In this episode, Allie chats with Amber Hinds who – among many other things – is the co-lead of the upcoming WP Accessibility Day event! In this episode, we talk about the event, accessibility in WordPress, and how things can move forward in the community and within the core software.
Episode Transcript:
Allie Nimmons:
Welcome to the Underrepresented in Tech podcast, hosted by Michelle Frechette and Allie Nimmons. Underrepresented in Tech is a free database but with the goal of helping people find new opportunities in WordPress and tech overall.
Hello everyone, and welcome back to another episode of the Underrepresented in Tech podcast. It’s just me today. Michelle is taking a little break this week, but joining me is the amazing, the fantastic Amber Hinds. Amber Hinds is the CEO of Equalize Digital Inc, a certified B corp specializing in WordPress accessibility. She is the maker of the Accessibility Checker plugin, which I have used before, and the lead organizer of the WordPress Accessibility Meetup. Through her work at Equalize Digital, Amber is striving to create a world where all people have equal access to information and tools on the internet regardless of ability, which is such a amazing mission statement. She recently spoke at Word Camp US, where we got to have all of maybe five minutes worth of conversation, where she led a website accessibility testing workshop, which I heard amazing things about. And coming soon she will be the co-lead organizer of the WordPress Accessibility Day Conference. Hi, Amber. Welcome to the podcast.
Amber Hinds:
Hi, Allie. Thanks. For having me on.
Allie Nimmons:
Absolutely.
Amber Hinds:
It’s fun when you’ve actually listened to a podcast and somebody’s like, “Hey, do you want to come on?” You’re like, “Yay!”
Allie Nimmons:
Yay! I’m so happy to have you here. The work that you do and all the things that you do are so in line with me and Michelle’s mission here. I love the way that you have that worded in your bio, “Striving to create a world where all people have equal access, information, and tools regardless of ability.” That’s so succinct. It’s so perfect. And I think that should be everyone’s mission as people who create things and put them out on the internet, right? That should be something that everybody wants to accomplish, I think.
Amber Hinds:
Yeah, I mean, in an ideal world, I think we’re building websites that we want to do something. We either want people to read them, or we want them to buy something, or we want them to decide to contact us, or fill out a newsletter subscribe form, and if it doesn’t work for everyone, then it feels like we’re missing the mark on that.
Allie Nimmons:
Absolutely. That makes total sense. And I think that WordPress Accessibility Day is a huge tool to push that mission forward, and I love this event. It was either last year or year before, I volunteered for that event and it was such a gratifying experience to just listen and observe, because I end up, most things I do, being in the foreground a little bit, so it was really nice to be a background player in that and really listen and really learn all the things that I didn’t know about how to make the web more accessible. So I definitely would like you to tell us a lot about WordPress Accessibility Day. That’s why we’re here. It’s coming up super soon, so what is the event? How did it get started? When is it? How can people get access to it? All that good stuff.
Amber Hinds:
So WordPress Accessibility Day is a 24 hour conference that is going to run from, I’m here in the US so I was thinking Central Time, because that’s where I live, from 10:00 AM Central on Wednesday, November 2nd through 10:00 AM Central on Thursday, November 3rd. And it was originally started just via members of the accessibility team, and it ran last in 2020, and then they took a break in 2021, and at the end of 2021 I was like, “Hey wait, where’d this event go?” And so I contacted Joe Dolson, who’s the other lead organizer, and I said, “Hey Joe, do you need help getting this going again? Because I would love to get this event going again,” because, as you mentioned, there’s just so much that we can all learn. I didn’t help organize it last year, but I volunteered and I was an MC, and so I got a front row seat for some of the presentations, and I learned something every time. And I was just like, “We need to bring this back.” So Joe was game, and we have a great organizing team.
We’re all volunteers from across the community and around the globe, and so that’s part of why it’s a 24 hour event. We wanted to have sessions that would work for people no matter where they were in the world and not just… So I gave you a US time, because that’s what orients or works well for me, and I may not be watching presentations at two in the morning my time, but because it’s going to run over 24 hours, the idea is that there’ll be sessions that work for someone no matter what time zone they’re in. Something will always be during their normal business hours, if that’s when they want to tune in. And so it’s a single track event, and it’s going to be held on the WP Accessibility Day website, which is this wpaccessibility.day, and it’s free. You can donate if you want to help support the event, but you don’t to. You can register for free.
