The Ultimate Blog Podcast - 132. ADA Compliance: What it is, Who it Benefits and Why Bloggers Need to Do it with Nina Clapperton

Episode Date: June 25, 2024

Is your blog ADA compliant? We welcomed Nina Clapperton, SEO expert and travel blogger, back on to share more about the critical importance of website accessibility. She shares her personal experiences with disabilities and highlights the tools she uses to navigate websites. She emphasized that 97% of websites are not accessible to people with disabilities, causing 71% of disabled users to leave inaccessible sites. Nina provided practical tips, such as using alt text for images, employing color contrast tools, and ensuring clear markers for interactive text. She also introduced the “spoon theory” to explain the limited energy individuals with disabilities have for navigating websites, advocating for inclusive design. This episode was so impactful and one that every blogger needs to take a listen to!Thanks for listening! Let us know your thoughts on Instagram: @sparkmediaconceptsJoin the Ultimate Blog Bootcamp HERE!Check out the show notes (link below) for more information including links and resources mentioned in today's episode!SHOW NOTES: www.sparkmediaconcepts.com/episode132

Welcome to the Ultimate Blog Podcast with Amy Reinke and Jennifer Draper. We are on a mission to empower women who want to start or grow their own blog. This podcast is for women who want to learn blogging basics and who crave inspiration and encouragement. Whether you are just getting started or have been a blogger for years, we are excited to welcome you into this space where we are passionate about creating community over competition. We are bloggers who want to encourage you to believe in your potential, step outside the norm, and step into a life where you create your own schedule, your own success, and your own story. Join us for weekly episodes as we navigate blogging and work from home life,

all while raising a family and having some serious fun along the way. all while raising a family and having some serious fun along the way. Well, this is going to be another exciting episode with Nina Clapperton. We had her on episode 123 talking all about travel blogging and SEO. Nina owns, she knows SEO, and she's a travel blogger and just a wealth of knowledge. If you have not listened to episode 123 yet, please go back and listen to that. Don't turn this one off though, because this one is going to be so good and not just good, but really, really important. It's talking about the things that we need to have on our site for accessibility purposes. And this is something that in actually that last interview, Nina shared with us that she's really passionate about it.

And I was like, fantastic. You can come back on because we really like talking to you. And you can share why this is so important. So welcome back, Nina. We are so glad to spend another hour with you. Thank you so much for having me and letting me talk about another hyperfixation of mine. It's a good one. It's helpful. Yeah, it is. And it benefits everybody listening, everybody who's blogging. And so

people are just going to be so thankful that you're sharing this because even Jennifer and I know that we're going to learn a lot in this episode. So Nina, just in case somebody hasn't listened back to episode 123, will you just go ahead and just give a brief like, hello, I'm Nina and this is who I am. For sure. Hi everybody. I'm Nina Claverton. I'm a Canadian. I have purple hair and I'm obsessed with my golden retriever. Those are kind of the three fun facts about me. I started blogging because I thought I was going to be a lawyer and then I hated the idea of that. And I had a stale Starbucks cookie and it tasted better than a life in a law firm would. So I was like, cool, let's start blogging.

And my travel blog really saw success with SEO. But one of the key things with it was my grandmother's blind. And so she can't actually see all these beautiful pictures on my website. And she kept writing me, she was like the only person reading my blog. God bless her. She'd also call me every week being like, paragraph three, there's a typo or something. She is the best editor for free that you'll ever find in like heavy Russian accent having this woman tell you like you put down the wrong capital, Saskatchewan. I was like, how do you know that? Also, like

she couldn't see the photos. And so I had some posts that were like, 10 photos to inspire your New Zealand wanderlust or something. And they're bad photos because I can't take good photos. I was using a broken iPhone. But it made me sad that she couldn't get the best out of it. And then when I started learning SEO, I started learning a lot about ways to game the system

and use accessibility things for SEO purposes, which is not what they're made for at all. And it's incredibly frustrating as someone who is disabled myself. I do have impairments that mean that I struggle online and I have to use screen readers and things like that. And until you have to do that, you don't realize how inaccessible so much of the web is. Like 97% of the websites that Wave, which is like a web accessibility checker checked, are non-accessible to people. And 71% of people like myself who are disabled

will leave the moment we encounter something that is not accessible. And there's about like a billion, I think 1.6 billion is the current number, of people who are disabled. You're gonna lose us. Like we are a really amazing group of people who want to go on your website and you're losing traffic, you're losing sales.

I can tell you, I am a diehard fan of anyone who does accessibility things. And if I noticed that you're not on your website, I'm probably not coming back. To be honest, like I will leave so quickly and I'll put you in my little like blacklist folder mentally where I'm like, Nope, this isn't for me. They don't want me here. So I became really passionate about things like alt text, especially that was kind of my first soapbox moment. And then it's expanded ever since to be, yeah, more about making sure everyone gets to exist online in a way that we should be able to exist in society as well, because there should be no barriers to entry for anything. I love it. And I love your passion for it.

