How to Build Strong Development Capability in Accessibility

Good afternoon, everybody. Welcome to today’s webinar. As usual we are going to give it a couple of minutes to let everybody get admitted and also for those who are struggling with their internet. I always know when I do webinars it is that first minute of right, I’m going to Zoom, now I need to register, find the pass code and now to wait for it to start. So we are going to wait a couple of moments for people to join.

While we do that, you’ll notice in the chat we’ve got a link to closed captions, so there is a link there and instructions as to what to do. Click on the closed captions button to show captions or click on the link. Nino, great, thank you for saying hello. As we are waiting for people, it is lovely to know who you guys are. If you want to tell us who you are, where you are, you don’t need to tell us the company you are at but what you are focusing on with regards accessibility and what you want to get out of today. We often have people from all over the world. If you want to write briefly, your name, where you are from, something that we can know about you, that would be lovely. We are just bringing extra people in, so it would be nice to see who you are.

Whilst you are waiting,let me just bring up on to the big screen how to get on to HiHub. If you have not been to the site before to find it, it is the menu bar on the top right, click on on demand webinars, there is piles of stuff there. There is material for every level in an organisation from developers to strategists to accessibility leads. And if you are not a member yet, if you click on one of these, and register to … oh, that is for future one, that is a reminder of future ones!

If you click on one of our links, and it will then ask you to log in. So you can log in if you are a member or sign up for free. Signing up gives access to probably 3 days worth of training in there. All of the previous webinars and the reason for getting your details is that we will keep you updated for future webinars and when the transcripts and the videos are uploaded so you can always unsubscribe at any time. You always have that choice. That is where you get the videos, it is worth having a look at old ones. We also have materials on podcasts,so we have some people saying, “I sit in the gym, this is a good way of doing two things at the same time.” So we’ve put the blogs on Apple Podcasts, Google Play and Spotify.We are slowly converting a number of videos to that, so please join on that. Nice to meet you Kevin, from California. Nice for you to join us. Hi, Mark. Hi, Michelle. Thankyou for joining us. We have people from Charlotte in North Carolina and from Edinburgh, a variety of people.

OK, we are going to start now, hopefully we have most people joined in. A couple of house rules, firstly, we have muted you to keep the conversation flowing but it does not mean we have stopped the conversation. If you want to ask questions in the chat my colleagues are online as well. We are happy to answer them during the session, we might bring them to the end for the overall Q&A. So, throw questions as you see fit, as you see how we are going. It will be lovely if you put on your video, it is nice to see who we are talking to, rather than a stream of avatars, and if you are working from home that is fine. If you have pets, people, others in the background, we all know we have a life beyond work!

We have an approach, called Chatham House Rules, if you are not from the UK, Chatham House is a place where people have open conversation, respectful, knowing that we honour conversation, everything is confidential, we don’t share the chat, because you may say things you don’t want everybody to know about but happy to share only in the group. So we ask you to respect everyone else’s stage of the journey. And the best question in the chat gets a free copy of one of Jonathan’s books! And up on the chat is the closed captions link if you need that. Typically, we will get the video out of this on to HiHub in about a week, there is a transcript in there. We don’t share the slides from this. I know people might be using their screen grabbers as we go along. But we don’t share the slides, you have the video and the transcript. We often find people from other organisations would love to have our materials too.

So, let me share who is presenting today and looking at the development capability, how do you build your development capability around accessibility? My name is Peter Bricknell, I am the Chief Product Officer at Hassell Inclusion. My background has been in business consulting and IT strategy and for many years I did not think of accessibility when helping and advising organisation, and now I realise it matters to us all as all of us will need this one day in our lives. We’ve got Usman joining us, he’s our Technical lead, he delivers our web developer training amongst other things, and will talk about the technical detail and I have Liam, who is going to talk about how do you know the gaps in your capability within the organisation?

So, what we are going to do today, we are going to look at the challenge of accessibility for developers, why it matters in your organisation. Liam is sharing about taking stock, how you can do a capability audit, how that helps you to shape out and to prioritise your training plan. Most organisations we work with have a fixed budget so, when do you do stuff? You can’t do everything at once. We are doing a little about overcoming the gaps, looking at what capabilities we see that developers need and why we need to think of training beyond reading a book. Usman is talking about ARIA, he’ll give a little demo of screen readers and some of the topics covered in training and then I will talk about the process of building capability and things beyond training that are useful to get there and then a Q&A. I hope that gives you useful material.

