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The WP Minute brings you news about WordPress in under 5 minutes -- every week! Follow The WP Minute for the WordPress headlines before you get lost in the headlines. Hosted by Matt Medeiros, host of The Matt Report podcast.
Eric Karkovack (00:00)
Hi everyone, and welcome to another episode of the WP Minute. I'm your host, Eric Karkovack. So today's episode is all about web accessibility. We all know the importance of building accessible websites, and there are moral and legal obligations to doing so. And the idea of an accessible website seems very simple, but it often feels like a complex subject. So to help us out,
I'm joined by WordPress accessibility team members, Adrienne Grace and Isla Waite. They're here to discuss the upcoming WP accessibility day and offer tips for making your website accessible. Adrienne and Isla, thank you for joining us on the WP minute.
Isla Waite (00:43)
It's Isla.
Eric Karkovack (00:45)
I'm so sorry. You know, I do this all the time. I should know better. I'm sorry. ⁓
Adrienne Grace (00:48)
Do you want to do it again?
Isla Waite (00:50)
No problem at all. I had
to do it now rather than in the middle.
Eric Karkovack (00:57)
I see the spelling and I always think of Isla, the Spanish pronunciation. So back to my high school days. anyway, welcome to the WP Minute. It is. Welcome to the WP Minute. I'd love to know a little bit more about each of you. If you want to tell us your background in accessibility, let folks know where your areas of expertise lie. Isla, we'll start with you.
Isla Waite (01:03)
Yes.
But it's like Thailand. Thank you.
Lovely to meet you, Eric. Thank you for having us today. So I'm based in Sacramento, California, although I have an accent because I'm originally from England. I am a project manager for one company and a business owner for my own business. And I am overall a WordPress accessibility professional. I got into WordPress accessibility probably five to six years ago now.
And it was kind of by accident. We were working on a project where this estate agency needed accessible PDFs And we're all sort of looking at each other like what's that? So we got some help and at which point I you know the world started to make sense for me and my colleague Rosalinda and we started digging in over a couple years we You discovered there is a certification with the International Association of accessibility professionals And we took that
And then, and out of that came the business that I now own that specializes purely in website accessibility remediation. And we coach as well because we want to help designers and developers understand that this isn't scary. And it just takes a little bit of planning. Yeah, so that's my background.
Eric Karkovack (02:29)
Adrian, how about you?
Adrienne Grace (02:31)
I have been a graphic designer and web designer for a number of years. And I want to say probably in 2018, I saw an article on Smashing Magazine, which our keynote speaker this year, Vitaly Friedman, is from Smashing Magazine and is very involved in the UX side of accessibility.
And the article was all about how designers play a role in web accessibility. And it was this aha moment for me. And I thought, wait a minute. And I decided, OK, I need to learn more about this. So my 2019 goals for the year, New Year's Day, was learn more about this web accessibility thing. Fast forward.
to today, I also have my certification from IAAP. And while I do websites and graphic design documents for small individual clients, I am now employed at The Standard, which is a benefits company. And I work in the creative team to make actually PDFs typically accessible, again, sort of like web design.
You want to do it as close to the start as you can in the source document, in the source code. So I'm doing a lot of training as well as testing and remediating.
Eric Karkovack (03:56)
Tell us a little bit about WP Accessibility Day. What is it and what are folks going to learn by participating?
Adrienne Grace (04:05)
Go, Ireland.
Isla Waite (04:06)
Okay, so WordPress Accessibility Day is a 24-hour continuous event and it's free to attend. This year we're using Zoom events, so it's all very professional. We've been slowly upgrading through the years. It's global. We have a global team of organizers. I'm gonna use Amber's, Hines, one of the board members, her term was phenomenal volunteers. That is what we have.
both in the organizing ⁓ team leads and then in the wider group of volunteers that help on the day and up to the event and everyone just digs in and it's amazing. So for us, that's the amazing part of it. And then at the end of all of that, we get two days of amazing talks that cover the gamut of accessibility. So it is WordPress accessibility that is the focus, but over the years we've branched into definitely different
areas so design and we have a colourblind designer as a speaker this year we have an Auslan speaker Australian sign language which is just going to be an amazing experience to see somebody signing somebody else speaking what is being signed and then another signer doing American Sign Language
Adrienne Grace (05:18)
Yeah.
