making people’s lives better. One thing at a time, Joe. The same question for you. What would you like somebody to take away?

I mean, so much of it is, is really exactly what Amber said, because it is, it is a process. It is one step at a time and. There. There are things you can do that make more difference than. Others. And it’s it is a good idea to learn what you can about some of the really basic mechanisms for testing the things that you can do at no cost and very little experience, you know, keyboard testing is something I really wish people would just understand because it is so simple to do. You know, you really only need to be. Able. To use 7 or 8 keys on your keyboard and you can tab through things and you can find out whether or not things work. And. I think. Just to be able to say something different than what Amber said, I would hope that people take away some basic element of testing some one test that they can do every time they look at their website and say, OK, I have found something. Now I can fix it because I think that’s one of the biggest problems is so many. People, they they don’t know what to do. They don’t know how to find problems, and obviously, you know, for many small businesses, small organizations, the idea of hiring a consultant to come in and do thousands of dollars of assessment on your website is overwhelming. So learning some basic testing can give you a good head start.

Thank you, Amber. Thank you, Joe. WordPress Accessibility Day, go sign up, learn something and make the world an easier place to use and the web better. And make people slice a little.

Better.

Thank you, guys. Thank you. Thank you.