I found a fantastic blog post by Adobe about accessibility champion Dax Castro’s business CHAX Training and Consulting. I’ve been aware of Dax for about five years now, due to his free tutorials about PDF accessibility via InDesign during the livestreams of the Adobe Max conference. I encourage everybody who makes PDFs that get posted on the web to learn from Dax and his business partner Chad Celius. I have watched and re-watched several of their recorded training videos, and I find them so valuable!
I watched a few of the talks during the previous livestream of WordPress Accessibility Day, and I found them so intriguing that I volunteered to emcee at the October 2024 event. I’ve been approved for a shift, and I have to say I’m pretty excited about the T-Shirt this year.
The T-Shirt says “:focus – It’s a feature, not a bug,” and it is meant to educate content creators that the highlight on elements that happens when one tabs through a webpage are meant to be there, so one should not remove the :focus element from one’s CSS.
I’m planning something big. I’ve made a Wisdom Bot that is trained with the videos I’ve been creating for this blog since 2017. Below is an embedded widget, similar to the Wisdom Bot. Ask it something about accessibility. Try these simple queries: “pdfs,” “accessibility,” “alt text,” “heading”.
I’m planning activities, workshops, and webinars to expand my brand Yolantis Website Mentor.
LLC, created
Membership platform & community hub, purchased
Zoom workspace account, purchased
Speaking engagement secured
See me at the upcoming Web 3 Leader Summit in the Spatial.io metaverse, August 22, 2024. Tickets are free and you can watch from a browser or in a Meta Quest VR headset with Spatial installed.
I came up with a question for Chat GPT: “what are some considerations UX designers can plan for to help people with Multiple Sclerosis (MS) have an easier time with websites? What do users with MS need, in terms of accessible design?”
In the video below, I talk through the various considerations that were listed.
16 minute video recording – starts at :40 second mark
Designing websites with accessibility considerations for individuals with Multiple Sclerosis (MS) involves addressing a range of potential symptoms that could affect their interaction with digital interfaces. MS can cause issues like motor difficulties, visual impairments, cognitive challenges, and fatigue. Here’s an outline of accessibility considerations:
Motor Difficulties
Keyboard accessibility
Large clickable areas
Voice control
Sticky keys
Visual Impairments
High contrast modes
Scalable text
Colorblind-friendly design
Accessible images
Cognitive Challenges
Simplified navigation
Plain language
Content chunking
Consistent layout
Error prevention
Fatigue Management
Task simplification
Save progress
Time extensions
Auto-save
General Usability
Responsive design
Minimal use of moving or flashing content
Accessible multimedia (videos and audio)
Feedback and Confirmation
Clear feedback
Confirmation messages
I’ve learned over the years that UX designers tend to say that if we make a digital product more accessible, it improves general usability for everyone.
There is a common element to the content I receive for posting on the web, no matter where I work. When I review first drafts of web pages, I often see the overuse of “click here” or “here” as link text. The use of “click here” as link text is a common practice that has persisted since the birth of the world wide web for several reasons, despite its lack of accessibility and usability. Here are some possible reasons why it continues to be used:
Tradition and familiarity: “Click here” has been used for a long time and has become ingrained in people’s habits. It’s a default choice for many content creators who may not have considered the importance of descriptive link text.
Lack of awareness: Some content creators may not be aware of the impact of link text on accessibility and usability. They may not realize that using descriptive link text helps users understand the purpose and destination of the link without relying on surrounding context.
Convenience: Using “click here” may be seen as a quick and easy way to indicate a clickable link without putting much thought into crafting descriptive link text. It requires less effort compared to writing specific and meaningful link descriptions.
Incomplete understanding of accessibility guidelines: While accessibility guidelines such as the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) recommend using descriptive link text, not everyone is familiar with these guidelines or may not prioritize them in their content creation process.
How to Improve
To promote change, it’s important to raise awareness about the importance of descriptive link text in improving accessibility and user experience. Providing education, training, and resources on web accessibility can help content creators make more informed decisions and encourage the use of clear and meaningful link text.
And I’d like to provide that training to content creators. I think it would be a breath of fresh air to lead a training aimed specifically at website owners who are content creators, not necessarily the back-end website coders or pros.
Did you know that when someone who is blind accesses the internet using a screen reading assistive technology, they have the ability to pull all links out of context and have the link text announced. That is their way of scanning the page.
An Example
Improper: “For more information about our accessibility services, [click here].”
Now, let’s rewrite the sentence with descriptive link text:
Proper: “Explore more about our [accessibility services] to ensure an inclusive experience for all users.”
In the rewritten sentence, we replaced “click here” with a descriptive link text that clearly conveys the purpose of the link. This allows users to understand the context and destination of the link without relying solely on the surrounding text. Descriptive link text is not only more accessible for users with disabilities but also improves the overall user experience for all website visitors.
