Building a Strong Business Case for Web Accessibility

Tearyne Almendariz: and he's getting some things set up but to let you all know yesterday I was on the plane coming back well coming here I say coming back because I was born in Chicago I'm Tearyne Almendariz nice to meet you if you haven't met me before um I'm the owner of NLBC Works which is me consulting because right now I'm unemployed it's fun but uh I got a message saying "Hi our speaker for the building a strong business case for web accessibility is unable to come and meet us you're CPACC certified you love accessibility can you help us with this?" And I said "Sure." And y'all saw how many times my name came up in the presentation so right now we do not have slides for this uh but we are going to have a conversation because um I'm part of the AIDE team as I let y'all know and we first of all I'm trying to not get on my soap box accessibility is critically important for everyone um and especially in times like these where access is being limited because some people don't think that it's worth investing in uh especially when you get to a point of do you solve for the Pareto Principle of the 80% or the 20% some people think that they're immune uh when I did my first accessibility talk at Texas Camp it was right after I had gotten swimmer's ear which I did not know that you could get from being a receptionist um and I could not hear out of one ear but on top of that I couldn't even put in headphones so I learned very quickly how important subtitles are um so Andy and myself are going to have like a panel fireside type conversation talking about the principles that are up here we do have some case studies from work that we've done separately um just to give y'all some of my background uh I have I started my formal web career working for the city of Dallas's Civilian Retirement Fund uh we served not only people that had disabilities that were aging but we also served people in different languages um my first talk that I did was uh government issues and just talking about the different ways that you solve for actual accessibility and actual diversity diversity issues for populations um I've also worked at Brightplum Lullabot and uh Lightning Fist the other Drupal uh hosting platform Pantheon so I have a lot of experience working with folks that have disabilities and fixing websites so Andy would you like to come and introduce yourself so I'm no longer awkwardly leaning over here yeah

Andrew Olson: Hi everybody my name is Andrew Olson I work at Principal Financial Group and uh I'm a front-end developer and uh I was really excited to join Principal because they were right at the beginning of uh starting their accessibility program so for me it was a really great opportunity to join an organization that knew that they wanted to bring accessibility to their work and they were already doing a lot of really great things with the work that they were doing but it wasn't formalized so I was excited uh you know to talk alongside Tearyne here about some of my experiences why I joined the organization where I'm at the things that I'm doing at the organization as a front-end developer as a Drupalist here and um just to kind of share some of those things so unfortunately like I said what we have on the screen here is kind of a guiding to the speaker that wasn't able to be here but the experiences between myself and Tearyne we feel like we can kind of share some of those things with you all and uh and kind of go from there and answer some questions and hear from you all to to to hear like some of the struggles you have at your organizations and how to bring some accessibility and approaches to you so with that um do you want to kind of go through some other things i'll bump up the screen here i think uh this it's like do we should have a microphone to pass back and forth so one of the Do I need to lean into it can y'all hear me if I just stand here okay cool um one of the things that's very easy to solve for is that if you are in certain industries in the United States uh such as finance or if you're in government and then education you are required to have accessibility built into what you do um how many folks in this room are in one of those three verticals

Chris maybe um and I know that uh some folks Hi Kat I've done accessibility talks with Kat before so that's why I'm picking on her um outside of that sometimes people are like "Well why are you wasting extra time on things people can see the website." How many people know that Beyonce was sued for having an inaccessible website yep because people thought you know who's who's going to have a disability and want to go to a Beyonce concert plenty of people um I believe it was Helen Keller that actually went to orchestra uh performances and she could feel the vibrations like just because you have a disability does not mean that you don't want to enjoy life or do things um so that is the end of the thought that I have right there I also have an attention deficit and left my medication in Dallas so I'm going to pass back over to Andy thanks for your school yep so one of the things that was at uh Principal Financial and something that I was excited about was um an accessibility statement so they hired somebody that was going to be coming to the organization and take on accessibility in that way so one of the first things was an accessibility statement on the site and um that was developed but there's also so if so let me ask you let me ask the the audience here does everybody have an accessibility statement on their website great have you worked on one before can you show us an example yeah absolutely i just want to make sure so these are some resources that we can share afterward but uh on the w3.org there is a great resource here to develop your own accessibility statement and it walks you through like certain things and it it helps you ask questions there's another resource as well that I can share it's kind of a a a wizard if you will to walk you through what kind of statement