347: Building Accessible Websites – Writing Good Alt Text, Identifying Issues, and Creating Content That’s Accessible for Everyone with Bet Hannon

This episode is sponsored by our sister site, WP Tasty. As I've shared before, the WP Tasty team, they make incredible plugins for WordPress. For people like you, people who are running a WordPress site, my guess is that's 90% of you, maybe 95% of you. Some of you might be using other sites. Wix, Squarespace, those are great sites, but we really believe that. Or site builders. But we really believe that WordPress is the place that you should be if you want to have good search traffic and flexibility with how your site is created. We love WordPress, which is why we created a business around it called wptasty. We had some opinions on how we wanted to go about building the plugins that we're using and how we wanted to use those to increase earnings to maximize the search potential and the social reach of our food and recipe site called Pinch of Yam. So we kind of built these for our own. We wanted to scratch our own niche. But then we also knew that there was an opportunity to package these up, the things that we were creating for ourselves and then offer those to other bloggers and publishers. So right now we have three of these plugins that we're using and then also offering through WP Tasty.

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It's tasty recipes, tasty Pins, and Tasty links. And one of the things that's been great about sharing these plugins with other people is we get great testimonials from people. Like this one from Christine from Bite youe Cravings when she was talking about tasty Pins. She says Tasty Pins has helped me seamlessly connect my blog and my Pinterest account. Before setting it up, pinning from my website was confusing, lacked information like pin descriptions, which is a part of what we do with Tasty Pins. And being able to set keyword rich descriptions, the correct title and disable pinning on certain images has really clarified my approach to getting my recipes to Pinterest, which is a great little testimonial about how tastypins works for people who want to do a good job of maximizing their exposure on Pinterest and the traction that they're getting there. So if you're interested in learning more about any of the wptasty plugin offerings, tastypins or tasty recipes or tasty links, and how they help you optimize your site for Pinterest, Google search and affiliate earnings, you can head over to wptasty.com that's the letter W, the letter P and, and then tasty.com thanks to the WP tasty team for partnering up and sponsoring the Food Blogger Pro Podcast. Hello. Hello. Welcome to the podcast.

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People get a tiny bit better every day forever. And this conversation is going to be one of those conversations.

Bet Hannon from Bette Hannon Business Websites is gonna be talking all about her experience with kind of the accessibility world. And a lot of us know accessibility, are familiar with accessibility, but not really the intricacies of what goes into it and how we can make accessible websites.

Why it's important, why we should be.

Thinking about doing that, why it should be a priority. And Beth's gonna share ways that we can do that and also the why behind the reason, really, for wanting to do that.

It's a great conversation.

Bet's an incredible individual, not only in her skills and knowledge, but also the heart behind what she does. So it's going to be a great interview.

Really excited to share it.

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Great. Good to be here.

Yeah. We're going to talk about all things accessibility. And that word, I'm guessing, is going to be familiar for some publishers, some bloggers, because maybe I've heard it in groups, heard conversations around it, maybe a little bit fear based, which we're going to talk about that in regards to lawsuits and kind of legal issues. But where I want to start is hearing about how you got into this, because your focus is really on accessibility and helping businesses, whether it be publishers, you know, online businesses, and I know it's beyond that as well, really make sure that they're doing this right. So what did your journey into this world look like? How did you get started with it?

Yeah, so I, this is actually a second career for me. I started, I did about 15 years in nonprofit management, and then right before the financial crisis in 2008, my position downsized and I kind stumbled into freelancing. I had been doing some, some building some websites for the organizations I served and other groups around them and just kind of stumbled into freelancing and then growing an agency over time. And we've always been 100% remote. So pandemic was nothing new for us, really. I told my mom, you know, the only thing that really changed for us is I don't have to explain what zoom is anymore.

Right. It's like you don't have to troubleshoot as long when you do a Zoom call.

Yeah, yeah. People know when you say to somebody, you're muted. They know where to look. And then about. We got into accessibility, so we've been doing WordPress development and helping people with other kinds of marketing things, setting up emails and email newsletters and that kind of stuff. And then in about early 2017, we, we had a client that we were helping them with their WordPress website, a big water district in California, and they're part of the state of California, so they're required to be accessible. And they, they were just learning about some of those new accessibility requirements. And we said to them, oh, let us help you. Find somebody to do that. And they said, no, no, no. Well, that's fine. Bring in an expert. But we want you to be the day to day people to help us. So we want to bring you along. Which is great because they invested in us.

Yeah.

As an agency too. And, and when we dived in and really learned, started learning more about accessibility and really I think for me, when I first saw somebody who was blind, they happened to be blind.

Yeah.

