Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Welcome to Within WordPress. With me today is Amber. Hi, Amber. How are you Doing.
[00:00:11] Speaker B: Really well. Thanks for having me. Remkus.
[00:00:13] Speaker A: Thanks for being here.
I look forward to having this conversation because it's been scheduled for trying to do the math here almost five months now in some way.
[00:00:27] Speaker B: I know. I apologize. My calendar. This summer has been wild. I think we talked about doing this interview at presscom.
[00:00:36] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:00:36] Speaker B: And then I looked at my calendar and I was like, I'm so sorry, but I don't think I'm available till September.
[00:00:42] Speaker A: Well, you have been busy and we'll get that very soon. For those who have no idea who you are. Wild. But you know, there are some. Please introduce yourself.
[00:00:53] Speaker B: I am the CEO of a company called Equalize Digital. We focus on web accessibility. We have a special place in our heart for WordPress as a former WordPress agency, but we do accessibility outside of WordPress as well. We have a WordPress plugin called Accessibility Checker.
Beyond that, I also run the official WordPress accessibility meetup. I'm on the board for the WordPress Accessibility Day conference meetup nonprofit. And I participate in the core WordPress accessibility team a little bit.
[00:01:30] Speaker A: Sounds like you have picked your niche.
[00:01:33] Speaker B: Yes. Accessibility.
[00:01:35] Speaker A: Yes. Like, I don't think there was anything you introduced there that did not have the word accessibility in there.
[00:01:41] Speaker B: That, that is true. I, I figured that one out early. What I thought was really fun and what I felt like was making a difference for the world. And then I decided, let's just focus on that.
[00:01:53] Speaker A: Yeah. And, and, and good for you.
I think you're doing wonderful stuff, which is one of the reasons I, I wanted to have this conversation with you.
Accessibility is for, for a lot of people, still a little bit of a black box, like they maybe have or probably have heard. It's a thing they need to pay attention to. But can you share a little bit about roughly what it is and maybe in. Maybe talk a little bit in percentages as well as in how many people visiting your site may indeed be affected by some version of an accessibility blocker.
[00:02:30] Speaker B: Accessibility is all about making your website work for everyone, regardless of what kind of device they're on or if they may need some form of assistive technology.
So common examples of assistive technology are screen readers, which blind and very low vision people use, which is software they install at the operating system level that then reads out everything on their computer, including websites when they visit them. Another form of assistive technology is captions on videos. But there's also a lot of people who use Alternative input devices like switches. There's a alternative keyboard called a Darcy usb, which essentially is like typing in Morse code in order to be able to use a computer or interact. There are people who use devices called SIP and puff devices, or they might use eye tracking if they have paraplegia and don't have use of arms as well as legs. So there are a lot of different people who engage with computers and websites in a lot of different ways. And accessibility is all about making that work for them.
According to the World health organization, about 1 in 5 people live with a disability. And there's a lot of different variations on how.
What type of disability it is. It could be something that impacts mobility, as I mentioned, it could be blindness, or it could just be low vision cataracts, which is maybe a temporary correctable disability. But at that time, when you go on, you might need to have everything zoomed in a lot until you get your cataracts corrected.
Or there's also situational issues as well. So it's a very large percent of the population that could be visiting someone's website that needs it to work outside of how a typical user might interact with the website.
[00:04:31] Speaker A: Yeah, 20% is not a small percentage.
I mean, no, that's.
For some reason. It was in 11 or 12% in my head. But 20% is.
Yeah, that's substantial.
[00:04:44] Speaker B: Very large. And in the US the CDC doesn't publish like an overall number, but they have a number.
And the CDC stands for Centers for Disease Control, which is part of our federal government agency.
They have a number on working adults. So people who have jobs and money to spend. And their number is one in four.
So it's actually 25% of. Whoa. Working age people. And I think sometimes people think, oh, well, people with disabilities. They wouldn't be my customers. They wouldn't buy from me.
But there have been studies done that they represent trillions of dollars annually in discretionary rep income. So not just money that they have to spend on absolute needs like groceries and rent and clothes, but actual discretionary I can buy for fun kind of spending.
So it is a very big population and it is people who can spend money with you.
[00:05:41] Speaker A: Oh, wow.
Yeah.
Okay, that's. And, and that's the second adjustment because 20 is large. 25, like a quarter.
A quarter of the.
Yeah.
What would you say the general state of a website is in terms of accessibility? Like if, if you just build something and you don't mind whatever tool you're using. And here you go, you have a site.
Let's Say It's a default WordPress theme.
Let's level it a little bit up to a higher percentage, hopefully.
How good are we?
[00:06:23] Speaker B: So if you have never thought about accessibility, then I can guarantee there are accessibility problems on your WordPress website.
How serious those are depends a lot on what plugins and themes you've selected and also how you have entered your content. So in WordPress land, we talk about, we have a tag that's available on WordPress.org for themes that's called accessibility ready.
Those themes have gotten a manual review and meet some basic requirements for accessibility. But it doesn't mean that every website built with those are going to be accessible because a lot of accessibility happens just in how people put content on the page. You know, are you adding alternative text to your images? Are you choosing colors that have sufficient contrast and are easy for someone with low vision to read?
