Post Status Happiness Hour Session Twenty Two

Transcript ↓

In this episode of the Post Status Happiness Hour, host Michelle Frechette interviews Gen Herres from Easy A11y Guide to discuss web accessibility. Jen shares her background as a developer and her journey in understanding and implementing accessibility standards. She emphasizes the importance of simplifying complex accessibility concepts for clients and offers strategies for agencies to sell accessibility services. Jen introduces a five-day challenge to help agencies qualify potential clients and sell their first accessibility package. The conversation highlights the significance of making websites accessible to a broader audience and the various reasons why accessibility is essential for businesses.

Top Takeaways:

• Accessibility Doesn’t Have to Be Scary:  Many people find web accessibility intimidating, but experts like Gen Herres help simplify the process. There are resources available to make accessibility more approachable.
• Planning for Accessibility Takes Time: Implementing accessibility properly requires time for strategy, testing, and client approvals. Starting now helps businesses integrate it seamlessly into their workflow instead of rushing later.
• Accessibility Can Help Generate More Revenue: Learning how to sell accessibility services effectively can help web professionals increase their income by offering more value to clients.

Mentioned In The Show:

• Easy A11y Guide
• WCAG
• Mozilla
• 17 Hats
• Equalize Digital
• Wacom
• New York E-Z Pass 
• Apple VoiceOver
• Deque
• JAWS
• Cloudflare
• WPAccessibility.day
• Cami MacNamara
• 5-Day Accessibility Selling Challenge
• Agency Accessibility System
• Guidebook for Accessibility at Your Agency

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

• Gen Herres (Web Accessibility Specialist, Easy A11y Guide)
• 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 00:00:03  All right. And we’re live with the Post Status Happiness Hour. Here it is Wednesday, March 19th at 4:00 pm on the eastern coast of in New York of the United States. because we are actually both on the East Coast as well. And my guest today is Gen Herres from Easy Accessibility Guide. Do you say ally guide or accessibility guide? 

Gen Herres: Yes, I say Ally Guide. 

Michelle Frechette: Okay. I’ve heard both like people say both ways, so I wasn’t sure how you say it. So Easy Ally Guide. Which is actually easier to say than the whole word accessibility. Which is probably why that nomenclature exists to begin with. 

Gen Herres 00:00:42  That really is why, yes.

Michelle Frechette 00:00:44  It’s good to have you here, Gen. Why don’t you give us a quick and. Yeah, quick introduction to who you are and you know where you are and what you do and you know all those good things. 

Gen Herres 00:00:55  Yeah. So I’m Gen Herres I am in the United States in Maryland, a little bit outside of Baltimore and D.C. I generally avoid the cities because parking in cities is a nightmare.

Michelle Frechette 00:01:10  So for sure.

Gen Herres 00:01:12  Parking in Rochester generally isn’t too bad given that Rochester is less of a big city.

Michelle Frechette 00:01:18  True. But it’s even that has its like challenges now and then. It depends. Usually you can find a parking place, but you must pay for it. So yeah. Yeah, that’s.

Gen Herres 00:01:28  That’s the hard part. Unless there’s a Wegmans nearby.

Michelle Frechette 00:01:31  Yeah, exactly. Well, so you have a company called Easy Ally Guide. And what do you do there?

Gen Herres 00:01:39  So I help agencies with accessibility. I’ve found in my own work with accessibility it was both wide and deep. So there was there was just so much to learn when I got started. Fortunately, I my background is as a developer. My degree is computer science, so I have a lot of experience with rabbit holes and going down rabbit holes. Yeah, I used to work at Boeing on some government projects, and they literally handed me 45 page government specification documents and said, good luck with that situation.

Michelle Frechette 00:02:22  Hahaha! Whoops.

Gen Herres 00:02:24  And at one point, I literally had to distill all of that down into specific requirements. And then I had to actually build things to that. So I, I have a lot of experience with here’s a pile of information. Good luck.

Michelle Frechette 00:02:42  Yeah.

Gen Herres 00:02:43  So that that has helped me a lot with so many things when it comes to WordPress because.

Michelle Frechette 00:02:49  Yeah I can imagine.

Gen Herres 00:02:50  You know, even the the WordPress developer docs, they have improved a lot over the years. I will absolutely give them a lot of credit for that. But when I first started, those things were were just good luck.

Michelle Frechette 00:03:07  Right?

Gen Herres 00:03:08  And yeah, over. For example, Mozilla has some amazing, amazing developer docs. Unfortunately, you probably need a college degree to read most of them.

Michelle Frechette 00:03:22  That’s not helpful.

Gen Herres 00:03:24  And I’m not talking a college English degree. I mean, like a technical degree. So if you have various different engineering backgrounds or whatnot, then then you’ve dealt with a lot of that kind of documentation before. But for so many people who don’t have that background, they look at those documents and they’re just like, I am completely and totally overwhelmed.

Michelle Frechette 00:03:50  Yeah.

Gen Herres 00:03:51  And then I got into, of course, the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, or WCAG, which are maintained by W3C. And I have read PhD papers which were less intimidating than some of those documents. Yeah, they they are really up there on the reading level. So I, I kept looking around and I could make it through a lot of this stuff. But when I talk to other people, they were like, I am so far over my head I don’t even know which direction is up anymore.

Michelle Frechette 00:04:28  Right. Yeah.

Gen Herres 00:04:29  And I was like, okay, so we really need to start breaking a lot of this stuff down into into digestible things that.

Michelle Frechette 00:04:39  Exactly.

Gen Herres 00:04:40  Because, you know, how much of website work gets done by a virtual assistant for example. You know, they, they need something that they can, you know, a set of instructions that they can follow and they can put content in. They need a set of instructions, you know, a checklist that they can follow to go. Okay. Did did I do it right? Okay. I checked all the boxes. All right. Publish.

Michelle Frechette 00:05:05  Yeah, exactly.