And I love that you're willing to share your personal testimony with it, because I think that's really, really important. So thanks for your vulnerability there. People often need like a face to put to it, which I think is unfortunate that like we need... It's kind of like, I don't know, there's a lot of arguments where it's like, oh, well, I'm a dad of daughters or oh, that's not like it shouldn't be about that. It's just a person who just needs to exist. And for me, like, I do have a lot of disabilities, I have a service dog,

and I find even in the travel space, there's a lot of work I'm doing now on travel accessibility, because there isn't as much as there should be. But with blogging and with websites, people just don't think of it. And so until you can put a face behind it, like my 90 year old Russian grandmother is the face most people now have in their head, which I love and she's super excited about because she's like, she likes to yell at people a little bit. So she's like, I'm so happy that like people can think

of this like adorable little old woman and she is the reason that they're making changes when really you shouldn't have to have someone in your head. But if you have to, yeah, picture a little old lady in her leopard print long sleeve shirt sitting there reading your blog, probably calling me to tell me about it. Yeah. I think anybody who doesn't struggle is, you know, they maybe don't have a picture of like how somebody might struggle

or what tools they might be using to get the information. But you're right, like everybody deserves access to all this information that's out there. Can you kind of help paint that picture even a little bit more? Like you mentioned briefly, like a tool that you use, what kind of tools are people using that are helping them to be able to access websites? For sure. One of the easiest systems is with a Mac. It's one of the reasons I use Macs is because they have a lot of built-in accessibility features.

So you can even turn these on yourself and try them out. So there's actually a voiceover feature, which is the built-in Mac screen reader, which will go over a website and read it out loud to you. Now, the thing is, it's reading everything on your website, and it's also reading pictures. So it's blind, essentially, so it can't be like, okay, here's what this picture is. So the way that it does that is through alternative text, also called alt text, mistakenly called alt tags. For some reason, it's not a tag, it's text. And it is literally an alternative to the image. So what a lot of SEOs teach is like, okay, in this blog post about things to do in Rome, you're going to label every one of those images things to do in Rome,

that's going to be the alt text. But what that does for me as a user, I have ADHD. So I use a screen reader because I do not have an attention span to read everything I would like to read. And for my grandmother, this is the same thing she uses because she's blind. However, she has like a specialized system from the Canadian Institute of the Blind, similar principle. It's going to read that page and then when it hits the image, it will tell you this is an image. And then it's going to say this is an image of and then it's going to tell me whatever. So this is an image of things to do in Rome. That tells us nothing. And this is like, I know this is an audio format as well.

So I mean, someone sitting there is going, okay, well, what's the picture? But if you have something instead that says, this is an image of the Colosseum at sunset with Nina standing in front of it, posing with her arms up with a big smile on her face and her ice cream is falling out of her hand. Like you can see how much more beneficial

that description is. So that's one element. Now there's also people who have color blindness, who have difficulties with my ADHD. I also have issues with like tons of animations. And if I'm on a page and there's videos playing that I can't pause, that's an issue. So there's a lot of different things people are doing

to just even navigate around that. But with systems like the one inside of a Mac, you can also do things like changing color scales, changing gradient. For people with epilepsy and things like that, you have to be really careful of seizure triggers on your site. So, so many businesses that start with some big flashy animation. I don't have epilepsy, but sometimes I still feel like, oh my god, I just got punched in the face by your website. That's not great. Yeah. Yeah. And for most of us on our phone too, elements like that take a lot of data to run. And in Canada, data is incredibly expensive. So I don't want to waste my data on you because I don't care about you yet from your homepage. So it's those little elements. Now, I find with a Mac, there are a lot of different things you can

do as well. There are Chrome extensions you can build in for captions or videos that don't have them. There are like there's a chat GPT for YouTube is a Chrome extension that'll give you a transcript for any video on YouTube, which is really helpful for someone like me who my brain sometimes moves too quickly. So I can't like, I need more I need to be able to like see it or like read it all faster to see if it's worth listening to. It'll also summarize the text for me or like the video for me so I can see okay, is this a video that's worth watching for me? Like will this get to the point that I

need? There's a lot of elements like that that many of us use that are little extra tools literally anybody could use. But for us when things are already harder, like there's that spoon theory where neurotypical people have like a drawer of spoons they're starting the day with. But those of us who are neurodiverse or who are disabled in some way, we start the day with like three spoons and every task takes a spoon. So for y'all, if it takes one spoon to go to a website, that's fine. But I get three websites a day that I can handle. And so if I'm going to your site and it's not good for me,

I've wasted a spoon now. So that's kind of the theory why we want to make it easier for people who are already struggling. And like, we're just, I don't know, as a disabled person, we're so used to like going anywhere online in person and getting less. So if we can do more for these people, it's amazing. So I highly recommend turn on voiceover for a day, turn on some of these different tools

and see like, they just benefit anybody. Like I've not met a single neurotypical person or able-bodied person who has not benefited from things like this. Like we all prefer ramp to stairs. We all prefer flat things. It's the same idea here. Yeah. You painted a very, I think, visual picture for us to understand. And for someone who has never had that, they've maybe never considered it.

And I think it's important for those of us who maybe haven't to be willing to consider it because you are obviously wanting to consume the content that a blogger is creating, you know, no matter what it is. And I think it also lends itself to say that the more flashy the website does not mean anything. For a number of reasons, we could go into that and like about so much more than just accessibility. But like you don't need some big flashy site, we really do at the heart of it need to offer a really good positive user experience and that goes for

Someone who is neurotypical and also somebody who has a disability of some sort as well So thank you for just painting that picture. I think about why it is important I loved the spoon analogy that you know, you don't you don't have as much to give at the beginning of the day. And so you have to be very careful with what you're doing and what you're seeing and the kind of content that you are consuming, essentially. So thank you for just being really vulnerable about that. So how should people, like if they're like, well, I don't know then how to put videos on my site, how should somebody put a video on their site to make them more accessible?