There is a annual report that is put out by a nonprofit in the United States called WebAIM.
And what they do is they use, they have a browser extension called Wave and they use their WAVE API to crawl the top million websites based on traffic and just their homepages. And they report on how many have what are considered easily detectable accessibility problems. So things that can be found with an automated tool that don't even require a human to look at them. And I believe the number this year is like around 94% of problems have, or websites have problems.
[00:07:56] Speaker A: So six out of 100 don't.
[00:08:00] Speaker B: Six out of 100 don't have those easily detectable problems.
So that's why I was saying if you haven't ever tried testing for accessibility, I could almost guarantee you have accessibility problems.
We do an annual report on page builders where I was going to ask you about that.
Yeah, we test a lot of different builders and I'll say that not all tools are created equal.
And I could guarantee things like 100% of Divi or I don't know, 99.9% of Divi websites, unless someone has actually actively remediated it, have major usability problems. And divi is what, 2 or 3 million websites?
[00:08:47] Speaker A: I think something along that.
[00:08:50] Speaker B: So it is definitely a big problem both in and out of WordPress.
[00:08:56] Speaker A: Let's talk about that report.
There's. So what you, what you did is you looked at all the current existing or did you, did you pre select?
[00:09:09] Speaker B: So we looked at 19 different page builders and then we used WordPress Core with 2025 theme as kind of like a baseline. What would you start with as comparison?
And this is the second year we've done it. Last year we only did 10, so we added nine additional.
Actually, technically we added 10, and we took one away this year.
And they were primarily selected by popularity. And then also we did ask in. We run a Facebook group and we asked in there. You know, what are some builders that you would want to test?
There were also a couple of builders, plugin developers, who approached us and asked us to include them, which I think is amazing. Like, shout out to WP Bakery on that. They came up to me at wordcamp Europe and they're like, hey, are you doing this again? If we give you a free copy of our plugin, will you test it?
They knew they weren't going to be perfect, but they wanted that feedback. And they were like, we want to be able to learn and grow, which I think is amazing. And that's like the right spirit to have if you're a plugin developer.
[00:10:21] Speaker A: I feel that.
[00:10:22] Speaker B: But we look.
Oh, go ahead.
[00:10:24] Speaker A: No, I was gonna say just a sidestep here. I feel like WP Bakery is making changes in how they do things because I hear multiple signals of them really wanting to better their product, which is very commendable. And I would, everybody listening in highly recommend if you have a plugin, if you have a service on WordPress, to at least have that base mentality. Um, but yeah, sorry, that was a. That was a tangent.
[00:10:53] Speaker B: We. We have a plugin too, and we love feedback. And all the time, you know, someone pointed out, you know, some bugs to us or things that maybe it's not a bug, it's just, hey, it could be improved. And I think that's the best way to be, if you're a WordPress plugin developer, be open to feedback and figure out how you can take it into consideration as you're building.
[00:11:13] Speaker A: It's the WordPress way, right? Open source.
[00:11:16] Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah.
[00:11:17] Speaker A: But, yeah, I was interrupting you.
[00:11:19] Speaker B: Yeah, no, that's okay. I was just going to say. So with these plugins, what we did this year, I was super intentional about making sure that we were testing them in as apples to apples of an environment. Like the exact same as close as I could get. So they all have identical content, meaning they have all the same fake blog posts that ChatGPT helped me write.
They all have, like, a similar navigation structure, like all of that kind of thing, because we really wanted to make sure that when we did automated tests, which was part of the report with Accessibility Checker, that we weren't getting a bunch of false positives.
And then we went and created a page. Now, this isn't a thorough accessibility audit of all these plugins. What it is is a thorough look at some components. Because actually fully auditing all of these plugins would take even more time than it took to do what we did, which was over 200 hours of work. Looking at all of them are writing the report and summarizing and going back and retesting. If the thing that was nice this year is our accessibility specialist, Maria helped me. So we had two of us testing so we could bounce back and forth. And we were able. We did manual auditing with screen readers, and we manual audited both on Windows within VDA and on Mac with voiceover.
So we made sure we had full coverage. And there's one or two of them where there's a note that says, this works okay in voiceover, but not in nvda, which happens sometimes with screen readers. And it's important that you test with both.
[00:12:53] Speaker A: What is nvda?
[00:12:54] Speaker B: NVDA stands for Non Visual Desktop Access, and it is a free, open source screen reader for Windows.
[00:13:05] Speaker A: So.
[00:13:07] Speaker B: If you have a Mac computer, then you have voiceover built into your Mac. You just have to go to Settings Accessibility, and you can turn it on and learn how to use it and test with it. Windows does not have a default screen reader, and so it's a combination of users who use jaws, which stands for Job Access with Speech. That is a paid proprietary screen reader. So it is rapidly losing user share to nvda.
So if you're a Windows user and you want to do accessibility testing, usually you would get nvda.
[00:13:43] Speaker A: Okay.
Am I correct in remembering that most people who use screen reader applications to process websites, they have it at an insanely high speed?
[00:13:58] Speaker B: Oh, yes.
So very recently on our podcast, the Accessibility Craft Podcast, my friend Alex Stein came on and he actually did some screen reader testing of. He showed both the worst and the best of these test sites.
And when he first turns on his screen reader, it sounds like.
