Note: This transcript was auto generated then some poor soul sat and listened to it, and followed through correcting any mistakes they spotted. Please however expect human error and shout if you spot an issue. Email: lee [fancy curly symbol] trailblazer.fm.
Verbatim text
Lee
Welcome to the Trailblazer FM podcast.
Lee
This is your host, Lee. And today on the show, we have the one, the only. It’s Gen from Easy A11y Guide. Gen, how are you doing today?
Gen Herres
I am doing well, Lee.
Lee
I am very glad to hear that. And I really appreciate you coming on the show. We’ve known each other and known of each other for very long time, and have never actually jumped on a show together, in my memory, at least.
Gen Herres
I don’t believe so. I think it’s a first for the two of us.
Lee
No, I don’t think we have. I mean, I am 400 odd episodes in, so no offence if you had, but I really can’t remember it. So I’m really honoured to have you on the show, and excited to talk to you specifically about accessibility post my burnout. So you may or may not know, I burnt out in 2023. And part of that is just all the workload that comes with running an agency and building websites, etc. And I’m not saying accessibility caused my burnout. It certainly didn’t. It was a completely different story. But one of the things I know adds a lot of stress to people’s lives, or perceived stress, is the idea that, Oh, crap, I need to either get my website accessible, or if I don’t, I’m going to be sued, and all of these horror stories, et cetera. I’m just looking forward to having that conversation with you. But before we do, could you Can we just let folks know who you are, where are you from, maybe something that people don’t know about you, and then we’ll launch into my questions?
Gen Herres
Sure.
Lee
Cool.
Gen Herres
I’m Gen Herres, and the company is Easy A11y Guide. We help both companies companies themselves, as well as website agencies, to get a handle on what accessibility is and what they need to be doing for it. Instead of the, Here’s the WCAG or Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. Here’s the thing. Good luck. We try to break it down into much more manageable chunks. Like, okay, 30% of errors out there are coming from your text not being legible. There’s not enough contrast between the colour of the text and the background colour. White text on a yellow background just doesn’t read well. So let’s fix that. Let’s Let’s just tackle these issues right now because they’re affecting everyone. Then we can get onto some more esoteric stuff.
Lee
Yeah, that’s awesome. I love the word esoteric. I’m really glad you fit that in. I’m trying to add more intriguing words to my vocabulary, and that’s a beautiful one. I’m going to try and use that one this week. Hold me accountable. All right.
Lee
I alluded earlier about the fear that comes with Accessibility, and maybe we could tackle that one first then.
Lee
Why do you think the accessibility in itself gets framed around fear and lawsuits? Because that tends to be what people talk about the most, at least on the Facebook groups.
Gen Herres
Yes. There’s two parts to this, really. Number one is how the law was framed in the first place. In the United States, the Americans with Disabilities Act was passed in 1990. It was first of its kind legislation. It really led the whole world in terms of disabilities and recognising them and recognising that you need to stop being a jerk to people. You need to let them in the stores. You need to let them buy the things, and you need to not discriminate against them. However, there’s a key flaw to the ADA, and that is the enforcement of it. There are not fines or penalties. The US Department of Justice only takes up a case when there has been a huge amount of complaints about the company. So they only go after things in the Fortune 500. They’re not going after small companies. In fact, they generally just ignore them. So the enforcement arm of the ADA became private lawsuits because this was the only way to get a business to actually comply. In many cases, this was the only way to get a wheelchair ramp installed. This was the only way to get an automatic door installed.
Gen Herres
What’s happened is the only real enforcement mechanism that most people have is a lawsuit. Then this drives the whole fear mantra because people are afraid of those. The other part is that fear sells. Using the trope of fear, this is the enemy, this is the scary thing, oh, but I can be your hero, that is a fantastic sales tool. That sells really well. Many, many companies have gotten into using that trope. That’s where the fear really comes from, is one, it’s how the law is actually built, and then two, what actually works in sales. One of the nice things is over in Europe, they put in the European Accessibility Act that went into effect summer of 2025. With that, they actually put fines and penalties. To actually be decent to businesses as well, they put in timelines. What that means is if someone reports that there’s an issue with your website, as long as you have a proper accessibility statement, then they can report it to you directly. That starts a counter. In most countries, that’s going to run to about 90 days, and there are some checkpoints in between. But it basically gives you about 90 days to completely resolve the issue before they can sue, before any fines could be put into effect.
