Post Status Draft – Interview with Amber Hinds on WordPress Web Accessibility

https://youtu.be/NILbIHLPwCQ

Transcript ↓

In this podcast episode, Cory Miller interviews Amber Haynes, CEO of Equalize Digital, about the importance of accessibility in WordPress and web design. They discuss the recent award received by Equalize Digital for their Digital Accessibility Checker plugin, which audits WordPress websites for accessibility. Amber highlights the challenges faced by screen reader users and the increasing legal requirements for website accessibility. She also shares insights on the role of plugin developers in improving web accessibility and the competitive landscape of different platforms in terms of accessibility. The episode concludes with Amber discussing upcoming improvements to their plugin.

Top Takeaways:

• Accessibility as a Skill Set: Agencies and web developers are encouraged to recognize the growing importance of accessibility in web development due to upcoming legislation. Amber suggests adding accessibility as a skill set and recommends starting with tools like the Accessibility Checker plugin to identify and address issues.
• Practical Steps for Improvement: To enhance accessibility, developers are advised to incorporate the Accessibility Checker plugin into their starter themes, whether custom or using a page builder. Amber emphasizes the importance of testing websites using only a keyboard, focusing on navigation, and ensuring that all functionality is accessible without a mouse.
• Evolution of the Accessibility Checker Plugin: The Accessibility Checker plugin has evolved over time, with a focus on improving user experience and introducing features such as full site reports and audit history. The plugin is continually refined to provide developers with meaningful insights into accessibility issues on their websites.
• Challenges and Opportunities in WordPress Accessibility: While WordPress powers a significant portion of the internet, there are ongoing challenges with accessibility, particularly in the core product. Amber discusses the need for a more strategic approach to accessibility within the WordPress community, addressing issues and making accessibility a priority in the development process. The conversation also touches on how other content management systems, such as CraftCMS, are actively prioritizing accessibility.

Mentioned in the show:

• Equalize Digital
• Accessibility Checker plugin
• GAAD Foundation
• Gaady Award
• Slack
• European Accessibility Act
• Craft CMS
• Drupal
• Meetup
• Shopify
• Squarespace
• Lone Rock Point
• NASA

You can follow Post Status and our guests on Twitter:

• Amber Hinds (CEO, Equalize Digital)
• Cory Miller (CEO, Post Status)
• Olivia Bisset (Intern, Post Status)

The Post Status Draft 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

Cory Miller (00:00:02) – Everybody, welcome back to Post Status Draft. I’ve got a great long time member of Post Status today. And Amber Haynes of Equalize Digital to talk about accessibility. And you all Amber, welcome to the podcast. But you all are just coming off a pretty good thing with an award. So but we’ll get into that in just a second. You want to share who you are, Amber, what you do at Equalize Digital. And then tell me about this award.

Amber Hinds (00:00:29) – Sure. Yeah. So I’m Amber Haynes, I’m the CEO at Equalize Digital. We are a B corporation that specializes in WordPress accessibility. And we have a plug in digital accessibility checker, which audits WordPress websites for accessibility and provides reports in the admin dashboard. And we got it’s up there on my shelf like I’m pointing at it at the. In early November, we were really excited to be awarded a Gaady Award from the GAAD, G-A-A-D Foundation. So that’s the nonprofit that’s behind Global Accessibility Awareness Day. And they flew me out to San Francisco, and I went to the award ceremony, and it was us and Unilever and the agency behind the brand new W3C website.

Amber Hinds (00:01:21) – So we were in really good company. And so they awarded us that for our accessibility checker plugin and the efforts that we’re making to improve accessibility in WordPress. So it’s really exciting.

Cory Miller (00:01:34) – Yeah, it’s a great competition. And you all standing out and taking WordPress to all facets of the earth. That’s pretty pretty awesome. So congratulations.

Amber Hinds (00:01:45) – Thank you. Thank you.

