Mike Mooney (00:00:26): (Silence). Thank you for joining the webinar today, everyone. We will begin momentarily while people sign in and we'll start at the top of the hour. (Silence). We will begin momentarily, wait one more minute as people still trickle in and we will begin momentarily. (Silence). Mike Mooney (00:02:16): All right. Happy new year, everyone. Good morning, good afternoon. Thank you for joining us today for exciting webinar on launching a sustainable accessibility program with Mark Miller. My name is Mike Mooney. I'm the digital marketing manager at TPGi. And before we get started with Mark, I just wanted to go over a few housekeeping items. First off, this session is being recorded and we will email the recording a few days after the video has been processed. So, you'll have that to review. We do have live captions available, so feel free to use those as needed. And lastly, if we have time for a live Q&A at the end, please submit questions using the Q&A box and we will get to as many questions as we can at the end of the session. With that, I will let Mark introduce himself and we can get started. Mark. Mark Miller (00:03:12): Thank you, Mike. And thank all of you for being here. I know this is lunch hour for many of you, so we really appreciate you attending and hope we can deliver some good, useful content for you. Launching a sustainable accessibility program is a pretty straightforward, simple title, but as many of you know, it's kind of a complex subject. So we have a lot of information for you today that we're going to cross at somewhat of a high level. We're going to talk about some of the tools and services that TPGi uses with its customers to facilitate accessibility programs. And like Mike said, as we're going along, feel free to ask questions. I'm sure you guys will have them. And we'll see if we can get through all that content and get to those questions. Mark Miller (00:04:01): So, with that, the first thing I want to talk about is just what is digital accessibility? I'm assuming everybody here showed up because they're looking for a sustainable accessibility program on a website, on their mobile app or on their sort of collection of digital assets. So let's just talk about what accessibility is. So ensuring content is accessible to everyone regardless of abilities. That's the simplest way to think about what we're talking about here. Can everyone access your content? Whether that's a public facing website, whether that is a native mobile application, a document like a PDF, or if it's internal facing, can all of your employees access that? So why is it important? Why do we care that everyone can access our information? I'm sure there's a lot of obvious reasons rolling around in your head, but we tend to sort of see this in three different buckets. Mark Miller (00:05:02): One is a legal bucket. One is what we've called moral. I think there's probably a lot of different ways we could have titled that one. But you can think of it as sort of for the right reasons, right? Because everybody should be given access. And then the final one is business. Right? So let's go through each one of these and talk about them because understanding why you're doing this and what you're trying to accomplish... And by the way, it could be a combination of these, right? We're not saying that it's for one of these reasons, we're saying these are the three reasons that motivate. And sometimes it's all three. But understanding this is really important to launching a program so that you are headed towards the right goals. So, let's look at the legal implications first. Right? So, probably no surprise to all of you that lawsuits are very real and that risk is out there for companies of all sizes. Now I'm not a lawyer, this is not a legal discussion. Mark Miller (00:06:05): So of course, one of the things to think about is engaging your internal legal counsel or external legal counsel, or however you do that to truly understand this. But a lot of what we see in a lot of the reasons why people are launching programs, is to help mitigate this level of risk. So why is it a risk? Well, the Department of Justice has continually stated that websites fall under what's called the public accommodations language, which is referred to in title three of the ADA. Title three of the ADA essentially says places of public accommodations or places that public are coming to, need to be accessible to people with disabilities. And then if we look at the legal action that's occurred, or the lawsuits over the years, you can see that there's sort of a steady increase and there's no indication that that's slowing down. Every year we see that happen with more and more earnest. Mark Miller (00:07:08): So, the moral implications or what I refer to as sort of the right reasons. Right? The reasons that make us feel good about what we're doing and make other people feel good about what we're doing. So, one is corporate and social responsibility is a critical factor that ties into your brand perception. Right? It's very easy to get reputations and stuff you don't want and it's always nice when you have ones that you do want. And of course, it's always good that you always want to feel good internally about your own brand and that it really is sort of living up to the standards that you've created for it. Corporate responsibility nurtures, grows and protects brand reputation and valuable potentially up to 11% of a company's total by value. Mark Miller (00:08:01): So when you do this, there's kind of a side benefit that you're really improving the value of the brand. And then your employees will feel more positive towards employers that foster this sense of inclusivity. So it's not just about that external perception, but it's about what your own internal resources, your own internal people, really how they feel about their company and their brands. So what are the business implications? And this is where you start to look at the bottom lines. Right? This is where the people are concerned about the numbers. So a substantial segment of the world's population, roughly 15% according to the World Bank. And the US population, which is 61 million people identify with having a disability. Okay? Total after disposable income for working each people with disabilities, this is their disposable income. The money that they... Their discretionary money is about 490 billion. And that is according to the American Institutes for Research. Mark Miller (00:09:12): Inaccessible job application portals and organizational intranets prevent companies from employing a truly diverse workforce. So if you look at your company policies, does the accessibility of your internal digital assets sort of match up with what that policy is? And the people with disabilities tend to be the most loyal customers once they find a product of service that can satisfy their needs, it's often more trouble than it's worth for them to switch. And I think that that's one way to say it, the other way to say it is that a lot of the web unfortunately, is not accessible. So when you provide something that is accessible, it really creates