Yeah, the best way, because video is so good for so many people. And first of all, I'd say, even if you don't have videos, try to make some, because there are different learning styles out there, and this is something I've especially learned from running courses, but different people engage with things differently.

So with videos, I recommend putting it up on YouTube first and then embedding a YouTube link. YouTube is incredibly accessible. They allow you to have captions running automatically generated. Even if you're doing a live on YouTube, you can actually turn captions on in real time. So as you're like speaking in that moment, especially with like live master classes and stuff like that, where there's limited time bonuses, many people who are hard of hearing, or even people just like English isn't their first language. I know I don't enunciate the best in the world. Like I'm from Toronto,

we drop our T's on everything we say. So it can be hard to understand me. And with a tool like, I don't know, Ahrefs, where some people pronounce a Ahrefs and I pronounce it differently, they might not know what I'm talking about. So having clear captions is super important. Having a speed change.

This is harder with live videos, you can't really do that because you're talking in the moment, but I watch everything at like two to three times speed, which I know sounds kind of ridiculous, but I need that to actually pay attention to it. I need chipmunk voices. I don't know why, but it's like a thing for my ADHD

where I play things incredibly quickly. And so I can't sit there and watch one time speed. I will not listen, especially because most of us at one time speed, I know I speak a bit quickly, but most people like speak slowly. They really enunciate every, I'm getting bored just talking like that to be honest, too quickly. And so for me, I also I need the opposite, I need a slowdown function. And YouTube has that natively, then the next thing is include a transcript. So if you

are not going to write an actual blog post to support the content, and include all of the content, just copy and paste over a transcript. Most systems like loom and whatever, if you're recording in them will automatically create it. And if not, YouTube will automatically create it. That Chat GPT for YouTube Chrome extension that I mentioned, it's free, literally just called Chat GPT for YouTube. It doesn't like write content, it's not stealing your content.

It's just automatically pulling the transcript. And then from that, it'll also do a like five bullet point summary for you. Take both of those and put them into your blog post. Then you have a summary for people so they know what you're talking about, and then they have a transcript if they prefer to read, or if like me, they prefer to listen and read at the same time. That's a really good option. Now, most of us don't have the production quality to hire like a sign language interpreter. If possible, obviously like try to, but I'm not telling you you have

to because ultimately, like, there are other things that you're doing in the video with the captions and such that will help that person. But if you were ever going to like, take your blog and do like a live summit or something, if at all possible, having something like that available is really great. But there is a barrier to entry there. And there are some issues with fake sign language interpreters, which is a whole other thing. So I recommend getting the captions up quickly and making sure as well with the transcript that it's not something you're making them work to find. If you can put it on your website, what I

do is I put it in an accordion block, which means that it collapses. So it just says transcript, they can click it and then it opens. So I still get to have like a slightly prettier site if I want it, but also screen readers will read that transcript if needed. Okay, so we talked about images, we talked about video. I think also just being able to see the screen clearly, right, is another issue like the text on the screen, the colors and all of those kinds of things. Can you talk a little bit about that in terms of accessibility? A lot of people think with links especially that just like making them blue or something is enough, but you actually need two different markers that something is unique text. So if it's something that's interactive, it should be very clear that it's interactive. Because none of us want to click on something and then end up somewhere we didn't expect.

That's in my opinion, the same as someone like throwing you in the back of a van and you're like, I don't care if I'm going for ice cream. I'd like to know where we're going. Oh, this is disturbing and not great. So same idea here. If someone is colorblind, just because you think that like, okay, blue is a different enough color from black,

doesn't mean that they can see it. It also is for someone who is using grayscale or something on their computer, or someone who literally can only see in grayscale. There are people that have no color awareness. They're really gonna struggle to identify that. So I really recommend having a text decoration as well as a color.

So that's typically an underline. Almost every system is automatically going to underline your links. And typically we are the ones who break that. So a lot of the like pretty things we do on websites are the problem, that like we are the issue. Go back to Taylor Swift, like, hi, I'm the problem. It's me sort of situation.

You like natively WordPress, especially is one of the most accessible systems. They have the ARIA landmarks built in. They have like a lot of the technical details that people, like most of us, most bloggers, we don't know how to do. We would not know how to code that from scratch. WordPress does it for us. And so with these links,

like the native way to include links is almost always having it underlined. Please do that. Otherwise do something else. I find italics aren't clear enough. Bolding can be okay, but it depends on the font. And if you typically bold other text, that's not going to be as helpful. You can highlight, I don't care what you do, do something that makes it really clear. You can even put an icon beside it. One of the accessibility features, it's a bit more advanced, is having an icon that clearly shows that you're leaving the website.

So Link Whisperer now has like a function for this where it puts like a little, it's almost like a square with an arrow like pointing into like the upper right corner that's basically like, hey, this is gonna fly you off this website just so you know where we're going. It does also do this if it's like a sales page

or something for you and it's like hosted somewhere else. So just keep that in mind. But it is helpful for people to know what's gonna happen. And so that's one way with text. Now with actual like text on the screen as well, we all have bad eyes, let's be real. Like just in society, none of us want to view 12 point text.

I know that was like high school English or whatever default. On a website, the smallest font size you should have is 16 pixels or 16 points. Honestly, I would say like, I wouldn't go smaller than 20 because so many of us are viewing this on our phone and many people have small or crappy phones that they just like, kind of can't deal with. So having it big, easy to read is super important.