Cory Miller (00:01:47) – Well, I know you’re you’re you all specialize. That’s your focus accessibility and particularly with the checker with your product. Um, I’m curious about WordPress accessibility. What’s on your mind today? And I guess I should say higher up from that is like web accessibility. What are you seeing with the web and in particular with WordPress?

Amber Hinds (00:02:11) – Yeah. I mean, you know, the big thing with WordPress and accessibility is always, I think, the focus on accessibility in core and in the editor and continuing to try and improve and enhance Gutenberg, which, you know, some of our the Post Status members, there’s been some conversations about that and some of the challenges that the block editor can have and full site editing can have for people, especially screen reader users.

Amber Hinds (00:02:40) – So, you know, I mean, a thing that I’m always advocating for is that people join us in the Make Accessibility Slack and contribute on Fridays. Meetings are on Fridays at 10 am Central, my time in the US and chip in because there’s only Joe Dolson is part time sponsored. And then I think there was one full time sponsor, but I don’t think there is anymore. So they’re always looking for more contributors. But I would say, you know, like generally some of the trends that it’s good for people to be aware of is that there is a big increase in legal requirements for all websites to be accessible. You know, a couple of years ago we were talking only about government funded websites. Now we’re talking about all websites, non-profits, even small businesses. The European Accessibility Act is going to come into play in June of 2025, and it’s going to require all businesses to have accessible websites. There are laws in Canada, laws in the United States. The Justice Department has been strengthening the requirements around the Americans with Disabilities Act to say that it really does apply to websites, which that applies to even very small businesses, have to pay attention to those laws.

Amber Hinds (00:04:13) – So that’s something that I think people haven’t thought about accessibility. They really need to start thinking about it now.

Cory Miller (00:04:20) – Yeah, those big legislative things or rule change things help push us over. But there’s also some preparation for it. I remember GDPR and was a big deal and rightfully so, but you had to really change. And I think that’s such good news, though, for taking this final. Another big step in making sure everybody can access the web and websites. So but June 2025.

Amber Hinds (00:04:51) – Yeah. Yep. In Europe I think, you know, the thing that is really interesting about it is that it’s it does. So it does take a mindset and a mindset shift and it takes a change in our practices. You know, it doesn’t happen overnight. But I think, you know, a lot of us were around when we were building websites that weren’t mobile responsive. And then in the beginning we were all like, no, you don’t need that. And then maybe we said, okay, yeah, you need that, but I’m going to build you a separate one or I’m going to charge you a whole bunch extra to do that.

Amber Hinds (00:05:23) – And nowadays, I mean, would would we launch a website that’s not mobile responsive, or would we be like, we’re going to double your costs to have a mobile responsive website? No, it’s just an expected standard. And I think accessibility is kind of in the same way. Like it takes some time to get up and you need to figure out how to fit that into your processes and what you need to change about your starters or the plugins that you use or the the way you write code. But I think once you start to learn that and you figure out what tools can help you, then it’s just going to become second nature. And then in the long run, accessible websites, they’re better for SEO, they’re easier for everyone to use all, all people, not just people that we think of as, you know, the typical disabilities that we that we might think of like a blind person or a deaf person who needs captions. I mean, the number of people who use captions. I mean, I’ve read captions on videos this week while I was on my phone, right? So I really think, like once you figure out how to work it in, it’s just going to have a better end result for all of us.

Cory Miller (00:06:33) – And I think there’s a message back to those agencies that are working with clients that they can say to clients is there is now more legislation coming. We need to get on this now and start talking and having the conversation, because when it happens in Europe, it’s like you said with the DOJ and different things, it’s going to cascade here. Um, what are those? What are those couple of things. So there’s a lot of WordPress agencies in Post Status. What are the couple of things you might recommend to get. Get ready to really actually add this as a skill set to their web agency that they can do, and start working on that.

Amber Hinds (00:07:14) – Yeah, well our plugin of course, I’m going to totally pitch our plugin, but. Put our plugin on your starter. That’s what I would do even before you put it on a finished website. Whatever it is, whether you’re using a custom starter or you’re using a page builder, we all probably have a blueprint that has things kind of configured the way we like to start from.

