Promet and Florida Realtors Webinar on Website ADA compliance with Denise Erazmus of Promet Source, Ashley Burns of Promet Source, and Joel Maxson of Florida Realtors TRT: 54 minutes 57 seconds Video Description Power Point Presentation where presenters give discussion over graphics or read the on screen PowerPoint. Followed by Question and Answer Period. Joel Maxson (small picture in picture on screen) directly addresses camera: Ah, hello, for everybody participating, my name is Joel Maxson, ah, Associate General Counsel of Florida Realtors. I’m sure most of you have seen me around, but ah, but for those who haven’t my main job at Florida Realtors is to manage the Legal Hotline. So I wanted to introduce today’s program that is gonna focus on the technical side, of website compliance by just giving the briefest of legal overviews because the technical side and the legal side kind of intertwine. Ah, and part of the question that I am always asked is, how do we get here? For those of you who have looked into the Americans with Disabilities Act, I think everybody understands that for decades the ADA has applied to physical buildings, and if you want to open an office and something that is open to the public, its just going to be a cost of doing business to make sure that your physical structure is compliant with the ADA. As, its not longer a baby law, its an entrenched law and everybody kind of understands it, its sort of in the background. But some clever attorneys a couple of years ago, got the idea to apply the principles of the Americans with Disabilities Act to websites. And these lawyers and their firms, have targeted , for a bout five years, we have been looking at this closely and paying attention, they’ve targeted big companies and they’ve brought big cases. Now, almost all of these national and international companies settle, and say “yes, we will make our, take steps to make our websites compliant, for people for people with vision and hearing disabilities. But a few have fought. And the couple of cases that have come out so far, and they are just a couple, have been victories on the side of the disability. In other words the companys have been forced to make some sort of change to make their websites compliant. So as we watch this trend develop, ah, so far on the Legal Hotline we haven’t much from our members, you know not really much of a peep at all. So its been more of an academic reminder, hey, this could be an issue. This could be an issue. Now a recent trend that many of you have probably seen and heard about is that a law firm out of Miami, they also have a tie to Washington D.C., has basically blanketed the state with demand letters saying your websites are not compliant. And you need to bring them, make them assessable, and its this, by the way, this recent law firm that has blanked the state, doesn’t look a lot like the other ones. But that is kind of a side point, if you wanna know more about how they’re acting, and behaving, what they are looking for, and what so far seems to be fairly small demands, ah, for settlement, and no lawsuits filed yet. We’re having a talk about it on the Legal Hotline, but, don’t get too distracted by this particular firm, and their claims, which by the way are coming under Fair Housing Act. Instead of the ADA. I don’t know that that matters, because the point their raising, accessibility of website, is one that we have said and will continue to say is an issue, as a business issue, it’s a decision you should get in front of and have a plan. So, that’s why today I am very happy and excited to say we have Promet Source, and from conversations leading up to this meeting, I have found them to be very practical and logical and organized. So I’m excited to hear what they have to say on the technical side. Now, when you do get in front of it, what will that look like. So, I’m going to send it over to Ashley Burns and she’s going to kick off the conversation from the tech side and I’m going to blank out and start taking notes for our Hotline Attorneys. Ashley Burns (small picture in picture on screen) directly addresses camera: Thanks so much Joel. My name is Ashley Burns, I’m an account manager here at Promet Source. Just a couple of housekeeping items to address very quickly, this webinar is being recorded. A copy of the webinar will be sent out to every one following the presentation. We’ll also share with you a link to the presentation itself, it has a lot of good resources in here, so we will be sharing that with you guys. And we do encourage all of you to, ah, take your questions and put them into the chat box. There’s a Q&A chat box, on the bottom of your screen. So feel free to ask any of the questions that you have through out the presentation and we do promise to hold time for questions at the end. So we definitely will get to those. And I know Denise has a lot of great stuff to cover today. So, I’ll let her take it away from here. Denise Erazmus (small picture in picture on screen) directly addresses camera: Hello everybody my name is Denise. Just a little bit about myself. I’m a web accessibility specialist with Promet since about April 2019. I’m certified professional in Accessibility Core Competencies. I have a certificate from Northwestern in full stack development. I also have a B.S. in Technical Management and a B.A. in Political Science ( inaudible ) education. There’s my email for you. And my LinkedIn if you ever need to get in contact with me. So, what are we going to discuss today? Well, we’ve got to figure out what is this web accessibility thing. Why should we make our websites accessible? How people with disabilities use the web. And then we’ll go over some common accessibility errors. Discuss a little bit of the topic of accessibility overlays. Some accessibility tools. The Promet Process and then we’ll save some time for questions and answers. So what is…just bear with me for a second, I’m sorry…what is accessibility? Web accessibility means that website tools and technologies are designed and developed so that people with disabilities can use them. We’ll discuss this later on but it brings in the concept of the acronyms of POUR, and then the WCAG guidelines for accessibility. These guidelines encompass everyone with disabilities like auditory, cognitive, neurological, physical, speech, visual. It also is people with temporary disabilities. You break your hand can’t use your mouse, can only use your keyboard. People on mobile devices. More people are using sole mobile devices now and not their computers. And temporary disabilities such as the sun shines on your screen. You know we all have had that experience where you can’t see your phone. So, Some accessibility tools and guidelines can help with instances like that. So why should we make these websites accessible, why do we care? Well, according to figures released by the Census Bureau in 2012. Five point six, I’m sorry 56.7 million Americans have some type of disability. This can include 19.9 million that have difficulty lifting or grasping. 