Also having a clear demarcation between your headers and your normal text so that people can see the difference. However, a lot of people use headers for decorative text and that people can see the difference. However, a lot of people use headers for decorative text and that is not what it's meant for. Headers actually are a sequential drop-down system almost. So H1 is your title, H2 are going to be chapter markers, H3 are sub-chapters, H4 are sub-sub-chapters. That's how it's structured. If you just randomly start throwing H4s into like your first sentence or something, which is something I experimented with for a while as one of those like

tricks for SEO people talked about, it confuses the heck out of a screen reader because it's like, okay, we're on a chapter header. And it doesn't understand that this is just a normal sentence. So it really throws things off. Also, it's really confusing if you're jumping from like, okay, a chapter header to a sub, sub, sub, sub chapter header and then back, or if you're, I've seen people use like H6 and then an H2 is like, the H6 is like shadow text that just like drops the keyword in again. Don't do stuff like that.

If you wanna change the size or color of text, change the size or the color of text, don't change the coding. Because the coding, that's size or the color of text, don't change the coding. Because the coding, that's part of the ARIA landmark, which ARIA landmarks are basically just like, if you think of that image I mentioned before, where it says, this is an image, that's what it's telling the screen reader,

that's what it's telling Google, that's what it's telling any robot that is crawling this website. It's like, this is a link, this is an image, this is a video, this is a chapter header. And that's how it's demarking it for when it's explaining it to a reader, because me just sitting here with my screen reader, I don't know that like things to do in Rome is your H2, or if it's just a piece of text in the actual like flow of the text, unless it's really clearly laid out. So that's

something as well. Having like like not weird cursive fonts, a lot of people are like, I'm gonna download every fancy font from Creative Market. Once again, we are the problem, it is us breaking things. You are not too good for Arial. You are not too good for Times New Roman. I'm gonna be honest with y'all. Like you do not need something that is like a fancy,

like cursive handwriting or like it's fake, I don't know, Arabic looking like, no, just just just use basic text because people just want to read it and you are actively fighting against them trying to make something fancy and most people aren't even taught how to read cursive anymore. So like you're taking away a whole demographic of people that it's just unfortunate. So those are kind of like the big things I would say. I mean, you want to have clear spacing, have white space. And with colors, kind of alluded to this, Jennifer, as well, people can't see every color.

And this is something I see all the time. We often think of having high contrast colors, meaning don't have neon yellow font on a lime green background. Yeah, don't do that. It's not the early 90s. It's not the like very first website that ever existed. But equally, we need something that's clear. So like I wouldn't put bright blue font on a dark blue background. Because if someone does have some sort of color blindness, they're in the same spectrum, they won't be able to see the difference. So there's actually a free color checker you can use online. It's called Web AIM Contrast Checker. If you just Google color contrast

checker, I believe it's the first one that comes up. But there's so many. And you input the color codes of your background and your font color, and it will actually show you, okay, here's a bunch of different scenarios. Is this visible enough? And just because it's visible enough to you does not mean it's visible enough to a specific user. Even if you think of like, I had a severe concussion a few years ago, so I have like the orange light turned on on my computer to minimize the blue light. That means that colors are very different to my computer than like to someone else.

Yes. So just because you think, okay, my yellow and red are high contrast enough on my very blue monitor doesn't mean that for me on my yellow monitor, that it's like high contrast enough. So this will do a quick test for you. It's 100% free. I do it on like every blog audit I do for people. So if it had a limit, I would have hit it long ago.

So take the five seconds and it'll even show you if you start dragging like, okay, let's make the darker color just a bit darker. Let's make the lighter color a bit lighter. It'll help you find like the right variation of even the same colors you already have. And this comes up less so on the basic text on your website. It's usually more in call out boxes where you have like a link on a blue background or something or a yellow background. I see a lot of like blue on yellow colors and sometimes it works, but if your font is too skinny, it won't work. So just do a quick check. It doesn't take very long and no one's yelling at you because you're trying to fix it. So like that's a good thing is you're just improving it and

you can usually change those colors really, really quickly for your site. Yeah. Have you been listening to the podcast because you want to start a blog? Maybe you've listened to several episodes now and you're feeling inspired, but something is still holding you back. Most often, tech is what prevents people from starting their blog. And that is why we created the Ultimate Blog Bootcamp. Our signature online course was created to support new bloggers as they start their journey.

The Ultimate Blog Bootcamp is the support you need as you get started and we literally support you every step of the way. You get instant access to the course and can start your blog today. It's time to stop thinking about it and just do it. The course is broken up in such a way that you start at the beginning from branding and design and tech setup and will move into the basics of SEO and email marketing. You get our support on Slack for six weeks so you never have a question unanswered and you will be empowered as you create your blog from the ground up.

We know how overwhelming starting a blog can be, and with our support and others who are in the course, we hope you know that your blogging community is waiting for you to say yes to your dream. Click the link in our show notes for more information on the ultimate blog bootcamp and how you can get started now. Are there any other ways that somebody can test their site's accessibility? Because they might not know. I think it's important to note that you don't know what you don't know. So I don't want anybody feeling guilty, like, oh my gosh, like I didn't think about these things.

But you know, once you're giving this knowledge, Nina, I think it's then important to like, okay, so what's the next step? Like what can I do? So how can somebody look at their own site site's accessibility and like, kind of make the tweaks that they need to make? Yeah, you don't know what you don't know. And this is the thing is like, I only get mad at people that know this and then get mad at me for telling them it's wrong. I literally once sent an email where I was like, and it was a controversial title. It was like, your blog hates me. It was the best, the best email I've ever had, like 75% open rate.