appreciation. And there's a brand loyalty because you're... By people with disabilities because you are doing the right thing and it's not what somebody with a disability might experience all the time. Mark Miller (00:10:09): So what constitutes digital content? And I've sort of mentioned some of these things before, but some of the things that you think about are websites, and that could be a public facing website, that could be something behind authentication. Maybe you're... If you're a bank, you probably have a public facing website, but then you also have the online banking experience where your customers when they become customers, people are authenticating into it. You may have completely internal facing digital assets in your internet, mobile applications. So mobile applications in today's world come in the form of native mobile apps, the things that you download from the iOS or the play store. And also those mobile applications come in the form of responsive web content. Right? So sometimes those things that feel like native mobile applications are actually reaching out to responsive web content, or our websites are changing according to the portal we're accessing with it. Mark Miller (00:11:12): And then the final one that a lot of people don't stop to think about is kiosks. And kiosks really became big when the Air Carrie Act required that certain percentage of kiosks be accessible in airports and. So forth. So these are the dedicated hardware, software boxes, if you will, that you find when you go out in public. And when you think about kiosk or you think about this experience, it could be kind of a traditional sitting in the middle of the room place where you're going to get your boarding pass or something like that. Nowadays, you see them in fast food restaurants where you can actually place an order on a kiosk, but just to point a sale experience or that digital table tent that you see in a restaurant, these sort of smaller different types of experiences fall under kiosk as well. Mark Miller (00:12:10): All right. So let's dive in. What is digital accessibility? This is me right here at the podium ready to talk to you. All right. Well, the internet has rules. Right? And we all know this. In order for a webpage or a mobile application to load properly, the underlying code has to suit certain universal guidelines. So when your browser, whether it's Safari, Chrome, IE, whatever browser it is that you're using, when it hits a webpage, the reason it can interpret that webpage is because the developer that's created, it has followed a set of rules that we all agree to. Right? They're put out by an organization called the W3C. And these guidelines ensure a comparable experience on these multiple devices. So it doesn't matter what you're using, you're going to get a very, very similar experience. Mark Miller (00:13:01): So if developers don't adhere to the code, the website's going to break. Right? It'll offer an unpleasant experience. So we all sort of understand that because we all use the internet all the time. Well, good news. Right? Accessible code also has rules. So, really when you start thinking about accessibility on the web, it's an extension of those rules in very simplistic terms that allows us to extend that consistent experience to people who might access the web in a different way than a person without disabilities would. Your traditional sort of keyboard, mouse monitor user. So developers must adhere to special guidelines in order for users to engage with digital content in different ways to have a great experience. So for example, users who may not be able to use a mouse, but who can navigate by using a keyboard. Mark Miller (00:13:53): And this could be all sorts of different individuals. Right? Maybe somebody with a mobility impairment, maybe... Certainly, screen reader users aren't using mice, they're using keyboards. So it's a great first question. And I heard a wonderful webinar recently by a friend of mine. And he asked the question, what's the most important tool you have to test a website for accessibility? And the answer was a keyboard. Keyboard accessibility is so important because so many people rely on the keyboard to navigate content that you might be clicking through with a mouse. And by the way, you sprain your wrist, you run out of battery, there's all sorts of reasons why you might be temporarily in the situation if you do rely on a mouse. So just having that, your content accessible for a keyboard can be a great experience for all types of users. Right? Mark Miller (00:14:49): Users who may not be able to hear video or music, this is kind of... This one's an easy one to perceive, I think. Right? If there's somebody speaking or something's going on auditorially and somebody has a hearing impairment, obviously there needs to be a text equivalent, a transcript, captioning, something like that that enables that person to perceive the important content as well. And visually impaired users who are using assistive technology, and this really needs a screen reader. Right? So people who are blind or have low vision, sometimes people who have cognitive impairments, like maybe on the autistic spectrum somewhere, even ADHD. I personally have ADHD and a little bit of dyslexia. I don't use a screen reader to navigate a website, but I do use a screen reader to proofread my own work. Because what I can't visually see, I can hear. And some people who might have even more challenges than I do, they might extend that to reading content on the web. Mark Miller (00:15:55): So accessible code rules are determined by an international group. So I told you earlier today that the people that are telling us the HTML standards that we use so that all browsers are giving equivalent experience, well, guess what? That's the W3C and they do the web content accessibility guidelines as well. So the W3C was founded by a gentleman named Tim Burners-Lee. He is known as the founder of the web. He started to create a web markup for scientific reasons years and years ago at CERN. And now he actually still works at the W3C. And that group is made up of over 400 members from around the world. So they're very concerned about everybody being able to access the web. And that's why they give us what's called the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. You may have heard are pronounced WCAG, WCAG, WCAG. There's all sorts of shorthand ways to say that. And new versions of wake WCAG are released every few years. The most recent version is 2.1, which is from 2018. Mark Miller (00:17:02): Those of you who've been paying attention might be thinking, "I heard we were supposed to have 2.2." And that's true. I think they were trying to get it out last year, and I'm not sure what's going on with it now. But 2.2 seems to be around the corner. So they're always looking at ways to improve these guidelines. They're always iterating it. I think there's also work being done currently on a 3.0. Accessible code is important because of assistive technology. So assistive technology is any device or software that enables a person with a disability to engage with digital content. Right? So