Developer: I think that companies that sell accessibility solutions try to frame accessibility as a black box that’s impossible to understand. But I believe the concepts are not that difficult if you take the time to learn them.
Kris: Exactly, exactly. This clip is so good. I had to share it. It’s from- I’m screen recording a YouTube video right now. The title of the video is How to Check Web Accessibility with a Screen Reader and the Keyboard.
The channel is ExpandTheRoom. I will link to both the video in the channel below. I am on the right side corner of the screen. And the reason I’m sharing this video is because the message is so important to relate to website owners; this is not an impossibility; it is very doable.
What is important to understand is that some accessibility considerations do require a developer to implement. There’s no way to get around that. But there are many more accessibility issues where development knowledge really isn’t necessary.
So a nontechnical person can still make significant strides in accessibility by themselves. That’s important to know. And she’s right many sellers in this space, paint this impression that you’d need them or else it’s you’re not able to do this. It’s not true.
You just have to take the time to learn the subject matter. And as you go through and you start learning more and more about accessibility, you find out it’s fairly intuitive. It’s actually fairly obvious.
You just have to invest a few hours of your time and then you will really start piecing things together. Now certainly, there are web accessibility professionals and experts, you’re not going to get to their level.
They have spent years on this and it’s taking them months and months of training and or just firsthand experience. You’re not going to have that, but you don’t need to become an expert to remediate your website.
And it’s important to make that distinction. There’s expertise, but you don’t have to become an expert to improve the accessibility of your website. And so, where my course comes into play with all of this is I organize the information and I prioritize the accessibility issues that you want to pay attention to, first.
So that you can significantly reduce your risk of litigation as you’re working on accessibility. So what this course is, is it really amounts to an SOP or step-by-step instructions that you can hand to your web developer or your content manager and tell them hey, follow the instructions in this course and let’s improve the accessibility of our website.
My course isn’t designed to include all of the different accessibility considerations. But what it does do is it accounts for the most commonly claimed issues in litigation, particularly by the most active plaintiffs’ law firms.
So it organizes everything and then it instructs your team is going to learn about accessibility as they go. They’re going to be trained on certain accessibility issues. And then those accessibility issues are going to become a part of their knowledge, a part of their skill set.
And this way, accessibility will be introduced into your processes. And then after you go through the course and then after you find and fix all of the issues that the course details, then you’re going to go through and you’re going to, for example, go through my WCAG checklist, and then incorporate all of those other accessibility considerations.
But again, the most important part of this video is that this is doable. It’s not an impossibility. And it’s something that you can take on with your team and significantly improve the accessibility of your website.
Will you make it fully WCAG conformant? Highly unlikely, but you’ll be able to make significant progress.