and what kind of commitment that you have and so it allows you to pick a standard which is WCAG which is the the web content accessibility guidelines and it's an international standard and allows you to say hey we're going to commit to these standards so whenever you come to our website um we're going to commit that people can get the information that they need through these various ways and that was really helpful another statement is kind of acknowledging that you're working towards it and a way that if they do see something on the site uh that they can report it and then that goes to you and u it it's kind of a commitment that you're going to be reviewing it and something that you're going to be working towards so go ahead yeah and so to add to this right we're talking about the accessibility statement why is it important how does this prove business value well when you have people that are coming to your website being able to see that if there is a problem that is keeping them from being able to do business with you it's frustrating when you run into a problem but knowing that an org has made that commitment that is going to retain your customer base that is also going to possibly get them to talk to someone else and be like "Hey I had this issue and they were willing to cover it." I believe also some um it's been a minute I'm kind of under caffeinated uh some places require you to have an accessibility statement right can you talk I think so um sure um so in my past life I was a consultant and so I was on I was able to perform audits for certain clients so we were requested to come in and perform an audit and then I was on the other side too of a remediation so they already had the audit and they had the list of things to fix and so I've been I've done that as well and again in my current position it's a Drupal website and the great thing about Drupal is it's already kind of had a commitment to to having the platform as accessible but just like anything just because the platform is accessible you can make it inaccessible right so it's just ever vigilant to to do that and yeah go ahead can we ask questions throughout absolutely sure i'll just repeat them for here cool um um yeah you guys mentioned some places where accessibility is often times mandated that's you know upfront you need need to have it but I think there's as more and more things go online especially as an older guy like I'm not used to doing everything online but more and more crucial day-to-day things paying your electricity bill you know paying your gas bill whatever um those are like those have to be done by everybody and so I think the um and I found frustrating sites that put you in a loop for an hour because some you know because somebody coded it wrong um uh anyways I think the accessibility is going to is becoming more and more of an issue with more crucial day-to-day function to go online so it's interesting so to kind of repeat you're talking about services that are essential for people in this the modern day world right so what I think I get what you were saying is what's required is um so for like educational institutions that take government money or I know uh there's people in the room that do government websites there is that obligation because you're taking funds from people and you're serving the people that that access is there so I know education the one of the remediations was educational institutions but I know governments as well but as far as like private industry that is not a requirement as of right now in the United States Canada has um the Ontarians with disabilities oh so I know in Canada there's a little bit more uh it's a little bit um stricter in that they're asking companies and and websites to adhere to that again don't quote me on that but the Canadians are farther ahead with asking uh businesses to do that um that reminds me that um one of the other business cases for making sure that you have accessibility like you were saying you have your websites and services that are coming up but how many websites are really restricted to just the United States so even if we're not required or even if your organization is not required to do it in the home country the good old US of A right if we're thinking about that if you are doing business internationally there's often times where you are required by uh the GDPR EU my brain is like cycling through all the studying that I did for CPACC you had to learn all these different laws and so maybe you're compliant in the United States because nobody cares but maybe you're not if when it comes to Europe in um I was going to say something about China but I don't know anything about China's accessibility laws so that is another uh business case for accessibility if people say to you oh well you know we're fine we're not in education government or finance it's like yeah that's in the United States but we have a bunch of partners out in Prague is coming up in my head right now cuz I had the Drupal Prague shirt but we have business with Prague and for the EU we have these things that we have to do so that is another business case yes there's a accessibility law going into effect I think June 24th in the EU that's big and that's really um going to affect basically any business that's coming okay and then for the recording on June 24th there's an EU um law that is going into effect which is going to affect a lot of folks yes I see Kat in the corner yeah also there's multiple states that have their own accessibility oh thank you so there are also multiple states that have their own accessibility law so even if you're not required to federally you might still have to do that statewise so yeah yeah um I think you mentioned CPACC is that a Oh yes so uh I have been a member of the International Association of Accessibility Professionals which is a lot to say um but there is a Yep can you Thank you i love Andy so much y'all i met him while working on MidCamp and it's just like when I find myself out of hands Andy's like "Hello I got you." Um the