Isla Waite (05:24)
for that particular talk. And I've heard that speaker is very interesting and entertaining. So I'm super excited about that talk, but yeah, it's so varied and it is for, it was initially for developers. That's the way it was designed in the early days when it was Joe Dawson, who is still on the board now. But now it's everybody, designers, developers, product managers, project managers, everybody.
Eric Karkovack (05:45)
Yeah, it looks like a very diverse array of subjects and something that can impact, you know, the beginner, the more intermediate and advanced users, which I think is great because I think one of the things that someone who builds websites, really everybody has to be a stakeholder in accessibility, right? You've all, mean, as a developer, I can build something accessible, but if my client's not on board, that only goes so far, right?
Isla Waite (06:13)
Yep.
Adrienne Grace (06:13)
And that
is true. It's the concept of shift left, which you may have heard of, which is we want to be thinking about accessibility from the get go. From the time you put pencil to paper or pixel to screen, you want to be thinking about accessibility from the ground up. And you are right that this, have a diverse set of topics. We try and be inclusive in that way in that there are
Topics for beginners, intermediate and advanced, for all sorts of people within that process. Again, designers, developers, maybe project managers, everyone in the process. We also try and make it inclusive because we do have American Sign Language. We also have live captioners. And then we have somebody on our organizing team, Joanie, who has been doing an amazing effort.
getting translators and we are getting a lot of the past talks translated into primarily French and Spanish at the moment, but we do have a number of other languages that folks are able to now access on our YouTube channel the prior years in other languages. So we do try and make this truly accessible on all levels.
Eric Karkovack (07:29)
Yeah, we don't always talk about language and accessibility, we? That we primarily like to do things in English. I know that's kind of how the world works, but WordPress is global. The web is global. And if we can make it accessible to folks who speak different languages, I think that's such a positive. So kudos to you for doing that. And I also want to mention, too, that
Both of you are on the west coast of the United States right now. I'm on the east coast. There's a three hour time difference. It's just a little after 6 AM when we're recording this. ⁓ I applaud you both. Your dedication to accessibility is unrivaled. If I had trophies to give out, you would both get one. So thank you for that too. So that's dedication to your craft. ⁓
Adrienne Grace (08:04)
Hahaha!
Isla Waite (08:04)
You
We are fully loaded today.
Adrienne Grace (08:08)
Yes, thank you. We have our large cups of coffee.
Isla Waite (08:15)
Thank you.
you
Eric Karkovack (08:19)
So
Adrienne Grace (08:19)
Well,
Eric Karkovack (08:19)
that's awesome to see.
Adrienne Grace (08:19)
thank you. Actually, I will say in all honesty, because we are on the West Coast, and we do, as I mentioned, we have a global team of volunteers. My role this year is as volunteer lead, and I've been placing a lot of the emcees and moderators, as well as a few of us folks from the organizing team that will be the tech admins.
We pass it off over to, I think the next team behind us is, they're based in Australia. They'll be turning it over to folks that are in ⁓ Africa and Europe. So we truly do have a global set and I have been up into the wee hours of the morning, our time in a couple of years. We're trying not to do that to ourselves this year. We are very, very fortunate.
Eric Karkovack (08:59)
Yeah
Isla Waite (09:06)
There's always something going on behind the scenes and nobody in the front knows about it. That's the plan.
Eric Karkovack (09:09)
you
Adrienne Grace (09:10)
Yes.
Eric Karkovack (09:12)
Well, after this is all over, at least you'll hopefully be able to catch up on sleep a little bit and get back to a regular schedule.
Isla Waite (09:17)
Yeah.
Adrienne Grace (09:18)
It's,
yes, don't get me wrong. It's worth every moment of it. But like anything, you put your heart and soul into it and it's a really dedicated team of people that I feel like have become our friends and we are all very dedicated to making this go off as seamlessly as possible because we have some amazing speakers this year. I mean, we've had them every year.
⁓ one of the topics I wanted to say was I know in previous years, if anybody's interested in the legal aspects, we have actually also had folks who talked about the legal aspects of accessibility, not just in the US, but I know this past year, earlier in June, we had the European Accessibility Act, which took effect. We've had some folks that have talked about them, I believe in Africa. So we do touch on even those topics.