So, why do we care about this, the challenge with accessibility and developers? We run a free self-assessment scorecard, any of you can do it, it looks at about 60 questions around your maturity against the ISO standard for digital accessibility. There have been over 400 organisations that have completed it so far. We did a survey against 300 of these. Typically, we see high motivation and capability is low. So people want to do it but how do you know what good looks like? How do you know if you are capable of doing it? When we talk to clients, often they may have all of the right intentions and then it doesn’t quite get there. And typically, historically, the answer to doing all of this is we are going to do an audit. The trouble is when you do an audit there are 2 problems, one is the most expensive time to make fixes around accessibility. And 2, Typically the project budget is finished so you are now asking people to do remediation when there is not the budget, the team or the access to it. So earlier in the process, the cheaper it is to get the accessibility right and the cheaper it is to make the right changes.

So if you look around at the Devs,that’s the time to make sure that people get it right. When we ask people, if they check projects,about 37% say that they don’t. So, what you will do, there will be stuff that gets out there with a risk of litigation, with the risk that people have to do an audit and a large number of fixes. One client, they had something like 1,000 fixes to do across all product sets.

So, then you have only 30% of people saying, “Yeah, we would fix all of the issues with a project.” We have seen places where people get sued and they say “we haven’t got time and the budget to go and do all the fixes” and 2 years later the lawyer comes back and says “you haven’t changed anything, we’re going to sue you again”, then they think about maybe we have to think about this, to get the developers to get it right the first time.

Recently we did work for the CAA and we reviewed 11 airlines around digital accessibility. This information is in the public domain. So I’m not here to name and shame the people on the list, in fact, I know several of the organisations at the lower end of it, that are doing incredible work now to address those issues. But what we did discover, that the WCAG standard around accessibility is not enough. In fact good accessibility is in the journey. For example, easyJet allows you to book assistance online. Others say they can help as long as you phone up the contact centre, wait 45 minute, deal with someone who does not know what they are doing and fingers crossed you might get something at the airport to support you. So, it’s the journey that matters and if the journey is not working people then start looking at WCAG and saying why have you failed.

We had one of the people on the list, I’m not going to mention them, who had been very compliant, very good pages but the experience was less good than other people. So somebody who wants to get something done, the pages are great but it is not doing what they want.

So some of the barriers are often changes that developers need to fix. So around the keyboard accessibility and the keyboard focus. Making sure that you are building your site that works for the mouse, for the keyboard, for touch, for sight, for screen readers.It is making sure that the structure of it is clear, that the markup, the headings, if it is going through a screen reader or another tool that is obvious where you are on the page. That the buttons are labelled correctly. That people know where they are on the page. We have seen in the past, where people are sued, that offers help and advice that will help you get there but it is hiddenfrom view. The other things we need these changes, that developers need to fix them.

So when we look at capability, we need to think about several steps. So it is not just let’s put somebody on a training course. Who needs training? A skills audit helps you to get there. How to build awareness? We often find people say that they are fine, well, do they know what accessibility means? People coming on to the webinars, and others producing webinars it is a great way of building awareness. The other thing we do with organisations when they need to build awareness in teams is our snapshot and live audits where we spend time with the product team going through the site with different perspective, that is often the ah-ha moment … now I understand why I have to code this.

Then to build the skills, so the developers that need the training and also Q&A and content need training. So the Q&A needs to be tested so that they can test what the developers are building and quite a lot of systems have content so the content needs to sit on the top of the code and that needs to be accessible too. And you do need that practical experience, there are choices to be made, it is not a black and white here is the right answer. So often there is feedback needed on shall I do this or that? And the other thing is to find out what good looks like, if you are building accessibility components on a website it is easier for the developer to do the right thing. Many organisations have something that may be called a centre of accessibility excellence but it is the ghost buster team. Who do you call? Guidelines and policies help you get there, as long as they are just in time that you can find it when you need it, and tools and templates make things more simple and quicker.

So that is defining good. Lastly it is creating a community. People want to do what the community does. So share success when winning awards. Have things like masterclasses or Q&A sessions where people can bring issues and others can listen and learn. Some organisations do a champion’s programme so when they want to get people across different departments you have somebody in that department who has a smattering across the whole of the different range of accessibility. And the big thing is to think of continuous improvement. Training is not a onetime thing.

