In this episode, we talk about the looming June 28, 2025 deadline for the European Accessibility Act and what organizations doing business in the EU can do with just weeks left to meet WCAG 2.1 AA.

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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 onto the show.

Amber: Hello everyone, it’s Amber and I’m here today with Steve.

Steve: Hello everyone.

Amber: And Chris.

Chris: Hey everybody. I’m back from playing hooky.

Amber: We did miss you on our last episode. We’re glad to have you back. For everyone who is listening or watching and wants to know where to get show notes, you can find those if you go to AccessibilityCraft.com/120.

Today’s Beverage

Amber: Chris, what are we drinking today?

Chris: What we are having today is Saint Arnold Irish Hello which is a, what they’re calling a dry stout, an easy drinking dry stout. So I would expect this to be a dark colored beer. Probably not particularly sweet. And it’s got some cool illustrations here on the front. Texas Brewery. And I’ve never had this particular one from Saint Arnold before, but I think they’ve been making it for a while, and I’ve just never picked it up because I never think to grab stouts except for you, Amber. So we’ll be giving this one a try today.

Amber: So I love stouts. I wasn’t, I guess I haven’t paid much attention to a dry stout, so I had to look that up because I was really curious. What does that mean? So for anyone who’s not familiar, a dry stout is something that is known to be lower in sweetness versus, you know, like the chocolate stouts, or we’ve had a peanut butter stout before. They’re usually made with roasted barley, so it’ll have stronger coffee like flavors. And might be a little bit more light bodied on the stout side. So we’ll see.

Chris: Maybe that’s where that easy drinking comes from.

Amber: Yes.

Chris: It’s gonna be less like drinking oatmeal,

Amber: I don’t know. So apparently Guinness is a dry stout. I think most of us have had Guinness. So they’re not, they’re like so big now. It’s not craft anymore, but this is probably a decent fun beer to try for a conversation about Europe.

Steve: Yeah.

Chris: Well, let’s crack these open. And I did get my Accessibility Craft pint glass, and I’m gonna give it a pour so we can see it out of the can.

Amber: Oh, awesome. It did say, it does say, this is Texas’s oldest craft brewery.

Chris: It’s quite dark.

Amber: Oh yeah.

Steve: It smell, it smells dark. It does not smell like it’s going to go down easy, like it says.

Amber: Chris’s glass there had probably I don’t know, an inch and a half or two inches of foam on the top.

Chris: Yep.

Steve: Oh, it’s a lot.

Amber: It’s so pretty.

Chris: Yeah, it’s not as much of a, like creamy head as I’ve seen on other stout beers. Um, it’s definitely a little more standard. Big bubbles though. I don’t know if you can see the character of those bubbles. If I try to get it now, my lights are killing all the contrast, but it’s got big bubbles in the head of the beer.

Amber: I, I love stouts and I always think it’s funny because even if it’s really hot out, I would be like, I’ll drink a stout. And a lot of restaurants, especially down here, they don’t keep them on tap or stock them in the summer time.

Steve: Yeah. Yeah.

Amber: But I really like stouts and this one, it’s got a good, like darker rich smell to it. I wouldn’t say I can’t really pick out any notes of like chocolate or coffee or something. You sometimes can, but…

Steve: I think I smell coffee.

Amber: Does it smell kind like coffee yet?

Chris: I get a little coffee. I get a lot of molasses on the nose.

Steve: Oh, is that what I’m smelling?

Amber: Maybe.

Chris: I got that more like sour off-sweet molasses smell.

Steve: I don’t know if I would say easy, but I’d say it’s smoother than a lot of the stouts we’ve done.

Chris: Yeah.

Amber: Yeah.

Chris: I would not rate it in the easy drinking category. It is easy drinking in the stout category.

Steve: Yeah. Yeah.

Amber: I think this just goes for me along with the fact that I like really dark chocolate. Like I buy 85 or 90%. And I really like that. And so I think I like that same thing with the beers.

Steve: Yep.

