(Steve Bruner) Alright, welcome to the WordPress
New York City meetup!
Okay, so tonight we are going to have
Sveta present about accessibility with websites.
(Sveta voiced by an interpreter) Hi, everyone!
My name is Sveta.
Actually it's short for
a longer version of my name.
I'm originally from Russia, that's why I have such a long name.
And i'm presenting about web accessibility - something i'm very
interested in as a deaf person.
As someone who is disabled, naturally I'm very interested in
web accessibility.
And this is a logo created by some university
that represent accessibility.
Because not everyone uses a wheelchair, there are people who are blind or deaf,
who have cognitive disabilities
as well who aren't necessarily represented by the wheelchair logo
that's usually used for accessibility.
So you have the eye, the hand, and the ear, and the brain to represent cognitive abilities as well.
So I am sure you all know who Tim Berners-Lee is. Is there anyone who doesn't know?
Who knows who he is?
OK many of you know who he is - and this is a quote from him:
"The power of the web is in its universality. Access by everyone
regardless of disability is an essential aspect."
In the early days of the web
it was actually more accessible than now
because most of the websites were text and links,
and not very many images and videos.
So there wasn't a lot of audio, but today
97% of websites are not accessible.
Many people who are blind. They think: "Oh they can just
use screen readers. That's good enough for them." But actually the web,
the sites must be coded
in order to be compatible with screen readers, or people
who can't use a mouse,
or who can't use a keyboard, need other devices.
Automatic captions are not very accessible for deaf people.
So 97% of websites as a result are not accessible.
Maybe people think that people with disabilities are a small group of people,
but actually disabled people can constitute the largest minority group -
more than foreigners
and the market here for people in the United States
is $1 trillion.
That's double the spending power of teenagers.
Worldwide, people with disabilities constitute
a $ 4 trillion market place.
That's almost the size of China.
So it's a really important group of people that should not be ignored.
It's not just people with disabilities
who benefit from web accessibility as you see from these pictures.
You have a mother with a stroller and also a businessperson carrying
a roller suitcase.
Ramps are actually very helpful for people in all these situations.
It also benefits people who use carts or any sort of wheeled devices.
Ramps and elevators help
these people as well.
So it's not just for people who are using wheelchairs.
Also captions not only benefit people who are deaf.
Speakers of foreign languages also
benefit from captions.
People who are developing their literacy skills or
if someone's in some sort of noisy environment and
they want to watch something quietly on the web,
that's another reason why captions for videos are so important.
In talking about the spending power of people who have disabilities
doesn't only affect people with disabilities, but their friends and
family members as well.
If products and services are not accessible
then you lose those extra clientele as well because
you have 2 billion people worldwide
are connected to people with disabilities.
That constitutes a disposable income of $8 trillion.
So it's another benefit.
The devices that can help
people with independence in terms of computers or mobile phones -
you have a large audience. This participation,
this increased market opportunity,
also having a positive image, not just waiting for someone to sue you
because your website is inaccessible.
If u show that you're making an investment for accessibility,
it's a much better better investment than spending money on a lawsuit later.
Improved visibility is another benefit, and also higher search engines results.
Speaking of search engines -
this is the largest accessibility needs user on the Internet,
because Google, Yahoo!, and Bing -
those sites can't see images and they really rely on captioning
for the images.
If a video doesn't have captions it does not appear in search results,
because Google can't hear a video.
Thus captioning and the tags
are very important for search engines.
And with javascript...
sometimes the code in javascript is not compatible with some keyboards as well.
How many of you are familiar with Web Accessibility Guidelines?
It seems that there are a number of you.
Perhaps it might be very overwhelming because the list
of guidelines is quite long
and even for myself I can be quite overwhelmed with that, so people tend
to make these categorizations
and create basic guidelines
which are described as the acronym P.O.U.R.
Perceivable.
Meaning blind people who can perceive the image,
they might need an audio to supplement,
or for people who can't hear, they rely on captions.
Operable.
Means people who use a keyboard
to make sure that everything - all the functions can be used
by a keyboard not just by a mouse.
You don't have to hover over something to be able to see the option.
People can't rely on a mouse would then
not be able to use that function.
Understandability.
Understandable means if text is there to make sure that text is easily
understood by any user.