Amber Hinds (00:07:34) – Nobody starts from zero. Hopefully you don’t start from zero on every project. So like do that, go through the problems and try and figure out if you can improve so that instead of starting with ten problems on every page, you’re starting with zero and then figuring that out. So even our free version of our plugin, it scans posts and pages like there’s no limit. And that is really helpful for learning because honestly, like a lot of that and even us when we started we learned by doing and and so just getting in and trying to test things with our plugin. Another thing is, is take your mouse, turn it off, put it in a drawer, and use only a keyboard to navigate your website or the websites that you’re building for clients and figure out can you search for a product, add the product to the cart and check out without touching a mouse? If there’s a carousel, can you navigate through the carousel? If there’s accordions, can you open and close the accordions? Like all of those things that you think are important for users to do? Can you do it with just the tab keys and the enter key? And the button should be able to be triggered by the space bar, right.

Amber Hinds (00:08:48) – Like all of those important things. So I think those are probably the two. Most important is to just start testing and find problems. Will it be 100% perfect if you do only those two things? No. But will it be significantly better? Oh yes, it will be significantly better.

Cory Miller (00:09:05) – That’s great. So I love the thought of adding the accessibility checker to your starter theme, because right now they could start doing that and just seeing and learning through experiencing, okay, these things came up. I haven’t used the checker specifically, or maybe I have trying to think, but there’s a number of, I guess, warnings and things in the plugin that you can probably sniff around and go, okay, this is a common pattern. This, this thing I know in when we’re re-doing Post Status, one of the conversations was our orange color with white text on a button wasn’t wasn’t up to speed. And that was interesting for me to think about because, you know, I’ve got a fairly good vision. Yeah, the color contrast.

Cory Miller (00:09:49) – But I know I’ve heard all you say that and but it was, it was something of interest going, okay, now I have to think. We have to think through that. I think we ended up on a blue. But when you said the navigate with a without your mouse, it brought me back to a friend of mine. It’s been almost 20 years now. I was using Jaws to read things and going I never I’ve not had to do that. I didn’t even know. When you push a button with the spacebar, like I was thinking, how would you click? So you taught me something today.

Amber Hinds (00:10:21) – Yeah. So buttons are either return key or spacebar. And I’m talking not like a link that’s styled like a button, like a literal HTML button tag, because we have this weird confusion where we call things buttons, but they’re not really. They’re actually just links that happen to look like a button. Links are just the return key. So the other thing I would recommend if someone wants to learn or if you never heard a screen reader.

Amber Hinds (00:10:45) – So I run the WordPress Accessibility Meetup. It’s on zoom twice a month, first Thursday in the morning US time, and third Monday in the evening US time. So it sort of works. No matter where you are in the world, you can pick at least one and. They’re all, you know, there’s a whole bunch of different topics and that sort of thing. But once a quarter, Alex Stein, who’s also a Post Status member, he comes on with me and we do free accessibility audits live for WordPress plugin developers, which we’ve had a lot of phenomenal Post Status members. Volunteer and be brave, because I know it takes a little bit of bravery to let your stuff go up there. Um, but but he uses his screen reader and we’ll go through. And I think if you’ve never heard of Screen Reader, you can either get the recordings for them off of our website, or you can tune in live for the next one. And I highly recommend that because it’s it’s very enlightening to sort of see how other people experience the web and experience things that to you it might seem obvious or like easy, but if someone’s just listening to it or they’ve never used it before. So.

Cory Miller (00:12:00) – Well, I know we’ve talked about like with accessibility there’s a there’s legal requirements and issues that will come up. And that’s a that’s one compelling reason. But the other is if you just think through you’re saying that navigate a site and see if you can click. You’re really talking about usability and experience. And so I’m sure through those process, working with your clients and the people that your customers with your product, they probably tune up quite a bit their UI, UX experience for their websites.