Gen Herres
What that does is that allows the company some time because no one’s going to be perfect 100% of the time. The grocery store is going to have a tree fall in the middle of the parking lot and it’s going to block something. As long as it’s addressed quickly, that’s life. That happens. We can move on. But if If it’s not addressed, then the EAA has provisions in there to go after the company. I really like how Europe has implemented that as that gives the business time to actually fix it, acknowledges that we’re not going to be perfect 100 % of the time. Unfortunately, in the US, the ADA has not had any updates in 35 years, and it’s really overdue.
Lee
Well, let’s hope that does happen, but it is encouraging to hear what they’re doing in Europe, for example. I mean, it is very hard. I think you’re right, fear sells. And the idea that I could have a client update their website and just do one small mistake and it could then cause some form of error. I don’t know, maybe a buy now button can’t be clicked or can’t be understood by a reader, etc. Because maybe they’ve pasted a snippet code or maybe they’ve done something wrong or nested something in the page builder, etc. That fear there goes away. If it’s, Oh, we see the issue, we have 90 days to comply, we’ll do it instantly and get it fixed. All good, as opposed to the fear idea that a lot of people online have been selling, that if someone finds an issue with the site and can’t purchase, then it’s discrimination, and they’re probably going to sue you, which is a horrible feeling.
Gen Herres
A couple A lot of US states are working on legislation that would require notice for anything under the ADA. Basically, require that the customer give the business a certain amount of notice, something in the neighbourhood of about one or two months of notice before any legal action could be taken. I love that idea because it gives them a chance to fix it. I mean, most of these companies are not doing this maliciously. They’re doing it because they didn’t know. The best way to educate them is to say, Well, you got 60 days. Get it fixed.
Lee
That’s a good reasonable amount of time to fix it. Exactly. Unless your site is massive, I guess. But yeah, I’ll let the person worry about that. It’s not my problem. I’ve just instantly felt the anxiety there. Some of the big sites I’ve built in the past thinking, Holy moly, that would be no fun. Well, actually on that then, overwhelm certainly still comes in because the idea of laying a design out in code, either through a page builder or actually through HTML, CSS, etc. And then running it through multiple, multiple tests and knowing that if I change a little bit of code, it’s potentially going to cause a new issue, just like the old days when we used to have to make sure our website worked in Internet Explorer 6, as well as, you name it, other browsers, et cetera, and everything was slightly different, and every change you made might break it in something else. Are there tools that can help us, or am I going to too many extremes? Am I getting something wrong about the idea around accessibility?
Gen Herres
That’s really two parts. It’s tools and it’s also processes. When we have a better process, we make fewer mistakes. Takes. For example, we all have processes that help us get the website set up for the first time. We have a list of things that we have to check, and some of them are make sure that the site administrator email address is going to a correct one. Others are make sure that this actually reads at a fifth grade level or make sure that the main menu actually includes the things that are really important to the client to have accomplished. Some of them are really specific, and we can check them in two seconds, and some require a bit more thought, but it’s all part of our procedures. We have things like, well, you need to check the copy through a grammar checker to make sure you didn’t put a giant typo on the homepage hero. Or some companies have missed a step in their process. I’ve seen companies in the Fortune 500 with placeholder text. I remember someone screenshotted a Zillow notification. And it said, Headline goes here, body text goes here. And that was a notification that got pushed out to them.
Lee
I left a robots.txt for six months as no follow. Oops. So they disappeared off the internet.
Gen Herres
Exactly. So it’s not just about the tools, but it’s really about the processes and the procedures and saying, Okay, I’m building out this longer blog post. Well, I need to make sure that I have a good heading structure. Why? Because, well, Google really cares about my heading structure, AI really cares about my heading structure. Oh, yeah, it’s also really useful for humans. That’s accessibility, but it’s also readability. It’s also comprehendability. Yes, there are tools, and an overwhelms definitely a real thing. One of the things I like to talk about for overwhelm is start small. For example, when we learn how to multiply numbers, we all learned multiplication of numbers at some point, hopefully. We don’t learn by trying to multiply matrices for linear algebra.