Even though maybe you might think:
"Well, there's a YouTube video - YouTube has automatic captions -
that might be good enough."
But automatic actions are usually unintelligible. They really
do need to be cleaned up
otherwise most deaf people will not be able to understand them.
Robust.
Means something that's compatible with current and possibly future technologies.
So now talking a little bit about how to make a website accessible in terms of
the technical aspects.
The semantic web.
In terms of the semantic web, content is king.
Perhaps someone has
a fabulously beautiful looking website
but the functionality in the content is weak.
We have these three elements: html, css, and javascript.
The html provides a very strong foundation first,
and then you can use style sheets with css,
and then javascript - it's probably
best to use javascript only when necessary.
I know it might seem fun to add some more fun functions, but
the less javascript, the more accessible a website could be.
How many of you are familiar with
that WordPress has this word 'role' - R-O-L-E
- how many of you have noticed that in WordPress?
A few of you?
I've noticed that role
equals main role banner
and I thought that perhaps some people think you can just delete that but that's very
important part of the web accessibility.
Here's some examples of role -
like body,
the role document,
header
has a role, banner,
and if main will have a role, main,
footer has its content info.
So on the WordPress
template keep the role, don't get rid of that.
There are more examples of this role as well.
In terms of the html structure, it's important to have a good structure
to the website.
Many of you might
skip links, but it's important
that it's in the top of the html page,
because many people who use screenreaders
don't want to hear link over and over. again for every page.
So they prefer to have the option of 'skip link'
to the main content or other parts of the webpage.
You can also hide that
with the css style sheets,
but don't use 'display none'
or 'visible none'
because that will cause the screenreader not to show the content.
If you indent over -
over position -
then you can hide
those commands that only the screenreader will be able to distinguish.
Talking about images -
navigation - all the navigation buttons must have bullets
and
for the screenreader.
You can style with css,
but it's important to have those bullet points.
Drop-down menus - it's best if you use html and css not javascript for those.
You can have the drop downs in css,
but it's also important to keep the drop downs limited to maybe two levels,
because the screenreader is going to repeat
that over and over again.
Header , , -
it's best to use that
for the content organization, not for decoration.
The keep that just for the page title,
and for subcategories -
not using that for the menu
or for anything other than
just the content.
It's really annoying to see 'click here'.
To download you don't need that. Just click here to download is very annoying.
Or click here to download with check list.
You can just have download checklist and the kind of file that it is because the
screenreader reads click here, click here, and the screenreader isn't sure what
you're clicking for.
So the message, if it's just very clear - download to a pdf -
then the person who is using the website will know to expect the certain
kind of document.
For the content text,
make sure it can be resized in terms of a percentage, or
in the terms of em.
This way people who have low vision,
who have some vision but can't see very well, can resize the text.
Similarly on mobile devices,
don't have frames,
image maps,
or layout tables.
Those are very hard for screenreaders to be able to detect.
Make sure that all functions can be accessible all through the keyboard,
and that javascript - if you have to use it -
it's better if it's downgradable,
because then it there is a problem with javascript the website is still functional.
Write in simple language using bullet points. Most people -
anyone could have a disability, or the general public doesn't
necessarily have as
much time to spend reading
a lot of text on a web page.
You'll also want to have the web layout consistent for each page.
If you need to, it's best to use html 5 canvas instead of flash.
You can make flash accessible,
but html 5 is a better way to go.
Flash is also not accessible to users of iPhones and iPads anyway.
I'm talking about the images and logos.
There's a lot of confusion between 'alt' and 'title'.
alt means what you can't see.
the title tag is an optional thing - you don't need to have that.
If it's an image that leads to another page,
like a logo on the top left of the the navigation,
you could have a description of what the image is.
Accessibility logo, for example, alt.
And then the title will say "go to home page" or going to a different website.
If the image is just decorative
then you can keep the alt empty,
but don't remove it. Just had it there, but it doesn't need
to have anything in there.
Also no text in the graphics - it's best to use
html for the text
as screenreaders will not be able to read the text inside of an image.
Avoid image maps if possible, that would be the best.
Providing text or shapes for a color button,
and i'll talk about color in a moment.
Don't use strobing, flickering, or any sort of optical illusion because
people who have seizures
will be sensitive to that, and they might not even be able to see that or detect that.