Amber Hinds (00:12:35) – Yeah. So that’s the interesting thing about accessibility. Like I mentioned before, that it really helps everyone. There’s a lot on, just like user interface or user experience in general, that can be improved when you start looking at, you know, like what is what is the text of your links, is it meaningful or are you just linking the word here? So this is an easy thing. A lot of people, they write paragraphs and they’re like, oh, if you want to contact us click here.

Amber Hinds (00:13:05) – And they only link the word here, right. But like having a link that is meaningful. So you know, contact us and you link that whole phrase that helps people who are blind and they’re only hearing the link without the surrounding context. It also helps people who are sighted because, you know, usually we have style differences. And if you’re skimming the page, the links might jump out at you more. And if you were looking for how to contact someone, that link might jump out at you more than the word ‘here’ would. Right? Or we all know that links and their anchor text can impact our SEO, right? So it helps Google know where this link goes to. Also, instead of just the word ‘here’. So there’s there’s like a lot of stuff that are just general benefits for everyone.

Cory Miller (00:13:50) – That’s a core compelling case right there for okay, there’s looming times coming, but sharing that back to the customer that this doesn’t just check a box for the legal requirement. You’re into usability conversion.

Cory Miller (00:14:08) – There’s SEO benefits all the way around. So I love that. And thank you for those three I think those are excellent. Use the checker on your starter theme. Turn off your mouse, try to navigate the site and then the WordPress accessibility Meetups that happen several times a month to jump in and start preparing for this. Well. So the next question just to the accessibility checker is it’s tell me a little bit about the back story that how long has it been out. And then I’ll, I’ll switch gears to ask what you’re excited about with it.

Amber Hinds (00:14:43) – Yes. So the backstory on it is that we had started just doing accessibility work for clients, and we were paying for a SAAS software that would bulk scan websites and help us find problems. And boy, those are really expensive. You’re paying per URL. They also weren’t because they aren’t CMS specific. They the one that we were using, you know, like it would say there’s JavaScript on this page. And I’m just like, great, okay. That’s really helpful.

Amber Hinds (00:15:17) – And they’re like, oh sure, nothing’s broken. And you’re just like this. Like it’s not helpful, right? And so we started talking about what’s a better solution. And we realized, well, one, we need something that understands WordPress and is written specifically for WordPress. So we have some rules that we’re in the process of rolling out that come from the ACTS Open Source Rule Library, but we also have custom rules that are specific to WordPress. And, you know, we can flag if it’s a carousel because we know all the carousel plugins and we’re looking for it. So instead of just telling you there’s JavaScript, you should go check it. We can be like, go look at your carousel, right? Which is much more meaningful instructions for people. So we started talking about that um. Really in detail early 2020. And then we spent some of our Covid time and our PPP funds building out our MVP of the plugin and released it, really released it in January of 2021. So it’s almost three years old now.

Amber Hinds (00:16:23) – And we we’ve been iterating, iterating on it. We got an investment from Amelia Capital, which was helpful because we’re able to hire a full time developer to work on it in May, and we have done some things I could I could show you, if that’s okay.

Cory Miller (00:16:42) – Sure, sure. Yeah.

Amber Hinds (00:16:43) – Okay. So I’ll show you this on my website, which I just started working on. I have not been. If you look at my website, you can tell I haven’t done anything on it for like since 2019. Oh, I did not mean to share my full desktop. Hold on one second. Try again. There you go. But I. I’ve been doing some stuff on my website in the last week and I went in. So this is a new feature that we added the free version. It just shows you reports on the post edit screen, and it sort of shows you what problems are. And then in our paid versions, we have more full site things. And we just recently had this add on for audit history where you can actually track performance over time.

Amber Hinds (00:17:30) – And this is where I was sitting at, which when I was like, put this on, I’m like, I’m going to actually do work on my website. And this is totally normal. If you put it on a website where you’ve never thought about accessibility. And I’ll tell you, this is built with a page builder, it’s built with a theme that I bought off Themeforest in like 2016 or something, like it’s really old and so I never thought about it. So I have 46,000 issues, but I started going in and looking at some of them, and you can sort of see in a day, I dropped it to 41,000. It’s because I needed to change some settings in a plugin to like, so sometimes it can be pretty easy. This was yesterday. I was using an Instagram feed plugin and it had them opening in Lightbox, and there were a bunch of problems with the Lightbox and I was like, I don’t actually need that. There’s a setting where I can turn that off and they’ll just link over to Instagram.

