MBA1613 Guest Teacher – Jeff White – How to Make Your Website Accessible to All

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Hello, my name is Jeff White and I'm the co founder of Kula Partners, a marketing and web design and development agency based in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. We work primarily with B2B manufacturers located throughout North America, and I'm also the co host of a podcast called the Kula Ring where we interview those manufacturing marketers and learn about their successes and failures and the things that they're most interested or excited about. But today I'm here to talk to you about how to make your website accessible to all. It's a really important topic, and not one that a lot of people understand or even know the importance of, but the fact of the matter is, over 13% of adult Americans have some form of disability, with vision and hearing loss being the most prevalent. And in this day and age, there are actually lawsuits being levied against organizations that do not have accessible websites. In fact, the same laws that apply to accessible places, such as having wheels, wheelchair ramps, or accessible washrooms. The ada, or Americans with Disabilities act, applies to the web. So what I'm going to talk to you today about is how you can structure your site in a way so that it is going to be available and accessible to everyone. And I'm going to show you exactly what you can do in order to make your site available to all. With 13% of Americans having a disability and the fact that in many B2B sales relationships having 8, 10 to 14 members of a buying committee, there's a very real chance that some of the people that you're trying to sell to actually do have a disability. And as such, ensuring that your site is available to those people is not only the right thing to do, but it also may impact your ability to sell to the companies that you want to sell to. So let's talk about that from a foundational perspective. One of the very first things that you need to consider when you're building an accessible website is that your navigation is clear and concise and that it makes sense and adds value to the content on the site. Many people, when they're putting together their information architecture or their main site map navigation, use general categories such as products, services about us, things like that. But those don't really begin to describe what, what kinds of content you're going to find underneath of them. And I often urge our clients and others that we work with to use more descriptive language that talks about the actual categories of products at the top level of their site. This ensures that upon first glance or first read through of those navigation categories, that someone can actually get more information about what it is that your company does or sells. So I would encourage you to put those key categories into the navigation to ensure that it actually makes additional sense to someone who's reading it or viewing it for the first time. And while it's very important for your navigation to be well structured and for the link names to be relevant and descriptive of the content that people are going to find behind them, structuring the page hierarchy of the site is of equal importance. And not only does this help to organize the content within the site, but it also helps to ensure that visitors to the site are able to find where they are in the overall site structure. You need to add signposts, breadcrumbs, and other elements that tell people exactly what page people are on within the site and what category of content they're looking at it in. This will help them ensure that they know where they are spatially within the site. One of the great things about using semantic terms for your navigation is that not only are you going to make it easier to understand and use for all of your site visitors, but it's going to have a positive impact on your on page search as well. So as you're creating this navigation, the second thing that you need to consider is that people with certain disabilities are going to have a hard time navigating the site with traditional tools like trackpads and mice and touch. They're going to be using screen readers and other assistive tools, and they need to be able to move through the site in a way that isn't necessarily the same as what a sighted person would be able to do. So we like to employ something called keyboard navigation that allows a user to quickly skip past all of the chrome or navigational elements that they can get right to the meat of the site. This happens by hitting the tab key and allowing somebody to actually skip directly to the content within the site, and if they choose not to do that, it will actually read to them what the different navigational elements are. So implementing keyboard navigation is one of the quickest things that you can do to actually make your site accessible. If you're looking For a guide to all of the requirements for website accessibility, you need to look no further than the Website Content Accessibility guidelines or or wcag. This is a list of all of the available accessibility features and things that need to be built into your site to meet or exceed the accessibility standards. There are currently two core levels that we are concerned about, and that's AA and aaa. The AAA guidelines actually add additional scope for higher level contrast as well as mobile devices and considerations for those with cognitive disabilities, not just hearing or sight. There are two different levels of this. The AA guidelines have less stringent contrast requirements. In small text, it's four and a half to one. In the AAA guidelines, we're looking at a difference of 7 to 1. So this ensures that text that is smaller than 18 point in Roman or 14 point in bold has sufficient contrast between the foreground and the background so as to be legible to those who may not have the ability to it as clearly as those with regular and normal sight. There are tools that are available that will actually allow you to very quickly check the contrast within your web browser, and these will show you exactly where the problem areas are. Now, interestingly and importantly, the contrast guidelines only apply to content if something is more of an illustrative element. Contrast guidelines are not in effect, so that's something to keep in mind that illustrative components of the site don't necessarily have to fit the same level of guidelines as content that needs to be read by your users. Additionally, content alternatives are one of the single most important areas where those developing websites can make their sites more accessible to other users. For images, you want to ensure that you're entering an alternative text or alt tag for that image that describes exactly what someone is going to see there. This should not simply say that this is a photo or an image or an illustration. It should actually be a descriptive caption of it so that an unsighted user will actually be able to understand what that image is doing there and how it is adding to the content. Every image on the site should have an alt tag, unless it is just an illustrative image that is used for effect, visual effect, and not for actually communicating content to the end user. This applies as well to content that is not text or image based, such as video. Video should have captioning so that those who cannot hear can actually read along with it. Audio files should have transcripts or captions as well. This has the additional benefit when adding a transcript for content that that content also has an SEO value so that search engines can read the text and content. That's one of the great things about having a podcast is that if you provide a transcription of that content, it actually gives you additional fodder for search engines to find your site if it's optimized correctly. Lastly, wherever possible, try to avoid putting important and useful content into PDFs, especially as it applies to ebooks and other things that people would normally sign up for to download. This content can be made much more accessible simply by putting it into a traditional webpage, and you can even put that behind a signup if you wish. But wherever possible, avoid using PDFs. They're a nightmare from an accessibility perspective, and they're not particularly usable for regular visitors as well, especially if they're coming to the site on a mobile device. So to recap the steps that you need to take in order to make your site accessible to all, include starting with a foundation and an architecture that provides a hierarchy of information that will help people find the content that they're looking for and organize it in a way that makes sense. This is going to have the added benefit of being search optimized, and it's going to ensure that people who are using the site can find their way around once they get down to pages that are several levels deep. Use descriptive terms when naming your navigational elements. Provide keyboard alternatives for navigating the site so that people can use the tab key and return in order to be able to jump to different sections of the site or move directly and quickly into the content. Ensure that all of your content is of high contrast nature, especially smaller text, to ensure that users with low vision can see it, and ensure that you provide text alternatives and audio alternatives to those who may not be able to see or hear the content on your site. This is especially important for images, video and audio files. Please make sure that you provide additional ways that people can access that information. Avoid PDFs wherever possible, and generally think about how you might use that site if you were not able to use a mouse or a trackpad, or able to touch on different links or elements within it. All of those things are going to help you to have more empathy as you're designing a site that is accessible to all users. If you'd like to download a checklist of all the website content accessibility guidelines I've talked about here, you can go to Bit LY Kula that's K U L A Accessibility Acc E S S I B I L I T Y that's Bitly Kula Accessibility My name is Jeff White and again I'M the co founder of Kula Partners. Thank you for listening.

