Transcript ↓

In this episode of Cache Up, host Michelle Frechette chats with Joe Dolson, co-founder of WordPress Accessibility Day. They discuss the event’s origins, its 24-hour global online format, and the importance of accessibility in web design for people with disabilities and aging users. Joe explains the logistics behind providing live captions, ASL interpretation, and paying speakers. The conversation highlights the volunteer-driven nature of the event, the need for sponsorship, and ongoing efforts to improve both digital and physical accessibility in the WordPress community and beyond.

Top Takeaways:

• The Origins and Growth of WP Accessibility Day: WP Accessibility Day started in 2020 as an online accessibility-focused event and was significantly shaped by the pandemic, which allowed the team to attract international speakers. Founders Joe Dolson, Amber Hinds, and Bet Hannon built a volunteer-run organization that has grown into an annual, fully online 24-hour event, enabling global participation.

• Commitment to Accessibility for All: The event emphasizes true accessibility, not just compliance. It includes live ASL interpretation, live captions, and translated content (currently in Spanish, French, and other languages), ensuring participants with various disabilities and language backgrounds can fully engage. Accessibility is seen as a benefit for everyone, including those with temporary or situational disabilities.

• Valuing Contributors and Maintaining a Sustainable Model: WP Accessibility Day pays its speakers and translators to honor their time and expertise, despite being a volunteer-led nonprofit. Sponsorships and donations fund professional captioning, sign language interpreters, Zoom infrastructure, and post-production, balancing high-quality accessibility services with organizational sustainability.
  
• Real-World Impact and Awareness: The conversation highlights how accessibility challenges extend beyond the web to physical spaces and everyday life. Joe and Michelle emphasize the importance of listening to feedback from people with disabilities, including temporary ones, and addressing barriers proactively. The event and its materials serve as both an educational resource and a demonstration of inclusive design practices in action.

Mentioned In The Show:

• WP accessibility day
• id24
• Bet Hannon
• Amber Hinds
• Vitaly Friedman
• Smashing Magazine
• Joe A Simpson Jr

🐦 You can follow Post Status and our guests on Social Media:

• Joe Dolson (Co-Founder, WordPress Accessibility Day)
• Michelle Frechette (Director of Community Relations, Post Status)
• Olivia Bisset (Intern, Post Status)

The Post Status podcast is geared toward WordPress professionals, with interviews, news, and deep analysis. 📝

Browse our archives, and don’t forget to subscribe via iTunes, Google Podcasts, YouTube, Stitcher, Simplecast, or RSS. 🎧

Transcript

Michelle Frechette 00:00:02  Welcome to the Post Status Cache Up podcast, where I’m catching up with Joe Dolson. Joe. How are you?

Joe Dolson 00:00:08  I’m doing really well. How are you?

Michelle Frechette 00:00:11  I’m good, thank you. It’s been a little while. We usually see each other at events. I think it’s been almost a year, probably, if not a little bit longer since I’ve been, physically in the same space.

Joe Dolson 00:00:20  I think. Did we see ourselves in Europe? I think we were both.

Michelle Frechette 00:00:24  Probably ships passing in the night, though, if I was going, I guess.

Joe Dolson 00:00:27  Indeed, yeah. Fair enough.

Michelle Frechette 00:00:29  It was a busy day. But yes, I believe that’s true. We were both in Europe this year. It was nice to see you. Anytime we get an opportunity. And today is no exception. So today we’re here to talk about WordPress Accessibility Day, WP Accessibility Day. You are, I believe, one of the founders. Correct? 

Joe Dolson: I am.

Michelle Frechette:  Of this great day. You do a lot with accessibility. I would hazard a guess that it is at least 90% of your working day is around accessibility things.

Joe Dolson 00:00:56  I sometimes feel like 90% of my day is just fixing things that I’ve already broken. But yeah, let’s let’s call it accessibility.

Michelle Frechette 00:01:08  I mean, broken things need to be fixed, and that’s all part of accessibility, right? So it’s all good. So tell us a little bit about the history of WP Accessibility Day. For anybody who’s not aware of how it came to be.

Joe Dolson 00:01:20  Yeah, absolutely. So the idea was kicked off in the fall of 2019 before.

Michelle Frechette 00:01:30  The world came to an end?

