Podcast appearances and mentions of amber hinds

I think it's one of the most important default themes WordPress has released in a while. Sure, the design is fairly opinionated, but with the mix of new patterns/blocks available, I think someone with a little WordPress know how (and grit!) will be able to design a solid website for their brand or business. Even for the freelancers or agency owners out there, searching to offer a more affordable solution for their clients, I think TT4 can fill that gap. But don't confuse that with it being a solution on par with Kadence or GeneratePress. Certainly not as powerful as Elementor or Beaver Builder. There are large gaps that cause it to fail really quickly. One that stood out to me recently was the lack of mobile design features in the Site Editor. In my latest video, Customize Mobile Views on twenty twenty-four, I demonstrated the lack of simple breakpoint features inside the site editor. I'd have folks comment on my channel asking how to change things in the mobile nav, or on a landing page, with no clear direction on how to do it — in the theme.When the debate of Page Builders vs Blocks comes up, how could we not want to clear up this confusion? A few takeaways from Eric Karkovack's post from the link above: “Some people aren't fans of the Site Editor or Gutenberg. They'll naturally point to its quirks and limitations. Fair enough.”“Perhaps this doesn't apply as much to block themes. More than anything, they may be limited by the Site Editor. There may be a feature that it doesn't yet offer. Thus, you must work within its capabilities.”And this is why there's such a fierce debate from the page builder audience: WordPress still has so much time to catch up — if ever.One area I disagree with Karkovack on, at least in the context of TT4 is, “The gap between commercial and free products isn't as wide**.** You aren't missing the ability to customize the look and layout. Nor are any crucial features locked down.”We certainly are missing some of those crucial features for mobile or even a more robust query block, for example. And while I know it's the Site Editors fault, your average end user doesn't. And I'm much more critical on the default theme experience because, well, it's the default theme!Karkovack encourages us (and WordPress developers) to create a better narrative, which brings me back full circle to where I always land: The core experience is good enough for the masses, but when you need more, you go to a full featured theme or page builder. Though, I don't know if that excuses some of these features missing from the default experience.I think the core experience of WordPress + TT4 can live along side a freelancer's toolkit which also includes Kadence or Elementor, for example. Speed and simplicity being the obvious advantage of the former. And at the end of the day, I think that's perfect, at least for now.And if you invest in that core experience, there are products like Twentig that can supercharge your Twenty Twenty-Four website. I think a 3rd party tool that enhances default themes is very smart. Maybe this is where block based themes and the default experience of WordPress lives? Do we need more? Hit reply and let me know. Don't miss this WordPress contentNow it's time for the links you shouldn't miss!Aurooba Ahmed launches “JS Essentials for WP Devs” with the first lesson dropping on March 4th 2024. Introducing JS Essentials for WP DevsAngie Byron reminds us why your peers might not care about your DevRel/community efforts. No one gives a &*^@# about your DevRel/Community Programs (and what to do about it)Amber Hinds continued the climb up the mountain of accessibility adoption for .org and other WordPress related websites. Apparently some progress has been made. https://x.com/heyamberhinds/status/1760679617873301882?s=20Get a deeper look into Awesome Motive Founder Syed Balkhi's business mind I this recent interview. How to Compound Your Wealth in Unorthodox Ways with Syed BalkhiWP Tavern Launches Writer Hunger Games WP Tavern Launches Writer Hunger GamesWP Mainline shares how you can make more money with LearnDash LearnDash 4.11.0 Introduces A New Way to Generate RevenueEric Karkovack wants us to clear up the confusion surrounding block themes Clearing Up the Confusion Surrounding Block ThemesDon't miss our YouTube videosFollow the WP Minute on YouTube.Learn more about Synced Pattern Overrides coming to WordPress 6.5 New in WordPress 6.5: Synced Pattern Overrides ⭐️Supercharge your Twenty Twenty-Four theme with Twentig Supercharge Twenty Twenty-Four Theme with Twentig!

So today we're chatting with Gen Herres about web accessibility. Gen is an experienced WordPress developer who has been in the field for over a decade. After making the typical mistakes in website development, Gen met Amber Hinds in 2019 and became interested in accessibility through her company, Equalize Digital. This led to a deep dive into the world of accessibility, and Gen began to incorporate it into her development processes. She discovered the lack of good checklists for accessibility and continues to explore this challenging and rewarding aspect of web development. Whether you're new to the world of accessibility or a seasoned professional seeking to enhance your knowledge, this episode provides a comprehensive overview of the critical role that accessibility plays in web development.

In this podcast episode, Cory Miller interviews Amber Haynes, CEO of Equalize Digital, about the importance of accessibility in WordPress and web design. They discuss the recent award received by Equalize Digital for their Digital Accessibility Checker plugin, which audits WordPress websites for accessibility. Amber highlights the challenges faced by screen reader users and the increasing legal requirements for website accessibility. She also shares insights on the role of plugin developers in improving web accessibility and the competitive landscape of different platforms in terms of accessibility. The episode concludes with Amber discussing upcoming improvements to their plugin.Top Takeaways: Accessibility as a Skill Set: Agencies and web developers are encouraged to recognize the growing importance of accessibility in web development due to upcoming legislation. Amber suggests adding accessibility as a skill set and recommends starting with tools like the Accessibility Checker plugin to identify and address issues.Practical Steps for Improvement: To enhance accessibility, developers are advised to incorporate the Accessibility Checker plugin into their starter themes, whether custom or using a page builder. Amber emphasizes the importance of testing websites using only a keyboard, focusing on navigation, and ensuring that all functionality is accessible without a mouse.Evolution of the Accessibility Checker Plugin: The Accessibility Checker plugin has evolved over time, with a focus on improving user experience and introducing features such as full site reports and audit history. The plugin is continually refined to provide developers with meaningful insights into accessibility issues on their websites.Challenges and Opportunities in WordPress Accessibility: While WordPress powers a significant portion of the internet, there are ongoing challenges with accessibility, particularly in the core product. Amber discusses the need for a more strategic approach to accessibility within the WordPress community, addressing issues and making accessibility a priority in the development process. The conversation also touches on how other content management systems, such as CraftCMS, are actively prioritizing accessibility.Mentioned in the Show:Equalize DigitalAccessibility Checker pluginGAAD FoundationGaady AwardSlackEuropean Accessibility ActCraft CMSDrupalMeetupShopifySquarespaceLone Rock PointNASA

If you missed out on WordCamp US 2023, today's episode will share some of the highlights from the talks of Matt Mullenweg and Josepha Haden Chomphosy. I urge you to watch the entirety of their presentations, but to also tweet at us to share your thoughts on the future of WordPress.Clips includeMullenweg's outlook to WordPress 6.4 and Twenty Twenty Four theme.What does WordPress and Collaboration look like?WordPress will look different soonA collab of LMS plugin providers takes shape“How to keep WordPress thriving” asks JosephaIn the newsHere's a list of the articles or links, mentioned in today's episode!FesteringVault is back with more annoyances.WordPress Accessibility Day 2023 (Look for an interview with Amber Hinds soon on WP Minute+!)WP Tavern highlighted These top agencies made a free WordPress for Enterprise PDF.Allie Nimmons says goodbye.There's a new Consortium on the block. ★ Support this podcast ★

Apple Journals & Day One | Matt MullenwegImportant Takeaways:Apple announced its own Journal app at WWDC, which competes with Automattic's product, Day One.Day One has a few advantages over Apple's Journal app. One of them is the upcoming feature of Shared Journals, which allows fully end-to-end encrypted shared private journals with friends and family.Another advantage of Day One is its cross-platform availability. Unlike Apple's Journal app, which is limited to Apple devices, Day One works on all Apple devices, Android devices, and the web.Link: Original ArticleA Place of One's Own, in Noho – Automattic DesignImportant Takeaways:Automattic has a unique office space in Noho, New York, which is described as a “magic space” with unobstructed views of lower Manhattan.The office design is inspired by the aesthetics of jazz clubs and features collections of mid-century vintage furniture, art and design books, and original art pieces.The office is designed to be a practical and elastic canvas for diverse uses, and it reflects the rich aesthetics of Automattic's multiple creative tools.The office space is not just for work; it also serves as a socializing and connecting space for Automattic employees.Link: Original ArticleLinking to Supporting Orgs – Make WordPress.orgImportant Takeaways:The post discusses the need for a dedicated page on WordPress.org to link to independent organizations that support WordPress's mission of democratizing publishing.These organizations are not officially part of WordPress but offer valuable resources and opportunities to get involved.The proposed structure for such a page includes an introduction, organization categories, organization listings, updates and announcements, and contact information.The organizations should align with the mission of WordPress, adhere to a code of conduct, and actively contribute to the WordPress community or the broader mission of democratizing publishing.A vetting process is suggested for adding organizations to this page, including initial screening, detailed review, contacting the organization, decision to list, and periodic review.Link: Original ArticleWordPress Accessibility Day Gains Nonprofit Status Through Partnership with Knowbility – WordPress Accessibility DayImportant Takeaways:WordPress Accessibility Day, a virtual 24-hour conference focused on accessibility best practices for WordPress websites, has gained 501(c)(3) nonprofit status through a partnership with Knowbility.The event was initially started in 2020 by the WordPress core Accessibility Team and was revived in 2022 by Amber Hinds and Joe Dolson as an independent event.The 2022 event was a success, with 11 organizers, 1604 attendees, and 20 volunteers from 52 countries. After all event expenses were paid, WordPress Accessibility Day donated $2,000 to Knowbility.The partnership with Knowbility allows WordPress Accessibility Day to gain nonprofit status, making donations tax-deductible in the United States. It also provides access to Knowbility's accessible online event planning resources.The 2023 event will be held from 10:00 AM CDT (3:00 PM UTC) on Wednesday, September 27th, until 10:00 AM CDT (3:00 PM UTC) on Thursday, September 28th. The event will be live captioned and have sign language interpreters.Link: Original ArticleOne Equity Partners acquires cloud services provider Liquid Web and forms new holding company, CloudOne DigitalImportant Takeaways:One Equity Partners (OEP) has completed the acquisition of Liquid Web, a provider of managed cloud services, forming a new platform known as CloudOne Digital.The senior leadership team of Liquid Web will transition to expanded roles in the new, larger CloudOne platform with Jim Geiger as CEO, Carrie Wheeler as COO, and Joe Oesterling as CTO.Liquid Web, founded in 1997, operates 10 global data centers with more than 500,000 sites under management. With its brand acquisitions, CloudOne Digital will serve over 187,000 clients worldwide.CloudOne Digital will offer a broad portfolio of cloud products that meet the needs of web-dependent small and mid-sized businesses, cloud servers for developers and businesses with highly persistent, compute-intensive workloads, and managed private cloud for mid-market businesses that require enterprise-grade infrastructure and solutions.OEP plans an aggressive expansion strategy for CloudOne Digital, aiming to combine and integrate complementary businesses in the multi-cloud infrastructure segment.Link: Original ArticleWordCampers Demand Changes to Q&A Format – WP TavernImportant Takeaways:WordCamp attendees are calling for changes to the Q&A format at live events, citing issues with attendees abusing the format for self-promotion or not asking relevant questions.WordPress Core Committer Felix Arntz suggested that questions taking longer than a minute should be asked informally at a later opportunity.Arntz proposed several ideas to improve the Q&A format, including submitting questions to a central platform for upvoting, discarding lengthy questions, and providing mandatory training for emcees on handling problematic Q&A situations.He also suggested making Q&A optional, depending on the speaker's preference, to create a more inclusive environment for speakers.The feedback received on Arntz's Twitter thread was largely positive, with other attendees offering their own suggestions for improving the Q&A format.Link: Original ArticleNew Filter Controls: Discover “Commercial” and “Community” in the Theme and Plugin Directory – Make WordPress.orgImportant Takeaways:New categorizations were introduced in the Theme and Plugin Directory in late 2022 to enhance the browsing experience. These filters categorize plugins/themes as “Commercial” and “Community.”The “Commercial” filter allows users to discover themes and plugins developed by professional companies and individuals who offer their products for a fee. These premium options often come with dedicated support, advanced features, and customization options.The “Community” filter showcases themes and plugins created by the WordPress community. These products are often developed by passionate individuals who share their work for free or follow an open-source philosophy.The introduction of these filter controls is part of an ongoing effort to improve the browsing experience and refine the visual aspects of the Theme and Plugin Directory as part of the site redesign.Users are encouraged to provide feedback on these updates and try out the new filter controls.Link: Original ArticleThe Power of Community: A WordCamp Europe Sponsorship StoryImportant Takeaways:Barn2 Plugins sponsored WordCamp Europe (WCEU) for the first time in June 2023. The experience was described as a great opportunity for networking, brand exposure, and team bonding.The company spent a total of €13,256 on the event, including sponsorship costs, travel and accommodation, team t-shirts, WordCamp tickets, and other related expenses.The sponsorship booth was a key part of their presence at the event. They created a quiz for attendees, with winners receiving premium swag items. The quiz was a success, with 145 participants.The team also produced a video showcasing some of their most popular plugins, which was displayed at their booth.The author, Katie Keith, highlighted the difficulty in calculating the return on investment (ROI) for sponsoring a WordCamp. However, she emphasized the intangible benefits, such as increased brand awareness, networking opportunities, and team building.Link: Original ArticleSustainability Team • Supporting Organizations • Commercial & Community Themes & Plugins • Pattern Curation – Post StatusImportant Takeaways:The WordPress Sustainability Team has been established with the main objective of embedding sustainable practices into the WordPress community and its processes, focusing on ensuring longevity socially, economically, and environmentally.Several organizations exist to support the work of WordPress, such as The WP Community Collective and HeroPress. A proposal has been made to display such supporting organizations.Filters have been introduced for Themes and Plugins to distinguish between Commercial and Community efforts. The Patterns Directory is considering using filters for displaying all patterns associated with a theme.The post also includes a roundup of other WordPress news, including updates on WordPress 6.3 and 6.4, WP-CLI releases, community events, core updates, design updates, and more.Link: Original Article ★ Support this podcast ★

