- Hey everyone. We're just gonna wait a couple seconds for a few more people to filter in. In the meantime, feel free to add your questions to the Q&A. Good morning, everyone, or afternoon, depending on where you are. My name is an Anthony Priore and I'm the digital marketing specialist at TPGi. Thank you for joining us for this asking me anything session on Accessibility training with Brian Elton. Before we get started, I just have a couple housekeeping items I'd like to go over. Firstly, this session is being recorded and we will email everyone the recording after the event. Then next we have a captions available, so free to turn those on, use them as needed. And then lastly, if anyone needs an Accessibility audit, support, training or usability testing, let us know. We'll send out an email with link to schedule time, with one of our experts. With that, I'll let Brian get started and provide a little introduction to himself, and then we can dive into some questions.

- Great. Thank you Anthony. Yeah, so as mentioned, my name is Brian Elton. I'm the practice manager for training at TPGi. I've been with TPGi for just over three years. You know, having worked, been working on training, you know, I've been providing training for most of the time I've been here. Also involved in doing audits and compliance and consulting with clients about their specific Accessibility needs. Prior to that, I worked for, oh, over 18 years, I suppose, as a front end developer and front end development manager, various web agencies around Toronto, which is where I reside in Canada. And yeah, now I'm here to answer any questions that you may have around training.

- Awesome. Thank you very much, Brian. We appreciate your time. So I think we'll dive right in. Maybe we have question about does this accessibility training help or impact an organization?

- Well, I mean, training is, is definitely an important aspect of any sort of Accessibility program at any company. I mean, first and foremost, the unfortunate reality is that relatively few people know, you know, even know what Accessibility is, or Digital Accessibility particularly, sort of let alone, you know, how to, why it's important or how to implement it. So learning about the users that want to access your content and use your services and the tools that they must use to do so. You know, will bring awareness to, you know, difficulties that many users have and hopefully cause people to, you know, gain some understanding and some empathy, you know, and building this common knowledge and empathy is a big part of ingraining Accessibility in your company's culture. You know, so that Accessibility is considered from the outset of any project that may be undertaking, you know, and even people who are aware of Accessibility may not realize, you know, know the basics of beginning to implement it, you know, designers, developers, quality assurance and beyond. You know, having, you know, a good Accessibility training program gives your team a head start in learning the ins and outs of what can be a very deep topic when it comes to digital Accessibility. Another part is that, you know, technology evolves over time and, you know, and also legal standards evolve over time. So having a good training program in in place will allow you to keep up to date the most recent, you know, technical advances and how they affect Accessibility. And also when it comes to legislation and guidelines, you know, that govern the Accessibility standards that you must maintain. You know, just keeping up on what organizations must, you know, must comply and what standard they have to comply to. And then, I mean, finally really the having, you know, good training and especially an instructor led training program, you know, gives you access to professionals, Accessibility professionals to ask them tough questions and again, for myself, you know, particularly I've experienced both in the software development life cycle side of things, you know, as an active contributor and then consultant in that process, but I've also audited and consulted on many, you know, digital properties, websites or digital, you know, applications, mobile, mobile applications from a standards compliance side of things. So having both of those perspectives kind of gives me unique insight into, you know, how to solve, you know, some of these Accessibility issues. And my story's not unique. We have lots of trainers here at TPGi I that have very similar varied background.

- Awesome, thank you. I mean, and just as a reminder, everyone please feel free to add your question to the Q&A chat. Brian, that sort of leads pretty well into one of our next questions. What trainings does TPGi offer?

