E10: Creating Accessible Content

In this United in Accessibility podcast episode,  Members from Texthelp emphasize the importance of making digital content accessible to all, not just from a technical perspective but also in terms of language and design. 

Transcript

 00:00 Speaker 
Please welcome Shauna Hanna and Tony Kelly. Shauna is the Content Strategist at Texthelp. She is responsible for planning the creation of digital content on Texthelp’s website and social media. 

Tony is the Digital Optimization Manager at Texthelp. He is responsible for looking after the Web Properties of Texthelp, the roadmap for those websites, and building that information into their accessibility roadmap.  

Today they will be discussing improving access to your digital content and making sure that your words can be understood and used. They will touch on how readability, use of language, and inclusive design comes into play, how accessible content plays a key role in your SEO strategy and more!
 
00:37 Tony Kelly 
What are we going to talk about today, we are going to talk about creating accessible content and the inclusion talents. To set the scene a little bit on why we think it's important to talk about those things. I think unfortunately, a lot of the web today is still inaccessible, there's a lot of work still to be done. There's a lot of legacy issues and still a lot of new things that have been built for the web, whether that's content or websites, that there's a lot of education and understanding, I think they'll be sort of brought out in that.  
Hopefully, through the course of our talk today, we inspire you to go back and be some of your own organizations and start that conversation or keep that conversation going depending on where you are in your own accessibility journey. But three key things that we are going to talk about today are readability and use of language, and then a little bit about inclusive design and digital content and we'll finish off with SEO strategy and accessibility and how those two are interlinked. Before we jump into that, a little bit about us, my name is Tony Kelly, I am the digital optimization manager at Texthelp. What that means, I look after all the web properties and Texthelp and the roadmap for those websites and through that is built into our accessibility roadmap as well. If anyone has any questions afterwards, please feel free to reach out or connect on LinkedIn always happy to answer some questions and I am coming to you today from Northern Ireland. And I will pass you over to Shana to introduce herself to everybody. 