15.2 million with cognitive, mental or emotional impairment. 8.1 million with vision impairment. And 7.6 million with hearing impairment. So that is a lot of users and this doesn’t encompass those temporary disabilities that I just mentioned. Also we have the number of web accessibility lawsuits filed Federal Court rose to at least 2,258 and that was in 2018. That’s up from 814 in 2017. Representing 177% increase and this number continues to rise. Obviously this is a dated stat. I would guess this is much larger at this point. Now I’m gonna go a little bit just breeze through some of the accessibility laws. I’m not a lawyer so this is just a general overview. Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 is legislations that establishes rights for individuals with disabilities. It requires agencies that receive federal funds to provide individuals with disabilities and equal opportunity to participate in programs and benefits. This applies to all Federal Agencies and those doing business with or receiving funding from Federal Agencies. Now we have the section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act. U.S. Congress amended the Rehabilitation Act in 1998. Applies to Agencies receiving Federal Funds, when they develop, procure, maintain, or use information technology. It was enacted to eliminate technological barriers, make available new opportunities, and encourage the development of new technologies. And then we have the big law. The Americans with Disabilities Act. It became effective on January 26, ’92. Says its wrong to discriminate against people with because of their disability. Addresses employment and workplace discrimination. State and local governments, parks facilities, programs and businesses, and non-profits. There’s three parts that define it. You have to have a condition that’s a substantial effect on one or more major life areas like communication. Protects those that had a disability. And those that are regarded as having a disability. Its specific to Florida. Florida’s population jumps 31.4 percent from 2000 to 2020. Likely incidence of disability at 15%. So the amount of disability in the state of Florida is increasing. The ADA is then broken down into titles. Title One addresses workplace discrimination. You know reasonable accommodations. I can’t you know stand for a long time you need to provide me a chair. Stuff like that. Titles Two, Three, and Five applies to State and Local governments, programs policies and facilities. Requires reasonable modification to enable use of services and sites. And then Title Four is TDD. Which is the telephone system for the deaf. We then have a lawsuit for that is specific to Florida. Lawyers awarded 100 K, um, in a Winn Dixie case. So, bear with me, um, its basically stated that they shall adopt and implement the web accessibility policy and insures that its website conforms with WCAG 2.0. We will go over WCAG and specific laws that govern how your website appears. Um, and that they should make a publicly available and direct link for the, on their website, for a statement of accessibility. So stating what are they doing to make their website accessible. And another aspect of accessibility is, was called SEO. Its Search Engine Optimization. How easily can somebody through just like Google, find your website. Having an accessible website increases search engine optimization. Accessible designs enhance the user experience. Its better for sighted and unsighted users. Titles help screen readers and searches. Lot of this is very tech heavy, but like good heading structure establishes a content hierarchy. Having captions again, videos on your sites. Having captions on your, um, video. Allows them to be indexed so they can be searched, versus, with things such as Google. So how do people with disabilities, what do do how do they search the internet or use the internet? People who are blind or have very low vision will use a screen reader. There’s also something called a Braille board, which is pictured. Basically what it does is it reads the website and transcribes it into Braille. You also have closed captioning, so, for someone who can’t hear, they can read a video. Then there’s also for someone who has motor issues, voice control. You can control your computer using your voice. This is built in now on most computers along with screen readers. Then there’s key board control. I have some sort of issue where I can use a mouse. So I can only, I can only use my keyboard to control the screen. And then you have high contrast mode. What that will basically do is turn a screen black and white. It’s extremely helpful for individuals with color blindness. Or also cognitive disabilities, if they find a color distracting. Black and white can be another option for them. So what we’re gonna do were is this is a recording, of a screen reader. That, and the site isn’t necessarily a good site so we are gonna hear kind of what is the experience is that a screen reader users gets? When a website is not accessible. Computer voice speaking and reading website (very difficult to understand): Skip to content, link, in four items, group, link, this image, (inaudible) banner, Chrome has new window, collapse button navigation. Link, login, weather enclosures, button, link free (inaudible) Banner, link, explore list three items, link, engage, link, connect, search, search text field, search search. Search submit button. (Inaudible) link, free (inaudible) previous button name, link, learn more, next button. Link, gain access, (inaudible) link, (inaudible) link, (inaudible) … commitment to our community, you are cut, link, (inaudible) article, link, read more one of three, selected, tab, one of three remain, link, Health plus wellness, article, Chrome has new window, link, recreation, link, 02 20 slash, link read more, one of three selected, hit tab, one of three, named previous button, link, parts, experiences, list three items, link, parks features, link, rent a shelter, link, about the Monon Community Center, link, amenities, link, become a member, link hours of operation, link, rates, link, about the water park. Link, amenities, link purchase a day pass, link, hours of operation, link, rates, next button, name. listed link image Carmel Clay Parks and Recreation footer. Chrome has new window, link, info at Carmel Clay Parks dot com. Link, sign up…. Denise Erazmus (small picture in picture on screen) directly addresses camera: So, as you can see, some things are good. You can tell, it would say link, and it would give you the information. What is that link doing? But then other things such as like a phone number. Three thousand one seven eight four three, three thousand eight seventy. I don’t know about you but that’s not normally how I would read a telephone number. So you can see some of the information wasn’t fully given to the user. The screen reader user should have the same experience as the, um, as a sighted user. So another aspect of this is PDFs. I don’t know if you as Realtors use a lot of PDFs on your sites