Amber Hinds is owner of AshBer, an independent insurance agency specializing in Medicaid-compliant annuities and long-term care (LTC) insurance solutions. Ashber partners with attorneys and financial advisors across the country, helping them get their clients eligible for Medicaid and LTC by offering strategies for asset protection whether the client is in the preplanning stage or a crisis scenario.   Amber studied finance in college, graduating magna cum laude, and realized during an internship that few companies offered Medicaid planning. The need for this service and the opportunity to help people motivated her to create a special career path. Today, Amber has more than 14 years of experience. She is licensed to practice in all 50 states and is a qualified investment advisor via her Series 65 license with FINRA. WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW    (3:01) Most often, Amber receives a set of information about a client (e.g., what assets they have, what they're paying for, their cost of care) and then she offers a proposal for an insurance product to help qualify that client for Medicaid immediately and get them benefits right away. (5:23) Ashber is looking for more law firms with which to partner and relies heavily on client referrals. Amber and the team strive to provide stellar customer service and return proposals the same day because of the time sensitivity of the requests.  (15:41) If you have a loved one who is in a nursing home or will be soon, it is not too late to protect their assets. The only time it's too late is when there's no money left. As long as there's something to protect, there are ways to assist. (17:02) You can tell when you're working with a law firm that cares about its clients. That's the type of firm that Amber wants to work with and it's why she enjoys working with everyone at Bellomo & Associates.   (19:08) The Ashber website (link below) lists helpful resources such as Medicaid guides for each state, planning tools, case studies, etc. The company also conducts free monthly webinars for all of its partner law firms and financial advisors. ABOUT BELLOMO & ASSOCIATES Jeffrey R. Bellomo, the founder of Bellomo & Associates, is a licensed and certified elder law attorney with a master's degree in taxation and a certificate in estate planning. He explains complex legal and financial topics in easy-to-understand language. Bellomo & Associates is committed to providing education so that what happened to the Bellomo family doesn't happen to your family. We conduct free workshops on estate planning, crisis planning, Medicaid planning, special needs planning, probate administration, and trust administration. Visit our website (https://bellomoassociates.com/) to learn more. Links and Resources Mentioned Ashber: https://www.ashber.com/ Bellomo & Associates workshops:https://bellomoassociates.com/workshops/ Life Care Planning The Three Secrets of Estate Planning Nuts & Bolts of Medicaid For more information, call us at (717) 845-5390. Connect with Bellomo & Associates on Social Media Tune in Saturdays at 7:30 a.m. Eastern to WSBA radio: https://www.newstalkwsba.com/ Twitter:https://twitter.com/bellomoassoc YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/user/BellomoAssociates Facebook:https://www.facebook.com/bellomoassociates Instagram:https://www.instagram.com/bellomoassociates/ LinkedIn:https://www.linkedin.com/in/bellomoandassociates Ways to work with Jeff Bellomo Contact Us:https://bellomoassociates.com/contact/ Practice areas:https://bellomoassociates.com/practice-areas/        

In this episode of Chasing the Insights, I talk to accessibility guru Amber Hinds. Amber talks to us about the importance of website accessibility. Amber Hinds is the CEO of Equalize Digital, Inc., a Certified B Corp specializing in WordPress accessibility, maker of the Accessibility Checker plugin, and lead organizer of the WordPress Accessibility Meetup and WP Accessibility Day conference. 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. Since 2010, she has led teams building websites and web applications for nonprofits, K-12 and higher education institutions, government agencies, and businesses of all sizes. Equalize Digital is a corporate member of the International Association of Accessibility Professionals (IAAP) and a WordPress VIP Agency Partner.

Blocks are now a key part of the WordPress experience. But what if they were platform-agnostic? That's the idea behind the Block Protocol. Founded in 2022, the organization recently released a WordPress plugin.In its initial release, the Block Protocol plugin adds over a dozen new blocks to WordPress. Included in the package you'll find blocks to display common items such as addresses, how-to lists, and countdown timers. There are also AI-powered blocks for generating images and text.The blocks work on any platform that supports the Block Protocol. And additional blocks are in the works.To learn more, The WP Minute's Eric Karkovack sat down with HASH CEO David Wilkinson to discuss the project, along with its potential to enhance WordPress and other platforms. https://youtu.be/oY2-lBUrz9o Next up (listen to the podcast for more): Amber Hinds of Equalize Digital discusses the pre-seed investment her company received from Emilia Capital and what it means for their Accessibility Checker plugin.Links You Shouldn't MissArtificial Intelligence is increasing its presence within WordPress. Last week, we reported that OpenAI has made its API available to developers wanting to integrate ChatGPT into their applications. It didn't take long for the WordPress community to dive in. One example: the recent launch of DocsBot AI. The product allows you to create a custom chatbot based on your website's content and documentation. It's free to try, with paid plans also available.Meanwhile, an open-source alternative called OpenChatKit has also been announced.Speaking of ChatGPT, The WP Minute's Eric Karkovack recently used the AI tool to build a simple WordPress plugin. He wrote about the experience and the unexpected lesson he learned.WordPress security is getting better. According to Patchstack's State of WordPress Security In 2022 report, 328% more security bugs were reported year over year. The firm opines that, because more vulnerabilities are being reported and patched, the ecosystem is becoming more secure. They also note that 93% of security flaws originate from plugins. Thus, keeping your installs up to date is as important as ever.Automattic is increasing its presence in the Fediverse. The company has purchased the ActivityPub plugin, which allows WordPress websites to integrate with Mastodon and other decentralized platforms. Sarah Goo ★ Support this podcast ★

Imagine the excitement you would feel if you knew you were close to invincible? Karen Allen, mindfulness expert and CEO of 100% Human, discusses how she took the lessons learned from surviving an unimaginable personal tragedy, to teach leaders how to build their leadership resiliency muscles. Resiliency is an essential skill of “Leading with Courageous Agility.” ------------Full show notes, links to resources mentioned and other compelling episodes can be found at http://LeadYourGamePodcast.com. (Click magnifying icon at top right and type “Trevor”)Love the show? Subscribe, rate, review and share! JUST FOR YOU: Increase your leadership acumen by identifying your personal Leadership Trigger. Take my free my free quiz and instantly receive your 5-page report . Need to up-level your workforce or execute strategic People initiatives? https://shockinglydifferent.com/contact or tweet @KaranRhodes.-------------ABOUT KAREN ALLEN:Karen M. Allen is a Mindset Expert and TEDx Speaker who is passionate about empowering highly motivated individuals and business leaders to harness the power of their mindset and develop the self-awareness necessary to overcome challenges and achieve their full potential.After the unexpected loss of her husband, Karen reclaimed control of her fate by rediscovering and healing herself from the inside out. Since 2014, Karen has been studying the human mind, positive psychology, and post traumatic growth.WHAT TO LISTEN FOR:Why being resilient is not about suppressing emotions or bad habits. It is about dealing with them to affect positive change and outcomes. Why living on auto-pilot is a recipe for mediocre accomplishments and a success inhibitor for high achievement of goals.Karen's addition to the LATTOYG PlaybookFEATURED TIMESTAMPS:[03:48] What made Karen up-end her career path to do what she does today.[08:14] How Karen used her learnings from her personal tragedy to help leaders in the workplace.[09:51] The moment Karen discovered the most powerful mindset exercise that she teaches today.[12:25] What gets in people's way of successfully using the mindset exercise.[18:15] Why Karen loves Dr. Carol Dweck's work.[19:22] Learn the difference between mental strength, mental health and mental wellness.[23:23] Karen's entry into the LATTOYG leadership playbook.[27:35] Signature Segment: Karen's LATTOYG Tactic of Choice[30:48] Signature Segment: Full Disclosure[34:20] Signature Segment: Karan's Take

It's an In The Loop holiday special! Cory and Phil listen back to clips from every episode this season and judge themselves harshly. If you haven't listened to all of the season 2 episodes yet, or if you're curious about our thoughts since the episodes aired, you won't want to miss this. Thank you to all of our season 2 guests, and to all of the new and returning listeners! If you have questions about WordPress website development, contributing, or anything else web-related that you'd like to hear us discuss, send an email to podcast@blackbird.digital. You can also find us on Twitter as @InTheLoop_WP. Blackbird Digital is a web and app development agency that specializes in WordPress, creating on-screen experiences that connect, teach, communicate, and inspire. Visit https://blackbird.digital for more information. ## Season 2 Episode Links (4:18) Pajamas & Burnout: https://anchor.fm/blackbird-digital/episodes/12-Pajamas--Burnout-e1e2mhq (10:28) Accessibility by Default with Bet Hannon: https://anchor.fm/blackbird-digital/episodes/13-Accessibility-by-Default-with-Bet-Hannon-e1fornp (16:20) All the Web's a Stage with Allie Nimmons: https://anchor.fm/blackbird-digital/episodes/14-All-the-Webs-a-Stage-with-Allie-Nimmons-e1h1rgo (28:07) Number Goes Up: https://anchor.fm/blackbird-digital/episodes/15-Number-Goes-Up-e1ikm16 (47:25) Just Build It with Aurooba Ahmed: https://anchor.fm/blackbird-digital/episodes/16-Just-Build-It-with-Aurooba-Ahmed-e1jui2f (1:00:54) Build Your Product Muscles with Lesley Sim: https://anchor.fm/blackbird-digital/episodes/17-Build-Your-Product-Muscles-with-Lesley-Sim-e1l3dri (1:14:05) We Like Gutenberg, We Swear!: https://anchor.fm/blackbird-digital/episodes/18-We-Like-Gutenberg--We-Swear-e1mhn78 (1:18:30) All-In on Gutenberg with Ryan Welcher: https://anchor.fm/blackbird-digital/episodes/19-All-In-on-Gutenberg-with-Ryan-Welcher-e1noamk (1:26:32) Equal Access with Amber Hinds: https://anchor.fm/blackbird-digital/episodes/20-Equal-Access-with-Amber-Hinds-e1p2v09 (1:30:41) Mastering Theme Development with Brian Coords: https://anchor.fm/blackbird-digital/episodes/21-Mastering-Theme-Development-with-Brian-Coords-e1qonaa ## Other Links (3:04) Season 1 Highlights: https://anchor.fm/blackbird-digital/episodes/11-Season-1-Highlights-e1c2cgs (25:51) Why Wordpress: https://anchor.fm/blackbird-digital/episodes/1-Why-WordPress-eaontu

