Press This: Accessibility, Inclusive Design, and Debunking Myths

Welcome to Press This, a podcast that delivers valuable insights and actionable tips for navigating the ever-evolving world of WordPress. 

In this episode, host Brian Gardner and Ryan Bracey, director of web UX at Second Melody, explore accessibility in web design, breaking down what it is and debunking common myths about it.

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Brian Gardner: Hey, everybody. Welcome back to the Press This podcast. I am your host, Brian Gardner, a WordPress advocate at WP Engine. And I’m excited about today’s show. Ryan and I have connected several times, even several years ago. I walked through the block editor to the agency he works for. But I will introduce Ryan Bracey, the director of Web UX at Second Melody, out of New Jersey. Ryan, welcome to the show.

Ryan Bracey: Thanks, Brian. Glad to be here.

Brian Gardner: It’s funny how often people connect in WordPress through various channels. Yes, we all love WordPress, but it sometimes brings specific aspects of web design development or WordPress people together. And in this case, that’s what happened in this particular show. But before we get into the topic of accessibility, could you give us a couple of moments to talk about Second Melody and your involvement there? Maybe even before that, how you got into WordPress to set the table for what we’re going to talk about.

Ryan Bracey: Absolutely. So yeah, as you mentioned, my name is Ryan Bracey. I’m the director of Web and UX at Second Melody. We are a branding studio located in New Jersey. We are fully remote, though, so we are a dispersed team, but our headquarters is in New Jersey.

And what my agency does is everything a brand could need from you come to us; you don’t even have a name yet. We can name you and give you a logo, develop a brand for you, and give you messaging pillars so we can assign a voice to your brand. We will design collateral for you, social media marketing, and then what my team handles is anything web-related. We will do the strategy behind a website. We will design and build that website. So we can meet you as a client anywhere along that map. If you need everything, we can give you everything. If you need some things, we can also provide them to you.

As for how I got into WordPress, I started, much like you, Brian, as a designer. And I still consider myself primarily a designer, even though I’m almost exclusively a developer. But I got into web design, I got into web design. I started researching UI components, how to design things for usability, and how to design things that were easy for my developers to code. And just doing that research, I picked up more code until I eventually started developing sites myself and became a full-on developer.

The agency I was working at was WordPress-based. So, I naturally moved into WordPress, found this whole community, and met people like yourself.

Brian Gardner: In our last episode, I talked with Rich Tabor, who, as we all know, works with Automattic right now. And we made a joke in that conversation, the whole designer and developer thing, right? Because it feels like, I don’t know, like many years ago, those were two different skill sets. And I think now, in the joke we made and that conversation with Rich is in the room full of developers, I’m a designer, in a room full of designers, I’m a developer, and so on.

Ryan Bracey: Yeah, exactly.

Brian Gardner: When you explain sort of your design background, I think, in general, people think design, logos or colors or whatever, but there are all kinds of even specialties within just design alone, usability, UX, accessibility, all this other stuff that we’re going to get into here. I’m excited to have you on the show because you’re not just another person who could put pretty pixels on a page; you do it purposefully and for all kinds of people. And that’s the nuts and bolts of where I want to go. I will use that as a segue because you are part of Second Melody and have some involvement elsewhere. Would you like to talk about that?

Ryan Bracey: I would love to; that was a great segue. So I think you put it perfectly too of saying it’s more about looking pretty, it’s usability, it’s what I’m putting out there functional and which ties in nicely to the organization I’m here for today, WordPress Accessibility Day. I am the lead organizer for the speakers team. So, this year, my responsibility has been coordinating with speakers, rating submissions, and building our schedule.

So, we are a nonprofit organization, and we put on a 24-hour global event once a year dedicated to promoting and learning about website accessibility with a focus on WordPress. So, since we are an international conference, it is a fully remote conference. We run for 24 hours with a session starting each hour on the hour.

We have speakers from all over the world, and they speak in all kinds of disciplines. So we have anything from very advanced developer-focused talks to designer talks to the legality around accessibility today, accessibility for content writers. So, we will try to cover all facets of accessibility and your skill level.