[00:14:24] Speaker A: Yeah, I think I remember those.
[00:14:25] Speaker B: And we're like, okay, turn it down for the rest of us that don't have superhuman hearing.
So, yes, they are very fast. And I mean, you can do everything. Alex is a developer. He is a WordPress core contributor for a long time.
He writes code, he does everything without sight and just listening to the screen reader at this incredibly fast, fast pace.
[00:14:46] Speaker A: Yeah, that's wild.
I think the very first time I heard it was. We had.
I don't remember his name exactly. Bram du Vigno, I think, is his Name at Work Camp Europe, the very first edition, and he demonstrated it. I was busy running back and forth because he was the first. And you know, as we were organizing, we were learning and doing and adjusting, but I remember seeing like five or ten minutes and the speed of the words coming through the mic or through the, to the, through the speakers was like, there were words there like, I can we, can we do that again? And then he slowed it down, and then he slowed it more down. And I, you saw the audience go like, this is for real. And he made jokes about it, but it is for real.
[00:15:38] Speaker B: I had Alex slow his down TO I think 45% was the speed and he had it up at like 100%. Plus there's a rate boost checkbox that makes it go even faster.
And, and then we sent the podcast over to our captioning company because normally for our podcast we just caption them and transcribe them in house.
And my partner Chris was like, this is too hard. And then I sent it to them and they did it and they were like, next time you have one of these, there's going to be an upcharge for.
So even the 45 they thought was too hard.
[00:16:15] Speaker A: How close is 45 to YouTube times 2?
[00:16:21] Speaker B: It's slower than YouTube times 2, I think a little bit. But yeah. So we asked Alex, how do you do that? But it's really just a matter of training. And I've gotten to a point where.
So I usually do 45 when I present, but when I'm just testing, I usually will be up around like 65 or 70. 70.
And now I like all videos. I almost always have them on 2X. I listen to audiobooks on 2X and podcasts. In my podcast app, I have the thing that's like delete spaces or pauses.
[00:16:54] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah.
[00:16:54] Speaker B: Set up. So it's like fast speed. And then every time someone pauses for a breath, it just deletes that gap.
[00:17:00] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:17:02] Speaker B: So you do get used to it and you can go a little faster.
[00:17:05] Speaker A: I was going to say, I, there's quite a few YouTube content creators that I at least put at two times. Some of them are, are quick and I'll have them at 1.5, 1.75, whatever.
In a previous life I, I taught speed reading, which is the, the other version, I guess, in this particular area because it, it's from the same principle. You start reading and if you're lucky you can hit average and you're about 250 words a minute.
And then there's tools and ways to learn how to up this, the speed of the thing you're reading.
And I managed to get around 970, 980, somewhere between that, which is almost four times as fast.
But if you, if you, you know, when I first learned how to do it myself, I learned like somebody was in the similar range. But I ended up and going like, there's no way I'm going to get close to even that. Like, half of that. Like, I don't. There's too many words.
[00:18:11] Speaker B: You just.
[00:18:12] Speaker A: But your brain is capable of so much more than you, than what you're aware of, because you've never trained it. And I just remind you, telling this just reminded me like, oh, yeah, I used to do other version of that. And okay, I guess, I guess you can learn.
But I suspect that's a. That's a lot of things to process.
And then everything else becomes like, can you please talk faster?
[00:18:38] Speaker B: Yeah, I don't know. I wondered that if Alex is like, boy, this conversation is boring. Yeah.
[00:18:45] Speaker A: Yeah, no, but I mean, I think, yeah, you get used to it. I guess you're coming from a deficit, right? So ideally they could just read and they could see and then, sure, that'd be a normal thing. But I, I can't help but think that once you've learned how to process information faster, everything else just becomes slow. Because if I now click to a different browser and watch the same YouTube I was watching in Brave, which is my default, it's not set at whatever speed I set it. Right. It's the. Whatever that session has remembered. And I go like, why is this different? What's, What's. Oh, yeah, there you go.
Pastor, please.
[00:19:29] Speaker B: Yeah, it is interesting, I think, just in general, how we can adapt to things and grow.
[00:19:37] Speaker A: And.
[00:19:39] Speaker B: The other thing, I think that's worth noting for people who create websites too, just knowing how screen reader users move around, or people with assistive technology, they're not going to listen to the entire page from top to bottom, just like we wouldn't. If you load a webpage, you're probably going to skim it, pick out parts that jump out to you, which is why headings are really important. Right. Maybe jump to that section, read some of it, then jump somewhere else.
Or even using proper block quote tags for your testimonials.
Because we design them visually so they'll stand out, but if we don't have the appropriate HTML behind them, then someone who can't see, see the visual might miss that or not realize, oh, this is a quote. Now that I'm hearing right.
So it is really. There's a lot of layers that you need to think about when you're creating websites. But once you kind of learn the basics of that, then, you know, like you were saying, you don't even notice at first that your website or your YouTube videos are on this faster speed. It's just normal to you. And that's kind of the way I think about accessibility a lot, which is you have to learn how to do it, but then once you learn how to do it, it's just like, oh, this is the way I build things now.