WordPress powers over 43% of sites on the internet today, making it a powerhouse web technology. Its simplicity attracted bloggers and do-it-yourselfers who navigate the platform by Googling code snippets. That knowledge gap comes with a whole host of accessibility issues. Amber Hinds, Founder and CEO at Equalize Digital, quit her part-time gig as a freelance developer when she found WordPress was an easier way to manage content. She's been doing accessibility work on the platform since 2016 and has seen a boom in the past two years of companies searching for accessibility experts. Amber built the Accessibility Checker plugin as a guardrail to help DIYers avoid common mistakes by auditing a site and flagging accessibility issues. The plugin is also an education tool for content managers, and developers to learn about accessibility. In this episode, Amber talks to Chuck and Robbie about web accessibility on WordPress, making accessibility a priority in colleges and boot camps, and RVing around the country with her family. Key Takeaways [00:35] - An intro to Amber Hinds. [00:54] - A whiskey review - Weller Special Reserve. [07:49] - What it's like working with WordPress in 2022 compared to earlier years. [10:47] - Amber gives an overview of WordPress. [13:36] - Amber explains unique accessibility problems in WordPress. [15:47] - How Equalize Digital's plug-in audits WordPress sites. [21:55] - Amber's thoughts on how to make accessibility a priority. [35:33] - Chuck and Amber talk about RV life and being on the show, “Going RV”. Quotes [08:43] - “I think the recent number that I saw was that 43% of websites are built in WordPress.” ~ Amber Hinds [23:53] - “I feel like having more general visibility about the broad range of disabilities and also putting people's faces to things is super helpful.” ~ Amber Hinds [28:33] - “Companies need to realize that accessibility is everyone's responsibility.” ~ Amber Hinds Links Amber Hinds LinkedIn Amber Hinds Twitter Amber Hinds Equalize Digital WordPress Accessibility Checker Weller Special Reserve Pappy Van Winkle Maker's Mark Buffalo Trace Distillery React Absolut Vodka Shopify Square Space Drupal Matt Mullenweg Automattic Magic Mouse Logitech Lift Mac Darci USB Colorado State University Java Script Dream Weaver Next Js Tumblr WAVE WordPress Accessibility Day Shutterstock  Gutenburg Nicolas Steenhout A11y Rules Podcast Colorado State Google GitHub Roomba Going RV House Hunters HGTV America's Got Talent Property Brothers Matthew McConaughey HBO Netflix Hulu PBS Kids NewsHour NFL ESPN New England Patriots Astro Nuxt 3 Google PageSpeed Google Tag Manager Google Fonts Lighthouse WordPress accessibility Meetup Connect with our hosts Robbie Wagner Chuck Carpenter Ship Shape Subscribe and stay in touch Apple Podcasts Spotify Google Podcasts Whiskey Web and Whatnot Top-Tier, Full-Stack Software Consultants This show is brought to you by Ship Shape. Ship Shape's software consultants solve complex software and app development problems with top-tier coding expertise, superior service, and speed. In a sea of choices, our senior-level development crew rises above the rest by delivering the best solutions for fintech, cybersecurity, and other fast-growing industries. Check us out at shipshape.io.

Cory and Phil interview Amber Hinds of Equalize Digital, an agency and plugin company that specializes in accessibility. We talk about their Accessibility Checker plugin, how it can be useful for agencies and their clients, and the journey of building it, as well as Amber's involvement as Lead Organizer of this year's WordPress Accessibility Day happening November 2, 2022. If you have questions about WordPress website development, contributing, or anything else web-related that you'd like to hear us discuss, send an email to podcast@blackbird.digital. You can also find us on Twitter as @InTheLoop_WP. Blackbird Digital is a web and app development agency that specializes in WordPress, creating on-screen experiences that connect, teach, communicate, and inspire. Visit https://blackbird.digital for more information. ## Links Equalize Digital: https://equalizedigital.com (12:35) WP Conference Schedule plugin: https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-conference-schedule/ (19:11) Accessibility Checker free version: https://wordpress.org/plugins/accessibility-checker/ (21:30) Accessibility Checker Pro: https://equalizedigital.com/accessibility-checker/ (46:11) WordPress Accessibility Meetup: https://equalizedigital.com/wordpress-accessibility-meetup/ (47:19) WordPress Accessibility Day virtual conference: https://wpaccessibility.day/ (53:24) Conference schedule: https://wpaccessibility.day/schedule/ (56:55) Amber on Twitter: https://twitter.com/heyamberhinds (56:58) Equalize Digital on Twitter: https://twitter.com/EqualizeDigital ## Upcoming WP Events WordPress Accessibility Day, Nov 2–3, 2022: https://wpaccessibility.day/ WordFest Live, Nov 18: https://www.wordfest.live/

Adobe set to acquire Figma If you're a designer or UI specialist in the WordPress world, chances are you already know about the Adobe/Figma deal. A $20 Billion dollar deal in cash and stock – 40 times Figma revenue – shocked us and launched more memes, probably using Photoshop, than we've in the tech space since…well about 4 months ago. 4 Years ago, Figma donated an organizational membership to WordPress.org. Will you continue to use Figma? Tweet at us. In Mullenweg's recent WCUS address, he snuck in the mention of Automattic's new cloud service – wp.cloud. It looks to be infrastructure for cloud providers wanting to serve up some WordPress hosting, leveraging .com's sprawling CDN & other technology. Products like Jetpack already use .com's CDN as part of their services, as I'm sure other products like VideoPress do. I reached out to Jesse Friedman, who leads the wp.cloud initiative, for an interview. Here's a sneak peek of that, which airs next week – subscribe so you don't miss it! Hosting news continues with WP Engine jumping into the WordPress flavor hosting with a new WooCommerce offering. While Siteground surprises us with their Easy Digital Downloads speciality hosting. Next up (listen to the podcast for more): Michelle Frechette with the Community Minute & Amber Hinds with the Accessibility Minute! Links you shouldn't miss There's a handful of other links you shouldn't miss this week. These links should help you stay informed around the moving and shaking of WordPress: Matt Mullenweg WCUS Address This is a direct recording of his livestream session. If you missed it or want to hear the audience Q&A round, click to tune in. Why WordPress and Wix will Always Be Worlds Apart The WP Minute's Eric Karkovack, breaks down a detailed comparison on how much WordPress & Wix differ. Help Test WordPress 6.1 The WordPress 6.1 Beta is out! Remember, don't complain…explain…your issues by testing the latest version before it's released.  From the grab bag Some of these links might interest you – dive in! ACF 6.0 is releasedWebP pulled from 6.xSyed Bahlki makes an interesting prediction about the future of WordPressMatt Cromwell launched WP Product Shop Talk Twitter Spaces. Subscribe to The WP Minute as this show will be exclusively syndicated through our podcast feed. Thanks to all of the members who shared these links today: Eric KarkovackDaniel ShutzsmithRaquel Landefeld

I am a massive fan of those who try to make the world a better place but also make the world more accessible and try to accommodate those who have disadvantages. Amber Hinds is the CEO of a company called equalize digital. Her goal is to make the Internet more accessible for those with disabilities. Amber is just one of those kind-hearted souls who sees something wrong in a particular area and finds a way to help. In this interview, she tells how she gets into this field, and also why she does what she does. https://equalizedigital.com  

I am a massive fan of those who try to make the world a better place but also make the world more accessible and try to accommodate those who have disadvantages. Amber Hinds is the CEO of a company called equalize digital. Her goal is to make the Internet more accessible for those with disabilities. Amber is just one of those kind-hearted souls who sees something wrong in a particular area and finds a way to help. In this interview, she tells how she gets into this field, and also why she does what she does. https://equalizedigital.com  

Tips from Rich Tabor, Cassandra Decker, Robert Rowley, Daisy Olsen, Ronnie Burt, Amber Hinds, Jonathan Desrosiers and Ronald Gijsel

Show Notes I met Amber many years ago, before she was CEO of Equalize Digital, when we were both freelancing and building micro agencies. Every time we connected, we’d laugh about the parallels in our families and businesses, and this podcast conversation was no different. Amber started freelancing with young children, built a mico agency […]

Amber Hinds is the CEO of Equalize Digital, Inc., a Certified B Corp specializing in WordPress accessibility, maker of the Accessibility Checker plugin, and lead organizer of the WordPress Accessibility Meetup and WP Accessibility Day conference. In this episode, Amber teaches us all about Website Accessibility and answers our biggest questions: 1. What is website accessibility and why is it important? 2. Who benefits from an accessible website? 3. What are the legal requirements around website accessibility? 4. How can small business owners get started with website accessibility? 5. Are there any shortcuts to making websites accessible? Connect with us: https://equalizedigital.com/accessibility-checker https://equalizedigital.com Lexie's Website Lexie's Instagram

User accessibility is not only something you should do, but is something that legally needs to be done. Your website and digital marketing should be accessible! The great thing is that this helps with your customer conversions as well as SEO. Learn why accessibility is something you should care about and get Ambers tips for how to update your website. https://thefirstclick.net/164

Guest host, Amber Hinds is sharing with us her POV on Equalize Digital's first "exit." "This post tells the story of how WP Conference Schedule came to be and why we ultimately ended up selling it before even launching the paid version of the plugin."Amber Hinds Links Amber Hinds Equalize Digital Sells WP Conference Schedule Amber Hinds Blog

So on the podcast today we have Amber Hinds and she's here to use her expertise to explain how and why WordPress websites need to be accessible. It's a really important topic at the moment. There seems to be a groundswell of understanding that the web really does need to be made available to all, and that means thinking about all the people who might be visiting your site. So that's people who are using screen readers, people consuming videos who are hard of hearing, and so much more. We talk about what accessibility is and what comes under its purview. Is it something that you need to do under law or is it something that you can leave until later? There's a lot more to this than meets to eye, and it's well worth a listen if you're new to all this, or if you've already started your accessibility journey.

So on the podcast today we have Amber Hinds and she's here to use her expertise to explain how and why WordPress websites need to be accessible. It's a really important topic at the moment. There seems to be a groundswell of understanding that the web really does need to be made available to all, and that means thinking about all the people who might be visiting your site. So that's people who are using screen readers, people consuming videos who are hard of hearing, and so much more. We talk about what accessibility is and what comes under its purview. Is it something that you need to do under law or is it something that you can leave until later? There's a lot more to this than meets to eye, and it's well worth a listen if you're new to all this, or if you've already started your accessibility journey.