If this is your first time hearing about web accessibility, I’m talking about it now. We will have something for you. If you’re an expert, you’ve worked in it for years. We will also have something for you. And yeah, our mission is to help educate and bring accessibility to the forefront and teach people how to make websites usable for everybody in the world, regardless of their abilities.

Brian Gardner: So we’re going to dive deep into that statement alone because I think there are some myths around accessibility, such as what it is and who it’s for. But I’ll acknowledge one thing: we’ve had Amber Hinds from Equalize Digital. She is involved in the WordPress accessibility movement, does a podcast, and has products.

It probably was about three or four years ago when I started to ask what accessibility is and why it should matter to me. Right. As a product person, I take a lot of responsibility for the things I’ve put out in the wild, and it started, I started to be convicted saying, OK, you know, everything I do, I think looks pretty, and it codes well, and it runs fine and Google page speed. But accessibility is sort of, and I won’t use the word taboo because it doesn’t.

That’s not quite the right word, but it sometimes feels that way where it’s one of those things people don’t want to discuss. Because most don’t understand it, or most don’t want to do the extra work, or it’s not front end or fun in their eyes, which is not true. So, I had Amber at our Build Mode session. And even before that, I asked her to jump on a call and ask her to help me understand accessibility at a very high level.

She gave me access to her Accessibility Checker Pro plugin, which I ran on a couple of sites I was working on, and then ran it through the products I was working on. It was eye-opening because there are various levels of accessibility, but it’s even kind of like the 80-20 rule. You spend 20% of your time to knock off 80% of the existing issues just with some knowledge. And I started, and we’ll talk about this too.

I started first with the accessibility, the contrast checker tool, right? Like text in the background, I obsessed over that and insisted on becoming the contrast checker policy of WordPress. I get frustrated because you see themes that come through on the directory, and I could spot from the screenshots that this stuff isn’t going to pass accessibility. I may try to get on the theme review team at some point. Cause I feel strongly about this.

A lot of stuff makes it that just fails miserably. And so that’s maybe my contribution towards wanting to help with accessibility. But let’s start at the beginning and talk about accessibility 101 for, like, the layperson or the person who wants to understand fundamentally what it is. Can you talk a little bit about what web accessibility is and why it is important?

Ryan Bracey: Yeah. Amber Hinds is one of our board members for Accessibility Day. So that was a suitable plug. So, at its basic level, web accessibility is just the idea that everybody should be able to access information online. Full stop, that’s it. It’s just that you, as a human browsing the internet, should have no issue accessing that information, regardless of your situation if you are a person living with disabilities. So what we try to do is, and you brought up the contrast checker, that is a pretty good place to start. It just ensures that if I have text on a background color, I’m not putting neon green text on a neon yellow background. A person with low vision wouldn’t be able to see that. Nobody would be able to see that.

Brian Gardner: But it looks pretty though. I mean, that’s what matters, right? And that’s what I get. Well, it looks pretty though. It doesn’t matter if it doesn’t pass the checker. I like the way it looks; it is a terrible excuse.

Ryan Bracey: Right? And it’s something we hear often. And then other things, too. So, make sure that the text on that background can be read clearly. I gave an extreme example, but stuff like white on maybe a medium or dark blue you would think would pass as someone who doesn’t have vision issues; I can read it perfectly, OK. I’m way below the requirements if you check that contrast. I’m probably cutting out a large portion of my audience from even being able to read this text.

Also, it’s just things like using UI components that make sense. You’re correctly using them so that if someone is not a sighted user or someone does not browse the web in a typical manner, and I say typically because there is no such thing as a typical user, but what we consider typical is someone using a point and click interfaces like a mouse or a trackpad. If someone has a cognitive disability and they’re navigating with a keyboard. If you’re misusing UI components, it might be impossible for that person to navigate your website. If you’re building your heading structure incorrectly and a blind user comes to your site using a screen reader, they might not be able to read your content in the correct order or quickly navigate around your site.

The same goes for putting a video on your site, and someone with a hearing impairment comes to watch it, but you didn’t include captions or a transcript, so they can’t intake that content. So, all that to say and bring back to that base sentence is that it’s just making sure anyone coming to your site can access the content you’re putting on your website, regardless of their abilities.