Gen Herres 00:05:07  But, you know, we need things that, like regular people can, can handle and deal with. And so that’s a lot of what I try and do is get this stuff distilled down into simpler. One of the recent challenges I had was someone asked me to explain the difference between, legal compliance and WCAG conformance, because you’ve heard it. Everyone’s confused by that.

Michelle Frechette 00:05:39  Yes absolutely.

Gen Herres 00:05:41  So they asked they’d heard 101 different explanations, and they’re like, can you explain to me like I’m five years old?

Michelle Frechette 00:05:48  Yeah.

Gen Herres 00:05:49  I’m like, well, I’m gonna have to think about that. So I walk the dog and I do most of my my good thinking when I walk the dog. And I came up with a jar of marbles. And so if you think about a business there’s lots of different parts to it. You know there’s that one company called 17 Hats to represent all the different hats that a business owner wears.

Gen Herres 00:06:16  And you kind of think of those as a whole bunch of marbles inside a jar, because the business has employees and a website and social and direct email and their finances and how they treat customers and their business, their actual physical building, and who cleans it and shakes out the trash and all of the little bits and pieces within their business. Right? So when it comes to a whole business, there’s a whole set of laws, you know, many different laws apply to their business State, Local, Federal. All sorts of different things. There’s the tax laws and they they’ve got so many bits of compliance that the entire business has to follow. But when we’re talking to them we’re generally just talking about their website, maybe their transactional email, their marketing email. But we’re only talking about a couple parts. The reality is like we’re dealing with a couple marbles in that whole jar. So that whole jar is the business’s compliance. And we can’t really say anything about the whole jar because we only have a couple of the marbles that are actually we even know anything about.

Gen Herres 00:07:35  We don’t even know about most of the rest of the marbles in there. So we can take out, you know, our marble, and we can look at it and we can say, oh, good, it’s it’s green. It’s supposed to be green. It has, you know, these properties about it. We can look into those and we can we can make some some really good statements about this one marble. But regardless of all the statements about this one marble, we still know nothing about the whole jar.

Michelle Frechette 00:08:04  Right.

Gen Herres 00:08:04  So the whole jar is the business compliance. And the conformance to WCAG is just measuring that one marble.

Michelle Frechette 00:08:16  Okay.

Gen Herres 00:08:16  So that has been going over very well. 

Michelle Frechette 00:08:17 Yeah that makes it that makes it much more understandable for sure. Yeah. It makes a lot more understandable. So when we talk about accessibility, like when I talk about building accessibility to my own website, I’ve already bought into what accessibility is. I already understand that I should have a more accessible website for a number of reasons, right? First and foremost should be that more people can access and use my website.

Michelle Frechette 00:08:47  But there’s also, SEO purposes, right? It aids in SEO. There’s also conforming. Like you said, there’s laws that are required in different places of the world. And so there’s lots of different reasons that accessibility is important to me as somebody who builds websites for other people. Sometimes the challenge is making that person or that business understand why accessibility is important, why we need to do it, and why it costs money to do those things. It’s not just free for somebody to go, hey, I’m just going to come real quick. Make your website accessible. Right? So, so what do you tell people and what I mean? I’m, I’m absolutely leading you up to and like, what is a team you put in the putting the ball on the tee so you can hit it right off into the fairway. I’m not a golfer. I’m making stuff up as I go. But, how do you help agencies and, you know, even an agency of one versus even an agency of 100 people, how do you help them be able to sell accessibility to their customers?

Gen Herres 00:09:58  So the first thing I like to do is I like to not mention accessibility to clients. I don’t start with it because it’s a confusing legal thing, and we don’t need to start clients with confusing legal stuff. I like to start clients with okay. You want a website? Why do you want a website? Is it a vanity project? Or is it so that you can connect with people you don’t know?

Michelle Frechette 00:10:30  Yeah for sure.

Gen Herres 00:10:31  You know which which one is it. Now I mean if it’s truly nothing but a vanity project then we’re off in the land of vanity project and that’s where we’re going. But yeah the vast majority say it’s that they can connect with people they don’t know.

Michelle Frechette 00:10:48  Right.

Gen Herres 00:10:49  Okay, great. So you’re dealing with a whole lot of people and you really don’t know much about them. Do you, do you know where they physically are? Are they at home? Could they be out on, walks? Could they be out at transit? Could they be sitting in waiting rooms at appointments? Could they be in a cafe? You don’t know where they are, right?

Michelle Frechette 00:11:12  No, of course not.

Gen Herres 00:11:13  So the first thing is, is we don’t know where people are at when they come across our website. So I like to start people with just starting with, with some really basic questions right off the bat. Like do you want commuters to be able to use your website? I’m here in, you know, kind of the general metro area between Baltimore and D.C. so there’s a lot of commuters. They probably drive or possibly walk to a metro area and then they commute. Okay. You basically have a captive audience for somewhere between ten, twenty plus minutes. They’re going to it’s it’s easy to keep them where they’re at. It’s also easy to lose them. So the first question I like to hit is do you want commuters to be able to use your website.

Michelle Frechette 00:12:11  Okay. And of course they said yes.

Gen Herres 00:12:13  Of course they say yes. So this means that we’re dealing with a phone and or a tablet. It also means that we have varying levels of internet connection stability. 

Michelle Frechette: Sure. 

Gen Herres: This might not be a fast internet connection.

Gen Herres 00:12:32  The next thing is we have varying light levels. Like when you’re on a commuter train, the cloud could appear. The cloud could disappear. It could be bright, sunny daylight and you’re like, wow, I can barely read anything on this phone. Or it could be dark and at night. So you’ve got very unknown light levels. So contrast and really clear text and really being able to see what the heck is a link and a button and where I’m supposed to actually be clicking.

Michelle Frechette 00:13:05  Right.

Gen Herres 00:13:05  Really important. Like I’ve, I’ve been to some websites and I’m like okay every heading on this website is link blue but none of oh wait this one clicks.

