In this episode, we talk to long-time WordPresser Mike Demo about the accessibility project he worked on during the Cloud Fest 2025 Hackathon, and his experiences with accessibility both earlier in his career, and today.
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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: Hey everybody, it’s Amber and I’m here today with Chris.
Chris: Hey everybody.
Introducing Special Guest Mike Demo
Amber: And we have a special guest with us today, Mike Demo. Hey, Mike.
Mike: Hey, how’s it going? Thanks for having me.
Amber: Doing pretty well. We’re super excited to have you here with us today. For everyone who’s not had the pleasure yet of meeting you, could you give a little introduction to yourself and what you do?
Mike: Yeah, so I work at Hosting.com as an agency lead in North America, which basically means I help agencies be more successful in their businesses by helping them with products and services. And then I’ve been in the space a long time, so I’ve been in other hosting companies, I’ve been in agencies I’ve served on boards of other CMSs. So yeah, that’s it in a nutshell.
Amber: Is your background more on the management side or were you ever a developer? What’s your technical background?
Mike: I have been a senior dev historically when I was doing agency work. Mostly focused on Joomla based, but PHP is PHP, right? So at a high level.
So yeah, I am a developer, but I haven’t done that for a living directly for a while. So I like to say that I help salespeople translate what the techs want via what the client needs. And I’m kind of like a bridge, is kind of how I explain it.
Amber: Well, we are really excited to have you here with us today. For everyone listening, this is episode number 124. If you want to get show notes and a full transcript, you can find those at AccessibilityCraft.com/124.
Today’s Beverage
Amber: Chris, we always start with a beverage.
Chris: Yeah, so I, I really need to thank Mike because you, Mike, you played a role in helping us find this beverage. It came out of a conversation we had at the accessibility contributor table at WordCamp Europe Contributor Day in Basel. And I’m familiar with Jones Soda Co. And we’ve actually, I think, tried at least one flavor of Jones Soda on this show previously.
Amber: Turkey and Gravy.
Mike: Thanksgiving soda. Yeah, you need to pair that with, Salt and Straw makes a Thanksgiving meal ice cream, as well.
Chris: Oh, there you go. Nice.
Amber: !Salt and Straw is my favorite ice cream place.
Mike: I’m aware, we’ve been there together.
Amber: But that soda, not my favorite soda. I gave it a big thumbs down on that episode.
Anyone who wants to listen can go listen in our archive to see what we thought about that soda.
Chris: Totally, but hopefully Jones Soda Co going to redeem themselves with what they’re calling Mary Jones Cola, which is a THC infused soda. How did you come across this or hear about this if you have a story to share or like how did you find it?
Mike: Yeah, so first off, I am not that experienced historically , until stuff started becoming legal. But Surly Brewing is a really popular brewery here in Minnesota. And they’re actually the ones that make this for Jones. And that’s how I came across it. So if you look at the back of the can it usually says, at least the last one I tried canned under the authority of Jones Soda Company. And then it talks about where, so this is actually made in Minnesota.
So that’s how I came across it, it’s local. And so it’s THC, but it’s because of the farm bill and the weird ways that allowed all of these products to become legal nationwide. It’s not cannabis, it’s hemp derived. That’s why all of a sudden you’re seeing THC products everywhere in the country. It’s because of a loophole in the farm bill, quite frankly. Which I find kind of funny.
Amber: So I was looking at this. It’s got, so what we have is the 10 milligram HD9-THC. I have no idea what this means. 20 milligrams of caffeine. So it’s got, it’s a, is it like an, gonna be like an energy drink? Is that…
Chris: No, it’s 20 milligrams of caffeine is like what? A quarter cup of coffee? It’s,
Amber: Oh, okay. That’s not a lot.
Mike: Yeah. A Coca-Cola is like 120 milligrams for 12 ounces.
Amber: Oh, so this is less caffeine than a normal Coke?
Mike: Yes. Yes. But more THC, but 100% more THC than a normal. Well, unless we look historically right.
Chris: I was I was reading their guidance about this, and they have, I think it’s like, there’s like a 5 milligram, a 10, and then there’s like a 50 and a 100 that you have to go to a special part of the website to , to even see the 50 and the 100 .
In their vernacular, they said five was, you may not feel or notice any difference, like physiologically. They said 10, inexperienced people or people who have had a gone a very long time without having any THC, which, yeah, they said the 10…
Amber: Raising my hand for everyone listening.