Brian Gardner: So one of the things I get another thing I get convicted of is even though it passes the contrast test, this is sort of kind of a tangent, but it’s something I want to point out because I’m guilty of it and I want to defend it still, but I don’t want to be disrespectful or inconsiderate to folks is the use of, I’m a black and white and splash of color kind of guy, but minimalist by nature. so my brain says, I’m going to use pure black #000 on pure white #FFF or vice versa. It’s probably worse with white text on a pure black background. But Sally Goetsch brought it to my attention that there’s this thing called digital eye strain. And that’s where you’re like, well, black and white. I mean, it doesn’t get more contrast than that. But, if you can Google this, and I’ve Googled this and researched this extensively, it’s actually, and not only is there a tiny element of it that kills conversion.

So, digital eye strain is a group of vision-related problems that result from prolonged screen exposure. And some people have just issues seeing that. And so just another quick call out to, you know, design something just simple. Tailwind does a great job of using a sort of dark gray.

But it’s a thing, and it’s out there, and we won’t get into the legal part of it yet, but we’ll talk about that as part of the second half here of the show.

Ryan Bracey: Yeah, and that’s a good call out. We focus so much on low contrast, but you’re 100 % right. There is such a thing as too much contrast as well.

Brian Gardner: Maybe we can spend a few minutes just talking about, like, as a freelancer, as a product builder or an agency owner or anybody building something for somebody else on the web, why should they pay attention or at least, you know, educate themselves a bit and what should they think of and why is accessibility important is kind of what I’m asking.

Ryan Bracey: You’re right about what you said earlier in the podcast. Many people consider it a taboo, so why should I care about this? Why is it going to make it look less pleasant? It’s too much extra work. And then, especially under the lens of a freelancer who might not be charging as much as an agency charges for someone like that, they look at it as a lot of extra work for me, and I already have a tight margin. So why should I spend my time doing this? So I think that’s a great question because you should spend your time doing it. I’ll get into this later, too, but it’s not much extra work. You have to put a little consideration upfront, but once you start figuring out what to do, it’s not that much extra work you have to do.

It’s a moral obligation to ensure you’re not excluding people from your products. It’s, and I like to say it’s the right thing to do to top-line it outside of that. I don’t want to use this as a reason, but it is a big reason. It is possibly one of the more significant motivators for anyone who is a little on the fence about whether they should spend their time or money on this—that it is a legal requirement as well in our country, as well as many other countries around the world to make your site accessible to anyone coming. So, there is a little legal aspect to it, too. Still, I like to focus more on the ethical and moral approach; it is just the right thing to do to make sure whatever you’re putting out in the world can be consumed by anyone coming across it and trying to absorb that information.

On top of that being the right thing to do, it helps your site in many aspects. Having a site that’s accessible doesn’t just make it accessible for users who live with disabilities. It makes it a lot easier for anyone to access. So, I am just returning to my point of using UI components correctly.

Yes, this ensures that anyone using any navigating device, keyboard, mouse, trackpad, or whatever someone’s using can use those inputs. It also makes using those things much easier for anyone visiting your site. It also makes your site easier to hang on to and more easily scanned by search engines. Because if you think about it, Google or any other search engine bots are non-sighted users. So, having the correct markup in your DOM and the correct heading structure makes your pages much easier to read for those bots, increasing your SEO standings. It just, altogether, you are, like I said, doing the right thing. Still, you are also just improving your site’s usability for all of your users and putting a product out that’s not just a better user experience but better for search.

Brian Gardner: I like using the word inclusive because it slightly alters the connotation. And it makes it a little bit less scary for people to hear. And I’m going to tell a story here real quick. I am often naive and stubborn with my thinking; I’m opinionated. It’s easy for me to jump to conclusions and formulate opinions based on whatever. We go to Disney World at least once a year; we’ve been there several times. One of the things that Disney has is the transportation system. And so buses take you from the resorts to the hotels, the parks, and all this other stuff. One of the things that every bus has is space for two motorized vehicles.

