The Captain Coder Podcast

You Should Care About Digital Accessibility

June 14, 2022 Marisa VanSkiver, Captain Coder Season 2 Episode 6
The Captain Coder Podcast
You Should Care About Digital Accessibility
Show Notes Transcript

One in four adults in the US have some sort of disability and control $500 billion in disposable income.

Does your online content reach them - at all?

Chances are, there are some tweaks you need to make to the content you’re creating on social media and within your website to be inclusive to everyone.

Ensuring your digital content is inclusive is also called digital accessibility.

In today’s episode, I’m going to teach you exactly what digital accessibility is, why it matters to you and your business, and a few simple tweaks you can make to start being more inclusive.

Mentioned Resources:


At the time of this recording, I get the pleasure of speaking this week. All about digital accessibility at accessibility summer camp, this free training free completely free virtual event happening on Friday, June 17th is sponsored and put on by WSU tech and it will provide accessibility training that empowers attendees to create quality accessible environments. Now, while the conference will cover a variety of accessibility topics, I personally will be talking about creating accessible experiences online, simply put digital accessibility is crucial to ensure that your content and your business is inclusive to everyone. Now, if you've never heard of digital accessibility, or if you've been hearing about it lately, but you're not really sure what it means for you and your business, then let me introduce you to it. In today's episode, we're going to discover what digital accessibility is, why you should care about it in your business, and a few tweaks you can make to your content. Now to be more accessible, you're listening to the captain coder podcast each week. I take you through actionable strategies that can help you grow your online business. I'm your host, Marisa VanSkiver, AKA captain coder. Now, in case you didn't know, one in four adults in the us have some sort of disability. When we talk about digital accessibility, what we're really talking about is ensuring that we've that everyone can use. It's simply that it's the ability for all people, regardless of their abilities or their disabilities, to be able to access virtual or digital content. Now with digital accessibility, yes, we have to make some changes to the way that we do things we have to plan to be accessible. It's really hard, especially as I have been running quite a few accessibility audits lately for clients, it's really hard to go back and fix certain things. If they weren't thought about from the get, go to be accessible. And that's really what digital accessibility is all about is taking a step back before we launch something. Before we build something and ask ourselves, is this accessible for everybody? Even if they don't utilize the internet, like I do one of the big things with digital accessibility, one of the things I think we probably put the most focus on is those who are visually impaired. We of course, do not browse the internet the same way as someone who might use, what's called a screen reader to browse the internet, a screen reader, more or less reads the internet back to someone who cannot see it for themselves. My own accessibility journey. When I started to learn digital accessibility started here as well. So it is very much a place where we start, but that is not the be all end, all digital accessibility either. When we talk about making something accessible, we talk about making the internet accessible for somebody who is hard of hearing, who maybe has different visual impairments, like color blindness, where they can't see things the same way, somebody who is dyslexic and making sure that they're able to still read and get the content that we're providing, perhaps somebody who cannot use a traditional mouse on a keyboard or another tool. We have to think about how we are building our websites, how we're creating content for social media, all of those things, to ensure that we are being as accessible as possible. I'll be honest. It is incredibly hard to be accessible for everyone. There are however, a few tweaks that we can make to make huge jumps, huge jumps. And with only 0.02 person in the internet that passes w C a G standard standards, accessibility standards. We have a long way to go, but I'm going to talk you through some very simple steps that you can take to improve your accessibility and Is it a, gonna get you to a hundred percent, maybe not depending on how your website is built, depending on what kind of social media content you have, but making steps and making progress is better than ignoring it all together. Of course, you may be asking yourself, okay, why does this matter for me and my business? Well, for one, do you wanna reach your entire target market in the us? There are working age people with disabilities that control nearly$500 billion worth of disposable income. If you are not, let's just, let's just take that for a second. Again, 500 billion. We're talking about a market that can spend money that wants to spend money that wants to work with you, but you have to make it easy for them to work with you. Now, if you are not following any accessibility, um, processes right now, you are potentially cutting off a huge piece of your otherwise target audience because you're not designing and creating content with them in mind. So think about the fact that there are people in your target market who may have different visual abilities than you, who may have different hearing abilities than you, who may utilize the internet different than you do. And when you think about that and you really start to understand where this accessibility comes into play is to really make sure that you're reaching everyone that you want to reach. If you wanna make an impact in the world, if your goal is to make some kind of positive impact, it is really hard to make that positive impact for yourself or your clients. If you're not following digital accessibility, best practices, this is one of those things where you do not wanna cut people off. And this is definitely an easy place to make changes where you're reaching more people. So don't, don't neglect. It don't just think, wow, that's not my target market because it is, it is your target market. And you do