Joe Dolson 00:01:31  Yes, indeed. When the accessibility team, the WordPress accessibility team, just decided we wanted to put on some kind of event. And at that stage, we had literally no idea what it was. We threw out all sorts of ideas, you know, just a big accessibility contributor day. And we finally settled on doing a series of talks kind of modeled on the id24, which is a very similar event. That’s 24 hours of consecutive talks all on not exactly on accessibility, but inclusive design, generally speaking.

Joe Dolson 00:02:11  And it’s a great event. And if it’s happening very soon and you should go to it. But that was kind of the concept and how we came up with it. And we were, you know, deep into planning all sorts of ideas and then, you know, March 2020 hit. And we were like, well, I’m glad we’d already decided this was going to be online.

Michelle Frechette 00:02:32  Because the world went online for a great amount of time at that point.

Joe Dolson 00:02:36  Yes it did. Which it was actually had a really interesting side effects for the event because, as an all-online event that was already in well advanced in planning, we were able to get really an amazing collection of speakers because a lot of really international speakers who talk on accessibility all the time. Everywhere. We had a lot more availability in their schedules than they had maybe anticipated having. And so it was really an amazing conference. What it also was was an incredible amount of work. Because the other side effect of the pandemic hitting around that time is, people started to kind of drop away from the organizing team because, frankly, life happened.People had kids and they needed to deal with. Now their kids are in school and things got really busy. And so the team kind of shrunk. The team was great. Everybody who was involved in an amazing amount of work. But by the time the event actually happened, we were down to like, you know, maybe 4 or 5 people running the whole thing. And it was intense.

Michelle Frechette 00:03:48  I believe it.

Joe Dolson 00:03:51  And so really, the modern quote unquote, the new WordPress Accessibility Day, the nonprofit that Bette, Amber, and I have now founded to run this organization. All comes out of Amber reaching out to me after 2021 didn’t happen, and kind of saying, I’d like to restart WordPress Accessibility Day. But I don’t want to do it without you. Are you interested? And I had to really think about that. I didn’t know Amber at all at that point, you know, hadn’t ever.

Michelle Frechette 00:04:25 Now your besties.

Joe Dolson 00:04:27  It’s like we never met and we never talked. So we had a meeting and we talked about it. And now we’re great friends because, you know, I, I find that we worked really well together. We do have one problem working together.

Michelle Frechette 00:04:41  Which is?

Joe Dolson 00:04:42  We, we both have a strong tendency to overdo it.

Michelle Frechette 00:04:47  Oh, yes. I see that.

Joe Dolson 00:04:49  There’s an element where when every time you ping somebody at 1130 at night, they respond within five minutes and say, oh yeah, I can take care of that. It is an unhealthy relationship. It was very effective. It is a large part of what enabled, like the 2022, 2023 conferences to happen. But we are so, so happy. We’re both getting better about this. We’re we’re cutting back. We’re.

Michelle Frechette 00:05:18  Creating boundaries.

Joe Dolson 00:05:19  We have to make sure we have a big enough crew working on this that all of this stuff can happen. And we have that now. Like the volunteer and organizing team for WordPress Accessibility Day is amazing.

Michelle Frechette 00:05:33  I agree.

Joe Dolson 00:05:34  They mean, you know, the rest of us who have put in way too many hours early on can sit back and put in a normal and reasonable number of hours instead.

Michelle Frechette 00:05:45  Right, right. And so for those of you who heard those people who just heard you drop a couple of names, so that would be Amber Hinds and Bet Hannon, right? Who are both huge proponents of accessibility as well. And whose businesses also include accessibility all day, every day. So from that first one in 2020, which, you know, we didn’t, I thought it was funny that 2020, like, we should have had perfect vision of what was coming in the future, but nobody knew. Right? Just because the year 2020 to today, it’s been other than that one year that it was like, okay, let’s regroup and figure out how this goes forward. It’s been an annual event, including this year, all online and a 24-hour event, so that no matter where you are in the world, you can watch something live, and you can be there interacting. It’s all on Zoom, so you do have to register. It’s not like you could just happen upon it on YouTube or something like that. You do have to be registered for it.

