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In this episode, we interview Patrick Rauland, Senior eCommerce Developer at Xero Shoes, about his experience remediating WooCommerce stores for accessibility at scale. Xero Shoes is a massive online store that sells specialized running shoes across multiple global web properties.
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>>CHRIS HINDS: Welcome to Episode 64 of the Accessibility Craft podcast, where we explore the art of creating accessible websites while trying out interesting craft beverages. This podcast is brought to you by the team at Equalize Digital, a WordPress accessibility company and the proud creators of the Accessibility Checker plugin. In this episode, we interview Patrick Rauland, senior e-commerce developer at Xero Shoes, about his experience remediating WooCommerce stores for accessibility at scale. Xero Shoes is a massive online store that sells specialized running shoes across multiple global web properties. For show notes and a full transcript, go to accessibilitycraft.com/064. Now, on to the show.
>> AMBER HINDS: Hey, everybody. It’s Amber and I’m here today with Chris.
>> CHRIS HINDS: Hello, everyone.
>> AMBER: We have a special guest, our friend, Patrick. Hey, Patrick.
>> PATRICK RAULAND: Hi, I’m excited to be here.
>> AMBER: We are so excited to have you. Do you want to introduce yourself, share your WordPress background, any experience you have with accessibility or anything that people should know about you?
>> PATRICK: Sure, so I’ve been in WordPress for a long time now, a long time. It’s weird when it starts to go into decades, but I’ve been–
>> AMBER: You get to a point where you stop thinking you want to share the number.
>> PATRICK: Yes, over 10. I’m not going to say how many, but I’ve been building WordPress websites since forever. WooCommerce was one of the first e-commerce platforms I built, websites I built. I loved it so much and I contributed code to them. I actually had the opportunity to join the team a few years later. I joined the team. I did a whole bunch of awesome things at Woo. I did support and development and product management.
>> AMBER: This was pre-automatic acquisition, right?
>> PATRICK: Yes.
>> AMBER: This was when WooCommerce was independent?
>> PATRICK: Yes, I think I was employee number 34, something like that, so pretty small. I think we grew to 50 and then we were acquired a little bit later. Woo was where I first did my very first thing with accessibility. Very early on, you go from tables to semantic HTML. You go from inputs to buttons and stuff like that. Really, the first thing for accessibility I ever did was for Woo. I made sure that you could check out through storefronts in WooCommerce on a keyboard.
Maybe I uncovered a couple of small issues, but this was, I don’t know, eight years ago, nine years ago. A long time. It’s really cool to come back to it now and see accessibility being much more fully featured, developed, a thought-through practice, so it’s really cool. I’ve done a bunch of other stuff. I can ramble as long as you want about WordPress stuff. I’ve organized WordCamp Denver. I’ve ran my own e-commerce sites. I did some marketing for Nexcess. I worked at Paid Memberships Pro. Now, I’m a developer at Xero Shoes, a senior engineer at Xero Shoes. I feel like I’ve done a whole bunch of stuff. I could ramble for an hour.
>> CHRIS: On top of all that, you also design board games, right?
>> PATRICK: I do. That is my hobby. It hasn’t quite come back since the pandemic, but I have two published board games. One I published myself and one through a publisher. I sell my own board game on my own WooCommerce site, which is cool and fun and just delightful.
>> CHRIS: With that gaming connection, that was actually the reason I chose today’s beverage, which is Bishop Cider Skill Check. It has a gaming reference. Electronic gaming, not board gaming, but that is why I chose this today. I don’t know. The art just got me with the retro vibes. It’s got the four keys and the joystick. It kind of looks like an arcade cabinet on the front.
I don’t know if my camera is really doing it justice here for when we get these videos up. The other thing that’s a fun fact about these guys that I thought was really interesting is they actually have what they call Cidercades across Texas. They’re in five different cities and they have arcades where they serve their cider, so like pinball machines and old-school arcade games and all of that. I have not been to one, but I’m excited to try it at some point.
>> AMBER: If it’s really good, I think we have to go. Actually, it’s funny because you bought this and I was like, “Ooh.” Of course, we were trying new beverages. I had never heard of them before, but then I was taking our daughters to a dance competition and I drove right past it. I was like, “We should go there.” I was like, “We have that in our fridge. If it’s good, we should come back.” [chuckles] I read that you like arcade games. I have hardly played any arcade games in my life.
>> PATRICK: No, I live in Denver. There’s a really cool arcade bar in Denver. It’s kind of a little far from where I am now. Literally, all the tables have built-in arcade machines. I’ve been there a couple of times and that stuff is really fun. I could see it as a fun, I don’t know, date night or something.
>> AMBER: Yes, just like a Friday night kind of thing. This is neat because we’re also having the– well, it’s pre-pear for flavor. Is that the name of the flavor? No, Skill Check. It’s a pear-flavored cider. I can’t remember if I’ve had a pear cider before. I’ve had lots of ciders with apple. [chuckles]
>> CHRIS: Let’s crack these open, get a little sound effect here next to the mic maybe.
>> AMBER: That’s my favorite part. I don’t know. People who listen to podcasts might hate that, but I love it. [laughs]
>> CHRIS: I don’t know.
>> AMBER: Oh, it smells very pear-like.
>> PATRICK: Yes, it does.
>> CHRIS: Yes.
>> AMBER: In a good way or bad way? What do you think?
>> PATRICK: In a good way, for sure.
>> AMBER: Oh, I like this. It’s dry. It’s not like really sweet.
>> PATRICK: I assumed it would be sweet.
>> AMBER: They have a rating thing, so are those 10? Is that a grid of 10 rectangle-filled bars?
>> CHRIS: Yes, it’s a beverage with stats. It’s got stat bars.
>> AMBER: You know what it makes me think of? The weird résumé templates that you can get for Photoshop where people are like, “I have this much JavaScript,” and they build a little account. That’s what it makes me think of. It only has a three for sweetness?
>> PATRICK: Yes. I’m sorry. UX problem here. It’s out of nine. Why would they have nine squares and not 10?
>> CHRIS: Oh, that is weird.
>> AMBER: It is out of nine.
>> PATRICK: 30% sweet, I guess. It’s good.
>> AMBER: You think they just ran out of space and they didn’t want to make it smaller, so they just deleted one when they were designing the can.
>> PATRICK: Yes.