And we’ll have live stream, and chat, and Q and A, and sign language interpretation this year, which we’re really excited about, and live captioning, and a full transcript that’s all typed by a human rather than autogenerated, and that way hopefully it can be as accessible for everyone in the community.
Allie Nimmons:
That is so exceptional. I’m so excited for all of those things. And I love that it’s a 24 hour event, because you’re right. I think that when people hear accessibility, particularly when it comes to the web, I feel like people immediately think blindness or low vision, and there’s a very specific idea of what accessibility means and what it means to create for all people and so on. But having the event be available to people outside of our hemisphere is another way of making it accessible that I feel like people don’t think about as much, because if you are in… I don’t know. Because I’m also in a central time zone here in the US, so if we have an event during our time, somebody in, I don’t know, France or Kuwait, it’s like, “Oh, well this is the middle of the night for me, so how am I supposed to be able to participate?” And so it’s super awesome that it’s 24 hours. I love that. Is there anything special about this year’s event, or different, or new as opposed to the last WordPress Accessibility Day that you’re excited for?
Amber Hinds:
So the sign language interpretation is new. That was a big thing that I wanted to do. We’ve off and on been able to get sponsors for our meetup in order to do sign language interpretation, and it’s something that we’ve had attendees for the meetup request because we do have some deaf attendees who are culturally deaf, meaning they grew up speaking sign language as their first language, and so it’s harder to translate the English or it just means different, so being able to have the sign language is really helpful. And that was a big thing that we said was a goal. We wanted to bring in enough sponsors to help cover that for WP Accessibility Day, and we were very excited that we were able to do that.
Another thing that is new this year is that it is no longer running through the WordPress Foundation. It’s an independent event, which means that we are able to pay speakers. We don’t have a huge budget for that because, again, we’re all volunteers. We’re bringing in sponsors, but we said even if it’s a small something, we wanted to be able to give speakers something for their time because we really believe that it’s important to compensate speakers for their time. It takes time to put together slides and to come and be brave to talk in front of people, especially if you don’t do it very often. So that was something that we said this year, since it’s an independent event now, we have the ability to do that, and so we have budgeted for that. We’re going to have t-shirts and they’re fun. We’re excited about that. We’re giving them to speakers and volunteers and organizers, but I’ve been playing around with some of the drop shipping options, so if other people want to buy them, they can buy them too.
Allie Nimmons:
Oh my gosh. I’ll be first in line if you’re selling t-shirts. I love the design for the event, the mosaic puzzle design, and so I will be your first customer, if you figure that out, to get a t-shirt.
Amber Hinds:
Awesome. Yeah, our t-shirts don’t actually have the logo on them. There’s not a picture. We haven’t put a picture out yet, but watch for it. It’s a little bit of an edgy statement on accessibility and WordPress.
Allie Nimmons:
I love edgy statements. All right. I’m doubling down.
Amber Hinds:
It’s a design that can be read multiple ways, let’s put it that way. So it’ll be fun to see what people have to say when we put it out there.
Allie Nimmons:
Absolutely. Oh, that’s even more exciting. I definitely want one now. An air of mystery. That is all so cool. I’m obsessed with that you’re paying speakers. I love WordPress. I love the WordPress Foundation. I will always say that. It is so silly and kind of stupid that that is a barrier to paying speakers, doing it through this channel means you can’t. I don’t think a lot of people realize that, right? You’re literally not allowed to pay speakers. I’ve heard people talk about that if they’re hosting a meetup, if they want to do a Word Camp or whatever, that you’re literally not allowed to compensate your speakers outside of speaker gifts, which, I’m sorry, as a speaker, I would much rather get some money than a water bottle or a backpack or a t-shirt. I have a million of those things, right? It’s very silly. So I’m so glad that y’all have been able to get it to where it has to be able to do that, because that’s super valuable.