need to care about somebody who maybe doesn't use the internet the same way you do. Now, the second piece and the part that gets most people's attention. You wanna protect your business from lawsuits in the United States, especially under the Americans disability act. You can, and your business can be sued for not being accessible online. Does this happen to a lot of small business owners? Not so much, but it does happen. And while most of the lawsuits are being filed in places like New York and Florida, they're not being filed against companies that only exist in New York and Florida. They're being filed against com companies all over the United States. And a lot of this is to make an example of these larger corporations so that people will make changes to their content and to the way that they put out information online. But the big thing here is without following some accessibility, you're putting your business at risk. And while yes, you may think I will never be a target. You don't know that. And do you really wanna take that risk, that, and have that liability because you simply didn't wanna spend 10 more minutes when you create content to make it accessible. No. And honestly, there again, do you really wanna cut off part of your target market? No. Now, if neither of those options is good enough for you and to focus on and build up your digital accessibility, then you need to think about how digital accessibility improves your SEO. Here's here's the really cool thing about Google. One. Google cares about their user and because they care about their user, they care about accessibility. But two Google also browses the internet much like somebody who uses a screen reader to browse the internet. They can't visually see the images that you're sharing online, but they can read the alt tags, the file names and all of those things that you're doing to tell somebody who can't visually see it, what that image contains. So if you want to improve your SEO, your search engine optimization, then when you follow digital accessibility, best practices, you're actually going to get a bonus and be able to improve your SEO of your website. When you're following that on your website. Now, if you haven't noticed, I could probably talk about this for a long time and I will on Friday. So if you wanna learn more and you wanna dive into this, make sure that you go to today's show notes and register for the event on Friday, where you're gonna hear this entire presentation. I'm gonna go through just a few simple steps, however that you can take now to improve your accessibility on your website and on social media. Now, if you can't tell, it's going to get worse. As I continue to talk, I have had allergies and a sinus infection over the last few days. Um, so please bear with me through the frog in my throat, but let's dive in to some simple steps that you can take to improve your accessibility. And I'm gonna start with the number one, the easiest thing that you can do, but also one of the biggest impacts that you can make. And that is by using alt tags or alternative tags on your images. Now this applies to your website and on social media, almost every single social media platform gives you the ability to add an alt tag to the images that you're uploading. You may just have to dig around because it's not, it's not the easiest thing to find on every single platform. Now, an alt tag basically is just a description of what is in the image. So if you upload a picture of yourself, then the alt tag could be something as simple as, um, Jane Smith sitting in front of a brick wall with her hand under her chin. If you, you can get as detailed or as little detailed as you want, but you wanna give them enough information so that the context of the image can be understood. It's literally a description of the image in the alt tag. And they're so incredibly important because someone is using a screen reader for them to understand the you're using on your website, they won't get anything. If that alt tag is blank. And here's the other thing that most people don't understand if you're not using alt tags, a screen reader will then default to reading out the file name. I want you guys to think about the last several times that you've uploaded images to your website or to social media. And they were probably iPhone selfies, right? Or something that came with a name like image, oh, 1 35 dot a G I C or.jp. Do you think that file name tells anybody anything about what that's in, what's in that image? So if you want people to be able to get something out of your image images, you have to have not only an alt tag with a description, but make sure you change that file name too, to a description of what is in the image. So a lot of the images on my website will have my name somewhere in the file name. And then the alt tag will be a description of the image itself with my name. Here's the cool thing about using alt tags and file names when it comes to images too. That's how you show up in Google image search. That's also how you get weird images in Google image search that don't seem to match because people have used alt tags that are not an actual accurate description of what the image is. So be very careful about this. Yes. Can you use your targeted keywords in your images? Of course you can, and that becomes an SEO boost for you, but it really should be a description of what's in the image itself. Make sure you're not keyword stuffing and make sure you're focusing more on the user, on the person who's going to be listening to that alt tag description, to get information about the image and focus on them and not Google. Now, one of the other low hanging fruits when it comes to accessibility on websites and on social media are video captions and audio transcripts. So if somebody is hard of hearing or let's be honest, 80% of people watch video without sound anyway. So you're just being accessible to like a hundred percent of the world, but utilizing captions on your videos for any kind of narration will make sure that everybody can access the information in that video. Social media took a while to catch up to this, but you're finally able to add captions on almost any social media platform. And if you're uploading videos to say Vimeo or YouTube, you're able to utilize captions there too. If you want to create captions that are a little bit more accurate, but are still inexpensive. I personally still use rev.com