Chris: It’s definitely got that toasted bitter flavor profile. There’s no sweetness there at all. Full bodied. Like you would expect. It’s like drinking whole milk.

Steve: Thick. Yeah. Thick is the word I’m thinking.

Amber: It is not that thick. I don’t know what you’re talking about.

You know what would be really good to pop in the top of that glass that you have there? Scoop of vanilla ice cream.

Steve: Oh…

Amber: Make yourself a stout float.

Steve: That just sounds like a good way to ruin some ice cream.

Amber: I think it would be tasty. I think if we went back through all of the episodes, I definitely have recommended pairing alcohol with ice cream more than one time.

Steve: Yeah. Like every episode.

Amber: Not every episode.

Chris: Yeah. I will say when we had the Stroopwafel Liqeur, I’ve poured that on some vanilla ice cream a couple of times, and that’s because I, we don’t drink a lot, so we still have that bottle. Um, and it’s…

Amber: Do you still have that?

Chris: Yeah, we still have it.

Amber: No, does Steve, I’m wondering if Steve does.

Steve: No, it sat on my desk for a year and then I tossed it

out.

Amber: Liquor doesn’t go bad, Steve.

Steve: I don’t what? What? I don’t know. What am I gonna do with it? Like maybe I should have got some ice cream.

Amber: You know what we did do once was I think that Chris was making a syrup and he cooked it with some sugar. Not like it really needed it. ’cause it was really sweet anyway. But then it was an alcoholic and I think we had it on waffles or something.

Steve: The cookies that came with it that we had with it were amazing.

Amber: Yep. So for everyone who wants to hear about that, since we’ve taken a tangent, you can go find the episode where we talk about Stroopwafel Liquer, leor and why accessibility is more important than SEO.

Chris: Yeah, totally. Well, what do we think about this particular stout beer? Would we rate that thumbs down, thumbs in the middle, or thumbs up?

Amber: I give just about every stout a thumbs up. I give this one thumbs up.

Steve: So I’ll rate it in the context of all the drinks we’ve done, and I’ll give it kind of like a, thumbs to the in the middle, sideways. But in the context of the stouts that we’ve done, I’d give it a thumbs up. I rated at the top of the list of the stouts we’ve done.

Chris: Yeah. ’cause I feel like the other stouts we’ve done have been like way more heavy handed and like thicker and more intense than this one.

Steve: Yeah.

Chris: It’s good. It’s good. I definitely agree with their easy drinking categorization.

Quick Rundown of the European Accessibility Act

Chris: But we’re here to talk about the European Accessibility Act and the countdown. I mean, the countdown’s been going for years, but we are at the very end of the countdown now. We’ve been shouting about this from the rooftops for years in the accessibility world, and it is now when this episode comes out, it will be less than a month away. So, Amber, what is the European Accessibility Act, who does it apply to, and what types of digital content and products fall under the EAA’s scope?

Amber: So the European Accessibility Act is a directive, not a law.

A lot of people say it’s a law, but it’s not a law. It is a directive that the European Union passed in like 2019, I think. It’s been a long time.

Steve: Yeah.

Amber: Saying that member countries had to create laws requiring certain businesses that are for-profit businesses to have accessible websites, and they had some guidelines, and now all of the member countries have laws, and we are talking about this because June 28th is the enforcement deadline.

By which time those countries are going to have to start enforcing the requirement that businesses have a accessible website. It requires that websites meet Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, or WCAG 2.1 AA. And it applies to any businesses that are selling digital services or products, websites, mobile applications, any sort of digital products themselves, self-service terminals like kiosks that you might find somewhere also have to be accessible.

eBooks have to be accessible, and any business that has 10 or more employees or makes 2 million euros in annual revenue, which they call turnover in Europe is who has to meet this guideline.

Steve: So just a little clarity on that. So, so from the European Union level, it’s a directive and it was a directive that went out to the member countries for them to create laws, right? Or are the member countries creating laws or directives as well?

Amber: They’re creating laws.

Steve: So they’re the member countries are creating laws. Okay. Okay.