[00:20:57] Speaker A: Speaking of building, I'm curious, for the Page Builder report, what are some things that stand out in the positive? You already mentioned something very much in the negative being diffie as 99% not okay. I think I heard you say what were some positives, because I guess those are nice to hear as well.
[00:21:22] Speaker B: Yeah. So Cadence did very well last year.
This year they got 100% now full transparency. And I disclose this there too. Like, they've been working with us over the past year to fix things and audit and all of that kind of stuff.
So, you know, they did very well. But there were others that have grown Beaver Builder.
They're not our client or anything like that, but they've been working on trying to fix issues that we flagged last year. And I saw, I think over 20% increase in their score.
So that's really awesome. Bricks was another one where last year, all of their accordions and tabs, they were all just divs. There were no buttons or anything. So you couldn't. If you were using keyboard only, you couldn't open and close them. You couldn't choose a different tab to be the active tab. And they've fixed all of those things.
So to me, that is one of the best outcomes out of a report like this is tools taking the feedback and saying, oh, we are going to fix these things. And being able to see year over year that there is some improvement. So that was probably one of my happiest takeaways from doing the report is.
[00:22:39] Speaker A: Your investment of 200 hours. Is that.
Do you see that as your.
Let's call it giving back to nudge folks to start building better solutions and therefore a better Internet. Is that how you. You justify? Because 200 hours, that's. That's a lot of time. That's five full weeks.
[00:23:02] Speaker B: Yeah, was a lot of time. We started testing these in May.
No, sorry, in June, right after WordCamp. Europe was when we set it all up and started Testing and then we just published in the of August I do so I do see it as a way to give back to the community.
It's you know, it is part of volunteer I do regularly also if we come across things on our client sites, I'll go and report them back to the plugin developers instead of just fixing them on our client site because I'd rather it get fixed for everyone.
You know, I'm sure my business partners at the end of the year are going to be asking me like was that a valuable use of two of our team members time.
So we are hoping that people will maybe choose to opt in and get the data or join our email list or say hey, what you give back is great, I want to stay in touch or maybe explore your other products and services.
But no, I do see it as a big way of giving back. But really the other thing I would say is that when I think about impact and where we can have the biggest impact on accessibility, it really is with these kinds of tools making fixes.
Because the reality is that a lot of people who build WordPress websites are not developers or they are maybe power users who understand some CSS or can find tutorials and implement some PHP with the help of ChatGPT or Copilot or something like that.
But a lot of people don't even have those skills and they're just like picking a tool, choosing templates, dragging elements on and filling in their content.
And the only way that WordPress websites are going to meaningfully get better is if every tool starts from an accessible point.
Because especially like that example I have of accordions and tabs that are just built with divs.
Unless you know advanced JavaScript, you are not going to be able to fix that and there's nothing you can do about it as a content creator aside from choosing a different plugin. And hopefully average users will learn how to test and will know how to make great plugin choices. But really what's most ideal is if plugin developers just put it out there.
And then when we think about these builders that are used by hundreds of thousands or millions of websites, if they release a fix that can then go out to all those websites, that is probably the biggest impact. And so we have a history, we've been a certified B corporation. Like we really have put a lot of effort into what we do to give back and have bigger impact beyond just like our own bottom lines. And me fixing one website is awesome, but if I can give feedback to a developer that can fix a million Websites. Well, that's way cooler.
[00:26:15] Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely.
[00:26:16] Speaker B: So, I mean, that's the way I think about it.
Maybe at the end of the year you can have one of my business partners on and they can answer that question on whether they think 200 hours was worth it or not.
[00:26:28] Speaker A: Chris is invited. I'm assuming he'll join.
[00:26:33] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, I'll tell him to follow up with you about that.
[00:26:36] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, please do.
If not just to answer this question.
[00:26:41] Speaker B: Yeah, I'll say in general, contributing to WordPress at all.
It's interesting to say, is it worth it?
So it's not just us spending a bunch of time putting together a free report.
It's also, I'm on the board of WordPress Accessibility. I've helped to organize that conference since 2022.
Organizing a conference, as you know, is a huge amount of time. And I also put hundreds of hours into that anytime contributing to any make teams. Right. All of that is volunteer. It's not paid.
I think there's something about those of us who decide to do that. Like, I don't know, like we all have something special. We're like, this, this is worth it. I get joy from doing it, but it does it. It takes away from my billable hours or it takes away from my time with my children if I'm doing it on a Saturday or in the evening. And so I think, you know, everybody has to figure out how to balance that themselves. I hope I'm having a positive impact and that it makes it worth taking away from those things.
[00:27:53] Speaker A: I'm pretty sure you do.
So I, I've contributed very intensely to WordPress the project myself for 15 years. So starting in, probably in earnest, 2008, but also a little bit before that.
And I never did it from a, hey, look at me. But more like, hey, this is super easy for me to help fix, so why don't I help fix or help organize or help make happen and all of those things and it becomes normal to think of like, this is getting very philosophical, but I think it's a good point to make.
Most people have this, like, what impact do I have on the world at all? Like, why should I even bother? And I'm annoyed by this or that, but you have impact.