Michelle Frechette 00:13:20  What if it’s blue. It should click and it does. Yeah.

Gen Herres 00:13:25  Yeah exactly. So just just trying to be easy to use. Then I bring up you know okay. So we don’t know where these people are. Do we know how they are? Not really. Do we know if they are having a bad allergy day?

Michelle Frechette 00:13:44  Right.

Gen Herres 00:13:45  If they have a screaming toddler on their hip?

Michelle Frechette 00:13:51  I fell and broke their arm last week?

Gen Herres 00:13:53  If, if they’re there, you know, if their carpal tunnel is acting up and they have their wrist in a splint.

Michelle Frechette 00:14:00  Sure.

Gen Herres 00:14:02  We don’t know how they are. So we want to try and make sure that this is as easy to use. So we want to have like big tap targets because that’s great for both the phone, especially if you’re on like a moving metro. You’re like okay.

Michelle Frechette 00:14:16  Oh sure. 

Gen Herres 00:14:21  And the other one is, you know, you, I have a friend with carpal tunnel. I’m sure you know people with carpal tunnel. Sometimes his his hand is a brace, and he’s still attempting to use a mouse. And the targeting on this mouse is less than ideal.

Michelle Frechette 00:14:40  Right. And let’s not forget the fact that, like what. I’m using my phone, my finger is not pinpoint perfect. So I’m no I’m using and I don’t have like terribly large fingertips. And yet it’s still hard to. And sometimes they’re having to pinch open just to be able to click a link. So I understand exactly what you’re saying.

Gen Herres 00:15:02  Yeah. So I, I, I start by trying to engage clients and, and get them talking, get them thinking, okay, I’m, I’m not dealing with a perfect person. They’re probably not having a perfect day, and they’re also probably not in a perfect situation. So I’m either going to reach them where they happen to be or I’m going to lose them.

Michelle Frechette 00:15:32  Yeah.

Gen Herres 00:15:32  And so I usually start from this angle and deal with, you know, talking about real people, people that are strangers, people that we don’t know what what kinds of situations they’re in because that makes them a lot of clients think, oh, oh yeah, oh, there was that that time I was so frustrated with that site. Oh yeah, there was that app. I couldn’t figure out how to get that stupid thing to work, and I just, I just got rid of it.

Michelle Frechette 00:16:06  So you mean accessibility is not just for blind people and people with low vision? Is that what I’m hearing?

Gen Herres 00:16:12  That’s exactly what I’m saying. So I really try to tie it into goals. And then I like to actually write out these, these people and situations as specific goals. So now they have something in front of them that they’re agreeing to. And they also understand how we got there, how we got to this person that they’re agreeing to. And now I’ll, I’ll frequently even encourage them to name these people so that they start to actually get a connection or, you know, do they have a friend or relative who’s like this and we put their name right on it to try and really get a connection to. So it’s no longer just random strangers. It’s now. You know, someone we actually are starting to to get emotionally committed to.

Michelle Frechette 00:17:03  My cousin Carl and grandma and whoever. Yeah.

Gen Herres 00:17:08  So once once we get there, then I bring in. So there’s, there’s some great news. We have these industry standards called WCAG. And that doesn’t need to make a lot of sense to you because you don’t understand the details of HTML or CSS, but you probably heard those words before.

Michelle Frechette 00:17:29  Of course.

Gen Herres 00:17:30  Those are standards maintained by the same organization to big international organization. They maintain a whole bunch of standards. So we’re just going to add in these really, user standards with those when we do builds. And so we get sign off on who we’re actually talking to, who we’re connecting with, and then we get to sign off on, you know, that we’re going to follow these standards. And then that helps you down the line if they want to push back. Because. So you don’t want cousin Carl to be able to use the website?

Michelle Frechette 00:18:09  Right.

Gen Herres 00:18:09  You’re you’re pushing back on this. And this is how we were making sure that cousin Carl could use the website. So now you don’t want him to? Now like, oh no, no, wait, we do so right.

Michelle Frechette 00:18:24  Exactly.

Gen Herres 00:18:25  When you start tying it into something like that, I find that there’s just so much less resistance because they see why.

Michelle Frechette 00:18:34  Right. Yeah. No, that makes perfect sense. And so you have created tools to help agencies be able to sell accessibility to their customers. So should I bring that up? Should I bring that up on the screen now are you ready to show that?

Gen Herres 00:18:53  Yes. Go ahead.

Michelle Frechette 00:18:54  Okay. So let me add that and I’m going to take the logo off so we can see your whole screen okay. Go for it.

Gen Herres 00:19:03  So what I’ve got going on because when I’ve talked to a lot of agencies they’re like, yes, I want to do accessibility, but I need it’s not an urgent need because I haven’t sold it to anyone yet. And so I asked them, well, why haven’t you sold it? Well, because I don’t know how to sell it. I guess I need more information. I guess I need something, but I’m not quite sure what I need.

Michelle Frechette 00:19:32  Yeah.

Gen Herres 00:19:34  So after chatting with several of them, they suggested that I put together a five day challenge. So, like, can you, can you maybe put it into a sprint so I can, like, do it?

Michelle Frechette 00:19:44  That makes sense. Yeah.

Gen Herres 00:19:46  So basically this this involves the things I’ve already been using with other clients. And you know, I’ve got one of the testimonials here. Someone they came to me because they had an incoming lead with no specific budget who needed accessibility. This one happened to be tied to a local state or local government. So it was a small local government in the US that falls under ADA title two, which means wcaG 2.1 level double A. You don’t have to understand all of that. It basically means there’s a specific set of standards that they have to follow.

Michelle Frechette 00:20:26  Okay.

Gen Herres 00:20:28  And but the organization didn’t have any budget specified. They weren’t sure. And so we got them talking. And before we went into the call, we discussed, you know what, what are the agency’s goals. And so it was either to sell a starting package or to sell a monthly retainer. Those were the two goals that the agency had. They wanted to sell one of those two because that would make sense for them.