Amber: So these are laws that, that maybe we can talk about a little bit more that have specific enforcement mechanisms. So they’re gonna say something like, oh, the government might go out and randomly scan your website, or there’s gonna be a form where, people in the community can report issues with your website, that sort of thing. And so there’s, the law says, here’s how we’re gonna find out if a website doesn’t comply. And then the laws also have, basically what the consequences of not applying are, which ranges from smaller fines to, I’ve seen fines as high as 500,000 euros for failure to comply.

Are nice friends in Ireland included some jail time.

Steve: I’ll drink to that.

Amber: Obviously, I, you know, I don’t know. I don’t think that it’s gonna be like your website is inaccessible. You’re getting…

Steve: You’re locked up.

Amber: Arrested right now. I think we’ve talked about this before. I suspect the way that will go is you’re going to get told to make it accessible. And you don’t, or you lie about it or something like that. I don’t think jail is the first stop on that compliance journey.

Chris: Jail usually happens after contempt or negligence or something like that.

Steve: Yeah. Or ever? Has it ever happened?

Amber: I mean we’re gonna find out.

Steve: Yeah.

Amber: It’ll be the 28th.

Steve: There you go.

Chris: Yeah. Keep an eye on court cases in Ireland over the next few years.

Amber: Yeah, no kidding. So I feel like we should dive more into what businesses that are located in Europe or that serve Europe. ’cause you don’t have to just be located there. You could just have a lot of customers there are supposed to be doing and how this impacts agencies that build for these businesses.

But let’s take a quick commercial break first.

Brought to you by Accessibility Checker

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What should impacted organizations be doing right now?

Amber: So we’re back. There are, depending on when folks are listening to this, how recently after we released it, 20 some odd days to become WCAG 2.1 AA compliant. This is the countdown. What can you do?

Steve: It’s the final countdown

Amber: In 20 days.

Steve: Yeah.

Chris: The NFL theme is playing in my head now.

Steve: You’re welcome.

Chris: Yep.

Amber: There should be sound effects effects in this podcast.

Chris: Yeah, I know. That would’ve been a perfect audio drop, wouldn’t it?

Amber: You can still do it when you edit the episode.

Steve: There you go.

Chris: I could, we’ll handle it in post. This is a lot of the conversations I’m having with people right now. We’re getting a lot of folks, particularly in Germany and in Lithuania, reaching out to us. I’m not sure if those we’ll talk about this later, but maybe those countries have more strict enforcement mechanisms that may be some other EU member states, and that’s why we’re seeing a lot there.

But I’m having the same conversation over and over, which is kind of trying to answer the question of what do I do? How do I start with this? And the reality is at this point, when we’re weeks away from an enforcement deadline is, you might have trouble finding an accessibility specialist who can quickly turn around with a full and comprehensive audit and give you a whole plan.

And probably what you’re looking at doing at this point, this close to the deadline, and this is assuming you’ve done nothing, is trying to start with some sort of very quick surface level evaluation. You could use a tool like Accessibility Checker or a different tool that works better for your systems or your CMS to get an idea of where you are.

In terms of accessibility, just in terms of errors, warning counts, what you’re, what the report’s telling you, and that will give you at least a surface level glance at what your deficiencies are. And your very next step after you have an understanding of kind of where you’re sitting with automated tests should be to try to get in touch with someone who can help you formulate a plan.

But, there’s gonna be components to that plan . And what most professionals are going to recommend, and I think is generally a sound approach, is to begin with evaluations and with remediation to try to identify the all the issues and then fix them. And then follow that up with policy changes, accessibility statements, and ongoing training to try to make sure that with your policies and your practices and, with how you’re maintaining your website, that essentially you’re able to maintain that accessibility over time. So first you attain it, then you maintain it.

