In this episode, we talk about Amber’s experience filing an ADA grievance against the City of Georgetown, TX, and what she learned going through that process. We also touch on more philosophical points about proprietary CMSs and a perceived lack of digital accessibility expertise among local governments.
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Mentioned in this Episode
- Best Maid Pickle Sour
- ADA – File a Complaint
- Georgetown Texas Website on August 21, 2024 (WebArchive)
- Current Georgetown Texas Website
Transcript
Chris: Welcome
to 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. And now, on to the show.
Amber: Hey everybody, it’s Amber, and I’m here today with Steve.
Steve: Hello everyone.
Amber: And Chris.
Chris: Hey everybody.
Amber: And we have a really exciting show for you today. It is episode number 96. So if you are interested in finding show notes and a full transcript for today’s episode, go to AccessibilityCraft.com/096.
Today’s Beverage
Amber: We always start out every show with a beverage. What are we drinking today, Chris?
Chris: Oh, we’re having fun today. We foreshadowed this.
Amber: He’s punked us, you guys.
Chris: We’re having Best Maid Pickle Sour. So this is a partnership between Best Maid Pickles, which is a national pickle brand, and Martin House Brewing Company, which I believe is located in Fort Worth.
And they have teamed up combining beer with pickle juice. As like a brewing thing. So…
Amber: It’s, I want to know, is this revenge for me making you try turkey and gravy soda last Thanksgiving?
Chris: I feel like I’ve messed around on a couple of drinks secretly hoping that our audience finds that entertaining, but I don’t know. Write in or comment if you think silly drinks are fun or if you’d rather us you know, taste cool snooty things that are fancy. We could go either way with it.
Amber: I’m just telling you, I’m not sure that the best beers are made in Texas and this might stick to what I think.
Chris: Yes. The question will be, do beer and pickles together enhance one another?
Or does the pickle ruin the beer or does the beer ruin the pickle?
Steve: Or is it like the strawberry beer that we tried and it’s just a marketing ploy, right? Like, does it really not taste, yeah, it just tastes like beer.
Amber: I thought that the strawberry, I really did. I’m going to say this every time.
I thought the strawberry beer tasted like strawberries. I can’t believe you guys couldn’t taste strawberries in that.
Chris: Well, beer’s a pretty strong flavor and strawberries are a fairly subtle flavor, but I think we’re going to taste pickle. My money’s on we’re going to taste pickle because that’s a very strong flavor.
Amber: All right, so this can deserves a description. It is illustrated to look like pickles or a pickle jar, I guess, right? With the Best Maid logo on it, which has a little illustrated girl with her tongue sticking out, I think.
Chris: Steve’s camera is getting the high def there. That’s great.
Steve: Yeah, there you go.
Amber: All, all around the can. It is covered in illustrated pickles. Can I say, I’m always the one who doesn’t like things. I don’t like pickles. Do you like pickles, Steve?
Steve: So, so this is a weird little pickle anecdote. So if you, if, so say I go to Chick fil A, right? Chick fil A comes with a pickle on the sandwich, right? You can order it without the pickle. I get it with the pickle and then I pick the pickle off, but there’s still some pickle flavor on the sandwich, which I think is enough pickle. Does that make sense? I like…
Chris: The juice from the…
Steve: Yeah, a little bit of pickle juice on the chicken. I like, it kind of adds a little something, but I really don’t want to eat the pickle.
Amber: Well, then you might like this because, theoretically, there’s no chewing
involved. It’s just the juice.
Chris: All right. Well, we’re, there’s only one way we’re going to find out if this is good or bad. Amber would probably prefer to talk for 20 more minutes before we crack these open.
Wow. There was some pressure behind that. I actually got some pickle beer on my mic.
Steve: Oh my goodness, it’s strong.
Amber: It smells like a dill pickle. Not a bread and butter. Like, it doesn’t smell like a sweet pickle. It smells like a dill pickle. Can I? I’m gonna out Chris. I’m gonna out Chris. He drinks pickle juice.
Chris: Hey, I’m leaving now.
Amber: So he’s going to love this beer. I’m telling you.
Chris: There was a whole Twitter thread actually, where someone asked me if if I drank pickle juice and I was like, only when the intrusive thoughts win, sometimes I do.
Amber: He taught our kids like to do it too.
Chris: My, my spicy kid likes to drink pickled jalapeno juice. So you get the sour and the burn. Probably a good cure for a cold. All right.
Amber: All right. I haven’t tried it. Has anyone tried it?
Steve: I’m just going to say on the nose, this smells disgusting.
Amber: Yeah. This might be the grossest thing we’ve ever
Chris: Nope. Nope. Nope.
Steve: Chris is out.
Amber: All right. I’m going to go for it. I’m afraid, but I’m going to do it.
Chris: The answer is. They both ruined each other. It’s like pickles that got left in the sun too long or something.
Amber: It doesn’t taste like beer to me.
Chris: Yeah. It tastes like stale beer mixed with pickle juice.
Steve: All right. I’m going to get a chaser ready on this one.
Chris: Yeah. I did. I did.
Steve: Here we go. It smells repulsive. Oh my goodness. It’s so bad.
Amber: I think this is worse than the turkey soda.
Chris: 100%. The turkey soda had just kind of like a weird, sweet, salty kind of, it just…
Amber: Okay, so I’m gonna be fair. I’m gonna try it again because I’m gonna try, like, I think we need to describe it because maybe there is someone out there that this is the right beer for.
Steve: Oh god. It’s still bad. Here’s my description, right? It tastes like somebody ate a whole jar of pickles, drank a case of beer, threw up, then they bottled the throw up, and then we drank it.
Chris: I’m not gonna lie. That’s pretty accurate, actually. I don’t know if I could do better than that. That’s pretty accurate.
Amber: It is definitely salty. Like, it’s way saltier than I expected it to be. Yeah, it really has a lingering flavor. You know, I really like sour beers.
Chris: As a guy who drinks pickle juice, like occasionally, like a small little tiny, like, shot glass of it, for like the electrolytes and just because I like that flavor it’s the beer is what ruins it, honestly, for me, like as a guy who likes to occasionally drink a little bit of pickle juice, the beer part ruins the pickle and the pickle ruins the beer. Neither of them work together in this way. So it is truly a gag drink in every sense of the word, in my opinion.