- So we have a couple of different types, really when it comes to the types of training in general, we have, we can sort of group them maybe into two sort of types of training. There's self-paced training and then instructor-led training for self-paced training. We do have a suite of courses that are part of our, the TPGi ARC platform with a particular subscription. And these things are just, you know, courses that you can take on your own time, you know, and it's mostly just reading and, you know, participating and a few, you know, knowledge checks along the way and gives you that, you know, that way of getting good in good information whenever it's convenient for you. We also offer instructor led training. So we have a couple different varieties of that. We have private instructor led training as in private as in just for one organization. We'll schedule, you know, sessions. We have a slew of sessions that are already, you know, kind of ready to go. We usually do around an hour and a half of virtual training sessions, generally speaking, with just your organization gives you lots of time to ask questions and, you know, maybe even, you know, get insight into the specific problems that you're having. We can do custom training for instructor led training, where basically we work with the, you know, with you or whomever to come up with what's the most appropriate training for what's, you know, what your organization needs. And then finally, we, we offer a different type of instructor led training, which hopefully sort of bridges a bit of the gap between, you know, self-paced and instructor led, where when we do instructor led training, you, part of the challenges that can come up from that is, is being able to schedule those trainings when, you know, people that are gonna attend are all available, you know, working with everybody's schedule, everybody's busy. So finding the right time for everybody to come together for that one session can be, you know, a challenge sometimes. So with this Cohort instructor led training, what we designed is a repeating offering of sessions. So either on a biweekly, monthly, or bimonthly basis where we have, you know, 20 or so training sessions that are just on a, you know, that are just repeating and, you know, you can sign up for this and have a subscription for this where you can attend any one of those sessions and, you know, you can make it fit into your own schedule and not be locked down to a singular session. And yeah, so that's, I mean, that's our latest offering and, you know, looking forward to, to building on that.

- Awesome. So another question that we have here is how, how do I know what my learning gaps are and what trainings might make sense for my company? Or what, how do I know what trainings my company might need?

- Oh, well that's a big question. You know, this can come from a few different ways. I suppose. You know, quite often we have people coming to us for training after they've had a technical audit of their property, you know, and they'll see that there are gaps in certain areas of their Accessibility and therefore, you know, that may elicit what kind of training is needed. So maybe there are some Accessibility issues that have to do with the design, whether that's in, you know, the color contrast or layout or, you know, anything like that where we may need to start looking at, you know, courses that are, they're directed towards designers and user experience designers, even business analysts, you know, anybody that's involved in that sort of early part of the software development life cycle process. Or maybe, you know, a lot of the issues you're having are development based, you know, they are in the actual code itself and, and how things are marked up, in which case we may want to look at the types of training session we have there that are geared towards developers and quality assurance. And then if you haven't had a technical audit and you still want to try and understand, you know, what might be the best, I mean, that's something that we can have a discussion about 'cuz we have a wide range of topics, you know, from sort of generalized Accessibility awareness based topics and learning about what Accessibility is and types of disabilities learning about assistive technology and the, the things that users may use in order to consume and, and interact with websites. And then, you know, all down from, you know, design and user experience and research, development, quality analysis, assurance, I mean, or, and even document fundamental Accessibility or, or word or PowerPoint Accessibility. So we have this wide variety and just a matter of a conversation to find out, you know, where do, where does a company feel like they're, they're lacking in their knowledge and we can work with that.

- Barbara just sent in a question via chat. She's asking, is there a limit to the number of subscriptions a company can use with the trainings?

- So the private instructor led training that we do, their purchase sort of as a, a la carte sort of methodology, you buy one session. And then we typically limit those two, but 50 people only because we want to be able to have the ability to interact and have questions and, you know, and get larger and larger numbers. Then it becomes a little more difficult. For our Cohort style training. We have a much larger number of participants that can, that can interact because there is a Cohort, meaning like it is not limited to one company or, or one individual. It's like, you know, it's open to anybody who has a subscription. So we do allow for, for larger groups in that and with also with the Cohort, I dunno if I've mentioned this before, it's like, you can attend sessions, you know, you can repeat sessions, you can attend as many as you want or as little as you want. So there's, you know, opportunity for, you know, relearning stuff that may have gone by.

- For sure. So someone's asking, how do you find the best training schedule or program based on your team's size and time? Some of those kinds of variables?

- Yeah, it can be tough for me. Everybody's time is valuable. I find that most often, we usually schedule something like either two sessions per week or one session per week and try to get it, you know, at the same time every week. Just so that, you know, there's some predictability around when the sessions are running. And then, you know, people within the, the teams can, you know, can predict and can schedule that time, you know, weeks in advance. And we find that, you know, that that tends to work the best to fit into, to really busy schedules. But there's also that opportunity to, you know, if you want to dedicate a week or dedicate, you know, afternoons every afternoon for a week to training, you know, that's certainly something that can also happen. We do want to be mindful of the idea of like, you know, all of our trainings right now are, are typically virtual in this, you know, new world, new world order here with, you know, travel restrictions and all the rest, or difficulties in travel, et cetera. So we're doing a lot of virtual sessions and that can really tough to do, sit in a virtual session for, you know, eight hours, you know, even if you have breaks in there, like an eight hour day of virtual training is, is really difficult. So we do recommend, you know, keeping it to, you know, shorter chunks, you know, maybe no more than two sessions in a day so we can do, you know, like an hour and a half and take a break and do another hour and a half, and then maybe not too many in a row, just to try and make sure that people, you know, stay focused and stay engaged and, you know, it isn't too much to consume at one time.