but PDFs also need to be accessible. They will follow the same WCAG guidelines that we’re gonna discuss. And they need to meet levels A and double A which we will get into at a later point. But it is something to keep in mind that it is also another issue in accessibility that you have to look at. So now we are gonna discuss the acronym of POUR and then the WCAG guidelines. POUR is an acronym for four principles that describe functional accessibility. Many of the challenges faced by people with disabilities can be described by using one of these four principles. We also sue these principles to help break down the WCAG Guidelines which we’ll discuss next. So first we have P. Which is for perceivable. Can the user identify content and interface elements by using their senses. For many this means is the element visually perceivable, for others it’s a matter of sound. Some examples, you have an online application form with input fields. If the field labels are not readable does the user still have the ability to complete the form? Will I know what to put in what box? I you have a chart, if the user can not see the chart, do they understand the information it contains? DO you have information in your system that they can access it in a different way? Then you have a website that contains information that does not meet contract guidelines. Can the low vision user still use this information? Next we have “O” which is Operable. Can the user successfully use controls, buttons, navigation, and other interactive elements? For many this means being able to find and identify the interface control visually. And then being able to interact with that control. For others this may be using a keyboard, or a voice control device to access this same element. Some examples is a navigation menu that reveals a submenu where it drops down. When the user uses a mouse to hover on it, if the menu does not expand when it receives focus, meaning when you click on it or interact in some way, can the user still access that same information? Also for links on a website can be activated with a mouse click. If that click does not receive keyboard focus, can a keyboard user still access them? “U” is for understandable. Is the technology consistent in its presentation and format? Is it appropriate for the audience? So some examples is the reading level appropriate? So you would expect like, a, um, a website for children to have a much lower reading level than say a medical journal. So you need to structure the content for your audience. Being Realtors obviously you deal with a wide range of people so you want to go for a common reading level. If the website contains non-English sections, so say you have Spanish on your website. The code needs to define that that is Spanish so when the screen reader gets to it, it doesn’t try to use English pronunciations rules to pronounce Spanish. Is the navigation consistent from page to page? So meaning if you have five pages on your website, is it all structured essentially the same way? Does the user have to re-learn how to use your website with every single page? Or did they figure out the first time and then know what to do from then on? Last would be Robust. This a little more of a technology issue. Does the website meet technology standards and is it designed to function on all appropriate technologies? Meaning will your website work on all web browsers? And then also if you have videos on your website, does the user have the appropriate plug in to make it work? And if not can they still obtain this information? So those concepts of POUR are then used for WCAG guidelines. WCAG is Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. And it was developed by the W3C, which is the world wide web consortium. Which is an international community where members organizations, a fulltime staff, and the public work together to develop web standards in cooperation with individuals and organizations from around the world. The goal of, is the goal of providing a single shared standard for web content accessibility that meets the needs of individuals, organizations, and governments internationally. So what we are gonna do, this gets a little complicated in the rules so I’m not going to spend so much time going over each individual rule so just kind of, yeah, and overview of it. How this works is they are broken up into this POUR principles that we discussed earlier. And then there’s level A, Level Double A and Level Triple A. Level A is kind of like, I’m a “C” student, I’m getting just the bare minimum done. Level AA is – um, we’re doing good, we’re already doing well. And then Triple A is – You’ re amazing, the sites fantastic. In general we try to aim for double A. Triple A gets hard to do for everything. But the general kind of goal, is at least double A. So what are some of these rules? So this first one we have is perceivable guidelines. One would be like for 1.1 non-text content. Is there Alt Text on all your images? And we’ll discuss what alt text is. For 1.2 video content, which will be non live. Is there a text transcript of all video content? So if a person can’t hear. Can they read about it instead? 1.3 is adaptable. Tables are set up correctly. That’s within code. Is it intuitive reading order. So if someone is using a keyboard. 1.4 is distinguishable text in images that are decorative. If there is an image and there is text in it, is it decorative only? You don’t want to be using an image, so give content for information. Then we have the operable guidelines, so 2.1 would be keyboard access, could I get to everting on the page using just the keyboard, I don’t have to touch my mouse. I’m just tabbing through it, can I get to everything? Then also 2.3 is for seizures. If you have animations on your website. They need to not flash more than three times per second. Then we also have understandable guidelines. Is its predictable, do an, um, like is there a change that is expected? So you don’t want to be clicking on something and like the colors change on the site. That would not be an expected change. And the last one is those Robust Guidelines again, this gets like I mentioned before a more little technical, in such things as is the code written properly? Does it run on all operating systems? Just like we end a sentence with a period. Code needs to be ended in a certain way so all those thigs are done, that sort of thing. Ok, so what we are gonna do now, now that we kind of know a little bit of about how we decide if a site is accessible or not. And we’re gonna go into some examples of specific issues. So first we’re gonna talk about color contrast. Contrast is a measure of the difference in perceived luminance or brightness between two colors. The brightness difference is expressed as a ratio. 