Most people clicked it. Most people loved it. The people that got mad got very defensive. So my first thing is don't get defensive. I had to like literally remove people and like ban them from my business because of how hateful they were about it. And I was like, this is the thing you have a lot of internalized ableism. Everyone does. I do too. Like the second I had to start using mobility aids, I was like, I'm 28. Like I second I had to start using mobility aids, I was like, I'm 28, like, I shouldn't need this. It's like, no, you do. So just like we need to get over the shoulda, woulda, coulda.

You just need to do these things. So the first thing is set that aside, stop being defensive and just start fixing things. So then there's a bunch of tools. Now I have a blog accessibility checklist on my website. It's sheknowsseo.co slash blog hyphen accessibility hyphen checklist, but that's going to take you to an interactive checklist where you can actually go through each step to see does my blog meet this.

There's also a tool called WAVE, W-A-V-E, which if you search it, I think you just search like WAVE accessibility, but it's a free tool where you can input your blog's URL and it'll actually run a really extensive check. No website passes 100%, I'll be honest with you. You would have to like hire a lot of developers because there's always gonna be some like one weird thing, but you can look with it and it'll show you, okay, where are your links?

How clear are they? Is your font size big enough? Everything I've talked about so far, it's gonna go through on your site for free. It is 100% free. It is basically a nonprofit organization that is trying to help people improve web accessibility. So like basically my favorite website, I think it's great. There is the web AIM contrast checker. And then there's a few others that are maybe a bit more different

or advanced, I guess. So if you have the free Ahrefs webmaster tools, which is like on Ahrefs, you sign up, you make a free account, it'll actually send you a report of your website every month and look for like broken alt text, look for broken links and things like that. It's not perfect, I will say. Health score, ignore it. Because if you have a good security plugin, it'll block it sometimes. And then it looks like, oh, you have these slow loading pages. It's like, no, it just served the myriads of Ahrefs bots, like a bit of a recapture to be like, chill, what are you? But it will tell you, okay, you have these 20 images

that lack alt text, and it's a really easy way to find them across your website. You can also use the Ahrefs rechrome extension to check your header structure. If you just want to do it at a glance to make sure that it is ordered properly. You can also check your structured data so you don't have like, I don't know, it says there's a video but you have no video on your website. You have to do something really weird to trigger that though. So if you're not a coder, you probably wouldn't have like accidentally coded in a video or something.

Then there's things like the Hemingway app and the readability analyzer that make sure you're not using language that is like, I don't know, if you're not teaching academic English, don't use academic English like language. We are all lazy. I mean, I have a master's in like, basically one of the degrees I did was in talking bird language and medieval dream poetry. It is useless, but it is something I have in my life. I would never use the language I used in the dissertation for that in normal life because no one wants to read it.

I don't think my like actual advisor cared enough to read it, to be honest. They were like, why are we talking about this rooster? Let's move on. So just make sure your language is casual and chill so anyone could read it, especially someone who has a developmental delay or someone who does have basically any trouble understanding the way words are written. There are tons of people with dyslexia. I don't remember the name of it, but there's the dyscalculia, I think it's called, the like numbers one as well. So make numbers super clear, but just making it easy to read. And then lastly, I will kind of plug my own thing. But if you go into chat GPT and you have a paid subscription, if you search alt text or she knows alt text in the custom GPTs, I made a free GPT that if you upload images,

it'll auto-generate alt text for you for your images. You can actually drop in the URL of your website of a page, and it'll look at every image on the page and find the ones that are missing alt text for you and automatically generate it. It will look at the page to find keywords and context as well. So it's not just going to say things to do in Rome, it'll actually write you proper alt text. So those are a lot of tools I know,

but honestly, they all take like five minutes to use. And once you like, once you do the wave checker once, once you do the contrast checker once, you're kind of done for like six months, unless like you've changed something. Same for the webmaster tools and like the Chrome extension. Once you get in the hang of this, you're not gonna need to check these as often.

So I would recommend like plan a weekend of trashy TV, put on like Married at First Sight, put on like Love is Blind or whatever, whatever your guilty pleasure shows are, go through this a bit and then give yourself like the fun reward of doing something a bit trashy or like, that is like kind of a bit more brainless. I mean, I am reality television addict over here, so like no judge.

But like you need that. You need something happening to like feel like, okay, well, this is the reward for me now. And then yeah, put it out there. And I would recommend doing a quick test of it. Use something like the voiceover on the Mac, put it out there in accessibility groups. A lot of times people like myself are willing to take a look at websites. Even like in like the raptive ad Network Facebook group, there are many people that go like, hey, if you all want me to take a look at your website, just so you know, I use a screen reader,

I am happy to take a look. Like, people who are disabled, we are very helpful, which I don't think we have to be. But so you can test yourself a bit, but it is really good to get someone else's eyes on it. And then the last thing I would say is like, be open to feedback and criticism. If I go to a website, personally, I don't bother anymore because I've gotten a lot of bad feedback and like bad reactions from other people when I do this. But unless I'm like paid to do a blog audit, I will stay out of it. But there are many websites where I would go to them and be like, hey, love this post, just a note, I would have loved some alt text in the images.

And people would get really defensive. Don't do that. Like we are genuinely trying to say, I really love this. I want more people like me to be able to engage with it. I'm not trying to fight you. I'm not trying to be like, Oh, like, if you you suck, like, no, I'm saying, that's how I feel internally. And I'd rather I don't feel like that. So I'm going to come at you nicely and say, Hey, could you please try and help people like me? Cause there are so many of us and so many that people that are neurotypical that still use a lot of the systems that we use.