If you talk to our people, Usman, Yak and others, who are strong technically, they developed that training and learning over time. They have made mistakes and learned from others,so the community helps you to get better.So that is giving you a framework of why this matters. We are drilling into knowing your gaps so passing over to Liam to talk about how you can assess your capability.

So as Pete said we are talking about taking stock of where we are doing accessibility, capability audit, rather than doing something like a product audit. The key question to ask is are you good at accessibility? And a lot of you might say, yes, and reasonably so, you maybe have been coming to the webinars or maybe been in accessibility for a while with lots of experience when it comes to it but when looking at measuring capability, especially when it’s mass capability across groups of people we have to look further than the face value of a yes answer and to look at really?

And the reason to do this is because 20 plus years after the first digital accessibility standards came out, 4% of websites were accessible or know of the WCAG failure at least. Surely if we are saying that we are great the ability, then the number should be bigger.

So, if that is a problem, what is the solution? As Pete mentioned, training is a key way to do this but we have to make sure we are targeting the training, we need to make sure who knows what to prioritise those that need it the most. A key way to do this is through assessment. Assessments are essential to know the truth about a team’s accessibility competence. What they know that they have picked up that is true, what they picked up that may not be true and where the gaps in the accessibility lie. But, it is important that when you measure capability you don’t do so in silos.

We know accessibility and the responsibility of accessibility moves across the entire journey, and that people involved in the development cycle have responsibility. Which is why when we do assessments for some clients, we assess up to eight different job roles, so product and campaign managers, designers, content authors, web developers, app developers, both Android and IOS, QA Testers and procurement and legal.

An example of why this is important, if we take web developers for example, we may do a capability survey that says that they are brilliant but we do an audit at the end of the project and find out that a product still has problems. But that is because we only looked at the capabilities of the web developers but maybe not for the content authors and find that the content authors don’t know how to publish or create accessible content which means that all of the work that the web developers has done is undermined as they cannot create the accessible product at the end of it.

If you are doing an assessment, what may be a typical question, given we are talking of developers, let’s keep it specific to them? When we’re doing our assessments, we like to have questions in two areas. The first is the technical questions, things to understand as a developer, do you know about accessibility within your job role? This is for a relatively high-level not complex for anyone, but trying to understand do you know accessibility and what you do? So the questions may be what the best way is to indicate to a screen reader that an image is decorative. And which users will benefit from skip links at the start of a webpage. Now when we do it we provide multiple choice answers, because we know that accessibility can be subjective so helps to constrain those down but these are key questions to answer the question in the beginning, are we good at this? But that is not the only thing we need to know, we need to set this all in context and we need to understand the why behind the answers. Which is why we have questions 3 and 4.

So question 3 looks at how much do your developers discuss digital accessibility with your UX design colleagues. We need to understand the dynamics that work between different groups. Do you they have the ability to push back on UX designers if something isn’t accessible. Or do the UX design colleagues have the ability to talk to developers about the way that they imagine something works and have a conversation about the behaviour? Or it may be that as a developer you have all of the knowledge but there might be barriers stopping you from implementing or achieving the accessibility ambition. We need to know that. So it might be as an organisation you don’t have the culture that is right at the moment. Accessibility is not the way that things are done quite yet.

It could be that the technology you are building on, the infrastructure is not set up properly, or maybe not up-to-date so you cannot build an accessible product off the back of it as maybe it does not work well with new assistive technologies. Or maybe that you have all of the knowledge but you don’t have enough time. The organisation are prioritising other areas of the development process ahead of accessibility so you are unable to implement the information. So when you do the assessment, it is not only important to understand are we good, it is important to understand why.

Let’s assume that we have done these assessments. Let’s look at example assessment data. This is something from a client. I will not say who, it is real data we have got. What they wanted to do, with the different roles they said we have limited budget, who do we prioritise? We presented information to them with various elements like have they been trained in accessibility? What do they rate their current knowledge as? What their skill score was when we looked at competence? Then to look at perceived scores, by working out do they think that they are overestimating their abilities or are they underestimating their abilities? So we can understand the mindset that they are in.

So let’s put our Manager’s hat on, let’s look at the data to look at what do we maybe prioritise there. So, to the web developers, the product in question was something consumer focused and the web developers are the people who have impact on the product and how it is developed. So, they have a relatively low score of 32%. Not surprising when I see that almost three-quarters never had accessibility training. Given the impact on the product, maybe that is a priority for us.