Chris: Yes, and I did as well. They said the 10 is, you might feel very mild effects. And then they go up from there. I went with a conservative THC dose, for our audience’s sake as well as my own.
Amber: So we still need to do normal life and work this afternoon in theory. So we’re gonna play it safe. But this is a can, which is interesting because all the Joan Sodas I’ve only ever seen in bottles. I have no idea why the difference. I don’t know if you know that, Mike.
Mike: I I don’t know, but just something to keep in mind. It’s 10 milligrams per serving, and this can is two servings.
Chris: Oh, okay.
Amber: Oh, good to know.
Chris: Thank you.
Amber: Don’t drink a whole can unless you wanna be surprised later.
Mike: Just be aware of that.
Chris: Yeah, no, thank you. That, I genuinely appreciate that. Well, I’m curious to see if this cola flavor just tastes like normal cola or if there’s like a, a flavor difference with the additional ingredients. So I’m gonna crack mine open.
Amber: Yeah. If it tastes like coke, I’m not drinking very much, and I’m telling you that right now. I hate Coca-Cola. Chris loves it. Okay. I don’t think this smells good.
Chris: I smell like that cinnamon Cola-y you know smell right off the top.
Amber: It smells skunky to me.
Chris: Does it? I wonder if that, I don’t really…
Amber: I don’t drink any I don’t drink Dr. Pepper. I don’t drink Pepsi. I don’t drink any of that. So whenever we have one of those beverages, I’m like, eh…
Mike: It’s, it smells like a, it smells like Cola, RC Cola with, you know, that’s been in a room with people smoking. I mean, I can, you can kind of pick that up a little bit. Yeah.
Amber: Is that like a THC smell? Like a pot smell.
Mike: That’s a cannabis smell.
Amber: I guess incidentally, I’ve smelled it on the sidewalk. Like we used to live in Colorado, where it’s legal.
Mike: There you go. Yeah.
Amber: It’s been a very long time since I’ve sat in a room where someone was smoking it. All right, I’m gonna try it. Chris already tried it. You have to compare it to Coke since you love Coke Zero.
Chris: Yeah, the, I feel like the sweetness is there, but not overpowering, which I appreciate that they didn’t just load it with sugar.
The bubbles are, I would say, moderate bubbles. Like it’s not aggressively carbonated. And I do get this like very slight hint of I’m gonna call it herbaciousness. But there is definitely like a undertone of some sort of plant-based component, which is probably the THC I’m tasting.
So Mike, you’ve only had this one other time, I think you told us, and it was a different flavor.
Mike: Yeah, I had. The root beer was better.
Chris: The root beer was better?
Mike: I mean it, at least the sugar is full cane sugar, unlike, you know, so it’s not like a high fructose, which is what Jones’s thing, right? Is that all their sodas are cane sugar soda. The root beer was better. Yeah. I It tastes like a generic, it tastes like a generic cola, basically.
Amber: Yeah. I’m not in love with the flavor. I kind of am like, maybe if there was a root beer, I would’ve liked it better. I’m kind of curious how it would taste if you got one of the fruit flavors, with that.
‘Cause we’ve tried a few different beverages or like mocktails where they do like plant-based like alcohols. And they kind of have a similar like underlying flavor to this, which I think is just really interesting. And I don’t know if either of you know, did we look up? How they actually get the THC in this? Are they soaking the leaves in the syrup before they carbonate? Does anyone know?
It’s kind of interesting. I mean, it makes me wanna go do some research.
Mike: Yeah. I mean, the farm, I know the farm bill has provisions, like it has to be US grown and there’s only certain types of plants and there’s different ways you can do it. I’m not an expert. I’m sure there’s websites that talk about it. I do know that Delta 9 I think is organic, where some of the other deltas are synthetic. So this is the…
Amber: Well, I did find on their website a whole PDF that’s like the certification and there was a whole section where they were testing for all these like pesticides and they, like they said, like it had none of ’em, right, like it was listing it all out. So I thought that was kind of interesting. In some degree, like these products probably have more oversight than just like a normal pop would have.
Mike: Yeah. When I travel to places where it’s, where only CBDs legal and THC is not you know, like topicals for like back pain or whatever. Right. I make sure that I get the ones that have the Federal certification certificate, which is what you’re seeing, so that I can prove if needed, that, oh, this is only CBD. Now there’s some places that, that’s not even legal, but you know, if CBD is legal and THC is not, you know, so it’s important to try to go with companies that have the testing because the ones that don’t, you don’t really know what you’re getting.