>> CHRIS: I don’t know why I expected it to be bubblier. For me, the thing that I first noticed was that the bubbles are a little understated on this one. I feel like I have some ciders and they’re a lot more effervescent than this one is, but I love the acidity. It’s got a really nice backbone to it.
>> AMBER: I think you get points for using “effervescent” and you’re like the only person who says that word, but you say it on every other podcast episodes. I’m like, “It’s such a good word. Why didn’t I ever say that?”
>> CHRIS: It’s that wine-tasting background rearing its head. I don’t know. I like it. I would have it again. What do you think about the apple versus pear? Do you all get more apple or more pear?
>> AMBER: Oh, it’s definitely more pear to me.
>> PATRICK: It’s definitely more pear. If they didn’t tell me there was apple in here, I would assume it’s just pear.
>> CHRIS: The other thing that I thought was interesting about it is the ingredients list. Hard apple cider first, then water, then pear juice concentrate, so it’s interesting. I guess they make the cider and then they add the pear juice in, which is not what I would have expected, but that’s cool. It does have a really nice flavor, though.
>> AMBER: That means they were not fermenting the pear. I wonder why. Do you think it’s harder to ferment pear than apple?
>> CHRIS: I don’t know. That’s where my knowledge ends.
>> AMBER: You should google that first.
>> CHRIS: I can say [inaudible] it’s like effervescent, but I don’t know. I don’t know if pears are harder to ferment than apples.
>> AMBER: As you can tell, Patrick, the beverage tastings that we have here are very non-technical.
[laughter]
>> PATRICK: This is the maximum as I go for technical beverage tastings. Can I transfer to a glass with ice or is this against the rule–
>> AMBER: Yes. You told us that cider is your preferred beverage. Do you normally have it over ice?
>> PATRICK: It needs to stay cold. As soon as an alcoholic drink or a cider gets warm, it’s like 30% less good, warm. I’m going to try to nurse this through the show and the ice is–
>> AMBER: What color is it? Is it yellow?
>> PATRICK: No, this is a blue glass, but it’s a bit yellow. Yes, it’s a bit yellow.
>> CHRIS: All right, so while speaking of pears, we have prepared some questions for Patrick today. The last or most recent stuff, I should say. Hopefully, not the last stop on your journey through the WordPress and e-commerce space has been at Xero Shoes. Most recent stuff. We just, full disclosure, finished an accessibility audit for you all. You’re the lead on that project. I was wondering if you could share some background about Xero Shoes’ motivation for the accessibility audit. Maybe take us through a little bit about how this very large e-commerce brand site is all stitched together.
>> PATRICK: Yes, I’d love to. If you haven’t heard of it before, it’s X-E-R-O. Look up xeroshoes.com. You’ll see the site. We have been in hyper-growth mode for basically a decade. It’s just been massive growth. We now, as of this past fall, have three websites. We have a US site, a UK site, and an EU site. We have fulfillment centers in each of those countries. We’re not just talking about an online operation. We sell real physical products. We have people and I think we have another office in Europe. They do their own customer support over there. It is a global operation, so it’s very large–
>> AMBER: They were on Shark Tank, right?
>> PATRICK: Yes, and the seven, eight-year, I forget exactly when. Yes, Xero Shoes is on Shark Tank a while ago. I think that clearly helped propel us forward. By the way, the founders didn’t take the deal. They had a deal like, “No, we think we’re worth more than that.” To their credit, they absolutely were.
>> AMBER: Just being on the TV show probably helps, right? I actually think I met that founder. I was debating if he came to WordCamp Denver or if there was a WooCommerce thing. I sat with him at a table at lunch and he was wearing tie-dye. He was telling us all about running barefoot. I was just like, “Doesn’t that hurt your feet?”
[laughter]
>> AMBER: A very long time ago.
>> PATRICK: I don’t remember if you came to WooConf in Austin. Did you come to that?
>> AMBER: I did.
>> PATRICK: Because I’m pretty sure that’s the first time I met Steven.
>> AMBER: Maybe that’s where I met Steven.
>> PATRICK: Yes.
>> AMBER: Okay, maybe it was there. I thought it was in Denver, but maybe I did come down to WooConf in Austin. That was when I still lived in Denver.
>> PATRICK: Yes, so I’m pretty sure I met Steven for the first time in Austin. The company here, it’s in between Denver and Boulder. The company is here in Colorado. I think I met up with Steven once for coffee here in Denver, but I really met him in Austin, again, like eight years ago or something. Something crazy like that. I think what I was trying to get at is the company is large.
I think we’re going from crazy growth and let’s open all these operation centers and fulfillment centers and different websites to, “Okay. Now, let’s refine what we have. We have distribution across the world. Now, let’s actually refine what we have.” I’m sure you’re well aware. I’m in a lot of private e-commerce groups. Lots of large e-commerce stores are getting these ADA lawsuits.
If you get to a certain size, it will become inevitable that you just need to protect yourself from that. It’d be like driving a car without a license plate or something. You’re going to get pulled over. Maybe you can go a block without getting pulled over, but you’re going to get pulled over. I think you just have to do these things when you’re at the size. I think that’s probably the main reason we started refining what we have.
>> CHRIS: In my observation, Xero Shoes is one of those companies that prioritizes accessibility without hesitation. There’s been plenty of people that we’ve worked with like Amber and myself, where there’s frequently pushback like, “But our brand,” “But this platform that we’ve used for years,” right? I’m wondering if you can point to anything intrinsically in the culture at the company or certain individuals being the driving force behind that. I understand the compliance and risk mitigation piece, but are there other factors there?
>> PATRICK: Of course. I think the other factors, I think we have a really sophisticated digital team. We have a couple of people who have been in the WordPress world for a long time, other people who run their own WordPress companies, other people who’ve been at the company for a long time and have literally done everything. I think we have a really sophisticated team who understands that accessibility is important.
It’s one of those things where it’s like if you break your arm, you’re not disabled, but you can’t use your mouse for two months because your arm is broken, so you have to use the keyboard. I think many people on the team have had an experience like that. We understand that accessibility isn’t just for the X small percent of people who are officially disabled. It is actually all of us under certain circumstances need to have an accessible website.
I was thinking of an example the other day of like you add captions to videos so that when you are in a loud bar, you can still understand what’s being said in the video, or if you’re in bed and your partner’s asleep, you can still understand the video because there’s captions on. It’s little things like that that a digital team really understands and I think we advocate for. We’re a company full of people. We have over 100 people. I think the hardest thing internally for us was the colors because we have this bright white on a slightly light blue background, which I think looks good, but it definitely doesn’t pass contrast checks. Do we have to change it?