International Association of Accessibility Professionals is a an organization through which you can gain certification um have has anyone else in the room heard of this before okay oh there we go how many of us are certified cool cool i think I was certified i think it expired i got very busy i had a I have a 2-year-old whose birthday is today so I've been kind of busy um but there You're here I am here just so you know you can um if you contact them and let them know that they'll let you add and you can Oh thank you Kat yeah you can get a credit for this oh that's true that's what keeps happening is I keep doing things like this and then forgetting to report it back because I have an attention of it so recording it's going to be on the recording repeat it for the I'll repeat oh sorry so you can if you are in a situation like me and your certification has lapsed you can contact the International Association of Accessibility Professionals and you can get your certification redone but this is also very helpful in that um you will be sorry for your organization you you might know what you know about accessibility right but having this kind of certification will open doors especially if you are working at a uh an agency or you're doing like contract work especially with the federal government having folks on your staff that are CPACC certified so this one's a certified professional and accessibility core competencies and that is why I just say CPACC um there are different levels there are different applications right what's the WAS again web accessibility stand no there's another one so this is the first level and then there's a second level up which is very difficult to get web access web accessibility specialist yeah so um actually when I was working at Lullabot we had a study group that we did where we were working on getting the certification um and to ha as an agency to say "We have folks that are on staff that are certified to be able to do your audit to fix these." Um after I left Lullabot was it before that it was before that so before that I went into an interview I had done some talks um and they came in and the reason why I got the interview was because I was working for a financial institution and they got sued because they were doing loans and a blind user could not access his profile information so uh having this kind of certification has a huge impact on the kinds of uh clients you'll be able to get on customer confidence so yep yep i heard you breathe i am not I'm well I just want to give the other side of it i am not certified i am a front-end developer that became passionate about all the websites that I built um you know making access for all in that way nothing against the certification and and I think it's great and the studying for it is great um but what I want to just stress to everybody is that that's not necessarily uh it's not necessary for you to go back to your organization and and bring accessibility to your organization um again through consulting that's how I was introduced to a lot of this and uh again working on projects where there was a requirement to say all the features that we add have to meet WCAG whatever the criteria is and so if you are in that position you know the the there are tools and resources out there that can help you understand more about how to meet those requirements and so uh Tearyne has a great slide and another presentation that um I can maybe pull up here and find in a second um but to to help yourself so for example again I'll just talk through experience here we use a tool called Siteimprove which crawls the site and reports back uh certain um errors or you know ways to improve the site to meet that criteria and it comes up with a score and because again I work at a financial institution it has a baseline score cumulative and so we look at that score in where we are and that is definitely a benchmark for us but we're also looking to improve upon that as well as as our own internal organization and again this is just for the public site there's many digital properties at where I work in many applications and what's been really exciting is that it just uh came uh there there's a new policy that any new feature that we add to digital properties needs to meet the WCAG criteria and they didn't just do that and say that like this is what's going to happen right it was over the course of a year and there's a team and a group of people that can help with audit and answer those questions so I was really happy with the roll out of that at our organization it gave people time to say this is coming ask the questions there was audits and there was resources and people there was training that was also done to it so it's not something that was just thrust upon it still feels kind of thrust upon but there's avenues and ways that the team can get that kind of support so it a lot of people kept asking the questions whenever there's a a meeting or a conversation about it it's like do we have to have that old application you know brought up to speed and the answer is that's not the priority but if you're adding new feature anything net new and you have an opportunity to improve like let's say the navigation on whatever feature that you're you're working on you have that opportunity definitely fit that in so um that's the really exciting part of of what we have um we personally on our team use tools uh I had the uh opportunity to work with somebody in the room here where um part of the process even when I joined the team was working on features and checking pages before they went out and got published but um another thing that I want to say is it's not just the site uh we also included uh something called Editoria11y are you all familiar with this module yes uh it is a wonderful module uh because it's not always just tech it's uh it's Editoria11y and actually let me bring up the the page forum yes