Lee
I don’t even know what that means.
Gen Herres
That’s not where we learn. I minored in math in college. Oh, I failed. Anyway, that’s a very complex thing. We also don’t learn by multiplying fractions. You probably did have to do that at some point. We learn with really simple numbers. We start by doing something small and doing something small well, and we get good at the small thing. Then after we’ve gotten good at the small thing, we go to something a little bigger, and then we go to something a little bigger. What I like to tell people is start with, I have a very simple set of seven questions that people can answer pretty quickly about a page, and I call that the lightning test. Start with that. Start doing that regularly. Get Get good at that because that’s your basic multiplication. That’s two times four. Start there. Get good at something small. Then after that, I also have a whole series called the Quick Audit. That goes through a mix of automated tests and manual tests that is going to hit about 90 plus% of the actual errors that you’re going to find on a website. It’s a lot fewer than the 50-item checklist of WCAG 2.1
Gen Herres
Because it’s somewhere right around 15 items on the list. It’s a much smaller checklist. It’s a much more specific It’s a specific list. But like most things in life, it’s the 80/20 rule. Eighty % of the issues come from 20% of the criteria. Why don’t we tackle this 20% of the criteria that’s going to be most of these issues. Get good at that before we worry about the rest. That’s the progression, is that you start with something smaller and simpler and get good at it, and then move on to something harder. Accessibility, like a lot of things, SEO and other things, it evolves, it changes, you learn more, you start to understand more. You’re not going to get it all in one You’re not going to get it all in one year because it evolves and it changes and the Internet changes and the code-based changes and all of that.
Lee
Well, WordPress updates, for example, could introduce something new, couldn’t it? From a third-party plugin, if you’re using it. Say a form plugin or something makes an update. That could, in theory, I guess, change something in the code that you weren’t expecting. Now, before we kicked off, you were sharing with me a wonderful metaphor for how How important it is that we bake this in from the beginning. Would you share that with folks? Because I found it really good. I’m a visual person, and I was able to really visualise why accessibility from the get-go is super important as opposed to something that we so often feel is an afterthought. Just for context, I very often used to think, for example, responsive design was the afterthought. You design for desktop and then you responsive later. So again, with accessibility, a lot of people think it’s something to do at the end. Could you share with us what you told me?
Gen Herres
Yes. So accessibility is going to get into every part of the website. It’s going to be part of your content strategy. It’s going to be part of your site structure. It’s going to be part of your design. It’s going to be part of your code. It needs to even be in your copywriting, because if you are writing copy that has paragraphs that are 10 lines long, that’s not pleasant to read. It really isn’t. It’s part of every step of the process. I like to compare it to plumbing in a house. If you are building a house and you think, Okay, plumbing is a small thing. Maybe I’ll just worry about it at the end. Well, now that you’ve finished your kitchen and you go to turn on the faucet and nothing works, in order to fix that problem, you have to rip out the cabinetry, rip out, open the walls, and try and get pipes through. That is going to be an extremely complex problem. But if you start thinking about the plumbing at the very beginning of the process, when you’re first drawing the blueprints, okay, where is the plumbing going to go so that we can have the sink in the kitchen, dispense water, and drain water?
Gen Herres
This is important. You have all of this work that you do, and it’s not a huge amount when you’re doing in the blueprint stage. Then you bring in the plumber at the correct point during the framing process of the house, and then you bring them in at the end to do the fixtures. As long as you think about the plumbing in the house at multiple different points during the build process, the plumbing accounts for a really small amount of your total house budget, frequently less than 5% of your total budget. In many mature companies where they have really solid processes, it also Accessibility accounts for less than 5% of their development costs, but only because they’ve built it into the processes and they’re incorporating it. It’s a whole lot like when we first discover covered certain things about JavaScript. We were like, Oh, my gosh, this is so much work. Now, several years later, you’re like, Well, this is just how you do it. We now have a process to do it, and it’s no longer a large portion of work because that process is now baked in, just like your responsive design. If you thought about it and you built with it when you were first starting, you have very little cleanup work to do at the end.