The, the more difficult thing is finding the thing where you can have a meaningful impact in a way that is sustainable for your health, for your finances and for that environment where you are trying to inject your contributions. And for me, the very logical choice was there the open source part of WordPress and then organizing the events and then you know, writing tutorials, helping out on the forums. All that sort of stuff just comes natural because you get fun out of it, you get joy out of it. And again not like look like hey, look at me. I. I know this answer. Look at how good I am. No, I. I don't really care. But the how I'm perceived. But is that particular person having a net positive effect of me interacting with them?
That's a joy to me. It's as simple as that.
You know the saying leave the world or leave the situation a little bit better than when you saw it.
It's a very simple principle. And for the record, I commend what you and your partners are doing in terms of shining the light on accessibility.
Anamika is one of the other advocates. I'm as well as Rian Rietfeld.
They are banging the drums so loud and it's just.
[00:30:21] Speaker B: They are both amazing.
[00:30:22] Speaker A: Yeah, they are. And you know, but there's so much more which is why I wanted to cover this topic with you specifically and.
But there's so much more that needs to become of a.
A base principle. People working and building on the Internet start to comprehend. It's really not that difficult. It's getting your. Wrapping your head around semantic HTML. Okay. You should do that anyway. And then figuring out what the things are you would add that would detract from that. There's a delta. Fix that delta. It's not rocket science. Sure. If you're really deep into JavaScript and certainly on the advanced side of things.
I need to scratch my head as well.
But then I ask somebody who does know and you know, figure it out. But, but start there.
[00:31:16] Speaker B: Yeah. I mean that I would, I would love if the base starting point for every WordPress theme and every WordPress plugin was you install it and it won't add problems to your website.
On the performance side as well it seems so obvious. Like right. Performance security.
Security is a huge one.
Accessibility and I mean if you think about the way laws are going. So the European Accessibility act began being enforced in June of this year.
There's a lot of laws in the United States that are strengthening around accessibility requirements in Canada and the UK all, all over the world and like accessibility isn't something that is niche anymore. It's not something that should be ignored. As we talked about the percent of people and really I feel like as someone who has my own personal WordPress blog that I don't want to think a lot about. Right. I just want it to still be up. When I go there, I want it to like every once in a while, like once every six months. If I go write a blog post, I want it to not look broken, like all that stuff. Like you just want the things that you install to work and not make your website worse or hard to manage.
And, and I would hope that when plugin and theme developers are thinking about that as like, maybe their moral obligation as someone who's putting this thing out into the world is that they would include accessibility in that as well.
And, and I would say if you feel like you can't maintain a plugin, then don't put it on WordPress.org, leave it on your GitHub. It can be public on GitHub, but there's no, like, oh, I'm going to maintain this. I'm going to make sure that it's nice for people.
[00:33:09] Speaker A: So yeah, I think that's a good point. You don't have to publish it on dot org. If you just want to code and learn coding, you'll have solutions that are subpar on any of the important things, for sure.
How do you think we got in this place where the default way of working does not include accessibility? And I'm also including performance and security here because I think they're pretty much rooted in the same problem. What is your take on how we got here?
[00:33:46] Speaker B: So in the beginning, I think so this is the beauty of Open Source and WordPress.org is that you don't have to have any sort of official training to start working on it.
This is how I learned to code.
And I started with a personal blog. I wanted to figure out how to change the colors. There wasn't colors in the theme, so I googled it. I learned some css and then I wanted to, you know, maybe change something about the footer. Well, that required me to learn some PHP and then. Right. Just like going. And there's tons of tutorials and videos and anyone can publish on the web.
[00:34:26] Speaker A: Right. You literally described 95% of people working with WordPress. That's how they started.
[00:34:32] Speaker B: Yeah, that's the way we started. We didn't go to school for it. We didn't take. Many of us didn't even do like official boot camps. We didn't have anybody checking our, especially a lot of us. Like I was a solo developer for a very long time. No one checked my code for my client websites. I got no feedback.
Right. And so I think the, the reality is, is that when they're like, it's wonderful that there are no gatekeepers. But when there are no gatekeepers, there's also not forced like evolution or improvement.
And, and I actually think this problem is accelerating now with the addition of AI.
The. I, I saw a couple of people that were like, I'm using AI to create a plugin a day and submit it to the repository. And I'm just sitting here being like, oh my gosh, I don't even want to know what those plugins look like.
And I say this from a place of.
If you looked at Accessibility Checker when we launched it in 2020 and you look at it today, it is massively different because we got forced in a couple of different ways, but one was we needed to be on the WordPress VIP platform because we have clients who host there. And WordPress VIP coding standards are actually more strict than WordPress coding standards.
So our entire plugin had to be rebuilt for security, for performance, for all kinds of things.
Luckily we had the accessibility part right. But, but like we had a gatekeeper that forced us to do that.
[00:36:23] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:36:24] Speaker B: And, and now any time we code something new, like we build a new plugin, it starts from that. And, and I will say, like my, my partner Steve and our lead developer William, like, they've, they've gotten critical about what plugins we can put on our website because they're like, well, now we've learned.
Right. But I think the right, this is the mixed bag of WordPress.org, fewer gatekeepers, like they're doing the bare minimum of security checks the first time you submit.
Not even currently. Every time you update.
[00:36:59] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:37:01] Speaker B: And it just like nobody taught us, nobody told us better.
[00:37:07] Speaker A: This pretty much sums up my, my thoughts on why we are where we are.