Amber: Yeah, we have a very non-technical system of would you buy it again? Which is a thumbs down, thumbs in the middle, thumbs up. I wanna hold on that and let’s have our conversation and everybody can stay tuned and at the end, after we’ve chatted and allowed some of this to absorb, we can discuss how we feel about it.
Does that sound good to you guys?
Mike: Sure. I will say the name and design, is top notch. For being Joan Soda.
Amber: Yeah. We normally talk labels. We didn’t talk labels. Do you wanna describe it a little bit?
Mike: I mean, it doesn’t have the photos, which is what Jones is famous for is the big pictures. It has lots of warnings ’cause of well, what it is. But it’s a pink can and it just says Joan Soda, but it says Mary Jones, which I think is funny.
Amber: ! Yeah, it’s a play on the Mary Jane. Yeah, but using Jones. Yep. I, you know what I thought was interesting about the Mary, so the font, the typography used for Mary almost looks like it could be kind of like smoke, like it’s a, it’s still boxy, it’s not wispy, but it’s got that curly kind of vibe connecting all the letters versus the Jones is the very blocky sans serif, which is kind of interesting.
Mike: Yeah. Although under a hundred milligram cans, which I haven’t tried and don’t intend to, they have a picture of a mirror on a car that says objects and mirror may appear closer and they are closer than they appear like from Jurassic Park. And I thought that was also really funny. Yeah. Yeah, it, yeah it’s really, it’s cool to see an independent family like, Jones Soda is family owned, independent, not corporate owned. So it’s kind of cool to see, you know, independent companies trying different things. Yeah. With American made THC. There we go.
Chris: Totally. And I like my if I was wearing a hat, my hat’s off to you for suggesting a truly unique experience that will give a final, very scientific rating to later.
But for the first half of the experience that I’ve had so far, I’m encouraged. I don’t mind the flavor. And to me this is pure wizardry because I remember 20 plus years ago trying stuff where cannabis had been infused into some sort of edible something, right? And it always tasted gross. Like it, it was not a pleasant experience, at least for me back in the day.
So I’m impressed with the I guess very exacting attention that they’ve paid to making sure the flavor is good for something that is what this is.
Mike: Yeah. But of course, check the laws in your area. Every place is different.
Amber: Yeah. So we did order this online and they shipped it to us.
And it was, it’s very legal, but that may not be in every state, right? So everybody should check that. Or other countries, if you’re in other countries.
Mike’s Takeaways on Accessibility from Cloud Fest 2025
Amber: Well, we brought you on today, Mike, not only for the interesting beverage suggestion, but because we wanted to talk a little bit about hacking accessibility, and this is inspired by a couple of conversations that you and I had on Facebook Messenger, and of course you attended Cloud Fest this year and participated in the hackathon working on an accessibility focused project, which I’d love to chat more about. But before we do that, for anyone who’s not familiar with Cloud Fest and the hackathon, could you provide kind of like an intro to what that is?
Mike: Cloud Fest is the craziest web conference, you know, you’ve been to. You know, there’s things like Web Summit and Lisbon, which are really huge and have you know, a hundred thousand people.
But Cloud Fest is the largest for hosting companies. They have an agency day. It’s at Europa Park Theme Park, which is Europe’s second largest theme park, and they rent out the whole place. So before the main conference starts, they do a hackathon, and I think they had 120 developers this year. Carol for most recently at Yoast now she’s doing her her next adventure.
It is, the organizer has been the lead for, as long as I can remember. I think I’ve gone five times and yeah, it’s a bunch of open source projects from all different walks of life. Not necessarily just WordPress. There’s WordPress people there, there was Joomla people there, there was just PHP open source things.
And you know, you get together for three days and you start from, you build from zero. And it’s really cool to see what can come out. Some really cool features like, a few years ago there was a feature about how to reduce your carbon footprint on your website via an extension. And a lot of Yoast people were on that team, and now Yoast has included that inside of Yoast SEO. There’s a setting to save, you know, energy consumption on your website by restricting certain crawlers.
So it’s cool to see all the different you know, projects that come about and it’s always a lot of fun and. It’s really cool to be at Cloud Fest when there’s just like a small group of people before, I think they had 10,000 attendees this year or something, so it’s nice to be there before all, everyone descends.
And then so usually goes hackathon in the beginning. Then Monday is WordPress day and Agency Day. And then the main event, which is more focused on hosting companies and infrastructure, although there’s still a WordPress track and stuff, starts Tuesday and then that goes through the rest of the week.
Chris: Wow. And so you participated in this hackathon and it was accessibility related. What was your project, Mike?