Lee
Yes, absolutely. In fact, I’m just thinking We’re getting here as well. If we were to put this into the design process perspective, part of the package that agencies will often provide is a style guide for the website. That’ll include, say, all the buttons and the size of the fonts used, the size of fonts, the colours, etc. So that in itself, right from the get-go, before the client’s even signed off the final design and the final style guide, if that goes through, say, colour contrast checking, then you already know the moment you’re building the site that you’re covered, at least on all of your buttons, and they’re not something you’re going to go and have to change later on after you’re running it through third-party tools.
Gen Herres
Exactly. So if you handle a lot of these problems up front, so what I do, I have a course on how to build an accessible website where we walk you through a small brochure website and how to build it. One of those things is, Okay, here’s the brand colours. They are not accessible with white. Here’s exactly how I’m going to solve this and get it done in just a couple of minutes so that we have things that we can use.
Lee
That’s really good. Like you said, it means you’re not ripping out the cabinets in your kitchen and you’re not making holes in the wall for all the new pipes because everything’s been done right from the get-go. For those who are, thankfully, you did allude to this earlier as well, for those who are retrospectively doing their accessibility, all is not always lost because sometimes the number… Well, in my experience, and you may agree or disagree, but In my experience, I’ve seen, say, 50 errors, and that’s made me feel very, very overwhelmed. But it then turns out that the moment I just fixed two or three things, i. E. The colour in my CSS, and I’m using variables anyway, that’s just eradicated 30 of the errors because that same colour contrast issue was replicated across 30 different buttons on the homepage. So instantly the list does get cut an awful lot quicker than we might imagine. I think that might overwhelm people not realising that some of those issues are relatively quick to fix, not to minimise the amount of work that you still do have to do.
Gen Herres
I was working on one site for a library recently, and the initial automated report had a couple thousand issues over the website. Many different pages. Again, a lot of these issues are going to be fed from that template type source. Basically, one day, what happened was we reviewed the source of the issues, where things were coming from, and changed out the WordPress theme. Most of the content was built in a page builder. The header, the footer, and the main CSS style sheets, we could change those out without having to rebuild all the pages. What we did was in literally one day, we cleared over a thousand errors from that website because we changed the theme and we did some fixes we did that. And, ta-da. So it’s not necessarily going to be an absolutely massive amount of work to fix some of these problems, but If you bring in a master plumber versus you try and watch a couple of YouTube videos on plumbing, probably going to end up with different solutions and different end results.
Lee
Yeah, that’s another good way of putting it because I have tried to fix my own plumbing before and not made a very good job of it. And we’ve had to have people to come and fix my mess.
Gen Herres
And then you ended up calling in the master plumber.
Lee
Yes, we’ve had to have them back out. I guess as well, what we’re saying here is that If you are looking back and thinking, crumbs, I need to retroactively resolve sites that I haven’t done in the past for whatever reason, be it budget, be it not really realising how important this might be, or changes in your local law, wherever you are in the world. We say this so as not to overwhelm people, that sometimes these issues aren’t so hard to fix, but the better solution is certainly for future builds to make this a part of the journey. You said right at the beginning, so is not to be a jerk, because maybe there are a smaller amount of people who can’t access certain types of content. But I think it’s, and you think, and many of us think, it’s really important that everybody has access.
Gen Herres
Yes. The thing is, some people are going to have permanent disabilities. A lot of people who have permanent disabilities are amazing at masking those issues. For example, in the US, we have military veterans. There’s a lot of them. My husband is In the US, half, literally half, of our military veterans have a disability. This isn’t just something like color blindness. This is a recognised disability by either employers or by the Veterans Administration itself. So many of these people are being paid monthly by the Veterans Administration because the military broke them in some way. That of our military veterans. Many times when people think about a military veteran, they think about them going on hikes. They don’t see them as having an issue. Well, I happen to know several veterans because my husband is one. There’s a couple of them who I know who have a 100% VA disability rating. That means the government recognises that they severely, severely broke this person, that there are going to be some days in which this person’s life is an absolute nightmare. For some of them, I know one person who gets just ridiculously severe migraines. He literally keeps a barf bucket next to his bed because some days he can’t make it that far.