So those would be a thing to do for sure. And then, yeah, like we talked about before, pretty is a problem. Honestly, pretty is usually not functional. So don't add in a million carousels. Don't add things that, like, if you have to fight WordPress to add it, usually that's a bad sign. Usually that means you are doing something that is not only going to hurt site speed, but also accessibility. So like try to keep plugins to a minimum. I'm sure like the blog fixer talked about this too, but like you don't, you're not creating the Mona Lisa websites because no one wants that.

Like there is a reason there's a structure that works and like white background with black text. That's great. That is so fine by most of us. And like we just want it to be simple and clear and legible. That's the big thing. Yeah. And really that's what most most readers want. Anyway, They're not there for like lots of flash and stuff. They want their information. So I think this should be a relief to many bloggers that you don't have to put in all of this work to make all this custom stuff

that WordPress is designed essentially with what you need in order to make a website that's great for everyone who wants to access information. And I would suspect that the reason that people get defensive when you approach them is they just feel overwhelmed. Like they don't know what, you know, we don't know what we don't know. So they're not, they don't know how to fix it. They feel like, you know, they've heard people make a big deal about it

and they feel like, oh, it must be really, really hard to do this. But I think you've broken it down into some really simple things that, you know, any of us can do. Just let's dip our toes in and let's get started because if you keep ignoring it, it's not going to go away. So what can we at least start making progress on? And you've given us, you know, lots of free tools. So there's no reason not to like sit down, watch your favorite show and just dig into

this for a couple of hours and see how far it gets you. I think the one question that I would have is, you know, besides obviously like you want it to be available to any reader, are there any other implications of not having your site be accessible? Is there any, you know, could you get penalized by Google or anything like that? Are there any risks involved in not making your site accessible? I think the thing people forget is that Google is blind. Google is a robot, just like my screen reader. So what a lot of people do with that alt text

is their keyword stuffing. And it used to be a strategy back in 2008 when Google didn't have their ability to do latent semantic indexing, which is basically just it can understand contextual words. Back then, it literally was include the word often enough and you game the system. You didn't want it to look unnatural though to the user, so you would hide those words. People would literally turn keywords white so it blended in with the background, just

like you would do in an old essay trying to trying to like, game the system when you're like 13 and you haven't realized they can figure that out pretty easily yet. Like, I think people were doing here. So they were hurting people and then it started hurting Google too, because Google realized, okay, that's a problem. Like we don't want you guys doing this. We want to actually have helpful alt text and alt text is something that doesn't just exist on websites like Facebook is

actually oddly one of the best places for it where it will auto generate alt text for an image based on its detection. And it's crazy because Facebook is not accessible in like most other ways, but they are one of the only software is doing that Instagram, you have to manually add it, TikTok, you can manually add it like YouTube, you have to manually do it. Most places you are the person doing it. And it's unfortunate that like it falls on us, but equally all content falls on us. Like if you are the one making all these other things, finish the job. It kind of feels like you're like slapdash icing a cake and you're not actually

finishing icing it if you're not doing these extra bit. So for Google, like that extra context, that extra experience of you in the picture of whatever extra like information you can put in there is really helpful. One case I see all the time where people really cut themselves off at the knees is they will have like an infographic on their page. Like let's say it is like 10 things to do for accessibility

and they don't have the text of that checklist. Like the checklist is just an image. Google can't see that. So you've now just said the text of that checklist. The checklist is just an image. Google can't see that. So you've now just said, here's this checklist. I'm not going to tell you what's in it. And that's not helpful. That's clickbait. No one wants to click on that.

So you've actually tricked Google into thinking your helpful content is clickbait nonsense, and you've literally cut yourself off. So what you want to do, number one, just put it as text on the page instead, and or number two, is make it as text on the page instead. And or number two is make it alt text for that image. Any infographic, any image that has any text in it that is relevant, especially things like graphs and any sort of like, I don't know, for statistic thing, any sort of like visual information, make sure it is so clear what that is, why it's there at its purpose.

When you're writing alt text, the two rules are, pardon me, what's in the picture? Why does it matter to this post and where it is in the post? What is the purpose of this? So just telling me infographic checklist, okay, well, Google's looking for those semantic words to tell me that you knew this is an accessibility checklist

and you aren't just saying like, F you, ignore accessibility or something where it doesn't want to rank that. You haven't done that. Like it cannot see this. So you really want to make sure you're adding that in. It also helps with image SEO and getting the images to rank over in Google images.

So super important there too. But yeah, overall, like Google also pays attention to people leaving your site. So if someone's coming to your site and it takes a while to load and then they leave before it loads, or most people aren't engaging with your content, Google knows that. And they're like, hey, this must not be very good.

I quoted at the beginning, there's like 1.6 billion of us who are disabled. And those are only the people the World Health Organization categorizes as disabled. I don't know that I would technically make their cut, especially because like, I don't file for disability or anything. So because of that, I would caution a guess and say it's probably more like 3 billion, to be honest, are using systems. So because of that, 71% of us will leave a website, you are losing out on like over a billion people to your website. And if Google sees that, that these people are coming and bouncing out, they're going to mark it down. So really all of this, as well as we talked about before, better for normal users too, and I use the word normal because other people use unfortunately.