The first time I went, we were all excited. We were running short on time. We wanted to get to the park. We got into the line for the Magic Kingdom. At the end of that, as we were getting ready to get onto the bus, a motorized scooter came up instantly, and I got frustrated. Why? Because I knew what that meant. It meant that before anybody got on the bus, the guy getting the driver was going to have to get off. was going to have to lower the bus down. He was going to flip the landing. She was going to have to drive up into the thing. And then they would have to hook her in and do all these things.

And that was going to cost me time. And I got selfish about my time until we got to the park and all got off. Then, she got off and talked to her family. Her granddaughter wrapped her arm around this woman in the wheelchair as they headed to the entrance. She was driving, and the kid was skipping beside her—happy.

And it hit me right then and there. I wondered, my God, how would this person have gotten to Magic Kingdom otherwise? If Disney had made considerations for making their transportation system accessible to all people, in her case, with a disability, she could not walk or get there otherwise. It was one of those mornings where I was just like, OK, like life made more sense to me that day.

It’s not quite the same thing, but imagine someone coming to your site and getting to the bus and not having a way on or to get to, you know, your sales page or Magic Kingdom, for that matter. If there was no vehicle in which that person had a way to get to that point, then you’re not being inclusive. And so, you know, that was several years ago and kind of, you know, fast forward to web accessibility. It’s a slightly different topic, but it’s a similar sentiment.

Ryan Bracey: Yeah, I love that story too because I feel like people think of web accessibility, especially as this new thing came out with the internet a few years ago. But that shows, no, it’s everywhere around us. It’s out in the world. In the same way, you wouldn’t build a house without a front door; you shouldn’t build a website without considering how people will access that site. It’s true. I have always liked hearing stories about accessibility out in the world.

Brian Gardner: Fast forward to five or six years ago, my wife injured herself running, and we had a Disney trip planned, and she was unable to walk. She was on crutches. And that was sort of another reaffirmation that I was like, now we’re going to be those people who held up some other family because she had to get her motorized vehicle onto the bus. And so it came full circle, and it’s the kind of thing that is general.

It is the right thing to do to keep things inclusive for all people. Let’s shift the conversation. You and I discussed last week on our call that there are common myths about accessibility. These are things people think are true but aren’t necessarily true. And in fact, they might be the exact opposite of what they believe it is. So, myth number one, and some of these may sound fun, but they’re very real, and they’ve happened even to me in conversations or projects that I’ve been a part of. Myth number one: people with disabilities are just looking to sue over inaccessible websites. Do you want to talk about that?

Ryan Bracey: Yeah. And this is something I hear often. I work with many large companies, many of which have their internal legal departments. It’s very new to many of these people as well. So they’re coming to us as I’ve just heard about this web accessibility. Have you heard of this? What’s going to happen? Is our site OK? Are we going to get sued? How do we make sure we’re not going to get sued? So it’s always kind of this little frantic call, but I’ve just learned about this. What is this?

What do I have to do? Which I always like to take a step back. As you said, this is a big myth. No one is out to sue you for having an inaccessible website. And that is a big fear people have. If I don’t do this, it’s primarily a legal risk that is the impetus for being accessible or inclusive when you design and build your site.

What it is is that when people with disabilities are giving you feedback on your site, they’re not attacking you. They’re trying to provide constructive input with the overall aim of making your website and the internet as a whole better for everybody. It’s not that people are out there on ambulance-chasing websites and are looking for a lawsuit to file. One of the easiest things you can do on your website, and I tell this to clients too, who may have a site we’ve inherited; our project scope is to create a new website for them. Look at the old site. I’m sure you’ve seen the backend of some old sites you inherited.

Sometimes, it’s not the easiest to work with them. The amount of time you’d have to put into something to get it to a point where you could even start giving proactive help to someone would blow your whole budget. One of the easiest things you can do as a website owner, if you fear you have a site that might be a little inaccessible, is to add a page to your site with a way to contact you that says, we are aware that there may be issues with our site. We are doing our best to make this accessible.

If there’s something we missed or some way we could make this experience better for you, here’s how you can get in touch with us—just that tiny step makes it now a conversation that you can have with a person visiting your site. And then, to bring it to the legal aspect, many courts do see something like that as you are making reasonable strides to try to be accessible. They don’t want to know that you’re writing it off entirely. So, it protects you slightly, especially if you say we are working on something new. We know we might have some issues in the interim, so please get in touch with us. We’ll try to accommodate as best we can in that interim time. And it’s, like I said, great for you. You can have that conversation now with your users. And you get a little bit of protection from that as well.