You know, using a website that was accessible and how that really just enabled them to be independent and have this human dignity. I was hooked.

So that's cool. Can you talk about what that's like? Because I think people in theory understand it, but even just when somebody who's visually impaired is using a screen reader, um, would that be the right term for it? Screen reader?

Yeah.

What, what does that look like? And, and, and I think that picture will help people understand why it's important.

Yeah. When I've done live workshops and stuff, I actually sometimes bring in a little YouTube clip of a person you reading using a screen reader. And there are dozens of them out there. You can just Google, you know, person using demoing a screen reader. And it can so pretty much know you can. When you turn it on when you're testing with it, it's kind of annoying because it reads out right when you're testing. And so sometimes if I accidentally turn it on and I'm like, yeah. So it just kind of works its way through the page. And we had. So I would encourage people to go to YouTube and see somebody who depends on it doing that. And that's especially important if you're going to start testing or you're going to try and use a screen reader to kind of get a sense for what it's like on your website. Just to understand that people who depend on them every day and use them all the time use them differently than you or I might if we're just testing. Right. And stumbling through it. And so. Well, one of the big things is they usually have that the speed turned up like super high.

Yeah. Just in terms of somebody reading back to them.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Or the machine reading back. Yeah, yeah.

So it's a machine reading through the language and that's there and it reads out things like, you know, when you hit an image, it'll say image of and then it reads the alt text. So you never have to put image of in your alt text because the screen reader already puts that in there. Those kinds of things. And so, yeah, it's pretty cool. And then watching people, watching people who have mobility issues, they are using, you know, there's hundreds, maybe thousands of different devices for that. But it all comes back down to keyboard navigation. So people who, like Stephen Hawking had a little sensor on his cheek, or people have eye movement trackers or other kinds of things, really it all just comes down to navigating through your site with the keyboard. Typically with the tab key and the enter key, you can see how much you can get through your site doing that. But people who use screen readers also use a lot of keyboard navigation.

Sure. So an example being if somebody's visually impaired, they might come to the site, they would use tab to navigate, if everything's accessible, would be able to understand what a link is, would be, the text would be read back, which that is maybe just kind of a default behavior. And images would be read back. The alt text being a really important piece for that. And oftentimes in our world we're thinking about, hey, alt text SEO optimization. But alt text, really the SEO is secondary. It's like Google riding off of an accessibility feature. Like, first and foremost, it's not meant for Google, it's meant for accessibility. And so when you're crafting those, think about, My understanding is like, think about how you would read it to somebody who might not be able to see that to describe what the image is. Yeah.

And that, that's. And actually Google starts the algorithm. My understanding is that the Google algorithms really are starting to, you know, discriminate there too. Right. That, that when you're obviously keyword stuffing or you're obviously trying to manipulate it, that really what they're looking for is a just a plain sense description of what's going on in the image. Right?

Yeah.

And that's great. Ideally that should be supporting or connected to the other text that's on the page. Right. So they're, they're using that, that, that description to kind of get a sense for what's happening on this site and how good of an experience is that?

So you're in this world of accessibility, you go through this kind of trial by fire of learning the ins and outs of it, and suddenly you're like, wow, this is, I love this. Right. And it's impactful work. It's needed work. My guess is that you could go to just about any website and see an opportunity for them to improve the accessibility on it.

Yeah, that's. And that's something to be aware of is that in some sense, no website is 100% accessible because it's always a journey. You're always working at it. Every time somebody adds new content to the site, there's a potential for it to not be accessible. Again, you're always working at that. But then when you start thinking about, well, it's not just people who are blind or people who have mobility issues, but you can begin to include things in accessibility like, well, things like colorblindness, things like things like ADHD and reading disabilities, things like anxiety and depression. People with anxiety and depression give up. So if you have a checkout process on your site that's complicated, or a registration thing, somehow that's complicated, people just give up. So just kind of beginning to look at all of those things and then you have to look at. Well, there are compound disabilities, or the medical term would be co. Mortal. Two things. Maybe they're blind and they have anxiety, or there's a reading disability and they're colorblind. And so how are you going to begin to do that? It's a journey always. But yes, I often will check. It's a compulsive thing. I think probably it's something I should seek there before. But anytime I visit sites, I start looking at, oh, yeah, that's probably not accessible.

It's interesting. For Pinch of Yum, we had an email from somebody, this is maybe like two weeks ago, and to your point about being colorblind, they mentioned like, hey, this button is kind of hard for me to see and talk specifically about why. And it was super helpful feedback. And so we, we went and made an update on that. So they're, they're. The contrasting colors was strong enough to be easy to see. Um, and so you can start to see how a lot of those factors play into it. What when somebody hears that, my guess is 99% of people are going to say, I want to be that person that is aware of this and moving towards improving that. And. And there are also probably people who feel overwhelmed with just like learning WordPress and installing a plugin and getting their content out the door. How do you see people being successful.