I don’t know. Maybe there’s some people out there who have very different palates from the three of us that would appreciate this, but this is a firm and instant thumbs down for me.
Steve: Two, two thumbs down.
Amber: I think we all give this one a thumbs down. It really has like, hamburger aftertaste to me. I don’t eat hamburgers, but that’s kind of what, like the flavor that is left in my mouth, is that? Yeah. And I’m gonna, oh, use my A2 mug to take a chaser. ,
Chris: I know what you use this for. When your kid asks to try a beer, this is the one you get out. . .
Steve: There you go.
Amber: Guarantees they will think that beer is disgusting and never want to drink it ever again. I’m pretty sure only in the U. S. do we like, try to make our kids know. Like in Europe, they’re all like, yeah, here, have something delicious. We’re all like, no, it’s horrible. Oh man. Usually I can sip on them throughout the show and like, they grow on me a little bit. But I don’t think, I don’t think so. I’m sorry.
Chris: I set that one far away on the corner of my desk.
Steve: Yeah, that one’s pretty low.
Amber filed an ADA grievance!?
Amber: So, we’ve got, like, two extra. Do we have to think of someone fun to give them to for Christmas? Alright, well, you want to know what else left a sour taste in my mouth?
Steve: Yeah.
Amber: It was visiting my city website earlier this year, right after my city, Georgetown, Texas, got a brand new website. And I was trying to go find information on like our water bill on a Saturday. And I saw this brand new website and I was like, Ooh. I’m an, you know, I’m an accessibility person.
I’m going to see how accessible it is because I knew that their last website was really bad. In fact, I had actually used their last website during one of my accessibility testing workshops as a demo, because it was really good for showing all the possible problems you could see. So I was excited because I thought maybe it’ll be better.
And then I realized that it wasn’t so great. So I want to talk about that today. And specifically what I want to talk about is filing an ADA grievance. Because I filed an ADA grievance with my city about their website. So that’s what we’re going to talk about today. Because their website was just about as nasty and bad as Best Maid Sour Pickle beer.
Steve: I mean, why did you file this grievance in the first place?
Amber: I think that’s a good question. So a little bit of backstory. I mentioned that the previous website was not accessible and I’d actually used it in demos.
I had tried at one point in time to email the city’s ADA coordinator. because there was someone listed on the website that was the ADA coordinator for the city, and give them feedback on the prior website. And I had emailed maybe two or three times, not from my company email, just from my personal Gmail account.
Like not saying I was connected to my company, like nothing. Because I didn’t want them to think I was just trying to sell them something.
Steve: Yeah. Yeah.
Amber: And I had emailed and been like, Hey, this is an issue on your website. Do you think you could fix it? It was a WordPress website. And I was like, here’s a plugin that would be better than the plugin you are currently using.
Like, and it wasn’t my plugin. Right. It was just like, I was trying to give them help and I never got a response. And so when I saw this, I was so mad and I was like, they just launched a brand new website. I’m sure that my city paid a lot of money to some vendor to build this website and it wasn’t accessible.
And I was like, do I just message this person again who is like a black hole? And then I saw on their website, you know, the Americans with Disabilities Act page, and there was a link to file a grievance. And I was like, I think maybe if I file a grievance, they will have to respond. So that was how I decided to approach it because I had tried reaching out to them and had gotten nothing in the past.
Steve: So, so a follow up question to that is, did you come across the issues naturally? Was it just you just being inquisitive of the announcement of the new website and you being an accessibility professional, was that you’re just, Oh they launched a new website. I wonder if it’s accessible. Or did you naturally stumble across an issue?
Amber: So it’s kind of a combination of the two, right? So, one of the things that I saw right away was there’s like a pop up, there’s also a slider that changes on the homepage that doesn’t have a pause button, and so that right there is a flag for me.
I’m like, Oh, okay. They’re doing something wrong. I don’t even really have to look for it because, I just know if you’re autoplaying something, it has to have a pause button. But like, does the navigation menu work with the keyboard? I tested that because I’m not a keyboard only user, right? So I, as an accessibility professional who was curious and who knew how bad their previous website was, wanted to know if this one was better.
So I went looking for problems. So I will totally acknowledge that. Now that said, if I was an assistive technology user, I would have found these problems without looking for them because though I think the website was so bad, it wasn’t usable.
Chris: So we’ve established you don’t use assistive technology other than in your day to day as an accessibility professional. You don’t identify as disabled. Are you allowed to file ADA grievances?
Amber: That is a good question. I wondered this myself as I was sitting here debating what to do on a Saturday. And I went to ADA.gov, their file a complaint page. And what it says is, if you believe that you or someone else was discriminated against based on a disability, you can file an Americans with Disabilities Act complaint.
So, I believe, based on that, that anyone can file an ADA complaint if you believe that someone with a disability has been discriminated against, you can do it on behalf of them. You don’t have to do it only on behalf of yourself.
Chris: Yeah. So, to put that in a real world context, if you’re a person walking by on the street and you notice that a publicly accessible building has a staircase but no visible wheelchair ramp. You don’t have to be in a wheelchair to go complain and say, Hey, this building needs a ramp or alternative means of access.
Amber: Yeah.
Chris: Well, I learned something today.
Amber: Yeah. So I think I want to tell you more about what was wrong with it. But let’s take a short commercial break real quick, and then we can talk about that.
Brought to you by Accessibility Checker
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So just in this few, the last few minutes, I kind of, you know, in my own inquisitive, accessibility professional mind, I’ve been clicking around and trying to see what’s wrong with the website as well, but can you maybe explain to us or share with us what were some of the problems that you found on the website?
Amber: Yes. So I, of course, because I knew I was going to file a grievance, when I decided I was going to file a grievance, I decided I needed to record something that proved it had those problems at that date and time. So I have a video, which I want to play for everyone and I’ll pre frame it. All it is looking at the homepage.
I did not go beyond the homepage. There were just significant enough problems on the homepage that to me it’s a sign that the whole website is probably bad. And some of the things that I encountered were just non functional. So what I’m gonna do is I’m gonna put up this video. It’s about 15 minutes long.