So on the podcast today we have Amber Hinds and she's here to use her expertise to explain how and why WordPress websites need to be accessible. It's a really important topic at the moment. There seems to be a groundswell of understanding that the web really does need to be made available to all, and that means thinking about all the people who might be visiting your site. So that's people who are using screen readers, people consuming videos who are hard of hearing, and so much more. We talk about what accessibility is and what comes under its purview. Is it something that you need to do under law or is it something that you can leave until later? There's a lot more to this than meets to eye, and it's well worth a listen if you're new to all this, or if you've already started your accessibility journey.

Welcome to Episode 438 of the Yeukai Business Show. In this episode, Amber Hinds discusses The Accessibility Advantage: Optimize Your Online Presence by Improving Accessibility on your Website So, if you want to know more about How to Optimize Your Online Presence, tune in now! In this episode, you'll discover: Why Accessibility is important for a websiteWhy and how Google favours Accessibility elementsPractical changes you can make (that do not require a developer)  About Amber Hinds Amber Hinds is the CEO of Equalize Digital, Inc., a Certified B Corp specializing in WordPress accessibility, maker of the Accessibility Checker plugin, and lead organizer of the WordPress Accessibility Meetup and WP Accessibility Day conference. 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. Since 2010, she has led teams building websites and web applications for nonprofits, K-12 and higher education institutions, government agencies, and businesses of all sizes. In addition to accessibility, Amber is a recognized search engine optimization (SEO), UI/UX, and WordPress expert. Her company is a corporate member of the International Association of Accessibility Professionals (IAAP) and a WordPress VIP Agency Partner.  More Information Learn more about How to Optimize Your Online Presence at https://equalizedigital.com/ Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Thanks for Tuning In! Thanks so much for being with us this week. Have some feedback you'd like to share? Please leave a note in the comments section below! If you enjoyed this episode on How to Expand your Business, please share it with your friends by using the social media buttons you see at the bottom of the post. Don't forget to subscribe to the show on iTunes to get automatic episode updates for our "Yeukai Business Show !" And, finally, please take a minute to leave us an honest review and rating on iTunes. They really help us out when it comes to the ranking of the show and I make it a point to read every single one of the reviews we get. Please leave a review right now Thanks for listening!

Amber Hinds is the founder and CEO of Equalize Digital, which is a website accessibility consulting company. We do accessibility audits and remediation and accessible website and application development for largely, I'd say, large enterprises, government agencies, colleges and universities, K12 schools, and some nonprofits. Amber's main agency which is a parent company for Equalize is called Road Warrior Creative. She had been running the agency for about five years before they undertook projects with Colorado State University where everything had to be accessible and meet WCAG 2.1 AA standards. This was the genesis for Equalize Digital.  In this episode, she shares how we can address digital accessibility needs to help people and drive massive growth. Insights she shares include: Why is digital accessibility important?What can we do to make the world more accessible?The business case for digital accessibilityHow best to address website accessibilityHow best to evaluate a company's digital accessibility capabilities and optionsTools that we can use to help address digital accessibilityHow to best stay on top of trendsand much much more ...

Listen to this episode to learn why your law firm can't ignore website accessibility. As we continue to advance in technology, we must always remember to create our content, documents and websites in a way that is accessible to people with disabilities. Amber sheds light on many different areas of importance when it comes to accessibility. Amber is the CEO of Equalize Digital, Inc., a Certified B Corp specializing in WordPress accessibility, maker of the Accessibility Checker plugin, and lead organizer of the WordPress Accessibility Meetup and WP Accessibility Day conference.   Amber gives listeners actionable tips on: [2:00] Why ignoring website accessibility is a bad strategy [4:10] Developing the Accessibility Checker Plugin Amber and what it checks for  [7:40] The importance of accessibility online when it comes to disabilities [17:40] What people are getting sued for for not being accessible online [23:40] Amber's book recommendation  Resources mentioned in this episode: Structured Negotiation by Laynie Feingold Connect with Amber here: Instagram Twitter LinkedIn Facebook https://equalizedigital.com  Connect with me Instagram Pinterest Facebook Twitter Karin on Twitter Karin on LinkedIn Conroy Creative Counsel on Facebook https://conroycreativecounsel.com 

Listen to this episode to learn why your law firm can't ignore website accessibility.   As we continue to advance in technology, we must always remember to create our content, documents and websites in a way that is accessible to people with disabilities. Amber sheds light on many different areas of importance when it comes to accessibility.   Amber is the CEO of Equalize Digital, Inc., a Certified B Corp specializing in WordPress accessibility, maker of the Accessibility Checker plugin, and lead organizer of the WordPress Accessibility Meetup and WP Accessibility Day conference.   Amber gives listeners actionable tips on: [2:00] Why ignoring website accessibility is a bad strategy [4:10] Developing the Accessibility Checker Plugin Amber and what it checks for  [7:40] The importance of accessibility online when it comes to disabilities [17:40] What people are getting sued for for not being accessible online [23:40] Amber's book recommendation  Resources mentioned in this episode: Structured Negotiation by Laynie Feingold Connect with Amber here: Instagram Twitter LinkedIn Facebook https://equalizedigital.com  Connect with me Instagram Pinterest Facebook Twitter Karin on Twitter Karin on LinkedIn Conroy Creative Counsel on Facebook https://conroycreativecounsel.com 

News WordPress 6.0 Beta 3 is now available for testing. These releases are moving along and testers are needed for the most recent release. If you would like to check out the release schedule you can go over to make.wordpress.org. It was just announced that Matt Mullenweg will be speaking at WordCamp Europe in Porto, Portugal June 2-4 2022. If you plan on attending this event you may want to listen to a podcast from Delicious Brains that gives some great ideas on how to make the most of your WordCamp visit. WooCommerce WooCommerce has released 6.5 RC2. This puts them on track for the May 10, 2022 release date. Testers are needed for this release as well. From Our Contributors and Producers Sarah Gooding over at WPTavern writes about how the WordPress subreddit blew up this week with reports of MemberPress locking users out of the plugin's admin if they do not renew their subscriptions. MemberPress is a popular membership plugin for WordPress that does not have a free version available. They do clearly outline the subscription policy but cutting off access to the plugin's admin screens leaves users without the ability to manage the membership functions of their sites once their subscriptions lapse. It will be interesting to see if this “change” impacts their customer base. David Vongries tweeted that he is looking for a new home for Kirki. If you are looking to venture into the Gutenberg product market this may be a great opportunity for you. Reach out to David if you're interested. Amber Hinds also tweeted about two plugins that need to be rehomed. They have become a distraction from the main focus on accessibility. Go check out the thread on Twitter and reach out to Amber if you're interested in her plugins. MasterWP has announced their WordCamp US 2022 Travel Sponsorship Program. Rob Howard explains how to apply. Go check out his blog post to apply to be a speaker to WordCamp US and possibly receive sponsorship. If you would like to contribute to helping send somebody to WordCamp you can head on over to DonateWC. Chima Mmeje was interviewed over on the Matt Report about how and why to raise your freelance rates. Go listen to this interview to discover how entrepreneurs can raise rates through grit, perseverance, confidence, and ultimately discovering self-worth. Next up: Block Editor Dev Minute by Aurooba Thanks to all of the members who shared these links today: Daniel SchutzsmithEric Karkovack

On today's podcast, Amber Hinds from Equalize Digital, Inc. and Stephen Halasnik from Financing Solutions discuss the meaning of website accessibility and why it is so crucial to businesses. Having an accessible website that supports digital equity is essential to the growth and development of every business. Besides its legal significance, experience has shown that disabled Americans constitute a sizable part of the market. In 2019, disabled Americans spent more than $200 billion online in discretionary spending. In other words, no matter the type of business you do, your company is likely to engage with customers of all disabilities, and it's proper you factor in their needs while designing your website.

What is website accessibility? Why is website accessibility important? In this segment, Amber Hinds is going to cover website accessibility. What does it entail, how to ensure your website is accessible, and some tools and resources to help you understand further and test out your skills. See video here - https://youtu.be/bIAbcEy_1Xo WHO IS AMBER? Amber Hinds is the CEO of Equalize Digital, Inc., a Certified B Corp specializing in WordPress accessibility, maker of the Accessibility Checker plugin, and lead organizer of the WordPress Accessibility Meetup and WP Accessibility Day conference. 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. Since 2010, she has led teams building websites and web applications for nonprofits, K-12 and higher education institutions, government agencies, and businesses of all sizes. In addition to accessibility, Amber is a recognized search engine optimization (SEO), UI/UX, and WordPress expert. Equalize Digital is a corporate member of the International Association of Accessibility Professionals (IAAP) and a WordPress VIP Agency Partner. AMBER'S CALL TO ACTION Learn more about website accessibility and what you can do to make your website work for people of all abilities. Attend a WordPress Accessibility Meetup via zoom twice per month to build your accessibility skills. If you have a WordPress website, try Equalize Digital Accessibility Checker for free to help you identify accessibility problems faster as you edit content. https://twitter.com/aucoeurblog https://equalizedigital.com/accessibility-checker https://equalizedigital.com/meetup https://www.facebook.com/groups/wordpress.accessibility GENESIS'S INFO https://thehello.llc/GENESISAMARISKEMP CALL TO ACTION Subscribe to GEMS with Genesis Amaris Kemp Channel, Hit the notifications bell so you don't miss any content, and share with family/friends. **REMEMBER - You do not have to let limitations or barriers keep you from achieving your success. Mind over Matter...It's time to shift and unleash your greatest potential. If you would like to be a SPONSOR or have any of your merchandise mentioned, please reach out via email at GEMSwithGenesisAmarisKemp@gmail.com --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/genesis-amaris-kemp/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/genesis-amaris-kemp/support

I had the chance to sit down with Amber Hinds of Equalize Digtial to discuss her role as a Contributor at the WP Minute. Some of the questions we covered: What is real WordPress journalism?How can business owners contribute without burning bridges?How does this get funded? I hope you enjoy this lengthier WP Minute discussion. If you do, please share it on social media! ★ Support this podcast ★

Your host, Warren Coughlin, talks with Amber Hinds of Equalize Digital. Equalize Digital makes your WordPress website accessible and ensures all people have equal access to your products or services, regardless of ability. Reach more customers, reduce liability, and increase conversions. To learn more about Amber's work, visit https://equalizedigital.com/ (https://equalizedigital.com/) If you'd like to be a guest on the Business That Matters Spotlight, click https://warrencoughlin.com/podcast/ (HERE)