we talked about a screen reader, it's the most widely used AT. And it read... In simple terms. Right? Think about it in simple terms, but realize that it's actually a pretty complex piece of software. In simple terms it reads the content aloud. Mark Miller (00:18:01): The functionality that goes beyond that runs very deep and enables the user to skim content and do all sorts of things that we do with our eyes or I do with my eyes. But if you're a screen reader user, you might call up all the headings on a page, call up all the links on a page, things like that to simulate or to move rapidly and specifically through that content in a way that's important to you where a person with vision would be scanning the page to find it. In order for a screen reader to read all the content allowed on the screen and in order to make sense for the user, which is what I was just talking about, that is why the developers need to follow the success criteria in the WCAG guidelines. Two of the most common screen readers in the world are JAWS, which stands for Job Access With Speech. We are actually owned by the company that owns Freedom Scientific that creates JAWS. TPGi is. Mark Miller (00:18:55): And the other one is NVDA. I don't know why it's not on the slide, but that stands for non-visual desktop access. JAWS is really the most powerful and widely used screen reader in the world. It is a paid product and therefore a supported product. So you see it used in business a lot. NVDA's an open source product. So you see it more used by individuals and less adopted by business because obviously businesses need supported products. Accessible code is only part of the puzzle. So the importance of user experience and usability, just because a website or application is technically accessible... And what I mean by technically accessible is you've gone through and you're doing the best job you can to adhere to the guidelines. And when we talk about conforming to the guidelines, it is not complying with the guidelines. There's no 100%. You won't find a website out there that meets the WCAG guidelines at a 100%, nor is that an intention. Right? That's why they're guidelines. Mark Miller (00:19:58): There's all sorts of reasons out there why it's difficult. And it's also one of the reasons why we're talking about a sustainable program, is because it's ever changing. You're always changing your website. So just like bugs on your site, your level of performance to the guidelines, you're going to go up and down. But even substantially conforming with the guidelines, doing a great job doesn't mean you've made it really user friendly. Right? A bad user experience can make the difference between someone checking out and paying, right? Thinking of an eCommerce site or getting frustrated and mentally checking out. And I think we've all done this. We've all gotten on a website, not like how it's run and been like, "Forget it, they don't need my business. I'm going to move on." And so imagine that people with disabilities who have probably more challenges out there, because we really don't have a very accessible web now, they're experiencing that frustration much, much more often. Mark Miller (00:20:58): All right. So, let's talk about some things that can create a better user experience. And before I go into this, there's nothing like user feedback. So this is not intended to replace user feedback, but just to more give you an idea of what we're talking about here. So easy to follow navigation. So ensure that the content and the page structure are set up so that no matter where a user is on the page, they'll be able to navigate to a different section and understand where they are on the page and understand how that page relates to the content throughout. So, skip links are a way to think about this, and that is where you can quickly skip down to the content on the page, as soon as you enter the page. So if you think about some of the navigation on some of the websites you've been in, sometimes if you look at that main navigation and then all the sub navigation, imagine having to tab through all of that before you got down to the content on the page, that could be very difficult. Right? Mark Miller (00:21:58): So being able to jump over that is an example, being able to see all of the navigation. So when you do have that hidden content, maybe you hover over a navigation topic and it opens up other navigation options, is that perceivable by the screen reader? And so on and so on and so on, we could sit here forever and talk about examples. Breadcrumbs at function as navigation menu will always show a user exactly where they are and how the pages relate to one another. So breadcrumbs are a very good way start to solve some of the navigation or help people really understand where they might be on your site as they're navigating. Okay. Page structure have a clear hierarchy. So this is the semantic structure of the page. There should be a title that explains what a user will find on a page and then headings and sub-headers that will help break up the content for easier skimming and images that support the written content. Mark Miller (00:22:56): So, if you think about... I was talking about the screen readers have the ability to say, "Hey, list all the headings on the page." That screen reader will tell the screen reader user what the headings are, where they are in the hierarchy, is it heading one, is it heading two. And so imagine that scenario gives that screen reader user, a very quick picture of everything that's on the page and enables them to jump right to what's important to them. That's an example of why this structure here is so important. Color schemes has suitable contrast. So this is going into the, what we call a color of contrast ratio. So choosing colors with contrast that enables a low vision or color blind user to distinguish between text and elements. So this is sort of the background color versus the foreground color. And if that lends to it being easily readable for people that might have challenges with their site. Mark Miller (00:23:53): So this helps everyone in different situations. Right? If you imagine that scenario where maybe you're getting out of your car and you've been driving, you haven't wanted to touch your phone because you're driving, but maybe you know you've got a text or something, or there's something you have to check in for, or whatever the scenario is. And you step out of your car and you pull that phone out of your pocket. And the sun is beaming down. Right? You've got an immediate challenge because the sun is washing out your screen. Right? If the developers have adhered to the color contrast ratio guidelines and the WCAG guidelines, you're probably going to be able to see it. Right? Mark Miller (00:24:37): Usability is proven. So conduct user studies with people with disabilities to see how they engage with your digital content real time. To me, this is obvious. We do that with all types of users. Why not extend it to users with disabilities specifically, so we can make sure not only are we creating usable... Creating access through adhering to the guidelines, but