Steve: So I mean, 26 days is not a lot of time. And and we’re coming down to the wire, but I mean, the question is what can you do? Chris was just kind of talking to a holistic approach to that. But maybe there’s something you can do in the next 26 days if you’re sitting here listening to this podcast and by then, you know, if you’re a business of 2 million euros of turnover, is that what we call it? Or you’re a business of 10 employees that’s not insignificant. You may be able to put a little bit of a dent in this before the deadline. And what we’ve seen with accessibility is that kind of any effort towards it kind of goes a long way and showing that you’re paying attention or you’re making an attempt to be compliant.

So, so you could, if you have a development team already, if you have a development vendor already I would work with them in the next, you know, few weeks to see if there’s some low hanging fruit that you can try to identify is there something in your navigation that’s not accessible?

And is that something that a developer that could fix for you and, in an hour or two hours or something. And that would probably go a long way. ‘Cause if navigation is being blocked in some fashion any fix or remediation of that goes a long way for accessibility. So I would try to make an effort in that small timeframe and then, you know, from there, then look at something more holistic and long term, to help bring your product or your website up to compliance.

Amber: What do you think about like between now and then? Make sure at least your nav menu is functional. Could you come up with some really concrete things that seem realistic in a 20 day timeline from a dev perspective?

Steve: Yeah, absolutely.

Yeah. I mean, of course navigation is how we get around the website, so that’s like number one. Now, sometimes that kind of remediation could be difficult. I get that, but sometimes there’s some low hanging fruit there with a small fix to your navigation, such as if your parent, if your parent navigation item has like an ampersand on it, so you click on it, it doesn’t go anywhere.

So that it can just like aid in the hover state of a dropdown menu. Maybe just throw a link in there, like it doesn’t, you know, if you have a link in that top one, it that is helpful. That it just doesn’t go anywhere.

I think it’s like with anything with accessibility, it’s what you prioritize, right?

And you know, with some countries are enacting some pretty strict laws, it is worth putting some priority on these things. But aside from the navigation menu, things in your header, things in your footer, because those are global elements that are going to be a net benefit throughout the whole website.

If you have some accessibility problems, maybe with the way the alt tag is on your logo or, some links in the footer, and say your website has 200 pages or 100 pages, you’ve basically just remediated a hundred pages with a couple global changes.

So I would definitely look for big changes like that and look at tools to help you surface, you know, where you can get the best bang for your buck in that regard. But I mean, aside from that, you can go further. Amber said, 26 days is a lot of time if you prioritize this.

I mean, you could also install this plugin called Accessibility Checker.

Amber: And tick a box. If you want to start compliance and you haven’t done it yet, you should be installing Accessibility Checker on your WordPress website.

Steve: Yeah. Yeah, I think so. It seems a little self-promotional, but if you really want help quick, we have…

Chris: You got 20 something days, right?

Steve: And you can do this in, you can do this in literally minutes.

And Amber’s not talking about Accessibility Checker Pro, which is a premium plugin. She’s talking about Accessibility Checker free. No cost. You could install this and you can start making your website more accessible just by enabling certain fixes. And our, and not to toot my own horn here, but our plugin fixes things and then it evaluates whether or not it actually fixed them. So it’s not just a, an overlay, right? It’s gonna go through and evaluate if it actually worked.

Amber: It’ll tell you if it didn’t work and that you still need to go do manual work. Whereas an overlay is just gonna be like, it’s all fixed now.

Chris: Enjoy your false sense of security served to you on a silver platter, right?

Amber: Yeah. I think what I would say is. Install Accessibility Checker. Even if it’s only the free version, you won’t be able to bulk scan your whole site, but you could 100% in the next, even if there’s only 15 business days, right?

You could install it, you could go open your homepage and look at the report for your homepage. Fix everything that’s flagged in your homepage because that’s gonna get your header and your footer right, and the content on your homepage. It has an accessibility statement draft, so you can modify the accessibility statement to meet your needs.

I will say that I have a post on our website that we’ll link in the show notes that goes through all of the requirements for all the countries. And there are some countries that require you to have a publicly posted accessibility statement. So you can go tweak this for what makes sense for your organization, publish it in the footer, either add it to your existing footer or check a box in the plugin and we’ll add it to your footer for you.