We’re gonna be hidden. But then I think we should come back and talk about what the problems were that I found on the homepage. And for everyone who is listening or watching, just pay attention, I think, as you watch this video to how, the types of things I looked at, how I tested them, which is part of why I think this video is helpful, because it might give you an idea on your own website or the websites of your city, what you could look at and how you could test to try and find accessibility problems, and also maybe pay attention to how many problems you can find in such a short amount of time, because while 15 minutes might seem long in the span of a podcast, it’s really not that long. So, so I’m gonna play this video and we’ll be right back.
Testing the Georgetown, TX City Website
Amber: This is a video showing the current accessibility of the brand new City of Georgetown, Texas website.
If I go in here and I hit tab you can see my focus right now is on the email, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube. Now I am on the logo for the City of Georgetown website, and I’m going to hit tab, and I’m going to assume that I can get to the residence menu item, which if I hover over it with my mouse, you can see there’s a pretty large mega menu that pops up here.
And I hit tab and instead I go to the search icon. So I have bypassed everything in the main navigation. Residence, Business, Explorer. How do I? And I’m now in the search bar. Now, well, the button to submit search, which is a little weird because it’s before where you’d actually do the field, not after. It should probably be after.
And then where I can enter in the input that I hit tab, I’m on the language selector dropdown. Now I hit tab and I am on something. Ah, DC done. It took me a minute to figure out where this was because the focus indicator is insufficient, but pay my utility bill down here. Now I got tiny difference on Report an Issue, tiny difference on Apply for a Job, tiny difference on Find an Event.
So again, like insufficient focus indicator. Now I’m up on the slideshow here, which is auto playing, and you’ll notice I can use this button, I think. Let’s see. Oh, it’s not a button. It’s probably a link because it jumped me down instead of actually doing anything. Let’s just look at it real quick. Oh, it’s a div.
Hasn’t been given a role of button? I don’t even know what this element is. Oh, there we go. Well, that’s weird. It’s been, these two buttons have been removed from the tab index. The div has been given a tag index, but it’s not a button, so it doesn’t function with a space bar, which it should.
There we go. Does it work with the return key? No, it doesn’t even work with the return key. So for whatever reason, we’ve taken two perfectly good buttons right up here, and we have said don’t allow people to use these two perfectly good buttons, and instead allow them to focus on the carousel, on the div that contains them, but we’ve not actually added any sort of functionality that allows this to be interacted with, which makes no sense and is super confusing. Also, there’s no pause button and that is also a WCAG violation of 2. 2. 2. So there is that, but also I can be focused on them but not see them. It was also a violation. So I’m in the search box, utilities, so down below let’s see.
These are tabs. I wonder if these sound like tabs.
This is a button. Yeah, so these are tabs that change the content, but they’re not marked up as tabs. This should tell me that I’m on a tab list. They should have ARIA controls so it makes it clear what they’re going to do. Just saying button, library events button, that tells me nothing.
This should not be a toggle button. Toggle buttons are buttons that have like a press state, so like off on not something that just like goes to the next slide.
So you’ll notice I’m pressing the button. It is not announcing the date, so it didn’t tell me November, December, nothing. It’s not saying anything on the screen reader.
Alright, fine, let’s go to today. Did it take me to today? No, it loaded September. It didn’t tell me it loaded September. It didn’t like shift my focus to today, which is here.
Yeah. I’m also not getting any sort of information.
So it does tell me, at least here, that I can go to and it includes September and all that. But, oh, do you hear that? The slide that’s intermittently? That’s the slider up higher on the page. It’s so disruptive, I can’t even talk to you. And there’s no way to pause it or stop it.
It’s just going to intermittently, as I’m moving through the page, announce every time that photo changes. Which is super annoying, as you can tell. But what I was going to say about the calendar, I’m going to have to talk over the screen reader, is that there’s a difference between events that, or days that have events, and days that don’t.
I can visually see this because some of them have blue circles, and some of them don’t have any circles, and I’m assuming the ones with no circles don’t have the Any events. The one with the light gray circle that fails color contrast is the current day, but I bet you when I go there.
Yeah, so it’s visually telling me this is the current day, but it doesn’t tell me with the screen reader that this is the current day. Ah, so. Let’s see, what else do we have?
Yeah, and then all this stuff fails color contrast down here. You should either just not output the next month or you should style it differently and not have it fail color contrast. I’m just going to read from here.
Screen Reader: Column 2, Ling, 7, Column 3, Ling, 8, Column 4, Ling, 9, Column 5, Ling, 10, Column 6, Ling, 11, Column 7, Ling, 12, August, 5, Library 2nd Floor Closure, August 5th, 9, 00, AM to 6, 00, PM, August, 13, Kelly Groves, Falling, August 13th, 9, 00, AM to 6, 00, PM, 7, 15, Live Music at the Library, Chesky, September 15th, 2, 00, PM to 3, 30, PM…
Amber: Oh, heading number 4?
Screen Reader: Report an Issue, Link, Apply for a City Job, Visit, Link, Pay My Utility Bill, Link, Find Dark, Link, Mayor and City Council, List 7 Items.
Amber: Okay, I want to go back up to these dates because I had the screen reader read it, but I don’t actually think I can reach it. Also, you notice there was a decorative image right here that got read out, like a border or something. Also, these are heading 4s, which make absolutely no sense in the context of the page. We’ll look at the headings in just a minute. Let me go back though.
This library second floor closure, as a mouse user, I can click on it and it opens a modal. How do I get rid of the modal? Oh, there’s a close button way down here. Does escape key work? Escape key works. That’s good. Now where’s my focus? Oh, my focus. It lost focus. Look at that. When you close a modal, you’ve got to return focus. But I can’t actually get to these with a keyboard because they’re not actually buttons.
They should be, it’s just a div. It should be a button that has, ARIA has popup and modal, and that modal should open appropriately and labeled. But none of this is functional for anyone who uses a keyboard. Whether it’s a screen reader user or a sighted keyboard user, I can’t even get to these dates.
Let’s look at this real quick. I find this is interesting. Like, why does this not work? So we have what we expect, a navigation. This navigation is unlabeled. It should have a label that says Primary Navigation. Then we have our unordered list. That’s good. And then here’s our first list item. So here is, I think, the mistake.
We have this text residence right here, and then we have a link, which is totally wrong, this should be a button that has an ARIA label on it, but it’s not actually visible anywhere on the page. Now I bet, let’s try something here. And if we were to edit this, and put residence in here instead. Oh no, this is why. In our CSS, we actually have display none right there. There we go. That’s the true problem. They have literally hid this with the CSS, display none, on the toggle button. So if I turn that off, I can also, wow, that is a really funny fallback font. I’ll take my text out of this that I put in there.