>> AMBER: Changing the brand colors.
>> PATRICK: Yes, it’s really hard and you’re attached to it emotionally. There is some internal pushback and we’re saying, “Look, this is just for now. We’ll work on a new design for the website. We’re going to change these things immediately.” By the way, we’re working on a new website redesigned for August, so we’re doing the, what is it called, remediations now of these are the things we have to fix. Then in six months, we’ll think through the problem in great detail. We’ll make something better than we had a year ago.
[music]
>> STEVE JONES: This episode of Accessibility Craft is sponsored by Equalize Digital Accessibility Checker, the WordPress plugin that helps you find accessibility problems before you hit Publish. A WordPress native tool, Accessibility Checker provides reports directly on the post-edit screen. Reports are comprehensive enough for an accessibility professional or developer but easy enough for a content creator to understand. Accessibility Checker is an ideal tool to audit existing WordPress websites, find accessibility problems during new builds, or monitor accessibility and remind content creators of accessibility best practices on an ongoing basis.
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>> AMBER: Well, I think the other thing I’ve noticed through conversations with the team is, overall, you all are doing a lot of that. Like you were saying, you’ve grown and you’ve had these three separate sites that maybe have had different people managing and that sort of thing. At some point, you hit a point where optimization is really important. I know you guys are doing a lot on the SEO front and just caring a lot more about code quality.
That’s where I think accessibility can come in as well because there’s a lot of overlap on, like we talk about, headings. Heading helps a lot for accessibility, but it sure helps Google understand your content too, right? I do think too, at some point, larger organizations realize that accessibility is just part of having a performant, optimized website that loads quickly and ranks well in search and helps people achieve the goal of the website, which in your case is buy some shoes and check out, right?
>> PATRICK: Yes, definitely. I think we’re understanding how people use the website better. Maybe this is helpful, so I kind of run– I don’t say “run.” I take the lead on three projects. It’s accessibility, SEO, and conversion rate. You know what’s great is all three of those really feel like they’re aligned. Anytime there’s something with headings, that also aligns perfectly with SEO. I will prioritize that to make sure it gets done because it’s affecting two individual initiatives at the company. I think we understand that headings are important. Looking at some of the accessibility tools, you share some incredible screenshots.
“Oh, we have three H2s in the mini-cart widget for some reason that someone coded six years ago. Let’s clear those up. No one needs to see them in the heading chart.” It also improves our SEO, right? I think when you have people from different initiatives, SEO and accessibility and conversion rate all look at a problem. In my case, that’s me doing all three. When you have someone who looks at those, you have to do it. It makes sense. It makes sense from a user standpoint. It should also help Google and it should also help conversion rates.
>> AMBER: I’d love to talk a little bit about the audit that we did and some of the things that we found and that kind of thing. I think what might be good to talk about is some of the components that are included in the Xero Shoes website. Maybe you could share theme or page builder or whatever you’re allowed to talk about because I think that’s a big thing with enterprise websites is it’s not always all custom-coded, right?
You’re pulling in different things. Maybe a live chat widget or just different things. I know when we were doing the audit, a lot of the accessibility issues didn’t come from things you guys did, right? They came from a third-party vendor. Can you talk or give just a baseline background on how these websites are built just so people have that understanding before we dive deeper into some of the problems?
>> PATRICK: Sure, so we have a forked version of storefront. For anyone who knows WooCommerce, we forked storefronts. I’m using the royal “we” here.
>> AMBER: That’s a theme?
>> PATRICK: Thank you. Yes, the official theme from WooCommerce, but years ago like seven years ago, something like that. That’s the most recent version of the website. Hence, why we’re redoing it, but that was the starting point with WooCommerce. Let’s say with this version of the website, I think the founder, Steven, who we talked about earlier and a couple of the people in the digital team, we tried a zillion plugins that do all sorts of things from marketing to fulfillment to a lot of stuff with how we process orders and a lot of, of course, marketing integrations. I feel like the bulk of what we do is there’s a lot of shipping integrations, a lot of payment integrations. There is a live chat. There is a Klaviyo for email.
>> AMBER: Custom reviews, right? You’re not using WooCommerce reviews.
>> PATRICK: Correct, yes. We have a third-party review system as well. Boy, yes. Then we have a lot of reporting that everything gets sent out of WooCommerce into reporting. We have some custom fraud stuff in the checkout. We have some custom shipping methods. Really, a lot of the stuff we use is we probably have 100 plugins on the site. I know that’s not a good metric of anything really once you know WordPress, but there is a lot of built-in functionality from WooCommerce. Just to name one is we have swatches on the product page. That is the built-in WooCommerce swatches extension. We have a lot of official extensions from WooCommerce that give us the functionality we need.
>> AMBER: Like I was saying, a lot of those issues came from vendors. I’m sort of curious what your experience was when we, for example, like that reviews or like Flavio in their pop-up that allowed people to subscribe to the newsletter or get coupons or enter to win something, right? We want to give everyone the equitability to win something. What sort of response did you have from vendors when you went to them with–
>> PATRICK: Yes. When I got this list of accessibility issues from you, the first thing we prioritized, I assumed that vendors would take a very long time fixing things. Probably months is probably a realistic time frame. I looked through, scanned them, and said, “Okay, I think all these are with vendors. Let’s find the vendors. Let’s reach out to them.” We’ve already reached out to the vendors months ago. I would say two-thirds of vendors are incredible and one-third of vendors are probably never going to get their act together. Not never, but probably more than a year would be my guess.
>> AMBER: They did the thing where they say, “We’ve logged this issue. Thank you,” and that’s it.
>> PATRICK: It’s worse than that. It’s, “We’ve logged the issue, but it’s not a priority and we’re not working on it in the near future.”
>> AMBER: Oh, they’ve even said that.
>> PATRICK: It’s something to that effect. Correct. Two large companies. I won’t say who, but two companies that are– By the way, I think they’re both public companies on the stock market. They’re huge. They do not care. They just don’t care yet. I think my personal theory is e-commerce websites are seeing some litigation. They’re going to go through remediation. We’re going to fix some stuff and we may end up changing some vendors.