The tangled Web we WordPress. This week on WPwatercooler we're continuing a discussion we started last week on episode 412 which made its way onto Twitter where we discussed with Brian Gardner and Bill Erickson on using WordPress Full Site Editor and if it's ready for Agencies to use. Are we really storing all this in post_content & post_meta? Where do we go from here? Frost – WordPress Theme – https://frostwp.com/ 1.0 Is the Loneliest Number https://ma.tt/2010/11/one-point-oh/ Building the New Pagely.com – https://zao.is/blog/2021/11/22/building-the-new-pagely-com/ “the core should provide features that 80% or more of end users will actually appreciate and use. If the next version of WordPress comes with a feature that the majority of users immediately want to turn off, or think they'll never use, then we've blown it.” https://wordpress.org/about/philosophy/ Twitter Thread (thanks Amber Hinds @aucoeurblog for the mention) .@bgardner We're not building FSE themes yet, but are all-in on the block editor and theme.json. Our reasons for not using FSE yet: 1. Too beta for production sites. Gutenberg is *barely* production-ready, with breaking changes in every major WP release. 2. Need ability to lock down template editing so non-technical clients don't accidentally break site. We had to stop using reusable blocks because too often clients accidentally deleted all content in it instead of removing the block, which broke content globally. 3. We want our themes to be version controlled. When you “edit” a FSE theme or the global styles, it saves your changes in database. GH repo does not reflect actual site and will make future updates more difficult. 4. I believe in separating design, code, and content. HTML files with hardcoded block markup makes this more challenging. That said, I think FSE is a big step forward for the majority of WP users. Most users/businesses with a WP site don't have budget to hire an agency to build a custom theme. FSE vastly improves their capabilities. I agree w/ @aucoeurblog it's not ready for enterprise / larger biz. Originally tweeted by Bill Erickson (@BillErickson) on February 24, 2022. Panel Jason Tucker – jasontucker.blog Steve Zehngut – zeek.com Sé Reed – sereedmedia.com Jason Cosper – jasoncosper.com Brian Gardner – briangardner.com Bill Erickson – billerickson.net Are You Looking For Brand Awareness? Wanna Sponsor Us? You could be a show sponsor. Let people know you're still in business and supporting your products. Supporting podcasts is a great way to repurpose your in-person conference budget. We have been sponsored by big brands such as Kinsta and Cloudways. Why not get your audience in front of the thousands of people who download this show every month? Yes, WPwatercooler has thousands of downloads every month. We're not just a YouTube Show. http://wpwatercooler.com/sponsor

About this episode. On the podcast today we have Amber Hinds. She works at Equalize Digital, and became interested in online accessibility when she was given the job of creating a website for a public university. Given that the site was funded with public money, the finished site needed to be built with accessibility in mind. Since then Amber has been learning about accessibility, and educating others in how to build accessible websites through projects like the WordPress Accessibility Meetup. Today we talk about what online accessibility means, and how it ought to influence any website build. We consider the situations people who need an accessible website might find themselves in. What are they experiencing as they browse the web and what tools are they using? Is there a legal / moral responsibility to build accessible websites, and is it enough to have a website which is partially accessible? What tools can you use to help in this endeavour, and what tools you might want to avoid? Useful links. WordPress Accessibility Meetup Amber's Accessibility Checker Web Accessibility Laws & Policies WAVE Web Accessibility Evaluation Tool axe Accessibility Testing Tool NV Access Siteimprove Monsido Pope Tech Overlay Fact Sheet Overlay False Claims IAAP (International Association of Accessibility Professionals) Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 WebAIM

On the podcast today we have Amber Hinds. We talk about what online accessibility means, and how it ought to influence any website build. We consider the situations people who need an accessible website might find themselves in. What are they experiencing as they browse the web and what tools are they using? What tools can you use to help in this endeavour, and what tools you might want to avoid?

"When it comes to accessibility lawsuits, we as developers should be proactive to ensure a site is as accessible as possible." — Amber HindsIn this episode of Post Status Excerpt, David chats with Amber Hinds about the things WordPress professionals should be paying attention to. Their conversation covers recent trends and news in the accessibility space: meetups, lawsuits, overlays, and design trends.Why This Is Important: Accessibility is important to everyone, so it is critical for WordPress developers and designers to keep accessibility in mind. David and Amber only scratch the surface of this topic. Amber encourages developers to read this call from the Accessibility team to share their ideas, take part in the discussion, and suggest what to prioritize for WordPress in the near future.Every week Post Status Excerpt will brief you on important WordPress news — in about 15 minutes or less! Learn what's new in WordPress in a flash. ⚡ You can listen to past episodes of The Excerpt, browse all our podcasts, and don't forget to subscribe on Spotify, Amazon Music, Google Podcasts, iTunes, Castro, YouTube, Stitcher, Player.fm, Pocket Casts, Simplecast, or by RSS.

“I totally rely on [the community] now… it's like an extended family… it means a lot to me and I'm glad that everybody's hanging on in there with me.” —Nathan WrigleyAfter the first Post Status WordPress News Draft went so well, we decided to do a more European timezone-friendly version. The group of news “avengers” that assembled in this episode are Winstina Hughes, Tammie Lister, Nathan Wrigley, Amber Hinds, Yvette Sonneveld, and Malcom Peralty — with David Bisset hosting. In three rounds of draft picks, this group assembled new and interesting picks of the most noteworthy or influential WordPress news stories of 2021.Also: Video recordings of some of our members' single biggest news picks were included in this episode.Post Status Comments

Members of the WordPress Community on Their Takeaways from SOTWThis episode of Post Status Comments features a live conversation in Twitter Spaces that was recorded right after Matt Mullenweg's State of the Word 2021 broadcast on December 14th. Bet Hannon, Eric Karkovack, Maciek Palmowski, and Rae Morey joined David to share their reactions. Others from the audience join in, including Jeff Chandler, Ryan Marks, Hazel Quimpo, Scott Kingsley Clark, Jason Taylor, and Amber Hinds.Among the questions discussed: What stood out in the State of the Word for each of our guests? What did they think of Matt Mullenweg's take on web3, NFTs, and ownership? Was there agreement about Matt's points on WordPress market share, acquisitions, and contributions to WordPress core teams?This engaging conversation went on for a little over an hour.Browse past episodes from all our podcasts, and don't forget to subscribe to them on your favorite players. Post Status' Draft, Comments, and Excerpt podcasts are on Spotify, Amazon Music, Google Podcasts, iTunes, Castro, YouTube, Stitcher, Player.fm, Pocket Casts, and Simplecast. (RSS)

Do you struggle with finding reliable and approachable methods for testing your WordPress sites for accessibility (e.g. WCAG 2.1 AA, Section 508, etc.)?In this episode of PressThis we interview Amber Hinds of the WordPress plugin Accessibility Checker by Equalize Digital about her thoughts on why building accessible WordPress sites are important, how to test your sites for accessibility, and what to do about the results you find with your tests.Making accessible sites isn't just a cool thing to do for differently-abled people, but it's also a way to GROW by making your site more attractive to a bigger audience.If you've been fumbling with how to test and optimize your sites for accessibility, don't miss this episode of PressThis. Listen now!