Michelle Frechette 00:20:59  Sure.

Gen Herres 00:21:00  So we went in and we talked to the organization. And what do you need to see from your investment? And they said, well, we needed to see some kind of improvement each month in order to justify the spend. So the monthly retainer was going to be the direction we wanted it to go. So that way they can get a report each month saying, look, we made these changes so they had something to show for the money. And so we worked through it, got through the call, they were happy and we got through and got the contract.

Michelle Frechette 00:21:37  Nice, nice.

Gen Herres 00:21:40  But I mean, they originally came to me and they didn’t know they were like, I, I don’t even know what I’m supposed to do with this.

Michelle Frechette 00:21:48  Right, right. Like, you have this lead. So you have this five day challenge?

Gen Herres 00:21:56  Yes. Sell your first accessibility package. Or if you’ve already sold one, you can sell more of them.

Michelle Frechette 00:22:02  That’s right. It gives you some tools. Right. So you have a better understanding of how to make that happen.

Gen Herres 00:22:07  So the the first day on Monday we will start by learning how to qualify people. And so we’re going to go through a simple qualification system. And this is a system that I mean I’ve had several virtual assistants learn this in ten minutes flat is not complicated. This is no fancy tools needed.

Michelle Frechette 00:22:30  Nice.

Gen Herres 00:22:31  So it’s just we just get two. Two numerical scores, and then we just look those up in a table, and that’s the answers.

Michelle Frechette 00:22:40  Nice.

Gen Herres 00:22:41  So we do the quick scoring and then we’ll know okay. What’s going on with this client. How good, bad or ugly is the website currently. And then how much risk does this organization have.

Michelle Frechette 00:22:58  Okay.

Gen Herres 00:22:59  So then you can put those two together to understand the picture of accessibility for them. Are we dealing with high risk and a poor score? In which case okay we we really want to get on this. Or are we dealing with a good score and low risk?

Gen Herres 00:23:19  In which case we’re probably going to move on to the next one.

Michelle Frechette 00:23:22  Gotcha.

Gen Herres 00:23:24  And then we get into the specific goals and really going through the questions and the conversation and the follow up questions with clients, because questions are so powerful for connecting with people.

Michelle Frechette 00:23:40  Absolutely.

Gen Herres 00:23:43  So we go through that and we get specific targets, then set up for what we want to sell to these people and start putting together the plan of which clients going to get what approach. And then we get into the actual what’s going to go into an outreach email if we’re outreaching to existing clients or what we’re going to put into a reply email for if we have an incoming lead, what are we going to send them. And so I’ve got actual actual emails that I’ve sent to people that have converted.

Michelle Frechette 00:24:22  Nice.

Gen Herres 00:24:24  And then we’re going to put together kind of the the basic line items related to accessibility for the quote. Because I’m not going to give you the entire quote because I don’t know what other service bundle you’re going to tie this in with. There’s so many different services that people can be offering in addition. So I just get some of the specifics related to accessibility and also how to price out your first accessibility thing. Because a lot of them are like I haven’t, I’ve avoided even quoting it because I don’t even know what to write in this.

Michelle Frechette 00:25:03  Yeah, yeah. Because it depends on how much time it might take. And it depends on your level of ability and the needs. Yeah I can imagine.

Gen Herres 00:25:13  So I go into a few different pricing options to include the extra costs into your quote.

Michelle Frechette 00:25:20  Nice.

Gen Herres 00:25:20  And what those costs are and how to estimate them.

Michelle Frechette 00:25:24  Yeah.

Gen Herres 00:25:25  And then yeah. Go ahead.

Michelle Frechette 00:25:28  Is it easier to build it into a new build then to try to go to somebody who’s already got their website and convince them that they need some more work to make it accessible?

Gen Herres 00:25:38  It really depends on the customer. So for example, I have one customer and we’ve been doing, a bit of work on their site because it kind of finally came to a head that they’ve just been having more glitches and more issues, because it was a custom theme that I inherited from another developer, and I’ve been working on it, cleaning sections out of it over time. But we finally hit the point. They were like, okay, we’re we’re going to give you the budget. Just just go fix this thing. Fix it. Finally, make it less painful.

Michelle Frechette 00:26:26  Exactly.

Gen Herres 00:26:27  So as part of that, we’re also improving the accessibility on it because we have the go ahead to do that. But a lot of times that’s that’s kind of what it is, is there’s some sort of pain point. So it could be that conversions aren’t going well in a site. So you may tie in accessibility with a conversion optimization. Because those frequently go hand in hand. I remember, Equalize Digital had done a conversion optimization on their process for their free downloads, and they had found a huge, huge return on that conversion optimization. And part of it was ensuring that the form was totally accessible and also simple. And so they, they’d done some testing. I just recently redid an e-commerce site that was, again, an old site that had come to a frustration point and so completely new build onto a new platform, and their sales were up about 20% out the door. And for e-commerce that’s that’s important you know.

Michelle Frechette 00:27:40  Yeah for sure.

Gen Herres 00:27:41  Easier, an easier more accessible checkout and probably more instantly apparent to the customer was their complaints just vanished. They used to be fielding a couple of calls or emails a day from customers just having difficulty. And now they have like maybe one a week.

Michelle Frechette 00:28:08  Oh wow. That’s quite a difference.

Gen Herres 00:28:10  That’s that’s a huge difference for them. They’re like.

Michelle Frechette 00:28:12  Yeah.

Gen Herres 00:28:13  And the fulfillment got got streamlined a lot on the other end. So a lot of times you can you can tie this in. So if you have a new lead coming in and you’re probably going to be doing a bit of work on the website any way you can tie it in with that. If you have an existing client who’s got kind of a site that hasn’t been done anything in like five years, it’s frequently time for a refresh anyway.