But let’s look at the others. To the QA testers, they have a low overall score but they have a few more people trained but the QA testers are the gatekeepers stopping us from making sure that if something falls down the cracks through the product, design, developers that it is not end user and that we protect the brand and the reputation of the business so, the developers may have a larger impact on the product but the QA testers might have a larger impact on the organisation. So then we have designers and product managers. Designers look like they are pretty good. 82%. They are ahead of what they think they are, we will get to that in a second. But this is not surprising when we see 15% have not had training but the rest have. So they understand what is going on. But comparing that to our product managers, three-quarters of them have no training but they have only a low score, so not surprising. We need to make sure that our product managers are thinking of accessibility in the initial feature set to make sure we have budgeted the time and resources towards it.

Now we have the information, who do we prioritise? Let’s start with the web developers, they are the ones building the product they may have the biggest impact on the quality it ends up with. So we start with them. Given this they have had no training.

Then to the QA testers to reinforce the gatekeepers to protect the brand and protecting us from ourselves. Product managers are next to make sure it is pushed left as far as possible to make sure we think of accessibility as early as possible, ensuring that we budget enough time and to think of it in the ideation stage and designers, maybe not to have training but maybe a QA masterclass or online resources to keep up to date with what is going on. So, whenever you are looking at assessment data, if we have done one for you or you looked at it yourself don’t just look at the scores but the information around that to understand who do we then prioritise.What has been the summary of doing the assessments? The first off is that designers tend to be the highest performers but they don’t think they are good, linking back to what we saw on the last slide. The reason is they may have no formal accessibility training but we find that good, accessible design follows good principles of UX design to make sure it is equitable and inclusive. Whilst they’ve not had the formal accessibility training they know the principles of good design that links through so they achieve a higher quality than they think that they are. Developers, sometimes they can overestimate their knowledge, that is partly because a lot of them may have had training but it could be out of date. It might be they had training 2 or even 3 or 4 years ago. As we all know, technology is dynamic and assistive technology can change or the standards change. We had a webinar a few weeks ago on WCAG 2.2, so things change quickly and sometimes the developers are not up-to-date with this.

Third, the results that we get and you get can be surprising but it is important to understand the true capability before prioritisation. As we mentioned a few time, resource and investment can be scarce. Sometimes you have to make sure that the when you are choosing a group to train, that they are the group to demonstrate the most tangible results and impact so when you are showing the success to those that hold the budget you can say we have demonstrated such success in this group, this is the proof we need more training.

Finally, it is always better to prove capability before you need to, rather than after. It is easier to look forward than to look back and to go, why didn’t we do that at the level we thought it would be when it comes to accessibility? And more importantly, if you are negotiating a new contract, or a new deal you don’t commit yourself to a level of accessibility that you are not capable of doing yet. But you are able to have an open and honest conversation to negotiate around that. That is a summary of doing skills assessment and identifying gaps, now to Pete to look more at prioritisation and some areas of training and a little about that.

So the next question about how do we build capability is to think about who do we want to put on training courses.You, when you look at the roles and the teams, you have high impact people in a role, and you may be thinking of the level of competence that they need. You want to put people and training who are in the middle of developing new stuff that lasts for a while, you want to get that right. There is an immediate priority, let’s get the instructor led training for those people and those roles, let’s get them up to speed.

The next one maybe we need to seed expertise and other projects where we do retro fixing. Again, you probably want to get those to people to become the knowledge experts. And then you have the wider team. And you may say, actually, we have done the physical training for those people, we have a larger group, maybe we do online training for a variety of them. So, you are thinking about the impact of roles, the key people, whether they have got that existing experience, whether they need that top up and then build the roll out plan against those priorities.

Then the next thing to think about is the number of people. Is it tens of people? Is it hundreds? Is it thousands? How quickly do you need the training done? And when do people have the time for training? What we often see in the old day, you would do a physical day’s training or 2 days of training, people coming out of the office to go to a location to be trained in the classroom. Got them away to focus. Now with virtual training it is harder to get someone out of the office for half a day. So you have the traditional instructor led, that’s great for building and testing skills. We have video learning out there, E learning, you can probably find a pile of materials, some of which is free on the web. Good for somebody who wants to learn at their own pace. Some organisations see that as the only way, we have 1,000 people trained as they clicked on the video training but I don’t know if you have been in a place where people just try to do it for compliance. So, we see that instructor led is powerful, if you are looking at video-driven training, having blended learning with masterclasses, feedback, you have the chance to ask questions, is a great way of driving your training. So that is the thinking about how to do training. I would always push back with a corporation or the leadership that say, let’s just do video training, it is all we need to do.