- Sure. And you mentioned Cohort training a little bit. Someone's asking would, would Cohort training be better for companies or would it be a good option for higher ed?

- I would say either it is certainly something that you, you know, you'd wanna purchase as a company as opposed to an individual, you know, it is directed that way as a subscription basically that opens up the training to anybody that's within the organization. And so whether that is, you know, a higher education organization or otherwise, you know, it is something that is appropriate for sort of higher volumes of people wanting to get through, get through the training. We don't necessarily focus our training on specific, you know, verticals or types of types of businesses or, or anything like that. You know, really we're looking at digital Accessibility and that really applies sort of across the board. We will certainly, you know, if we're doing private instruction with particular companies, then we will target in on some particular things that are, you know, obviously challenging in that particular vertical, whatever you wanna call it, that type of, that type of company be banking or higher education or whatever it is. But, you know, from our Cohort perspective, it's, it's kind of, you know, we just, we look at things from a very, you know, Accessibility based, you know, generalized type of perspective.

- So we have a, we have a question typed in the chat from Jock, and he's asking, I'm a content creator for a website whose audience will be cognitively disabled people and have hired an excellent designer now creating a wire frame and prototype. I have minimal understanding of HTML, CSS JavaScript, and Aria, what, if any, TPGi courses or training do you recommend for me?

- So we do have a, a session that is directed specifically a content creators, people who don't necessarily have access to the code base or don't have the knowledge set to manipulate, the code base, somebody who may be, you know, using a, a content management system or, you know, Wizzywig type style of editor. So we have a session that's specifically for that type of content. So we talk about, you know, things that you can control, you know, with, along with the designers. So you know, the color contrast, the types of content that you're entering in the, you know, the reading level, the content types, the structure of the, of the content because you can, you know, through your CMS you should be able to control heading levels and whether you're using, you know, lists and tables and all that type of thing. So there are a lot of structural elements that you can control. There's a lot of design elements that you can, that you can control, and particularly the, the content and how it's written, you know, particularly if your website is for people with cognitive disabilities and we have to be mindful of how things are structured and written to ensure, you know, understandability, et cetera. So, you know, we certainly have that type of session. And you know, even sort of without that, we also talk through, you know, sessions that are geared towards design and through user experience, et cetera, that will also play into that type of content. So as you said, you working with the designer, you know, there is a lot that can be done leading up to when the actual content creation, you know, does happen to ensure that there is, you know, the content is accessible.

- Just as a follow up, Jock is asking if there's a name for that course or session.

- Accessible content fundamentals, you'll see it in, if you go to the TPGi website, under our training section, we have them broken out by our role. So we have general, we have user experience and design, we have development, quality analysis or quality assurance and document, and also mobile. We do have some sessions on mobile Accessibility, so that will be under the content. There's a content creator's also one there for social media and multimedia, which is also something that often falls under the purview of content creators.

- Awesome. And thank you again to everyone sending in their questions. We appreciate them and please keep sending them in. We do have another one. So someone's asking, we already have a team working on Accessibility testing, but we're looking for a tool or set of tools that can help us make our website or app Accessibility compliant. Even a paid tool would work. As of now we're doing it manually via narrator, keyboard access, all texts, rla, et cetera. But is there a course that TPGi can, we can subscribe and learn from in that respect?