And then turn on some of the fixes that make sense for your website. And that will get you some progress. Is it gonna make it perfectly accessible? Absolutely not. You have more work to meet the law.

Steve: Yeah.

Amber: But that is a great start.

Steve: But it goes a long way. And since Amber opened the box here to promoting our own thing some of the I’ll just list out just real quick, some of the quick fixes that you can enable.

Like just like tab index, right? So, a lot of times tab index is modified on websites, which kind of breaks the natural tab order of the website. Well, the Accessibility Checker, you enable remove tab index and it removes it from elements that shouldn’t have it and restores the native tabbing order.

Force underlines. So you can make sure that your links are underlined so that they can be distinguished between, you know, just text.

You can block links from opening new windows. It’s not good for accessibility for a link to open in a new tab. So you could block it and there you go. You’ve fixed that problem. But if you actually really want that, you can also enable a feature in the plugin that will actually put a notification that this link will open in a new window. A visual indicator and a screen reader indicator.

So, that’s just a few of, just a handful of the ones that are in the free plugin.

Chris: Save you potentially hours and hours of time.

Steve: I don’t wanna go on, but like skip links, form labels, focus outline, you know? All kinds of things that, that you can achieve just in the free plugin. No cost to you and it pleases us that, you know, we’re doing our part to help make the web more accessible.

Amber: Yeah. You know, if you’re an agency or a developer listening to this, there’s an also an opportunity here, right?

If you haven’t talked to your clients about the European Accessibility Act and you know you have clients that are either located there because you’re located there, or that are large enough that they serve that market, you should definitely be reaching out to them like today. Stop this podcast episode right now.

Steve: Yeah.

Amber: And contact them. Tell them about this because that’s part of how we serve our customers best. Figure out what a plan is for them. This also benefits you. But if you work at a business, I think don’t panic because there are things that you can do.

I mean, I could be surprised. I’m sure that on June 28th, like there’s not gonna be a million letters going out to every business in your town suing you, or giving you a fine or a warning. I don’t know. But but I would say like the biggest thing is coming up with plan and starting to do things and documenting what you’re doing.

So if you install Accessibility Checker and you start fixing things, document that somewhere so that you have a history of this is what I’m trying to do to become conformant.

What should impacted organizations be doing long-term?

Chris: So Amber, you mentioned that June 28th date again and we’ve listed a ton of different ways that you can take action using Accessibility Checker as an aid to help you make progress faster.

But what would your recommendation be for a recommended timeline or roadmap to compliance over, say the next 12 months?

Amber: Yeah, this is hard ’cause every website is a little bit different. I think you have to assess whether you’re going to remediate your existing site or rebuild it. But a lot of things can be remediated. I mean, we’re in the process right now of remediating a Divvy website, and I’m gonna tell you out of the box if you saw my page builder accessibility comparison, you know, that divvy is literally the worst tool a website can be built in from an accessibility standpoint.

But we’re able to fix it. It’s not unfixable. I think initially you probably have to do some of that assessment. Also assessing how big the website is how much content there is. This is something we do with our remediation customers is we will look at their content and do an assessment for what I call rot.

So this is content that is redundant, outdated, or trivial. So for example, your event calendar post about some meetup that you held in 2009, does not need to exist on your website. You don’t need to spend time fixing accessibility problems in it. You know, adding alt text to that graphic about the image, like all that kind of stuff.

Because the reality is you could probably tell by looking at your analytics solution that you’re using, that literally no one goes to that page. So the best solution on all that kind of content is to just hit that trash button. Get rid of it. And this is good for SEO too. You’ll hear SEO people talk about this a lot that like you can benefit your SEO if you have a very tightly defined site map without a lot of redundancy and like thin content.

Like you want more depth to your content. So, so I think you have to do some of that initial assessment. Probably a timeline is anywhere from five to 12 months, depending upon how much content you figure out that actually needs to be remediated. And how much is dev and how much is content. And then I would try to figure out some sort of timeline that puts a lot of the dev stuff early on.