Eric Karkovack (10:10)
Yeah, that's great. The legal aspect is kind of huge and something like folks in our profession don't necessarily know about. ⁓ You know, here in the US, the guidelines are so very unclear and we see lawsuits. We see things that happen that we're not exactly sure why sometimes. You know, sometimes it's very clear cut. I remember the Domino's pizza case years ago where they had like, I believe a flash build your own pizza.
Isla Waite (10:34)
Hahaha
Eric Karkovack (10:35)
⁓
widget and it obviously not accessible but that was kind of obvious. yeah, yeah actually it was yeah I mean you really had to have a high-speed computer to even run that thing if it didn't crash and a lot of dexterity to use your mouse just so. So it's great you guys are covering all the topics.
Isla Waite (10:39)
To anyone, to anyone.
you
Eric Karkovack (10:55)
I also want to mention, I don't think we mentioned the dates, it's October 15th through 16th, and the website is wpaccessibility.day, and we'll link to that in the show notes as well. Nice that it actually is the 16th is my birthday, so I appreciate you giving me all these lessons on my birthday. That's like the best gift anyone can give me. So thank you for that. But I do want to switch gears for a moment because...
Isla Waite (11:10)
you
Eric Karkovack (11:19)
At the WP Minute, we like to give actionable advice. A lot of our audience are freelancers, they're agency owners, they're developers. And I think accessibility, as I said, is one of those things that it seems so simple, right? And yet we so often fail at it. And in your experience as project managers and accessibility experts, what are the most common things that you see?
that go against best practices, like maybe mistakes that are made on sites.
Isla Waite (11:49)
I mean, the biggest is color contrast. And I think that goes for websites and PDFs, which commonly appear on websites these days. Yeah, when the text is not strong enough against the background, whether it's too dark or too light, and, you know, a lot of people might struggle to see it. And that's a common issue and a bit of a sticking point sometimes with designers who want to make something beautiful.
And we completely understand that. beautiful isn't always accessible. So, well, wait, wait, let me take that back. Accessible is beautiful. And we help those designers make that their vision reality, but with more contrast. that...
Eric Karkovack (12:34)
I even had clients who've
come to me like that too and say, well, this doesn't match our color scheme. I said, well, it doesn't pass muster with the color contrast ratio. they're kind of stuck in that mode where it's got to be this very shade. even if it only looks that way on their monitor, which is still a problem too, because different devices, different monitors are going to show that color a little differently.
Isla Waite (12:42)
Mm.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Eric Karkovack (13:01)
Adrian, what else do you see that folks are doing wrong?
Adrienne Grace (13:05)
Obviously, I was going to say color contrast is far and away the largest. I do see a lot of forms where there's no label or just have placeholder text. And that's a big one. know, again, often designers or sometimes, know, stakeholders, oh, want it clean. I don't want it to distract people. But the problem is that
As soon as you start to type in the placeholder in that field goes away. And now I have no idea. Did it ask for, especially when it comes to say something like a number format? What did it say? Where's where's the hint? It's gone. I have no idea what it means. You know, I cannot be the only person who might have had a phone call or an email or, you know, a child that needed something and you can't.
Isla Waite (13:50)
Yeah
Adrienne Grace (14:00)
come back 10 minutes later, what was I in the middle of? I don't know. I heard a woman who was a UX designer. She said she had been in a car accident and had a horrible migraine for like four months straight while she was healing. And she said, it totally changed the way I approached forms because suddenly I was, my migraine meant that I couldn't remember stuff.
and looking at the screen was so difficult. And she said that that experience, as bad as it was, the positive effect out of her or her as a UX designer looking at that in a different way. So there are a lot of things that's color contrast, but thinking about folks that have dyslexia, know, other, you know, what we think of as, you know, less obvious, you know, yeah.
Isla Waite (14:53)
Invisible. Yeah.
Adrienne Grace (14:55)
Color contrast also affects people that are colorblind. And we do have a colorblind designer who's going to be speaking this year, which I think is really fascinating. That is something they're going to see the world a little bit differently. So it is some of those things that we think about, hierarchy that needs to be clear. Is it easy? Can I see it right away? Do I need to struggle to understand it?
Isla Waite (15:23)
and kind of screen readers to see it.
Adrienne Grace (15:25)
Yeah, there's that.
Isla Waite (15:27)
We talk a lot about screen readers in this world.