With both of those things without getting.

Overwhelmed by maybe feeling like it's beyond their expertise or the resources they have available. How do people do this? Well, especially if they're just starting out or at an intermediary level, as opposed to a brand like Pinch of Yam, where we'd have a budget to put towards that and pay a developer to push the fix out the next day. What does that look like and how do people do that? Well, in the early stages yeah, so.

It'S important to recognize that in, especially when we talk about WordPress, but even in other content management systems there are accessibility related things that are content related and some that are theme related. So things, things like your theme, like does it have skip links? So like when you go to the site, can you skip directly to the content without having to tab all the way through the menu? So, so things that are content related are easier for non technical people to deal with. And coincidentally, you know, if you fix all of the, you know, all of the headings issues, if you get alt text on all your images, you and you properly nest those headings, you know that's pretty much, you know, they, they do these studies that say that's like you know, 70 to 80% of all the accessibility issues on your site. And so, so if you're beginning to educate yourself about how to put content in, I would say that's the place to start. Educate yourself. Don't keep creating inaccessible content. Right. You may have a ton of old content that you've got to still deal with, but at least learn how to put it in in an accessible way so you can go forward. Then you could begin to deal with, you know, address over time some of those older posts, I would start with your more popular posts and then kind of gradually work and there's some tools for that you can find like there's some plugins that will help you identify images that don't have alt text, for example, and begin to kind of work through things and then you can begin to think about is your theme accessible? And when we work with folks, you know, part of that is, you know, the, the lifespan of a theme design probably somewhere in three to five year range. Five if you're lucky.

Right. Meaning towards the end of that it starts to become outdated.

Well, and I would say yeah, yeah. That you're going to want to redo design anyway. Right. You're going to redo the design anyway. So if you're more than halfway into that, it's probably more cost effective. If you have a lot of theme issues related to accessibility, then it's probably more cost effective that rather than trying to fix all of those to just go ahead and bump up your redesign. Sure. And so helping people begin to think about that. So that when you educate yourself so that when you get ready to do that next redesign process, you're already thinking about what are the things you're going to be looking for to make sure that that's accessible. And so some of the things just make sure. There are themes in the WordPress repository that are labeled accessibility ready. There are. And of course, any developer can put accessibility ready on any theme that they're going to sell you. So do your homework and make. Make sure you're checking on those. Just because they say it is just, you know, do. Do some diligence on that, you know.

Yeah.

And then, you know, being ready to do that next time around, I think is just a really. Those couple of things will get you a long way and then just realizing again that it's going to be a journey and you're going to keep working at it. It's going to be a long process.

Yeah, we talk about that a lot on the podcast. We have this. So the name of our parent company is Tiny Bit. We talk about getting a tiny bit better every day, forever. This concept of 1% infinity, like, great. You don't have to fix all the problems and every day it doesn't have to be a hundred percent, but to your point, have it on the table as something you want to continually improve and get better at. I want to pull out a few of the different things that you talked about. Alt text. I think that one's really easy to understand for people and it's something they can be doing and there's no downside with it. There's only upside in doing accurate alt text. Text that describes what the image is. That's simply, simply what it is. The other thing you talked about was nesting headers. Can you talk about what that means and why that is accessible?

Sure. So I have recently discovered that they don't teach high school essay writing like they used to, but I used to have to write an outline. Right. You know, so there was a Roman numeral 1 and then there was a capital letter A, and you went. And you went down and you kind of nested those. Those. Those levels in. And the H tags on your website are supposed to be nested like that. So the. And you. You'll often see when you're editing things, you can make something an H1 or an H2 or an H4. And a lot of times people just think, well, those are just design. That just gives me the size and style of the font differently. And they're only thinking about it as a design piece, but it actually needs to be there for the accessibility, but also for the SEO. Google is looking for this stuff too, right. So the H1 is always the page title. So in WordPress you never make anything else. In H1, H1 is always the title of the Page or post. So then everything other main level items are H2. So. But you should never then skip from an H2 to an H4. You need to have a three in between.

Yeah, right.

And you can go down to six, but we don't see that happen very often. Mainly you're doing twos and threes and maybe a four.

Sure. If you get. If you get super nested. Yeah, yeah. If you're going like really deep on a. On a subject and have a long article. But usually you're not going to need that much.

No. And you just want to make sure you're not skipping any levels. Right, sure.