A few months ago we heard from Amber Hinds about the importance of accessibility and how her WordPress plugin can help you create more accessible content. She also said that you need a human being to catch most accessibility issues – that’s where Bet Hannon comes in. Bet tells us all about what to look for when auditing your website, and how to execute a sampling audit. We also talk about a TON of tools. In Build Something More, listeners get a pre-and post-show. The pre-show is all about beer. The post-show is about database queries. (more…) View on separate page Transcript Joe Casabona: Real quick before we get started, I want to tell you about the Build Something Weekly newsletter. It is weekly, it is free, and you will get tips, tricks, and tools delivered directly to your mailbox. I will recap the current week’s episode and all of the takeaways, I’ll give you a top story, content I wrote, and then some recommendations that I’ve been using that I think you should check out. So it is free, it is a weekly, it’s over at howibuilt.it/subscribe. Go ahead and sign up over at howibuilt.it/subscribe. Hey, everybody, and welcome to Episode 219 of How I Built It, the podcast that offers actionable tech tips for small business owners. That’s a relatively new tagline I’m trying. It used to be “the podcast that asks, ‘how did you build that?'” But we’re expanding beyond that and I’m really excited about that. First, before we get into it, I want to thank our sponsors: TextExpander, Restrict Content Pro, and The Events Calendar. You’ll be hearing about them later in the show. But first, I want to bring on Bet Hannon. Bet Hannon is the CEO of Bet Hannon Business Websites. We are going to be talking about their website accessibility sampling audit. In an earlier episode, I spoke to Amber Hinds about accessibility in general, their tool, the Accessibility Checker. Now we’re going to learn how an agency actually goes about doing an audit and helping their clients not get sued and have a more accessible website. So Bet, how are you today? Bet Hannon: I’m great. Glad to be here. Joe Casabona: Thanks for coming on the show. For those of you who are not Build Something Club members, bet and I had a fantastic pre-show conversation about craft beer. So if you are interested in that, you should become a Build Something Club member over at buildsomething.club. But for now, Bet, before we get into the nitty-gritty, why don’t you tell us a little bit about who you are and what you do. Bet Hannon: Great. So I run an agency that’s focused on WordPress. I got involved with WordPress in about 2008 after I had worked for 15 or so years in nonprofit management and doing some techie geeky things for the organizations that I served. But my position got downsized in that financial crisis and kind of stumbled into starting to do a little freelancing and then develop that into an agency. And have been loving it. I love problem-solving for people. Every project is like a little puzzle to solve. Joe Casabona: Yes, absolutely. That is what I also enjoyed about. When I was doing the full-time freelance website making thing, that was always my favorite part. I wrote a plugin recently, the first one in a while and I was like, “Man, I miss this.” So I’ll have to make it a habit of coding regularly. You lose it too. I guess it’s kind of like riding a bike. But men, things change. Bet Hannon: I know. I’m missing more. I’m doing more. I’m doing less and less of that myself, you know, as I’m running the agency. But it is nice to get in. What I miss is diving in and doing Gravity Forms customization. Joe Casabona: Nice, nice. Well, not nice that you miss it, but nice that you would do it. I always liked customizing Gravity Forms. So you got into WordPress in 2008. So this is your second recession, we’ll say. As we record this, there’s still a global pandemic. Bet Hannon: We actually have been doing okay. I was kind of worried for a bit. You know, a lot of folks really just figuring out they need websites or they need to revamp their websites, or they need to repurpose their websites. So we’ve been doing okay. Joe Casabona: That’s great. That’s interesting. I had a conversation with Brad Morrison back in May 2020 about that very thing. Like we were both kind of making websites in 2008, 2009. And I feel like whenever there is a recession, people realize they need to pivot or improve their online presence. I mean, especially true with this current one because…yeah. Bet Hannon: Right, right. Figuring out how to get information out there about when they’re going to be open or how they’re going to do curbside pickup or all of that stuff. I am kind of notoriously bad for giving unsolicited feedback about websites. So when I go to the local restaurant and I’ve looked up their thing, and I go, “Hey, your colors here are not accessible and this is terrible on mobile.” Joe Casabona: Man, I would do the same thing, where I’m like, “This should really be like that.” However, the PDF doesn’t download or whatever. Your website not…” Bet Hannon: Last week I went to the dentist. I paid the dentist bill from a couple months ago, but there’s no way to pay it online. I had to call and give them and do it over the phone. So when I went in, I said, “You should really not be taking those numbers over the phone. It’s easy to make a payment form. Call me.” Joe Casabona: Yeah, exactly. “Let me know.” I’m always incensed when you can’t pay for something online or whatever. So you have a WordPress agency now. Would you say that your main focus is accessibility or it’s just something you bake into every website? Bet Hannon: Well, it’s something we bake into every website. We got started with accessibility almost four years ago now. We had a client where we were doing administrative maintenance on their site and they are… they’re still our client. They were our a big agricultural Water District in California. And because of the way they’re connected to the state of California, they became aware that they were going to have some accessibility requirements. And they asked about what needed to happen. We said, “Oh, we could refer you to somebody.” And they said, “Well, we want to work with you. Let’s all learn this together.” Joe Casabona: Wow. Bet Hannon: So we dived in, and our entire team got trained and learned a lot about accessibility and worked through a lot of that with the client and just really got hooked. When you start diving into what makes the site accessible, but also the power of making the website available to more people and usable by more people and seeing how it really can impact people’s lives, whether they have a permanent disability or a temporary disability even, you know, to be able to use the sites. And so we just really got excited about that. Some of the best advice I got as an agency owner was never ever put accessibility in a proposal as something to be refused. That you should never put yourself in a position of allowing the client to throw people with disabilities under the bus in terms of bringing down the cost. That for me it’s staking our reputation as an agency on… everything we do has accessibility baked in. And I truly believe that accessibility is going to be what mobile responsive used to be five or 10 years ago. In another five to 10 years, everybody will be doing accessible websites and it’ll just be what every self-respecting developer does. So we’re just kind of on the early curve for that. Joe Casabona: I love that. When you said that it reminded me a lot of responsive web design. Because that was something that I felt I got in on early. I saw Ethan Marcotte talk about it super early. I put it in my proposal as like, “Do you want a responsive website?” And then I was like, “Why am I even asking? It’s just going to be part of it. It’ll be part of the cost. If they want to buy a cheap website from someone else, they can.” Bet Hannon: Yeah. And quite frankly, more often than not, when I talk to clients, and I say, “Look, this is part of what we do. We bake it into everyone. There are some legal requirements that you may or may not have. You need to do this,” and they’re like, “Oh, yeah, thanks. I hadn’t even thought about that yet.” So they’re usually grateful for having it or the topic being brought up. Joe Casabona: Absolutely. I mean, it’s our job right to advocate on behalf of our clients and inform them, right? When I go to a pizza shop, the pizza shop should expect that I know how to make the perfect pizza. I shouldn’t expect that they know how to make a website. Right? Bet Hannon: Well, it’s kind of what we do as freelancers and agencies. The client comes to us and they may say, “I want this one inch of website.” And we start looking at their… our job is to kind of take a consultative approach and to say, “If you added this on, this would really impact your business in a positive way. You can really grow your business by adding this thing on,” or “tell me about how you do the sales process. Oh, we can help automate that for you.” You know, so that you’re taking more of a consultative approach to helping people understand what they might need that they don’t yet know that they need. Sponsor: This episode is brought to you by Restrict Content Pro. 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The plugin has worked extremely well for me and I was able to get memberships up and running very quickly. Right now, they are offering a rare discount for how I built it listeners only: 20% off your purchase when you use RCPHOWIBUILTIT at checkout. That’s RCPHOWIBUILTIT, all one word. If you want to learn more about Restrict Content Pro and start making money with your own membership site today, head on over to howibuilt.it/rcp. That’s howibuilt.it/rcp. Thanks to Restrict Content Pro for supporting the show. And now let’s get back to it. Joe Casabona: So you mentioned that your team got trained. What was that like? Is there a certification process for accessibility? Bet Hannon: Mm hmm. Joe Casabona: All right. I was going to add a second part of that question, but your face lit up. So go for it. How was it like? Bet Hannon: There are. They’re both. There’s some online journey. There’s a ton of training that you can do out there. So if you’re just starting out and you’re wanting to learn more about website accessibility, some free options for doing that are going to WordPress TV. And there have been a bunch of presentations at various WordCamps on some of the technical pieces for accessibility. I’ll just be the first to confess that I’m not the lead developer at our agency. So some of those kind of technical pieces are not where I would necessarily be helpful to people. But there are tons of presentations from WordCamps to start getting going. There are some LinkedIn Learning pieces. Joe Dolson, who’s an accessibility advocate within WordPress has a great LinkedIn Learning course on Accessibility and WordPress. Very helpful. And then we had our folks do Deque, D-E-Q-U-E, deque.com, they do services around accessibility, but they also have some learning pieces. You can buy basically a membership for a year to do their self-paced online learning pieces. So we have everybody in our group do their base level, which is just awareness about disabilities, and what different accommodations are. So just kind of educating our team about what those are. And then our lead developer has been doing more advanced pieces in preparation for taking a certification exam. So there’s the International Association of Accessibility Professionals. They actually have some certification pieces. Those are several levels, in fact. Those are kind of where our folks are going. So as you may or may not have guessed, one of the ways that you might you would test a website for accessibility might be to use yourself a screen reader. So screen readers are what people who have visual impairments might want to use, and it reads out loud things that are on the web page. We’ve done that, and our developers done that for a long time. But we became aware like, I don’t know, maybe like six months ago, sort of like, well, you can use these tools, but are you using them like a visually impaired user would use them? So I did a little networking and found the consultant and agency, that is the Oregon Federation for the Blind refers people to. So if I experienced blindness and I needed to get training, my state would send me to this guy to learn how to use a screen reader. And we sent her to do training with him, our lead developer. And that was amazing because we had known for sure, but sure enough, people who are blind or visually impaired use screen readers differently than maybe we had anticipated. And so that then helps us be better at testing what we’re doing and how we’re building things out. Joe Casabona: Wow, that’s really interesting. I’ll mention one more resource that I read. Because there’s a chapter in my book on accessibility. But I read “Accessibility for Everyone.” It’s a book by Sarah… Oh, my gosh. Her last name is escaping me right now. I’m very sorry, Sarah. Oh, no, it’s not even Sarah. It’s Laura Kalbag. Laura Kalbag. That’s right. Sorry. But the book is fantastic. I will link that and everything that Bet just mentioned in the show notes over at howibuilt.it/219. Your mention of using a screen reader is very interesting because for my book, there’s a video component where I tried using one in order to show my readers how to use it to test. And honestly, it’s just I had never used one before. So I don’t think it was the most effective demo. But that leads me to ask another question, which is there must be resources in general for testing accessibility with a target audience. Right? So for example, I have transcripts for this podcast. I suspect that there’s a way for those who… Forgive me, I don’t know that I… The proper terminology is escaping me but people who are deaf or have hearing impairments. Is that the right way to put it? Bet Hannon: Mm hmm, hard of hearing. Joe Casabona: Okay. Someone got upset with me for saying hard of hearing Bet Hannon: Well, all kinds of groups, there are a variety of takes on things. Hard of Hearing is what I do see often. Joe Casabona: Okay, cool. That’s what I thought too. Okay, cool. But in any case, I guess, are there resources for you to test accessibility features with those who are most likely to use them? Bet Hannon: Do you mean doing testing with disabled users? Joe Casabona: Yes. Bet Hannon: The actual disabled users? Joe Casabona: Yes, yes. Bet Hannon: Well, people with disabilities often are chronically underemployed, and so if you have a way that you want to do a lot of testing, you could certainly do some networking to find people who could help you with testing. I think you should never ever ask a disabled person to test for you without getting compensated. Joe Casabona: Of course. Bet Hannon: I mean, think that’s just rude. We have several folks that test for us and consult with us when we have questions. Sometimes you’re testing a site and it’s just really hard to get a sense for… you know, if you tagged into this in a certain way, it might get you into a trap that you couldn’t get out of. You know, what are the clues? And so, just kind of having people do some testing for us. So we have a few people that do that for us. Joe Casabona: Got you. Bet Hannon: But resources for finding those people, I don’t… I mean, that’s going to vary quite widely. Joe Casabona: Got you. But there are resources available if you do some networking, like you said, and ask around. Bet Hannon: Yeah. You know, I would ask around. I mean, there’s some state agencies in your state, probably. You could network around about where do they send people when they need training? And then those people who are doing training on those things may often do some consulting like that on the side. Joe Casabona: Awesome. That makes perfect sense. This has already been super informative. Now, you have a website accessibility sampling audit. In a previous episode, I think I mentioned this earlier, with Amber Hinds, we kind of talked about like the WCAG ratings and things like that, which is sort of an automated thing, right? You go to a website, you get a rating. If it’s double, great. If it’s triple, even better. But we still need a person auditing your website, right? Bet Hannon: Yeah, yeah. Right. There are a variety of tools that are out there, automated tools there where you can test your site. And wave.webaim.org is the one that Amber was probably talking about. That’s one of the best known. Lighthouse is another one. It’s a Chrome extension that you can put in in the specter tools and you can look at there. They’re great. Those automated tools are really good and important to us because they can help save you a lot of time. The important thing to remember about them is that they only catch about 30% of the accessibility issues. And you may get some false positives and false negatives. And you’ll always need humankind of… you’ll need to look at things with a human eye. Those testing tools are never going to be enough to say that you’re fully accessible. So, for instance, an AI tool can tell you “yes or no, there’s an alt tag for this image.” Yes is good, No is bad. But if the alt tag is the name of the file, jpg49678, that’s not compliant. So it can give you the false negative that you had all the alt tags are taken care of when they’re not really. So you want to make sure that you’re using those tools as they’re intended, to do some basic screening, but at the same time that you’re really looking at things. Even the tools that Amber and her team have put together are great but they really require you to engage. And that’s the thing with accessibility. There is really no just put a plugin on or just pay to make it go away. You really have to learn what’s accessible and what’s not and implement it regularly. Accessibility has some parts for WordPress, and that’s what we deal with almost always. For WordPress, some parts of accessibility are in the theme. So whether your menu is accessible or not is largely controlled by your theme, for example. Your color contrast of your buttons and your color contrast is set by your theme. But a huge piece of accessibility is your content. So when you’re putting in content, are you making sure that the images have alt tags? Are you making sure that the H tags and the headings are nested without skipping any levels? So a lot of that content piece is stuff that people are just going to have to learn and learn to implement correctly as they go. Joe Casabona: That’s a really important point. I think Amber made the same point, right? Because Accessibility Checker… I don’t know if you’ve used it. Bet Hannon: Oh, yeah. Joe Casabona: She gave me a pro version. That was an inaudible “oh, yeah.” But the education part is really important. When I look at my blog posts and I see the kind of score I get, it’s like, “Hey, you have two h2 tags in a row here and you skipped an h2 tag or whatever it is.” Because I always forget if the… maybe this is a question you can answer for me. The site title is an h1 in most themes, which means your blog post… Bet Hannon: No, the page title is the h1. Joe Casabona: The page title is the h1. Okay. Bet Hannon: Yeah, yeah. Joe Casabona: So if I’m looking at a blog post… gosh, I should know this, but I don’t right now. If you’re looking at a blog post, should the title of the blog post be an h1 or an h2? Bet Hannon: Well, the title of the post or the page will be the h1. And that should be taken care of in the theme. The theme should handle that for you. And then when you start putting in H tags for kind of organizing your content, you should start with h2s. And you can go you can skip from an h2 to an h2. You just can’t go from an h2 an h4. Joe Casabona: Right. Bet Hannon: I think people often don’t quite understand or get that you shouldn’t use the H tags to style font. Right? Joe Casabona: Right. Bet Hannon: An H4 four can have as big a font as the h3 or the whatever. But you’re kind of organizing the content. I sometimes say it’s like when you were in high school English, and you had to do that outline with the Roman numerals and the capitals and then the lowercase Roman numerals and lowercase letters, and you have to kind of build it out in that way. My team doesn’t like that because “who learns to do that in English class anymore?” is what they tell me. Then I feel old. Joe Casabona: Really? Hold on. We can talk about this in Build Something More because it’s a sidetrack. People don’t learn how to do that in English class anymore? I’m outraged. Bet Hannon: Ohhh, yes. Well, you graduated before No Child Left Behind really diminished education. Joe Casabona: Oh, gosh. Bet Hannon: My wife is a college professor and sometimes what people have not learned in high school is quite astounding. Joe Casabona: Ah, that saddens me. Bet Hannon: Yeah, it is. My team sometimes talks about it as nesting file folders. That’s a different example that you can talk about. Like the whole drawer is the h1 and then you can have h2s and then nested folders. But you have to make sure that you don’t skip any. Joe Casabona: That’s interesting. I’m going to bet like most of my blog posts are inaccessible because I guess it was just always like a mental block for me. I thought the site title was h1, the page titles h2. So I always started in on h3. Bet Hannon: Oh, okay. Yeah, yeah. Joe Casabona: I better go back and fix all those. I reckon that there’s like… Bet Hannon: A few at a time. And that’s the thing. When people realize that they’ve been doing something incorrectly… I mean, know better, do better. That’s the thing. When you know better you can do better. And so when you realize that you may have not done that correctly over time, it can seem insurmountable. I mean, it just seems like this overwhelming task, I mean, if you have hundreds or thousands of posts to deal with. So the key is start and do a little at a time. Just make a goal to do two of them a week or three a week. It doesn’t take very long once you figure out what you’ve done. And then just kind of make your way through them. There are some tools for doing that. There’s a couple of really great alt tag checker tools. So there’s a free one in the repository—and now I’m going to forget its name, but we can put it in the show notes—that basically when you install the plugin, it’ll show you all the images in your media library and just show you which ones are missing alt tags. Joe Casabona: Oh, great. Bet Hannon: But then you still need to go back and fix them. And then there’s a paid tool, and it costs like $200 a year. I don’t remember the name of it, either, we’ll get into the show notes… Sorry, guys. I know it’s two, guys. Well, one is written by my friend Andrew Wilder and his team, but the other one I don’t even know. But anyway, the paid tool is really nice because it pulls in all existing alt tags. It will use AI to try and generate an alt tag based on what’s there. You have you still have to go in and kind of like say, “Oh, that’s not quite right. Let me actually fill this out.” But it gives you that help, that start. And then when you fix it there using that plugin, it fixes it on every post that’s used that image. So if you have a lot of images, it’s probably worth getting that paid tools. Joe Casabona: Yeah, for sure. For 200 bucks saving you hours of work. That’s really interesting. Because as we’re talking about this, I thought I could probably make a plugin that loops through the content of all of my posts and just bump up the heading. I’d still need to check. Bet Hannon: Yeah. If you knew it, you could do that, I suppose. Joe Casabona: I’d have to make sure it doesn’t go above h2. So I’d have to say, “Is this an h3 change to an h2, or whatever.” It would have to be smarter than just looping. Bet Hannon: If you knew you were consistently making the error, right? Joe Casabona: Yes. For me personally, I’m confident I consistently make that error. You know why I’m confident? I write in Ulysses, which is a fantastic writing app. It’s markdown, and it exports directly to WordPress. And I always start with an h2 for the document title, and it bothers me, and then I do h3 for all subsequent headings. So I know for a fact. Bet Hannon: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. If you start fixing it, you could do that. You might be able to do that. I got into doing more database query stuff a couple of years ago. We had a really large site with a ton of stuff, and very active site. We were going to be doing a new theme for them. And there’s always that problem where you have the active site where there’s WooCommerce, or an active blog, or whatever, and then like, you’ve got to pull that back together. So I was experimenting with a plugin that purportedly was going to merge in the changes from the production site. And in the testing, it looked all great. But during the time we had it in development, it got stuck in some kind of a loop with Gravity Forms entries. And I had 15 million, with an M, additional extraneous entries. I just had to start learning how to write queries to get stuff out because it was so huge. I couldn’t even get it to load. Joe Casabona: Jeez. That’s horrifying. Bet Hannon: It was crazy. Joe Casabona: There was a plugin a few years back that I guess was not viable market wise. It was bought by Delicious Brains. Bet Hannon: By the time I was looking at this, they’d already pulled that off. Joe Casabona: Oh, man. Bet Hannon: This was another one. But it’s a difficult problem. It’s not an easy problem to solve. Anyway, I learned how to do a little bit of SQL. Joe Casabona: Very nice, very nice. We can talk about that in Build Something More because I have some fun stories. Sponsor: This episode is brought to you by TextExpander. In our fast-paced world, things change constantly, and errors in messaging often have significant consequences. With TextExpander, you can save time by converting any text you type into keyboard shortcut called a snippet. 