Eric Karkovack (15:29)
It's speaking of that.
mean, the first thing I thought of when you talked about form labels is that we can make labels hidden so that only screen readers can see them. Right. But that doesn't necessarily make it accessible. It's accessible to a screen reader, but what about everyone who's just looking at the form and doesn't know what they're supposed to fill into that particular item? I was, I was using a, uh, a plugin setting the other day where
it had these labels inside the field and I had to keep cutting and pasting the text I was writing to make sure that I was getting the formatting correct. And it's like, it doesn't have to be this hard. Why can't we just use labels?
Isla Waite (16:01)
Mm.
I think this is another common, not attitude, but misconception in the world that, we should hide things that make the design somehow different to what we've been used to for the last two decades. When actually the things that we would like to see for accessibility will help everybody, you know, across the gamut, whether you've got a brain injury or you're just having a bad day and, you know, got up at 5 a.m. and can't remember anything.
Eric Karkovack (16:33)
Yeah.
Isla Waite (16:36)
Having those form labels visible above the place where you're typing all the time means that you don't second guess yourself, you're not feeling anxious to get this thing done. It just calms everything down.
Eric Karkovack (16:49)
Yeah, I think that sometimes we're marketing folks and ⁓ designers and developers kind of collide. You know, we're, you know, we have people insistent, but we have to hide this. We can't have this here. It looks old fashioned or, know, and in reality, you're just making it harder for the, folks to, you know, make those conversions of sales, things that, ⁓ you know, you're hoping they do on your website and you're actually making it harder by making it.
Isla Waite (17:02)
Mm-hmm.
Eric Karkovack (17:17)
look cool. That leads me into my next question. We have such a large ecosystem. We have all sorts of ready-made themes and plugins. And I think we can get off to the wrong start when building a website just by choosing the wrong theme or plugin. How do you handle that? mean, is that something that you
Look at when you're in the project management phase that you have trusted plugins you know are accessible. Have you ever had to say like, sorry, we can't use this?
Adrienne Grace (17:48)
Yes, I was going to say yes to all of those. Yes, I've had to say to clients, I'm sorry. We can't do it this way. Again, I say, being in this community, you do start to hear the plugins or theme builders that are more accessible. And of course, the
Isla Waite (17:50)
We've said, sorry, you go, you go.
Adrienne Grace (18:11)
more into it you get, the more you know what not to do, to not hide your form labels. But there is a lot of stuff out there. I would say do the research if you can ahead of time. I will, I guess it's not my business. I'm gonna shout out Equalize Digital has a called an accessibility checker plugin that I rely on heavily.
⁓ to flag a lot of those issues. But there are things that you don't even think about. It's maybe your form plugin that we've talked about, something that came up recently in the WordPress accessibility meetup that's monthly is, gosh, I'm blanking, the cookie banners. Sorry, it is early my time. The cookie banners that pop up in anything that's like that, that's a modal can...
Isla Waite (18:52)
Mm.
Eric Karkovack (18:53)
yes.
Adrienne Grace (19:00)
be an issue. it's sometimes those things that I would admit a cookie banner would be something like, ⁓ I install it. I'm happy legally. I check that, yes, I'm doing business in the EU and Australia, and I'm great because it'll just set up the right language. And we're thinking about it in terms of the legality of it and making sure for our clients that we're covering them. But suddenly we might have opened them up to another issue around accessibility. Maybe you can't use it.
Isla Waite (19:28)
And some of those
issues are actual barriers. We watched Alex, who is blind, navigating, landing on a website and landing on a cookie banner and then basically getting stuck in it and getting stuck in like a thousand different options that he didn't understand and then trying to find his way out of the cookie banner. He hasn't even made it to the website yet and you've lost a potential audience there. It's fascinating to see someone.
use a website completely different to the way that you might use it. Yeah, it's very enlightening.
Eric Karkovack (19:57)
I think that
seems to be such a huge part of this too, is that we don't always get to see that. And the opportunity to see how someone else experiences that website, I mean, can totally change your perspective, I'm sure, on what it is and what it needs to be in order to be accessible. So we talked about Accessibility Checker. That is a great plugin.
Are there any other tools and processes that you recommend folks use to ensure what they're doing is following those guidelines?
Adrienne Grace (20:33)
I'll take your time.