And then looking at content priorities. So what pages are really important for the funnel? What pages are just really high traffic pages? Work on those first. If there’s content things like the missing al text or ambiguous links where you’ve just linked the word click here. But honestly, if you put your content team on that, you can make a lot of progress.

Even in a few hours. But if you were to say, hey, we’re all gonna focus on this for half of our days for the next three weeks, four hours a day. You know, five days a week. And we’re gonna go through, you can really fix a lot of content problems and if your dev team or your agency that you’re working with or whatever is working on that I think there’s a lot that can be done.

And then just trying to get those high priority pages and then you just space out the rest over whatever timeline makes sense to you. I dunno, does that kind of answer the question?

Steve: Yeah, I think so.

Amber: What do you think, Steve, about timeline?

Steve: Yeah, so I mean, if you’re looking at a more extended timeline, right?

And you’re trying to put together a more holistic campaign around your accessibility and how you can approach it over the next 12 months. Now this is moving more into the pro category of the plugin, but it can help assist in some of this and it can help assist identifying, you know, problem pages or problem issues throughout the website.

We have a add-on for our pro plugin called Audit History. It’ll track daily your accessibility and you can start tracking it over time. So if you start making some of these content fixes that Amber is saying, like when she’s talking about that rot content if you start removing things, sometimes that increase increases the accessibility.

Of course, if you’ve got, X number of pages that are, you remove a thousand pages, of course your footprint’s gonna be a lot smaller. And this can track that progress over time. We can track it in a graph and we can track, you know, we have different data points in which we track that as well. But…

Amber: You know, the other thing, I mean, we use this so heavily in our remediation is that open issues page in the pro plugin. Because you don’t have to go open each page to see what problems exist on this. And what I like to do is say, this is the problem that I’m gonna tackle this week or this month. And it could be something like linked image is missing alternative text. And you could take across a website with 5,000 blog posts and it would tell you every time there is a linked image and any one of those blog posts that is missing alternative texts, and you’re like, hey, this is a high priority, ’cause obviously this link has no name, no accessible name. So that would be considered a critical blocker.

And you can go into open issues, you can go to that, and then it will tell you every post or page, and you just go out and fix them.

Because there are certain problems like empty links or, a lot of times when we do almost what I call like collaborative remediation with some of our clients. Some of our clients, we do literally everything. Other ones are like, Hey, we’re gonna save money by, you do the hard stuff and we’re gonna do content stuff. So I will point a client at the ambiguous anchor text.

And they can go there and it will just tell them everywhere on their website that they’ve linked, you know, the phrases, click here or learn more here, or whatever. And that’s easy for them to go through and edit all those posts and pages. And honestly, if you sit there for a couple hours, a lot of times you can get almost all of them fixed.

Steve: Well, so on open on the individual open issues we list out all of our rule checks and then we order those by the greatest count. But on the Fast Track tab we order those, we do a multifaceted ordering. So we, we order them by the number of affected pages and the number of failing checks. So what that does from a visual standpoint when you pull open the Fast Track, is that kind of surfaces, like , where is your biggest bang for your buck? Like just on fixing accessibility issues and getting the, those accessibility scores to, to either go down or up, which whichever way you want it to go. But depending on the stat, but to improve it.

Amber: If you had a linked image missing alternative text, for example, your logo in your header, and that would really surface in that view because it would be on, let’s call it 500 pages every page of your website, and it would flag multiple problems. It would flag an empty link and a linked image, missing alt text, and a warning for image empty alt.

Steve: Yeah, so every one fix nets you three accessibility rule fixes. But yeah, it’s a definitely a way to see Hey, if I just fix this one place that’s three rules fixed and it’s on like you said, you know, a hundred pages, so like it’s a huge net gain in accessibility.

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Amber: Yeah. I think the biggest thing is just to start, right?

Steve: Yeah.

Amber: It’s probably a conversation you have, Chris, a lot with people.