There we go. All right, so now if I’m not displaying none in my toggle button, let’s get my mouse out of the way, can I, look at that, well the return key doesn’t work because, why does the return key doesn’t work? I don’t know. It does, it will toggle our aria expanded true false, but as you can see it’s not opening it.
So there’s also some sort of CSS that is stopping that from coming up, but the real, but this right here is an issue, and then there’s an issue on like this container, probably, that it’s failing to adjust the CSS styles, but I don’t know why we’re hiding these toggle buttons.
On desktop, you need to have those on desktop too. This is just a few of the issues on this website. Of course, the navigation menu is probably the most massive problem. But, I mean, there are so much more. Let me see if I, let’s turn the screen reader back on again, because I’m curious what, like, searching is like.
So all of this right here, services, forums, all of Georgetown, Texas, like these search executions are completely non functional for both the keyboard user and a screen reader user wouldn’t even know they were there.
So let’s just search it. I think I searched. Why is it not submitting?
Can’t get it to submit. Let’s turn the screen reader off. Also the clear button that’s right there can’t go. Does it work with the screen? No. This button only works with the mouse? Let’s see. Is it actually a button? It is a button. But I don’t know why. There’s something about it that stops it. It’s received focus.
That’s the space bar doing nothing. That’s the return key doing nothing. You have to have a mouse in order to be able to search. So, obviously there’s so much more that needs to be looked at on this website, but those are just a few examples of the problems that I found in a very short amount of time that are going to make this website completely inaccessible for a very wide percent of City of Georgetown residents.
So that was my video. Just some of the problems that existed on that website. I’m curious what you guys thoughts were watching that and seeing that.
Steve: I mean, it was pretty bad.
Chris: Yeah. What Steve said it was abundantly clear that anyone who actually needed to interact with that website with assistive technology was not going to be able to do virtually anything useful, which is a huge fail.
Is it common for government websites to have accessibility issues?
Steve: Yeah, and, and I mean, maybe you can talk to this a little bit, Amber, since you did the testing, but these, do these seem like common issues or do these seem like, to some respect it feels like the developer or the creator of the website, went over and beyond to do kind of really unorthodox things, right?
Like, I don’t know if that’s the right word to use, but like, like with the way the buttons are turned off and then they’re replaced with a div and, you know, just, you know, Modifying things like that, where it seems like if they would have just left it alone, I don’t know if it’s a plugin or whatever, it would have been better.
So, so are these common issues or does this seem a little bit of kind of a little more I don’t know, advanced issues or like they kind of shot themselves in the foot a little bit by trying to focus on functionality over accessibility or over semantics?
Amber: Yeah. I mean, I feel like, so we do a lot of auditing for other agencies, for websites that already exist.
I don’t, I wish I could say that the kinds of things we saw on here, like a navigation menu that literally cannot be used with a keyboard or buttons to open a modal for events that are not coded as buttons and don’t work without a mouse. I wish I could say that was unique. But I actually feel like the issues that I saw on this website are incredibly common.
Now I don’t quite understand, I didn’t even know, you know, there at the end where I was showing the search and it, the search button is a button. I have no idea why it didn’t work when I tried to use the spacebar or the recurrent key. I don’t know, Steve, have you ever seen that? Like, I almost feel like they must have written some JavaScript to block that.
Steve: Yeah, totally. I mean, there’s something.
Amber: Because it is an HTML button. That’s something that I haven’t seen as much, and so I wouldn’t even know where to begin, I guess, besides maybe, can we start turning off some of the JavaScript on this page to try and figure out which one is blocking it? Do you have any idea how you’d even begin to assess something like that?
Steve: Well, so I’m actually, I’m looking at the web archive version of the site. I’m looking at that search icon. And it is a button and you tried to use a modifier to like, control option, space bar, and still the…
Amber: Yeah, I mean actually we could circle back to this
Steve: Yeah, there might be a there might be a prevent default JavaScript on there and they’re hijacking it to do something.
Amber: Because they have like I was wondering if because they have that. There’s like a visual pop up that comes up when you search that is like search suggestions. So maybe they’re like, Oh, people will just use that instead of actually submitting the search and going somewhere. I just, I don’t know. That one to me was a new one that I’d never seen. Like this is a button, but it, someone has literally made it not work.
Steve: Yeah, I think it’s, I think it’s that pop up. It’s definitely in it. And to be quite honest, I don’t, I know we’re going to get into it, but I don’t know that it’s been fixed.
Amber: I don’t think it’s been fixed. I just looked at it on their current website. I still can’t submit that button with a keyboard. But I, so this website, so it is no longer a WordPress website. It’s using some sort of government CMS, like a proprietary CMS that targets city government websites.
It might even say in the footer, does it say in the footer? Because if it does, I totally want to shout them out. Oh yes, here we go. It says website powered by Revise. The government website experts.
Chris, I’m going to call on you. What is your reaction to like, this website that is not accessible fails the ADA, fails the literal legal requirements for the city, built by supposedly government website experts. How do you think this website launched the way it is?
Chris: Lackluster or non existent QA. And I think both parties are responsible. I think the agent, the agency, CMS, whatever, you know, maybe they hired an implementer, right, of this proprietary CMS, or maybe the proprietary CMS themselves did it. I’m not sure.
But clearly that vendor did not do their due diligence, because it’s not just like, it’s not just like, you know, color contrast, right? It’s like links and buttons getting confused. It’s tabs not being coded properly. It’s keyboard traps or keyboard nav bypassing entire sections of arguably the most critical part of a website, which is the freaking primary navigation menu.
Like, to me, that’s a, that’s an indicator that, the agency and their technical team do not understand accessibility fundamentals at all, and they are not testing for them at all. At the same time, the government agency that has procured this website clearly also does not understand accessibility fundamentals at all, and did not even do the most basic vetting, like hitting tab on a keyboard, what, six times before you found a problem, Amber?
Or just clicking on a WAVE button, like, and maybe it’s an education issue they don’t know how to check, right? Because accessibility is a quote, invisible problem to 80 percent of the population and like, people don’t know what they don’t know and that’s all fine. I’m not trying to be too judgy, but at the same time, there were clear multiple points of failure. In both organizations, both the buyer and the seller.