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Joe Casabona: We haven’t even talked about the service yet, the website accessibility sampling audit. Tell us how that works, how you put it together, why you put it together, all that fun stuff. Bet Hannon: So you might want an accessibility audit of your site to help you know what things are wrong. Like you have been doing some of these things to try and fix things, but there may be still things that you are not sure are problems yet. And it is difficult with accessibility to know… It’s kind of like SEO—knowing where you’re kind of moving toward. It’s a moving target or that’s kind of fuzzy sometimes. So getting an audit is a great thing to do. Traditionally, an accessibility audit would look at every single page in detail and give you a detailed report of every single page of your website. And as you might imagine, that’s a labor-intensive thing because that’s a lot of work. So even if you have a moderate-sized site, it could run you into tens of thousands of dollars. And so what we discovered is that, by and large, if you have problems on with accessibility on your site, you can catch a lot of those with a sample of your content. So we developed an audit that was taking a sample of your content, and then you as the site owner can get this report. And then you have to extrapolate from there. If on your site audit we note that you have images without alt tags, you probably have a lot more than those then on the pages we looked at. So we try to work with folks to do around 25 URLs or so. Even sites that are really big blogs with thousands of posts, you really don’t need more than about three or four posts to do that. Unless you have a blog with a variety of authors. So we try to tell people, you know, try to get all of your page templates represented, try and get a good kind of representative sample of content through time. So like maybe if you start changing and doing better with your H tags now… but we’re only looking at those, we might not pick up that you still have that problem earlier. Joe Casabona: Got you. Bet Hannon: So we want to look at content creation through time. We want to get a variety of the authors on the blog. So maybe one person is continuing to do this one thing that is creating accessibility issues. Look at various features. If you’re doing a WooCommerce site or some other eCommerce site, you know, you want to look at the checkout process, you want to look at its membership site, looking at the process for doing that, and just try to work with them to come up with around 25 URLs to look at in terms of doing that. Joe Casabona: That’s right. And then we produce a big report. Often the reports are more than 15 pages. We actually give them a list of everything we looked for whether or not they violated it so they know what we checked for. We use those automated tools, but then we have human beings checking the page. And then if we run into something where we’re not sure about, we’ll call in our consultants and have people with actual disabilities looking at the content as well. And then we do include an hour of consultation time at the end. So then you can jump into a Zoom call, we can explain it to you, we can demo problems for you, show you why it’s a problem. Some people find that really helpful. If you want, you can bring your… we don’t need to do the remediation. But if you have a regular developer you work with, you can bring them on the call and we can make it more of a technical call about how they might need to fix that or what they might want to do to fix a problem. Joe Casabona: That’s great. That sounds a lot like when Gutenberg first rolled out I created a course, and I basically said like, “How to audit your website to see if it’s ready for Gutenberg.” Very similar. Page templates. I said just like, “Pick a sampling of old and new posts.” But content through time is a very nice, snappy way to put it. I know exactly what you’re saying and I think that’s great. Authors, various features, things like that. And then the one-hour consultation at the end. Patrick Garman came on the show a few weeks ago. They have in a WooCommerce performance site audit, also includes some consultation time. This was not a planned question or anything like that, but do you think that the audit has been a good addition to your business? Do you think it’s helped your business a lot? Because it seems like it’s an idea that’s catching on more, at least in the WordPress space. Bet Hannon: It is. I do think we have to be careful about taking on too many. It takes about two weeks start to finish and we only onboard one a week just because it represents a pretty good chunk of labor for us. And keeping up with our other projects is kind of priority in terms of paying the bills. But it is a good thing. Because most of an accessibility audit is done from the front end, we’re able to do audits on sites that are not WordPress. We can do a Shopify site or a Wix or Weebly site. But those folks don’t tend to want to do those kind of things. But you can do it on any kind of other platforms that someone might want to do. I think people are increasingly concerned. I’m seeing that more niche-driven. So for a bit, we had a ton of audits for food bloggers. So a pretty well-known food blogger got sued around accessibility, and it just raised that awareness for everybody that they… On the one hand, a good number of them are like, “I don’t want to get sued.” But what they also do know that it’s an important thing to do. They can increase their audience, it gives more people access to their content. So they definitely aren’t just anxious about being sued. And I want to be careful about not throwing around the fear-monger kind of thing. Joe Casabona: Right. Right. Bet Hannon: I mean, it is about not getting sued at one level, but it’s also that there are a lot of really great reasons to make your site accessible. Joe Casabona: Yeah, absolutely. I’ve said this on the show before. People ask me how I grew my show so quickly, and I think one of the big growth points in the show’s history is when I added transcripts. I saw a definite increase in traffic to the site and even an increase in listenership. Sometimes it’s not just the deaf and hard of hearing who want to read the transcript. It’s people who maybe can’t listen at that moment and or maybe they want to read along while they listen. Bet Hannon: I have seen statistics go by that say that 80% of the videos on LinkedIn are played without sound. Joe Casabona: Wow. Bet Hannon: 80%. It’s very high. It’s pretty high like that for Facebook, too. I think about that, well, one of the times when I’m surfing LinkedIn is in the early morning when I don’t want to wake somebody up, or when I’m in a waiting room somewhere, pre-COVID, or where I just can’t listen. But I sure watch videos go by and yeah, the captions. Joe Casabona: For sure. I mean, that’s super interesting. 80%. That’s wild. For me, it’s usually maybe I listened or watched something and I remember a phrase and I want to find that phrase. So even for those who do listen or watch with the sound on, the transcript or the captions, the searchable text is invaluable to a lot of people. Bet Hannon: Well, you’re getting the search engine juice from that too. Joe Casabona: Yeah, exactly. Bet Hannon: Right? Joe Casabona: Yeah. Bet Hannon: When you think about captions, you have to think about whether it is… if it’s a video, often you’re doing captions because the video is conveying something of the conversation or the interaction as well. But for a podcast, doing the transcript… Well, I often do listen to podcasts at time and a half or, you know, I bump it up. If you got a transcript for me to read, it’s much faster. I can read a lot faster than I can listen. Joe Casabona: Yeah, yeah, for sure. Awesome. Bet Hannon: So it’s not just situations where I might be time pressed and I just want to skim through stuff. Sponsor: This episode is brought to you by the Events Calendar, the original calendar for WordPress. This free plugin helps you with calendaring, ticketing, and more powerful tools to help you manage your events from start to finish. Whether you run school events, concert at a venue, or fundraisers for nonprofits, the Events Calendar gives you the tools you need to make it your own. And with the Events Calendar Pro, you can create custom views, recurring events, add your own custom fields to events, and much more. Run virtual events? No problem. 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Joe Casabona: I know some well-known, big time podcasters who have kind of poo pooed transcripts because they don’t feel the added cost is worth it. And I’m just like, “First of all, you’re making more money than I am podcasting.” Even if you don’t use… Rev is expensive. My virtual assistant transcribes the videos I sent her so I know that she understands the task at hand, and she transcribed a 30-minute video in like three hours. Worth it. Worth it to pay her that. It’s cheaper than Rev. Bet Hannon: And there’s some other services that are up and coming too. And I think we will see more and more of those. Joe Casabona: I’ve been using otter.ai. Any place that offers an educational discount, I’ll grab it. Bet Hannon: I just heard about Otter today in another… I was in a meeting this morning and somebody mentioned that one. Joe Casabona: How funny. Bet Hannon: I hadn’t heard about it. Joe Casabona: What’s that called? That’s called something. You hear about it once and you hear about it everywhere. Bet Hannon: Synchronicity Joe Casabona: Oh, man. Bet Hannon: Oh, no. Joe Casabona: There’s something effect. I’ll look it up for the post-show. But anyway, we could talk tools all day. I mean, I guess that’s helpful, right? It’s an accessibility show. But otter.ai and Descript both offer educational discount, so if you have a .edu address, you can get it at like half price. So I’ll just snag those. I’ve been pretty happy with Otter. There’s a few things, but it’s AI, transcription. Bet Hannon: Right. And I don’t know if it kind of produces a transcript, but I do know that I’ve been seeing going around that Zoom is giving… For Zoom, they’re giving free on the fly too closed captioning for meetings. Joe Casabona: Yes. Bet Hannon: But if that gets saved in a file, that would be checked out. Joe Casabona: Yeah, absolutely. Bet Hannon: There’s a way to turn that on in your account. Even if it’s live transcription, stuff like that is often a little buggy. But at least you’ve got something to start with from there. Joe Casabona: Again, you can hire an editor to edit it or have your virtual assistant read through and just spellcheck. It’s probably easier for them. So yeah, absolutely. Gosh, this has been super great. As we wrap up, if somebody wants to get started, maybe they have a website, and they’re not sure if it’s accessible, what are some tips to get started? Bet Hannon: Well, the first would be don’t be tempted by what are called the overlay plugins. So it’s big business right now. Those overlay plugins have huge amounts of venture capital pouring in. So their ads are everywhere, and they want to suck you in with just “buy our service and everything will be taken care of.” And they don’t. So don’t get sucked in with that. And then just start educating yourself about what needs to be there. I’d say the very base kinds of pieces are the things that we’ve already talked about in this podcast. You know, your alt tags and you’re heading tags, and then just start trying to work your way through testing your site, getting your content squared away. But ask questions. There are tons of people out on Twitter and LinkedIn and other places that are, if you have a question, willing to look at that and give you some, you know, not free consulting, but point you in the direction of some resources. Joe Casabona: Awesome. That’s fantastic. And with alt tags—again, I think I brought this up on the show previously, but I do want to drive this point home—it should be as descriptive as reasonably possible. Is that kind of the way to put it? Bet Hannon: Right. Yeah. We have a blog post that should come out on our site in another couple of weeks about alt tags. We’re in process with it. But yeah, you want to make it descriptive of the image, but you never want to put in the word image or photo or graphic or anything like that, because the screen reader reads that out loud. The screen reader already tells someone that it’s an image. And so you would just say, you know, “Father and child playing on the beach on a sunny day.” You know. It shouldn’t be too horribly long but it should be… If it’s a photo of a person, it can say, “Photo of Joe Casabona, an incredibly good-looking Italian man.” Joe Casabona: Well, thank you. You’re making… Bet Hannon: You can embellish your own text. Joe Casabona: Yeah, there you go. People will probably picture like Fabio or something. Maybe Fabio is like old-timey reference and newer, good-looking Italian man. That’s interesting. So “father and daughter on beach on a sunny day” is good. But maybe like, father and daughter on beach sunny day with red pale and father’s wearing like green swim trunks. That’s too much. Bet Hannon: Too much detail. Too much detail. Right. Yeah. Well, the thing you don’t want to do is you don’t want to put anything in a meme-like image with text on the top. People do that a lot. They just go to Canva and they’ll make a little meme thing to promote an event or to promote whatever. The thing is, when you do that, you need to make sure that you’re providing alternatives for that. So you can do it but you just want to make sure that… For instance, we have clients where they’re doing a lot of events driven pieces. They might make that graphic, but then in the text of the post, they need to… so that the alt text on the graphic can say, “Graphic promoting this event, details in the post below.” And then the person can skip into the content and get the details. Joe Casabona: Yeah, details in the post below. That’s another thing that I think Amber mentioned. Go ahead. Bet Hannon: But the thing is, if you only put that little Canva image that’s kind of meme, like, Google can’t see that text either. So you’re not getting any search engine juice off of that. Joe Casabona: That’s really interesting. So you wouldn’t necessarily want to have that exact text in the alt tag if it’s also like the title of the post and mentioned in the post below. Is accurate that accurate? Bet Hannon: Right, right. It becomes repetitive. Joe Casabona: Okay. Cool, cool. Bet Hannon: And actually, people who are using screen readers, which the alt text is about people who are using screen readers, like the rest of us, they skim through content. When we all go to a website, we just skim through, and we’re looking at the headings, and we’re looking for what interests us. We’re not really reading every word. So people who are using screen readers are skimming through, and they’re skimming through to look at the headings, H tags, come back to play on the links. And you want to make sure your links are set up so that the link text, the part that gets underlined or made into a colorable or whatever that effect is, but that link text is descriptive because often they’re just skimming through the text and having the screen reader read out that text to them. So if all of your link texts say “click here,” “click here,” “click here,” there’s no context. They’re gone. Joe Casabona: Oh, jeez. Wow. All right. Lots of really good… Bet Hannon: So “click here to learn more about accessibility. Click here to do blah, blah, blah. Click here to download a blah, blah.” Joe Casabona: Yeah. Love that. Right. And then I guess the same with buttons. You don’t just want to say like, “Click here.” You want to say like, “Enroll today” is usually what I put. But maybe I put “enroll today in Podcast Liftoff” or whatever. Bet Hannon: Right. I mean, yes, potentially. And then you remembering that buttons are really just links. Joe Casabona: This will be the last question before we wrap up. We’ve been talking forever. Bet Hannon: [inaudible 00:51:51] Joe Casabona: I know. I know. It’s just such a great conversation. This is mostly for me, and I hope the listeners are getting something out of it. With anchor tags, you can add a title text, right? Bet Hannon: Mm hmm. Joe Casabona: What’s the utility of the title text? Can I say like, “Enroll in the clickable tags” and then have a title that has more context? Or is that kind of like frowned upon? Bet Hannon: Oh, you’re asking me more of a technical question now. I’m sure there’s an answer, but I don’t know. Joe Casabona: All right. I mean, that’s a good answer too because that means at least you weren’t presented with some hard opinion on it. I’ll find something… Bet Hannon: You gotta remember I’m very rarely any more in the content in that way. Joe Casabona: I’ll find the link for the show notes for that because that’s… Bet Hannon: Cool. Joe Casabona: Again, we didn’t talk about that. It just came to my brain and I wanted to ask. Bet Hannon: Yeah, for sure. Joe Casabona: Before we wrap up, you gave us some great tips, do you have any trade secrets for us? Bet Hannon: Oh, yeah. Just don’t get hooked into those overlay things. They are… I really try not to say this very often, but they’re really kind of evil. A, they purport to fix all your problems, but they can only deal with the 30% that’s AI. They kind of make it sound like you won’t get sued if you use them. But that’s not really the case. Actually, we’re seeing some cases where people are being targeted because they’re using them. And the predatory lawsuit people know that they can’t take care of everything. They’re hooking people in a way that just feels kind of manipulative and not very… just not a good heart behind that. Joe Casabona: It’s snake oil. Bet Hannon: It’s snake oil. It really is. And because it’s an overlay, so it’s fixing some of those accessibility problems on the fly as your page is loading, which is adds extra bloat, slows your site down, do those increasingly focusing on speed. So it’s not great for your search engine kind of results and all of that as well. And when you stopped paying for that service, all of those problems are still there. You haven’t fixed anything. You’re paying all that money to the service over time and nothing’s getting fixed. Joe Casabona: That’s really interesting. So these overlay products are not like, “Here’s what’s wrong.” It’s like, “Here’s what we’re telling you is wrong and we’re just going to add a little JavaScript to fix it or whatever.” Bet Hannon: It’s like, “We will try and fix the things we can fix.” So they’ll use AI to put in alt tags, which may or may not be correct. They’re just guessing at the alt tags. And then they put these little, they put some little tools over on the side. Well, if you are a person that has a tool, an accessibility tool that you use on the web, if you have a screen magnifier or you already use some kind of colorblind filter thing, you have tools that you already are familiar with that you have installed that you want to use. And so those little accessibility tools things, it’s kind of like, look at me, I’m trying to be accessible is what it comes down to. And for people with disabilities, it’s sort of like saying to them, “Hey, you should leave the tools that you like and all the shortcuts for to use my second rate thing that’s going to come…” Because those tools conflict them. They create a conflict. So you should leave the tools that you know, and like, and know all the shortcuts to and use my special tool over here that I paid minimal bucks for.” Joe Casabona: It’s almost like a virtual signal. Bet Hannon: It’s frustrating. It’s a virtue signal but it’s really… it’s like telling the person in the wheelchair, “You got steps in front of your restaurant, you need to go around and use the ramp and come to the kitchen.” Joe Casabona: Jeez. Bet Hannon: It’s really offensive. Joe Casabona: Absolutely. And it just goes to show you, right? Because… Bet Hannon: I get that people want to be concerned about accessibility, but take some time to think it through in. Joe Casabona: Yeah. I mean, be concerned and then find an actual solution and not some Band-Aid that you bought at the dollar store. Bet Hannon: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Those services are not cheap either. And that’s the thing. Over time, you’re paying a lot of money, but it’s not really getting fixed. It’s just a kind of a cover-up that’s going to go away when you stop paying. Joe Casabona: Yeah, absolutely. It just goes to show you that the best way you can be accessible is to write good semantic HTML and know the best practices. That’s just… Bet Hannon: Yeah, exactly. Joe Casabona: Awesome. Bet Hannon: Know better and do better. Joe Casabona: Yeah, know better and do better. I love it. Bet, this has been such a great hour we’ve been talking for. We may talk about other stuff in Build Something More. So be sure to catch our pre-show where we talk about craft beer, our post-show where we talk a little bit more over a build something club. Bet, if people want to learn more about you, and they should, where can they go to find you? Bet Hannon: You can find me on Twitter @BetHannon, and then our website is bhmbizsites.com. Joe Casabona: Fantastic. I will link those and lots of stuff that we talked about. This is a tool-heavy episode. So it’s going to be long show notes over and howibuilt.it/219. Bet, thanks so much for joining us today. I really appreciate it. Bet Hannon: It’s been great. Thanks for having me. Joe Casabona: Thanks to everybody listening. I really appreciate it. Thanks to our sponsors, TextExpander, Restrict Content Pro, and the Events Calendar. Until next time, get out there and build something. Sponsored by:Restrict Content Pro: Launch your membership site TextExpander: Get 20% off your first year by visiting the this link. The Events Calendar Source