Amber Hinds (00:18:22) – So I just like change that setting. And now we’ve gone down. So this was a new thing that we released, which allows people to sort of track, which especially nice for agencies if you’re doing work for clients, because you could, you know, if I did this for the full month and then I’d be like, look, I took you from this many problems, does this many problems. And we can see that the website is getting better. So so we released that just last month. And this is sort of this was our big push before WordCamp US, which was having the full site report because we didn’t have a full site report. So we have this now in the Pro version, and you can sort of see how many things you’ve tracked. And then in the open issues here is where what’s sort of helpful is this breaks it down by what the specific problem is. And I have the ability if I was like, hey, I just want to go fix like major problems, right? So like an empty button, that means somebody would just hear button, but they wouldn’t know what it’s for.

Amber Hinds (00:19:21) – And there’s only three of them. I haven’t looked at this, so I have no idea what we’re about to see. It’s sort of funny, but we could see, like on these specific pages, I have a submit button that only has. Oh, it’s probably related to my search. It only has a font awesome icon in it. So a person who is on this page and they’re blind and they can’t see the icon, they wouldn’t actually know. This is something they have to submit. Now this it’s the same thing. So I could probably fix it one place and it would fix them all. Um, but yeah, so that’s sort of a high level of what it is. And some of the things that we’ve been working on.

Cory Miller (00:20:03) – That’s excellent. That that to me makes it more I don’t do website obviously I haven’t for a long, very long time, but um makes it accessible, accessible, approachable to do this, to go okay, you know, get hit with a bunch of errors.

Cory Miller (00:20:21) – Okay. Start looking through and seeing where you can make some differences, just like you said with turning off the plug in. I think that’s excellent. And I can see how if you’re running that on site and just noticing the issues that kind of come up, you’re going to learn a lot along the way.

Amber Hinds (00:20:39) – Yeah. I mean, honestly, one thing I would love is for plug in developer. Like, even if they just used our free plug in because it’s interesting we use this and like I mentioned like that one setting and that that plug in, I changed it. But I turned off something in their plugin and but if they were testing like then they would see that. And so plug in developers could use this to, to test their own stuff. And really like when I think about the reality of making the web more accessible, WordPress powers almost half the internet, but the vast majority of those sites are not built by a whole bunch of custom code. They’re built with plug ins and themes, free or commercial, that users have found and used to achieve their goals on their website.

Amber Hinds (00:21:29) – And so if we want to make the web more accessible, then it really has to be bottom up and plug in developers. And this is a big reason why Alex and I do those quarterly plugin reviews. And we’re hoping, you know, it’s and why they’re public and they’re not just private information for that plugin developer, because we’re hoping other plugin developers will look at it and be like, you know, oh, I also have buttons that only have font awesome icons and no text or Aria labels on them in my plugin. I should go fix those, right? Because if you have 5000 active installs. 5 million active installs or anything in between. You fix that in your thing and you make 5000, 5 million websites better.

Cory Miller (00:22:16) – Yeah. And when you say plug ins, are you referring to their front end output only or?

Amber Hinds (00:22:23) – So in an ideal world, all plugins should have both accessible frontends and accessible. Admin screens and admin interfaces, because there are lots of people with disabilities who have WordPress websites, or people who rely on assistive technologies, who have WordPress websites, and they should be able to use the plugin to build a website too.

Amber Hinds (00:22:49) – From an impact standpoint, you’ll have a bigger impact by fixing the things that are on the front end first. So that’s probably where I would recommend that a plugin developer start is make sure all of their public facing their shortcodes, their blocks, whatever it is that their plugin outputs, that that is fully accessible. And then and then go on to your admin screens, your setting screens. If you use the default WordPress UI, it’s going to be accessible. Where you get in trouble is if you start building like fancy UI’s or, you know, doing things where you’re like using a lot of JavaScript to. Make a span or a div a button. Not actually using a button tag, right? Like things like that can cause problems.