Amber: And I mean, that sort of makes me wonder a little bit about the ADA coordinator. I’m going to say it. Because I’ve previously emailed this person. They never responded to me. And I’m like, if anyone should have a job that is like QA our new website, it seemed like you might go to that person.
And it does make me wonder, like, what kind of training does that person have? Before they got that job or when they started in that role, did anyone give them training or are they most, are they more of like a paper pusher? Like they respond to complaints and like move things forward, but they don’t actually have any real knowledge about website accessibility or maybe even building accessibility for all I know. I don’t know. I found this very frustrating, which is why I ended up being like, I’m just going to file the grievance.
Chris: Yeah. And so to that end, how did you go about filing that grievance? That’s the first question of a two part question.
How did you do it?
Amber: Yeah. So, it was not hard. So, let me I’ll share my screen real quick and maybe I can tell you like how I filed it and what I did. So I just looked on the website. I really, I hoped to find something in the footer that would say like ADA or accessibility or something like that. I didn’t, they just have a privacy policy, but I went to contact and under contact, they had Americans with Disabilities Act and right on that page was file grievances here.
So that was good. Then it took me over to a form that I could submit. And so I had to provide information. So my name, my address, my phone number, my email address the date of the incident. So I just put the current date. And then description of the incident. And I just gave a brief description of some of the issues I found and they wanted to know a suggested outcome. And my suggested outcome was hire an accessibility specialist to test your website and people with disabilities and remediate all problems found. Obviously, I did not list everything out, but I was basically like, I want you to go find somebody who actually understands this because clearly you all don’t. And then get it fixed and, oh, I can put us back up here too. There we go. Look, there’s us.
Chris: Right. Did what was the, like, what was the response? Because that was the other part of the question. We just like really dragged both parties, you know, the CMS and the city through the mud here being like, you both totally failed. How was the response?
Amber: On the top of this form, it says within 15 calendar days, the ADA Coordinator will acknowledge receipt of the complaint and may meet with the complainant if needed, and then within 30 days they will respond in writing or in an alternative format as needed.
So pretty much what I did appreciate about this was that it basically outlined a timeline in which I could expect a response. So I submitted this on Saturday. September 14th. I got a automated reply immediately afterwards via email. Basically said, hello, thank you for your grievance submittal. A copy has been sent to the city’s legal department, the ADA coordinator, and our records retention manager.
You can expect the following, and so basically that same information. And then if the options that are offered by them don’t resolve, I can file an appeal within 15 days of their final notice and it gave me an address that I could send over if I wanted to write an appeal or anything like that. So that was the initial response.
Then I did receive an email from them on Wednesday, September 25th. So this is faster than I expected. I actually think I was at WordCamp US when this came in. So, so like 11 days later and it just said, good afternoon, Ms. Hinds, I hope this finds you well. We’ve received your request for assistance with website accessibility issues.
He repeated issues that I mentioned. So keyboard and accessibility, navigation menus, empty headings, missing form labels, hidden items, receiving keyboard focus. We appreciate you bringing those items to our attention and for your recommendations to have a trained accessibility professional audit the website and develop a plan to remediate those issues.
We as the city staff are evaluating your request and communicating with our website vendor and working to identify the issues you’ve raised. And they said they’ll provide me a more formal response. No later than October 14th, so that was at 30 days. I did not reply to this because I was at WordCamp US and I was just like, okay, great, it’s moving through the process.
And then on October 10th, they responded back to me. And this is what they said. They’re, again, they said they’re committed to act, access to people with disabilities. They appreciated my contact, listed back all the problems that I had listed again. And then they said, we as a city staff have evaluated your request and have made the following changes to the website.
They said the navigation is fully keyboard operable and the dropdown can be opened. Opened with enter and closed with enter or escape. Mobile navigation is now in tab order and can be navigated with the keyboard. They removed empty headings and hidden items, removing keyboard focus. Click link sections now allows focus to the elements on the screen.
And the left and right arrows will display more links if necessary. Calendar events now receive keyboard focus. Modal can be opened with enter when closing the modal. The focus will be set on the last clicked element instead of resetting the top of the page. They said they fixed color contrast issues.
The search pop up can be navigated with left and right arrow keys and can be closed with escape and focus. And they basically said and then they said, if there’s any additional items, please let me know. And this came from their transportation manager comma ADA coordinator. And they sent me a, a PDF of this letter.
I have not tested it to see if it’s tagged. I almost probably should have done that before this podcast to see if they sent me an accessible tagged PDF, but it’s the exact same text as in the email, so I was a little bit like, eh, maybe I give them a pass on that, because they also had it in plain text in the email.
So this is what they said. They said, hey, we fixed a bunch of things. And that was the response within a timely manner, which I mean, my initial reaction to that was, that’s awesome. Their navigation menu works now.
We look at accessibility on the same website live! Did they fix anything?
Amber: Um, but that was kind of what the process was and the response. What do you guys think about how the website looks right now?
Steve: Yeah. Do we want to just make an overall, can I share my screen? Like, can we yeah. You share your screen, Steve.
Amber: We’re going to let the. The dev expert here, give us an assessment on how accessible he thinks this website is now.
Steve: If it’ll let me, hold on. Let’s try this.
Chris: Well, while Steve’s pulling that up, I will say that I’m just doing some quick keyboard tests right now, and it’s way better than it was in your video.
Steve: Yeah.
Chris: So that’s nice.
Amber: Are you able to open the nav menu with a keyboard?
Steve: So like Amber said, you can get to the keyboard now, or you can get to the navigation with a keyboard for those listening. I’m on the navigation and when I tab through the Navigation items. There is outline. It’s a little wonky looking. It’s real. It doesn’t really fit around the link real well.
It’s real tall, you know, and it’s, and this is probably a developer thing. Just trying to get the spacing that they want. They probably just added a padding to the top of the navigation item. But so I’m able to tab through. And I don’t have to go through the sub menu items, right? If would prefer maybe an, a visual indicator to toggle open the menu.
There isn’t one, but I can toggle open. They’ve got a very large kind of mega menu with four columns and I’m able to go through. With no problem, I move on to the next one, then I can initiate that. So this is an improvement and probably one of the bigger improvements that you can make it. Cause if your navigation’s not accessible to a keyboard user, that’s like a huge problem.