Brian Gardner: I added an accessibility page to my website. It is what you just described. I’m firmly committed to continuously enhancing the accessibility of my website. As you recommended at the bottom of that page, accessibility is an ever-changing process, and I strive for ongoing improvement to increase accessibility and functionality for all. Should you experience difficulty using this site, I welcome your feedback and invite you to contact me. And so again, if you know, I think half the battle is just the attempt to try to make it accessible and show less ignorance, I guess, in this case. And so, go ahead. Before we get to the next myth, I want to call out because this isn’t on our list of things to discuss, but I was thinking about this as you discussed the first myth.

Ryan Bracey: Yeah. So yeah, that’s perfect.

Brian Gardner: One myth I think of is that people think it will cost me money, and I have to do more work for this client. But you could, I mean, this is a shocker in newsflash, you could offer it as a service where you make people pay for it, whether you learn how to do these things yourself and provide that as an upcharge. You can also work with someone like Amber at Equalize or hire somebody out. And say, Hey, I know this is important. I’m aligned with or partnering with people who are and offer that as a service. Or even if you recommend that they contact those folks indirectly. But it doesn’t have to be a thing that costs you money or means more work to do for the same amount of money. Just bake that into the price for whatever project you’re working on.

Ryan Bracey: Yeah, exactly. And that’s what we do here. We don’t offer it as a line item because we don’t want it to be something that can be crossed off, but it is just baked right into our cost. If you’re getting a website from us, we’re considering accessibility along the way. Our price is adjusted to account for that, and our process adjusts it. And then, as you said, even though we have people we outsource to, if you want a little extra, we have some contacts who are certified under the IAP, and they have them; I’m going to mess up the CPA CC certification. So, if you are someone who is certified in web accessibility, we will put you in touch with a person like that if you want to go that extra mile. But as I said, we build it into all of our processes so that if we’re touching a website for you, it will have accessibility in mind.

Brian Gardner: I love that, and I even love the visual of the idea of crossing it off because if someone sees it as a line item that costs, let’s say 1500 bucks, it would be easy for them to say, I need it to look good I’m going to take this and save some cost, and so I love that you guys at Second Melody do that so let me ask you this Ryan I don’t want my website to be unattractive or hinder the creativity in which my process might be is that a myth or is that fact that people say this

Ryan Bracey: Right? It’s a fact that people say it. The myth, yeah.

Brian Gardner: But the myth is, yeah, inaccessible websites are unattractive. That’s not true.

Ryan Bracey: No, not at all. We both have a creative mindset, and any creative will tell you the same thing, but restraints or limitations make you a better designer. It gives you something to design within it. The worst thing you can do to a designer is give them a blank slate without direction. If you think of accessibility as something else you must consider, it makes it easy. It might take some learning in the beginning, but for someone like me or members of my team who have been doing this for a few years now, you don’t even think about it anymore.

When you’re putting text on a page, check the contrast. You’re finding images. If it’s a non-decorative image, you assign alt text to it. It just becomes second nature. And I’m lucky enough to work at an agency that does the whole gambit of starting with branding all the way through. So even our brand designers consider this at the beginning of the process when choosing a color palette; they ensure the colors work together. They put a page in our brand guidelines that we deliver that shows what combinations work together. They ensure that if they’re choosing fonts, they’re easy to read, which means there’s enough letter spacing between letters to read the words correctly.

If you’re looking at a font with a lowercase l and uppercase i and a number one that all look like the same glyph, maybe we don’t use that font. So you can do many little things initially, and then it becomes second nature. And it doesn’t take away from the appearance of the design. I want to point anyone to my WordPress Accessibility Day website, 2024.wpaccessibility.day. If you look at that website, I think it is very nicely designed and uses a lot of pastel colors, which many people also believe you cannot do with a pastel palette and have an accessible site. I will tell you to look at that site. You will change your mind.