So an example being like, if you and I were going to write a why Talk why tacos are awesome post, that would be the H1, why tacos are awesome. H2 would maybe be. You could write a little intro paragraph. H2 would be like the. I'm building this on the fly because of the variety of tacos that you can make. So that would be the H2, like, variety of tacos. And then the H3 could potentially be like chicken tacos, shrimp tacos, tofu tacos, like beef tacos. You could have all of those. And then after that it would be like the next header would be like fun party food or something. Like, it's another point of why tacos are awesome. But it all like each section rolls up into the next to your point. It's visually, when you're looking at it, it makes sense. But what I hear you saying is that from an accessibility standpoint, it helps somebody navigate that content. Is that how it manifests from an accessibility standpoint?

Because people who are using screen readers or accessibility devices are often skipp from H tag to H tag. So maybe they're going to skip through and just read all of the H2s to see if there's something there that is of interest to them. Right. Or maybe then they'll skip it and they can do this via their keyboard shortcuts. Right. They can Skip it at H2S. If that doesn't sound like what they're looking for, they'll skip to the next H2 that does sound like what they're looking for. Then they'll start reading the H3S. So it helps people really quickly. Just like a sighted person would be scanning things. We're not really reading everything. We're just scanning for what we're looking for. So it's a way of scanning. So if you don't offer that scaffold of those headings for people to be able to scan quickly. They just give up. They move on to a different set.

Yep, that makes sense. And a couple points that you mentioned, like, I'll only have one H1. That's one of the things that we. This was on a SEO audit and I think a lot of these things compliment each other where SEO is accessibility and accessibility is SEO. But you have one H1. And that being important because you just have one. An article should be about one thing and the H1 says what it's about. And in doing this audit we realized like, oh, there's a lot of content on Pinch of Yum. And we also were looking at a site we recently acquired called Curbly. And it's like, oh, there's, there's articles that have multiple H1s. That's a really easy fix. And so you tighten that up by nesting things properly within the headings. So for somebody who's like frantically jotting down notes where they're like, okay, headers. Okay, good. Got that.

Like, another thing with headers is sometimes people would be tempted to make an entire sentence bold. Right. To just bold the bold. The paragraph text.

Kind of like a header hack.

Yeah, but that's not that. Yeah, if you're tempted to do that, you probably need to make it a header. Some. Somewhere in the header. Right. And italics too, if you're going to make a. Like italicizing a word or two is really great, but when you start to ital synthesize a whole sentence, it makes it really hard for people with learning disabilities to read.

Sure.

So you want to make sure you're not using bold and italics as kind of hacks in that way. So. Yeah.

Yep, that makes sense. So what, what does that look like from. I think a lot of people in a situation like this will say, like, I just want to make sure that I'm doing it right.

Oh, of course, yeah.

Is there, is there. I know Google Search Console has some built in mechanisms for, for keeping track of this. Even like con. I think contrasting colors is maybe a part of it with Google Search Console. But is there any way that somebody could be like, go to, you know, accessibilitychecker.com as. Adam, that's not an actual URL. No, but they're all put in your website and then get feedback on how they could improve this.

So there are some. So there are a number of them online. One of them is wave. And you can put in your URL and you can have it come out and it'll check and it'll check the contrast and It'll check your headings and you know, some other things that are looking for in the kind of the theme are there labels on things correctly? And the important thing to know, and those are great, that's a great place to start if you're not doing anything. The important thing to know is that those, Those checkers use AI, artificial intelligence. And AI only gets about 30% of the issues made on average on a page. So it's a great place to start to find all the low hanging fruit. But part of the problem with doing it right is that there's a lot in accessibility standards. A lot depends on context, A lot depends on what you're doing. And so that's why art and science, it's more art in some ways sometimes than that. So for instance, you always want to have alt text on all your images, except when it's a purely decorative image. You know, if you have like a fleur de lis that's separated content sections, no alt text there.

Yep.

And you, it gets labeled in a different way as decorative.

So but AI wouldn't be able to pick that up. It would surface it as an image and your score would be dinged until you put in there like wavy line. But it's like in regards to adding context around the content, it doesn't help.

Right. But you don't want to put things in there for the screen reader because that's not helping the experience of a visually disabled person who's using the screen reader. They don't need to know it's a visual separator or you know, that's like, it just wastes their time. Right.

So.