A year from now, when some of these companies realize they lost large clients, then they’ll care about accessibility. Wait two years if you want the large companies to change. The small companies have been incredible. I am shocked at the number of WordPress plugin developers that have gotten back to us quickly. I’m sorry. I’m jumping ahead. Your next question was about if there’s any I want to shout out. I want to shout out one.
>> CHRIS: Shout them out. Shout them out. [chuckles]
>> PATRICK: The variation swatches. That’s Lucas Stark. He’s an official third-party WooCommerce developer. He didn’t understand the accessibility, so I sent him the issue. He didn’t understand it. I sent him a video explaining the issue. He disagreed with it, but here’s what’s incredible. He’s like, “Look, I disagree with this. I’m not going to add this to the plugin, but here’s some custom code that you can add to your website to fix this. Once you implement it, let me know, and then maybe I’ll consider adding it.”
That’s like, “Hey, I don’t know if this is technically correct and I want to add it into my code for everyone. I personally do think it is technically correct,” but he still wrote us custom code for our website to solve our solution, which is just magical and incredible. Now, I want to say I never want to work with another developer for that functionality again.
>> AMBER: Yes, no, that’s awesome that he gave you a code snippet to fix it because a lot of developers would be like, “I disagree.”
>> PATRICK: Yes, correct.
>> AMBER: They do the thing which always frustrates me when you are a developer and you’re coming to them and then they’re all like, “You should hire a developer to help you with it.”
[laughter]
>> PATRICK: “You’re the developer.”
[laughter]
>> AMBER: No, that’s awesome. Did you have any of the other smaller plugins that released fixes for these?
>> PATRICK: Yes, so we had a payment gateway, which is not an official Woo one. It’s on the WordPress.org repository, but we sent some issues to them. They fix them. We have a couple of more, which I need to send to them, but they fix some things. There’s at least one more that fix some things and then one outside the WordPress world is our chat software. Well, they haven’t fixed it yet. They’re actively working on it. That’s a lot of replacing divs and spans with semantic HTML, but that’s actually a lot of work if you have custom classes and the way you write your CSS selectors and blah, blah, blah. Rebuilding your user interface is a big ask and they’re going through with it. I will give them kudos as well on–
>> AMBER: That’s amazing.
>> PATRICK: They haven’t crossed the finish line yet, but they’re clearly working on it.
>> AMBER: That’s really good.
>> PATRICK: Again, two-thirds of people, really, really good. A third of people probably not going to do it within a year.
>> CHRIS: That just has me coming back to what we’ve said for a long time. I think this is a technical majority. Two-thirds of people are responding really well is that the majority of people understand the need and want to do the right thing. They just maybe don’t know what they don’t know and haven’t and maybe don’t have the tools or the skills or the experts standing over their shoulder saying, “Hey, your approach here should be different when you’re building out XYZ solution.”
>> AMBER: I think at some point, though, I totally get if you are a person who put a free plugin on WordPress.org. You have no monetized version of it, you do you. [chuckles] Investing in having someone audit your stuff, I totally understand why you would not do that. However, I do think there is a threshold where some of these larger companies, including WordPress plugin companies because there are some WordPress plugin companies that make a lot of money. They should be thinking about this and they should be considering it.
Especially now, we’re thinking ahead to June 2025 with the European Accessibility Act. It specifically calls out e-commerce websites. We had a speaker at WordPress Accessibility Meetup last week. I don’t know if you were there for this, Patrick. Basically, the way that it works is it’s a directive that says all the individual member countries in the EU have to create their own law and their own ways of enforcing it by the state while Ireland’s law includes up to 18 months of jail time for people who work at companies that don’t have accessible websites. Jail time.
>> PATRICK: I saw that on Twitter, I think.
>> AMBER: Yes, I posted about it after she talked and I was like, “What? I was like, “This can’t be real.” I went and found the law on Ireland’s website, which, by the way, had some accessibility problems, so that’s a little funny, but I shared it. If you read it, it’s not like you’re going to get surprised, you’re arrested, right? They’re going to come to you, be like, “You have to fix it. Here’s your timeline,” and it’s if you refuse or maybe someone commits fraud and promises something that’s accessible to the government and then it’s not. Still, I think a lot of these companies are going to see, especially with what’s happening in Europe like you were saying, they’re going to start losing customers.
>> PATRICK: Yes, correct. It’s not that you will get sued. It’s just like, is it worth the risk? Why be with someone who opens you up to seriously damaging your business, your livelihood? For many companies, it’s just not worth it for, I don’t know, a FAQ plugin or something. Oh, that was one of the ones that updated their markup, by the way, our FAQ plugins.
>> AMBER: Oh, did they?
>> PATRICK: Yes, they updated the markup.
>> AMBER: Oh, that’s so good because we were having a whole conversation about if they won’t do it. I was like, “It’s so easy to write these accordions.” I was like, “Just use the same short code. You won’t even have to insert your short codes, write your own plugin.” I was like, “ChatGPT can do it for you.”
>> PATRICK: Again, most people are really, really good about it, but you’re right. I think, at a certain point, people will move away and use more accessible options. Then, eventually, a year later, maybe the software will respond. You know what? Like WooCommerce, many companies are taking it seriously and are being proactive. Well, there’s always going to be people who are slow.
>> AMBER: Let’s talk about WooCommerce a little bit itself. We on Accessibility Craft, if anyone is listening and this is your first episode, we’ve had a couple of episodes talking about this because I was going through audits on multiple of our e-commerce customers beyond Xero Shoes. I was like, “I really just want to see what baseline is like,” right? I built us a store that three people have bought things out of whatever because I was like, “I want to see what baseline WooCommerce is.” I ended up, during that process, opening 45 GitHub issues for WooCommerce because of issues that just exist in WooCommerce core.
The answer right now is, “Could you build an accessible WooCommerce website without writing code?” No, because there’s problems in WooCommerce. They’re still open. They haven’t closed them even though we’re talking four or five months later from some of these issues I’ve opened. I’m curious what your experience has been with WooCommerce in general. I know you’ve opened some issues. You’ve also been submitting some patches. I’d love to hear you talk about that like your thoughts on contributing. Should other developers be doing that? What are your thoughts on WooCommerce as a plugin and accessibility in general?
>> PATRICK: Good question. There’s a lot to unpack here. Just in case people skip the beginning, I did use to work at Woo. I understand a little bit more about how the development process works, have a little bit of insight there. I think the thing to remember is they are dealing with a lot of many, many, many challenges about which countries are technically countries. I remember, we spent months–
>> AMBER: Like for shipping or something?