Michelle Frechette 00:28:36  Yeah. So accessibility is not a set it and forget it. It’s something you need to tend to like a garden, right? You need to keep going back and double checking. And every blog post, every page you publish requires more attention to make sure that you’re staying at the level of accessibility that you should and want to be at. So this class that you have, I see that you’ve actually reduced the price to $87 for a five day class. That’s pretty darn good. It starts next week. It starts on Monday.

Gen Herres 00:29:09  It does. It starts on Monday. Yeah.

Michelle Frechette 00:29:10  And it’s a live class. You’re not selling somebody videos you’ve already created and it’s hands off. What if somebody can’t make those times? So it’s like 1:00 eastern. What if somebody’s just not able to make those times work? Will you be doing this again? Is there another way for them to access this information?

Gen Herres 00:29:28  Yes. So, it will be a live zoom call. And then after the zoom call, everyone who’s registered for the class will get the zoom recording.

Michelle Frechette 00:29:37  So if they can’t make it a day or whatever, they still will get the recording and they can do the work.

Gen Herres 00:29:42  Exactly.

Michelle Frechette 00:29:43  Perfect. And you still have spaces left for next week?

Gen Herres 00:29:46  I do, I still have I have some spots left.

Michelle Frechette 00:29:49  Okay, good. because it wouldn’t make sense to be telling everybody about it if you’re like. But it’s all filled up.

Gen Herres 00:29:56  It is not yet full. No, we still have a few spots.

Michelle Frechette 00:29:59  Nice. Now, you and I were on a different call this morning, and I see the tab open on your browser. Were you showing me some.

Gen Herres: Hahaha. 

Michelle Frechette: You were showing me someone. You want.

Gen Herres 00:30:10  This tab.

Michelle Frechette 00:30:10  I want you to show us this because I was really intrigued by this. This morning when you showed us how you’re going to use this and to train people and how it actually is so quick and easy to give yourself an idea of what level of remediation, let’s say, you need to do to make your site more accessible. So can you walk us through this really cool thing that you built?

Gen Herres 00:30:32  Yes. So I, I love spreadsheets. Let’s let’s just be honest. I have a personal attachment to them.

Michelle Frechette 00:30:41  I mean, don’t most developers like things that are nice and neat and organized like that? So I think a lot of you’re barking up the right alley here, I think.

Gen Herres 00:30:50  So I will try and keep my mouse relatively still. It’s a little tricky because I, I use a, pen, a little pointing device on a 16 inch wide Wacom tablet as my mouse because I have some hand issues. So yes.

Michelle Frechette 00:31:11  Nice.

Gen Herres 00:31:13  But that means that, I actually have extremely precise mousing because of this. And it can also just be really easy to bounce my mouse around a lot.

Michelle Frechette 00:31:26  Oh, I can imagine.

Gen Herres 00:31:29  Because it’s a pen. It’s a pen. I can just wiggle it.

Michelle Frechette 00:31:31  I love that actually. And I want details about that later because it’s not easy to use your mouse for something. So anyway, so you have obviously your website because yes, you are you meets all the criteria. Right? Because you work on that and you make sure it is that way. But let’s pretend that a site isn’t let’s just let’s not use any of my sites, because I don’t want to feel that at the end of the day, but let’s just call it like ABC site and yeah, make some stuff up about it.

Gen Herres 00:31:59  Yes. Well, well, we’ll just, you know what? You you live in New York, so you probably have an E-ZPass .

Michelle Frechette 00:32:06  I do.

Gen Herres 00:32:08  So we can beat up the New York E-ZPass  site.

Michelle Frechette 00:32:11  Okay, I like that.

Gen Herres 00:32:13  Because I routinely beat up the New York E-ZPass  site because it’s so bad.

Michelle Frechette 00:32:19  It really is. And and I just want to, you know, to to caveat that with, I am absolutely willing to do the work on my own sites. I just don’t want to, go down that rabbit hole on this live stream and feel terrible about myself at the end of an hour, so. So please continue.

Gen Herres 00:32:35  So we’re going to use the New York E-ZPass site, because they absolutely fall under the ADA title two legislation. And this website. It’s not even mobile responsive.

Michelle Frechette 00:32:49  No it’s terrible.

Gen Herres 00:32:49  This thing’s a train wreck. You’ve you’ve probably visited it and been like.

Michelle Frechette 00:32:54  I have an account there. So yes, I have on more than one occasion.

Gen Herres 00:32:59  So, we start with the lightning audit, and I also have, videos.

Gen Herres 00:33:03  If you search the top of my site, I’ve got a cute little search, and you can search for the lightning audit on here.

Michelle Frechette 00:33:10  Nice.

Gen Herres 00:33:12  So the first thing is we’re going to look for an accessibility statement. Now, normally I just do a, you know, command F and look for the word accessibility because that’s the fastest way to do it. I can assure you it’s not here.

Michelle Frechette 00:33:26  They have a fishing policy and a privacy policy, but they have nothing about accessibility.

Gen Herres 00:33:34   Correct. So we’ll just drop in that. This is the E-Z Pass website. And so the the first thing is going to be that, that that’s a no. Then we’re going to check for a skip to content link. This is one of the easy checks. So you just click up here at the top and put your cursor here. And then all you do is just hit the tab key. And the very first thing I have arrived at is the home button. That is not a skip to content link. So we are going to say no because there was no skip to content found.

Michelle Frechette 00:34:13  Correct.

Gen Herres 00:34:15  Is it free from autoplay and continuous animation? That one is actually a yes. I mean.

Michelle Frechette 00:34:21  Yeah, probably only because they didn’t know how to do it.

Gen Herres 00:34:25  Quite likely. So the next thing is we’re going to check for focus state. And so the browser by default has a blue and white focus state. And it looks like they haven’t actually modified that. So wow that roads and travel is actually a link.