But basically like you just want to have an easy to use website. Don't make it too hard for anybody. Don't make it too hard for us. Don't make it too hard for someone with poor wifi. Cause honestly, like poor wifi feels like a disability sometimes as someone who hikes a lot. It's kind of similar where there's a lot of like issues navigating sites, having a like triple drop down in your menu. Having a one of my biggest pet peeves is where you can't right click on the screen, like you can't like copy

information. Because a lot of us use that actually to put it into a system that will summarize it for us. Not because we're trying to take your content, but because as a user, I am trying to make this something I can read better. For dyslexia, there's a lot of different tools that will like highlight certain words, or even certain letters of a word to help people keep on track with it. And sometimes they don't work on computers, because those-click disablers, they often disable my screen reader as well. Most accessibility plugins, not accessible. They break all of our tools

because we have our own system. We don't really want you to pay 50 bucks a year for a very subpar version of it. But also I have to be able to see to turn it on, which is a massive flaw that I don't know why those plugins have not figured out yet. But yeah, just, we already take a brunt of this anyway, but you don't want to hurt yourself with Google. You don't want to hurt yourself with us. And it's unfortunate that I often have to like, kind of talk about this stuff as though it's

going to hurt your rankings and your income. Because people, we are as a society trained to be individualist thinkers, and that's a whole other thing, but of course you're gonna put yourself first, and I get that. And I also get that as a busy entrepreneur, I was working four jobs while growing my first website. I did not have time, and I would have taken it personally too, I'm sure, if it wasn't my own grandmother telling me,

hey, you're kinda screwing me over, that I can't actually engage with your content, and I am your best reader right now. So like maybe care about me. Like it's the same thing here. So yeah, I would recommend think of it either as a person or yeah, if you have to think of it from a Google perspective, but really it does come down to the user and Google is all about the user. And Google has no reason to differentiate a disabled user from a neurotypical or able-bodied user. They don't know. So they just see someone leaving your site in droves, essentially, and you are hurting yourself massively. And same goes for sales. I would also recommend for anyone

selling products and things like that. Think of different thinkers. Think of different learners. Every course that I have, I do video lessons. They have captions. They have speed changes. They have a transcript. They also have a summary, they have action steps. I do a private podcast feed for people who just want the audio and to listen on the go. I also do a workbook. That's a lot of work for me, right? And you're probably like, Oh, my God, I don't want to make a course like that. I get it. I didn't really at the beginning either. But I realized like for myself, I don't want to pay $300 for something and barely be able

to get through it. I don't want to struggle through it. They should be making it as easy as possible for me. And once I realized that I was like, cool, from the other side, I should be doing the same. I should be offering that level of customer service, because all of those people are my customers. And even if someone paid $1, they paid the same as somebody else.

And so whether or not they're able-bodied, they should get the exact same experience. So I highly, highly, highly recommend thinking about that stuff. If you're going to run tours as well, I know my travel bloggers out there, be really clear about if it is disability friendly or not. Many of us understand that like some things can't be. I have a service dog. I did a trip to Mexico. I ran a summit there. He couldn't go to Chichen Itza. He couldn't go to the cenote. Like they

just weren't service dog friendly. So I just bowed out of that day and I was okay with it because to be honest, I just wanted to sit down and chill by the pool for the day. But I needed that clarity. I wouldn't have wanted to personally like and I ran it so I had to know. I didn't want to book it. I spend like $3,000 on a vacation and And it turns out I can't do anything or I can't even walk up to the bedroom. Cause it's up a bunch of stairs. Like I stayed at a house with friends. They knew to put me on the ground floor, like things like that. You just need to be really cognizant of these things.

And the more you are, the more you're going to attract diehard fans. I can tell you my favorite creators are people who think about this because I feel loved, I feel cared for. And in society, we often don't feel that way, which sucks. Like it shouldn't be that way. My favorite creators are people who think about this because I feel loved, I feel cared for. And in society, we often don't feel that way, which sucks, like it shouldn't be that way. So, yeah, give all your disabled friends a nice little home on your website,

and we will come back. We are very passionate people. We are very diehard fan people. So, you're gonna get a lot of views out of us. I love everything that you've shared. I think it's important. I think that you've shared the story behind it. And sadly, I do think that sometimes it takes putting a face to it in order to make it important and to make it more than just about Google. Because it is more than just about Google. As bloggers, we know how important it is

to offer a good user experience. And so, yes, we're, I mean, to our fault, we know how important it is to offer a good user experience. And so, yes, we're, I mean, to our fault, we are usually talking about neurotypical individuals who are there. But I think that you've really helped us understand that there is a whole other population that we can be serving and that we can be making sure that our blog is a place that they are welcome and they feel like they can learn to whatever we are creating. And no matter what the disability is, you should be able to do that. And you've given so many concrete evidence reasons as to why it's really important.

So thank you. I'm really glad that you're passionate about it. That way you can help us you're passionate about it. That way you can help us become more passionate about it too. And we don't know what we don't know. And so like Nina said, if you're kind of going through this episode, like, oh my gosh, I have a lot of work. What I want you to do is take a deep breath, like she said, and then like turn on some TV or something that you can enjoy while you do it. But then Nina has a checklist actually.