- Yeah, we do have a, we have a session called Accessibility testing, and we have some other ones actually that, that play into that as well. So from a testing perspective, we have, when there's talk, just talks about testing as a whole, talks about, you know, what is automated testing and how does that factor into to Accessibility, what is manual testing, what are some of the manual testing tools that you can use? And it sounds like you're sort of on that way, you know, using, doing keyboard Accessibility, using a screen reader to navigate the content. You know, there are some other tools that we can recommend in that, in that session we do have a couple of sessions that are geared towards quality assurance that just talks about, you know, like web content fundamentals and interactive content fundamentals, so there is a higher awareness of, you know, what the sort of things that we're looking for from a programmatic standpoint. And then we also have a live testing workshop that we offer, which is one that is very much driven by you, you know, the audience, the attendees where, you know, we will cover some of the fundamentals of Accessibility testing, but then we want, you know, we want our audience to bring that, bring examples to us and bring problem areas to us or ask questions about, you know, how do I test for this? Or how do I, you know, what tools should I use for this? And we can do a lot of live demonstration on live testing, essentially to help you through those sticky spots and, and whatnot.

- So while we're on the topic where we're getting into sort of like the specific trainings that are offered and those sorts of things, do you, do we offer intro or advanced trainings depending on the level that someone's at and their understanding of, of Accessibility?

- I would say that we don't, we don't typically have this, the various levels, you know, intro and whatnot. We have ones that are more generalized in the sense that they are more about awareness and understanding of disability and understanding of guidelines and legislation and sort of like what Accessibility is at a, at a higher level. But when we get to say, you know, our series for developers, you know, there is no basic and advanced, it is, you know, we try to encapsulate, you know, everything you, you need to know within that series of, of sessions, you know, similar for QA similar for the design and user experience. The one exception I suppose to that is in our document series, when it comes to PDF mediation, PDF mediation is quite a broad topic and so, or a deep topic, and so we have a fundamental course, and then we also have a, an advanced PDF course for remediating, excuse me, PDFs.

- We just had another question pop through. So back to training gaps. Do you have a survey that takes the sensitivity of asking users about their disabilities and what they need from a learning slash training perspective?

- We will, when we arrange training with, you know, the representative on the company's side, we'll certainly talk about the needs of their, of their attendees, if there's any additional considerations need to be made. I mean, we do our best to ensure that we have, you know, like today we have captions available when we run training sessions. We either have captioning or we have transcription, live transcription running. You know, we try to be mindful of everybody's needs, you know, in the way we present our content, you know, descriptive words, and, you know, moving beyond just, you know, just a straight presentation. So yeah, we do our best to, to consider all those situations, but we certainly will, you know, ask the representative from the company, you know, if there aren't any additional considerations that are needed. And that can also include like, you know, providing you know, this, you know, their PowerPoint slides ahead of time so that somebody's able to follow, you know, along in, in the way that works for them or any sort of other types of handouts that we can provide, you know, prior to the session, we'll always work with the, with our, you know, company representatives to make that happen.

- Awesome, yeah, and please keep sending your questions through chat we appreciate those and we still have some time left. We'd love to get to as many as we can. Back to Cohort training a little bit. You sort of touched on this a little bit. How does instructor led teaching help an organization's productivity?

- Well, I mean, you get to, you know, when you have a, a instructor led session that we've got, you know, people that are dedicating time to it, you know, we can focus in on the specific issues that, you know, teams are finding. So, you know, when we, we schedule sessions, you know, they're, they are broken down into, you know, a consumable amount of, of content and content that's directed towards, you know, specific issues. So if I speak to the, the developer series, you know, we have, you know, sort of like the development fundamentals, we talk about images and non-text content. We talk about forms and hair handling, keyboard, Accessibility, WAI-ARIA, like introduction to WAI-ARIA. And so because we're able to sort of focus in on, on more specific topics within Accessibility, you know, we can get all those people in the same room, so to speak, talking about that one specific thing. And, you know, have access to, to people like myself to ask questions, you know, work through any particular issues that may be happening. And then it acts as a bit of a springboard now. Okay, so we've had that dedicated time, we've asked some questions, we've got the, you know, the understanding that we need for this particular topic. And then that can, you know, springboard off of that to, you know, put it into action, you know, right away into your process, whether, you know, waterfall, sprints, you know, whatever your, Agile, whatever your methodology is. You know, you can, you can take that knowledge from there and the, you know, the answers to the questions that you may have and readily away put it into practice. We try to make our, our sessions as practical as possible. So there is knowledge takeaway. There are, you know, code examples that you know are, that are used to illustrate what you know, how things are done. You know, we relate our, as much as possible, we relate the, the items that we're talking about the, you know, the design aspects, the coding aspects, the usability aspects that we talk about, we try to relate that back to the web content Accessibility guidelines as well as much as possible because we do want to have that understanding of the connection between, you know, what it is we're designing and developing and why we're doing those things or how that relates back then to, you know, some of the, you know, guidelines and legislation that we're also bound by.