Brian Gardner: You have every right to say this. Pastel colors with white text don’t work. But in this case, it looks striking. If you look at the WordPress Accessibility Day logo, you see it in the market, the market itself, with several pastel colors, from blue to orange to green to pink and purple. Those colors with black or dark text on top even have call-to-action buttons. Cause I think our minds are like, call to action buttons need to be color gradients with white text. And if you were doing this ten years ago, there’d be like text shadow, which is, you know, stuff we all want to forget. Still, I have started to enjoy the idea of, like, a pastel, like a light color button with black text, maybe putting a black border around it to help frame that in so that they can see the contrast against the white, but is a good looking web design.

That leads me to the next half step before we get to the last myth: WordPress now has a contrast checker as part of the block editor. So if you have a background color in a group or a button or a paragraph block, let’s say it is a light gray, and then you try to change the text color to something darker gray but would fail the test.

WordPress puts out a lower note that says, this isn’t accessible. It’s hard to read. You might want to pick a different or darker color or a color that contrasts more with whatever the background color is. And so there’s almost like training wheels. If you’re using WordPress and the block editor, some training wheels will help you avoid what is probably the biggest, the most significant thing people do, which is the contrast thing.

As you mentioned, the other one is the alt text for images. At first, I was like, stuff them with keywords because it’s good for SEO and Google. A friend and I went back and forth about all of this. And we somehow got into, you know, alt text, and I was like, yeah, that’s, you know, pretending I knew what I was talking about. That’s great for accessibility because it helps with SEO. And she’s like, no, it’s way more than that. And here’s what it is. You imagine closing your eyes and going to the museum and saying there’s a painting on the wall. And, like, that’s it.

Ryan Bracey: Yeah, that doesn’t help anybody.

Brian Gardner: And I’m like, OK, yeah, no, that doesn’t help. If you said, cloud, OK, that’s also not helpful, but saying, Chicago skyline with boats, a sun, and a cloud, you suddenly give somebody at least some help—somebody who’s blind and can never really see the picture. You make it more descriptive. And so, even inside my themes and products, I used to say sample image. I’m like, that’s not helpful. You know, a sample image with a Powder logo or something to that effect is at least, you know, a little bit more and almost like a sentence case. Like really, you know, you don’t have to go crazy, but help somebody. Use it not as a keyword-stuffing tool, which can sometimes backfire.

Just imagine yourself trying to imagine what this thing is on the page and close your eyes, and just what do you see? Because that’s what the person on the other end who’s impaired can’t see and needs you to tell them what it is. So, there are two things: contrast on text and background and all text on images. That’s a lot like the immediate failures we see in accessibility. Is that something that you see as true as well?

Ryan Bracey: I always see those things and poor use of heading structure. That’s right? And it’s interesting what you said about alt text, which is right on. Imagine your eyes are closed, and someone has to describe the image to you. That’s the perfect way to go about it. There’s a little more nuance to it. The actual criteria only say you have to define non-decorative images relevant to the content and not explain them within the content. If you have a sample image in your case, but you explain that in the paragraph next to it, you can leave an empty alt tag. You would do this because someone non-sighted would be reading duplicate content.

Meanwhile, for a sighted user, it’s just supplemental. So there is a little nuance to it, but if you need to write alt text for images, that is the perfect way. How would I describe this to someone who has their eyes closed?

Brian Gardner: OK, we both said that you and I are developers in a room full of designers. That being said, myth number three is that accessibility is solely the responsibility of developers.

Ryan Bracey: I often hear this, especially when inheriting sites; you make this accessible? Or if we get to the point of development, you will make this accessible too, right? We’ve already done the work. So, as I mentioned before, our brand designers consider this stuff when creating a brand: they’re looking at colors and fonts.

So, luckily, if it’s a brand we’ve developed in-house, by the time it gets to my team, we don’t even have to consider those things. We know the colors are going to work. We see the font’s going to work. Content writers play a big part in this, too. The guidelines that drive compliance and web accessibility are called the web content accessibility guidelines. Content’s right there in the name.

The whole point of accessibility is creating content that users can access. Well-written, well-organized content will probably get you 85% of the way there. A developer does just those things I mentioned before, ensuring you use interactive elements or UI components correctly. You’re coding them correctly to ensure that if someone comes with a different kind of assistive technology, you’re not excluding that technology. You’re allowing people to interact with the site.