Joe Dolson 00:06:47  That’s actually an interesting point. Like we had to really think about that the first year. It was all just streamed on YouTube, and I think that was also true the second year. We did ask for registrations in the second year, but it was still all streamed to YouTube. But ultimately, it was an accessibility decision. And it was it’s kind of this difficult balance. It’s like, I know people don’t want to have to register for another thing and give their email away and all of that. But we wanted to add a sign language. And in order to have sign language, what we needed to be able to do is offer two synchronized screens that people could have. Otherwise, what you have for ASL is very much it’s kind of second class because you have just a tiny little window embedded in your screen and. So yeah, you can get the sign language if you’re hard of hearing but have amazing eyesight.

Michelle Frechette 00:07:48  Right. Or blow it up so that that’s the only thing you see on your screen. Yeah.

Joe Dolson 00:07:52  And so we wanted to make sure that we could offer that. And really, Zoom was the only platform that really made that work for us.

Michelle Frechette 00:07:59  I love that, and in addition to ASL, because not everybody who is a deaf person uses American Sign Language around the world. It also has live transcriptions so that there’s more accurate than just voice text recognition being used.

Joe Dolson 00:08:15 Right. We’ve been working really hard on trying to make this as available to as many people as we possibly can. It’s kind of not very feasible to have sign language interpretation into multiple languages of sign language. And part of that is, it starts to get really complicated if somebody needs to both know their flavor of sign language and English.

Michelle Frechette 00:08:42  Yeah.

Joe Dolson 00:08:43 You know, there’s just a lot of complexity. And once you have that many people, that many screens, we don’t have a production team. We’re still a volunteer-run organization.

Michelle Frechette 00:08:52  Exactly.

Joe Dolson 00:08:53  But what we can offer is, you know, like you said, we have the live captions, so that that’s always being part, of the part of the event.

Michelle Frechette: Yeah. 

Joe Dolson: And then afterwards we have those captions corrected, and we’ve been working really hard on getting things translated.

Michelle Frechette 00:09:07  Yes.

Joe Dolson 00:09:08 So actually, almost all of the 2023 talks are now translated into at least one language, and many of them are now in two. They are. Our widest availability is in Spanish and French, and those are the ones we’ve really been pushing for just for global access. Since we had to prioritize something. But yeah, we’ve had a number translated into Hebrew. Yeah, we’ve got a whole variety of translators that have been really great. 

Michelle Frechette 00:09:39  I love that. Yeah. Yeah. That’s fantastic. It’s interesting because you can’t, you know, we’re not the United Nations, where you can put on a headset and something, so it might immediately translate it into your own language. I’m sure AI is going to get there someday, but it isn’t there now through Zoom, for example. And would it be perfect anyway? Probably not. But I remember talking to somebody when I, this is back during 2021, I think I spoke at WordCamp Taipei, which was online, and it was live, and I had to get up at like be up at three in the morning because it’s on the other side of the world from where I am.  And somebody said, do you speak Mandarin? And I said, no, it’s in English. And they’re like, well, why is it in English? I said, because so many people tune in. English is a language that a lot of people in WordPress speak, or at least have a basic understanding of. And so, although it isn’t perfect, you do have to choose a language to present it. And the truth is that most of our presenters do speak English. And most of the receivers who people who are watching it also at least understand enough English to be able to participate. And then we are translating it into other languages as well, for people to be able to have as part of our library, which I think is fantastic. Now, you did mention it’s a nonprofit, but we do have sponsorships, and we do open up for donations. So, I mean, I know a lot of the answers to the questions I’m asking you because I’m also on the organizing team. But for those people who don’t. Why are we getting all this money from other people if it’s entirely volunteer-led?

Joe Dolson 00:11:12  Well, the team that’s running it is all volunteer-led. But the fact is, we need a lot of services, and we are going to pay professional captioners to provide those captions. And we need to pay professional sign language interpreters to get the sign language. We’re paying for Zoom events this year, which is a much more expansive program, but it is giving us some very useful and needed features to be able to improve what we do. We also we’re hiring somebody to do our post-production editing of videos to just clean them up, make sure the ASL is properly synchronized with that. You know, there are a lot of miscellaneous costs in running an organization and making it work. You know, we have to have a Google Workspace account. Actually, that’s we get that for free as a nonprofit. Some things we get benefits now.

Michelle Frechette 00:12:05  Now we do, though. We didn’t, but we weren’t a non-profit forever ago. 