so I have a funny story that I think is related to this i kept trying to update my profile picture on MidCamp and it wouldn't save it and do you know why I wouldn't save it Editoria11y alt text I didn't put alt text it was three in the morning so So here it is uh Editoria11y again a11y is a numeronym if you aren't familiar with that so it stands for accessibility for the A and the Y and there's 11 letters in between so that's why we say a11y Editoria11y and what is really great is the coverage that this allows so we have content authors that work with stakeholders and there's pages being created right now so as a developer a front-end developer you know we can't always be there for those people in that moment and what this tool allows is when they're editing and building in Drupal it catches some very easy things so again it helps in the authoring experience as you heard from Tearyne is alt text it doesn't uh can stop you from that I think that was probably a requirement for that particular field field but with Editoria11y um it just kind of gives you that a mark on the page and says are you sure uh you don't want to add alt text and just a a brief thing is not every single image needs to have alt text it might be decorative and in those cases it might create more noise and the great thing about Editoria11y is it challenges you and says "Hey something is missing here do you need alt text in this context?" So it doesn't error out it really challenges you and and uh helps you become better the question and I can see the H1 highlighted here part of the part of the basic old challenge an ongoing challenge is just to use semantic HTML correctly yes right semantic HTML huge fan of semantic HTML and I have a interesting story so uh when I first joined we have uh stakeholders that need SEO and as we know heading having headers and H1s helps with SEO um because that is the main idea of the page so through the course of us coding we thought we were very clever we're saying we can't always guarantee that a content author and this is before we installed Editoria11y by the way so we were having instances where folks were just adding headlines but they weren't necessarily H1 and we're like you know we're missing out on SEO juice to have the title of the page the H1 but we didn't fully understand the value of showing that H1 H2 to users and how important that is for people that navigate in different ways to have there's a key that you can bring up the heading structure of a page and help you consume that information in different ways not just visually right so back to the story we thought we were really clever we said "Hey we're going to take the title of the page and we're going to add it as a hidden H1 in the page." Oh no so every time somebody comes SEO people loved it right but it's not visual so then every headline within the page was always an H2 so you go to the the homepage or another page and the the banner that you would see would be an H2 but really it's an H1 but the H1 was hidden so when we had our team of experts come in again I'm I was there you know I'm I'm passionate about accessibility I was like "Yeah that's good because H1s are there" they're you know folks are using um they're able to still see that heading structure and get that idea but it started becoming duplicative right so that hidden H1 was the same as the H2 that was in the page so it just became duplicative as you can see it was a a fallacy of of the approach right again you you think you're clever with with how you're doing this and then when you know better you do better so we're you know backing that out and making those changes but the whole point of semantic HTML is the page structure makes sense the H1 is the main idea H2 you don't just skip to an H3 or an H4 because it's smaller and looks nicer right so there's ways stylistically to have the same flow of it without skipping headers around so yes I don't know if you answered this question while I was out of the room but I wonder other than for legal reasons uh what is the sort of sales driver like to like really sell why to do accessibility these days yep actually thank you Norah for the question and I believe that I picked it up uh what is outside of the sales driver the point or to push oh sorry yes outside of legal things that you are forced to do uh what is the driver for doing accessibility uh thank you for asking that question it'll actually expand upon the question that we were just asked about uh semantic HTML so these things are great for screen readers uh having your site uh with semantic HTML but expanding outside of that as the technology is coming up uh when we first started getting things like Google Homes and the Amazon Alexas and all these other internet of things that are con congesting digesting all of this content that we are putting on the internet when you try to interact with the internet of things if you have your site semantically loaded correctly um the content will be rendered on all these different multimodal platforms in a way that when the technology sorry so you might have your content that is already there we don't know the next piece of data that's going to come out what's the big thing that nobody stops talking about right now AI AI and so for those of us that had our website semantically enabled well now when somebody like me goes to ChatGPT and says "Hey ChatGBT what actually I could do one of those like what is it that MidCamp has going on this next week?" Um I actually had it build me a Google Drive not Google Drive a Google Calendar based off of the events that were listed on each day of uh MidCamp so you know when you build your site not just correctly as far as rendering on the page but semantically with great accessibility then you have something that can adapt that is adaptable and that is resilient and will be able to change as technology evolves so that is one business case that I have what about you Andy yeah um I'll just say you know um with with the the maybe it's less about legal and and scaring folks into doing the right thing it's really about the the serving your customers so uh at the financial institution the the goal is to have financial