>> PATRICK: Yes, for shipping. Let me give you a silly example of like– Okay. Well, China thinks Hong Kong should not be a country, but Hong Kong thinks Hong Kong should be a country. Do you put Hong Kong in the countries list that then people in China are upset? They had to deal with the political ramifications of their code as much as the code itself. We dealt for months with a tax issue where it was rounding up 1¢ at a time and rounding down a cent at a time. For taxes, it has to be exactly correct. There’s just a lot–
>> AMBER: Exfil that can be horrible, right?
>> PATRICK: Correct. There’s tax-inclusive pricing, tax-exclusive pricing. There’s all these a million settings that WooCommerce has to make sure work. They do a lot of stuff. If you look at their repo, they have many, many, many issues open in their GitHub repository. They’re just not going to get to them all unless you nudge them or help out. They’ll get to the most important. They’ll get to the top 5%, the top 10%, but they’re just not going to get to all of them because they’re fixing SEO problems.
They’re fixing tax problems. They’re fixing this. They rebuilt a bunch of their UI in blocks, which is great, right? Blocks are really incredible with Gutenberg and how much it’s advanced in the last five years. Because of that, they’re slow on some of these accessibility issues. Here’s what I found worked. Reporting the issues, they will eventually be solved, I’m sure. By you reporting the issue, that is the first step.
Other people can then comment on them and say, “I have this issue too. A separate accessibility audit also found this issue. Here’s why it’s important. Here’s a screen recording to really show you the issue as opposed to writing it down.” I feel like movies like a 10-second movie can be much more compelling than a 15-paragraph essay about why something is inaccessible. Anyways, you do all that. Then for me, the thing that really helped was going to the office hours where there’s a developer who’s there to listen to you.
They run them once a month. I think it’s like the second or third Wednesday of the month. You can look it up on their developer blog. They had three or four developers at office hours looking at issues. I asked them about a couple of issues, including the ones I opened. We went through a couple of rounds of back-and-forth revisions on the code. Eventually, one of the patches did get merged in.
>> AMBER: That was a patch that you had worked on?
>> PATRICK: Correct, yes. It seems silly for me just to fix it on Xero Shoes because I have to fix it on three sites, .com and eventually .eu and .co.uk. I would rather write it once and merge it into WooCommerce core and then we don’t have to have this little piece of code that fixes WooCommerce on three separate sites.
>> AMBER: On three different websites.
>> CHRIS: Which, by the way, then is another dependency that you have to manage on an ongoing basis for every future update.
>> PATRICK: Yes, this is our custom code that we need to make sure it still works with the new updates. It is worth it to us.
>> AMBER: Make the world better for everyone.
>> PATRICK: Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. I’m a big fan of WooCommerce. I just know they have a lot on their plate. There’s a lot of stuff they have to do. I understand why they can’t get to it all, but those 45 issues are still open. If you can write a little bit of code and then nudge them in office hours, that is the best way to move your issues forward. I think I wrote the patch. I think someone tagged it, but no one looked at it week or two. Then I got on office hours and, “Hey, can someone look at this?” Immediately, I think that day, they looked at it, gave me feedback, and I was able to move forward.
>> AMBER: That’s great. Do you feel like it matters at all that you used to work there or no like any developer who wants to go help out with accessibility and Woo as long as they go to office hours maybe?
>> PATRICK: Yes, it’s probably the latter. I was working with people that I didn’t personally work with at Woo, the people who reviewed my code. It’s not like it was someone I knew who was reviewing my code personally. I don’t think that was a factor, but maybe. Maybe it’s like you scan something. You’re like, “Oh, I’ve seen this person’s name 80 times before.” He’s probably correct in what he’s going to say. Maybe it’s that thinking. I don’t know, but probably not. I think anyone can get their stuff fixed.
>> CHRIS: A little bird told me that you all have a really interesting approach to programmatically adding alt text to metric tons of images because you’re a giant e-commerce shop. Can you take us through how you’re doing that?
>> PATRICK: Yes. I think some companies, and there’s nothing wrong with this, will pay an intern. If you have a thousand images that don’t have alt text, you’ll pay an intern. They’ll work on it for a week and you’ll kind of solve the problem to some extent, at least from a legal standpoint, but maybe not the best way to solve it. We thought about that like, “Is it worth paying?” I think we have something like 150 products. Each of those products has men’s and women’s and then each of those have different styles.
>> AMBER: We’re at 300.
>> PATRICK: Some shoes, especially new shoes, have one style, but I think our Prio has six styles that are actively for sale on the website.
>> AMBER: Styles for us non-e-commerce folks means colors or something-
>> PATRICK: Correct.
>> AMBER: -like some physical difference that would impact the images of the product?
>> PATRICK: Correct. I think there’s 1,800 product images that need alt text on .com. It’s not just 1,000. It’s 1,800 on .com.
>> AMBER: Times three sets.
>> PATRICK: Yes, not all the shoes are all the sites, but it’s close to that. Correct. We’re getting close to probably 4,000 images. It’s like, do we really want to pay someone to do this once? Then it’s done poorly. What was great is we’ve had this awesome new photographer who joined our company a year ago, a year before I did. He’s had this consistent file name for over a year. We’ve been releasing so many products in the last year or so. I think he’s even been renaming some images.
Anyways, we’ve had this consistent file name for a while. We realized this. Now, we can say, “Oh, this is the front right angle of,” and we have the skew in the file name. It’s the front right angle of the Prio men’s shoe. Then the one thing we’re adding that’s human input is each style has a sentence fragment that describes the shoe style. A little bit like with a red strap on top or with a blue sole.
90% of each alt text is automatically generated and then a little bit of human stuff that we save in the database, export it, add it to the website. We do all sorts of cool stuff. In the end, WP-CLI, this is on the website, but we haven’t run it yet. It’s there. The code is done, but the WP-CLI runs through all the images. If it picks up the skew, if it picks up the angle, and it picks up that sentence fragment, it’ll automatically write the alt text for all the images.
>> CHRIS: Wow.
>> AMBER: Save it into the database?
>> PATRICK: Save it into the database.
>> AMBER: In the normal alt-text fields?