Chris: Speaking of huge problems, I mean, I don’t know if the city cares that much about SEO, but there’s no H1.
Steve: Yeah. So we could talk about that a little bit. So like a heading order, which heading order is is something that’s fairly easy to get right.
Now, a lot of times we’ve talked about this before, designers or developers will use the one that looks the way they want it to look, not the one that is semantically correct. So, what I’ve done on the screen here is I’ve pulled up a Chrome extension called Headings Map, which basically just outlines your heading order for you.
And we can see that there is no H1 on this page. It goes through H2 to H3 back to H4. H2 and the H4. So there’s no H3 between the H2 and the H4. So…
Amber: And those were the H4s in the footer that I originally saw. And I was like, well, that’s weird because the problem with that now is it looks like those are actually sub items for online utility customer self service portal down.
Steve: Yeah.
Amber: Which is I think that pop up which we can’t see anymore.
Steve: Yeah, it’s not even visible on the screen, so there’s a in the right hand corner there’s a pop up and yeah, there’s a pop up, and it’s odd, I might, we couldn’t see it because the screen was the viewport was scaled down, so it looks like it’s not mobile responsive, so like, if you size the viewport down, it actually gets cut off until it just disappears. So…
Amber: Oh, man. So they must have probably used some sort of absolute positioning for that, I bet.
Steve: Yeah, totally. So what Amber was trying to illustrate was that the H2 in that pop up or alert as they’ve changed it to be Actually looks like the sub the main heading for the footer sections.
Yeah. Which is a little odd. Was there a, so like you talk about these not being keyboard, the the calendar the calendar days not being accessible to a keyboard, which they are now the,
Amber: I think it was the things on the right. In that events column that weren’t, are you able to open and close those now? Cause that was something they said they fixed.
Steve: Okay. I’m tabbing through the calendar.
Amber: Yeah. That focus state is still not sufficient. On those days in the calendar. So those can receive focus now.
Steve: Those can receive focus now, which is nice. Now I haven’t, it looks like it’s a link wrapped. It wraps the whole thing. So it should read out. All of it, or I’m not a hundred percent sure what the markup looks like.
Amber: Yeah. Each event, cause those trigger those pop ups. , they’re divs in the tab order.
No role of button and no, yes. So they would sound weird to us.
Steve: It would sound weird because, so what they’ve done is they’ve added the tab index attribute and they’ve set it to zero, which actually just introduces a non focusable element into the focusable DOM.
When you do that though, you need to. You need to also add ARIA, like role equal, you know, the correct role. You need to add keyboard event handlers to it as well. So it, it functions as a button would, I don’t know, would these be buttons? I mean, shouldn’t these just be links, Amber?
Amber: Well, no, they open a modal they should be buttons.
Steve: Oh, they open a modal. Sorry, my bad.
Amber: Yeah, so you’d need them to be like, they’d need to have ARIA has popup equals true. Yeah. So that people know. And look, you opened that modal. Did it put your focus in it?
Steve: No, it did not. I moved on. Yeah. So, so if I tab to an event I, Initiate the modal. My, it does bring the focus order, but it brings the focus order into a map that’s inside the modal.
Where am I? Where am I? Oh, no it’s focused. It’s focus trapping it, but look, it actually returns to the, it returns to the main page. That is super weird.
Amber: Yeah, it should just stay in the modal without going to the address bar.
Steve: And how do I close this with the close button? Is this a button? So we have a close button. It is a button with text in it that says close. So that should be fine. Right. So…
Amber: It seems like there’s still a lot of problems on this website. The one we were talking about earlier before you had pulled up is that search button up in the main header. It is actually a button but for whatever reason it cannot be toggled.
That one and the one down in the main over the carousel. I mean that carousel still auto plays which would result in what we heard on the screen reader when I was doing it where it was just randomly saying slide two of three.
Steve: Yeah. The top search in, in, in the header it does look like it’s a button now. And it, it does have an ARIA label that says search. I don’t see, I don’t know if there’s a label or a submit on this. Is there a label somewhere?
Amber: I still think it’s wrong that they’ve put the button before, like before the input.
Steve: The order is wrong. Yeah.
Amber: Because you would type in a search field and then expect to hit tab to get to the submit button, not have to think you’d have to hit shift tab to get to the submit button and go backwards.
Steve: Yeah, it’s weird. It’s not focused. Oh, it is focusable. It’s just out of order. And it is weird. Yeah, I guess it’s a little weird.
Amber: I guess they did, oh, they changed that. So when I did it before, it went to the submit button and then it went to the input. So it looks like they have fixed the DOM order issue. They just, but I don’t know why they tried to keep it on the left. I would have just moved it to the right. Probably some designer was like, no, it needs to be on the left.
Steve: So to speed through a couple things that there are still color contrast issues. You have to, when you put white text over an image, you need to make sure that the background of that div has a color.
And it looks like, I mean, it looks like there’s a div and then there’s another div with an image. So like, there’s still some color contrast issues. I actually am, I’m getting more WAVE issues now than I did before they made the changes. So there, yeah, so if you look, there’s color contrast issues on, this is, I don’t know what this is, like a call out or something, and it’s got an image with white text laid over top of it.
But when you remove those things away, you’re, you end up with basically white text on a white background. So it still fails color contrast. There’s missing form labels and empty headers and buttons, and these are not visible on the page. And I think a lot of these come from the translation from the, so if I turn the styles off on the page, I think it’s the Google Translate.
Yeah. The Google Translate has a feedback field somewhere that’s not on the page. I don’t know how to initiate this, but it’s got like, you know, what is this? Five form fields, missing labels to get into some of the more advanced things that I thought were odd. And these were probably there before.
Amber talked about this in the video. There’s like a hero image with a search box in the middle. And if you type in something to search, it auto initiates like a pop up of sorts. And now I don’t have my screen reader on right now. So I don’t know if it alerted to me that it actually did that.
Amber: I’m pretty sure it doesn’t.
Steve: Yeah. I would assume that it doesn’t. But maybe we can assume positive intent. I don’t know from what we’ve seen, maybe not. There’s a There’s a button to clear this out, and and it actually only shows on hover. And I don’t know if it’s a button. I don’t know what it is.