now we're trying to create the best experience we can. Okay? So what do you do? How do you move forward? This is me again, I'm back at the podium. So, first of all, take a breath. Right? A lot of people think about this and they go, "Oh my gosh, I've got this elephant of a task in front of me. What do we do?" Well, just like the old saying says, right? How do you eat an elephant? Well, one bite at a time. Right? Mark Miller (00:25:27): So don't get so overwhelmed that you get that analysis paralysis and go, "We don't even know where to start. What do we do?" The worst thing you can do is do nothing. Right? The best thing you can do is do something. And you may not pick the perfect something, but you want to get started. Right? And that's something that a good partner like TPGi can be for you. That's something that they can really help you with to make sure that you do get some... Really consider the priorities and get started. So taking small steps will help. Get started. There are testing options to help you identify errors so that you don't have to find them yourself. This comes in a both automated and manual way. And we'll talk about the difference between those two. Mark Miller (00:26:13): And the idea is to do what you can. Get started and improve over time. There is no magic accessibility light switch, although there's people out there that would like you to think that kind of thing exists. It's like every other easy button in the world, it doesn't exist. So it's really helpful to take that deep breath and wrap your mind around this idea that we just need to start and start in small areas and continue over time to improve. And that's where the sustainability piece comes in. Right? So how do we help our customers? Well, these are the things that we have available. There're similar things out there across from different companies and everything. Obviously we'll talk about what ours do, but automated monitoring is a huge part of an overall strategy. Automated scans cannot detect every single issue as many of you may know, but it is quick, easy, and inexpensive to scan a website and doing that on a regular basis. Mark Miller (00:27:18): When I say automated monitoring at a basic level, what I mean is scanning your website on a regular basis. On an advanced level it's recording, tracking all these things which our tools do for you. But that starts to give you a way to glean some very important information all the time. So if it will track your progress as you improve, it will be an early warning system for you if accessibility errors do get injected. And it is something that's from a financial or budgetary standpoint, is pretty sustainable. Right? It's something that you can do. There's other testing tools. There's... When I talk about scanning or monitoring, we're talking about covering an entire site. There's what we call single page scanners. These are the type of tools that a developer or a QA person sort of working on a single page finds a lot of value in. Ours is called our toolkit. It's a Chrome extension now very quickly. It's going to become... It's going to be broken away from just being a Chrome extension and actually work on any browser. Mark Miller (00:28:25): So it'll be agnostic. But this is where you can scan a single page and it will find errors that could be detected through automation. There's overlays that help you understand the page better. So there are some sort of bridges between automated and manual that occur in there. And that's a very important... Those type of tools in our toolkit, I know I'm a little biased, but I think it's particularly a good one. You can go into the Chrome store right now and download it if you want to take a look at it. It's very, very good, very user friendly, but those are an important piece in an overall program, especially when you think about the things that your individual resources are going to need, human resources are going to need in their day-to-day a to sustain and maintain accessibility. Mark Miller (00:29:10): We also have JAWS Inspect. JAWS Inspect is JAWS. The engine in the back is JAWS, but instead of outputting in speech, it outputs in text and it can format that text in multiple reports. It can listen. So if you're using automated test scripts like Selenium scripts, it can listen to those scripts. And at the end of that, when that script runs, you have a transcription of everything that JAWS would've spoken. So it takes a pretty good portion of what somebody would do when they're manually testing with a screen reader for accessibility, and makes it much more efficient, especially when you think about having to transcribe what a screen reader may speak. And then there's manual accessibility reviews. And that's when experts like ourselves are going in there and doing a combination of automated and manual testing. And this is the way to catch the highest number of issues to the guidelines you possibly can on a site. Mark Miller (00:30:16): So, manual testing is the way of catching as many of those issues as possible to do. This also would include your QA people. Right? Being able to go in and test at this level, at that manual level. And then finally, we have JAWS Connect, which any site that's being monitored by JAWS, JAWS Connect will solicit feedback from a JAWS user very specifically. So let's talk about some of these things. So automated monitoring. The value there is you identify errors and learn how to fix them. And you can also take and analyze that data, which the ARC platform does. And through those analytics figure out why they're occurring. And this is important. Right? You talk about a sustainable program. One of the biggest things in a sustainable program is to lift yourself up out of that break fix mode. Mark Miller (00:31:16): Here's a piece of code that's creating an experience that's not accessible, here's fix it. Right? That's your break fix mode. And that's important of course. But why is that occurring? Is that being injected in design? Is it being put in by content creators? Do developers need greater education? Are things being missed in QA? Do you need a solution that's going to fit into your CI/CD pipeline so that things are not making it to production? There's a lot of things to uncover there. And that's what's important about taking that automated data and really analyzing it. Powerful and easy to implement. And our ARC monitoring doesn't require any modification of the code. It's literally accessing your website like a user from the outside would. It can authenticate in, it can do all sorts of things if you program it properly to do so. But you're not adding any code or anything on your website to do it. Mark Miller (00:32:17): So this is just a quick look at what we call the domain dashboard. So we're giving you... This is the average number of issues per page. It's showing you improvements since the last time it was scanned. So this is scanning on a monthly basis and what that looks like over time. So good news, they're getting better. Bad news, since we started scanning them, the site's going down. This is obviously fictitious and data on the errors. So as you go