Michelle Frechette 00:34:48  I would not have even noticed it had it not been, you know showing up the way it is now because the contrast on that is absolutely abysmal.

Gen Herres 00:35:00  Yes. So but here when we get to these buttons, We somehow have lost the blue and white border, so it’s not really doing great on the contrast.

Michelle Frechette 00:35:12  Yeah. So then it’s all the content to the bottom.

Gen Herres 00:35:17  Oh no it doesn’t. Then we go to the bottom. Then we’re going to come up to these, this row of these three images here at the bottom. So we went down and then we went up. And then we go down to the very footer.

Michelle Frechette 00:35:35  And now we actually tried to mimic what it’s come to. It’s mimicking what it’s like to drive in New York State. You’re all over the place without getting anything done.

Gen Herres 00:35:46  Now, now we’re in the, in the header where it’s got the App Store links.

Michelle Frechette 00:35:51  Yeah. Holy cow.

Gen Herres 00:35:54  Now we’re going to pop to this this Queens and Bronx resident plan eligibility.

Michelle Frechette 00:36:04  Oh. It’s terrible.

Gen Herres 00:36:06  And now we’re. Yeah. So this this really goes goes in a lot of places.

Michelle Frechette 00:36:10  Yeah.

Gen Herres 00:36:11  So I’m going to give it a no on the good focus state because in some places it was but not all of the places.

Michelle Frechette 00:36:19  Correct. Yeah.

Gen Herres 00:36:22  So does the main menu work with the keyboard? So as far as I can tell the main menu did actually work with the keyboard.

Michelle Frechette 00:36:30  As that’s hitting the tab key? 

Gen Herres 00:36:33  Yes. We we were able to visit everything in the main menu.

Michelle Frechette 00:36:38   Nice. Okay.

Gen Herres 00:36:38  Not it the right order. But we got there.

Michelle Frechette 00:36:40  But they were there. Yes.

Gen Herres 00:36:41  Yes. Is the color contrast good?

Michelle Frechette 00:36:44  No.

Gen Herres 00:36:45  As we noticed, there are several color contrast issues. 

Michelle Frechette: Let’s just talk about red on yellow for one.

Gen Herres 00:36:54  The. Well, we have the, the red on yellow. We have the.

Michelle Frechette 00:36:59  Gray on white.

Gen Herres 00:37:00  Light gray on white. We have white on pink.

Michelle Frechette 00:37:04  Yeah.

Gen Herres 00:37:06  There’s a few issues.

Michelle Frechette 00:37:06  It’s a nightmare. Yeah. I’m actually starting to feel better about my sites because they’re not. They’re not 100%, but they’re way better than this.

Gen Herres 00:37:16  It’s better than than New York E-Z Pass.

Michelle Frechette 00:37:19  Yes.

Gen Herres 00:37:20  Then the next one is, are the links and buttons clear? So as we noticed, this purple text for new vehicle is not a link. And the click here to update is a link.

Michelle Frechette 00:37:33  So they’re both purple. Yes.

Gen Herres 00:37:35  They look identical, which means that no,  links and buttons are not obvious.

Michelle Frechette 00:37:41  Yeah.

Gen Herres 00:37:42  So we did all of that and. So now all we do is we just, count up our guesses. We have two.

Michelle Frechette 00:37:56  Two. Okay. And so that’s not good. 

Gen Herres 00:38:00  It automatically will give us a little bit of coloring, I did because I care about colorblind people. I did use blue for a good score because the most common colorblind is red green.

Michelle Frechette 00:38:15  Red green. Yeah.

Gen Herres 00:38:15  Now, in this case, red and green are allowed because it is a secondary indicator.

Michelle Frechette 00:38:22  Right. So now is the primary indicator. Yeah.

Gen Herres 00:38:25  Correct. So it’s okay to use red and green when it’s a secondary indicator. But I just went ahead and colored this blue anyway. And then it’ll go yellow and then orange and then red. So this has actually hit an orange. It’s got a score of two. It means that it’s a serious question. Do you completely rebuild or do you remediate.

Michelle Frechette 00:38:51  Right.

Gen Herres 00:38:52  Now we’ve looked at this site. It would be a complete rebuild.

Michelle Frechette 00:38:55  Oh yes yes yes yes I mean and I realize I’m looking at it through a small window in a window kind of thing, but even the font is small and difficult to read.

Michelle Frechette 00:39:06  It looks very dark, but but it’s so close to itself that it’s still like I like a dark font, but that one, it’s all on top of itself. Like that. Like I’m looking at the word account holders and the all the letters touch in the word holders, like, yeah, there’s, there’s very it’s very difficult to read through. 

Gen Herres 00:39:25 Yes. It’s, it’s a, it’s a very challenging website. So then we can take the same site and we can come here, put an E-Z Pass. And again we are going to evaluate it for everything. Is this website for the public? Well yes. Do they receive revenue from the government? Yes. It’s a division of New York State. Are they health care? No. 

Michelle Frechette 00:39:53  No.

Gen Herres 00:39:55  Are they e-commerce? Yes. You have gone in and paid your bill.

Michelle Frechette 00:39:59  I have.

Gen Herres 00:40:02  Do they get more than 10 million in revenue? Yes. And was their lightning score a three or lower? Absolutely. Yeah. So this gives us a nice red five.

Michelle Frechette 00:40:18  It does. Yeah.

Gen Herres 00:40:20  Saying that yeah this did not go well.

Michelle Frechette 00:40:23  No it did not.

Gen Herres 00:40:25  And so those those two indicators will see that the lightning score was quite poor. And we have a high risk. And so this is a website that urgently needs to be well completely overhauled.

Michelle Frechette 00:40:42  Yeah.

Gen Herres 00:40:44  Yeah. But so that.

Michelle Frechette 00:40:45  That’s probably not a WordPress website either.

Gen Herres 00:40:50  Oh no. This is, this is a custom. I’ve run the inspector. It’s a completely custom thing.