Chris: Yeah, and generally it’s easier to get people to start with an automated scanning tool because it’s less overwhelming. And with ours, the reports are right there in the dashboard, and generally people are already accustomed to using their website in the WordPress interface in some capacity. And so it’s very easy for them to get started and they get it.

In fact, I remember a support ticket just from like yesterday where someone was frustrated because their percentage score wasn’t moving in the way they thought it should, after they put in some effort to fix some rules. And I could tell that it was kind of like a game for them, and they wanted to see the numbers move and it was intrinsically motivated and they were. A little cranky that it hadn’t moved yet, and we were able to help them resolve that. But it’s it’s one of those things where I think once you get started you can also almost have fun with it, which sounds weird, you know?

But at least to the non-accessible person, we have fun with it all the time.

Steve: Yeah.

Amber: Yeah. So I would say going back to the timeline and how to do things, the order that I always recommend is fix all the automated issues first. So everything that Accessibility Checker finds, get that to 100% passed test, which does not mean 100% accessible.

And while you’re doing that, sometimes I would also recommend doing some basic keyboard testing, which you really don’t have to be an expert to do. Literally that means go to the front end your website, hit the tab key, and make sure you can get to all of the things that you would normally get to by clicking on them with a mouse like any buttons or, links or those kinds of interactive components, accordions, tabs, they all need to work with your tab key and your return key or your space bar. So I would say like doing that is the good first step. And then from there, if you really wanna achieve true conformance, you ought to have a accessibility professional do a full audit for you.

Obviously, for some people that doesn’t fit in the budget or it doesn’t make sense timeline wise or something else. So you need to do some screen reader testing. If you’re not sure how to do that, we do have a course on Voice Over and a course on NVDA that’s coming out soon. So you can find resources for that. We can link ’em in the show notes.

But thinking about this as a multilayered approach over the next few months, and that you’re gonna start with automated and then you’re gonna do some of these manual problems that you find just using a tab key. Then screen readers and potentially, especially if it’s a big profile website, have somebody who you know is certified accessibility specialist, whether that’s us or someone else, come in and actually audit it and verify that your meeting WCAG 2.1 AA.

Steve: So we’re talking about the European Accessibility Act. We’re drinking ourselves with Irish beer. We’re gonna go even further. We’re gonna bring Equalize Digital to Europe. So, we have WordCamp Europe coming up here in a couple weeks, a week. I don’t know. It’s coming soon.

Amber: Wait, we’re releasing this, while Chris and I are stumbling literally around Paris hoping to figure out how to find a train to Basel.

Steve: There you go. Well, this is Steve from the past figuring out what the date is now as you’re listening to this. So, Amber and Chris will be on the ground in Europe . What are you guys excited to, to do and see and who are you excited to talk to?

Chris: I mean, all of our WordPress friends, of course. Like all the people that, that we see one or two times a year. I’m looking forward to seeing all of those people. There’s a lot to name. I’m not gonna do a bunch of name drops. But suffice, say if you’re thinking, I wonder if Chris is talking about me. I probably am talking about you if you’re listening to this. I’m looking forward to seeing all of our WordPress peeps.

But beyond that, I’m just looking to speak to as many impacted companies as possible in the WordPress ecosystem, whether they’re an e-commerce company or a event bookings company who has a WordPress website and they’re concerned about the EAA, to a WordPress plugin company who’s concerned if their currently inaccessible plugin or solution is going to suffer with sales and cancellations because they’re not accessible, and this law is coming out, to hosting companies that want to find ways to help their customers and their end users tackle legal compliance in some way, whether that’s through education or through providing tooling or guidance.

Because we’re here to make the web more accessible. We all know that this directive is here. It’s not going anywhere. The enforcement is going to happen. And ignoring it or hoping to sweep it under the rug is not a strategy. With all that aside, like we just have to figure out how to solve this problem together and that those are the kinds of conversations I’m excited to have.