- So you, you've touched on a little bit some of the specific kinds of trainings offered, but I'm curious, based on some of the questions are saying, do you offer trainings that are a little more specific based on personas or example perhaps a UX design or working in higher ed or perhaps an HR rep in, you know, in a government organization or something along those lines to get more specific?

- So in those cases, what we would do is we'd work with you to do a, a custom session, whereas we can take a lot of the information that we, you know, that we may present in, you know, so for instance, in a UX perspective, we have a, a session called, you know, integrating Accessibility into user experiments. And we can take, you know, the information there, which, which applies across, you know, any industry. We can use that information and then we can help you, we can customize a little bit so that we are addressing specific issues that maybe found in your particular industry or in just your particular organization. So if there, you know, if you have very specific methodologies that you want to have assistance in integrating Accessibility into, then we can certainly build some, you know, some custom content to help support that. Yeah, so we are very much open to customizing, to adding content, you know, that's gonna suit, We have a very, very good UX practice here as well. So one of my colleagues David Sloan, is the practice manager for our UX group. And you know, he helps many, you know, in many cases has helped, you know, to integrate with the training, training offerings that we have to provide more customized solutions and, and more customized training and understanding of, you know, for your particular needs.

- So a personalized customizable training does sound like a pretty good option for someone who may be, you know, not sure where to begin or has a very specific need that they need answered.

- Yeah, so I think like, you know, from a, you know, starting out point, you don't necessarily need to go to the specifics. You know, the sort of offerings that we have in our, you know, a la carte menu, you know, they are foundational and they will, you know, springboard any organization, any industry to, you know, to, to get to a certain level of, of Accessibility as you have more challenges in your particular industry, things that are more specific to your industry, then yeah, there may be some custom training that may need to be put together just to address those specific items.

- We only have a few minutes left, so please, if you haven't answered or asked any questions that you'd like to get answered before our time's up, please do so. I'm curious though, Brian, since we've been going over a lot of things, is there any question that you haven't been asked yet that you feel like you want to address some topics on that you could, you know, provide some clarity that we maybe haven't touched on with all these questions?

- Oh, I don't know. It's been pretty good so far. We've covered quite a bit. I don't think so.

- Okay. More so just curious if there was something, if there was a gap perhaps we had missed, So someone's asked, you mentioned online training for, for QA on TPGi, where to opt into that training from?

- So we have, so I said you earlier on, we have sort of two, two types of training, so we do have a, a self-paced learning, so if you are a, a client of TPGi and you have access to our ARC portal, there's a subscription level for that where you can have, you can do self-based learning and there are, and that covers again, sort of a wide swath of roles and responsibilities throughout your company. And then we also have our instructor led training, which is really, I mean it's directed at groups or a company hiring us to, you know, provide training for a group, as an individual, there are less options, but if you know, if your company is interested in training, you know, we have, you know, wide variety of topics including those for QA. So whether that's, you know, just Accessibility testing, you know, sort of the fundamentals of testing, whether it's understanding web content and interactive content or, you know, even, you know, screen reader testing with JAWS is something we can, we, we offer and live testing. So I think we can probably paste a URL, Anthony, to our trading offerings.

- [Anthony] Yeah, we could definitely do that.

- I think somebody, I just noticed somebody's asking for some.

- We can also be sure to send that out in the, in the email that follows with, with all of this information, Jock's asking, are there documents that you can refer to us for cognitively disabled audiences.

- That I'll have to get back to you with. I don't have anything off, I don't have anything.

- Yeah, you can share that with me, I'll make sure it gets distributed to attendees.

- Sure thing.

- Does anyone have any other questions before we wrap up? We're close to time and I make sure that we, we can answer everything. All right. Well if there's nothing else, Brian, thank you very much for your time. We appreciate and thank you everyone for, for listening and for asking your questions. We hope to continue these sessions in the future and it's been really informative. So thank you.

- Thank you very much everybody.

- Oh, thank you. Bye.