down in ARC, you get into more and more analytics similar to this. You can scan with a couple of rules engines. You guys get the idea. So this right here is a performance visualization line. This is that WCAG density score that we saw on the previous line plotted over time. And this is a very important concept in sustainable accessibility programs. Remember easy and expensive to do. Mark Miller (00:33:18): And we're taking those automated results and we're using them as a representative sample that's indicating maybe what our overall accessibility looks like. Because if we're fixing issues, some of them are detected through automation. If issues are increasing, some of them are going to be detected through automation. And we're plotting that over time. So in this case, you can see that this group is okay, but in February of 2021, between February and April of 2021, something occurred and a bunch of issues were injected. So this is something that should alert the team. And it looks like it kind of did here. And they said, "Oh, no, what happened?" Right? And then by May, they've not only addressed it, but improved it. And then you kind of have the plane flying at a good level here. And this same type of event happens in September. So, this is the kind of data that you're looking for. Mark Miller (00:34:14): And this is not only important to understand when issues start to occur, but also to have this data to be able to demonstrate to... Your legal counsel can use it, your... At their discretion your higher ups, maybe you're reporting to them. How have we been doing? Don't believe what I'm telling you, here's the third party objective data demonstrating this progress. Look, we caught an error early on, we fixed it. We maintained it. And this is just showing some of the other analytics. So the percentage of all the different failures to the guidelines, the percentage each one makes up, this is in ARC. These are resources to our knowledge base when we're reporting an issue, we're also contextual linking you out to articles on how to address that issue. And then this is an algorithm that's rolling up priorities. So it's one thing to know all these issues exist, but where do you start? What's going to have the biggest impact on your WCAG density score. Mark Miller (00:35:15): And in this case, it's saying, "Hey, failures to 3.1.1, this is the biggest impact to the score." So, that gives you an idea of where you might start. So this is the kind of thing that you're looking to have on an ongoing basis for that program. And then these are just an example of those issues, the type of issues that might be reported. Okay. Why is ongoing accessibility monitoring important? Well, there's a couple reasons. One, many lawsuits out there are actually looking at digital access... They're scanning websites on these kind of drive by type efforts that are out there. So nothing can make you... There's perfect shield out there against lawsuits, but you can certainly start to mitigate and manage that risk by paying attention to what you look like to automated scanning tools. Right? It's one piece of that risk profile that you can monitor and manage. Right? So that's why it's important to continue. One of the reasons why it's important to continue to monitor. Mark Miller (00:36:21): So failures found can inspire litigation, understanding your automating scans will help your legal risk and also provide insight for improvement. So, it's giving you hints as to where you have problems and where you can improve even beyond what could be detected to automation. So talking about a toolkit, again, it's available to Chrome store, and it's a professional level tool that gives you quick information on a single page. Right? So again, think about this as something, your developer QA staff might have in their toolbox. And it goes right into the code level of issues. So you're going to actually see in the code where the issue is, it gives you immediate contextual sort of basic information on the fix. And of course, if you have access to the platform and the knowledge base in there, you get very, very deep, deep information on how to fix it. Mark Miller (00:37:18): And those are important concepts. Right? Because we want to put in the hands of the people responsible for this within your organization. You want to put not just the tools, but the information. Right? So having access to elearning, having access to knowledge base is an important part of that whole picture. Right? So, JAWS Inspect, we talked about this a little bit before. I really highly recommend JAWs Inspect for QA staff that is new to QAing for accessibility, because learning how to use a screen reader, it's daunting. Right? They're not... It's a simple concept. I want to hear the information aloud. It's a complicated tool, just the hot keys alone that you have to start to understand to use a screen meter. Listening to content that you're used to seeing is a very... We call it vision bias. It's very difficult for people with vision to do. So we find it can take a year or more to really create a good screen reader tester with screen readers. So, it's using JAWS Inspect and understanding how to use JAWS Inspect to do that level of QA, can really accelerate that effort within your organization. Mark Miller (00:38:39): So we talked about it before, it simplifies that testing, you're testing for JAWS compatibility without all those challenges of running JAWS software. And it's very, very easy to obtain and export transcripts. Way easier than it is to manually transcribe. And of course, we know we need to transfer those to put them in JIRA bugs and give people that usability explanation of why there's an error. So, manual accessibility reviews. As we talked about that, this is really human beings, experts presumably, either your QA staff that's learned or our experts that do this every single day and do nothing but this every single day. And this is an evaluation of how well your digital assets support the needs of the users. So, they're going beyond that tool, that automated detection, and they're actually using the assistive technologies and the alternative methods, keyboard only, turning off sound, all those type of things that a person with a disability might be doing that's different from your standard keyboard, mouse, monitor user that can hear auditory content. Mark Miller (00:39:57): So this places your organization on the path towards greater accessibility no matter where your starting point. So even if you started with automation, you've addressed that this is going to be a level up beyond that. Different options are available. Right? So just because you are thinking, "Hey, we're doing a manual review." That doesn't mean you need a full comprehensive review or that you have to do a full comprehensive review on a representative sample of screens. You might be doing something different than that. You might be looking at one critical user flow. You might be doing what we call a high level review, which means maybe you're testing just for screen reader issues, or you're looking for something specific. Right? And so we got a... A screen reader