>> PATRICK: In the normal alt-text fields, correct. It’s not like a weird filter that’s being done on the fly. It’s being saved into the database. The WP-CLI script does all the cool stuff. It can show you how many images don’t have alt text and stuff like that. Here’s the thing. If we only ever had 4,000 images, we probably would’ve just paid an intern to name them, but we have a product release every six months. Every six months, we’re adding, let’s say, 200 new images. We’re just going to recreate the problem six months from now and have 200 images without alt text.
>> AMBER: Somebody has to go.
>> PATRICK: Correct.
>> CHRIS: This is why having systems and measurements and consistency is so important for achieving accessibility. That’s really cool. Because you had really consistent naming conventions for images, that’s pretty much the only reason you were able to do this, right?
>> PATRICK: Yes, correct. We could not do this if we had inconsistent file names.
>> AMBER: I feel like you need to send that guy a beverage.
>> PATRICK: Yes. You know what? Just give me a second. I will do that.
>> AMBER: You need to send him a drink and be like, “You saved our alt-text game with your file-naming convention.” Most websites I’ve been on, it seems so random. Wow. [chuckles]
>> PATRICK: You know what? I think this is the benefit of having someone in-house. Because we have someone in-house, he cares about getting it right. The last photographer, I don’t know what–
>> AMBER: Instead of this image with a string of numbers.
>> PATRICK: Correct. I think this guy, he just genuinely cares about getting it right. He has everything organized for his purposes. I think because he wants everything organized, we have this giant photo media library in Adobe AIR. He wants that organized. Because that’s organized, then it’s organized us. Hiring people in-house, hiring an in-house photographer indirectly helped us fix our accessibility issues. Now, for the next product launch, we’re just going to upload the images and this script. What’s cool is the script started with accessibility. Now, it’s doing other things. It’ll upload all 300 images, 200 images, and it’ll assign them to the products correctly. We don’t have to manually upload images for each product.
>> AMBER: Were they doing that manually before?
>> PATRICK: Correct.
>> AMBER: Wow.
>> PATRICK: The way this company grew is crazy growth. We did so much stuff manually. Now, with a couple of extra developers on the team, we got to start automating. We have 200 new images. Let’s assign them to the products automatically. That’s Step 1. Let’s write the alt text, the Step 2. There’s just a bunch of stuff that we can start automating. Again, we are so focused on growth for so long that, now, it’s time to refine what we have.
>> AMBER: I love, though, that you had an accessibility problem you had to solve and you’re like, “I’m going to solve this problem. At the same time, I’m going to make our team members’ lives easier, so they don’t have to sit here and click this button on their mouse, I don’t know, hundreds, thousands of times in a day before they can hit Publish on a product.” That is really cool. I love that. Are there– Oh no, go ahead.
>> PATRICK: You know what? I went through. What was great is I obviously wanted to automate things early on, but we just had our spring sale in March, so about a month ago when we were recording. Going through the process, I think we spent at least a couple of weeks of a developer’s time uploading products, at least a couple of weeks of it. When you look at it that way–
>> AMBER: [inaudible] the cost of that?
>> PATRICK: Correct. Maybe this specific technical solution will save two days, let’s say. Two days of developer’s time is two days and it will pay forward-
>> AMBER: -thousands of dollars.
>> PATRICK: Correct. It will immediately get a return in the fall. Then next spring, next fall, it’ll just get better and better. I’m all about that investment.
>> AMBER: That’s cool. Are there any other automated or systematized sort of things you’ve figured out or other tricks or tips you might be able to share with people who are on the front of either remediating large websites or things where you have many assets or different components? Anything that’s come up?
>> PATRICK: I’m learning the power of WP-CLI. I think there’s some cool stuff you could do with just checking your own code, which I’ve generally not done a good job of linting my own code and making sure that it’s being written in the correct way. I think we ran it through some CLI check. That was really helpful, learned a bunch of stuff. There’s always silly stuff in there like white space, stuff that doesn’t matter. That has been helpful is to get into a more robust way of writing your code. You know what? Go ahead.
>> AMBER: We’ve done a lot in the last six, eight months, especially on our plugin, but we’ve ended up moving that over into the custom themes that we build for our enterprise clients with linting for WordPress coding standards, VIP coding standards, and then also doing some checks for accessibility where we can. I don’t remember what it is. I’ll have to ask Steve. I wish he was here. He’s on vacation this week, having a nice time-off.
They’re running something locally so that it will lint not– so he has linting on GitHub PRs, but he also has linting when they commit– like they can’t commit even locally on their computers if there are certain problems because he’s like, “I’m so tired of seeing this.” [chuckles] Honestly, I feel like that really does. It’s been a game-changer for us. Also, talk about saving time like reducing human review problems, right?
>> PATRICK: Oh, my God.
>> AMBER: If you can have an automated tool, that’s a lot of what the idea behind Accessibility Checker was like. Do you really need a person to tell you, you forgot to put alt text in this? That’s so much extra time for someone to go look at that or whatever the problem is like having an automated thing that can check it and catch it.
>> PATRICK: Correct.
>> AMBER: Really can save a lot.
>> PATRICK: I’ll just share a story of something I’ve been working on this week. I told you. I mentioned at the top that one of the payment plugins fixed the thing for us. This week, I’m testing it. I think we have test cases written out, but a human manually does of like, “Make sure the payment gateway does this. Make sure the payment gateway does this,” so that you can check out on PayPal on the cart page or whatever, all these extra, non-obvious things that a payment gateway does. I went through this whole process and I checked all this thing. It took me most of the day. It took me five hours or something because you have to log into PayPal, log into a site, or whatever.
>> AMBER: Before you can even update the plugin on your live website, you have to test and make sure you don’t break your checkout.
>> PATRICK: Correct, you’re right. The business is so large that a single day without the checkout working is it’s not worth it to the business. Someone should either manually check out or run tests. The thing that frustrated me is as I was finishing my tests, a new version of a plugin came out. I’m like, “Oh no, do I test it again?”
>> CHRIS: That’s so demoralizing. Oh no.
>> AMBER: Have you seen Playwright?
>> PATRICK: Well, we’re using that on our wholesale site. We’re going to expand it to our .com site very soon for this exact reason. Playwright, yes.
>> AMBER: Playwright. For the non-devs listening, it allows you to–
>> CHRIS: The non-devs in the call because I have no idea. You have Shakespeare, what?