So at Word Camp US pretty much every year, Matt Mullenweg, our benevolent leader, does a Q and A where people are allowed to ask him these rapid fire questions. He doesn’t know what they’re going to ask. And to me, it’s always almost like a game to watch as he tries to answer these questions in a very politically correct way without ever giving a solid yes or no on things in real time. It’s very interesting to watch.
Amber Hinds:
It’s very brave of him, to be honest. I will say I respect him for being willing to do it because you can really get thrown curve balls.
Allie Nimmons:
And he does. Every single year I feel like there’s at least one question that goes down in history as, yeah, that was the question. And I would say that maybe your question was at least one of the questions this year, at least for me, as the question and answer that really stood out to me. So if anybody missed what that was, can you give a little low down on what it was you asked him and what it was he said in response?
Amber Hinds:
Well actually I didn’t ask him anything. There was someone else who came up and asked about accessibility in Core. There are some big challenges-
Allie Nimmons:
I wasn’t actually in the room while the questions were being asked, so I was piecing things together from Twitter, so I apologize for my misinformation.
Amber Hinds:
Yeah. Okay. So someone asked him about accessibility, and can we focus more on accessibility because there’s some challenges still in Core, and obviously if the goal of WordPress is to democratize publishing, that means we want people with disabilities to be able to publish with WordPress. And one of the statements that he made while responding to that question was that he said there is a challenge with getting people with disabilities to test WordPress, and I believe that. It’s possible because who knows how much outreach they’ve done to the disability community? But I tweeted at him, and this is what got some attention afterwards, that this is only a problem if we’re not willing to pay people with disabilities to test. And this is something that both through my work and the testers that we hire at my company, Equalize Digital, and also through a lot of the speakers that I’ve had the opportunity to bring on as volunteer speakers for our meetup and hearing from them, a lot of times people with disabilities are asked to donate their time, and people with disabilities are very frequently underemployed.
And so, in my mind, there’s a really easy solution, which is committing dollars to run regular user testing sessions. And I think there’s definitely some frustration there. And I think his approach on it is everyone who works on WordPress is a volunteer, except for that’s not really true. There’s quite a few companies beyond Automatic. It’s not just Automatic, right? There’s a lot of companies who pay contributors to work on WordPress, and so some of these companies that are large companies that have the ability to sometimes even hire full-time individuals to exclusively work on WordPress, one of them needs to step up and say, “I am going to hire a person with disabilities to work on WordPress,” whether that is a blind person or maybe even just someone who is deaf but also is an accessibility specialist who their whole job could be managing accessibility, or someone with a motor challenge that maybe only uses a keyboard because they can’t move a mouse. There are a lot of different things.
So, I mean, feel very strongly that if we want this testing to happen, the best way to do it is to pay for it and to say, “This is important. This is a priority. We’re going to invest our dollars, whatever those dollars are, in making sure that it happens.” I will say though, there was also some follow up conversation. It’s not necessarily that the problem is just that things don’t get tested, because there are open accessibility tickets in Track and in the Gutenberg GitHub that haven’t been addressed yet, so there’s also a need for developers to be interested in putting effort into resolving accessibility problems when they are identified because there are people who are blind and use screen readers on the accessibility team that open bug reports or that do test things. So it’s not always that they just don’t know that things aren’t accessible. It’s that sometimes things are being allowed to ship inaccessible.
Allie Nimmons:
Yeah. That’s so interesting. And what frustrates me about that is, okay, we have this system where everyone is a “volunteer”, and that’s great and that’s fine and that creates this great vibe that we have in this community, in this small village sort of a feel where everyone is pitching in and doing their share and so on and so forth. But the difference of, okay, well maybe we don’t have enough resources, or people power, or time to ship this new feature because everyone’s operating on volunteer basis is very different than we don’t have the resources, or time, or people power to ship very basic level essential things, like the software being accessible. That’s not a feature. I feel like people think of that as just another feature of, “Well, okay. Well, if it’s not accessible, as long as it ships and lots of people can use it, then it’s fine,” and that’s just not true.