Joe Dolson 00:12:06  We probably do. We did have to pay for it. Yes. Yeah. but yeah, there’s just all sorts of costs that come in. We pay our speakers. I mean, that’s one of the really key things, is that we make a point of paying every speaker. We do offer them the option to donate that back to not to us, but to some other organization. But to, it was that was a really important thing to me. And that’s actually one of the really key reasons why we broke away from being a WordPress community organization. Because within the WordPress community organization, it’s it’s mandatory that you not pay speakers. You’re not allowed to pay your speakers. And that was kind of for me, that was kind of a deal breaker. 

Michelle Frechette 00:12:56  Yeah, I think honoring people’s time, it isn’t just the half hour or 45 minutes that they’re on screen. There’s so much prep time that goes into preparing a talk, and you and I have given talks. We know that firsthand. So when you are and we’re not paying them nearly the amount that we that we could to cover all of their time. But we do give them money that says we value you, and we value your inputs here. And we appreciate that you have become part of this this day.

Joe Dolson 00:13:23  Yeah. And I think it’s really important, particularly if you’re trying to reach out to speakers who are themselves people with disabilities. People with disabilities are massively underemployed. And that underemployment is the fault of employers. It’s the fact that people are not providing an accessible workspace. They’re not providing a way for you to get to work, a way for you to get in the building, a way for you to be at your desk. They’re not providing enough freedom. If you simply can’t remain seated in one place for eight hours. You know, the technological barriers to working when you’re a person with a disability can be extraordinary and can change unpredictably when the people who are responsible for procuring new versions of software aren’t checking for accessibility, and suddenly, now your payroll system is something you cannot log into.

Michelle Frechette 00:14:21  Right. There’s so much.

Joe Dolson 00:14:23  Well, I work in accounting at this business. I need to do this.

Michelle Frechette 00:14:28  Yeah, exactly. And I’m I, you know, I work bifocals, I am, I’ll be 57 next. I’ll actually be 57 on the day of the event. Honestly. So it’s like WPA Accessibility Day is a lovely birthday gift this year. Thank you so much. But as I get older, you know, the fine-tuning in my hearing is not what it was in my 20s. My vision isn’t what it was in my 20s, which even then wasn’t that great, to be honest. So I appreciate the things that we do. That, you know, when people think about accessibility, oftentimes they think of building a website that includes people who are blind. But it’s so much more than that. And accessibility. We talk about all the time. Accessibility is for everyone. And to have an accessible website doesn’t just mean a screen reader can use it. It means somebody like me can see, who can see, can see the script because it’s not in a size eight font in a light gray, for example, that there’s contrast and that I can hear the things that are being said. I use captions all the time in movies and television now, and I am I don’t, I don’t I mean, I guess I’m happy to see some of the things, but incredibly perplexed that they’re describing sounds that I can’t hear on my television, like dishes clanking background in the music. And I’m like, what dishes? What music? Because I can’t hear that anymore. But, I mean, I also don’t blast the TV, so, you know, those kinds of things are very helpful to every individual as we get older. And sometimes we want to be able to watch things really quietly, and having those visual cues and being able to read the dialogue makes a lot of sense.

Joe Dolson 00:16:07  Right, absolutely.

Michelle Frechette 00:16:07  And so that’s and that’s what we’re bringing, to all of the people who are attending WP Accessibility Day also. So I did mention that it’s on my birthday, but would you tell us exactly when it is and what time it starts? How’s that for a for a segue?

Joe Dolson 00:16:21  That’s a great segue. So we’ll start with telling you when Michelle’s birthday is. 

Michelle Frechette: That’s right. 

Joe Dolson: That’s what’s important here.

Michelle Frechette 00:16:28  I’ll share my Amazon wishlist later. Just kidding.

Joe Dolson 00:16:31  Yeah, yeah. Michelle takes donations.

Michelle Frechette 00:16:35  For WP Accessibility Day.

Joe Dolson 00:16:37  Right. Of course. Right. Yes. Of course. Absolutely. So, yeah, the event is happening October 15th and 16th. It will be starting at 1500 UTC or 10 a.m. Central Time. A time that was chosen largely because it’s convenient to Amber and I.

Michelle Frechette 00:16:55  That’s right. Hey, it’s got to start somewhere. 

Joe Dolson: We made that choice for you all. Exactly. I think it’s very important that the people who are running it be awake and able to function at the time that it starts. I think that is actually.

Michelle Frechette 00:17:11   100% agree with you. Absolutely. How much does it cost to attend?