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You've made it on time for the McDonald's breakfast menu. You think to yourself, finally, I could start my day with my perfect breakfast. But what if breakfast could be even more perfect with the hot honey sausage egg biscuit it finally is? This won't last forever, so go to McDonald's and get it while you can. Ba da ba ba ba.

What a useful lesson by Jeff White. Jeff mentioned making sure you subtitle your videos. A lot of people think that this is a lot of work, it's gonna cost a lot of money, but actually it doesn't. We've been subtitling our videos especially for ads that we run, because with mobile ads you want to make sure that people can read and not only listen. We use a app called Headliner. This is a web app that you can use where you can upload your video and Headliner will actually automatically transcribe and create the subtitles. Now, it's about 95% accurate in my experience, so you may want to just look over the subtitles and when they're displayed. It's very, very easy to do. With Headliner, the UI is very easy to use and you can make some small adjustments just because sometimes you'll say something that's not super clear to the app what you're saying. You can clarif and make some edits, but I had a two minute video that I just uploaded recently. I was able to subtitle this video in less than five minutes. It was so, so simple. And then you can export it and it'll export the video with the subtitles embedded on the video. This is super low hanging fruit by the way. Headliner is really inexpensive. They have a free version, but they also have a paid version that's like $10 a month. If you have videos on your website or you continue to do videos, this is a great investment. Even if you just sign up to do videos you have and then cancel. But if you do video the regular on social media, on ads on your website, you're running courses. This is incredibly useful and well worth the $10 a month. Well, that wraps up today's lesson. Thank you so much for listening. If you want more exclusive content, go ahead and follow us on instagram over@instagram.com the 100 MBA Before I go, I want to leave you with this. Once you put into place the things that Jeff described today and you've improved your website to be more accessible, write about it. Write a blog post about why you made this decision and what you did to improve your website. Why is this important? Well, it's good to let your community know and let people know what you work on in your business and on your website. But also for SEO, when people search whatever you're in. Let's say you're a fashion coach and somebody who's looking for an accessible website in your niche will say, fashion website that is accessible. And if you had a blog post that says our new fashion website is accessible, you'll show up and people that are looking for somebody who made the effort to improve their website will find you. And guess what? They'll tell others as well. So this is really something you should tell others about once you implement. Thank you so much for listening and I'll check you in tomorrow's episode. I'll see you then. Take care.

You've made it on time for the McDonald's breakfast menu. You think to yourself, finally, I could start my day with my perfect breakfast. But what if breakfast could be even more perfect with the hot honey sausage egg biscuit it finally is it. This won't last forever, so go to McDonald's and get it while you can.