However, things like colors and content can be addressed way early in the process by your content creators and brand creators. Your designer does a lot of work on this. I always say that, as the developer at the end of the line, the amount of work I have to do in accessibility is small because so much has been done before it even gets to me, ideally. As I mentioned, that’s one of the nice things about working in an agency where we all have talked about it and taken this holistic approach to accessibility. Still, it is not the responsibility of just your developer. If that’s how you’re approaching it, you’ll always be playing catch up and trying to fix issues rather than trying to prevent the problems by having that accessibility-minded approach in the first place.

Brian Gardner: So we’ll call them the three Cs. You’ve got content, colors, and code. You don’t want your developer writing content. You don’t want your developer to write or choose colors and all of that. We all, in every case here, share the responsibility. Again, it’s not just a developer thing, as you mentioned. And so that is an excellent way to debunk the myth that it’s just for developers because that’s not true, as we just heard. OK, so with the time that we have left, let’s briefly go into one of the reasons why we’re here. We want to bring accessibility into the hands of everyone at WordPress; whether you’re a user, a developer, a designer, a content producer, or anybody who touches WordPress, accessibility is more accessible to you than you think. We’ll start with that.

Let’s talk about that. Accessibility Say is a 24-hour global event, as you mentioned, dedicated to promoting and learning website accessibility and best practices for WordPress websites. It’s live streaming free from October 9th through 10th. So, by the time this episode airs, that’ll still be several weeks out, with many opportunities to register. Why don’t you talk briefly about Accessibility Day, what folks can expect, maybe, you know, talk about a session or two that either you’re giving or you’re excited about or looking forward to hearing?

Ryan Bracey: Definitely. Yeah, so that’s the perfect lead-in, as Brian. We have registration open right now. It is free to attend. We do a lot of work to ensure we offer this as a free conference. We are a nonprofit organization under the umbrella of a larger nonprofit called Nobility. We volunteer our time as organizers. We do a lot of fundraising, though. We do pay our speakers an honorarium.

All this is to ensure that we provide this event for you for free. As you mentioned, it is 24 hours. It’s a single track. So it’s just one talk right after the other. We have presenters this year from all over the globe. We have people in all corners of the United States, Europe, Asia, Africa, Canada, and South America.

We have people from around the world talking from different perspectives. They will share their experiences working in this field, collaborate, and try to work with clients from their operations. We have a ton of excellent talks this year. I’m excited about it. As I mentioned, I am leading the speaker team. So these are all my children this year of mine, all the speakers we got to choose, and I’ve been talking to and interacting with, and I’m excited for a lot of the talks. Our keynote this year is about the legal landscape of web accessibility. So, as we mentioned, there is a legal aspect to this. Many laws came out in the past year, which are about to come out, especially in Europe, and will have a significant effect.

And I think people are getting a bit tense about what’s going to happen, what’s coming. So we wanted to bring in someone who’s an expert in that. So, our keynote this year is Lainey Feingold. She’s a disability rights lawyer. She started in the early nineties. She has been an advocate for accessibility going back that far. If you’ve ever used an ATM that has braille on the keys, she is one of the people who was instrumental in getting that incorporated.

So she’s been doing this for decades. She’s an expert in this, and her session title is accessibility as a civil right, the digital accessibility legal landscape for the WordPress Community. And she’s just going to talk about existing laws, laws that are coming up, what we can do to prepare for those, what they mean, and how that helps people in the disabled community. So that’s our keynote. I think that’s going to be a fantastic talk. I’m very excited for that one.

Outside of that, we have sessions about anything from content creation to design to development, from intro to accessibility-type beginner things through to advanced coding. We have talks like CSS tiny tricks and how to write code for single-page applications— laying out agile accessibility roadmaps for your team, like a development team. I’m pretty excited about one of our talks, specifically about how to remediate accessibility issues within WordPress.