Cory Miller (00:23:41) – So I love that we have a Make Team at WordPress that you, Alex and others are continuing to ring this bell. I’ve always felt WordPress leads in many ways, not just technology, but in this facet. I think it’s the right thing to do, and we’re putting our time, effort, like you and others to make the successful.

Cory Miller (00:24:04) – But I’m curious. So, you know, when I started with WordPress, it was it was it grew to be extremely dominant that it is now. But at the time we’re talking 15 or 16 years ago or whatever, there wasn’t a lot of competitors to WordPress. And today I look at different segments of just the web, and there’s some there’s some competition out there with WordPress. But I’m curious what you’ve seen or how you think the other platforms stack up. I’m biased, probably, and love WordPress and feel like we probably lead in some of those. But I’m curious where you where you feel we stand in comparison to some other platforms as. With the accessibility.

Amber Hinds (00:24:46) – You know, it’s hard. I think from some of the conversations that I’ve had with other people on the Accessibility Team, I feel like the WordPress core itself is probably only now getting back to the accessibility status of where it was one 2018 before Gutenberg was added in. That really set it back a lot. Most of the issues that were initially identified, they’ve all been resolved, but of course new ones have come in.

Amber Hinds (00:25:19) – I think there’s still some work that needs to be done on process. I talked earlier about at the GAADy’s. One of the other winners of the three winners this year was the agency who built the new W3C website, which is a major website, and they had a huge accessibility focus with that website. Of course, because the W3C is part of who puts together the standards for web content accessibility guidelines, and they evaluated Cms’s and they decided not to choose WordPress. They went with CraftCMS because of accessibility concerns. So I think that is something that the WordPress community as a whole needs to think about is what is this long term vision? And, you know, the mission of WordPress is to democratize publishing. If people who require screen readers, or who use a sip and puff device, or can’t use a mouse and have to type cannot create a website and publish content with WordPress. Are we democratizing publishing? No. We have to have an accessible core product. In order to achieve the mission of WordPress.

Amber Hinds (00:26:40) – It’s not just about abled people. So I think it’s really important that we think about that. I want to say, you know, I had a conversation with that agency and we were we were talking about it there, you know, like, why? And that was a couple of years ago that they were evaluating. I mean, it really was Gutenberg and full site editing. I think some of the problems that they had identified have been resolved. And so maybe if they were to do that analysis again, they might rethink not using WordPress. But I do think that there’s some community and some higher level things just within the WordPress community that have to be addressed, like on a mainstream, like where accessibility fits in the process, and being willing to make accessibility a blocker. And that to some degree can also be a downside of an open source. So CraftCMS is not open source, it’s a a paid CMS. But that does mean that there’s more control over who builds in it. And Craft was able to be like, yeah, we’re going to prioritize accessibility and whatever problems come up while building W3C, we’re going to do those first before you add new features. In WordPress.

Amber Hinds (00:27:53) – There isn’t currently a we’re going to fix all of the accessibility before we add any other new features, right. So I think like that’s something that has to be figured out.

Cory Miller (00:28:05) – Well, thank you for that outlook. What about Drupal? And I don’t know, even Adobe Experience Manager, some of those enterprise type platforms.

Amber Hinds (00:28:16) – So I don’t know much about the Adobe platform. Drupal has a pretty strong accessibility team as well. I think when you look at higher ed, you see a pretty strong balance between either Drupal or WordPress builds in higher ed. So I would say comparatively. It’s competitive. Maybe it doesn’t have some of the issues in editor that WordPress has with the block editor. Um, I don’t hear as much about Joomla. I know like a lot of the proprietary. So like Shopify and Squarespace, it’s a lot harder to make websites with those, accessible. Um, so I would, you know, if you have a client you really care about accessibility, I would I would be careful or cautious about going there.