Michelle Frechette 00:40:56  Yeah, I’m not surprised it looks like that. Yeah, it’s pathetic for sure. So these are the kinds of tools. I’m sorry. Go ahead.

Gen Herres 00:41:08  It it is a a study in in what not to do. I have used the the New York E-ZPass site on many a presentation.

Michelle Frechette 00:41:17  Oh, yes. And I have tried to pay my bill on mobile. And let me just tell you how difficult that is. 

Gen Herres: You can’t. 

Michelle Frechette: It’s it’s miserable. You have to get on a laptop or desktop to do it. So the tools that you’re showing us now is part of what you’re going to do in your, in your challenge next week then?

Gen Herres 00:41:33  Exactly. Yes. So you’re going to take your existing clients and you’re going to start scoring them so that you know what is going on with your existing clients. And the best way to learn is by doing. And the best way to learn more is by repeating it several times. That’s, you know, repetition is how we create habits. And then the habit is how we actually, you know, get things done quickly. So by doing this several times you’ll A. have scored your current clients so that you know how they’re doing. And B. you’ll have actually learned the process.

Michelle Frechette 00:42:12  Right.

Gen Herres 00:42:13  I’m a very hands on learner.

Michelle Frechette 00:42:15  Yeah. So we have we do have one comment from Daveden, I think I hope I’m saying your name right. A WordPress website would at least be mobile responsive as opposed to this. Whatever conglomeration of of, errors, the E-Z Pass site is 100% agree with you there.

Gen Herres 00:42:38  Yes. Yeah. So so the very first day is about scoring and profiling and figuring out how how things are doing, how things are. Because then this is what you’re also then going to use when you take in new clients. And so when someone approaches you, you’ll have this system down. You know, for solopreneurs, you’ll be scoring it yourself for larger you’ll have a VA or someone who is, who can just run this scorecard for you. So that you’re all teed up and ready to go.

Michelle Frechette 00:43:18  Nice. Very good. That’s awesome. So after somebody gone through the five day challenge, they’ve learned how to help their customers understand accessibility and sell that to them. You have other services as well don’t you? That they can sign up for that will help. Can you show us that? 

Gen Herres 00:43:40  Yes. So the main thing that I have is the Agency Accessibility System, and that is some tools. And then it is also a regular, twice a month, zoom calls so you can drop in and ask literally any, any random question you want about accessibility.

Gen Herres 00:44:03  If you want me, you know, you can hop in and we’ve, you know, live gone through how to use Apple VoiceOver on the computer. We we’ve gone through it. We’ve we’ve gone through settings. We’ve gone through what’s, you know, the most common settings, how to do the basic stuff, where to get the links to download. You know, the company Deque they have a list of shortcut keys for all of the screen readers.

Michelle Frechette 00:44:33  Oh wow.

Gen Herres 00:44:34  And they have it in a cute little printable document, so you can literally print out your your screen reader guide and have it next to you. For all of us who you know don’t actually live with a screen reader, we we need their handy little cheat sheet sometimes.

Michelle Frechette 00:44:52  I think an interesting exercise to do, and I’ve done this once, and I was mortified by how little like it was to put a screen reader in your browser and let, you close your eyes and let it read your website to you, and you’ll be. First of all, you’ll be astonished at what somebody who is blind, or has low vision or can’t look at their screen for whatever reason or processing it listens to and how it how it reads it to you because it’s so different than taking in visual information. And then if your site hasn’t been built for accessibility, you’ll be mortified by what you hear.

Gen Herres 00:45:35 Yes. I would be terrified what the E-ZPass site would sound like.

Michelle Frechette 00:45:39  Oh my gosh, can you imagine? But like even a site that I worked on before that had ornamental images and didn’t have alt text and the image name was like file 1275 dot whatever it was. Right? that jpeg. And the screen reader reads that and unless you tell it not to, or you put a description in so that it understands, that’s horrifying to listen to because it’s such information you don’t need to process. And I know I’ve listened to some people listen to their screen readers who use that and rely on it, and it’s going so quickly that I can’t process anything that it’s reading to them. And so it’s like you, it really kind of brings home how important accessibility is, especially for people who are using screen readers. But but yeah, clearly for everybody.

Gen Herres 00:46:34  One section I have on my site is the Learn Library, and in here is the I did a audit on the WordPress forms. So the most popular, WordPress forms. So I went ahead and did a so it’s got slides transcript, summary of the presentation, the YouTube video. And we also have a bunch of the links that were presented in here, which have a mountain of data if you just go through these. But one of them is the YouTube recording of a screen reader actually going through it. And I also have the whole YouTube recording, right, right here. But, I went through with Kevin Andrews, who is a blind screen reader user. He lives in DC, and I had him using JAWS, which is his preferred screen reader. And we went through I built out basically just a bunch of default WordPress forms and you get to experience the forms as he does. And so many people said that that was just so illuminating to them. They were like, oh my God, I didn’t realize that. I just created a train wreck.

Michelle Frechette 00:48:01  Yeah, exactly. Or something completely unusable. Right? And that is not what we want on our websites. We want our forms to be usable. We want people to be able to purchase things through our e-commerce. And if we’re not paying attention to accessibility, we’re denying a huge percent of our potential audience the ability to interact and make a purchase. So yeah.

Gen Herres 00:48:26 Yeah. And I remember one of the forms, the every single on a certain form field, literally every single time you entered a character, it read the whole thing out. 

Michelle Frechette: This whole form? 

Gen Herres: So literally it read out that whole field. So the title, of the label for the field and everything you’d written so far on every single character. 

Michelle Frechette 00:48:52  So if it said the name and I typed in M, it would say name M and I would type an I name. I like her name, M I? Oh my goodness, can you imagine how frustrating that would be? Like type fast.

Gen Herres 00:49:06  Well, you get to witness how frustrating it is.

Michelle Frechette 00:49:09  Yeah. Yeah for sure. Absolutely.