You want to omit the alt text in that particular case, which is very infrequent really. Right, sure. And then, you know, so those checkers can be great. But again it, some of it just requires some, some learning and some working at things. People do do testing. So there are ways to get what's called a, you know, like you would get an SEO audit, you could get an accessibility audit. If you had somebody try to do that for every single page of your site, it would be astronomically expensive. So typically what happens is people will do a sampling audit. So we typically do 10 URLs. So somebody will come to us and we'll Help them identify 10 URLs that have different templates within their site, different layouts, different maybe different content creators, different. You know, we can kind of work with you to get a good representation of the content on your site. Then we'll do the audit on those. And then we give you like a big report at the end that just tells you everything. We checked all the, all the, you know, all the passes and all the fails and where things are. And then for ours, we offer kind of a consultation at the end then, you know, like, so you can. We'll sit down with you, we'll help you explain it to you. If you want to bring your developer, we can tell them more technically how to fix things. And that kind of cool.

How about so. So there's one side of it, which I feel like is the proactive, doing the right thing side, and then there's the other side, which I think also exists and is important to address, which is a little bit of like, I don't want to get sued for not having an accessible site. Can you. And I think people might know people or friend of a friend situation where they're like, oh, I got this letter about being sued for accessibility, which is a little bit of a bummer because I feel like there's an opportunity to just create accessibility. Accessible sites, because it's the good and right thing to do. But at the same time, it's maybe like a motivator for people to do the good and right thing. Anyways, no matter how you get there, it's still a good outcome. But what, what can you talk about what's happening with those and what people should be aware of.

So the lawsuits that are coming are coming under the Americans with Disabilities act, as you might be familiar with that. That's where we got ramps and, you know, bathroom handle hand grabs and all those kind of things. That's. That law was passed in 1990. And of course, at that point we didn't really have websites in the way we think of them today. And they certainly weren't as ubiquitous everywhere for our daily life in the same way. And so what happened in the 90s with brick and mortar storefronts was that the US Department of Justice came out with some really clear guidelines of what it takes to make. To pass and not be sued. And we don't have that with websites. And partly because there's that issue of context and there's so many gray areas around how to implement. There's this standard and this standard and they kind of overlap and not really. And then. So it's just. There's a lot of. There's more ambiguity, I think, on websites.

Than there was as opposed to with the building where we just made these updates. And it's your ramp has to be.

This rate, this kind of really clearly.

Defined or like you need to change the handles so they're like pull handles versus old school, like circular handles.

Right. So, so what we're left with is really because there's not guidelines like that, we're left with lawsuits that are kind of. We're stumbling our way into them. Americans tend to be a little more litigious anyway than our European other counterparts across the world. But we're left with lawsuits. Some of those lawsuits are absolutely legitimate. I came to your site and I couldn't make it work and now I'm going to sue you. Others of them are more what we call kind of surf by like there'll be one attorney and one plaintiff and they're suing 45 people, you know, all at one time. And so really clearly some folks, I guess in a different context you would say ambulance chasing. Right. We're just trying to like do that. That doesn't mean that you should take those any less seriously. And some of them can seem really scammy. Like, you know, we had a client get one when we googled the attorney that it came from, he'd been disbarred three times. I mean, you know, it would be really easy to just sort of say, well, that's just a scam. I'm not even going to pay attention to it. But as that client's attorney. And we said to them, you can't, you can't do that. You have to take it seriously. You don't necessarily have to respond to them and get sucked in by to them, but you need to make sure that you're paying attention because they did raise some issues about your accessibility. And so it does leave you vulnerable. So you want to make sure that even if the letters just seem crazy that you're paying attention to it. Notice what they. If, if they specified something, what they did. We also try to. If you've been working on accessibility, we encourage folks to put a, an accessibility policy on their statement. And usually it has three parts.

It says on their site.

Like in their site. Yeah, like right next to the privacy policy. Yeah. That says we want everybody to be able to use this site. We specifically have been working to make this site accessible, using. And then the typical standards that people use are the website content accessibility guidelines that comes out of W3 and at double a standard usually. And so we're trying to do that. This is our goal. And then if you see anything or you have any problems, let us know because you can't. I mean, there's no way to do it all. But if you're inviting people to, yeah. Come to you first, that gives you at least a leg just now you got to take it seriously when they do. But, you know.

Yeah, yeah.

But at the same time, you know, then that gives you some, you know, you can say to the person who come surfed by sued you, like you didn't pay attention to emailing me first. Maybe that'll buy you a little time to.

That makes sense. And in a situation like that, how if, if you fix the things that are addressed in the statement, does that then create the ability for you to respond in a way where it's like, hey, thanks for the heads up on this, like litigious action that you took against us. We've actually fixed these and updated them. Or is it kind of like historical, that your historical wrongs can be brought against you?