Isla Waite (20:34)
Building a community, it would be a great one because you always want to be able to rely on like somebody else, like myself and Adrienne connect on all kinds of things and like, Hey, have you come across this before? Hey, do you have a recommendation for this? And that's the quickest way to get to a good place. And at the end of the day, we're all trying to do our best. And at the end of the day, across States and across countries, they're using different standards. Most people are using.
the WCAG standards, which I forget what it stands for, the web content accessibility guidelines, there we go. So most people are using that, but they're using different levels of it. So if you're just getting into it, that is super overwhelming. But finding people who offer like beginner introduction to WCAG is better than going straight to, you know, the insane directory that exists.
going to a bunch of webinars, going to WordPress accessibility day on October the 15th and 16th would be a great way to start. And I just want to revisit that question about plugins and themes. And I think it's like, what's that saying about eating the elephant a bit by bit? I think that's how you have to approach this when you haven't done it before. Certainly as a website builder that I am not, but I've watched my colleague do this over a number of years. And you start off
just take in a little bit, let's work on the contrast. Let's work on the hierarchy. Let's find somebody who can manually test this for us. I mean, that's a bit bigger part of the elephant, but they're out there. More and more people are learning to use screen readers to be able to test these websites. You could learn to do that yourself. And I know that Equalize Digital is offering a course in learning to use a screen reader. So yeah, just bit by bit and don't worry.
Adrienne Grace (22:14)
Yeah.
Isla Waite (22:19)
that it's gonna be a long, it's a marathon, it's gonna be a long journey, you can't learn it all in one day. And then when it comes to clients, that's kind of my domain, they might say, well, I want this, I want this on my website. And I'll say, okay, we have, now I know from knowledge, we have three plugins that can achieve that for you that we know are accessible. So it has to be one of those. We know that this one does things this way, this one does it that way, this one you've got to pay for and it's $500 a year.
So I'm able to lay those options on the table. And I always want to give my clients options rather than telling them what to do and, you know, hardline it, blah, blah, blah. It's a lot about education and a lot about helping them make good choices, which seems to go really well for me. They start to understand why it's important. I also talk a lot about, you know, if they're hiring, well, what kind of people do you want to hire?
Do you want to be inclusive? Let's make that form accessible. And the lights go on and they really start to understand it. And then, you know, when I put a budget in front of them, they're understanding why, you know, we need to do this research. And it's just so important for their company and outside of their company and our economy in California and our economy globally. It just has such a knock on effect to absolutely everything.
Eric Karkovack (23:37)
Yeah, I mean, education seems to open a lot of doors for people when they don't understand accessibility or understand why it's important. They may not see it as something that they need to worry about. But then when you start laying it on the table and this is why you want to have your forms accessible, this is why your shopping cart needs to be a keyboard navigable and those types of things. Then they start to see, okay, there's something in it for me, but there's something in it for the folks that are using this website and
are hopefully going to be our long-term customer and come back to us. It really benefits everyone, right? There's no downside to it.
Adrienne Grace (24:15)
Yeah, agreed. Making it, whoever said, really want fewer customers, or I want to make it more of a pain for them to get to this information or purchase this product or service. I don't think anybody. And the numbers are between 20 and 25 % globally, folks that have some form of a disability. And many of those disabilities are hidden.
You know, nobody walks around with a sign that says, hey, I'm colorblind. You know, some things are more obvious, but I've been sitting in a room where I'm the only one not wearing hearing aid. So, you know, that that's a barrier for some folks, which is why I everything in my world always has captions on. like, do you watch a lot of foreign films? Well,
Yes, but, you know, and there isn't a downside, right? Sometimes find out very quick dialogue. Hey, I was missing that, you know. So to your point, there's no downside to making things easier, quicker to understand, a faster, easier solution to get the information.
Eric Karkovack (25:04)
You
Adrienne Grace (25:28)
purchase the product, use the service.
Eric Karkovack (25:30)
Exactly, good points. It kind of leads me to the next area that I wanted to ask about. So we often build a website. We hand it off to our clients. And it could be 100 % accessible. Once the client gets a hold of it, it may not be 100 % accessible after long. So I know.
Eli, you mentioned training, right? ⁓ Coaching. What does that look like? What kind of advice do you give to folks who are going to maintain their website maybe and make sure that they're using best practices in the areas they're touching of the website? Because they may not be touching everything. They may be just putting blog posts in. how do you go about that?