security for all and it was a very easy statement for us to for accessibility because that is the mission of our company is to provide financial security for all I'm getting the the exact wording down but the whole point is that we serve our customers and anybody should should feel comfortable in their financial future in investing and and how they feel financially so accessibility just makes sense right if it's for all you don't say financial security for just these people but not these people over here so that jump for our organization the organization I'm at right now was a very easy jump and when you start looking at your website through that lens and you start looking at everything you're building you know you have your own experience and you think things are clever right so you know oh we're going to go get this information we're going to present it back in this way but perhaps you know is there a way that folks can access it in different ways you know uh is there is it searchable can they or sort it in a different way you know so those kind of questions that you ask and are those tools easy is it is it easy for them to manipulate some of that data or get at that data let me give you an example is like a graph right so if it's just like a pie chart on there uh visually you might be able to interpret and understand that but some people might need some more help understanding and interpreting it and then also making that data accessible and available in different ways people can consume it in different ways so that's something again at a financial institution there's a lot of charts there's a lot of graphs there's a lot of analysis and so providing that uh way to get at that data in different ways not just visually but also making sure the contrast you know people can understand and see that and also the description of those things like the audio description of those things has been a shift uh one other thing is video so every video uh nobody's able to really upload a video to our website without a transcript so that is a requirement um and what's great is that's normalized right a lot of these things are normalized and so these are great things to take back to your organization and to work to make those organized uh normalized so why would we ever put a video up there that doesn't have a transcript or if they say "Oh you know it's just it's on YouTube there's auto auto transcripts." Well what if you have an interesting product name that keeps getting misinterpreted every time so you would never work with marketing and say "Oh I just made a wonderful page and I misspelled our our flagship product." That would never happen right never so it's just bringing that kind of um ideas to just making sure that access is is there anything else oh lots of questions okay cool i don't I'm not going to ask you guys to stop the um presentation but I think your your translator died we need to hit the reconnect oh my okay thanks trying to do too many things at once yep you Yeah um I think everyone in this room kind of agrees right that accessibility is important that otherwise we wouldn't be here I think kind of going off of what you just finished Andy talking about that normalization of things i think have either of you encountered it a moment where it's like it's just more when you encounter someone either you're in your consulting work or in your organizations now where it's just like there's no money in it there's no time it's harder than it is that sort of stuff so like before that normalization happens like truly getting folks on board and having that buy in right I work in an education space I work at a university um so I think like we know it's important right but I think it's like when you kind of get down to like well this is someone's time and effort do we have an extra person to be doing this you know um it's going going to take longer than it is like why can't we just spin up a video on YouTube and like do the bare minimum like that sort of stuff so I guess it's like that level of push back that you've gotten to get to that normalization stage you want to take it first yeah I'll reiterate so the question is what are some barriers that have been been brought before it became normalized and that's a great question and experienced that many times and just to admit I was that developer that was like why are we doing this and it um I was like we have this insane timeline we have to you know do this do this do this and what really turned me around was semantic HTML was not being clever with certain uh requests that were coming in uh another great thing that I didn't say is that we have a a a uh design system and so design system had accessibility baked into it so the the people that are building the re reusable components that assemble the page worked hard to make sure that it was accessible as always you know people can make it inaccessible so it's just that um education about that so using a repeatable design system understanding when there is a new feature uh again a person in this room uh we worked together on things that were outside of the design system so we had this really wonderful design system and then they were clever and said for this new section we're going to do this new thing and so it was a commitment between us to bring that to our work and make sure that that new pattern when we do it and develop it meets that criteria and again as I said that's we had a whole year to kind of understand what new features mean and what that means to us and it wasn't just this is the way it's going to be it's using tools it's getting outside perspective so I would code something and then the other person would I'll say I can say your name okay i just uh Aubrey I I was lucky to work with Aubrey who when I joined the organization was already doing all these wonderful things bringing that to her work and so when we do code reviews between people as well and so I would look at her work and I'd say wow this is really great but there's times when I said have you thought of this