Amber: So I also am looking forward to WordPress community, all those people who feel kind of like extended family that we only get to see virtually and getting to see them in person. I love Contributor Day. Contributor Day is one of my favorite things about WordCamps. Probably because I have this inner bleeding heart that just wants to help everyone and volunteer.

I’m always trying to get people to come to the accessibility table. You don’t have to know accessibility. So if you’re listening to this on the way to WordCamp Europe. Come to the accessibility table and Chris and I and Joe Dolson is gonna be my co table lead.

We will be happy to introduce you to accessibility and tell you how you can help. Even if you are not an accessibility expert, even if you are not a developer, there are things you can do to help the accessibility team. So this is just the sales pitch episode.

Steve: I dunno, I mean, along those lines of sales pitch, we’re not just going, we’re gonna be sponsoring. We will have a booth. And Chris and Amber will be held captive at the booth and anybody can go up and ask them any question and take up about as much as their time as they need. And they will answer all of your accessibility questions.

Amber: Yeah, I think we should be a little bit easier to find sometimes At WordCamps we’re like, like you and I, Steve at WordCamp US, we weren’t anchored anywhere, and so we were kind of floating around.

But it’s nice for us to have a booth. I do have some Coozies left. I’m gonna take those. I got Braille Legos again because everyone loved the Legos. But this time, I went international, so I have two boxes of English braille, a box of Spanish and a box of French. Very cool. So you can enter to win some braille Legos in a language of your choice, which is super fun.

And yeah, we’ll be there. We’d be happy to share what we’re working on and that kind of stuff. I will say what am I also looking forward to? I am kind of curious to see if the accessibility vibe is going to be any different being in Europe and given the law. So I don’t know what do you guys think? Do you think we’ll see a change on that, or do you think it’ll be same old?

Chris: What what I am seeing most right now is agencies and product companies in the WordPress ecosystem, ratcheting up their level of concern about compliance and helping their customers be compliant insofar as their, or to the extent that they’re involved with their customers day-to-day operations.

I think we will continue to see development there for sure. I think more and more are going to kind of make their peace with that and accept that this is here to stay and it’s going to be a fact of life in the business world going forward. I know there was also a lot of belly aching back years ago about GDPR and that whole rollout. I think we’re gonna see kind of a similar vibe to that, where it’s gonna be a big mad rush to figure this thing out collectively. Globally for anyone who’s doing business in the EU in a serious capacity.

And then things will kind of level off and we will we’ll all be better for it and the internet will be better for it.

Steve: I mean, for me, if last year was an indicator of what this year will be last year seemed to be very much centered around the European Accessibility Act. I even did a interview with the Do the Woo Podcast about it last year in Italy.

And and I know the foot traffic at our booth was in was, a lot. There was like four of us, and it was almost too much to handle and people had lots of questions. Some people knew about accessibility, some people were just fresh fresh to it and just needed an intro to it. So it seemed very a very much like a big thing last year, even with the accessibility Act and, but last year it was oh, this is coming. This is coming. It’s coming soon. And I feel like I’m not gonna be there this year, unfortunately. But I feel like what you guys are gonna get a lot this year is it’s here, what do I do? Help me.

Chris: Yeah. It’s gonna be like a run on a bank.

Steve: Totally.

Chris: It’s gonna be like a huge crowd around the booth and Amber and I are gonna be panicking. It’s entirely possible.

Amber: We’re all going to miss Steve, and his wife Jennifer, who was phenomenal at our booth last year. But that does not mean that you cannot ask Steve your accessibility questions because he is going to be holding down the fort at Equalize Digital and running front lines on, along with the rest of our team support questions and those sorts of things.

So if you know, you can definitely reach out to him. Well, I think that’s about it and a wrap on this episode. We’re excited to see everyone. We’ll probably post a follow up on how the vibe was regarding the European Accessibility Act. I do know when I come back from WordCamp Europe, I’m gonna be doing a webinar for the Admin Bar about it.

So, we’ll probably post that on our socials as well if people wanna tune in for that. But I guess, cheers.

Chris: Cheers. We will see y’all in Switzerland. 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 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.