Gen Herres 00:49:11  Another one. It started reading out errors for other fields. Fields that, that you weren’t even on while you were trying to enter data on a field. So it was literally reading out errors for other fields. And you’re like.

Michelle Frechette 00:49:27  Wow.

Gen Herres 00:49:29  I got no idea.

Michelle Frechette 00:49:30  yeah. We’ve got a nice comment here that they’ll check the forms test recording after the stream, which is awesome. I, I’m gonna too, because like, this is like, I want to hear it, I want to I want to hear this. I trust you, obviously, but it’s like you got to hear it for yourself to see what a train wreck it was, right? 

Gen Herres 00:49:49  Oh, yes. Yeah. We can kind of we’ve got some, some things here in. So yeah. For example, one, it didn’t have any context for the radio buttons, so it probably just got combo box, radio button checked, pineapple button checked, select bananas combo box.

Michelle Frechette 00:50:12  What does any of that mean? Who knows.

Gen Herres 00:50:15  Well, it wasn’t really on any of the labels for the form groups. So you’re like I.

Michelle Frechette 00:50:22  Yeah for sure. And we only have a few minutes left. So I want to make sure that people understand what they could do, how they can use your, your assets. So first, I would have put up if you’re interested in the five day challenge, you’re going to go to easya11yguide.com/product/selling-challenge. But if you go to easyA11yguide.com all of the things are there. Right at the top banner is join the five day challenge. So you can find that very easily. And then also if you go to Services, was it services?

Gen Herres: It’s agencies.

 Michelle Frechette: Agencies. Thank you. That had that all of the different things like the accessibility system, and accelerator that are there that you can do more. And if people are interested in learning more, there’s a contact form that I’m sure you could tab over to very easily. 

Gen Herres 00:51:21  Yes. Yes, I can in fact use my own website.

Michelle Frechette 00:51:23  I, I had a feeling it would be that that simple for you. But you can hit that, hit up that contact. You can also schedule a 15 minute intro call as I’m seeing there. I love that your, your captura is actually through Cloudflare, so nobody has to try to tell you which Which, boxes have different images in them because several people can’t see the images in those things. And so yeah, it’s important. So if you want to schedule an intro call with Gen, you can go to her contact page. If you want to fill out an inquiry form and send her some information, ask her question. You can do that through there as well. And you know, $87. It’s it would be worth it even if you can’t make every single day because you will get the recordings to be able to go and sign up for the five day challenge next week.

Gen Herres 00:52:12  Yeah.

Michelle Frechette 00:52:12  And when you do that five day challenge again in the future, is this something you plan to bring back again?

Gen Herres 00:52:17  I, I am I right now have it tentatively planned for next happening in June.

Michelle Frechette 00:52:24  Okay. So that’s that would be awesome. So if you’re on vacation next week and you and this is something you really want to do, then it will come back again in just a couple of months. But why wait if you don’t need to, you can you see left. 

Gen Herres 00:52:39  Because for next. When you think about a lot of things, there’s there’s a little bit of time normally required. So you need to kind of get your plan together, send out your things. Sometimes it can take a couple of weeks to get the phone call scheduled, and then to get the contract together and the contract back. And now it’s May when it’s actually signed to start a project in June. If it is going now.

Michelle Frechette 00:53:04  Right, it’s a five day challenge, but it’s an hour a day. So if you can afford an hour a day to move this forward, you can start making more money with your with your customers because you’re able to sell them on the accessibility for their website, which I think is phenomenal. Any last words? That sounds wrong. Last words makes it sound so final. Any final thoughts? How’s that? Any final thoughts today? Gen, before I let you go and I head to dinner.

Gen Herres 00:53:32  Well, just that it doesn’t have to be scary. That’s that’s kind of the big thing that so many people have said is that it’s it’s very large, intimidating and scary. And it doesn’t have to be. Like, there’s, there’s those of us out there who can really help you get through all of this. We’ve gone through the really deep, complex documentation and we can now help you understand how this works. Yeah. Because I’ve I’ve worked with different people and they’re like, okay, I’ve made some progress. Now can you check it again. Yep. The other thing I have in addition to the Agency Accessibility System, I also have an Accelerator which is basically a whole lot of extra access to me. And I literally have and also I work with developers on a developer program and you can reach out to me via the contact form. But yes, I worked with, Calvin Elkin on his plugin and yes, it was a lot of just back and forth. Okay, I got this new section. Okay. Test it. Okay. What markup do we need to change? What do we need to do for the different Aria settings? Because his thing had quite a few Aria needs. So we just went through a lot of different things. And just it was that that back and forth feedback that made the progress so much faster.

Michelle Frechette 00:54:56  Absolutely perfect. Perfect. So yeah. So check it out. Easy A11y Guide. The L’s are ones. So if you’re thinking about it EasyA11yguide.com. Find the the challenge for next week. If you’ve already mastered that, sign up for the accessibility system. and might I add, if you go to WPAccessibility.day, you will also find a lot of talks, from the past. And you can take a look at what’s coming up this October for WP Accessibility Day, where you can just gain a lot of insight on as to why it’s important also. And it’s just a really good resource. I happen to be on the organizing team, so I want to share that as well. As long as we’re talking about accessibility. So, I want to also quickly, before I sign off here next week, Cami MacNamara will be here talking about web designer habits, something she sends out a newsletter every week with some great habits to build your business if you are a web designer. and Mark Andrew says, thank you Gen this is awesome. I definitely interested in the forms recording as well, so thank you for being here. The people who are watching. Gen, thank you so much for spending some time with me today, and I can’t wait to hear how your challenge goes next week. So you’ll have to keep me. Keep me posted on how that goes for you.

Gen Herres 00:56:20  I definitely will.

Michelle Frechette 00:56:22  Thank you so much. And we’ll see everybody next week to talk to Cami and yeah. So enjoy your evening and we’ll talk to you all later.