I mostly look with, from the lens of performance, some things are just, you know, if you never touch it or if you never think about the concept of what it means.
One of the things I see a lot is certain plugins that just have a tiny impact on the site. Really, you know, you wouldn't give it a second thought in terms of this is going to hurt my performance. But then they load something on every single page, load or, on every single page, refresh or load, something is running in the background and it only needs to do that once or, you know.
[00:37:53] Speaker B: That block has been added to the page.
[00:37:56] Speaker A: Exactly. Stuff like that. And those are the super simple things. And this is just, it's inexpensive, you know, you're not experienced with the problem it produces because on the whole, if you never work with Any type of site that requires to be performant, you're never going to find it because you'll be like, you know, it works just fine. And I'm not really seeing any drawbacks. But in the background, you're wasting resources, you're unoptimized, you're more prone to other plugins have an effect on your plugin, you know, you see more bugs happening. But if you don't touch any performance sites, like you don't have clients in that direction whatsoever, it's going to take a long time for you to realize that there's something to be fixed. And that's the same for accessibility and the same for security. If you don't touch it, if you don't ever touch it, what are the chances you're going to learn?
[00:38:47] Speaker B: Yeah, I'll say. Our big one on that was when our plugin got put on NASA's website because we've been testing it on fake websites. Or we keep around this copy of our old agency website that fails color contrast, all kinds of stuff. And it's got a fair amount of content. I want to say it's got like maybe 200 blog posts, but it's really not that big of a site. Right. And I think a lot of plugin developers are testing on like a site that's got maybe 50 posts, if that. Right. Like it doesn't have huge amounts of content or huge amounts of unique content.
And then we got our plugin put on a site that had over a million posts and we're like, our queries break the admin.
But we didn't know because we weren't testing in that scenario.
I think that is probably a challenge for plugin developers is figuring out how can you build your stuff that's going to work for everything or for really wild card situations that you never would have expected.
[00:39:52] Speaker A: I have two clients with well over a million posts publishing anywhere between 12 and 15 new articles per day and have been doing so for more than 20 years on WordPress.
Now those are databases that are 70, 80 gigabytes with all the metadata and all the other stuff that you can add to it. If you.
[00:40:16] Speaker B: I really want to know, are they every time they have a new theme or they register a new image size, are they cleaning out all the old image sizes?
[00:40:26] Speaker A: I am in charge of the site. Yes, they are.
Yeah. But before I took over, no, they were not.
[00:40:32] Speaker B: No, no, that was my thing. I discovered with my personal blog at one point, my host is like, you have like, I don't know, 70 gigs of images.
[00:40:43] Speaker A: Yeah. And you're like no way.
[00:40:45] Speaker B: And I was like no. But well it'd been so old and then you know, over the years I'd had multiple themes and every time you install a new theme it creates new image sizes and you hit that regenerate thumbnail else plugin.
[00:40:56] Speaker A: Yep. Oh, now there's a checkbox that says delete the previously used unused.
[00:41:03] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah.
[00:41:03] Speaker A: Or unused. Yeah, whatever.
But yeah, so those are good ways of learning because you're forced.
And in that regard I hope everybody finds themselves with their solution to be hosted on Words vip because they're one of the very few environments where you have your site hosted where there is indeed a requirement because they will have those types of clients. It's either scalability so the, the massive amount of just content or it's the traffic or it's a combination and both present it's, you know, their own issues.
Like the site I just mentioned, there's no such thing as an easy search and replace. Like this is an hour long thing for a relatively simple thing. So we build solutions that you know, we build something in go because that just goes WP cli just, just can't handle. It'll run for, for a full bloody day. That's you know, you, you find solutions around the problems you have. And, and, and yeah, like I said, I think everybody should be so lucky to have to be working with sites where, where they are forcing you to reconsider your choices as you build the product.
[00:42:21] Speaker B: Yeah. So WooCommerce recently added linting on every update if your plugin is hosted on WooCommerce.com through there and there have been conversations about this potentially coming to WordPress.org which I would be all for.
And I would love to be able to add some, some basic accessibility checks to the plugin check plugin what is used. But I'll say even if you, for all your listeners, right, if they are a plugin developer, even if you're not on one of these environments yet, like you can use the plugin check plugin. You can have VIP coding standards in like in GitHub, like checking against your code on PRS and things like that. And I would say implement it now because I mean for us it was definitely stressful when we had, we were forced to implement it on a deadline.
[00:43:15] Speaker A: And I was gonna say no doubt there was a deadline that you weren't comfortable with. So yeah, that's, that always happens.
[00:43:22] Speaker B: So do it now.
[00:43:24] Speaker A: Like she said, you listen to Amber do it now.
So this is educational, right? Because in, in a way you're set out to educate everybody on the principle of accessibility and then towards the solution, pointing at solutions out there that are not compliant just yet.
How far are you taking this educational side of things?
[00:43:53] Speaker B: Well, so this report we are planning, this is our second annual. We're planning on updating that every year.
Maybe not quite every 12 months, but we'll see about approximately every 12 months.
[00:44:06] Speaker A: I won't hold it to it.
[00:44:10] Speaker B: I do a fair number of other blog posts. If I test things I do try anytime I find issues, if I am going to blog about them, I'll always open GitHub issues or support tickets for the plugin developers too first.