and I'll link that in today's show notes. I use this to get captions and transcripts for all of my video in my audio. I actually use rev for my podcast transcripts so that I have something available for someone who maybe is hard of hearing or wants to just scroll back and see what I said without having to scroll through it in the 15, 20 minute podcast episode that I uploaded. So think about that. It's a very simple thing. And a lot of social media platforms, a lot of even Vimeo is starting to do auto captioning. It's becoming cheaper and cheaper to do, but just make sure that you have an option there for people to utilize and get to the content in a different way with your captions. You're gonna get what's called an S R T file. And you're able, that's a timed caption file that you're able to upload to pretty much any platform that does video and with audio transcripts. For instance, when I put those on my website, I either have that available with the podcast itself, or I maybe write the blog and then I have a transcript that they can download, but you just have to make that available. So they don't have to worry about getting the whole thing. And they're still able to access all of your content because there again, you want people to be able to access your content, right? You don't wanna cut people off from the content you're creating. Now, when it comes to design,<laugh> our third one here is probably the one you have to think about the most before you do anything else. And that is color contrast. This is really hard for a lot of my clients. And I'll, I'll tell you why one, you think, oh, this color on this color is gonna look really nice, but then I run it through an accessibility tool. I actually use web aims, um, contrast checker, and it always comes back. The one color combination that we want, it always comes back as a fail. And what that basically means is your font color on top of a background, color needs to have a high end of contrast so that everybody can read it. If it doesn't have a high enough contrast, somebody who has color blindness or low, low vision impairments or anything like that may not be able to actually read your content. Now, do you want to prevent people from being able to read your copy on your website? Uh, I don't, I don't think so. Like it would be kind of crazy to wanna prevent people from being able to read anything. And honestly, as I get older, I've noticed that color contrast matters even more to me. And I'm not even 35 yet. Of course my vision's never been great. But you know, there are a lot of things that we have to think about and that color contrast unfortunately, is one of them. So black on white, white on black, that always passes. But the nice thing about the web aim tool is before you start designing anything, before you go into canvas and create a graphic for social media, dear God, please stop using certain colors on certain colors, go to the web aim, accessibility color contrast tool, which is linked in today's show notes and check the hex codes of the font color you plan to use on the background color you plan to use and make sure it's legible, cuz what's happening for a lot of people that I see, especially on social media, you're uploading what you think are these great graphics, but um, nobody can actually read them. And if the contrast is super low, no, no one can read it. Like literally no one can read it. And it's not just me being a cranky old person. Like literally no one can read that light pink on a slightly darker pink graphic that you uploaded. So be very careful. I, and I'm gonna be excited when Canva finally adds some kind of color contrast checker because I know that a lot of the, um, problems come out of, you know, out of Canada, but go to web aim, check your, check your colors first, then create your graphics. Another one that I see a lot of people making mistakes with are PDFs. So what happens a lot in our industry, we wanted to have a simple lead capture. So we create a simple lead capture. That's just a PDF guide, but we don't take the extra steps to make that PDF accessible. So you're giving somebody a document that they're downloading that they may not actually be able to use. Now, if you're creating PDFs, I highly recommend that you actually have Acrobat, which is Adobe's program installed on your computer. And it comes with accessibility tools where you can add alt tags to images where you can describe any graphics or anything that you have, but mostly that you can make it text searchable. That means that somebody can come in and not only search the document to find what they want, but they're able to utilize a screen reader to read the document back to them. It's the simplest thing that you can do to make a PDF more accessible. Although I would discourage PDFs when you can, they have gotten way better. Um, actually my entire job, um, when I worked for the Scottish government publisher back in 2014, 2013, and I learned all of my accessibility tricks was to take non-accessible PDFs and turn them into fully accessible HTML. So they've always been a bad actor. They are totally getting better, but try to not use PDFs unless you absolutely have to. And then when you do make them text searchable, now there are tools like accessy and a few others that you can utilize to make them more accessible. But I prefer acrobats tools. And just stick with that. They're very simple. One thing that you wanna keep in mind, if you can't use a PDF, what can you use if you wanna give them a download check, look into doing eBooks instead. So when actual ebook is where they can go and they can change the font size, they can scale it. You have more control over accessibility tools. There are a lot of things out there. This is actually something I'm digging into more. Um, just because it's been a minute since I've created a bunch of eBooks, but think twice before creating a PDF. And if you do make sure it's at least text searchable. Okay. So one thing that I see a lot of people doing, which is, you know, this is literally the whole episode is literally just mistakes. Marisa sees on social media and she wants to vent about, okay, not totally true, but close those special social media fonts. I don't actually know how people get those fonts because I myself would never touch them with a 10 foot pole. And I'm gonna tell you why in a second, but you know what it is when you see on Instagram, somebody's got a different