user sent us an email that said they couldn't do this, can we get a screen reader user to test that out to verify it, tell us how to fix it. And then it identifies accessibility barriers that maybe overlooked automation. We've talked quite a bit about that. Mark Miller (00:41:05): All right. So we also talked about the fact that just because we've done this testing, just because you've looked at your site relative to its kind of conformance to the guidelines, that's not like we're done. First of all, from a sustainability standpoint, your website or your digital asset is dynamic. So just like you need to continue to look for bugs as things change on your site and address those bugs. You need to look for essentially what are bugs that affect people with disabilities. Right? So the effort is ongoing, but also there's a deeper level in which you can understand your site. And that is through actual user experience. So user studies are one way to do that, but we have an option called JAWS Connect. And what that does is it allows JAWS users in a very simple and direct way to provide feedback on your website. Mark Miller (00:42:01): And it's actually something we do for free. Anybody who is using our monitoring can turn this on for free. So if you're using ARC monitoring, you just let us know, and you can do this as well. And that user feedback feeds right into the platform. Right? So presumably, you're using that ARC platform or the people using that ARC platform within your organization are the people who are looking out for accessibility and know what to do about it. Right? So not only is it convenient for the user to be able to provide this feedback, you are getting that user level feedback delivered directly to the group in your organization that can actually be actionable on it. So this is very powerful. And this is very new by the way, this is several weeks old for us. We launched it early in December. So this is a sort of brand thing to the world that this can even be done. Mark Miller (00:42:57): It's simple, no code solution. So turn it on, there's no code you're adding just like was monitoring. It gives JAWS screen reader users the ability to easily quickly provide that direct feedback. That's the important point here. And it's free. So wrapping it all together. Right? Digital accessibility provides an inclusive experience. Hopefully that's clear by now, after this discussion. There are altruistic reasons. There are risk mitigation reasons, and there are business reasons for diving into it. In my mind, I don't care what the reason is, at the end of the day, we create a more inclusive experience for everybody. How we get there, it's a bit of the ends justifies the means. But you may want to make your product accessible to everyone, but if it is the legal risk that motivates your organization as a whole, then maybe that's what you as an evangelist would leverage. Mark Miller (00:43:57): So for me, they're all good reasons to do it and they all lead to a greater end results. Developers can follow WCAG criteria to enable individuals to use assisted technology, to engage with content. So remember that there is that success criteria out there from the WCAG guidelines, that is a fantastic place to start. It's a fantastic place to concentrate. Manual accessibility reviews can be a great starting point to improve accessibility. This is humans taking a look at it, and then automation can be used for things like ongoing monitoring and testing critical elements. And in my mind, automation is really the backbone or the thread that connects an ongoing program because it can be done on a regular basis very easily and expensively. And the last point, which is the point we really started with, is take a breath. Don't get overwhelmed. I know we covered a lot of things today. Really what you need to do is find a place to start and start that analysis paralysis looking at big budgetary numbers. Mark Miller (00:45:02): If that big number is hard, do an inexpensive automated stuff to start with. Right? But get the ball rolling, and before you know it you'll turn around and have a much, much more accessible experience. All right. We did pretty good for time. We're at 12:43, and I see that we have some questions entered into the questions and some comments. So, appreciate both of them. I am going to start with the stuff that was directly added into Q&A. So if you have specific questions, I'm going to keep going in the QA as long as I can. If we exhaust that, I'm going to jump over to the chat. I think a lot of that chat is you guys chatting with each other and making comments along the way. So, appreciate that, appreciate everybody's feedback. I know that there's people on the call that are... On the call. In the webinar that I know that several of you listening know what you're talking about. So, that chatter is very much appreciated. Mark Miller (00:46:07): So starting with the questions. Todd says, "I haven't heard any reference to various communications channel. Email possibly with attachments, SMS, MMS. Are there specific best practices, guidelines, or tools focused on accommodating these channels?" So, that's a fantastic question. And it's a really good question because it is kind of in my mind. Right? Often an overlooked area because it's kind of the... When you're thinking about a public facing particularly web content, it's sort of maybe the last way communication starts to happen when people engage in your website. But of course, it's important. Right? And in many ways, a lot of the advice that you get through the WCAG guidelines... And don't let the WCAG guidelines fool you because they say web. Right? A lot of people get hung up on that. But it can apply to an email, especially if that email is employing HTML, but even if it's employing basic text, even if you're writing a Word document and you're like, "How do I make this Word document as accessible as possible?" There's a lot of specific information out there, but the general spirit of the guidelines will always continue to apply. Mark Miller (00:47:20): Right? So, that's a really good question. The answer is yeah, there is some specific practices, guidelines. You will find a lot of those practices get more specific when you start to look at content, how to make content accessible. And in some cases, that advice does get as specific as here's what to do with emails. We evaluate emails all the time. So other than what we available through the knowledge base in ARC, Todd, I don't know that I have a specific place to point you, but maybe we can take that away and look at it. But as a general answer to your question, yeah. Start, look at content accessibility and then if you continue to dig, you'll find some people who've addressed those things specifically. How disruptive... This is from Philip. Thank you, Philip. "How disruptive is the prompt soliciting feedback the JAWS Connect to the user's navigation and way finding on the site? Mark Miller (00:48:24): So I'm going to answer that question. The first thing being completely transparent here, is I am not a screen reader user. So, that would be a great question to have answered