02:23 Shawna Hannah 
My name is Shawna Hannah. I am the content strategist here at Texthelp. And I work very closely with Tony on a day-to-day basis. My job really is planning the creation of all our digital content. Everything that sits on our website and all our social media, that kind of stuff. My email, if anybody has any questions throughout today, or we don't get time to answer all your questions at the end is s.hanna@texthelp.com. I'm coming to you live from our Texthelp HQ, very quiet office in Northern Ireland today. I'm just going to tell you a little bit about Texthelp. First of all, before we get into the bones of the presentation. This is our why, this is our purpose, we believe that everybody has the right to understand and to be understood. What that means is for us as you know, we're a SaaS company, we're a technology company, we create tools that help people at work to achieve more by making reading and writing easier. We also have other tools that help organizations to communicate simply, clearly, and in an accessible way. We have a big goal; we've got a pretty huge goal. And I really believe that we can do it. In fact, we have to, but our goal is by 2030 that we will have helped to advance the literacy and the understanding of 1 billion people around the world. We are on course at the moment, you know our tools, we already helping over 50 million people at the moment. So, you know if this is our mid shot, and this is what we hope to achieve. I'm going to start us off today really looking at readability and the use of language, making content accessible is much more than just following accessibility requirements such as the WCAG guidelines. I would absolutely encourage everybody to have a look and try to understand and include some of that in your work. But it's all about making sure that our readers, that our audience can be truly included whenever they're interacting with us. And so beyond visual elements and functional accessibility as our choice of language, we should want our readers to not only access our content, but also to understand it too. But not everybody has the same level of understanding. That’s why readability and accessible language is so important. Readability is all about how easy or difficult it is to read something. And you may not know this, but the average reading age is just seven to 8 at grade. And in the UK, it's around age nine. And so, they're pretty staggering stop, I would say readability very much depends on a text presentation, font choice, spacing, colors, etc., are all involved as well as context. The actual words in the sentences that are written on the page, other factors go into text rate abilities, as well like sentence length, sentence structure, the average syllables per word, those kind of things. And all of these combined factors help to assess whether your writing is likely to be understood. Checking our writing for readability can help us to communicate our messages in a way that's clear and understood for absolutely every reader and Texthelp. We have developed some guidelines, and we're going to take you through some of them in a few slides time. But we would recommend that you aim for a reading age of between 9 and 15. Accessible language then is all about writing in a way that's easy for people to understand. And this means keeping content simple, short, and clear. Really focusing in on using plain and simple English, people also don't read one word at a time, they bind around especially when they're on online, they try and anticipate words and they fill them in. We very much believe that you don't need big or complicated words to sound clever. And in fact when you write more, sometimes people understand less. It's really important to think about the language that we use. Also plant language is becoming more of a legal requirement in different companies too. So why is it important? As I said, when it comes to the public sector, it's clear language is increasingly becoming a legal requirement. For example, in the US there is the federal plan language guidelines. There's the plain writing act of 2010. And then here in the UK, English is mandatory for all of our gov.uk websites. We also have the public sector bodies accessibility regulations that came into effect in 2018. And in Ireland as well, plain language as the current is in the current program for government. There's also the European web accessibility directive and existence as well. When we look to the private sector, then it really just makes good business sense. It shows great customer service, and it makes life easier for the public. You know, it leads to the fact that customers don't feel excluded or frustrated. They call less often for explanations, and they make a fewer errors when they're filling out any of our forms. And it also saves time and money. Some examples we have you know, btw in the UK customer queries by 25% after adopting plain English in their communications, Royal Mail and the UK also saved 500,000 prints in nine months by redesigning a redirect Mail Form, the Canadian government department rewrote one form and the error rate and responses fell from 40% to 20%. And the US Veterans Benefits Administration save $4.4 million by rewriting a letter and responses also increased from 43% to 65%. Who does it help? When we talk about readability and planning plain English, there are a number of groups and I'm going to take you through each of them in turn. Anybody who has low literacy, you know that they potentially will not know the meanings of complex vocabulary and terms, anyone who has any cognitive impairments, so words and sentences that are easy to understand will carry less cognitive load for them. Anyone who might have a visual impairment, so short and simple sentences convey meaning and a smaller visual field for them. And anyone who might have low English fluency will not know the meanings of complex vocabulary and terms. Anyone who has a motor impairment clear concise content is shorter, so requires left navigation for them. And a dyslexic clear concise language is much more helpful and easier to understand. Anyone who has sight loss the RNIB here that's a registered charity for the blind here at NI UK, right actually recommend using plain English and any autistics out there, the National Autistic Society advise against the use of jargon in particular. And then there's just those of us who are simply in a hurry. The short and simply written content is much easier to scan and to absorb quickly. If anybody stressed, if you're anxious, you might find it harder to understand things, if you are multitasking, for example, if you're reading an email while you're trying to deal with a customer at the same time, then your attention is divided. So just to wrap up, what does plain English mean for your writing? Well, first, it means that it's clear so people cannot misunderstand. It's complete and nothing important is missing, the reader won't have any unanswered questions. And it's concise, so you're not adding any padding, or waffle or any unintended repetition. And if you do all these things, then it's much easier for people to understand. I have some examples, some before and some after that I would like to share with you today. So first up before high quality learning environments are a necessary precondition for facilitation and enhancement of the ongoing learning process. That's really complex. There's a lot of big words in there. There's a lot of long words in there. And if we applied some readability guidelines and plain English thinking to the sentence, we might get something that looks a little bit like this. Children need good skills if they are to learn properly. Another example of the before, if there are any points on which you require further explanation or further particulars, we shall be glad to furnish such additional details as may be required by telephone.That's a big, long sentence that really could be very much simplified by saying, if you have any questions, then please phone. So really, what I'm saying there is that we don't need to use a formal language, we don't need to have a whole host of jargon words in our language. You know, if you wouldn't use words, in a normal conversation with somebody who sat beside you, then maybe think twice about using them whenever you're writing. These are the guidelines that we have developed at Texthelp. We have nine top tips for better readability, and we try and apply these as much as possible. The first one is using click news plain English. Number two, nobody's got time for jargon and unnecessary buzzwords. So please take a minute. Number three, get straight to the point, cut their word of waffle. Number four, remove any repetitive words. Number five, use bullet points or numbered lists. Number six, address your readers directly using You and We. Number seven, make it easy to read. Use the whitespace and clear subheadings that really helps with scanning. Number eight, define any acronyms or abbreviations, again, so that it's easy to understand. And number nine, above all else, try and keep it short. These are just some of the guidelines that we have developed here @Texthelp. Another thing that I could say that you can use is to use a readability checker to help you and there's a few of them out there. But we actually have developed one ourselves, we have a large team of developers at Texthelp. And we've built our own tool for auditing the accessibility and readability of our website and our online content. The tool is called Reese Recheck. And if you'd like to check that out and get a free scan, then visit text dot help forward slash AAP hyphen, scan, you know happy free guys to try that out. But it really helps Tony and I you know, particularly because we do so much work on our website, it helps us to make sure that we're trying to make our content as readable and as accessible as possible. It helps us to highlight any grammar or spelling readability errors as we write allows us to really focus on plain English, and trying to make our writing a particular reading age and you know, avoid any long sentences, and avoid using jargon where we can't so you know, the toolbars all those things. But yes, above all else, readability and using accessible language means that everybody is included, and it just makes good business sense. 