font than is Instagram's font and it's like italicized or it looks cool and makes things stand out. I get why people do it. Here's the thing about those. A phone, a screen reader does not read those fonts like a font. Those are actually coming across like emojis. They are not accessible and they may not actually appear the same way depending on the device. I have a Garmin watch. So just for a really simple example, when I get a text message sometimes from, and it's coming from at and T, so you think they'd know better, but they actually use these specialty fonts in their text messages now. So it comes through to my watch, which does not have the ability to parse this. So it comes across in that weird, like special character thing. That's literally what a screen reader is seeing when you're using these specialty fonts on social media, I'm gonna just be totally Frank with you and be kind of harsh. If the platform does not let you change the font family, like what font you're using, the size, the boldness, anything like that. If you cannot do that within the app, you should not be doing that at all. I know it's boring. I know it doesn't look as cool, but the whole point of those of using the in-app tools is that means it's still being read as a font. It's still copy when you're having to hack it. It's not copy anymore. It's not font. It's not text. Now it's an image. And now it's an image without an alt tag and that nobody can read if they are using a screen reader to browse Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, whatever. So stop using those social media, special fonts, unless Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn roll out different font options within the app, which honestly is probably never gonna happen. I'm non venting. I just have one last tip for you guys today. And then you can tune in again Friday at 1:00 PM, central standard time, Friday, June 17th, to the WSU tech accessibility summer camp, to get more details and get some visuals to go along with this as well. But you wanna keep things easy and consistent. So if you have a button that is green on your homepage, then you wanna keep all of your buttons green more or less. If you have something kind of a hover state, something that happens when you hover over something, you wanna have that happen every time. If your headlines are a certain color, you wanna mostly keep those headlines the same color. When you're creating graphics for your social media, you wanna be consistent in your color choices for that as well. And that, especially on a website, when you're keeping things really simple, really easy to understand, and they're consistent. That means that nobody has to relearn how to interact with your company. Every single page they go to. If you get really inconsistent with a website, if you get really inconsistent with your website, you'll understand when people go through it, they're gonna get confused. They're gonna get lost. They don't understand how to navigate it. I'm working with a client on this actually right now, where we can make things a lot simpler. I'm talking about literally cutting somewhat like 20 pages and combining them into one page to just make the entire process easier, easier, and more consistent. So that the process to do exactly what we want the client to do is the same throughout the entire website, when you keep it consistent. And when you make that process really simple, you're making a whole lot easier for people to make decisions, but you're also making things more accessible. You have to remember again, that not everybody has the same abilities that you do and maybe they're dyslexic and they don't. It takes them longer to read something. You know, if somebody's with a visual impairment and a screen reader, if they have to tab through a ton of content or a ton of different things, or the menu changes places, then it might be very confusing and difficult for them to utilize that. So make sure that every time that you're designing a new page on your website, then it looks more or less consistent with every other page on your website. I'm not saying you copy the design exactly, but the The buttons should be the same. The links should be the same. The action items should be the same, especially to make it really simple for people to move through your website and to keep it accessible. Now you might be wondering, okay, I've just listened to Marisa ramble on for almost 30 minutes about accessibility. How do I know what I'm doing wrong with my own digital accessibility? Well, I love web aims web accessibility evaluation tool or its wave where you can plug in your website and you can check where you might be missing accessible options. But if you want a deeper dive, not only into your accessibility, but your SEO and your conversions, we do offer accessibility audits at captain coder. We're going to check your accessibility, but we're also going to be looking for those things that wave isn't going to know because it's an automated tool and the things that I've learned over the nearly 10 years that I've been doing this. So we check your accessibility and then tell you exactly what to fix what's high priority. And then if you would like we can help you fix that again. That's linked in today's show notes. If you're interested in an audit with captain coder for accessibility, or send me a DM on Instagram at captain coder and just say audit and I'll know that we can talk about an accessibility audit for you and your business. Now, if you are not prioritizing digital accessibility in 2022, I can tell you right now, just judging by the way, things are moving, that you're going to get left behind very quickly. So focus on these simple things that you can do to improve your accessibility. Now, even if all you're doing is adding that into your process for social media, and then, then look at your website, but you need to start somewhere. Don't just do not do anything. Start somewhere, start caring about it and protect your business and stop cutting people out of your target market. Thank you all for tuning into our show this week to catch more captain coder, you can subscribe to this podcast on your favorite podcast app. So if you have any questions or you wanna learn more about digital marketing and how it can help grow your online business, follow us on instagram@captaincoder or visit us online at captcoder.com. Can't wait to talk to you all again next week.