Isla Waite (26:15)
Yeah, great question. it kind of depends what our relationship has been with them to that point. Did we build them a website from scratch? Did we help them remediate, which is the word used to take an unaccessible website to an accessible website without rebuilding it? Which is a desired approach when you're looking at large websites. know, when they're deep and broad and the last thing they want to do is rebuild it, we'll start chipping away at
remediation and we'll do that over a period of time, which could be months up to a year or two, you know, it could take a long time. So during that process, coaching is happening. And, know, we might be using the accessibility checker plugin. My colleague Rosa Linda will be literally side by side with whoever's going to be the person taking care of the website, updating the content.
and talking them through how to understand what the check is telling them. And think that you're gonna get false positives. You're gonna get things that you now know with the knowledge that you've gained that you can ignore. Like literally tell the computer, ignore that, I checked it, it's fine, I know that PDF's accessible. So there's that level of learning that happens just through the process. And if we build them a website, it's more likely that training is gonna happen at the end.
and it will just be a part of the scope to do that towards the end. And then, a lot of agencies, us included and Equalize Digital too, will do maintenance plans to check in as time goes, whether it's monthly, quarterly, half every six months or whatever, just to make sure standards are being kept up. Do we need a little retraining here? And that's...
That kind of coaching can go as deep as a company wants to go. Obviously, generally depends on the budget, depends on how many people are accessing the website. know, third parties accessing the website, if you've got a lot of them can be quite the octopus to, you know, control. So you might want more checks. Yeah, that's pretty much it. It's okay. I knew who you meant.
Eric Karkovack (28:14)
I mispronounced your name again, Isla. I'm so sorry. I caught myself right after I said it.
You
You on the top of my screen. Okay.
Adrienne Grace (28:24)
Exactly.
Eric Karkovack (28:25)
I'm sensitive to it because people mispronounce my last name all the time, I apologize. Sometimes I get things...
Isla Waite (28:30)
I'm not even gonna
even try and say your last name.
Eric Karkovack (28:34)
Don't worry about it. You don't need to know it, but ask my family. have a short-term memory lapse that sometimes people that can you unplug my charger? Sure. And then six hours later, it's still plugged. yeah. Sorry about that folks. But I, but that's great advice for, for, coaching. I clients, you know, I, one of those things that, know, you could look at the site six months later and they put in, you know, say they put in 50 blog posts or press releases and they failed to put all at.
attributes on all of them. So you have to go in and kind of look at that. Do you see AI as a helper in any of this?
Because it can generate text, it can do things. I mean, it may not be accurate text.
Adrienne Grace (29:15)
there's that. I would say the bit that I've tested it, there are of course so many webinars out there and blog posts. think I see the phrase AI probably 150 times a day between the emails and blog posts and every platform that you log into.
Isla Waite (29:16)
Hahaha
Adrienne Grace (29:37)
I think it has its, its uses. I think the true danger is thinking that it's the be all end all and it's the answer. And it might get you started on something. It might give you a leg up. might give you something to work with, but in terms of alt text or other solutions.
it really still does take somebody going in and looking at it. I know, I think one of the first demonstrations that I saw, a gentleman was showing his photo app that had the AI built in and it routinely identified his black lab as a pair of sunglasses.
Isla Waite (30:23)
You
Adrienne Grace (30:27)
Like, I know this is not a pair of sunglasses. Even with low vision, I know it's not a pair of sunglasses. So sometimes it can be pretty good. A lot of times, particularly if you're asking it to decide what a chart or graphs, I find that a lot in, because you can run into the same thing in PowerPoint presentations. I see this a lot. And it's trying to tell you it's.
It's a chart with red and green and yellow bars. Great. That's fine. That is true. It doesn't tell me anything about the chart. So that is absolutely a case where I would encourage people to go in and actually write their own text, but at least review it. if it's something that's true, the other thing is the AI won't necessarily decide if something is decorative
That lovely fleur de lis may just be something that's visually appealing, gives the eye a rest in your layout, but doesn't have any meaning whatsoever. It's not conveying anything about your product, your service, or anything. So it could be left as a decorative image. And those, often are, to me, decisions that are better at least reviewed by a human.
Eric Karkovack (31:24)
Yes.
Isla Waite (31:50)
AI misses context.
Adrienne Grace (31:52)
Yeah.