If it's something that's a slower
pulsating type of image that could be ok,
but not something that's an optical illusion.
I mean, I know maybe it's apropos for some websites but usually
it's not very accessible.
Talking about color -
one in ten men are color blind.
I've met a lot of men
who are color blind, but actually I haven't met a woman
who is color blind, and statistically it's only one in two hundred.
If you notice a subway map,
typically I'll say to my friend, oh I will take the green line, or take the red line,
or the orange line.
I rarely will reference the number but if someone's color blind it might be harder.
Red and green are typically colors that people who are color blind are
sensitive to,
yellow and blue not so much,
and rare that you would see black and white color blindness
but this is sort of an image of what that might be like.
So you don't want to rely on color only.
For example these buttons -
stop and go here -
you can read it. It's a little hard, but for someone who is color blind,
that's what it will look like. It just looks like brown on brown,
and then the text gets lost in the color.
Contrast is a better way to make something more accessible.
Whether or not you want to add an image
make sure that someone is not reliant on the color of the
information for the information.
I'm sure you're familiar that facebook is blue. Do you know why?
Because Mark Zuckerberg is actually color blind, that's why facebook is blue.
I just read about about that. I thought that was cool.
In terms of tables I'm not going to go
into great depth in terms of the code
but here's a summary about it because
some tables are more simple, some are more complex.
Here is a summary just so you have a heads up about this.
In terms of captions
to explain what's in the table
must be there for the header,
and scope should be included.
and also CSS has specific rules for the table.
Tables should only be used for tabular data -
like a spreadsheet or something that's in a matrix format.
They shouldn't be be used for layout.
You should just use css for the layout.
In the past tables were used much more commonly but now not so much.
In terms of these tags for the heads, body, footer,
you can find more of these in google or online in other places.
Forms.
It's important to have labels for the input.
It is also good because the screenreader user is reliant on the keyboard.
Most of us are relying on the keyboard as well.
The 'label for' tag
might only be for
these small radio buttons.
If you use
that means that you can also include
the entire text. So if you click on the word -
that also gives you the selection as well. It's great for the keyboard users
and people using screenreaders.
If you use groups like radio buttons
checkbox
or setting up a field - .
and ,
those are basic rules for tables.
Now we're talking about video and audio and as a deaf person this is something
I've experienced a lot of frustration with - most videos online are not captioned.
Many video broadcasts are not accessible to deaf people.
Some people think, well YouTube has
automatic captions - and I encorage people
to use YouTube not Vimeo. Vimeo does not support captions at all,
YouTube has some captioning support.
I also recommend YouTube because it's very easy to use and it's an easy way
to add captions, but
do not reply on the auto-captions
because they are
really hard to understand,
and I'll show you in a moment an example.
It's important to have good quality captions and transcript -
not just relying on speech recognition. You could use that perhaps but make sure
that it's cleaned up.
Or perhaps hire someone
who can produce a good quality transcript
beyond just what an automatic speech to text recognition can do.
Also if you use radio podcasts
you can have a good enough transcript for that,
but make sure that you have the proper style -
identifying speakers for example; make sure punctuation is correct;
and if there are any sound effects like laughter or playing music, that that
information is included as well. Because a deaf person is not going
to hear those audio cues.
For videos you should have
both captions and transcript available.
The reasoning is because if someone is both deaf and blind
they're not going to be able to follow the transcripts -
I mean the captions.
They might be reliant on a braille display that pops up
for them to be able to read the transcript as away to access the video.
Transcripts benefit not only deaf
people and deaf-blind people, perhaps for an hour long video somebody
would be able to skim through the transcript a lot faster than watching
the entire video.
So it really in general is best to have both the transcript and the captions.
Sometimes you want to be able to watch and hear the video, and then be able
to read the captions,
without first watching the video
or just read the transcript.
Just as it's important to have the audio and video in sync,
it's important the captions be synced as well.
In terms of webinars
it's important to hire someone who's a professional transcriptionist,
somebody who is professionally trained for that,
so that they have 98% accuracy
with 220 words per minute.
That's the required speed and not everyone can do that.
So if you want to have a video pick a player that supports captions,
and if you want a transcript that may be too much for you to do yourself -
this is a popular service CastingWords -
and you can use that for podcasts and
also YouTube videos.