Amber: Oh, and I don’t want to ding them on that one. This one comes up in our audits. That is a Chromium button that comes from the browser. Yeah it’s browser specific. We’ve had so many conversations about that with Maria, our accessibility specialist and that kind of stuff. We, because there’s, it’s really hard for, a developer website to block that button, but like the browser’s adding it. And technically, if a browser does something by default, then it’s not a WCAG failure on the website’s part. So you don’t flag it.
Steve: Well, that’s a good point.
Amber: But that is a weird non functional thing for keyboard users. That is an issue in Chromium.
Steve: So I will say this. So when you search this and you get this like modal. Of sorts. I don’t really think it’s coded as a modal, but it, I think it’s intended to be a modal. It exists in the DOM before the search field. So if I was to do this and it actually alerted to me that there was a modal that popped up and gave me context, what it was.
And I wanted to see what it was, ideally we should shift focus into it first. Right. But there’s no focus shift, but say, I just want to continue on. Okay. I want to read what that is. I hit the tab key. Right. Okay. I’m not in it. Like I’m on to the next section.
You have to circle all the way back to the beginning of the website. So here I’m just holding down the tab key as it tabs through all the tab focusable elements. I’m back at the top of the website, going through the navigation menu. And now I’ve hit the modal. So, so it actually existed in the DOM before the search field.
And And it doesn’t, when you get to it, it doesn’t lock focus inside of it. So it, you know, it’s not going to alert that it’s a modal and it just stays on the page. I haven’t checked these close buttons and all that. Yeah. I mean, it’s a close button with an icon in it. So it’s, it’s probably not going to read it.
It’s probably going to read as empty or whatever. I don’t know if this is an ASCII character or something. Yeah.
Amber: Yeah. There’s no aRIA label or anything on that to say close search modal.
Steve: Yeah. So I’m trying to rush through, through this, but I did have one more I wanted to touch on before I get a little bit of feedback and I don’t know if this was an accessibility fix from before, but there’s a section called quick links on here, which just has like, you know, you know, two rows of four columns of icon and text links, right?
Now they look like they, they must be links. Let’s double check, but yeah, they’re links. Yeah, so they would read out. There’s some text in there. The what I found weird here when I got to it, so if I tab in there, there’s left and right arrows to page through. It’s like a slider, right?
So there’s previous and next buttons. I’m currently focused on these previous and next buttons, but it’s focused on them as if they’re one. So …
Amber: That’s the same thing I saw that we saw with the carousel slider up at the top. I bet you it’s like the div. They’ve added focus on the div that holds the buttons instead of allowing you to go to the buttons. I do not, like, I don’t even understand why would a developer do this?
Steve: Yeah, but it’s completely unfunctional to a keyboard. If I look at the markup on it, yeah, just like Amber suspected, she’s right. There’s a div that has both of them and they’ve got a tab index of zero on it. And then here are the actual I’m viewing the source of the website.
Now I’m hovering on an actual button for the previous button. And they’ve, so a button is naturally, a focusable element, right? Like we don’t need to work against semantic elements and make them not what they’re meant to be and what they will just do right out of the box.
Yeah. So yeah, tabindex negative one, which removes it from the focusable DOM. So, and they’ve done this on both. So the next and previous buttons are completely inaccessible to a keyboard. But for some reason, they gave me one div for both to focus on, that does nothing. This is an interesting place to get.
Where to draw the line on advocacy, and a cautionary note on hiring qualified vendors
Steve: And like, I know when you read back like the feedback that you got. It was talking about our vendor, right? So, so obviously this is passing through this government entity to a vendor. We, you know, we called out the vendor of this a minute ago. That this is where, when you’re building or you call yourself the, hold on, what was it, I want to make sure, when you call yourself the
Amber: Government website experts.
Steve: Government. Website experts, right? And government websites are required by law to meet certain standards, right? Certain WCAG standards, right? Like when, and then your developers are not trained at all. And they’re actually I feel like there’s a guessing game going on here.
They’re actually in their effort to make it accessible, they’re actually making it even worse. So it’s like, that’s why like, you know, vendors like this are not acting in the best interest of government entities that outsource to them when they say they’re the expert. If you’re the expert, you need to be the expert. You need to either have somebody staffed that has this knowledge of accessibility or you need to outsource and you need to hire a company or partner with a company to come alongside you and make sure that you are meeting these guidelines that these government entities are required to follow.
Amber: Yeah. So I want to step back just a tiny bit to like, I filed this grievance. They did fix one very major issue, which was navigation menu, which if I think about people in our town, like, in our town, you actually get a lot of your utilities through the city and you don’t have choices, like, it’s not like you could just go to a different vendor.
And so, you know, needing to be able to go to this website, use this website to pay your utility bill, that is a literal need in order to live. So I do think that the grievance, me filing the grievance was a good thing because it made that get a little bit better. But it seems like they didn’t really fully do what I asked.
So I do, I think, I’m curious your thoughts. I think I am going to send them an email this afternoon and be like, Hey, I do see that some things are better, but there’s a lot that still is not working. And do you think it’s worth it for me to do that?
Steve: Yeah. Just send them a link to the podcast episode.
Chris: In terms of next steps.
Yeah. I mean, I think you have to think about your own time too. Right. And there’s plenty that we are doing as individuals and as a company to advance accessibility on the web as a whole. So I don’t know how important it is or isn’t that you make the city of Georgetown website, like your personal accessibility battle. Like you can, if you want and it takes citizens stepping up and saying something sometimes to affect change.
I’m not debating that point, but I think in terms of what the next step should be is the city needs to hire an independent auditor. They need to review their contract with this vendor. And they need to, depending on what was in the contract, what the exclusions were, et cetera, they need to strong arm that vendor with their third party independent audit into delivering them an accessible website, which is what is required by law.
Now, I don’t know what was in the statement of work. It’s probably public record somewhere. And that might be interesting for a follow up episode to this, is to try to dig that up with an open records request and see what this vendor promised them. But I think it’s you know, what, at the end of the day cities are going to have to brush up on this and they’re gonna have to advocate for themselves because if agencies that are selling to government, you know, if there are a certain type of agency, if they can get away with it, they will like not doing their due diligence.
And I hate to say that about my own industry, but there are agencies in this industry that if they can get away with something, if they can cut a corner, if they can hire underqualified people and promise the top notch delivery, but hire underqualified, underpaid people to do it, they will do it.