The second question, is do you do it yourself? I’m going to go through this a little fast. With the materials on the screen. You, sometimes you can save money, I have been in organisations where we think we do it ourselves, you can get training from the internet. And what will happen is we would use internal time and spend a lot of internal time building a training course and you say, if we buy it from somewhere else, they have done all of the thinking for you, they can tweak it for our needs and we can land that training faster. The most valuable time in the training room is your trainee’s time, you want to get the best out of them in that time and to have them to have the chance to ask questions.

Then you want to think, what do the trainees do after? How to respond to their questions? How to make sure that they apply it? It is not only having the training course there but delivering that beyond the training course. So a QA masterclass is a great way, links back to the centre of excellence. So that is giving ideas about the gaps, and think being the types of training course. Now over to Usman who is talking about the overcoming of gaps.

I’m a consultant here at Hassell Inclusion, so let’s go over overcoming the gaps.

I’m going to firstly go over a report that was by WebAIM the 1 million 2023 report having a look at the top billion home pages. There were over 77 million ARIA attributes detected over the pages. That means an average now of over 77 per page. So that is significant. We also, the report found that there was a 29% increase in the use of ARIA code in a year and since 2019 it quadrupled, so there is exponential growth that you can say it is in the use of ARIA. So, with this, it concludes with more ARIA present, the home pages tested with ARIA present had the average of 68.6% more detected errors than without ARIA, it was not the case that ARIA is causing the problem but there is more logic that is applied to pages and so what it means is that the developers are choosing to include ARIA, it is the right thing to do but unfortunately, it shows when we have gaps in the knowledge, we can cause more harm than doing good. Now we do have a blog post written by one of our consultants, Graham Armfield a few years ago, describing why just a small amount of ARIA knowledge gets you into trouble. You can look at that on our website.

It is important to start from the beginning before getting into ARIA. When we know the purpose of ARIA, then we are able to use it appropriately. When it comes to native HTML elements, they come with the necessary functionality and the accessibility properties built within them. So whenever we have Webpages made up of purely semantic HTML elements there is no need for ARIA. However the web sites are now more interactive, we have dynamic content, we have custom components, there is more going on. Components such as accordions, modal panels, dialogues, et cetera, because of this there is more than just the native elements being used to describe things. They are a collection of elements to create an experience, so what we now need to think of is, all right, so if we are creating the custom controls we need to convey to the users exactly what these things are and what they can do and what the states are in, because the sighted users have the benefit of seeing but for a use of assist I have technology, like a screen reader user they don’t have the context so we need to give it to them.

So this is where ARIA comes in and we can make use of ARIA by applying the ARIA prefix although it is not the only way to include ARIA. By using the 3 attributes of ARIA, role, properties, states, we can convey the information to users of screen readers. The roles describe what the element is for, we have properties to describe the features of the element and the relationship it is has with the other elements and the state to describe the current state of the item. For example, if something is collapsed, expanded or hidden, this is what we use to describe states.

So what can ARIA do? We can also pretend or mimic something that it is not supposed to be. For example, we have an image element with a role of check box. So although it is not a check box, I would not recommend doing this but you could do this, so now a screen reader will understand this element to be a check box. We, this is useful because when we have a group of native HTML elements, binding them together we can pretend it is a native element or create our own element. But done in the wrong way it is quite serious.

We know what ARIA can do, how about what it can’t do? Just because we assigned a role to something does not mean it has all of the native functionality that a native HTML element has. So the same example of the role of check bookings to be applied to image, the screen reader hear it is a check box, it will not come with the native functionality. Such as receiving a keyboard focus when tabbing, the screen reader will not know what the check box is for. If you click on the check box there is no indication for the screen reader that it is being checked and if it is within a form there is no transmission of data as it is not a real check box!

So, what it tells is that there is a dependence on making use of Java script to ensure that we are mimicking the native functionality of the element and then to include additional ARIA attributes to ensure we inform users of exactly what is going on.