Eric Karkovack (31:53)
Yeah, I we all want the easy and cheap answer, right? But that often comes at an extra cost in that you're relying on a machine to do something a human is much better equipped to handle. I mean, I know there are some folks out there that, OK, we have alt attributes on all of our images, so we pass. It doesn't actually matter if it gets the context of the image. It doesn't matter if it is at all accurate or helps folks.
Isla Waite (32:06)
Yeah.
Eric Karkovack (32:20)
figure out what they're looking at or what's in the content. It's covered. Google PageSpeed says, hey, you're 100 % accessibility. So way to go. It's more than that, right? You have to have the human element still. I don't know that we're going to get away from that anytime soon.
Isla Waite (32:39)
Accessibility is not a checkbox. That is the wrong way to approach it.
Adrienne Grace (32:44)
Well, I would say one of the things is that we're asking
computer to write something for a human, right? The users are human. If the AI bot were just writing for another AI bot, well, okay. I guess that's all right. But the truth is we are ultimately designing and connecting with humans. And we can't forget that. That the human element is the absolute core of why we're doing what we're doing.
Isla Waite (32:58)
Thank
Eric Karkovack (33:15)
Absolutely, mean, the bot does not go shopping for you yet. I mean, I'm sure that's coming. Your personal shopper bot, you will look on Amazon for the right deal on toothpaste or whatever. for the rest of us, you know, who want to buy our own toothpaste online if we do that, you know, we need to know what we're looking at and what's there and how much it costs and how to buy it. So that's great advice. So.
I'm going to wrap it up there, but is there anything else you'd like to tell us about WP Accessibility Day? Any other great things that we're going to look forward to on October 15th and 16th?
Adrienne Grace (33:52)
When you sign up, you can get the cool t-shirt.
Isla Waite (33:52)
There is actually a
Eric Karkovack (33:56)
That is cool.
Adrienne Grace (33:57)
We have her.
Isla Waite (33:58)
register and you could buy one of these. you donate, have to remember how that works. You may donate if you like to WordPress usability. Let me read that out. Let me read that out. Okay. So on the back says, ⁓ alt equals WPAD in American sign language on the front of a light blue t-shirt.
Adrienne Grace (34:04)
Yeah, think it has.
Eric Karkovack (34:09)
Aha, I like it.
Adrienne Grace (34:13)
Sir.
Eric Karkovack (34:23)
Love it.
Isla Waite (34:24)
And the reason I read that out is because somebody might not be able to see it.
Eric Karkovack (34:28)
Exactly, and there are also going to be people listening to this in addition to watching it. So that makes a lot more sense, right? ⁓ I actually was at a concert over the weekend with my daughter and there were several performances that were signed.
Isla Waite (34:44)
Mm-hmm.
Eric Karkovack (34:44)
These
bands were up on stage rocking out and there was this gentleman in a very sparkly cowboy hat I actually have a video of him because he was so cool and he was grooving up there the music He was he was giving us lyrics. He was giving us Drums and guitar and all that stuff. It's like what a cool thing to do and and you know I'm sure there are folks who are hard of hearing in that venue and you know
Isla Waite (34:51)
Love it.
Adrienne Grace (34:58)
I was like.
Eric Karkovack (35:10)
Why not? It adds the experience too, even if you're not hard of hearing.
Isla Waite (35:12)
Exactly.
Eric Karkovack (35:14)
Well, thank you, Ila. And I said it right, didn't I? Ila, no, I didn't say it right. my gosh. I need more coffee. You're the ones who were up early. I'm just here. Ila Waite and Adrian Grace, thank you so much for being here and educating us on accessibility and letting us know more about WP Accessibility Day.
Isla Waite (35:35)
forget to register! 15th and 16th of October! It's free!
Adrienne Grace (35:36)
Yeah.
It's free, 2025.w.
Eric Karkovack (35:39)
It's WPAccessibility.Day.
We'll put that in the show notes. And ⁓ also, if you're listening or watching, visit the WPMinute.com slash subscribe. You can get our email newsletter there. You can support us by becoming a member. Support my mispronunciation of names and all the other embarrassing stuff I do on film. I appreciate both of you being here, and thanks so much. And we'll see you next time on the WP Minute.
Adrienne Grace (35:42)
Yep, exactly, thank you.
Isla Waite (36:07)
Thank you Eric. Bye.
Adrienne Grace (36:07)
Thank you.
Eric Karkovack (36:08)
Thank you.