Amber: I mean, that was what that whole , two million dollar lawsuit settlement in California was about against an agency that over promised and way under delivered on accessibility. But no, I think, you know, one of the reasons why I wanted to talk about this on the podcast, is, I mean, yes, we have some people who work in government who listen to the podcast but I also think for all of us who are accessibility professionals, one of the takeaways that I hope people might take is, I, for me to fill out that form, I did not give them a full audit.
You saw the sentences, I like just comma separated a few things that I knew were problems. It took me well, 15 minutes of me making the video only because I wanted like historical proof and evidence. And then it took me maybe another like 10 minutes to fill out that form. I haven’t said anything else to them since then. And they did already make some fixes to the website that are meaningful.
Steve: Yeah.
Amber: So I would say, obviously, you know, we can’t all go around doing it for everyone, but maybe if we could do that for our own cities we have the ability to enact some positive change. I am definitely going to email them and be like, yeah, I don’t think you did a sufficient job.
And I’ll probably at that point out myself as an accessibility professional. And maybe I will say, you know, hey, here’s a video recording that shows some problems but like, I think that I think it was worth me spending the time doing that. And I think that this is maybe a way that people can give back.
Now I’m not saying we should all go out and do free audits. Like I’m not going to offer to audit their entire website for free. Absolutely not.
Chris: No, they should pay someone.
Amber: Unless I get a tax credit on my tax bill. I don’t know.
Chris: Yeah,
Amber: No sales tax for you for the next year. I might take that one.
Chris: Texas, you want it to be property tax. That actually would come out to about the cost of an audit.
But no, I think if accessibility professionals go out and they do that and they do that advocacy, I think that’s great. I think if they, you know, this is just me personally putting like my business ethics hat on or whatever you want to call it, but I think if you do that as an accessibility professional in your free time, I think you should try not to do that to necessarily like sell your own services and try to like use complaint channels to enrich yourself. But maybe you could, you know, refer them to a colleague and be like, I’m an accessibility professional.
If that’s a conflict of interest, I will happily refer you to someone else, that can audit and help you fix these problems. And, you know, maybe there’s a way for all of us accessibility professionals to gamify that a little bit. Maybe we refer our own cities to other people and they refer their cities to us, right. And I mean, that, that benefits everyone and it also makes the city websites more accessible. And clearly we have a local and regional government accessibility problem here.
Amber: I don’t think our city is not, like, I’m pretty sure our city is just as representative of any other city’s website. Right? It looks really nice on the surface, but you dig in and it’s actually a pretty bad website.
Steve: I don’t know if I missed it, but do they have an accessibility statement?
Amber: Nothing beyond what’s on the, if you go to contact us and the Americans with Disabilities page, Americans with Disabilities Act page, there’s something there where I got the link to file a grievance, but that’s it.
And again, it’s not linked in the footer, which is also a little weird. That they’re not doing that, but I don’t even know if you have to out yourself as an accessibility professional. I didn’t, because I thought that what’s more important is I’m a citizen in this town, right? And I think to some degree, like, sometimes when you out yourself as an accessibility professional, like, maybe that is why the ADA person never responded when I emailed them directly, because they’re like, oh, she’s just trying to sell me something, right?
And so I did not, I just said, I’m a citizen, I was on the new website, trying to get information about my utility bill, and I saw all these problems that make it impossible for people with disabilities to use. And so that’s maybe where I would start. Not even thinking like, Oh, you can refer them to other people.
Like I would, like, I didn’t tell them who to hire. I just said, you should hire someone. Now that said, in my follow up, I’m going to be like, it is clear that your vendor does not know what they’re doing. As a citizen whose tax dollars paid for this website, I would advocate for you to find a different vendor.
Steve: Right. We’re not telling you who to hire, but we’re happy to tell you who not to hire.
Amber: Yeah.
Steve: Yeah.
Amber: I also think, like, this is a really interesting thing that, you know, and we should probably wrap up because we’re at an hour and 15 minutes, but, you know, I love these conversations. But this is not a WordPress website.
They went from a WordPress website that could be edited and worked on by anyone, pretty much anyone, right? Could have gotten access to that and improved their website. And now they are in a closed platform CMS, that maybe can only be worked on by the company who manages that CMS. I would, God I feel like that’s a whole nother follow up that we could have because it is entirely possible that it’s going to be way more expensive for them to remediate this website or maybe even impossible that for them to fix certain things if It’s the CMS that’s doing that.
And it’s not just unique to their website, like a theme, right? It’s like, this is a core thing of the CMS and now they’d have to go fix it for everyone. And they’re saying they aren’t going to do it. You know, that’s, I feel like there’s a big risk going from a platform like WordPress or Drupal or Joomla, or one of these other like open source platforms that many vendors know how to work on. to a proprietary CMS that’s made for your industry.
Steve: Yeah, it’s definitely a challenge. I mean, I mean, this is similar to kind of our space, right? Where it’s like we audit, when we audit websites and stuff, sometimes it’s the theme, right? Sometimes it’s a plugin and sometimes we’re judging, do we create a patch to, to make up for the accessibility issues in a plugin, or do we take the extra step and seek out who the author is of that plugin?
Do we open issues? Do we contact them? That way the net benefit to those accessibility issues being fixed is not just that one individual site. Like you can put a theme in it and you can make an accessible theme or you can make an inaccessible theme. I don’t know if Revise works the same way.
Amber: Yeah. Well, we’ll have to have a follow up on how this goes in several months. I will keep you all posted on my social media. Are you inspired to go look at your own city website, Steve, and maybe file one of your own?
Steve: A little bit. Look for a future podcast episode where we go through the city of Dayton, Ohio’s government website.
Amber: Well, it was good chatting everybody and kind of fun to dive into a website and code and test things on the podcast.
Chris: I’ll be pouring this out here.
Steve: Yeah, this is, I’m pouring this in the toilet, not the sink.
Amber: Nope, nobody, do not purchase sour pickle beer. We tried it, so you don’t have to. We’ll be back in two weeks when we hopefully have a much tastier beverage to drink.
Chris: I’ll make sure of it. Bye.
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, Spotify, and more. And if building accessibility awareness is important to you, please consider rating Accessibility Craft 5 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.