Yeah, no, once you fix, it's, it's, it's current. It's. That's my understanding. Although these court cases are changing all the time. Every, you know, every new one that comes out adds a new little nuance. And so I don't think it's, it's so much retroactive. I think what I would do, and I'm not an attorney and you should, if you get one of these letters, you definitely should contact your own attorney. Right?

Yeah.

And so, but I do think your attorney might advise you to not necessarily engage with the letter writer. Let them be there, but definitely start fixing the pieces of this so that you got a leg to stand on. A lot of times those sorts of threats of lawsuits, when they do begin to the demand letter is like the intention, I'm going to sue you. When you get to actually suing, it actually costs them a little money to get that far. So that fewer of those come. I wouldn't bet on that. But when they do come, most of those lawsuits end up being settled rather than litigated. But even then, you know, that's a lot of money to pay your attorney to represent you in all of that. And then you got to pay to if you need help getting your site accessible. And sometimes on a really short timeframe, sometimes, you know, the courts have said you have 30 days to make this website accessible. And that's like, wow, there's 10,000 posts here. How are we going to do that? Right.

Do you see any correlation to these being bigger sites versus Because I would imagine on one extreme, like let's say my dad, who's a potter and he does ceramics, he doesn't actually have a really Active site right now. But let's say he did and he got one of these would be like, wait, what like, you know, does that happen and what happens in situations like that?

I think the folks that are really trying to troll for these are really just using AI to do a little kind of quick test and say up. They're missing some halt techs. We'll just, you know, so I don't know that it's a correlation so much as they're just.

Yeah.

Trying to throw spaghetti anywhere, everywhere sticks. Yeah, yeah. I do think you're at a higher risk if you had, you know, if you have a website that really is pretty much just a digital brochure for your plumbing business, call us, you know, call us. There's not a contact form. There's, you know, your, your risk is really very low. Right. And then the more interactive or complex the, the pieces and content of your site are, the, the more that risk increases. So if you have an E commerce site where people have got to buy, put stuff in their cart and then check out, or if you've got a long registration form for your membership site or you, you know, a lot of these recipe pieces, you know, that have you got to work your way through the content or there are videos that then have, you know, don't need to have their transcripts and all of those kinds of things.

Right.

So part of it is just what the site is makes you at a higher risk for having stuff stick when it does.

That makes sense. Can you talk about videos? So we talked about photos and alt text and then how about videos? And a lot of videos on recipe sites will be audio only, so there won't be any transcript necessarily. What do you do in situations like that?

If it truly is audio only, then you should note that somewhere because if I'm deaf and I just come to your site and I see the video playing, I don't know that it's audio only.

Sure.

Right. I'm assuming because 99% of other sites that I have visited have a video that's describing something and, and you can just put like on it, you know, just like you might see, you might turn on captions on your television, right?

Yeah.

It just says cheerful music or something. Right. Depending on the recipe. Right. So that's one thing. You can put a transcript there. Better yet than a transcript would be to put in captions. You can upload that to Google. Google can do that for you through the voice recognition. And then you can fix the problems because of course AI is never quite Perfect. But if you upload it and then you fix those, you win doubly. Even more actually, because research shows that on social media and sites like recipe blogs, a huge portion, maybe as close as 50% of people are listening with the sound off.

Yeah.

So if you're on, if you're posting something on social media, if people are coming to your site, they're listening with the sound off. Right. I'm looking at that blog, I'm looking at that recipe while my kids are watching tv and I don't want to like, distract them or, you know, all kinds of ways that people with ab. With no. With, you know, more. No disabilities for hearing are watching things with the sound off. And so you, you get, you would get way more traction for your, you know, for what's going on in the video.

It creates a stickier video regardless. And in a situation where, let's say you're not doing a voiceover, your point would be still helpful to have some type of notation around that. So people, when they're, when they're watching it, they know that there's not actual, there's not somebody like speaking the directions over it. You're just, there's whatever you said, like cheerful music or ominous music or whatever it is. So people know, so it makes sense. One of the things you had mentioned when we were chatting before is the availability of tax credits for people who are looking to invest into accessibility. What does that look like? And how do people know if they're eligible for that? And how do you invest into that?

So, you know, we talk about Americans with Disabilities act, and part of that act was to create a way that brick and mortar store owners, business owners could have some tax credits for working to make things more accessible. In more recent years, that tax credit has also applied to websites and SaaS, platforms and other kinds of pieces. So to be eligible, you have to be a for profit business. You'd be making a profit and you have to have under. Either under a million dollars in revenue or under 30 employees. So you can make over a million dollars in revenue but have less than 30 employees. You still qualify. So one of those two. And then you, you can get up to 50% of what you spend. So say you spend $5,000 for an audit, you could get a $2,500 tax credit. And the credit is not a refundable thing. It just reduces the amount of tax you owe. So. And you can repeat that every single year. Right. If you get an audit on your site every single year, you can keep taking that tax credit. And you can, you can take up to $10,000 in expenses. So get a $5,000 tax credit.