It’s just not true, and it frustrates me that we don’t have a way to say, okay. Well, the volunteering and the paid contributor system has gotten us 90% of the way. Now let’s determine how we can get the other 10% accomplished. And, from what you’re saying, in many cases, that involves hiring people to do that work. And I think that, yeah, there’s tons of companies that contribute people to work on WordPress, automatic really is the largest and most financially capable of doing that. And so when I was looking at your response and the threads that were coming off of that, it just really frustrated me at the lack of proposed solution from leadership, whether you want to say that that’s Matt, or whether you want to say that that’s other business owners who contribute their people to WordPress. It seems like the role of leadership in a big project like this is to dissolve roadblocks, and this is a huge roadblock that we have. Is the project not being accessible where it needs to be?
I did a podcast with Press the Issue a couple of months ago where I tried to figure out how accessible WordPress is, and I was super horrified to learn how much of Core, how much of Gutenberg is just not accessible to people. And I think that that’s such a-
Go ahead. It just really upsets me.
Amber Hinds:
Yeah. I mean, I think to highlight that point, what was it? Only about a month ago? 2022? Was finally approved to get the accessibility ready tag, and this is the first time in many years that a Core theme did not have the accessibility ready tag, but it was because there were elements of full site editing that were not accessible. And so it’s like why are we releasing full site editing if people with disabilities cannot use it, and not even calling it beta.
Allie Nimmons:
Yeah. That’d be one thing. But yeah, calling it finished-
Amber Hinds:
We’re just saying this is ready for prime time. No, I don’t think so.
Allie Nimmons:
Yeah. And it’s like you know-
Amber Hinds:
But-
Allie Nimmons:
Go ahead.
Amber Hinds:
Yeah. And I think too, on that front with the company’s hiring, and I don’t know how much I can say, but I have a friend. He’s a developer, and, I mean, I’ve seen some of the things he codes and it just is way over my head, but he is blind and he has been handed by some companies in our space developer tests during hiring process that weren’t accessible to him, not because he doesn’t know the code and doesn’t know. He can do GitHub. But just the way the test was designed or the software that they used for the test wasn’t accessible, and so really thinking about even in your hiring process or the people that are brought onto the team and what the communication is like for them, that’s really going to impact the whole direction of the project.
Allie Nimmons:
Yeah, absolutely. And it’s frustrating because it seems like there should be a straightforward way to resolve this. We talked about paying people with disabilities to test the thing, but it seems a little bit more complicated than that. And if you could wave a magic wand and have a solution present itself, what would that solution look like?
Amber Hinds:
For accessibility in WordPress Core?
Allie Nimmons:
Yeah.
Amber Hinds:
I don’t know. So I’ll be first to say I’m not super actively involved with the accessibility team. I read. Every once in a while say things to people on the side that are on the team, but I don’t attend every meeting and all that kind of stuff. So I think there are definitely people on that team who are probably better positioned than me to say what the magic bullet is. Since Gutenberg got rolled into Core, we’ve been using that. That’s what we build sites for our clients. There are things about it that I really like, like not having to teach clients how to use Short Coach just to make columns, right? Things like that are better, but I do think that there has to be some thought put into how can we make an editing experience work for everyone, and maybe not rushing as quickly into just rolling in features.
And I do think accessibility problems should be a reason that something cannot be released, and we need to say that this is a bug that is not just minor. This is really important because it goes against the core value and the stated goal of WordPress, of democratizing publishing. If that’s what we’re trying to do, then we have to make sure everyone can use the tool.
Allie Nimmons:
That is incredible. That’s going to be what I sell this episode on is what you just said, right? That makes total sense to me. Yeah. It shouldn’t be optional. It needs to be mandatory. Like you, I don’t know an infinite amount about how these teams work and how things exactly get shipped. I imagine there’s some sort of list that gets gone through to determine, “Okay. Well, is this in order? Is this in order? Is this in order? Have we checked all these boxes to make sure that this can be shipped?” And it sounds like accessibility is not a part of that list, or if it is, it just gets overlooked. I’m oversimplifying it.