13:47 Tony Kelly 
The next section, we're going to look at how to improve the accessibility of your online content and really thinking that from a design perspective, it's a lot of lived experiences. As Shawna mentioned, we have sort of walked the walk in the past while rebuilding and redesigning our own site. This is really looking at some of the learnings we have from that. And hopefully you can pick up some ideas from this yourselves, diversifying your personas. For anyone who isn't familiar about a persona is if you think if you're creating content, or if you're building a new asset, you're creating that typically for a customer or a person or a group of people that you think will come to use your product or service. And a persona is really a representative of that grip that you can use to say okay, what do we need to build that is going to help these people when they do come to use our site. So quite often, those personas can forget or not use people with disabilities. It's a real superpower, I think to use and include users with disabilities within your personas. If you are thinking of people with disabilities at the start of your process, and before you start designing before you start building things, inevitably you're going to build a much better experience for everyone, not just people with disabilities. And the one in the middle there. I would say also don’t forget such as no disability so you may have a piece of content or you're going to build a section of your site, maybe that has instructional guides or videos. And you might have some of your personas that want to maybe watch those videos on the train or in the bus on the way to work. And maybe they forgot their headphones, it's still like watching the video, but they do want to be that person on the train or bus who's playing the videos. If you have sort of thoughts about that, and you've provided captions on your videos, they can still use the videos and sort of get the meaning and download the content to not miss out on that experience. Things like that are important to consider as well as the next step. This isn't an either or this is kind of a progression from thought about your personas. And who you need to build for it. There's nothing like going and actually speaking directly to customers to potential users and trying to understand the pain that they have, and how they got to the point of potentially coming to use your user service or purchase your product. So that should be an ongoing process. That's something we do quite often @Texthelp. It's not something you should just do when you're designing something new, you're building something new, people need change over time. And it's useful to get that feedback directly from customers. And really, to talk about the final point here, if helping to solve pain points for your customers, that's going to provide real value for them, they're going to keep coming back to you, if you can help keep solving their problems. That's going to build a much better relationship with you and your customers. Some things to avoid, then sort of during those conversations, it's sometimes your internal bias can come in, and you might start asking questions around the features they've used, or why do they love your product so much. And you don't want to really try to lead them to provide them with kind of be it's to an extent to sort of tell you why they think they're so great, or why they think that you as a company or your product is so great, really, you want to give them that space. Let them sort of guide you to where they got to and how they've got to the point of using your product. And don't try to put words in their mouth to speak while they're thinking it's fine. If you ask the question, and they take some time to think and come up with the response, let that silence sit there. And sometimes it's difficult, you might want to fill that space. But you really want to open the floor to them and use open-ended questions helps them to articulate their opinion and how they fix that and get to the point of engaging with you, some examples of where to start instead. A lot of this is sometimes just putting the customer at ease before you kick off and really get into the conversation. But ask them questions about their day-to-day life. And what's the pain that they experience that led them to your product or service? And how do they notice that pain in their day-to-day life? Starting off with simple questions like, tell me a little bit about what you do in your day to day, what are you working on right now. There's lots of useful things that you will pick up as they're walking you through the journey that they have went on, to get to the point not just how they use your product, if there's a specific reason how they got there, and that could be months ahead of them actually engaging with you, you want to understand that. You can take that and try to replicate that for other people, either in your content or when you're building out different areas of your website. 