1:1 would be white text on a white background and 21:1 would be black text on a white background. WCAG requires that visual text and images have a contrast ration of 4.5:1. There are some exceptions. For large text, if its incidental, or logotype. There are also different guidelines for input fields, that sort of thing. So how does, what does color blindness look like? So our top line is normal vision. You can see the full spectrum of the rainbow. The next would be red-green weak. So you can see like the powder blue becomes purple, the greens become a little murky, can’t really see the red at all. Blue yellow, you got a little more blues and pinks but I don’t really see any greens anymore. And then monochromacy which is no color whatsoever. So what effect does this have. Like, they are still seeing some color why wouldn’t they be able to read my font anymore. Well we have an example, this is an actual email that I received that we have a lovely yellow background and a gray font. Um, I am not color blind. And I have difficult reading this. So this is a poor example of design in general. But how we get those ratios, that we discussed, we use this tool that will be given to you guys at the end. We use a tool, where we input the colors. So we have a foreground color of gray, your foreground would be like your text or anything like that. Then a background color of this mustardy yellow. So our tool says we have a ratio of 1.24:1, which is a fail. Then it will tell us that it’s a fail for double A, it’s a fail for triple A, Fail for large text, And its a fail for graphical objects which is text in posts. The next issue would be Alt Tags. So an alt tag is an alternative text. Um, Its HTML code used to describe the appearance and function of an image on a page. You want to add alt text on all images unless they are deemed decorative. Being if you have an image on your page. What information are you trying to give you the user from that image. That’s what your alt text should be. So we’re adding alt text on photos is first and foremost principle web accessibility visual impaired users using screen readers, will be read the alt attributes to better understand an on-page image. Alt tags will be displayed in place of an image if an image file can not load. So you can still get that information to the user even if the page doesn’t load. Alt text provide better image context description in the search engine crawlers helping them index and image properly. And then which thus increases your search engine optimization. Ok so this is an example of Alt text, so… we have an alt tab of Jacobs Park sign. So think what do you think Jacobs park sign is going to look like. Well this is the picture we have. Now based on that alt tag you would think it was just this sign, just the Jacobs Park not the whole playground in the background. Um, so this is the code for it. So the title of the image itself is Jacob’s Park sign. So the alt tag was just pulled from that title. Where really it should be something more like Jacob’s park playground, you know, just a little bit more information so that the user knows that its the playground we are looking at. And not really the sign. The main thing to keep in mind with these alt text is think about what information are you trying to give your user by that image? That is most likely what your alt text should be. Here is another example from Amazon. This is a little bit more of an explicit example. We have a bag of Doritos. So the alt tag is Doritos tortilla chips, nacho cheese 1.75 ounce large single serving pack of sixty four. So as you can see you can fit quite an amount, in ah, alt text. So don’t feel like you need to make your alt tag Dorito tortilla chips. Its really not all the information, you want all the information in there that that image is giving. Or that you want your user to know. Next we are going to discuss label forms. So, I’m sorry ya, forms, the labels on the forms. So if you got a form like this, email the park district, and message. You would think based on the information you have, and labels, that, that that’s the information you need to give. You need to, you’re gonna email Park District or you’re gonna give them a message or hit submit. And that’s it. Well now we find out that there really is more labels right? You have name, first name, last name, email, phone number. And you have some indication of what is required. Well if these things aren’t set up properly, the screen reader user first of all would not know what is required, but then you submit the form, and you get an error. Well the error says, the errors have been highlighted below. If I am non visual, how am I gonna know what is highlighted? If I am color blind I might not know what is highlighted. Additionally, you have the error itself is, this field is required, please enter a value. What is THIS field? The errors should properly give you a list at the top of all the errors so a screen reader user or a color blind reader can read what the errors are. And then the error below each field would be the name, first name and the last name field are required, please enter a value. Or if you have an email, say, I just entered DErazmus and I didn’t put like at you know Yahoo or whatever. It should give you that information. What format does the input need to be? Rather than jut blanket, please enter a value. So those are some of the common errors that we see. Next we are going to discuss Accessibility Overlays. What is an Accessibility Overlay? Overlays are applications and coding that “sit” between your website and the assistive technology. The goals is to allow business owners and compliance managers the ability to make their website more accessible, without having to change the underlying source code. Sounds great we don’t have to change code, wonderful. Will this fix all my accessibility issues? No. Nearly 100 companies that were sued in the first six months of 2020 also had an overlay or an accessibility widget enabled on their website. So these overlays are not stopping lawsuits. So why shouldn’t we use these? What’s the problem? Overlay vendors fix only the easy stuff, leaving big accessibility gaps. They also make the user use their assistive technology. So this is the analogy I just kind of think of. Every day you drive a Ford Focus to work you’re used to your small car, you’ve been driving it for 20 years. Then suddenly I tell you, oh, I’m sorry, for this bit of road, you have to use a semi. You’re only allowed to use that. Well, it would be off-putting to have to use something you’re not used to. So they’re forcing the user to use their technology rather than the technology that they’ve set up to their specifications and their preferences. Um, these overlays also do not conform to WCAG conformance. They are not supported by mobile web users, so more and more people, especially people with disabilities are using their phones rather than their computer. I mean I don’t know if you’re like me, I don’t, after work I don’t search on my computer, I search on my phone. They also do not protect from lawsuits. We’ll send this out with materials later, but this is an article about, from a lawyer, about whether or not overlays protect you from an ADA, uh, lawsuit. So on the subject of lawsuits, this is a graph with some information about