If there's a time stamp,
you can then upload it to YouTube,
and they have a way that you can sync ticket options with the video.
I have more information on my own website.
Usually I'll give a one hour presentation on this kind of information
so I'm only touching on points here.
I want to show you why automatic captions are not reliable.
There's no sound on purpose, just for you to watch it.
So I've actually listened with a person
who could hear whether the captions matched,
and they said that it didn't.
The speech recognition is just relying on a machine.
It's good that it does something,
but it's hard to rely on the auto-captions.
Most people think that it's no big deal,
we can just use that, but they do really
need to be cleaned up by a person.
So here's some general information.
WebAIM is a great resource
for making your websites accessible,
and very clearly presented, the information there.
If you'd like to have an evaluation tool
this is a very popular site - WAVE -
developed by the WerbAIM team.
I do have that on my computer and it's very helpful.
It's not 100% reliable or accurate.
Sometimes it might miss certain elements of the site.
Firefox also has accessibility extensions,
and the WAI has a lot of different tools here.
Captioning, if you're more curious about that,
I do have a website here with
a lot of information and my contact information is there as well.
If anyone has any questions?
(Audience Member) Are there any WordPress templates
and/or plugins that you recommend as being very accessible?
(Sveta voiced by an interpreter) I'd have to google it in terms of accessibility and WordPress..
(Audience Member) Anything that you've used or come across
that you're really comfortable with?
(Sveta voiced by an interpreter) I've just started using WordPress
earlier this year so i'm not as familiar.
(Audience Member) What websites are potentially liable to being sued
for not being accessible, and for what period?
(Sveta voiced by an interpreter) There are so many.
Well, ninety seven percent of web sites are not accesible,
for example, Netflix.
The deaf community's actually suing, in process with a lawsuit right now with Netflix
because they refused to caption
their streaming videos. Their dvds have captions, but they don't have streaming captions.
CNN is also involved in a lawsuit right now,
they have captions on television but they don't have captions on their web content.
I know that blind people, they sued Target. There was a blind community
involved in a lawsuit against the Target website.
(Audience Member) So there's some examples, and like I say it's a better investment
to make their website accessible than be liable and possibly be spending money
on a lawsuit later. Are there any ways of tracking,
using Google analytics, to see how many access-challenged users are coming to your site
so you can say to a client, you need to address this?
(Sveta voiced by an interpreter) I don't think there's any way
to track using Google analytics. I think user testing is the only way
to really track accessibility,
and these accessibility valuation tools.
(Audience Member) Aren't there separate browsers
that can be used by accessibility...
(Sveta voiced by an interpreter) What do you mean?
(Audience Member) Uh... for the speech,
it can read through..
There are certain browsers that can..
that, if you need it read to you, 0:28:18.430,0:28:25.430 you can..use that browser,but I'm not sure if it's capturable in analytics.
(Sveta voiced by an interpreter) No, not that I'm aware.
It's the same concept as if you design a regular website,
and your user experience is not just about the people who are disabled but
you might try to have some user testing to see whether or not
the website conforms to the expectations
of a certain user group that's very similar
to people who are disabled.
The only really way to find out is the survey people with
disabilities and get their feedback.
(Audience Member) That's one of the questions I am asking about developers asking the disabled community
how to do certain things. I mean, I am beginning to lose my vision,
and I've found it's very difficult to get somebody to say,
well, it's very easy
to do this because I see other technology
being used broadly and maybe the inference about ramps,
well everybody uses ramps and it's part of the culture
not just about accessibility and those who need it and it's really for everybody.
(Sveta voiced by an interpreter) I'm sorry. Is that a comment or a question?
(Audience Member) The question is ...
How do you get people's minds
wrapped around that you should be developing for everybody all the time,
rather than to step back and say I'm going to do this site for blind people,
I'm going to do this site for deaf people. It's just that why shouldn't you just
include all these accessibility tools as part of your regular development?
(Sveta voiced by an interpreter) Well, because people aren't aware
unless they have had that explicitly explained to them
as it a deaf person I might say well I need captions, but I might be perceived
as being just one deaf person asking for that.
People don't realize that captions benefit speakers of other languages.