Amber Hinds:
I think it is to some degree. I don’t want to say that nobody is working on it, because there are a lot of really amazing people who are working on it. I just think that sometimes there are timelines set that maybe everyone in the community doesn’t get… Some specific people in leadership are like, “This is happening, and this is when it’s going out and we just make it ready by then, and if there are certain things, we won’t worry about it or we’ll come back and circle back and fix them later.” And with accessibility, it’s always easier to do it right from the first time, and very infrequently do people actually circle back. Now, in WordPress, that’s not necessarily the case. I’ve seen a lot of circling back, like the fact that 2022 is now able to have an accessibility ready tag because those problems were fixed. They just weren’t fixed before it shipped.
Allie Nimmons:
But that’s a good distinction to make though. Yeah. Being able to circle back is really powerful, but, like you said, is was what? A month ago that it got that tag, and we’re in October, so that means-
Amber Hinds:
And we’re about to release 2023.
Allie Nimmons:
Yeah. So that means the majority of the year there were people that couldn’t use it the way that everyone else can, and that’s not fair. And, yeah, there’s-
Amber Hinds:
The other thing-
Allie Nimmons:
Go ahead.
Amber Hinds:
I was just going to say the other thing that I would really like to see that I think would make a huge difference for accessibility of WordPress websites is more guidance and/or restrictions on how content creators can use WordPress to create content. So a really great example is the Core video block has a setting that you could use to make the video auto play and loop, and then you can also toggle on a setting to hide the controls.
Allie Nimmons:
So I don’t know a whole lot about accessibility, but I’m pretty sure I know that’s not a good option, or that’s not a good thing to make mandatory on a video, yeah.
Amber Hinds:
If you want a website to be web content accessibility guidelines compliant, anything that autoplays for more than five seconds has to have a control that allows someone to disable it. In an ideal world, we don’t autoplay anything on websites, because this is not 2005.
Allie Nimmons:
Yeah, we’re not doing Flash anymore.
Amber Hinds:
We’re not streaming music on websites the moment they load, all of that, right? But I get sometimes people like background videos or something to play on the side, but just that’s a great example where we could turn off the setting that hides the controls on a video that is set to autoplay. And then that way you can either hide the controls… I guess there’d be no point in hiding the controls on a video that wasn’t autoplaying. So maybe they shouldn’t be able to hide the controls at all. I don’t know. Or maybe we need a warning on that, and we talked about that at Contributor Day during Word Camp US, because I was testing that block a bunch. I think another thing that I would love to see is the Heading Selection, because using headings in the right order really is helpful for people on screen readers, especially, on being able to understand the content of the page and navigate around it.
So it would be so easy for us to recognize what headings have already been preceded the one, and then when you insert a heading block, if it would only allow you to choose the right number. So if it was your first heading on a page, you can only set it to H2 because your title, theoretically, is H1, but you couldn’t be like, “H4, just because it’s smaller and I like the font that it is,” right?
Allie Nimmons:
That would make so much more sense, and that would just make things so much more easy. When I put a page together, that’s something I have to think about. It’s like, “Okay, am I using my headings correctly? Let me go back over and see,” and blah blah blah. And if it just did it automatically, that would be so much easier for people like me who’ve been using WordPress a long time. But for somebody who’s just opening up WordPress for the first time today, that empowers them to create a more accessible website maybe without even realizing that that’s what they’re doing.
Amber Hinds:
Yeah, exactly.
Allie Nimmons:
That’s crazy. I would love to have stuff like that. And yeah. I mean I’ve definitely noticed that I think the trajectory of things has improved. That might be true or untrue. I mean, being able to select colors and have something tell me, “Hey, that color with this color is probably not going to work out. You should…” Seeing those sorts of things. I’ve noticed building in WordPress has become more accessibility friendly in various ways to me, and so sometimes I wonder if it’s a thing of, well, the net is growing. WordPress as a whole is more accessible than it was 10 years ago to build with, so we don’t really have to urgently address any of the issues that you and I are talking about right now. Have you heard that argument before, where it’s like, “Oh, things are getting better as a whole so we shouldn’t have to worry about it too much?”