This conversation takes us deeper into accessibility. Not only do we learn the important basics, but how eCommerce fits into the picture.

If you've skipped around the catalog of amazing episodes published this year, I've gathered four here today that should entice you to binge a few more. I stitched together clips from the years top shows in terms of download count and compelling conversation. Simon Bruce on where he draws his passion for the product space. Amber Hinds talks about her reasoning to form a Certified B Corp. Matt Mullenweg shares where WooCommerce is in the lifecycle. Miriam Schwab discusses how she thinks about raising money from venture capital. I hope you enjoy the first Best of I've ever published! Please share it on social media. ★ Support this podcast ★

Let's say you're a services business — you know, you make websites for people and sell them at fair market value. But, every so often, you get a little jealous about all of these product people running around printing money. You want a piece of that action. Managing customer expectations are daunting. Your master product plan comes together over night and you decide to cut off the deal flow coming into your business and even raise some capital to make this dream come true… …but then two major moments happen: A huge client contract that you thought went dark pops up their head and says “Yes!” aaaaaand the world hits a global pandemic. Now what? You're going to find out from today's guest Amber Hinds, CEO of Road Warrior Creative and Equalize Digital. Hey, if you like the show, how about a review on iTunes. And I'm looking for a quote or two put on the website — tweet at me @mattreport with a quote about how this Podcast has helped you. MattReport.com/subscribe to join the mailing list — I may or may not be working on something new so stay tuned there. Okay, tune in to find out how Amber handled all of this! Download the Accessibility Checker Plugin