by a screen meter user, because they can tell you their experience. Right? Going back to that whole principle. We set out and this was through feedback of screen readers as well to make it as unobtrusive as possible. It's actually one of the kind of major mandates of that. And if I kind of understand the experience from my non-screen reader standpoint, when a user enters a page, it is one of the options that they see. So there's sort of a quick... Yep, you can do it. And here's where you click if you want to do it. And then that screen user can sort of go about the rest of their business. I'm sure that's not a perfect explanation. Like I said, it's sort of new to us. So, I'm still learning a bit, but with my sided bias, non-screen reader user bias, that's kind of how I envision it. Mark Miller (00:49:32): So I think we've done a pretty good job. It is new to us. We're looking at those things and we're looking at ways to improve on everything so you might find that we even get better at it as the time goes on. But I think that's a really good question. A good point. And then Jenna asks... Thank you. "Do you have any advice on how to create an accessibility roadmap and how to integrate within the company's overall roadmap?" So, that's a great question and that is a huge question. My advice is we actually have that as a whole entire practice. If you want to reach out to me separately, I'm willing to chat with you about it. It's actually part of the practice in this organization. I'm part of that group. The other advice I will give you is that most of those programs are based on what are called CMM and CMMI models. So capability maturity, capability maturity integration models. These are models for maturing capabilities within an organization that started in the eighties and were refined through the nineties. And they're based on different levels of maturity. Mark Miller (00:50:40): So most people start off at sort of zero. We don't know anything about this or ad hoc. We're kind of doing some stuff, but it's been made up as we go along and we're looking to get to a level two, which would be managed, which is to kind of start to develop some consistency around it. So, I would look into... I would make sure that you have at least a high level understanding of those models, which just by nature of the fact that you ask the question you might may already. And the two data points you're looking at is data that comes out of manual reviews, automated scans to automated monitoring to find out where the problem areas are within the different process areas of the organization and also the stakeholders, which is very much what you would find in those CMM and CMMI programs. So I'm going to stop there because that's.... I love that topic and I could bore you all with it for the rest of the time. So Jenna, mmiller@tpgi.com, shoot me email we can get together if you want to talk further about it. Mark Miller (00:51:42): So, Mtiller. Which if you take the T out is just my last name, Miller. Asks... Thank you very much. "Can ARC monitoring handle SPAs? Can it detect failures within a single page web application where content is injected based on user interaction?" It can. Again, that's a bit of a rabbit hole of an explanation to go down, but the real quick explanation for that is, we've thought about monitoring up to this stage as you hit a domain, a root URL, and sort of spider out from there. I'm assuming that's how you guys have thought about it based in this discussion. But that's kind of typically how it works. We can also monitor through an automated script. Mark Miller (00:52:24): So if you create a Selenium script or use a Katalon Recorder or something like that, to create that XML script that simulates a user going through a user journey, ARC will consume that and you can actually monitor the active state of that user journey, which if you talk about ongoing accessibility, that's usually kind of a phase two in monitoring, especially if you think about eCommerce, a lot of healthcare, those type of websites, where there are critical user journeys. If a user can't check out, there's a problem, it starts to become very important to look at those critical user journeys sort of specifically, that same type of technology is the way to monitor that single page application where it requires a user interaction to get from essentially element to element. So again, Mmiller@tpgi.com, if you want to go deeper into that, I'm going to stop there for fear of over explaining like the other question. Mark Miller (00:53:34): Ryan asks AT Connect is not disruptive to the SR user experience as the feature is activated by an active link on the page. So, that seems like Ryan is chiming in to help me out with that. Thanks, Ryan. Samantha, thank you. Asks, "Are there going to be any webinars or information provided on road mapping?" So hopefully, I'm really hoping to gain more knowledge about that. We've gotten policy base, we're having a hard time getting buy in. So road mapping and evangelization is the other, I think, big topic in there, Samantha. Hopefully the explanations I've given have at least kind of covered that for you. Mmiller@tpgi.com. Mark Miller (00:54:20): Happy to discuss that further. We can talk about the evangelization piece of that as well. But you're not alone, that can be a challenge for a lot of folks. It's kind of what we call a grassroots start to it. You're probably very concerned with it, but how do you get that buy in from your upper management and how do you look at as an organizational problem to solve more than, "Hey, I've got a website, let's see if we can make it accessible. Both those are important pieces. So, hopefully I've covered those. Please feel free to add more questions into the Q&A if you'd like. We've got seven minutes left here. Mike Mooney (00:55:07): Mark there's one note in the chat from Laura Murphy. "Does TPGi provide form creation. We need a fallible accessible application that can be placed on an edge-based website." I don't know the to, I'm not sure you or not. Mark Miller (00:55:24): Let me find that... Was the question do we provide help or do we actually do that? Mike Mooney (00:55:30): Yeah. Yeah. It sounds like the question is phrased that way. Does TPGi provide form creation almost like constructing the form? Mark Miller (00:55:40): So, we can help with that. Let me put it that way. Absolutely. I mean, that's part of accessibility. There's part of a lot of best practices and a lot of websites have forms and we can give your team advice on how to create accessible forms. To be clear, we won't create a form for you. And the reason for that is that we are accessibility expert, so we stay in our lane in terms of giving it advice and not actually building things. And that's partially when you mix the two things a couple things can happen. Right? One is that you'll have accessibility experts telling you all sorts of stuff's wrong so that they can gain more business in fixing it for you. So that's one good reason to separate the people building and fixing from the people who are saying you've got issues and providing advice. Mark Miller (00:56:33): And