Cool. So for a business owner, you can think about that as an expense. So first there's a tax credit 50% and then additional above that that you're spending is an expense which, that will reduce your taxable income. So you can start to see how this looks different from an expense standpoint because you essentially give it like a 50% cut and then depending on which tax bracket you're in, you get a cut after that as well based on the expense running through your business.

Yeah. The key is that you've got to pay it out upfront. Right. You got to have the, you have to have the cash flow to pay it out up front. And then wait, wait until next year tax, you know, when you're preparing your taxes again to get, to get that credit. But, but it's a, it's a huge thing. And, and you know, it's not, you might think, oh, it's only for super specific accessibility things. But if you redesign your website and you're doing that to get it to be more accessible, you're making sure that you're working with a developer that's going to help you make that more, more accessible. You could take the whole project as part of that. And so the key is that you need to make sure that you're getting good receipts or good invoices or bills from those activities that clearly state that it's related to accessibility.

Cool. And at that point it would be talking with your CPA or tax person to make sure that they understand it.

And yeah, and the four form, I think 8826, but it talks about disability improvements.

Cool. 8826.

You said 8826.

Yeah, that's me personally making a note on my end for it. So the other thing you had mentioned was the possibility of doing insurance. And I know a lot of times we think about business insurance, right. If you have a brick and mortar store, you have insurance in case there's a break in or a fire or we have house insurance we don't often think about and we should insurance for online businesses. And this being an example of an area that you could get insurance do you know, like what does that end up costing? It's maybe hard to say, but. And how do people go about getting that clear, actually.

So this is. I only know of one company doing this so far. I suspect that it may increase as we are moving forward. They offer up to $50,000 in coverage. So if you think about what you would have to pay for your attorney and then the fees for making your site accessible if you had damages that you had to pay. So all of that they, it starts at now there and there's two ways you can do it. You can do the insurance alone, that's about $1,000 a year. And then you can do the. For $2,000 a year. They are partnered with a special agency that really works at helping to get the website accessible. That coverage is. It's, it's the flat fee because it starts out at only like I think it's $10,000 worth of coverage. And then as you meet some milestones to make your site more accessible, it can get up to 50,000.

Got it.

So you've got to do the, you know, some pieces of that. But they talk about, you know, you could get almost all of the first, you know, you could get up to 25,000 within a just a day or so of work. Right. It's not a huge thing. So, so and I can get you a link for that. We put it in the show notes if you want.

But yeah, great. What is the company name that does that?

Nebula Media is the one is the agency that's working with, with the insurance company. But I have to remember that the insurance company is related. I'm not going to say because I quote it wrong.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, right. We can put it in the show notes after. So if people want to check that out, that's great. And then how about on the audit side? I know that you spend a lot of time doing that and do accessibility audits. What would that you explained a little bit like you pull out some pages or look at, you know, if you have a certain page that looks one way and then a post that looks another way in your homepage. Like you'd probably look at the major components of a website. What would that process look like?

Yeah. And then you're looking at also the site specific things. So are there skip links, things that get people directly to the content? Are there. Is the menu accessible? Once in a while we'll see someone that has a search bar that is called a, what's called a keyboard trap. So you can get into the search bar but you can't get out of it. Yeah. Or an inaccessible slider or something like that. So yeah, so we would basically spend, our team would spend time looking at, you know, looking at those site wide pieces as well as every single page and we compile all of that we put it together in, we have a, you know, a report that we send out that gives you an, you know, an ABCDEF grade based on the number of criteria that you failed. And then we come back with, you know, exactly what we tested, exactly what you passed, where you failed, and then some recommendations for what you need to do. And we divide that into things that a site owner can generally do or con content person could do and things that you might need a developer's help with.

Sure, that's great. So the, the content side would be things that you could do historically, looking back, but also my guess is things that you could adopt as best practices moving forward. Is that a part of it is.

Yeah.

Hey, there's going to be things that as you're creating content, it's going to be a filter that you think about when you are in content creation like alt text for images.

Yeah. And there are some, there are a couple plugins out there that you can find in the repository, in the WordPress repository that will do like an automatic check of that content before you publish. But even then, you know, you have to be on board for it and your team, if you have a team of people, has to be on board for it. We've had, you know, we've had a client that we've worked with where we've worked with them. We did they have a compliance requirement and so you know, we've worked with them, we've done training, they've gotten there. We've, we've worked with the content creators and then they have us come back every year to do an audit. Well, every single time we come back to do an audit, it's the same content creators making the same errors again and again. Right.