Joe Dolson 00:17:15  It does not cost anything at all to attend. You do need to register, and at that time you can make the choice to make a donation. There’s an option to do a $10 donation. An option to do a $50 donation where you will get a gift of a WordPress Accessibility Date t-shirt. Or you can also become a micro-sponsor for $150 in the registration process. I believe we now this year also added a donate whatever you want amount, if you just feel like it. Because, I mean, why does it have to be $10. You can donate $5. Whatever. It all is helpful. It all helps keep the organization running, helps keep us secure. In case you know, companies sometimes have to change their budgets. They might not be able to sponsor next year. And if we suddenly lose a major sponsor, all those donations will be extremely beneficial to make sure next year’s event can still happen.

Michelle Frechette 00:18:15  Absolutely.

Joe Dolson 00:18:16  That’s really a big part of our fundraising is it’s not about making sure we pay for this year’s event. It’s about saying, okay, worst case scenario, can we put on next year’s event?

Michelle Frechette 00:18:27  Yes, absolutely. And right now, the answer is most likely.

Joe Dolson 00:18:32  Think so. Yep, most likely. 

Michelle Frechette 00:18:33  Tell us who is our keynote this year. Pretty exciting.

Joe Dolson 00:18:39  So our keynote this year is Vitaly Friedman, the founder of Smashing Magazine. He’s going to be giving a great talk about user experience and design, and how they relate to accessibility. Smashing Magazine has published a lot about accessibility, so I think this is going to be really fascinating.

Michelle Frechette 00:18:55  I do too.

Joe Dolson 00:18:56  And I think it’s a really great way to kind of kick things off. So I think I’m really looking forward to seeing that talk. There’s a lot of interesting talks. I mean, I’m always looking forward to seeing the talks. I never will go to all of them live because.

Michelle Frechette 00:19:13  It’s 24 hours.

Joe Dolson 00:19:13  I’m not going to stay up for 24 hours. That is the thing. I believe we had an earlier conversation about things we used to do in our 20s.

Michelle Frechette 00:19:20  Yes. Same. Actually. Same.

Joe Dolson 00:19:25  That kind of fits into that little niche. But lots of great talks about design and typography, readability. Some great things about some of the impact that geographical differences have. Like just the fact of you know, the entire Global South has much more limited access to just internet devices. What does that mean for accessibility? What does that mean when you’re talking about, you know, what does bandwidth mean for accessibility? And that’s that can be something that people don’t think about, like, okay, we made sure all of the colors are right. And we’ve got this JavaScript library that makes sure that all this stuff works. Unfortunately, that JavaScript library is 14MB unnecessarily. And.

Michelle Frechette 00:20:15  And your computer will come to a screeching halt while you try to access it. I’m also excited because, Joe A Simpson Jr this year is also going to be talking about physical accessibility, in spaces which, you know, from being my friend that I have had issues with as a mobility impaired person, accessing events and conferences and even some of what you expect to be the most accessible events still will have some issues where I can’t get into a door or, the green room is upstairs, but there’s no elevator, so me as a speaker doesn’t have access to those kinds of things.3  And can I roll with it? No, no pun intended, but yes, I can. Do you see what I did there?

Joe Dolson 00:20:59  I did see that. Yeah.

Michelle Frechette 00:21:01  It was unintentional, but it came through okay. But but is it the best experience? And just because somebody who’s a veteran in the field here can, you know, just kind of roll with the punches, so to speak, doesn’t mean that it’s acceptable and doesn’t mean it’s acceptable for everyone. And having been somebody who’s long-term in the community who can access people easier, doesn’t mean that it’s a good experience for somebody who has a mobility impairment coming in for their first or second time, either. So I’m really happy to see Joe talking about some of the changes that’s been made within WordPress for that. So that’s.

Joe Dolson 00:21:34  Yeah, I think that’s I think that’ll be great. And yeah, I do think one of the things that it’s easy for people to forget is that when people aren’t complaining, it’s easy to take that as they are satisfied.

Michelle Frechette 00:21:49  Correct.