[laughter]
>> AMBER: Basically, it allows you to create something. In a virtual browser, it’ll basically spin up and do actions on a step so you can test for them. We’ve been building this more into Accessibility Checker because, I’ll just say it, we’ve been doing a lot more becoming more object-oriented from procedural code. In doing that, I noticed a couple of weeks ago that several of our rules broke because somebody wrote the comparison to strict or something like that. It wasn’t flagging things that it used to flag. Then I was like, “Hey, did you guys actually, when you worked on this rule, go open and run a scan?” I’ve been building out a bunch of posts.
I already had a lot of them anyway from our original, but this is more set up for Playwright basically where it has examples of fails and examples of passes of all the accessibility issues on each page. Then basically, when they push code, they can have Playwright spin up, create a WordPress install, add that post, and then it will know if it has the right count or not. Then we know our rule is still working or the count is wrong. Something happened to our rule and it’s either flagging something it shouldn’t like a false positive or it’s missing something that it should have flagged. You’ve been doing something like that to try and help automate your testing?
>> PATRICK: Correct, so we’re just about done building that on our wholesale site. I guess the nice thing is we have .com, which is massive in terms of revenue and orders. We have a couple of smaller sites. We’ll usually build something for a smaller site and then port it over to .com. The other person who’s been working on the accessibility has been on a bunch of calls. My teammate, Jesse.
He’s the person who has been leading the charge on Playwright. We were thinking about, “Well, when do we want to do it?” We’re like, “If it takes five hours to test a payment gateway plugin.” You have to get your sandbox, PayPal credentials, yada, yada. If that takes five hours, it is worth it to immediately set up Playwright and just test PayPal or your payment gateway. It’s not even worth updating everything first.
>> AMBER: Even if that’s the only task it does.
>> PATRICK: Yes. I think on the first time we run it, it will pay for itself in terms of time. That is absolutely something we’re working on. You know what? Speaking of accessibility and just general, web development, best practices, we don’t update our sites enough because it’s a manual process. I will give kudos again to Lucas Stark, the variation swatches. Two versions before what we have, he’s been improving the accessibility. He added REL labels.
>> AMBER: We were just out of date.
>> PATRICK: We were out of date. Number one, for people who are listening, if you can keep your website as up to date as you can because lots of plugins are adding functionality all the time and you might just not have it because you’re six months out of date and, yes, it’s a manual process, but figure out how to make yourself update your site quickly and easily.
>> CHRIS: Yes, that’s good advice, especially because more and more plugin and theme devs are becoming aware of accessibility more acutely than they used to be.
>> PATRICK: For sure.
>> CHRIS: Throughout this whole audit and remediation process that we’ve engaged in together, was there anything in particular, Patrick, that surprised you or that maybe uncovered something you hadn’t thought of previously?
>> PATRICK: Three things are popping to mind. One we’ve already covered, which was I was surprised just that even a third of people aren’t really interested in solving accessibility problems, or it’s so far down their backlog, it’s going to be months to a year before they fix it. That was one thing. We’ve talked about that. I think I was also really surprised about the colors. The color contrast checker is, I would say, not visually intuitive. I don’t know if that makes any sense. There’s different ways your eyes perceive things. Just because your eye perceives it as readable doesn’t necessarily mean it is, according to the standard. We can talk about updating standards. They’re in WCAG 3.0.
>> CHRIS: In WCAG 3.0, they’re going to change the algorithm, maybe. It’s under discussion.
>> AMBER: Eight years from now? [chuckles]
>> PATRICK: Yes, eight years from now.
>> AMBER: If it actually gets published, I don’t know. Maybe it’s going to be 15 or 20. I don’t know. [chuckles] There are colors in that that will fast or currently fail WCAG 2.0.
>> PATRICK: Correct. I think there are some things that are harsh on the eye that technically pass. We changed our white text on blue to black text on blue. It’s a little harsh on your eyes, but it does pass the contrast. There’s just some unintuitive things. We’ve talked about this with our marketing team. It’s something that we just have to have a couple of conversations about. I know it looks fine. It does not pass these contrast checks. You have to and I think it’s just going to take some repetition internally to get to that point.
>> AMBER: With all of the clients we work with, that’s probably one of the hardest. Enterprise businesses are this way. Universities, a lot of times, have brand colors. They’re like, “We’ve been using these since the 1800s. These are our colors.” We’re all like, “Well.”
>> CHRIS: That’s a whole different conversation when you have one of those, yes.
>> PATRICK: I think the third thing is we work with a lot of vendors like yourselves, but lots of SEO agencies we work with. Something that’s so funny when you work in a big company is people will always tell you, “This is really easy change.” Let me give you one example. One of the accessibility issues could be fixed by updating our checkout. That sounds really easy. Okay, but something to check out. I just talked about the update process and we’ll get to that.
>> AMBER: You and I had a whole conversation where I was like, “Well, I think WooCommerce core block checkout is way better than your current one.” It’s easy for me to say that as the accessibility consultant. I’m like, “Just switch to that.” You’re like, “You probably have to spend five weeks testing it or something before you can do that,” right?
>> PATRICK: Correct. Speaking from man hours of efficiency, it makes sense to like, “Let’s finish the tests on wholesale, then we know the tests are working.” Portmondo.com update everything. I didn’t realize this. We have some custom shipping methods. We have some custom anti-fraud stuff. We also need to update those to make sure they also work with a block-based checkout, which they probably will, but it’s a big business. It’s worth testing. It’s just funny to me how people will say, “Just update your plugins or something.” When you’re at this size, it’s like, “Sure.” Obviously, we need to update our plugins, but also we need to make sure that things still work exactly as we need them to. Sometimes it takes more time than you think.
>> AMBER: Have you thought about a full timeline? I know you’ve talked about, there are some really emergent things you’re doing right now. Then there are some stuff that it just makes more sense to roll into, which I think is totally fair, into a whole new website that you’re already planning anyway. How do you decide on those things?
>> PATRICK: Good question. When I was just looking at the list of accessibility issues, we started with vendors just because those are going to take a while. They’re generally independent from what we’re doing. Started with vendors then it was any issue that affects all three websites. Any issue that affects all three of our websites, I really wanted to look at first because, again, it’s like a multiplication effect.
We’re getting three times the value for me fixing it. Then it came down to like, “Let’s fix the stuff like color like fixing the menu.” Our menu wasn’t very accessible. We fixed our menu. Now, it’s keyboard operable. That affects thousands of pages across the site. Every page has the menu, so let’s fix that. I’ve really enjoyed that. Sorry. I’m losing the thread on what the question was. I got very excited about my answer.