lawsuits during the COVID 19 period. So as we can see, they kind of went down in March and April but that is also the time period when a lot of us were locked down. A lot of courts were shut down. A lot of work kind of came to a slow. Well we’re all kind of starting to open up again right, so the lawsuits are continuing to go up, they’re getting hirer. What can we do? Is it hopeless? I can’t fix my website. What are some things you can do to help make this situation better? First thing you can do is to run your site through a manual tool and we will supply you with some of these free ones. There are pay ones, but one example of a free one is Lighthouse. It is important to keep in mind that these only find 20 to 30 percent of errors. If you get 100 percent on accessibility on Lighthouse, it does not mean your website is accessible. But what it’ll do, it’ll give you SEO and stuff like that too and performance. But it’ll give you a list of your general errors and what were some of the flaw on your site. I also recommend a few manual things like tabbing through your website. So go on your website, put your cursor in the search bar and hit tab on your keyboard. Can you get to everything on your site? That’s another, a manual process. Yeah, a manual process of testing it this is an automatic I apologize. To find So what do we do, we found a whole bunch of errors on our site. What do we do now? You can check with your suppliers and ask them to give you a compliant site. So if you paid somebody to build your site, see if you can get them to make the corrections for you and you’ll supply the materials later on. An example is some letters that you can send to your supplier to see if we can get your site a little more accessible. Next thing you can do is you can get educated. Here’s just an example of some of the presentations we have going on at Promet to help you get educated, but certainly there are other places you can do it, but you know, this is kind of what we offer, but it’s good to find out, okay I have these issues, what can I do about them. Or, if you have a developer that you work with, there’s somebody that you work with on your site, encourage them to get educated and see what changes they can make on the website for you. You find out that this is all just too much for you. You not comfortable dealing with the tech side, which is fine. You can hire a professional organization that can run both automatic and manual testing on your site. Organizations such as these can also fix an accessibility issue. This is what we do at Promet. I’m in the accessibility department. We run manual and automatic tests on websites, come up with a list of errors and then we can help people fix those issues. So, you’re a little bit more advanced. You’re familiar with these tools. What you can also do is use Web Aim and ColorZilla to pick some new colors for your website. So even if you’re using a Wix or something of that nature, you can still change your colors right? So if you’re comfortable, these tools will also be given to you. You can use something like Web Aim which is that black box, which will tell you what color you have, and then you can take that information and put it into ColorZilla and, sorry reverse that, you can use ColorZilla and then put it into Web Aim and it’ll give you the ratio. You can also click around and change that color, and see what affect that has on your ratio, so you can get more accessible colors for your site. You can also use a tool called Wave, which we will also supply for you. What Wave does, it’s another automatic tool, it will run your full site, it will give you a list, if you look on the left, it’ll give you a list of errors, contrast errors, some alerts and some other structural elements that get a little code heavy. You go into it, you can click an error, find out what is the problem, so like an image, an alternate text is not present, and then it’ll tell you how to fix it. And you can also get to the actual code level to fix it. This is where it’s good to point out, part of the reason why we can’t do just automatic testing like this, is that it won’t find everything. So like this error specifically. It says image alternative text is not present. Well say, you did have one. You have a picture of a beautiful house, but the alt text was car. Well this Wave system or Lighthouse or anything of that nature is just going to know, there’s alt text there and we’re good. The alt text is not giving the same information. So this is why it’s important to manual testing on top of your automatic testing. And then we also have some browser tools for the more advanced. We have Code Sniffer which will, again is another tool that runs all of your site. Axe which is a Chrome extension. It does a similar thing. Accessibility Insights, these are a little bit more detailed. These are all, kind of more advanced and accessibility tools. Contrast Ratio Checker which we showed. High contrast mode which is a good basic tool if you know how to put an extension in. It just converts your site to black and white. So you can see some of the problems. Where can a colorblind user have issues? Where can’t they see? Magnifying Glass. If you raise up your browser like to zoom or use a magnifying glass, some users use these magnifying glasses to raise up the font because they can’t read small print. So they’ll raise it very large, well do I lose any information on my site when you do that? Is there things that are hard to get to. So tools like this will help you figure that out. Then there’s also a MAC. There’s a built in screen reader voiceover. You can go ahead and experiment with that. If you go on YouTube there are tutorials on how to use voiceover. Similar for Windows, there’s something called NVDA which is their free screen reader. Also you can go on places like YouTube and get the resources to learn how to use these things. And I will turn it over to Ashley for a little bit about Promet. Ashley Burns (small picture in picture on screen) directly addresses camera: Thank you so much Denise. I appreciate that. So yeah, as Denise mentioned earlier in her presentation, we do have some tools for your disposal, as do many other companies that can help you address some of these issues. The first thing when we build compliant websites, it’s always ideal to start building your website ADA compliant verses retro fitting. Meaning, that when you’re building a website, you want to make sure that you’re thinking about ADA, that your objectives, that’s part of the forefront of the design. Next, we do have comprehensive audit workflows, meaning we can take the site as it is now, which if you know that it’s not ADA compliant, we can run an audit on your site and identify all the errors that are on your site that need to be fixed and validated to meet ADA requirements. So we develop that. We can also fix those errors for you and make sure, and bring it up to ADA compliance or we can simply hand over the audit and allow you to make those changes yourself. We can then go ahead and recertify