Joe Dolson 00:21:50  And that’s not the same thing. And especially for people with disabilities. Resignation to inadequacy is a common reaction because it is so ubiquitous, you know, you’re just dealing constantly in like in your case, with awkward rises that you’re like, well, okay, great. There’s a door, it’s wide enough, but there’s a two-inch rise here. And now I’m, I’m just kind of screwed. And things that people don’t anticipate, and you’re just, but you expect it because it is ubiquitous. It’s everywhere. People with disabilities on the web, you know, people who are using a screen reader. Yeah. Encountering a button that doesn’t have a label. Yeah. You know, that’s totally routine. That’s nothing. There’s no surprises there. So the reaction isn’t frequent I’m going to immediately write a complaint and send them an email. It’s just like another one of those I wonder what it does. I guess I’ll find out. Whatever.

Michelle Frechette 00:22:46  Right. Yeah. Oh for sure. And. And it’s also not only just the resignation to it, but sometimes there’s fear of retaliation, so.

Joe Dolson 00:22:54  Oh, absolutely.

Michelle Frechette 00:22:54  I’ve been in places where I’m the loud voice saying I can’t access, and there are other people in wheelchairs, but because of who they work for are afraid to raise their voice because they don’t want to be the person within their organization that’s complaining. I don’t see it as a complaint. I see it as standing up for no pun intended, again. I’m just walking into all of them today, for what I should have access to. And I’m talking about physical spaces. The same is true of our digital spaces for people who have other disabilities, and whether those are situational, temporary, or permanent disabilities. All everybody, you know, we talk sometimes about you broke your arm. So now you understand what it’s like to try to do one handed keyboarding, or you’re a young parent and you’re holding a baby and trying to work at the same time. There are a lot of reasons that people experience even temporary needs for accessibility online.

Joe Dolson 00:23:54  And I will say, actually, people with temporary disabilities can be incredibly useful.

Michelle Frechette00:23:59  Absolutely. 

Joe Dolson: And that it has a lot to do with the fact that they are much more likely to have the spoons to complain because they haven’t been dealing with it every day for the last 50 years. For them, it’s a new thing. And they’re like, oh, this sucks. I’m going to bitch about it. And you know what? That is extremely valuable because that is one of the biggest problems is people getting just worn out. You know, you reach the point where you’re like, I don’t, I don’t have the energy to complain about this again.

Michelle Frechette 00:24:30  Yeah. And if you’re listening to this and you’re like, what do spoons have to do with it? Look up spoon theory, I beg of you.

Joe Dolson 00:24:36  Yes. It is very relevant.

Michelle Frechette 00:24:37  It is very relevant. Absolutely. So we talked about how much it cost. We talked about what it is. We talked about it being 24 hours. We mentioned the t-shirt. Now, I love that there’s a little bit of tongue in cheek in last year’s t-shirt and this year’s t-shirt. Last year’s t-shirt had a frame, a border around the logo. And it said it’s a feature, not a bug, meaning the focus feature that sometimes people have complained about. Like why is this appearing when I’m tabbing through? It’s a feature, not a bug. This year’s t-shirt I love because on the front of it is WPAD in fingerspelling, American Sign Language, fingerspelling, and then on the back, which is also very tongue-in-cheek. We have the alt text for the front of the shirt, which I just think is delightful.

Joe Dolson 00:25:26  Yeah, it was a lot of fun to come up with that design this year. It’s always interesting. You never know what you’re going to land on. And, you know,  it’s a fun thing about doing the t-shirt is that it’s a very visible representation, and it’s something that people can actually hold on to and see. You know, and it’s just, honestly, it’s a fun thing for the organizing team to do and to, to get out of this is like, we end up having a t-shirt. It’s like, yay! This is fun.

Michelle Frechette 00:25:55  And it’s something fun to wear. 

Joe Dolson 00:25:56  Important for us as an organizing team to be able to have fun with it and to be able to say, yes, this is serious work. This is important work. But if we’re taking ourselves too seriously in the process and not having fun, then we need to be paid.

Michelle Frechette 00:26:17  Exactly.

Joe Dolson 00:26:18  I mean, that’s the thing. We’re all we’re all doing this for as volunteers. And if you’re doing volunteer work, it has to be enjoyable. So we need to make sure that for everybody who’s participating, it’s a good experience.

Michelle Frechette 00:26:30  Absolutely. So our call for volunteers, call for speakers, all of that is closed. But the call for translators remains open 24/7 365. So if somebody has a fluency in another language and would like to volunteer to translate from English to whatever that other language is, they can feel free. And we do. Actually, I say volunteer, but we do pay our translators as well. We do, because that is so arduous work.

Joe Dolson 00:26:57  Specifically, at this point, we’re paying for Spanish and French translations. We’re not paying all translators, and that was a hard choice.