18:09 Shawna Hannah 
I think we could talk to very briefly about but he's asking us to address why it's important to have your real base personas include persons with disabilities, rather than having persons with disabilities as a separate set of personas that are isolated from a typical customer base persona. 

18:31 Tony Kelly 
Yeah, for sure. That's a great point. And really, that's talking to the reality of the people that you're trying to target. And the customers that you have will be a very, very diverse mix. It's not one group of people who have disabilities and another group of folks who are fully abled, there's a real mix and a broad range of abilities. But then all your customers and I think it goes back to the point a little bit that if you're considering both of those together, you will end up making a much better solution or creating a better piece of content that works for everyone. And then, as we wrap this section up a little bit, get expert help. Texthelp are at its core, an accessibility company, you don't need to go around too many corners, a Texthelp to find somebody that will talk to you for numerous hours if you let them know about accessibility. It's at the core of everything we do in terms of our products. And we sort of thought about building our website. But in saying that, we still felt it was important to get expert help and take any of our own internal bias out of the scenario. We partnered with a user experience agency and brought them in, they helped run some of our interviews with our customers. You may have a scenario where if you're asking a customer for feedback on a prototype or a new feature, they maybe don't want to open up and maybe be critical of something that they don't find useful. If you take yourself out of the picture and put a neutral person in there to have that conversation, they may give a more honest appraisal of what you're asking them to assess. And plus, some of those agencies will bring a lot more of real world experience to the process they may have worked with other companies, and have that more experienced with the sort of diversity of persona that we're talking about and can bring that experience into your conversation, and help close some of the gaps that may exist in your own knowledge or are you thinking about going forward with that sort of research designed. 

 20:29 Speaker 
The IAAP certified professional and accessibility core competencies. CPACC credential is IAAPs foundational certification representing broad cross disciplinary conceptual knowledge about thoughtful design, policy, and management to be inclusive of all the CPACC is the ideal credential for those who manage and support accessibility, but who may not personally design implement or evaluate the technical details of accessible solutions. Check out the exam content outline on our website. 

21:03 Shawna Hannah 
Accessible social media plays a part in creating a good user experience for everyone. And it also helps to create a positive brand that makes it the first impression to as part of this series, there's going to be a much deeper dive and to social media later in this series. I encourage you all to come back and watch that as well. But some top tips for social media would be to add alt tags to imagery that you're using this functionality is available on platforms, like Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. I would limit your use of emojis where possible, make sure that videos you share on social media have captions, or subtitles, and a voiceover. If you go to use Subtitles leave a good amount of time between each frame, capitalize the first letter of each word and a hashtag limit links to one per post and make sure that is clear as to where the user will end up if they click through. And I would also then write your posts with accessible language in mind, taking into consideration some of the tips that we shared earlier on. And then if you prefer to use a social media management tool, then before you would go and invest in one, they are quite costly, make sure that it has accessibility features included. The two that we have used @Texthelp have been HootSuite and Sprout Social. They allow us to add alt tags to some of the images that we will post on the native platforms as well. I would also say that there's a great Facebook group facebook.com/groups/accessiblesocial, that you can get so much information from. It's run by a lady called Alexa Heinrich, she has written some guidelines and there's something that I didn't do every day, just to make sure that that I am trying to stay on top of what the trends are. Webinars then are another type of digital platform. I would just encourage everybody to try and choose an accessible platform, like Zoom or Google that includes accessibility features, such as captioning. And if you're not able to do them, then I would maybe outsource your captioning to a third party as well. That's something that we've done before in the past. If you can speak clearly and slowly when you're delivering your presentation and make sure that there's a way for our viewers to maybe raise a question or concern. And also, you can offer notes ahead of time to allow viewers to follow along a bit like what Tony and I did at the start, if you can give a visual description of yourself to kick off the session, then that really offers a nice inclusive welcome to all viewers because you really don't know what your audience makeup is like. Then when it comes to podcasts, that's another great digital content resource that we produce. We use the transcription service rev.com with the service, human transcripts, the audio from our podcast recordings. And this is I believe better than relying on any audio transcription, which can often be inaccurate, the thing that I really like about rev.com as well is that there's also the option to add timing to the transcript and it's nice as an extra if anybody's trying to navigate parts of your podcast as they read the script, it can very much help with that understanding. We host our Tech Talk podcasts on Buzzsproud, right? It's a podcast hosting platform, but it also allows us to add that transcript whenever we're uploading a new episode, and we also do the same with uploading the transcript to our website whenever we publish Stop there as well. When it comes to accessibility, it's important to remember visual accessibility is all about making sure that users enjoy the same benefits from your beautiful designs. And you know it really has alt text behind imagery, just make sure that any screen readers that comes along, they can read out the description of the image, as they come across visual elements also helped improve anyone’s that understanding. It's important that alt texts can convey the meaning as well. Over to you, Tony. 