[laughter]
>> AMBER: More like on how you prioritize internally. I know we had some conversations about, obviously, finding products. You can’t buy them if you can’t find them, right? The nav menu, the search might be really important. Then add to cart and checkout maybe is more important than an obscure blog post that has headings, right? Is it out of order or images missing alt text? It’s like, “Well, the blog post is not as important as a product page,” like those kinds of things.
>> PATRICK: Perfect. I think the way to think about it is a reverse funnel. The bottom of the funnel is the checkout and then the stuff above that is the cart and the stuff above that is the product page. That’s how we’ve looked at them. Again, we haven’t fixed every issue in the checkout. We’re working on it. Also, those are more sensitive fixes. Let me talk about one that we prioritize that is hard to talk about as we added some icons to our checkout to make it more– The accessibility problem we are fixing is WooCommerce by default is these little, thin red lines when you fill out a field incorrectly in the checkout.
If you put a phone number in an email field, it’ll give you this thin, little red line. That’s not accessible. We added just like a little red X icon. Because it’s the checkout and because we can’t do anything that drastically affects the checkout, we are AB testing that to make sure that, for whatever reason, it doesn’t hurt checkouts. It seems like it’s about even right now. Maybe a little bit negative.
Again, we just need more data to make sure that it’s not going to harm our checkout. We’re starting with the checkout and then going back to the cart and then the product detail pages, the PDP pages, and then the PLP, product landing pages, like the shop page and stuff like that. Then obviously, the blog and everything else comes after. We did put the header and the footer above that because those are on literally every page.
>> CHRIS: I like the idea of starting at the bottom of the funnel. That’s an interesting comparison or a way to visualize it. I like that.
>> PATRICK: There’s the legal thing. If they literally can’t check out, that is the worst thing for you from a legal perspective. Also, you want to have your checkout be fully functioning in every regard, right? If your business is to sell shoes, you can’t have a broken register. That has to be working perfectly under all circumstances, so it makes sense to fix it first.
>> CHRIS: The comparison I always use is no store would have an obstacle course in front of their front doors that excludes 15% of customers by default.
>> PATRICK: Yes, I love that.
>> CHRIS: I’m curious as we close this out because I know we’re about at time. Is Skill Check or Bishop Cider products in general a drink again or a pass?
>> PATRICK: I don’t know if this is a question for me. I’m going to give it a medium. I’m going to give it a thumbs in the middle is what I’m going to give it. If someone offered it to me, I would definitely drink it. I’m not going to go out of my way to find it.
>> CHRIS: Yes, I’m right with you. It’s like if this were in an ice bucket at a party, I might grab one. If it was between this or one of my go-to ciders is like an Austin Eastcider. I think for this, the bubbles is what made it fall flat for me. It’s just a little too flat. Not crisp enough. I think it might be the bubbles that did it for me.
>> AMBER: Where I went was it might be fun to go check out the arcade. Patrick, if you’re in Austin, let us know.
>> PATRICK: All right.
>> AMBER: I don’t think I would buy it again.
[laughter]
>> PATRICK: I do want to keep a can.
>> AMBER: The cans are really cool.
>> PATRICK: It’s a very pretty can. I want a can just for the coolness.
>> AMBER: It makes me wonder what their other ones look like. I actually had a thought because I did go peek at their website and I was like, “I feel like what we should start adding into these is how accessible is their website.” [chuckles]
>> CHRIS: Oh no. Well, there’s a 95% chance you’re going to find problems.
>> AMBER: Yes, unfortunately, that is true. It’s been really fun having you on, Patrick. Do you have any big takeaways or final thoughts that you want to share with people who are also going through this remediating large e-commerce website?
>> PATRICK: I think final thoughts would just be that I feel like, on some level, there’s still so much work to do. On another level, we solved really big problems really easily. Fixing the nav menu was huge. Fixing our colors was huge. I think you can make a lot–
>> AMBER: Adding focus outlines.
>> PATRICK: Adding the focus outline. Oh, my God.
>> AMBER: It’s a two-second fix. That one literally is a two-second fix. That’s not me just saying it.
>> PATRICK: Agreed.
>> AMBER: It makes such a difference.
>> PATRICK: I understand there’s business realities. If you can’t make your website perfectly accessible by next week, I understand that. There’s an 80-20 for accessibility issues. You can make your website so much better by looking at a couple like the focus and the colors and making sure your menus navigate. I think navigating your website by keyboard is like, if you can do that, you’re in a pretty good spot. Anyways, it’s not as hard as you think, I guess, is the takeaway.
>> CHRIS: Good advice.
>> AMBER: Well, it’s been very fun having you. Where can people get in touch with you?
>> PATRICK: You can find me all over the web. My programming blog is speakinginbytes, B-Y-T-E-S, .com. Board game stuff is laidback.games. I work for Xero Shoes, X-E-R-O. Then I also run a podcast on software marketing, plugin.fm. Boy, I think that’s the most of them. I got more websites, but those are probably the top four.
>> AMBER: Well, we will include all the links in the show notes.
>> PATRICK: Ooh, can I say one other thing?
>> CHRIS: Yes.
>> PATRICK: I am updating my Mastering WooCommerce book. It’s a book about how to work with WooCommerce. Because of the experience I’ve had with you, I’m adding a whole section on accessibility. I’m really excited to add that too.
>> AMBER: Yay.
>> CHRIS: Yay.
>> PATRICK: This is the second version of the book. It’s nice to have the practical experience and then also talk about it. There’s the 80-20s in the book of these are the things that you should definitely look at. I’m really excited to add that to the book. Anyways, it’ll be coming out in a couple of months. Mastering WooCommerce is something else you can find that I’ve done.
>> AMBER: That’s awesome. All right. Well, we are going to sign off and we will be back for another episode in two weeks.
>> CHRIS: All right. See you all later.
>> AMBER: Bye.
>> PATRICK: Bye.
[music]>> CHRIS HINDS: Thanks for listening to Accessibility Craft. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe in your podcast app to get notified when future episodes release. You can find Accessibility Craft on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, and more. If building accessibility awareness is important to you, please consider rating Accessibility Craft five stars on Apple Podcasts. Accessibility Craft is produced by Equalize Digital and hosted by Amber Hinds, Chris Hinds, and Steve Jones. Steve Jones composed our theme music. Learn how we help make thousands of WordPress websites more accessible at equalizedigital.com.