Michelle Frechette 00:27:05  Thank you for that. 

Joe Dolson 00:27:05  It was really about we, we wanted to try and reach the point where we could get a complete set of the talks in two languages, and then everything else is just kind of a bonus. And it’s been a difficult decision. It’s hard to decide who you pay and who you don’t. And we might reassess that, who knows? Because every year you ultimately we have to look at our finances post-event and after expenses and be like, okay. How are we in the black? How far in the black are we? What is something new we can take on as an expense for next year? I mean, that is basically literally what we do at the end of every year. It’s like, okay, we are in the black, we are not in the black. We are. What are we able to do? I mean, that’s one of the reasons we were willing to go to Zoom events this year, is we were sufficiently flush that we were like, okay, we can afford to pay for this higher level of service and take advantage of some of the things that it provides for us.

Michelle Frechette 00:28:09  Absolutely.

Joe Dolson 00:28:11 The main thing that it provides for us, by the way, is that we don’t have to try and wrestle with a single 24-hour nonstop stream. Everybody can register for one event and then have access to each individual one-hour stream. Whereas before we had to try and do it all as one stream and let’s just say, while Zoom theoretically can run for 24 hours straight, in practice, it got pretty weird, and we did have to shut it down and restart the stream. And that’s nasty because that means now you have to, like, send out an emergency email to all attendees. And this is the new link. And now you have to come to this one.

Michelle Frechette 00:28:54  And some of them, you don’t get back because they don’t see the email, and they assume it broke. And all of those things.

Joe Dolson 00:28:59  You always have to assume that some of those emails just won’t be received. And so you’re promoting it everywhere you can, but it’s just messing it up. You just don’t want to have to do that. So that is something that should just not be a problem this year, because it’s not we’re not trying to wrestle with this continuous, incredibly long session.

Michelle Frechette 00:29:17  And our sponsorship dollars and our donations are what are allowing that to take place. So thank you to everybody who has contributed. As you said, you can still make a donation. You can still sign up as a micro sponsor and contribute in those ways. Micro sponsorship does have some benefits to it. I think you get a persistent link and logo on the website, for example, and shows that you are in support of this whole event. So, and micro sponsorship, I believe. Do you remember how much that is? I want to say it’s 150, 150 USD. That’s correct. Yeah. Okay. That’s what I thought you had said earlier. And then I know my brain does what I don’t remember so.

Joe Dolson 00:29:55  And I’ll just tell you that if we were to change that next year, I will guaranteed to tell you the wrong number.

Michelle Frechette 00:30:00  Yeah. Like like so October 15th at 12, which is 12 UTC. No, two. It’s 10 a.m. I forgot.

Joe Dolson 00:30:09  10am Central time, 1500 UTC. 1500 UTC.

Michelle Frechette 00:30:13  1500 UTC. Thank you. I am coming back from Europe. Last week all of my plane tickets were in 24 hour clock time. I was constantly having to subtract 12 to remember what time it was at home, and make sure I didn’t miss my flight from the airport. I am not used to that 24 hour clock, but I’m learning. So there we go. So that’s all the information. Anything else you’d like to add before we wrap things up for today?

Joe Dolson 00:30:37  No, I think I’m just happy to do this. Happy to chat. It’s nice to catch up, and I’m really looking forward to this year’s WP Accessibility Day.

Michelle Frechette 00:30:45  Likewise, very much so. So you heard everybody be there October 15th at 1500 UTC, 10 a.m. Central Time, which is 11 a.m. on the East Coast where I am. See, I can do the math once in a while.

Joe Dolson 00:30:58  Yay, math!

Michelle Frechette 00:31:00  It’s all good. And if you’re interested in finding out more, we’ll. Of course, have this all in the show notes, but it is 2025.WPaccessibility.day and all of the links to register and support. And all of the things, including our schedule, are right there. So thank you for joining me today, Joe. I appreciate you and your ability to talk about all things all the time, especially off the cuff, because I didn’t give you any questions that I’ve asked. It’s just a conversation.

Joe Dolson 00:31:27  Well, thanks for having me here. 

Michelle Frechette 00:31:27  Yeah. My pleasure. Fantastic. We’ll see everybody at WP Accessibility Day, and we’ll see you all in the next episode of the Post Status Cache Up. Thank you so much for being here.