Gen Herres
Other days, he has a great day. It’s He’s got medicines that he has to take every day. But yes, there are days when he goes to the gym. There are days that he goes for hikes. If you see him at the grocery store, you are very, very unlikely to even think that he could have a disability. But he’s 100% disabled. He takes medicines every day, and he has some horrific days. Many of the people who have disabilities are amazing at masking them. You won’t know that they have an issue because most of the time people think, Oh, well, that’s like someone who’s totally blind and walking around with a white cane. No, most people who have disabilities, you won’t see them. That’s something that a lot of people don’t really get is that many of these disabilities are completely invisible and that people who have them are very good at masking them, and you won’t know. For example, me, My disability is speaking. I have brain damage that affects my ability to speak.
Lee
Well, I would not have known that. I am surprised.
Gen Herres
And yet I have spoken on WordCamp US stages.
Lee
Wow.
Gen Herres
We can mask, we can find things that work, we can find methods and treatments and procedures, and you won’t know that we have issues. But that doesn’t mean the issue is not there, and that when you provide Things that just work for us and don’t create barriers, we don’t really, really appreciate it.
Lee
Thank you so much for sharing that and for getting so personal as well, because that really does help to bring it home. There is a campaign, it’s been going now for a few years here in the UK. You remind me of it, which there are signs in a lot of places, especially at disabled restrooms or parking spaces, etc, which say, remember, not all disabilities are visible because very often somebody might get out of a car who looks perfectly fine and you’ll get somebody who wants to share their opinion about why they shouldn’t be parking there, etc. But it’s been a great campaign to help people understand that the stereotype of somebody who’s blind with a white cane is that. It’s a stereotype. There are many people. There’s dyslexia, isn’t there, as well, et cetera. So reading text or readable text is super important.
Gen Herres
Among the disabilities that affect someone’s ability to read, we have dyslexia, which is probably the best known. This is going to be affecting around one in 10 people.
Lee
Which is a lot.
Gen Herres
Which you know more than 10 people. There’s also a very similar one, but it is different. It’s called Irlen syndrome. Sometimes you You might have seen someone in the past wearing coloured glasses when they read.
Lee
Yes.
Gen Herres
There is a decent chance that they have Irlen syndrome because that colouring can literally make the reading significantly easier. Again, we’re talking about roughly one in 10. We have colour blindness that’s going to affect roughly one in 12 men and one in 200 women. It’s significantly more prevalent in men, but it does happen in women. I’m sure that you have met over 200 women in your life.
Lee
Yes.
Gen Herres
So you’ve met a woman who’s color blind. I have. But they’re unlikely to ever tell you. They are unlikely to tell most people because they have been told women can’t be color blind because that is a perception by society.
Lee
I’d never heard of that statement, but wow.
Gen Herres
Then there’s Synesthesia. You’ve probably never even heard of that one. That is when letters and/or numbers take on extra sensory things. For example, they may have colours. When someone reads numbers, they may literally see them in colours. They may get tastes associated with them. They may get smells associated with them. I had a friend who told me about her experiences with Synesthesia. And math is the worst thing in the world because she only gets it with numbers, and she gets it with taste. So the numbers take on taste, and trying to do large amounts of numbers just takes on a whole lot of different taste, and it literally makes her nauseous.
Lee
I mean, I don’t like maths at the best of times either.
Gen Herres
But that’s not something that she shares with a lot of people because they don’t believe her, and they judge her, and they pity her, and all sorts of different things that she just doesn’t want to deal with.
Lee
Well, that’s interesting. My daughter has something. I can’t remember the name of it now, but hers is when she’s reading numbers, her eyes will I think they call them skip or something or jump. So for her, a lot of numbers can get blended together. So it might actually say 800. That’s the word. It might say 800, but to her, she sees 80 because the O’s are blood together, et cetera. She struggles. She still hasn’t been able to pass math, et cetera. But that’s something that I’m aware of. But again, it’s not obvious to people. For many years, they just thought she was bad at maths, when actually what it is, is she can’t really see without being careful and without special coloured paper, she can’t see the numbers very well.
Gen Herres
Yes, there’s a whole lot of different approaches that can work. Unfortunately, find the correct approach for you, you have to try a lot of them. But sometimes you’ll find this one approach or this one way to write things or do things, and you’re like, Oh, my God, this is finally the one that actually works for this person. Yay.
