[00:00:00 ] Nathan Wrigley: Welcome to the Jukebox podcast from WP Tavern. My name is Nathan Wrigley.

Jukebox is a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress. The people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case, how to improve the accessibility of your WordPress website.

If you’d like to subscribe to the podcast, you can do that by searching for WP Tavern in your podcast, player of choice. Or by going to WPTavern.com forward slash feed forward slash podcast. And you can copy that URL into most podcast players.

If you have a topic that you’d like us to feature on the podcast, I’m very keen to hear from you, and hopefully get you all your idea featured on the show. Head to WPTavern.com forward slash contact forward slash jukebox, and use the contact form there.

So on the podcast today, we have Joe Dolson. Joe is a WordPress plugin developer, a core committer and a web accessibility consultant. He’s part of the Make WordPress accessibility team, the team dedicated to improving accessibility in the WordPress ecosystem.

His recent presentation at WordCamp US entitled, finding and fixing the six most common WCAG 2 failures, highlight some of the key areas where websites are not as accessible as they should be. The areas we discuss are, low contrast text, missing alternative text, empty links, missing form labels, empty buttons and missing document language.

Joe explains what each of these problems are, both in terms of how they can be fixed as well as what people with accessibility requirements might experience when they visit your site. We talk about how you can equip yourself with the tools that you need to diagnose these issues and online resources you can use to discover more about website accessibility.

It’s Joe’s opinion that you’re better off making a start right now, carrying out incremental changes rather than attempting to solve every single problem that your website might have. Begin the journey and take it one problem at a time.

We also chat about the fact that there’s an ever-growing legal compulsion to make websites follow accessibility guidelines. Lawsuits are going through the courts with greater regularity. So now might be the time for you to look into this topic.

That being said, Joe cautions against the use of tools, which purport to solve your accessibility issues with minimal effort. A variety of pop-up solutions have emerged onto the market, which claimed that they can make your site compliant with almost no effort. Joe is adamant that these promises are almost always false and that there’s real work to be done on each website, as they’re all unique and have unique problems to solve.

Typically when we record the podcast. There’s not a lot of background noise. But that’s not always the case. Over the coming weeks, I’ll be bringing you recordings from a recent trip to WordCamp US 2022, and you might notice that the recordings have a little echo or other strange audio artifacts. Whilst the podcasts are more than listable, I do hope that you understand that the vagaries of the real world we’re at play.

If you’re interested in finding out more, you can find all the links in the show notes by heading to WPTavern.com forward slash podcast, and you’ll find all of the other episodes there as well. And so without further delay, I bring you Joe Dolson.

I am joined on the podcast today by Joe Dolson. Hello Joe.

[00:04:23 ] Joe Dolson: Hello.

We are at WordCamp, I nearly said WordCamp Europe. We are at WordCamp US 2022. We’ve got Joe on the podcast today because he is doing a talk at WordCamp US. Do you just wanna tell us a little bit about yourself? Why you’re on this podcast, but then stray into what your talk is about.

[00:04:40 ] Joe Dolson: Certainly So I’m Joe Dolson. I’m a WordPress core committer. I’ve been a contributor to the accessibility of WordPress for quite a long time. I think I first started contributing in WordPress 3.4. I’d have to look at my history to actually know that for sure, but it was somewhere around there. So today I’m talking about a study from the nonprofit organization, WebAIM, out of Utah, in which they looked at the top million homepages around the web. The most widely visited, heavily known webpages, and did a bulk analysis of the accessibility issues on those pages.

And, I’m going to talk about six specific types of errors that they found constituted 96.5% of all detectable errors using automation. And the things that that exposes and how you can work with consultants. How you should use your time and how you should use automation to solve problems.

[00:05:39 ] Nathan Wrigley: Can I ask how it is that you became interested in accessibility problems, given all the myriad things that you could have become interested in web? How did accessibility fall into your lap and create so much interest for you?