then secondarily, we find that legal counsel prefers the objective experts to stay separate from the people who are actually fixing the issues. So when we come back in and check something and we say it's done, we're not motivated to say we did a great job because we did it. We're verifying what somebody else had done. So just a quick disclaimer kind of there. We can help you get it done, but we're not going to build it for you. And those are the quick reasons why. And I've said it a million times, but, Mmiller@tpgi.com if you want to talk more about it. Any other call outs from that chat, Mike? Mike Mooney (00:57:14): A lot of people had added them to the Q&A, but there are a couple new ones in the Q&A. Mark Miller (00:57:19): Oh, there are. Mike Mooney (00:57:20): Yeah. Mark Miller (00:57:20): Oh, look at that. Elizabeth. "Any sites that you can share that current use JAWS Connect so we can view the interactivity?" TPGi.com. Pop into our website, check it out. It's brand new. So it's not all over the place yet, as you might imagine. But as far as I know, it's active and continues to be active on our website. TPGi.com. They do... We are fooling with it. So if you go in, it doesn't fire up for you right away, just come back and check. It might be that they're making a change or something to it. Anonymous. I love questions from anonymous. "I work in a product organization, we're in the early days of change. Is it wrong to think of accessibility as a product unit? It's culturally semantically embedded." Mark Miller (00:58:20): I think that just unpacking this a little bit, if I'm... Hopefully I'm interpreting this question right. But it's important culturally and systematically to embed it and to look at all the different process areas within your organization that affects it. It can also be super, super helpful to have it be an independent discipline within the organization as well, so that you have sort of oversight. The question is, does the business have the budget, appetite resource, education, knowledge, all of that to develop that kind of practice? And the answer goes back to the advice in the beginning, if not start small and build that practice over time. I think that anytime you're in the early days, it's a fantastic opportunity to start somewhere so that as you grow, accessibility is growing with you. You have two things that are on a similar trajectory. Mark Miller (00:59:21): So I think kind of everything you're saying is not wrong at all. Your question was, is it wrong? I think, no. Think about it as a particular practice, great to pull an expert, great to have a department that handles it, but also think about how it fits with your organization culturally, and how it fits with your organization from a process standpoint within the organization. Elizabeth asks, "If you turn it on..." So, I assume we're talking about JAWS Connect, does it load on every page? JAWS Connect doesn't load, it's more of an option. And then when you click it, it's... If I have this right, and Ryan, I think you helped me out before, so feel free to pop something in. But if I have it right, the form is actually embedded in JAWS. And just... So there's not anything loading, it's just invoked in the website and sent through JAWS to that person's instance of ARC. Mark Miller (01:00:28): So it's not like there's a form on everybody's website. Remember how it's a no code, no touch. There's not a form loading on everybody's website or from everybody's website. Anonymous says to reread that. "I work in a product we're in the early days of change." Are you saying it's wrong to think of accessibility as a product unit? It's cultural... Is it wrong to think of accessibility as a product until.... Oh, until it is culturally [inaudible 01:01:04]. Mike Mooney (01:01:05): No, she just chimed in and said you answered her question. So... Mark Miller (01:01:08): Oh, okay. Okay. Great. I did read it wrong though. That was my ADD and dyslexia that I told you about at work in case you guys wanted an example. Mike Mooney (01:01:21): I'll read the next one for you. So, Anne had asked, "If we embed videos with captions on our website, do we still need to create transcripts?" Mark Miller (01:01:36): So, I'm going to answer it this way. I'm not an accessibility engineer. Right? So I'm not technically qualified to give advice on how to make your website accessible down to those level of specifics. My belief is that you would be covered. But... Mike Mooney (01:01:53): I think it's a best practice though to provide the transcript, because that's actually what we do on our site for our even post webinar. So once this recording is finalized and we've processed it, we'll provide a link to a transcript to make it easier for a screen reader user to go through that transcript. And I think a reason is because of speed. I think the screen reader user can go through that than going through the entire video. Mark Miller (01:02:19): Right. Yeah. So maybe... And again, I'm using really soft language here, just because we're not deep with WCAG experts, but maybe you technically might be fine. But everything Mike's saying is true from a best practices standpoint. Should I have a product owner? Yeah. I think I answered that before, but if you can do it, that's fantastic. Right? [inaudible 01:02:45] think of it as a [inaudible 01:02:46] a subject matter expert within the organization is super good. That's following on in the question about... That I misread. Rick asks, "Any plans to create JAWS Connect for other screen readers? I prefer to use NVDA for most of my usage and use voiceover on my phone." The shorter answer is, is that this is brand new, everybody's very comfortable providing it on a product that our sister company has. Mark Miller (01:03:21): I have heard that talk out there, but I don't know of any specific short term, long term plans. So, Rick, I completely appreciate that. You're not the only one, including us internally that are thinking in that direction. It's just early for us to really know what the future of this might look like. So, stay tuned. Stay tuned and I would not be afraid, it seems like you're not to make your voice heard and continue to communicate that that would be important to you. You're welcome, Anonymous. Anonymous said, "Thank you." And then Ryan, helped us out with the question about the JAWS feedback form. He says, "I think of it like a link that brings up a feedback form. If you don't activate the link, you will not see it." Mike Mooney (01:04:21): Yep. Makes sense. We're past the hour, a couple minutes here. Mark, really appreciate you spending time to answer everyone's questions and provide an excellent presentation for everyone. If anyone has any questions, you can follow up with mark personally directly at Mmiller@tpgi.com, but we'll send an email after the webinar with reporting and any resources that were mentioned today. So,, hope everyone has a great new year and have a great day. Mark Miller (01:04:55): Thank you. If you are here, it means you care about accessibility. We appreciate that. I hope everybody has a great 2022. Mike Mooney (01:05:02): All right. Great. Bye.