Lee
Well, I think we’ve not found it yet for my daughter, unfortunately, but we’re keeping going. She’s okay with reading. It does seem to be predominantly the numbers.
Gen Herres
Dyslexia means trouble with words. Dyscalculia means trouble with numbers, and Dysgraphia means symbols. She has specifically.
Lee
I didn’t know that one existed
Gen Herres
The Dyscalculia.
Lee
Yeah.
Gen Herres
Yes.
Lee
But again, that does then highlight, doesn’t it? I made an absolute assumption in my question to you earlier where I was like, and I know I said confidently that it’s only a small percentage of people, but the more we talk, it’s not, is it? It’s a crazy amount of people that do really need help in accessing the important content that’s on your site. Wow. Just taking a moment there of silence to be quite shocked. So for people who are as shocked as me, what’s the next most reasonable step somebody could take to start to rectify some of the errors and issues with their website?
Gen Herres
Where you start is with mindset. For example, let’s say you want to train for a marathon. A marathon is 26. 2 miles, not a short distance. It takes a lot of training. It takes a lot of dedication. You’re not going to get there quickly. So the very first thing you want to do is get into a mindset. Number one, you’re going to need to start picking up some regular habits. You want to train for a marathon? Well, you need to start with a number of short runs, and you have to do them regularly. That’s just what it’s going to take. You’re going to have to learn what foods you need to eat before, how long before, what you need to eat after, what’s really going to help fuel you. You’re going to have to make a number of adjustments to your life. But the first thing you have to do is you have to get the mindset that this is a long journey. Even once I hit a marathon, I’m probably going to do really poorly in it. But if I finish it, that’s a huge accomplishment. Absolutely massive. But then once I do that, I’m probably going to want to improve my time and run a better marathon for me.
Gen Herres
Yes. Also acknowledge that the vast majority of people will never run an excellent marathon. They will run a good marathon for them. The first part is just get the mindset that this is not a to-do item that I’m going to spend a week doing and be done. No, this is something you’re going to need to do for a long time. You’re going to need to develop habits about it. You’re going to need to develop processes for it. You’re going to need help. You’re probably going to need to work with a coach. All of these concepts that the first thing you really have to do is embrace that this is a mindset, this is a long journey, there’s no specific endpoint, and that’s okay. So is life. Life is a long journey with no specific endpoint and lots of bumps in the middle.
Lee
Absolutely. That’s really, really helpful. In fact, I shared with someone earlier because they were feeling overwhelmed with a project they were working on, and I reminded them that it was a marathon, not a sprint, and that they didn’t need to try and finish everything within a week. But actually, let’s just do a little bit at a time. And work our way through it over the course of a few weeks. With regards to marathons as well, you mentioned that it’s something that we wanted to keep doing and keep improving. I got highly addicted to marathons many years ago and ended up running several of them. So I really, again, resonate with the way that you share. So I just want to say I’m really grateful for how you’re explaining things. I’m a very visual person. The way you’re creating these visual imagery for me has helped me no end. I’ve interviewed a lot of people about accessibility. Just from me to you, I am very grateful to have had you on the show and for you to explain these things to me in a way that I’ve really, really connected with in a way that I don’t think I’ve ever connected with before.
Lee
So thank you so much.
Gen Herres
Thank you, Lee, for saying that. I’ve been tutoring since about 1998, and I’ve taught at university, and I’ve taught all sorts of different topics. So it’s very glad that it all resonates and is communicating well.
Lee
Well, you’re like the teacher I remember at school where it just clicked and you never forget the name of that teacher. I’m probably never going to forget this episode. Thank you very much for your time. What’s the best way for people to connect with you, Gen? And then we’ll say goodbye.
Gen Herres
You can find me on LinkedIn. I’m the only Gen Herres on there. You can also find me on my website, easya11yguide.com, and I’m sure that you’ll put those in the show notes.
Lee
I certainly will. Everything will be in the show notes. Gen, thank you so much, and I hope to talk to you real soon. Take care.
Gen Herres
Thank you, Lee.
Lee
Bye.