the site to validate that those changes have been made. And so these are kind of some of the packages we put together for you guys as options. The first being a sort of DIY option for you. You’ll notice here that we start every, every option with a statement of accessibility and a grievance method. Meaning you’ll make a statement on your home page allowing all the users that are using your website, to let them know that you’ve started the process, it’s under way, you’re making the changes to allow your website to be more ADA compliant. And you give them a method of communication, while that’s happening and being worked through, a way to contact you, as an alternative method. The second being some education. I know Denise shared with you, some upcoming training classes that we have. The link to those training classes is also right here and when we send out the presentation to you all we can include a promo code so you guys can get a discount off of that, August 26th training course. So we’ll share more information with you at the end. The second option would be to have us to go through and manually audit your website. We can start with your home page there, just to identify all the compliance violations. And that’s a report that we’ll hand out to you and we’ll include code model remediation fixes to make sure that those errors are fixed on your website. And again, we’ll go ahead and certify and retest that to make sure all those fixes have been applied. And the third option that we have is an audit and remediation package. Meaning we’ll not only go through and identify all those errors, but we’ll actually perform the fixes for you as well. So if any of these packages are interesting to you, or something you want to inquire and get further information about, we encourage you to reach out following this presentation. And those are just an example of some of our representative accessibility clients. And now I know that you guys had some questions for Denise that came through while she was presenting so I can go ahead and just read those for you now. Denise Erazmus (small picture in picture on screen) directly addresses camera: Yeah, can you read ‘um to me? Because I can’t get the Q & A box open. Ashley Burns (small picture in picture on screen) directly addresses camera: Yeah. Absolutely. So, what are your thoughts on UserWay? They have a free and paid version. The newest version allows a bot to scrap your website for errors and things that need to be fixed. Would you say this is an adequate platform without spending hundreds or thousands of dollars per month or quarter? Denise Erazmus (small picture in picture on screen) directly addresses camera: What it’s gonna do, it’s a great start, certainly. Right. Anything that’s looking at your site for you to find your errors. But like I mentioned, this is only going to find about 20 to 30 percent of your errors. It’s not like, my example of the Alt Text. It would know you have Alt Text on your pictures, but is it, you know, the rule is, concise and informative. Is it concise and informative. It’s not going to find all of your errors. It’s not going to know, can I tab through everything in my web page. It’s not going to know, our example of the screen reader where it read the phone number as a long series of numbers rather than like an actual phone number. It wouldn’t find that. So there’s a lot of things it’s not going to find. But it’s certainly a very good place to start. I recommend an automatic tool just to kind of give yourself, an idea of this is where I’m at. Another great example is Site improve, that is a pay service. But Site improve will do the same thing. It will scrape your website. Ashley Burns (small picture in picture on screen) directly addresses camera: Okay. Second question. Do you know if these attorneys that are suing Realtors are using these same type of tools to evaluate our websites prior to filing a suit? Denise Erazmus (small picture in picture on screen) directly addresses camera: I’m sorry wait. Run that by me again. I’m sorry. Ashley Burns (small picture in picture on screen) directly addresses camera: Do you know if these attorneys that are suing Realtors are using these same type of tools to evaluate our websites? Denise Erazmus (small picture in picture on screen) directly addresses camera: That’s what they’re doing from what I understand. They use like a free scraper and they find the easy things. Because, I mean, they’re not finding hard code issues, right. They’re finding the easy things like you could go on Site improve also has a free end. So you could go on Site improve and find 15 errors on somebody’s website. That is how they’re getting the errors from what I understand. They’re not hiring someone like me to go through your website. Ashley Burns (small picture in picture on screen) directly addresses camera: The next question. Do we have a site who we can check the accessibility where we can count on their results? Denise Erazmus (small picture in picture on screen) directly addresses camera: Anything that’s automatic is only going to get you a certain amount of things. If you really want a full, you know, we’re going to try and catch everything, you’d have to hire a company like Promet or someone similar that does a mixture of automatic and manual accessibility. You do have, certain sites will say that they’re accessible, and we can prescribe, send some information on how to question these people as to whether or not it really is accessible. There are certainly people out there that our selling sites that say it’s 100 percent accessible and it’s not. So it’s good to know, what are the questions that you need to ask to, you know, ensure that they’re giving you something that’s what you’re paying for. Ashley Burns (small picture in picture on screen) directly addresses camera: Right. Does this tool that knows how to read your site be one solution to support ACA? Denise Erazmus (small picture in picture on screen) directly addresses camera: Like. All these tools. I think the point I’m kind of driving home is, all these tools are a great starter point. So all these things that read your site that Lighthouse, Site Improve, anything of that nature, Wave, that it’s just a starting point. It’s not giving you all your errors, it’s not fixing everything. It’s just finding the basic stuff. And that’s the same thing like these overlays are doing. Overlays are fixing just the basic stuff. They’re not getting into, um, more complex issues. And that’s where you do need a mixture of automatic and manual testing. Ashley Burns (small picture in picture on screen) directly addresses camera: How do you handle pdfs? Denise Erazmus (small picture in picture on screen) directly addresses camera: Pdfs are problematic in their nature. Um, you need Adobe Acrobat Pro to be able to audit them and we do, I don’t know if we have it coming up, any of the training. Ashley may know. We do do training on how to remediate your pdfs. It is best, if you can, to get your pdfs just in the website like having in html