So, key takeaways in regards to ARIA. Firstly, to always make use of HTML elements when we can as it comes with the functionality and accessibility for free, we don’t have to worry about that. If it is not possible, and we are creating something custom, then to make sure that it works in the same way as a native control, so it includes making sure it works for mouse users, keyboard users and also touch. Finally we have to make sure that screen reader users get all of the context required in order for them to understand what is going on. So that is when we make use of role, properties and states.

So,that is just a short snapshot taken from our developer course. It goes into greater detail going over examples of how we can be using ARIA, when we should be using ARIA, the various attributes that are available as there are so many and this is a short five-minute snapshot of the content we have to ensure that the developers know how they can and should be making use of ARIA. We do need it because of the complexity and the webpages that we have nowadays.

So that is ARIA. Now, what I would like to do is to reinforce assistive technologies. It is important that we understand why we have them, who they are for and to do a short demo to demonstrate the amount of information given through a screen reader specifically and if we have the opportunity because of time, to show how speech recognition software works and the power it gives users in order to access content on the web. So, when it comes to screen readers, we have screen readers, which are on the Windows operating system and on MacOS and we also have some on mobile device. On Windows we have the most popular ones which are JAWS and NVDA. On MacOS we have voiceover. On Android we have TalkBackand on IOS we have Voiceover. Talkback and Voiceover are just the base screen readers, the ones of Windows and MacOS are controlled with a keyboard. Who is a user of screen reader software? It is typically someone with a visual impairments. So what they do, is a screen reader gives the user information about what is on the page. There is a focus that is applied to the elements on the page, specifically in regards web pages, information is given to the users, based on what is provided to the screen reader via the accessibility API. So if our webpages are structured properly with semantic HTML and appropriate ARIA, that information is then given in a way that makes sense to the screen reader user.

Then we have speech recognition software, there are two that are commonly used. There is Dragon that is downloaded on windows and voice control on MacOS. A typical user of speech recognition software is someone with significant motor impairments, So someone rather than using a keyboard or mouse they use their the voice to control a device. So you can say click on a link or button or a form field. So let’s start with a demo of NVDA. I have a demo page and on this page I will launch NVDA. I will silence it. Again, I will silence the screen reader, by pressing control. There is lots of information that is given.

What I wanted to show you is the basics of navigation to use a screen reader like NVDA. We can use the arrow keys to navigate through the elements on the page. If I press up or down it will then move through the first item. You can see there is a focus ring around the icon or the logo of this test page and we can see that there were some announcements that were made by NVDA and we can see the the text representation of the announcements in the NVDA speech viewer. So the NVDA speech viewer is a very helpful feature. It gives you the text representation of the announcement to make it easier to follow. We are interested in the amount of information that is given to the user. We can see banner landmark, visited link, graphic marshmallow. We are being informed by the screen reader that you are currently on a landmark , it has a name, which is banner and you are on a link which is also a graphic and that the accessible name is marshmallow. Pressing down again.

So we changed the context now from the landmark to another landmark which is navigation. This is also made up of a list with five items and we are on a link which has a name of home. So we can see lots of information is given, and this is very important for screen reader users to receive as it gives them context of exactly what is going on and where they are. Pressing up and down is not a way to navigate you can use keystrokes to get to points of interest.  Common key strokes to use are H which takes you through headings. So you can see we have gone through the headings and skipped through the paragraph content. There are other ways to navigate, you can navigate through links, tables, images etc.

Now finally I want to show you a good feature that comes with NDVA and that’s the element list. That gives you access to key areas of the page. You can bring the element list up by pressing the insert key on the windows keyboard plus F7.  It gives you access to all of the links, headings, form fields, buttons and landmarks that exist on the page. To access the radio group at the top, I can press shift-tab. I want to highlight the landmarks so if I go to the right I want to put your focus on the two landmarks that are navigation. We have navigation, that is primary and navigation that is a breadcrumb. So we have two landmarks the same but given an accessible name. So this is where ARIA has come in to distinguish between two landmarks that are the same. If I show you know that in the HTML, I will quit NVDA.

Let’s inspect this so that we can see this nav element, a landmark with the ARIA label with a value of “primary” that is an important feature. We are using this to distinguish between each navigation
landmark. The other one, which is the breadcrumb, it is further down in the HTML, we can see role, navigation and we can see that the label here is breadcrumb. So this is a way of distinguishing and we can see here the benefit of using ARIA. The other example to show you is the role attribute which is given on the header area and the value for that is banner. So not always that the ARIA prefix is used, as we can see on the ARIA label but we can also use the role attribute, that is also naming or giving a name of something. So that is a quick demonstration of NVDA.