This accessibility care package is a set of trainings and tools that can help with identifying what steps you can take to start creating accessible content from the beginning. Make your native file documents accessible from the start to get PDFs that are better for screen readers. Use checklists before publishing content to ensure your content accessibility.
I’m creating a presentation about accessibility that fills a gap I noticed in the current training patterns around digital accessibility. For the past five years, I would attend conference sessions, presentations, and online trainings about accessibility but very few presenters were showing the audience what it is like to experience content through assistive technologies. I’ve got a recorded interview lined up for my presentation so that my audience can hear screen readers announce content. As a followup to my presentation, I’m creating this accessibility care package for people new to accessibility.
Test your text color values for color contrast ratios. It gives you a simple pass or fail for different text sizes. This applies to printed documents, too.
Site Improve’s free toolkit. Site Improve offers a paid software, but they also have these free checker tools such as a Chrome extension and a color contrast checker.
Training
How to write alt text. There are ways and ways to approach alt text. I don’t have any definitive answers for this, except that you can make it brief. If an image is text heavy, it is better practice to re-describe it in the body copy, or use a screen reader only class to type out the content just for screen readers.
Site Improve’s Basics of Web Accessibility. I use this product at work because my agency pays for the license. They are an international company so this blog post includes technical standards from other countries.
Add Paragraph Styles: InDesign. When you set up your file with paragraph styles it makes it easier to map styles to tags for your export to PDF.
How to map a Style to a Tag in InDesign. It would be really great if your InDesign section headers and major content headers could have the tags H1, H2, H3. That way, when you export to PDF, the digital version will have semantic markup and the bookmarks should be automatic from document structure.
PDFs are not automatically accessible. You need to run a few tools in the full version of Acrobat to get full accessibility. Unfortunately, the free program Reader will not do these things.
By the way, I did write a term paper about accessibility while earning my bachelor’s degree in technical communication. See my portfolio accessibility page to read it.
Assistive Technology: Literally, technology to assist people with different disabilities. People with low vision use screen magnifiers, people with vision impairment use screen readers or refreshable braille displays. People with hearing impairments depend on closed captions in videos with audio. People with motor impairments may not be able to use a mouse or sometimes even a keyboard. There is one other class of disability with the label cognitive disabilities. Assistive tech for this group includes things like fonts specialized for dyslexia, and uber-clear writing and placement in form labels, plus the use of plain language all throughout the site.
Accessibility: In this usage of the word, we refer to the ability of web users with all sorts of disabilities to access content on the web. Access to content on the web can be blocked or limited for assistive technologies depending on many factors.
WCAG or Section 508: These terms are used with the phrase “compliance with,” since Section 508 is actually a part of the Americans With Disabilities Act, and WCAG is a set of guidelines published by the Web Accessibility Initiative to help content producers and developers to code better stuff for the web.
It’s All About Awareness
GAAD is an awareness day. What content managers don’t know can impair accessibility. Here is a pretend scenario: Content manager receives a signed document on paper and is instructed to ‘post this on the website.’ They use the multifunction printer to scan the paper to a PDF and email it. They post to the file manager in the CMS without checking the file. Bork! The file turned out to be an image of the text with no machine-recognizable words in it. This means people using screen readers have no access to that content because it cannot be read aloud by a machine. This is to say it’s inaccessible content.
If the content manager knew that text scanned in as an image could pose a problem for some of their audience, they could scan the document using different settings so that it could be machine searchable, and, even better, to have tags for accessibility added to the PDF and alt text added to any images in the document.
Another scenario: Web manager wants infographics all over the website to make data-heavy information more visually interesting. Web coder uploads three text-heavy images without any alternative text (alt text). Bork! Now all that ‘info’ in the infographic is inaccessible to users of screen readers.
In the scholarly articles about accessibility I have read, an industry’s failure to provide accessible content boils down to ignorance on the part of the developers and content managers. There isn’t much incentivizing going on to help people want to learn how to comply with accessibility guidelines other than the negative incentive of a potential lawsuit for failure to comply. And that is the use-case I see reported most often: a disabled customer brings a lawsuit against a government entity for failure to provide content in an accessible format.
What You Can Do
I have been using the hashtag #OhMyGAAD on LinkedIn to publicize the Global Accessibility Awareness Day. People are also using #OhMyGAAD on Twitter. I’ve signed the GAAD accessibility pledge and I earned the Site Improve certificates last year when I started using Site Improve. Before that, I had been coding federal government content to comply with Section 508 since 2011, and I also wrote a term paper on website accessibility in 2016.
Look up the hashtag on your favorite social media. Do three accessibility fixes on your own web content. When I think of accessibility, I remember that I am human, and I may not always be fully-abled as I am now. All the steps I’ve taken so far to publish accessible content are things I’d want any developer or content manager to do for me if I needed assistive technology.