code, it’s just easier. But you can use Adobe Acrobat Pro. They have an accessibility function. It’s complicated in that, you hit the accessibility thing, it’ll tell you what your errors are. Once you fix something, you can’t go back. So, it’s very permanent in nature, which makes it hard to use. Um, there are services out there, that will fix your pdfs for you. Just be cautious to make sure they’re actually giving you an accessible product in the end. But the main thing you need to do is Adobe Acrobat Pro in order to be able to fix those. And I would encourage you, if you can get the pdf off if you can make it a part of your website to do that. Ashley Burns (small picture in picture on screen) directly addresses camera: Thanks Denise. I was just going to say we can include additional resources for you guys on pdfs. If I embed a YouTube video on my website am I responsible for the transcripts, closed captioning, or is the creator of the video responsible? Denise Erazmus (small picture in picture on screen) directly addresses camera: I would, you, well, this gets into third party issues. But, if you have the video off of YouTube, if they posted it. Like if somebody else, say I had a website, I had a video I posted on YouTube, and you took it and posted it on your site, you couldn’t put captions on it so it becomes a third party issue. But, if you created a video on YouTube and then put it on your own site, you can put the captioning on it. It is extremely easy to put captions on YouTube videos. There’s a YouTube video on how to do it. It’s really just a matter of going in there and making sure, because YouTube will automatically generate captions for you. They’re extremely inaccurate. So all you have to go in, is there’s a screen where you can edit the captions. So you can then go in and make sure it actually says what you want it to say. But if it’s a video that somebody else did and you put it on your site, you can’t make the changes, so it’s a third-party issue, but you shouldn’t, you shouldn’t be using things that are not accessible anyhow. It’s not an excuse to not be accessible. If that makes sense. Ashley Burns (small picture in picture on screen) directly addresses camera: Will, will the follow up email to this session include pricing for your services. Further will your services 100 percent guarantee that we will be protected from receiving a letter from an attorney as long as no changes or updates are created by us, the users of the site? Denise Erazmus (small picture in picture on screen) directly addresses camera: You want to take that Ashley? Ashley Burns (small picture in picture on screen) directly addresses camera: So yes, we will definitely include pricing, if you reach out to myself, I can certainly get you pricing depending upon what services you’re looking for. If you are looking to have us audit your site or audit and remediate your site or build you a compliant website that the pricing may vary based upon the needs so you can definitely reach out to me directly, uh, for a quote on that. Denise Erazmus (small picture in picture on screen) directly addresses camera: As opposed to the guarantee, what we do in our general process, I don’t know how big your guys websites are, but, in our general process we use, um, we use rfps, so we use represental pages. So we don’t normally audit, like say I have a big website of 50 pages. I don’t audit 50 pages. I audit 10 pages, but I make sure I get some elements of everything. So what our sheet will say is, our letter will say that you can put on your website, is that, as of this date, we looked at these pages. These ones are accessible, these are the third-party issues of things that we cannot change. So if you change something, if you didn’t take the errors over to another page. Like say you had a YouTube video in 15 places on your site, and I looked at one of those and said, okay these are the errors, this is what you need to fix, you fixed it there, but you didn’t fix it the other 15 places, well, you obviously have an issue still. We guarantee, the pages we look at become accessible if that makes sense. Ashley Burns (small picture in picture on screen) directly addresses camera: Yeah. We can go over that in further detail when you, if you’re interested in one of those options. Denise Erazmus (small picture in picture on screen) directly addresses camera: And I think most of your sites are pretty small so it might not be that big of an issue but usually, that’s just how we, how we do it. Ashley Burns (small picture in picture on screen) directly addresses camera: What about Alt Text? Is that purely decorative? (inaudible) does Web Scraper show that as an error when it is not? How do we protect ourselves from this type of complaint? Denise Erazmus (small picture in picture on screen) directly addresses camera: So, Alt Text is not purely decorative. Alt Text is what the screen reader reads. Or, if say a photo doesn’t load, it’ll put that in there. Now you can have decorative images, so, I don’t know, you have a picture of palm trees. It’s not giving any information to the user whatsoever. But, it’s there to look pretty. Well you can have a decorative Alt Text. So it’s an empty Alt Text so it’s like Alt with quotes. What will happen then is the screen reader will skip over that image and it’s like it’s not even there. So the scrapers will find, as I mentioned before, the scrapers will find that there is an Alt Tag. It will not know if that Alt Tag is adequate. It will say, like the example I used before, you get a picture of a house and the Alt Tag could be, rooster. Well, there’s an Alt Tag. The scraper found it. But it’s not a valid Alt Tag. Ashley Burns (small picture in picture on screen) directly addresses camera: Is it good, okay, this is another question about User Way. Is it good to use a plug in with User Way? Denise Erazmus (small picture in picture on screen) directly addresses camera: I’m not familiar with User Way’s plug in. I’ve never used it. Um, but in general, like I said before any scraper is 20 to 30 percent. I still encourage you to do little things like tabbing through your website if you use VO or NVDA, just get the basics on how to use it. Use the screen reader on your site. See what the experience is. Those are the types of things that those scrapers are not going to find. Ashley Burns (small picture in picture on screen) directly addresses camera: Right. I think the quote was in the beginning, that a hundred companies that were sued in the first six months of 2020 also had an overlay or an accessibility (inaudible) on their site, so . . . Denise Erazmus (small picture in picture on screen) directly addresses camera: Are they an overlay or are they a scraper? User Way. Ashley Burns (small picture in picture on screen) directly addresses camera: I thought it was a widget. Denise Erazmus (small picture in picture on screen) directly addresses camera: Oh, okay. Yea. So then it’s not gonna, they only fix the easy stuff, right? Like, and they make you, as I said before with the widgets, they