25:31 Tony Kelly 
I just wanted to talk very quickly with one slide in here on pod quality assurance around accessibility. And how do you check that all those good things that we're talking about, are implemented, and then sort of keep tabs on them? I suppose in the future, there's several things that I'd like to talk about some automated checks, Shawna has mentioned a few tools that we can use. Again, we'd stack that the techs have developed, I use it, not every day, but at least every few days on our own website. It can run a scan of the entire site, and then comes back with a report and helps me then go and have those conversations, whether it's with content team, or development teams, for some things that need improved upon. I do think it's important to say that I lose tools, or I think they're very useful for discovering and finding those issues that you need to fix, I would lean away from using tools that potentially recommend automatically fixing them, I do think there's a human touch needed there, in terms of the best practice that you want to implement. And sometimes a tool just can't give the same sort of experience that you can sort of tech with a human. So those top two kind of go hand in hand and initiative that we've kicked off @Texthelp, which I think is it really ties back into the a few sites back where I talked about those conversations with customers, and having people to hand that you can go and have a conversation and run new features, new ideas pass text that was launched on accessibility champions network, which is essentially. We've reached out ahead of time before we kind of needed any help with a specific project and got some customers and users on board and say, look, at some point in the future, we might like to run some ideas, a few new features will be some things for our website, and get some feedback. What that allows us to do is to get that feedback really, quickly, if you don't have those people that they've maybe agreed to help. Sometimes it can take weeks, just going back and forth and trying to find people who are available. We've, I don't know the exact numbers, but we have a bunch of people that are happy to help. And we'll incentivize their time and say, look, if we take half an hour of your time, we send you an Amazon voucher or something like that. So that can be really valuable and just helps your flow when you're designing or building things. The last point is about challenging donors. We're lucky enough we don't have any donors in our organization. We don't need to use any of these, but there may be some organizations where people ask, well, what's the point? How does this help, I don't need any of these features. They don't have that empathy yet that everyone should have. But there's a few these things come up from a webinar from the good folks over at Deep Crawl data webinar accessibility a few weeks ago, I recommend also to go back and watch that. But if you do have a donor in your organization, there's a few things that you can ask them to do that will hopefully start them on their journey of accessibility. So yeah, some use a screen reader, listen back to your content, some of the things that Shawna had mentioned, if you have a lot of jargon words and unnecessary words in your content, if you listen to it back with a screen reader, sometimes that gives you a different perspective, in terms of rather just skim reading through if you read through, turn off JavaScript and try to use your website. That's a useful thing to do from both an accessibility and an SEO perspective that we talked about a little bit, if your website totally falls over, when you switch JavaScript off, you can do that in Chrome Dev Tools. But that's not going to be a good experience. Use an extension to emulate colorism changes. Again, you can do that within Chrome Dev Tools, or browse your website with that in mind. You have someone like that in your organization, you ask them to sort of go through that and carry out a task while under some of these conditions that we've outlined here, that will hopefully start to change their mindset of where they're at. And I suppose just to reiterate this point that when everyone is included, it makes good business sense. There are a few things I'll touch on in the next section. But I think whenever you look at it like this, it's common sense that the more people that you can get to your website, and the more people that can use it, that's only a good thing. I'm going to finish up by talking a little bit about SEO and accessibility. I think SEO has been SEOs in the past. I've sometimes blurred the lines a little bit and forgot that accessibility is there to help people and users when they come to your site. And I suppose SEO will be in search engine optimization. You're trying to optimize your performance in a search engine to get more people to your site. And some SEO has in the past, maybe one of piggyback and said well, if I do some of these SEO, these accessibility things, it might help me rank better in search and forgetting the fact that you're accessibility is there to help people and make your website more usable. I am going to break it down between people, process and platforms.Today, I want to talk a little bit more about the strategic side of things and how you can have those conversations in your organization to help you get help from higher up in your organization that you can get these things implemented a little bit better over time. The SEO and accessibility overlap, and there is an overlap. But I think it's useful to start with just a simple definition on both of them. If you think of SEO, from a perspective of its role is to get more people to your website, and specifically from search engines, it gets people to your door, accessibility then allows more people to use your website. If you do both of those things, really well get more people there and more people can use it. And why should you care? Again, going back to those