What I’m now going to show you is a demo using speech recognition software and that is voice control. So, I will switch to my safari browser and I’m going to go into my settings. To bring up Voice Control. And under motor we see Voice Control and enable it here. It is listening for commands. Will go through command to see the power of using this type of technology. I can scroll to the bottom by saying the following: “Scroll to bottom.” “Scroll to top.” We can click on links by saying the following: “click web content accessibility guidelines.” We are now taken to that link. Go back. I now will click on the input field. So we say the following: “Click, search, for.” “Click, search, for.” “Accessibility settings.” “Click search.” So we now have gone in an input field, typed in text and clicked the search button.

I’m now going to demonstrate the problems that the users may have if we don’t make use of the right accessible labelling. So I will attempt to click to click on the about us link I say the following: “Click about us.” Nothing happened, I will try again: “Click about us.” All right, so nothing. Let’s put this to sleep: “Go to sleep.” So, it is no longer listening for commands. Let’s look at the HTML here. And what we find is that this link has been given an accessible label of “about”. So what we have done here is effectively overwritten the text which can be seen on the screen, which is about us. So for someone who is sighted and uses a speech recognition software it will be challenging now to interact with it, they will not be able to, they will have to use another means. Which is possible but making it very difficult for them.

So in our training we go over more testing and use cases of assistive technologies, we go over mobile screen readers, Android and also Voice Over and cover extensive testing in terms of using NVDA on forms so this is a snapshot to give an idea of the importance of the technology, the importance of the developers to know how to use

the technology so we can produce accessible content. So the benefits in terms of our training and what make it is different. We cover key topics including focus management, custom components,

form errors and handling ARIA as we covered and common keyboard interaction problems.

These are typical problems that we find on the majority of websites. Our training also includes, real live examples, using live websites that are out there, so it makes it real and easy to test and work with. Also we have discussions using your own websites and web applications to give you the option to discuss something that you are currently working on. So it is an interactive session that works in terms of gaining knowledge to help you to develop or your development team to develop accessible websites and web applications. So, I will now hand over to Pete.

Brilliant, thank you so much. In fact, Usman, if you can take a few moments to read through the chat, you are more technical than me, so you may be able to answer those. It demonstrates, the question, why did you do this? That? That is the type of thing that is very difficult to get in a pure video-based training.

There is a really good question about Chatbots. That is a subject in itself. So, when we think about developing the capability, you may be saying, “Right developing capability is tick training.” Or we may send somebody off to look around Google, YouTube something like that. It is slightly more complicated than that, because what you want to do is change behaviours. A skills audit helps you to prioritise. We talked earlier about the live audits as a way of building awareness.

Some questions you were asking in the chat when we do a live audit, people can ask the question, why to do it that way? Does not ARIA solve all my problems? You may get a short or a longer answer. And then there is a developer training when you get the examples and the chance to ask the questions. In the background, if you are an accessibility lead, it is to think about how to make it easy to do the right thing? So, investment in the components for the future, making sure you have useful guidelines and the tools and the templates.So, that is given some shape of thinking about your developer teams and how to build capability.

One question we are asked: Should I be training everyone in a product area? Should I train everyone across the business? We see that you should not just do one set of training by itself. Because you are going to have your designer, developer and QA tester. And people change jobs. So, you may think about how do I give a range of training across the business, such that my developers are up to speed but they will get good designs that come to them? That my developers are up to speed and the testers are able to support them? Getting your developers trained first is probably the fastest thing as it means that code is working. And then you are looking at the people around them. But, don’t forget to get the content authors or the content publishers trained as well.

Often, we see and we are working with one particular software company, where they are developing accessible solutions, and they are worried that the people who configure them and put stuff on to them will not give good, accessible material. So they do force things like Alt Text. But a content author must be taught about how to write the correct type of Alt Text for the situation you are doing it. It may be an emotive piece, it may be showing you the purpose of a picture besides describing the content of a picture.

So I hope this has been helpful. Let’s open up to questions. So, if you have a question as we go along, maybe it is about how your organisation is prioritising that. Anything you are thinking about training and building capability, do put a question in the chat. I will just ask, Liam, have you seen anything in the chat so far that is a question that people are coming up with?