make you use their tools. And people are still getting sued for ‘um. So there is no guarantee in that. Ashley Burns (small picture in picture on screen) directly addresses camera: Right. So a site with only four to ten pages would be guaranteed? Now I think that’s in reference to our services? Denise Erazmus (small picture in picture on screen) directly addresses camera: It depends on what we, like, you’d, they’d have to talk to you. I’d assume that’s what they mean. Ashley Burns (small picture in picture on screen) directly addresses camera: Yea. Denise Erazmus (small picture in picture on screen) directly addresses camera: If we looked at everything. Ashley Burns (small picture in picture on screen) directly addresses camera: Right. Denise Erazmus (small picture in picture on screen) directly addresses camera: If that’s how it was structured. At that point in time, baring any third-party issues, then yes. But like so if there’s things that you can’t change, like I said, what we’d do is list the pages that we had, what error, then any errors we couldn’t fix. So to say that it’s 100 percent accessible, there may still be caveats to that. There’s things that were third party issues that we couldn’t fix. Like, um, we do a lot of municipalities right? And so, they often have their one site to link to other places. So, they’ll say, you know, click here to register and it brings it up in another program. Well, we’re not auditing that other program. We don’t audit third parties. So, there’d be that. Or, we don’t, also as Promet, we don’t do pdfs. So if you had pdfs on your site we would list those as an exception. We do not look at those. So those would have to be, you’d have to hire somebody to do it or do it yourself to make those accessible. So yes and no to answer that question. Ashley Burns (small picture in picture on screen) directly addresses camera: Well that’s kind of a good segue, you sort of answered that here. The free IDX site, including, included with our MLS are not WCAG compliant. Who would receive the attorney letter in the instance that the site was target, MLS or the agent? Denise Erazmus (small picture in picture on screen) directly addresses camera: I’m not an expert on that particular area, but I would think the agent would though. Maybe your lawyers can answer that but I would think the agent would. I’m just a developer. I don’t know that. (laughs) Ashley Burns (small picture in picture on screen) directly addresses camera: In general, do you have any recommendations for blogging, for example, make it plain, white background, font in black, size 12 in order to make to it accessible? Denise Erazmus (small picture in picture on screen) directly addresses camera: Certainly. All those things are great. I also would say, use a, um, san serif font, something without the little feet. It’s easier to read. Other like, little trick, I obviously have glasses, I have horrible vision if I don’t have glasses on, so if I take the glasses off, can I still read it? Um, show it to other people. Can they read all of it? But definitely black and white is the easiest way to go. Something clean. I little bit of a larger font. I might even go up like 14, if the size doesn’t bother you. Um, just to make it easier to read, but yea, anything, simple is always best when it comes to accessibility. Not that you can’t make something cool with accessibility. Ashley Burns (small picture in picture on screen) directly addresses camera: Great. And lastly, have you been successful in correcting issues in GoDaddy Web Builder that is not Word Press? Denise Erazmus (small picture in picture on screen) directly addresses camera: I haven’t had to do anything with GoDaddy, a lot of our clients don’t use that sort of thing, we’re mainly Word Press or Drupal. Um, things where like, you know, your WIX, and these plug and chug type websites can be problematic because, especially like WIX I know, they don’t allow you to all the code. So, you can still change things like your colors, and your Alt Text on your pictures and these basic things that we talked about. You can still change those things, but, um, a lot of times, like with WIX, you can’t get to the code level, so I can’t change certain things. And um, last I checked, which probably about six months ago, WIX was working on it, and so I’m sure, other people are going to follow suit, (inaudible) legally or whatever. Uh, to try and make it so you can access your code. But at this point, those sites are extremely difficult to make accessible, uh, and the recommendation, usually is to like go with a Word Press or a Drupal or something of that nature if you can. Ashley Burns (small picture in picture on screen) directly addresses camera: Great. Alright, well. Oh, looks like we have a couple more that just came in. How is Ditty? And I believe Ditty is an accessible Word Press theme. Denise Erazmus (small picture in picture on screen) directly addresses camera: Oh, is it? Okay, yea. Oh, I mean. Oh, I’m sorry, I hit the wrong finger. It’s all in your use of it too. So the site would be accessible, and it, there’s, especially like in Drupal I know they say certain things are accessible and they get brought over funny. So there still may be some things you gotta like, putz around with. And it’s still recommended that you ‘um, run a tool on it or do some manual testing. To like guarantee. ‘Cause a lot of times, these themes, they say they’re 100 percent accessible and they’re really not. But then there’s also certain things, like if you change a color, or make some customizations on that site, are you ruining the accessibility, are you taking some of that away? So, the testing process is still important. Even if you’re buying a fully accessible, uh theme. Ashley Burns (small picture in picture on screen) directly addresses camera: Okay, and we did have one more come in too. Is 2.0 still good or now obsolete with 2.1? Denise Erazmus (small picture in picture on screen) directly addresses camera: It’s not obsolete. The recommendation is still 2.1. Um, coming down the road, I don’t know if this is going to be five years from now or next week, they’re going to change the guidelines again. They’re restructuring, I think the guidelines will still be the same but they’ll be structured a little different. So the goal. The ultimate goal would be 2.1 triple A. But if you could start with 2.0, and then there’s some changes in 2.1 you could do it that way. But ideally, yes. 2.1 would be the way to go. Us personally, when we audit at Promet, we audit to 2.1. Ashley Burns (small picture in picture on screen) directly addresses camera: Great. Well thank you everyone and it looks like that concludes our Q and A questions. Thank you so much Denise and thank you everyone for joining us. Feel free to reach out to myself or Denise with any questions. My email address is aburns@prometsource.com and as I mentioned previously, we will be sharing a recording of the webinar as well as the presentation which contains all the resources. Thanks so much. Have a great day.