people, maybe in your organization, why should I care? Third, this is a from a survey in the UK, they're again, making better business sense. There's data there that shows, and this is from a few years back. But in 2016, there was a survey of more than 4 million people who abandoned the retail website, because of accessibility issues, as well as barriers, they couldn't complete their purchase, there was a terrible experience, those people took with them an estimated span of 11.75 billion pounds. In 2019, that number has grown to 17.1 billion. So that's probably a combination of more people are using the internet, where people are becoming familiar with it, they're probably also adding more buyers. It’s still an issue that we need to think about and educate people on and fix it. But for those people who are asking that question, why should you care if they only care about the numbers, and there is a business case here for it as well. And I think at the bottom, more importantly, it's just the right thing to do. If you can empathize with people with disabilities and how they come on and use the internet. I think in all walks of life, regardless of if it's online or offline, if you can make a positive change in the world for your fellow humans, that's something you should aim to do. This is really thinking about your organization, and how from an interchangeable perspective in terms of how you implement accessibility and SEO best practice. Your vision is really going to be set by your leadership team, and maybe your CEO, your strategy, that is there's a group of people who need to take that vision and work out well, how are we going to implement that and guess where our vision wants us to get to. And then at a tactical level, you will have people who are doing the work making the changes, making the optimizations, it's much easier if you have that vision pushing down from the top, it's very hard to work back up the way if you have somebody who's really at the tactical level and really up to speed with accessibility, but they don't have the support throughout the organization. That can be a tough mountain to climb. And that might mean that you have to go and persuade and get people in your corner, maybe in your senior team that will help you fight that fight to make those positive changes. And I think a successful strategy should consider three things and people processes and platforms will go into that in a little bit more detail. You must ensure that all teams and individuals understand priorities depart they play embracing their accountability whilst making sure in addition to clarity, they also have the tools and resources needed to be successful. You need tools and resources to implement any of these changes. But like I said, you need people to have real clarity on what they're doing and why they're doing it. And to be accountable to making those changes so that you set a goal. One of our goals is to double a compliant website. But that gives us a clear path of where we need to go to and where we need him to stay. And that makes it easier for me leading I suppose the web roadmap and working with the team to sort of give them a real clear goal to try to reach and sort of jump into those a little bit more detail people we've just to reiterate, your leaders are going to set the vision and the tone, that your strategy creators are going to take that vision, define the roadmap and decide what really needs to get done. And then your implementers are going to be the people who go away and do the work. And then processes. Processes aren't a thing that you want to use to micromanage people. Again, if we're thinking about best practices. It's really a good example here around process is, let's take all tags and images. For example, you might do your scan of your website with one of the tools we've built and found that you have 1000 images that don't have alt text on them. That's a big task for someone to go back and implement. You know, 1000 alt tags in one go. Let's say somebody does that it takes them a few days, they get it done. And a few months later you rescan the site and there's 2000 new images without alt tags added that is incredibly frustrating. Shouldn't have a process can help fix that. A written process to say look, every time you upload an image to your website, add an alt tags to it. You could also put in some automated things within your CMS to pop a message up to people who are using it that once they upload an image that they get a reminder to add the alt tags, it takes 30 seconds to do, you don't have that big batch of 1000 defects somewhere down the line. There's a number of questions. But it's just the kind of questions that you need to go through you and your organization. And then maybe ask yourself or ask your team and try to understand what are the processes that we should be considering if we're trying to implement best practice around accessibility, and SEO, and then platforms? Again, I've covered this a little bit previously. But really, platforms in my opinion, are there tools that help identify the issues, that's what they're best at doing. You could spend hours, probably days upon days, if you were trying to do go through a big website and try to identify all the accessibility issues. There are some plugins in Chrome that are available, but typically, they only work on a PHP or PHP basis. Again, that's going to take a lot of time. If you have tools that you can use that you can go through and scan your entire site, give you a report, and you can then take that away into your team. It really just allows the teams that are going to make those fixes and makes those improvements. They can spend their time working out what the issues are implementing the fixes that they need to fix. And if there is a process improvement needed, that they can work on that too. They're not spending all their time going to actually just try to find the issues the tool can take that heavy lifting off. 