So it's maybe processes and standard operating procedures, things like that that would be able to catch that.

Yeah, Sticks and carrots. You know, it's kind of there, There are some, I'm aware of some municipality knows like all government sites have to be accessible. So you know, I'm aware of one city where city government where they have you know, maybe like 75 content creators and they have a, that kind of an AI check for content related stuff. Right. And so when they find something that you put in, they identify you put in that content that wasn't accessible. You have to go back and fix it. Make knowing that I have to go back and fix it is a big piece of.

Yeah, for sure.

And it will be attached to your.

Name and there's a certain point at which it starts going in your HR file. And ultimately if you keep doing it, you could get fired. Right. So you get some consequences for your.

Yeah, yeah. We. It's one of the main uses of the first use that we kind of demo. We created a tool called Clarity, Clarity with an eye. And the idea is we're kind of shifting away from doing all of our content optimization in the spreadsheet and thinking about how do we do build a software tool around this. One of the checks that it does is it says, okay, scan for all of the or surface all of the images without alt text. You can take all of those posts and then put them into a project to go through and update alt text. But that being an example of kind of the. When you talk about low hanging fruit to your point before, you have to do the work. Right? Like it's one thing to know, it's another thing to actually do the work with it. So you have to be willing to do the work. Um, but it doesn't all have to be done at once. Like, like you said before, little by little over time, making improvements. Um, and I think it's something that people want to do.

Like, and some of those things that are low hanging, you know, you could, you could work for instance with a VA if you needed to do a virtual assistant to do some of those kind of pieces, you would want to do some training and do some quality checking, make sure that was happening. Well, I would be really careful about using things that are artificial intelligence though some, they can be a great help. But. So for instance, there is a plugin, a paid plugin that you can get that will go through all of your images in the media library and your posts and look for the ones without alt text. And then it will suggest alt text to you. You know, it's using AI to suggest alt text. And so we had a client where the image was a man, I presume, the dad with a kid on the beach and. And it said scary people in masks and. No, no.

Right, right. It's Daniel who's on our team and developer and we've touched base and you know, Daniel. So we did this acquisition of this content site called Curbly. One of the things we did is we wanted to add alt text to all the images. So we used. It was kind of this in between and there was like multiple thousands, I forget how many, but it was an insane amount. But he pulled all that information and then use. There's a service within Amazon where you can, it's like you can hire people at scale for like Task Tasky Projects. I forget what the name of it is.

I heard of it, but I don't remember the name.

Yeah, but anyways, that was our solution. And then we went through and like manually adjusted as needed if there's anything that was a little bit off. So it's kind of this in between of like human power to create to get us 90% of the way there on multiple thousands of images and then us scanning through and being like, is this right or is it off a little bit and adjusting as needed. So it was kind of a cool solution that he came up with. My guess is after hearing this, there'll be a lot of people who are interested in connecting and working with you want to make sure that they are accessible for all the right reasons for doing that. And also just to be from a legal perspective, to be safe in that regard. Are you working with people?

Do you do audits?

What does that look like? How do people connect with you if they do want to work together?

Yeah. So just reach out. I'm on Twitter, Bethann. Our website is BHMB Sites. So BHM B I Z S I T E s dot com Just shoot us through the contact form there. Just connect up and we can sort of walk you through some of the options for related to accessibility. We typically do if we're doing audits. You know, we have done an audit where it was just one page because the person just wanted to get a basic sense of how things were going. Typically more typically we do 10 URLs. We have done some bigger ones that are, you know, 25 or 50 URLs. Those are much bigger projects. But people do that. We are also, you know, we don't just do, you know, audits and remediations. I mean, we're a development shop too, so we do new site development. So you know, if people are looking forward to doing a, you know, a new website design, we certainly can are open to have those conversations too.

That's awesome. We'll link to that in the show notes. Bet, thanks so much for coming on.

Oh, you're welcome. Good to chat with you.

Another thank you to Bette for coming on and sharing her story, her insights, her knowledge and also the heart behind what she does. And again, be sure to check out what she does.

If you have a site.

They do really good work all around accessibility and how you can really focus on that for your site, not only because it's smart, but also because it's right. It's the thing that you want to be doing. To make your site accessible, to make sure that people can access it in a way regardless of how it is, they take in information and operate in the world. So thanks to BET for coming on.

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Hundred dollar Amazon gift card. That's a wrap for this episode. Again, thanks to BET for coming on and thanks to you for listening. Make it a great week. Thanks.