Amber Hinds:
No, I don’t feel like I’ve heard that. When I talk to people on the accessibility team, I think some of it is, so on the heading thing, those are good ideas, but it might just open a giant can of worms because somebody’s going to get upset that they can’t select the H4, and then there’s going to be a whole bunch of support tickets or something if this feature is rolled out. And I think, for me, I’m just in the land of this is where I work all day with accessibility, and all of our clients have come to us because they want to be more accessible and they are like, “Oh, okay, you just educate me on that, and now I understand why.” So I’m like, “Let’s figure out can we put in education?”
But maybe that’s where it starts is first we add a warning, “You’ve selected a heading that is bad for accessibility,” like we have a warning that these colors don’t pass for color contrast, or we have something that it highlights what an alt text is and links you over to the alt text decision tree on do you need it, right? So maybe it’s about putting more guidance in first, and then eventually we can work towards having those rails. I mean, it’s something we’ve talked about with our product too, like maybe we just need to build more of this into our plugin. But I think in the long run, like you mentioned, I think the reality is we’re going to see more accessible websites built with WordPress when the default is accessibility or you can only make very limited inaccessible choices and without even knowing it, because we need the people who’ve never heard of website accessibility to be able to install plugins or just use Core WordPress and have the way those tools are be accessible without them having to do anything.
Allie Nimmons:
That makes a lot of sense to me. Because it’s also like, okay, if you really want to use that H4 when you should be using an H3, it’s not like it’s impossible, right? If you’re a developer, you maybe can go in there somehow and manually change that code to do what you want it to do. It’s not like it’s completely out of your hands of what you can do with your website, but you’re right. The basic options, the default options should bend toward what is the most accessible, in my eyes, and then if you really want to break the rule because it’s so important that this is how you want it to be, then I think that is the beauty of WordPress is you have this one layer cake that everyone can come and eat, and then once you want to start getting fancy, you can add other layers to it and be crazy. But yeah, I think that primary layer should be as accessible as possible because those especially are the people who are not going to know better. Yeah.
Well, it was super wonderful to talk to you today, Amber. I love talking about all of this stuff. As I go through my career with WordPress, I learn more and more all the time about accessibility, and I’m super grateful that there are people like you in our community who are open and willing to teach and explain. And yeah, I think overall we’re going in the right direction. It’s frustrating sometimes when it feels like things are moving too slowly, but I think we’ll get there.
Amber Hinds:
Yeah, I think we will too. There’s been good I feel positive momentum, and there are a lot of people in a lot of companies who are interested in better supporting accessibility both in WordPress or in their own products or software. And so I think we are moving the right direction, and I try to stay positive about it.
Allie Nimmons:
Good. Well, before we go, remind everyone where they can go to register for WordPress Accessibility Day. Is it WordPress Accessibility Day or WP Accessibility Day?
Amber Hinds:
I mean, on the logo, it’s WordPress Accessibility Day. We’ve been having this conversation. It started as part of, I mentioned, the Foundation, so I think it was allowed to be WordPress Accessibility Day, but now that it’s not I don’t know if that’s… Now we’re talking about this and somebody’s going to call us out on it. But yeah, I don’t know. We might morph into being WP Accessibility Day only. It looks funny in the logo.
Allie Nimmons:
A little bit.
Amber Hinds:
So it is WordPress Accessibility Day. The website is wpaccessibility.day, because we are respecting the trademark on our domain.
Allie Nimmons:
Perfect. Good. And then where can people find you if they want to follow the things that you’re doing?
Amber Hinds:
The best place to get in touch with me these days is on Twitter, and I am @heyamberhinds.
Allie Nimmons:
Awesome. All right. Well, thank you again so much. And thank you all of you out there for listening, and we will see you again next week.
This episode was sponsored by the following companies. WP Wallet. WP Wallet is a free, simple, intelligent tool that helps WordPress professionals effortlessly manage all of their license keys and invoices for all sites and clients. Never forget a renewal, lose a license key, or miss out on a reimbursement again. Join WP Wallet for free today. LearnDash. LearnDash is taking cutting edge e-learning methodology and infusing it into WordPress. More than just a plugin, LearnDash is trusted to power the learning programs for major universities, small to mid-size companies, startups, entrepreneurs, and bloggers worldwide. If you’re interested in sponsoring an episode, using our database, or just want to say hi, go to underrepresentedintech.com. See you next week.