I think the meetup is another great opportunity as far as education and things that we put out there and WordPress Accessibility Day conference. I don't know when this episode is coming out, but that is going to be October 15th and 16th and it's free online.
[00:44:41] Speaker A: It'll be out before that.
[00:44:43] Speaker B: Yes. So everyone should go register then.
[00:44:46] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:44:46] Speaker B: So it's a free online 24 hour conference, but I don't know if that answers your question about how far the education goes.
Oh, courses.
[00:44:57] Speaker A: There you go.
[00:45:00] Speaker B: Okay. Yes.
You think I remember these things?
So that was my big experiment this year was I released two courses that are paid courses, one on voiceover and one on NVDA which basically teach you how to use them, what all the common keyboard shortcuts are, how to get help, and then also goes through. I have a bad and a good webpage example with different components. So accordions, tabs, carousels, forms, block quotes, I don't know, a whole bunch of different components. And in each course we go through them with the screen reader, listen to both the bad and the good as examples to help people understand what should I listen for when I'm using the screen reader to do it? So that was my big experiment this year. It came a little bit because of the fact that the reality is automated testing tools can't find everything.
Our plugin is phenomenal, I'll tell everyone that, of course. Right. But you can't only use our plugin and know if your stuff is accessible.
And so again, this goes back to, you know, you have to understand what accessibility is and how to listen for certain things in order to know if you're doing a good job.
And there weren't many resources that I could find that were aimed at like developers building tools about how to use a screen reader to test. There's resources for blind people about how to use a screen reader, but the way they would use it would be very different.
So I thought maybe I'll try and do that. And so I released this one in May and the other one in the beginning of August.
[00:46:53] Speaker A: As a fellow course builder, how do you like the process of building courses? Because that's quite different from anything else.
[00:47:03] Speaker B: Yeah. So the way I handled it was I wrote scripts, I got feedback from our team, in particular our accessibility specialists, to make sure I wasn't missing anything on the scripts. They'll also interesting thing about those two courses was I also had to code the good and the bad example pages.
[00:47:23] Speaker A: Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:47:25] Speaker B: Right. Like you have to build the things you're going to demonstrate also.
So that was a huge time commitment. And then I did recording, I did all of the editing and the transcribing and captioning and everything on the videos myself.
Because we didn't really have a budget for us to say let's go hire somebody to produce these.
I built them the course pages in learndash and I.
Right now I'm, I'm on the fence about when I think I'll break even on time. And I'm curious, I'm curious about your experience with this too because it was like between the time of like setting up the course website and like actually building that, integrating it with our existing payment gateway which is edd and, and then actually creating the content which required creating things to be able to demonstrate, to create the content. Right. Like all of that, it was hundreds of hours and I was like, I think I'm gonna need to sell like 200 of these to break even on time investment and maybe about halfway there right now.
[00:48:31] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:48:34] Speaker B: I don't know what's been your experience.
[00:48:36] Speaker A: So I, my. So first of all I, I have a list of in total about 12 courses that I want to build.
I think I have five published as in this is what I'm going to build. And I'm actually building one, the first one which is available as you're listening to this right now, it's available as a pre launch discounted price. The course is made.
Yeah, okay.
[00:49:04] Speaker B: We did that also for one of them where we pre sold it before it came out.
[00:49:08] Speaker A: Exactly. So what that allows me to do is already start making noise about it.
I get feedback.
I've asked tons of people who I know are very much specialists on the topics as well.
Like give me feedback, let me know and the amount of hours already put in and I have sold quite a few in pre launch already. So really I cannot complain. I'm quite over the moon with the moderate success it has and I've not made any noise other than drop a few hints here and there. So my campaign starts next week where I start to pump out content and related stuff left and right.
So all in all I'm not unhappy.
But if I start counting the hours and then, yeah, trying to then justify me not working on other stuff that I know for damn sure is going to make me money real fast.
There's, there, there have been some second guesses. Yeah, I, I don't know if I want to actually start calculating if I break even. Yes or no. And the main reason for this is I want to do the courses because I think they, they are courses that help elevate anybody working with WordPress from a serious standpoint. And if you're wondering what those courses are, go to withinwp.com courses. You'll see what I mean.
And the second part is I really like doing it. Like the very first thing I did with WordPress as soon as I installed it and started blogging on my own is I started blogging about how to solve certain things in WordPress. This is 2006, 2005 already, I think the first ones.
So I, I enjoy the educational side again. And then this, I, I've said this before in this podcast.
It, it's something that gives me joy. It's, it's, it's, I think it's wonderful. There's so many ways to help other people. Now this time around I'm doing it for a monetary compensation. I think I'm worth it, but I don't know if I'm break even worth it. So we'll see.
[00:51:26] Speaker B: Yeah, it's interesting because we debated this because so one we had done and we launched and started selling right away and the other one we did pre sale and at one point we were talking.
So I had come back from vacation and I had X amount of weeks to do the page builder report and get this course out when I said I would on time. And my partner Steve says what if we just refunded everyone their money?