My parents have perfect hearing
but their first language is Russian, not English,
and they watch television with the captions on,
because it helps them understand and learn English better,
The disability market is huge
and so they shouldn't be overlooked.
People who are becoming older, you'll notice the baby boomers
are now a very large segment of the population and and more and more of them
are developing disabilities as they age.
So I mean it's not easy,
I can overload people with statistics. People who care tend to really
make the investment, and others
don't, they won't.
Do you want to do responsive,
type of reactive design, or be like people who want to
develop based on user experience? Those are two different
approaches that people can take.
(Audience Member) No. I am just making, I guess, the comment that the very fact that you are here
raises the fact that a lot of people in this room probably never even thought about -
I mean that may be just an assumption on my part, but - I think this is just a way of raising
the awareness for the rest of the community.
(Sveta voiced by an interpreter) Yes, right. And, for me, I'm a sighted person
but sometimes, if a page is slow to load,
I still like to have the description of the image
because I might shut off images
and still want to to be able to see what it is to make it
load the page faster. 0:32:33.270,0:32:36.429 Just having "something dot jpg"
isn't necessarily going to be very helpful.
It helps the searchability
as well if those tags are there in the descriptions. Even though I am not
blind I benefit
from accessibility for blind users.
And even with captions, people think well they don't need that,
and then later on when they use them, they'll realize how they
appreciate it and they wish they had used them earlier.
I think there was some in the back with a question?
(Audience Member) I was just wanting to respond to something that the gentleman up there said earlier
about why include it in everything that you do as kind of a default thing.
Well why do we include mobile versions and responsive versions of sites 0:33:25.770,0:33:28.210 by default? I think it should be treated the same way. I'm not arguing with you. (laughter)
(Sveta voiced by an interpreter) That's a good point. Yes.
(Audience Member) Could you speak more about 0:33:40.419,0:33:43.200 responsive design?
Are you saying that responsive has
a better capability for the disabled?
(Sveta voiced by an interpreter) Well, not exactly. It can overlap,
but not exactly.
Because if you use mobile phones
but the code is not compatible
for a mobile phone, I'm not sure how exactly people with limited vision
even use the mobile phone. That's still new for me but that's another example
in terms of having the code be compatible for
what shows up on a mobile phone.
I know how people with disabilities use an actual standard computer. I'm not as
familiar with people with disabilities using mobile devices.
(Audience Member) This is more in reference to how do we make accessibility
more standard. I think we are at a good time now with html 5,
css 3, and all these new additions. They are still in the works of
being the global rule of the land, compared to how html was very much
do it until it looks right kind of thing, so right now, if we do push for it
in as many places as we can I think it will potentially be more..
(Sveta voiced by an interpreter) Correct, but that isn't enough.
We need to remember also about color -
it's not just about coding,
it's also about the design, and the visual aspects
of the website as well.
(Audience Member) That's a good point, thanks.
(Audience Member) Are there tools? As a designer and front end developer,
I'm always using tools like browser stats and from other devices because you can't
possibly have all the devices.. and this is something I need
to consider that there's even more devices that I'm designing for
that we're not even looking at. So I'm wondering if there are tools
that as developers we can access to get an experience of what
a disabled person may be seeing.
(Sveta voiced by an interpreter) Yes. You can download the free tools.
I think if you have a Mac,
Mac has screen reader software already built in. I just found this out.
There is captioning support too which i was really amazed at. I'm curious
as to what the screenreader with captioning is going to look like.
The Mac screenreader also has captions,
that's telling me what it says. It's really cool. So if you have a Mac
you use the VoiceOver
that's the Mac feature
you can select as an option.
I think in windows, I'm not sure what it's called because i don't use windows
there might be something that's
parallel that does
the same thing for windows.
(Audience Member) Can I just comment, add to that?
Because I do use windows, can I just follow up, is that ok?
(Sveta voiced by an interpreter) Sure, go ahead.
(Audience Member) OK. On windows there are a couple of speech
detects software. One is called Natural Reader, that will read the text on a page,
and also turn it into a wav file, so that you can automatically...
So, it will read through the copy you've written, turn it into a wav file, and
you can repost it on the site. So you've automatically turned it into something for
people who can't see but would like to hear what you've just written.
(Sveta voiced by an interpreter) Thank you for saying, that.
OK, I think that's it (Applause)