And I want to point this out. A lot of times when people share something, there is like either a paywall or it's a link to have to join somebody's email list. Nina has created this completely free to you. So you are not going to be on her email list by getting this checklist. So this is truly just a service and a gift. It's a gift is what it is to you to help make your blog more accessible. And so Nina, I would like for you just to kind of share a little bit about this checklist that you've

created and where they can find that please. You can find it at sheknowsseo.co slash blog hyphen accessibility hyphen checklist checklist all one word. If you'll just go to sheknowsseo.co and search.gov.gov.gov.gov.gov.gov.gov.gov.gov.gov.gov.gov.gov.gov.gov.gov.gov.gov.gov.gov.gov.gov.gov.gov.gov.gov.gov.gov.gov.gov.gov.gov.gov.gov.gov.gov.gov.gov.gov.gov.gov.gov.gov.gov.gov.gov.gov.gov.gov.gov.gov.gov.gov.gov.gov.gov.gov.gov.gov.gov.gov.gov.gov.gov.gov.gov.gov.gov.gov.gov.gov.gov.gov.gov.gov.gov.gov.gov.gov.gov.gov.gov.gov.gov.gov.gov.gov.gov.gov.gov.gov.gov.gov.gov.gov.gov.gov.gov.gov.gov.gov.gov.gov.gov.gov.gov.gov.gov.gov.gov.gov.gov.gov.gov.gov.gov.gov.gov.gov.gov.gov.gov.gov.gov.gov.gov.gov.gov.gov.gov.gov.gov.gov.gov.gov.gov.gov.gov.gov.gov.gov.gov.gov.gov.gov.gov.gov.gov.gov.gov.gov.gov.gov.gov.gov.gov.gov.gov.gov.gov.gov.gov.gov.gov.gov.gov.gov.gov.gov.gov.gov.gov.gov.gov.gov.gov.gov.gov.gov.gov.gov.gov.gov.gov.gov.gov.gov.gov.gov.gov.gov.gov.gov.gov.gov.gov.gov.gov.gov.gov.gov.gov.gov.gov.gov.gov.gov.gov.gov.gov.gov.gov.gov.gov.gov.gov.gov.gov.gov. like a bit too passionately, I'm sure. And so my students have gotten really good at that. But I was realizing that a lot of the other things weren't happening. A lot of things, people kept adding stuff to break systems and they didn't know how to fix it, which I totally understand. So I wanted to create a checklist in plain English.

Like, yes, I will use terms like ARIA landmark because you need to have it somewhere, but I define it and I show you how to do it. And so the checklist is interactive on the website and you can download a Google Doc version of it because also Google Docs often a little bit more accessible than PDFs. PDFs always more accessible than a PNG, just a side note, because screen readers can actually read the text on it. So if you have an infographic, try to make it a PDF because with a PNG, it is just like the screen reader can't tell there's text on the page.

So this one is a Google Doc. That way you can interact with it as well and like toggle it on and off. You can also actually like feed the both either the website or the Google Doc to chat GPT and say here's a web accessibility checklist, analyze my website for me, and then feed it your URL. I wanted to make this as simple as humanly possible so that you can actually take action. Again, most of these things, like even the complex stuff, most of the hardest stuff WordPress is doing for you. So you don't actually have to care about it.

Like the ARIA landmarks, unless you're custom coding stuff, which I do sometimes and then I break everything. So I can tell you, unless you're really a developer, you're not doing it, you'll be fine. So it goes through step by step. I break it down by different sections, so things like links, texts, images, videos, really making sure it's clear for what you're working on.

And you can chop this down to section by section, even with things like, okay, you're already using YouTube videos. You've got like 90% of that battle done. Like the things that I'll have listed, like captions and speed, you've done, you've dealt with that. Because YouTube deals with that and it's free, which is really nice. You don't have to like pay for another system.

So the checklist really is meant to be as easy as possible. I'm very excited about it. I also like custom coded it with chat GPT so that it itself is more accessible for people because I do like coding. And yeah, it's just it's a fun thing to do honestly to get to learn more about your website and I think it's also just an empowering thing to understand the way your website works That's what I love about coding too And like what I love about AI is it's all like democratizing all of these like complex things that shouldn't be gate kept

And you shouldn't need to spend two thousand dollars on a developer to get somebody to just like be able to use your website So yeah find that and she knows SEO co Download like it says like click here to get it and then you just get the Google Doc Like I do not want y'all forced onto an email list for this I want you guys to share this as much as you want like please share this make this available to whoever you'd like to Make it available to send it to your boss at your company because so many companies are not accessibility friendly send it to your boss at your company because so many companies are not accessibility friendly. So we're like, do what you can, but get on the soapbox with me because it is lonely up here by myself. I love it. Thank you so much just for being generous and spreading the love to the blogging

community. This not just helps those who are disabled or need those special assistants, but it helps all of us truly be more inclusive. And so just thank you very much for creating this and for sharing today. I think this is a really, really helpful episode that people are, they have a roadmap now. And oftentimes that's what we're missing. We hear about making it more accessible and things like that, but then we're like, okay, like, like, but what does that mean? And you I love how we can ask you like a one sentence question, Nina, and you can just go and share and so openly. So just thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. And I know that everybody listening today learned a lot. So like Nina said, please, please share this episode, especially if you are a blogger

listening, please share this with somebody. You don't know what you don't know and that's okay. But being willing to learn, I think is a really important characteristic of blogging. And so this was an excellent episode to share. So thanks Nina for being here today. Thank you so much for having me. And thank you for helping me get the word out about this. Yeah. We're excited to share, thank you. Thanks so much for tuning in today. If you'd like to continue the conversation about blogging with us, please find us on Instagram at Spark Media Concepts.

You can also sign up for our weekly newsletter where we share blogging tips and inspiration. You can sign up by finding the link in the show notes. For those of you who are ready for the next step and want to start your own blog, join the waitlist for the Ultimate Blog Bootcamp. The link to join the waitlist is also in the show notes. Go out and make today a great day.