[00:05:51 ] Joe Dolson: So when I started my business in 2004, I started right from the beginning with the idea that I wanted to pursue accessibility in websites. And that was because when I decided to become a web designer, I wanted something that was unique about what I did. I wanted to do something that wasn’t just marketing. I wasn’t really interested in marketing. I’d seen a lot of that around and I’m like, boy, that, that just doesn’t seem like it’s socially motivating.

[00:06:21 ] Nathan Wrigley: Mmm.

[00:06:21 ] Joe Dolson: It doesn’t seem like it’s interesting. It doesn’t feel like I’m doing something worthwhile. So I had to think to myself about, well, what do I know already? What do I have a unique access to that can make my business be a little bit different? And my mother was the executive director of a nonprofit that provided arts access for people with disabilities.

And so for years, I’d had conversations at home with family when visiting my mother in her workplace about what people with disabilities needed and how the ADA worked, and how all of this sort of world needed to be constructed. So what I already had was a reasonably strong sensibility for why people with disabilities need access and the very fact of the modality of different experiences and different perceptions. And so with some study about the actual technical side behind that, I was able to pick that up relatively quickly. Which is not to say I didn’t make absolutely horrible mistakes in 2004 and five.

[00:07:29 ] Nathan Wrigley: It’s almost, it’s something that came from your, your background,. Your family enabled you to have some sort of prior wisdom. Most of the rest of us, I would imagine are coming at it pretty cold, and if we were to go back, I don’t know, 5, 6, 7, 8 years, I feel like nobody was really talking about this. I could be wrong. Obviously you were interested in it, but as a proportion of the people that were designing websites, I feel that accessibility was not on everybody’s radar. I would imagine that many, many of the websites out there were not accessible in any way, shape or form.

But it’s become a real talking point in the last few years and people are making much more of an effort. Obviously you’ve got your conversation, your presentation at the event in the next couple of days. I’m just wondering if you could outline for those people who, maybe they’re new to WordPress, maybe they’re new to web design and they hear the word accessibility and they just think, well, I don’t know what that means. Just, in the broadest possible brush strokes. Just let us know what the 10,000 foot high version of accessibility on the web is.

[00:08:31 ] Joe Dolson: So yeah, the 10,000 foot view. Accessibility, web accessibility, and the access to information for people with disabilities is about making sure that the content you’ve put on your website is interpretable to the most, the widest variety of senses. So for people who are visually impaired, that means making sure everything can be understood by what’s called a screen reader. That will look at the text content of your site, look at the code of your site and interpret that in voice production.

For people with hearing impairments, that’s about having captions for your video. It’s about having transcriptions of your audio files. So it’s really about recognizing that people have different ways of perceiving the world, whether that’s because of dyslexia, and they have difficulty with the way text is structured. Or it’s visually impaired, so that they literally cannot see your images and have no idea what that is. Your responsibility in sharing that information is making sure it’s available to multiple senses.

[00:09:40 ] Nathan Wrigley: Thank you.

Your talk is called finding and fixing the six most common WCAG, W C A G, two failures. First of all, what’s WCAG 2? And then if you wouldn’t mind elucidating what are those six most common failures? Maybe we just go through them one at a time, and if we, if we stray off into a conversation about each one of them, that’d be good, and if not, we’ll carry on from there.

[00:10:02 ] Joe Dolson: Sounds great. So the web content accessibility guidelines is a document coming out of the W3C, the worldwide web consortium, and it’s kind of the international standard for what is considered to be accessibility. Version two is the version that was published in, I wanna say 2008. So it’s not new. But it’s been then updated periodically since then. The current version is 2.1. 2.2 is currently a candidate. It is likely to become a recommendation sometime at the beginning of 2023.

And that just keeps incrementing different ways of looking at things and what is considered to be a standard internationally for what makes content accessible. It’s a very useful document. It is enshri