As WordPress developers, we know it is a system that consists of themes and plugins and custom code and plugin code. So you could get an accessibility failure or warning about a piece of code you didn’t write. So this person will go into how to remediate these issues when you don’t have access to that source code, or it’s coming from a plugin. I’m excited for that one. I think we’re going to have a great keynote. All of our speakers are great this year. Every talk is going to be good. Since we are worldwide, it is 24 hours wherever you listen to this. You can pop in at any time and watch a talk or two. We will release these on our YouTube channel after the event, too. So you can always watch them afterward. And as I’ve mentioned a few times, I think there’s something for everybody here. So, no matter where you are in your journey, whatever you are as an individual, what your occupation is, I think there’s something you can find here that’s useful.

Brian Gardner: I love it, I love it. I’m a music listener throughout the day when I like that. Every once in a while, I try to replace music with just listening to something that is either a podcast or a YouTube video replay of something. In this case, you immerse yourself inside of this content even when it doesn’t require you to take an entire day off to like watch all the things right to say if there’s one or two things that you want to pick from this, you know while you’re taking a bath while you’re in the car while you’re walking in the woods like just you know hit the replay and absorb it that way.

I will say that you had talked about this; Lainey is a disability rights lawyer. She’s not chasing down people who have inaccessible websites. Lainey is being the change. She’s speaking at events like this to help educate those who build for WordPress on what to expect, errors, and things to look out for, as well as how to improve websites.

And so again, debunking that myth, this whole movement is more around making accessibility in education digestible for people who have difficulty understanding it. And so that’s what this event is for. I encourage everyone building or using WordPress to sign up to cherry-pick some talks. And, yeah. So, October 9th, again, is about four weeks away, just a month to the day we’re recording this. So, there’s still time.

Ryan, I appreciate our time here on this call, your efforts at Second Melody to do the things you guys do there, and most importantly, you’re taking additional time to care for and nurture this whole movement and this community. There’s a community of people who are just involved. And so if you know a lot about accessibility or know very little but have a passion for it, maybe you know someone from whom this could benefit.

I encourage you to reach out to Ryan, Amber, or anybody involved to see if there’s a way you can volunteer for next year’s event. It’s some facet of the event. You know, there are sponsorships and ways to volunteer or donate if you have extra money or decide to impact the world. There are ways to donate to this cause. And so, are there any last closing remarks you have here before we sign off?

Ryan Bracey: You just stole it from me. I was going to tell people to come volunteer. It is a fantastic community if you are interested in this and want to get involved. I was lucky enough to find Amber a few years ago through her Meetup talks. Through that, I was introduced to Accessibility Day. And it’s a fantastic community. Everyone’s so warm and welcome. You’ll find this across.

Brian Gardner: Alright, well, go ahead and tell them again. They want to hear it twice.

Ryan Bracey: WordPress is generally the best, but within accessibility, too. It’s a lot of people just trying to help. If you are interested and want to learn more, see the volunteer tab on our website; we are looking for volunteers even for this year’s event. We have all kinds of things you can do. We’re pretty set for this year’s event, but we need people for next year’s event, and we have some post-event tasks. Suppose you want to volunteer to help us get all the information out post-event. That would be fantastic. We’re specifically looking for help translating talks this year. So, if you know someone who can translate or write transcripts or speak a language besides English and you feel like you could help translate, we would love to have you check out the volunteer tab on 2024.wpaccessibility.day.

You can volunteer in many ways; fill out the form. We’ll let you know. As Brian said, we will take donations, too. So, if you have any questions or want to help us, we would love to help. But anyway, you can, we appreciate it.

Brian Gardner: Well, again, I appreciate your time here. I will drop the mic by saying this because I want everyone to know. Accessibility Day is once a year, OK? Accessibility is every day. It isn’t a, get involved once a year sort of thing. There are ways you can get involved throughout the year, through meetups, sponsorships, and even help working and contributing to the WordPress project itself.

Feel free to contact me, Ryan, Amber, and anybody. I certainly will guarantee that people would love to hear from you. So, thank you to everyone listening to this episode of Press This. As a reminder, our podcast at WP Engine here delivers valuable insights and actionable tips for those navigating the ever-evolving world of WordPress. Join me for each episode. I like to bring folks like Ryan from the community to talk about things WordPress people want and those they don’t want to talk about but should hear about. And that’s what we’re here for today.