and you're never going to be perfect i want to no uh promote my shirt progress over perfection so uh that's a person named Meryl Evans who's a wonderful individual that gives some great talks uh so uh her her thing is progress over perfection so anyway hopefully some of that helps a question or comment can I have some to that go ahead i just don't want to forget it sure yeah please and so from my end of it um a lot of the work that I do like just as a developer and now as a consultant myself uh addressing the barriers that people have when they're limited on time cash etc i had to write it down so I remember your question um a lot of it is really selling to the people that you're working with what is in it for them um in the abstract of the talk it talks about you're not just going to have a developer that you're working with so when I went to that financial organization the people that I had to convince were not just the people that hired me but also the QA team that we had that was like "Wait what are y'all asking us to do now what are you asking us to look for we have all these other sites that we have to fix regular important issues for why do we have to do this accessibility thing when it already works" aside from the suit thing this is one time that we got sued this person's going to be okay um and having to work with the project managers that I worked with the designers folks uh that Andy was talking about really helping people understand how is this going to help you to erase your technical debt your project debt going forward and letting them know hey uh often when sorry so often when we are working on something we think oh great now I'm going to have to do this I'm going to have to do it from scratch it's that people don't recognize that it's not it is going to take time it might not take as much time as you think it would uh there's a bunch of folks that are in the accessibility space that have put together great um lists and resources Kat Shaw has a great uh presentation i'm not just saying that because she's in the room and not just because she's my friend but there's a lot of stuff that I've learned from her uh there was also uh Rachel Olivero uh who was a super important contributor in the Drupal space who has passed away um after Rachel passed away is when I found her content and was able to use that when we were doing the accessibility audits at the financial institution so helping them to understand what it cost them before by not doing it all the errors and bugs that they're getting because they didn't build it the way that it really should have been built the first time what problems it's helping you to solve right now the resources that are available because there there are um I I was working on React projects at the time and there are so many React plugins and libraries that are already there for you to use that have accessibility built into them so if it's already there why not just do it like that helps people to get over the psychological hurdle and then also selling them this is and not like selling them monetarily but convincing them of this is the time that we're going to save by not having to do this when I taught the QA team how to do audits y'all they went and they audited everything they were so excited like look at this all these key presses are wrong we're going to fix all this stuff job security so that is how I approach it i can ask a few things yes kind of related so what I

And so talks actually about this so the first case is obviously the legal case and so you're talking about the section 508 and so there's also the ATAG um criteria which is specifically for the adding side so if you have employees with disabilities and they need to edit your site um and they have disabilities that covers them so if you're not um taking care of on that side then you're not then you could be sued as well so that's the other negative to consider the other case would be the business case so it's like one in four or over 25% of users in the states report having some one or more disability which means there's even more people that have a disability in the states that don't even report it and then globally it's like 16% or more sick people report having disability more have it and most people have more than one like if they have a disability they have multiple disabilities and in 2024 it was like over 4,000 um lawsuits were filed 80 lawsuits year so and those are the like the business case so if you are trying to sell it to your um your employer you say "Well why would we ignore one of four people potential clients or whatever?" And then like the human case you could say "Well it's the right thing to do." We could say um we have you know if it's one in four then we of course have employees with disabilities or employees with family members with disabilities and stuff like that so what are we saying to our employees and stuff like that and Kat I'm gonna we're we're getting close to time I'm so sorry no it's okay to say use some simulators or test users things like that could help and just also just it can save time and money in the long run if you um if you do things properly like doing the beginning and just quick for the recording um some of the reasons outside of what Andy and I have stated that Kat Shaw mentioned is when you have internal employees they uh have rights in the workplace uh that need to be adhered to so the accessibility helps your folks internally one in four people have disabilities and often multiple disabilities so ask your person that you're trying to convince why are we going to ignore one in four people here why are we going to ignore 25% of the people that we are working with um I know that we had maybe some more questions I will be here all week Andy will be here all week Norah's not letting us go home help us if you hear that i'm kidding i'm kidding but thank you all so much for still coming to this thanks for vibing with us and working with us and meeting us where we're at because that's what we do with accessibility thank y'all