Because he's like, how much time is it? Like was it worth? Like would it be worth it? Maybe be better to just do that and then you won't feel stressed out and you won't be working at night and on the weekends and like, you know, to get this done on time and. But, but I ended up being like, well I do like doing it. I debated this whole I could also just make the videos and put them on YouTube for free.
So then I'm still getting the knowledge out there, but I don't have to like format it like a course and like do all this other stuff. Right. Like, there's a lot more pressure I feel like when you're selling it, to make sure it feels valuable in a way that like, if I just live stream the same kind of thing, I'd be like, eh, whatever, I messed up. Not a big deal. Yeah, yeah.
[00:52:37] Speaker A: This is for sure a thing.
[00:52:38] Speaker B: I don't know.
[00:52:40] Speaker A: I find myself reading through scripts like a ridiculous high amount of time. Like, am I really going to say it like this? Do I get it across? Am I, am I skipping layers now? Am I? Because I want the. Any.
All of my courses thus far are for people who are slightly above the beginner level. Like you kind of know what you're doing, but you don't really understand it just yet. So I'm giving you 25 layers.
Sorry, 25 modules of how to make WordPress fast. And it's obviously one of those layers is optimize your images, optimize your scripts and you know, there's a whole bunch more. But every single step I'm doing I'm going like, am I going deep enough? Am I going simple enough first? Do I give the advanced people enough? Because now they have this, you know, non advanced part in front of it. How do I do this? Like, how do I bridge. Hold on. If you're listening, this is one minute of easy and then two minutes of more complicated stuff. There's a balance that is going on constantly. Am I, am I hitting the right spot? Like, like I, I could do without that one if I'm being really honest.
[00:53:45] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah.
[00:53:47] Speaker A: I don't think we're.
[00:53:50] Speaker B: Our own biggest critic. Right?
[00:53:52] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, for sure.
[00:53:55] Speaker B: But I will say that one that we were like, oh, should we not? Or should we. It's still getting. It got a sale today and yesterday, so people are buying it. So I think, I think with courses it's maybe a little bit of a.
Over time.
I will say I did initially think based on our email list size that we'd have more purchases right away.
And I think I've heard other people talk about that, that just because you have X number of subscribers does not guarantee no, no sales instantly.
[00:54:29] Speaker A: In fact, the noise I'm going to make is going to point to a very specific subscribe to this email form that is separate from any list that I already have because I've learned This from others saying, like, you know, whatever outreach list or whatever you have, it's great, but it's absolutely zero guarantee that those. Those people who joined that list have the intent that you intend for them to have. Like. Like it's not going to happen.
So all. All of them. And when I say them is anybody who is.
Jay Clouse is a good example of somebody who does phenomenal work in terms of educating people on this particular topic.
And I'm not part of his. His inner club or whatever he's club. Whatever he calls it. But he does share a fair bit of information where I go, oh, okay, let me just learn from it as you're sharing this.
And this was one of them. Like, just treat them as a separate source and that separate source built up properly. Sure, you can lean into that, but any other reach you think you have, you don't like, you don't.
So let's see.
[00:55:47] Speaker B: I've been following him on Twitter as well. He's an interesting person. Posts a lot of interesting, useful things.
[00:55:54] Speaker A: The Creator Lab is probably one of the first things I'll join as soon as I start having a little bit more out in the field.
So let's say Q4 somewhere.
Because I've heard nothing but positive feedback from people joining that in many different ways. So I like learning from people who already figured it out. There's no need for me to reinvent the wheel feel when it's already rolling down the hill.
But yeah, let's see how that goes.
[00:56:29] Speaker B: We'll have to follow up with one another and see if we decide our courses were worth it or not.
[00:56:33] Speaker A: We shall. We shall. Well, maybe we should just plan for a next episode right now. Have Chris join as well so we can have the second voice and we essentially retouch all the object. So subjects here. How about that?
[00:56:49] Speaker B: Yeah, that'd be super fun given.
[00:56:52] Speaker A: Given the schedule you're under. So, you know, six months. Is that sound. Does that sound fair to you?
[00:56:57] Speaker B: Yes, yes, that sounds great.
Actually. I think things are lightening up a little bit for me now with my big projects out there. And I'm not going to travel anymore through the end of the year. So that's kind of nice.
[00:57:11] Speaker A: I'll have a little bit of travel. I'll be going to WordCamp Gdynia and WordCamp Lithuania, Word Camp, Netherlands.
That's probably it.
[00:57:22] Speaker B: You all have a lot more of the smaller, quote, local word camps than we do these days in the U.S.
[00:57:29] Speaker A: It used to be New York that.
[00:57:30] Speaker B: I could just drive to.
[00:57:32] Speaker A: Yeah, it used to be other way around, but I think this is. And there's in between. Even in in Serbia there is one. And there's in Germany, one I could go out to even more if I wanted to, but know I got projects at home. Projects at home as well.
[00:57:50] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:57:52] Speaker A: I want to thank you for sharing your information and letting us in, in an easy way into understanding accessibility better, because I think you've explained it very clearly why this is. This is something that needs to be on the forefront of all your working with WordPress, on WordPress, in WordPress, however you want to call it.
Thank you so much.
[00:58:16] Speaker B: Thanks for having me on.
[00:58:18] Speaker A: You're most welcome. And see you in six months.
[00:58:22] Speaker B: Yes.