A question not only from this session but other sessions is what about accessibility overlays, can they bridge a gap? We have a whole webinar on that, if you dig around our website we discuss that. Our opinion is that the best answer is to build good, accessible code. The thing to do is to understand people according to their needs, not according to the labels that people give to them. So, you often get somebody who has poor sight but they have never thought about a screen reader. But they would like help around the visual. They would like help around Zooming in. My mum has macular degradation I think it is what it is called, so she cannot see in a number of areas of her eyes. She has never considered a screen reader before and probably would struggle with that, but she still needs help. As somebody has put in the chat, they don’t replace a manual assessment. And the same thing with automated testing, it gets you maybe 50% of the way there but not going to give you all the answers so you have to think of manual audits from different organisations. So we are very uncomfortable about overlays, they are not the answer. They are probably not even a sticking plaster and we have seen people getting sued because of some of their ways that they render pages.

Do we have recommendations for training contractor developers, that are not organisation-led. It’s a really good question. One of our clients said, “We’re going to train everybody. We don’t care if you are contractor or internal, we need you to be trained to get done.” The second approach that we help clients with is to make sure in your procurement process that accessible code, accessible delivery is a part of the role that the contractor has or your external agency. Often we think about it for software, we don’t think of it for people. We have had clients who have had a lot of digital agencies who are producing the material, and they are getting somebody junior off the street, and so the client needs to write a good brief – this is what we expect, this is what good should look like, and then quality assure it.

There is an initiative by HSBC at the moment, to train 1,000 people. If you go on their website and have a look around it, they are offering it to organisations and to people where you may put one or two people on a course. So that is one way that somebody can get training. If you are a larger organisation with 10 or more people sometimes it is better to do it in-house, you have everybody trained to the same level, there is a consistency there.

What other questions, Liam? Do we include people with disability as part of our training, as either a facilitator or a contributor? There are many people in our organisation who have accessibility needs. We don’t necessarily trumpet them, and they are not always visible and obvious so, that is one side of it, the second side is that we do include people with disability for a thing called our Speed Dating Services where we bring people with different back grounds and they talk about their experiences and that is really good if you have an organisation doing innovation, starting a new project and you get these different people to give different perspectives.

What we do have in our team, our trainers have been trained around multiple accessibility needs to look at it from multiple perspectives. Have you updated the training to meet WCAG 2.2? A good question! We did the webinar online about week or two weeks ago, the day that they launched WCAG 2.2, is the day we did our webinar, a wonderful coincidence. We are going through the training to look at 2.2, there are bits that have been already updated and there are a couple of questions in the team about if we need to add these extra modules, what does it do about the length of the course?

Any other questions, Liam? Otherwise I think that we will move to signing off. I think it is everything. One question from Grace it is a great one: How do you tests with people with different accessibility needs? There are some organisations that do inclusive testing, we do it, we know a few other people who draw from people with accessibility. You can also ask your user group internally, if they can do quick tests. So, that’s one way you can get people with disabilities to test your item, you don’t have to have them all in-house, you can go and say,”Can you test these with a section of people, and we will find the people for you.” Some clients, their products are so specialised that they want to know that they have a team around it. And also, we have places where the customers, where the customers have accessibility needs and they would love to test it. So, thinking imaginatively how you can draw and widen the group. I hope that you found it useful, I hope it has given some context to think about for the future. Our webinar’s coming up in November, we are looking at prioritisation, so, how do you take stock of where you are, where to focus on next year? Different approaches that we have seen. The in December we are looking at multinational organisations, some of you may work with these, what to do with organisations in multiple countries? What do you do to think about the regulation? How to balance the central team versus the local team?

One of our projects we are working on with a marketing team where they are looking at how do they take their global marketing to make it accessible? But what does it mean for every country that you translate to and to the culture that they work in? And the guidance that you do for the local teams? So we are bringing some of that in there.

I hope it has been useful. Remember, you have access to HiHub, if you have not already been there, please log in. It takes a day or so to be approved. Sadly, this is a lot of spam that comes through, from different parts of the world to try to register, so I know there is a little delay from registration to approval but there is access there to lots of materials. If you want to have a chance to win a book that Jonathan has written, throw in a question before you leave! When you sign off there is anything that you found useful in the training, feedback to give, please do, and thank you, or thank you and tell us what we can improve for the next time.

I wish you a good evening or a morning and hopefully you will join us for the next webinar. Thank you!