Amber Hinds (00:29:08) – I do know, like Shopify put some effort into their checkout pages and stuff because they got flack. Um, but, you know, if you’re in any sort of content management system where you can’t. Control everything or every aspect, then there could be a possibility that you can’t fix it yourself. And at the very least, you’re like, you know, at the whims of the developer of the content management system to actually care about your bug report. So.

Cory Miller (00:29:35) – Yeah. Well, I got a little bit off track there asking, but I wanted to ask as we kind of wrap up and everything. One is, what are you excited about with the accessibility checker that you have going on, or that has been done or in the works or getting ready to release?

Amber Hinds (00:29:55) – Yeah. So we are working on we have a beta right now, but probably by the time this episode comes out on how long it’ll take it, it won’t be in beta anymore and it’ll be released. We are working on rewriting our rules to be JavaScript based instead of PHP based.

Amber Hinds (00:30:12) – We’re starting with color contrast because that’s where we have had the most false positives, which of course our goal is not to provide people random errors. They have to just dismiss. Right? We only want to show you real problems. So so we’re doing color contrast first and then underline text, which is one of our custom rules. So we have to rewrite that. And then we’re going to be working through rewriting all of our PHP rules and doing some refactoring on the admin experience to make it easier for non-technical people to understand what to do when they find problems, so that that is what’s coming up. And a lot of that has stemmed out of conversations and the work that we did for NASA. So NASA, we announced earlier in the year they had helped to partially fund us building a frontend highlighting feature for the plugin, and that was specifically for that reason, because NASA has hundreds of content creators, pretty much none of whom have any sort of developer skills. And so we needed to build something that would make it easier for them when they’re using our plugin to actually know where the problems are.

Amber Hinds (00:31:21) – So so that’s sort of come from that. And we’re continuing to work on that wave just over the next six months, especially to really deeply improve user experience within the plugin.

Cory Miller (00:31:33) – Excellent. We didn’t even talk about NASA, but that was a very big launch a couple of months ago. Great, great news for WordPress and for Lone Point Rock and Equalize Digital. I heard your names quite a bit, so congratulations on that.

Amber Hinds (00:31:48) – Yeah JJ with Lone Rock Point was was great. He led the team on that. And and it was it was very neat to be involved and have a back seat on that whole build.

Cory Miller (00:31:59) – Yeah, what a flagship site to be able to point to as well. And NASA with their values, obviously, you know, want to embrace open source and accessibility and all the things. So. So one thing I know I think came out with Accessibility Checker was the audit history toothat’s already come out I think like as an add on. 

Amber Hinds (00:32:25) – Yeah. So the audit history I showed where it tracks over time that is that we released that the week before Black Friday or Thanksgiving week.

Amber Hinds (00:32:36) – And that’s included in our small business and agency plans. So we decided that we were just going to give it to people at those tiers and not sell it separately because we like them. So yeah, it’s available now.

Cory Miller (00:32:51) – Excellent. Well, Amber, thanks so much. Anything else we missed out that you want to share?

Amber Hinds (00:32:56) – No, I don’t think so. I appreciate that you had me on. You want to talk accessibility. And I hope, you know, we maybe inspired somebody at least to go try and use their website without a mouse or try and test something and see if you can find a problem. I think, you know, it’s not an overnight thing, like I showed my website, right? But I’ve made progress. Like I don’t have a lot of time to work on my personal blog. Right? But I was I looked at it yesterday. I was like, what is one thing I can fix, you know? And it fixed something that’s on every page. And I think, like if you think about it that way, like what can you do each day, like one small thing, then over time your practice is going to be better.

Amber Hinds (00:33:35) – The websites you build are going to be better. And you know, you probably won’t make that mistake ever again. Right? 

Cory Miller (00:33:43) – So absolutely. Well, Amber, thanks so much. It’s been very informative and helpful. I’ve learned some things and congrats again on the award and also the NASA project and all the cool things you all are doing over at Equalize Digital.

Amber Hinds (00:33:55) – Thank you.