 36:25 Shawna Hannah  
The team of Becky has a long-term goal to improve accessibility on our courses. They all do small things each week, that helped towards the overall goal, which is great. 

 36:39 Tony Kelly 
It is. It’s an excellent note I got there. But some platforms that I use most often. Readstack, as I mentioned, that is a textbook Zoom tool, was probably very privileged that we were probably one of the first teams to use it ever in the world. But every week, I will run a scan of the website, it will come back with a report some weeks, it says, there's nothing to fix here. Other weeks, you'll have, there's a few things that have popped up. And it’s much easier to fix those two or three things rather than have a big list of things. And it's much harder to get it on somebody's cute effects. But there's again, a short link up on the corner there. So, text dot L forward slash IAAP dash scan. There is a 30-day free trial available. But really useful tool that I use every week, as I mentioned, Headings Map as a free Chrome plugin. What it does it does it allows you on any page, you can open the plugin, and it gives you a summary of all the headings that are on the page. And we'll detail whether they're a h1, h2 or h3.From an accessibility perspective, you shouldn't have any gaps. As you go down through those, you might start with the h1, then you have a h2 go to h3 back to hit two. In some cases, it might go h1, fine h3 h6, and there's no order really in it that can cause issues with screen readers. And it’s a pretty common problem really, Headings Map would fix the problem for you. It will allow you to quickly look at the periods and sort of say, okay, here's my headings, and here's where it's out of sync, and do go back and fix it. Screaming Frog probably more until it would be more common in an SEOs toolkit. But there are some accessibility features in the net, again, alt tags, things like that, it'll give you a few technical feedbacks in terms of your SEO and accessibility performance. And then Contrast Checker is just a useful tool to have at a glance, if you're considering design or color changes that can tell you what successful being the driver of change, there's a lot of things that we've talked about today about change. And most, I would probably go as far to say all organizations can always improve, whether it's accessibility. it’s an ongoing thing. And you never get to a point where you say we're finished, we're done. That's us. Some might be further back than others. And they need to go and sort of really drive organizational change, mindset change, and have those sorts of sometimes difficult conversations within your organization and really get people to care about accessibility, and the earlier that you can have those conversations the better. I suppose if you're lucky enough to maybe be thinking about rebuilding your website, or you know what's coming up in 6 to 12 months, even two years’ time start those conversations. Now, it's much easier to talk about it at the start rather than I have been involved in some projects where people come in your website's launching in two weeks, and you're like, there's not much you can do in two weeks, both for accessibility and SEO and sprinkle some magic dust an at the end, it just doesn't work like that. You need to have that conversation from the start influencing key people you can help is going to be important across both as well. And this is the point that I wanted having a bias towards action. I think it was Jackie in the chat to her point, if you can do 2, 3, 5 things per week, that is a place to start. Don't wait until you have the perfect time. You might go and talk to a developer and developer might say, oh, well, I've got lots to do here, but in three months, I have all the time, we need to make these changes and three months passed, and there's another stack of things that are on his desk and it keeps moving. If you can get 5% moving this week, this month, do it and get the wheels turning is the estimate of change. 

40:29 Speaker  
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