Mike: Sure. So I was just helping with social media. I was on a team. There was you know, a lot of people doing lots of great things, but the project was able to make accessible infographs.
It started at, you know, there’s an API and. Basically we use the WordPress as the example, but you know, we were hoping that other CMSs pick it up. ‘Cause we had a Joomla person on our team as well. Basically you upload your infographic and it will automatically switch over behind the graphic an accessible version of the text and of, and what the charts say.
So if you have a screen editor on, it’ll show you the text-based version instead of the graphical version and vice versa. Or you could show both. And I was amazed how accurate it was ’cause it’s using AI to pull a lot of that data. I forget what. I think we used OpenAI.
It was some third party service. I can’t remember. I think it was OpenAI. It’s API but the plugin is, you know, the full plugin is open source and everything, so you can just download it and then attach your own key to it.
Amber: Yeah. And we’ll make sure to include some links for that in the show notes if anyone wants to check it out. I’m curious what inspired you to join that team? Or did you get assigned to a team?
Mike: No, definitely didn’t get assigned to a team. You pick which team you want. I had a lot more time this year because when I was accepted to the hackathon, I was in between jobs, right? So I was looking for a job.
But my first day at Hosting.com was the first day of Cloud Fest. I was just there to network with people and hang out. So I basically started talking to people saying, you know, I’m more interested in social media ’cause there’s different contests that you can not contests, but awards you can win in this a jury.
And one of them is social media related. And I thought I could do a good job on that and then I wouldn’t have to embarrass myself in trying to code when I haven’t done that in a long time outside of just friends projects and things. And yeah, so I knew that was one of the categories. I just asked people who needed help with that. This team did.
And so I kind of just did the social media part for it.
Chris: Very cool. As you were like bouncing around, like maybe asking or exploring different projects that might need social media help, did you see any other accessibility related projects or anything that were in the hackathon besides the one you worked on?
Mike: There was one other accessibility adjacent project, but I would have to look at the full list to jog my memory. ‘Cause there was a lot of great projects there doing a lot of really cool stuff.
Amber: How many projects are there during the hackathon usually? Do you know?
Mike: I think there was 10 this year, but don’t quote me on that. You can go to CloudFest.com/Hackathon and you’ll see all the projects and you’ll see the reports and the links to download everything as well as who won what. Our project won the best overall, if I’m remembering correctly. But we didn’t win social media, which, that personally was a little disappointing.
Amber: But you also won the Breaking Barriers Award too. So you guys got two awards, which is pretty amazing.
Mike: The team did an amazing job. Again, when I heard about it, I was very, I didn’t think we would get anywhere near as far as we did, and they did amazing. And I mean, at the end of the day, it was working and people could use it right away, which, it’s pretty cool.
Amber: And I think that team was led by Anne-Mieke Bovelett, right?
Mike: Yeah, she was amazing.
Amber: Well, I’m curious were there any takeaways from the project that you had coming in on, you know, more of that marketing or social media side of it that made you think about accessibility differently?
Mike: What was most interesting for me, and I’m gonna talk personally was the tribalism in the accessibility world. So, perfect example. We had social media accounts that were sharing accessibility articles and tips and I wrote a script that found the 100 most popular visited accessibility blogs.
And then whenever one of those updated something, it would pull and then summarize it and then tweet it out on our account. We use SocialBee, which was donated by Web Pros, which was nice for us to do our social media management and then that connect to Rebrandly to do our URL Shortener and all that.
Anyway, long story short, it was either Interactive Accessibility or AudioEye, or one of the big, you know, SaaS companies had an article that was just a general article. It wasn’t about their product because I was filtering out on anything salesy, but of course it was on their blog and team members had very strong opinions.
Amber: About linking to content by an overlay company?
Mike: Yeah. ’cause at the end of the day, in my opinion, good content’s, good content. I don’t care. It would be like saying I don’t like this big hosting company. So I’m not gonna link to a talk that somebody did that teaches me something. And that’s what I thought was very interesting.
I’m not saying that their product’s good. We weren’t talking about the product. It was just like some general, like five tips on how to write good alt text or some basic whatever. We ended up, you know, removing it or whatever. But I wasn’t expected that, that would be as heated as it was, which I thought was interesting.
On one hand, this is me as kind of an outsider, right? On one hand, yeah, we don’t want to promote companies that are selling products that don’t actually solve the problem. I fully get that. I understand, we’ve had that discussion, but on the other hand, getting clients to think about it and to be reading anything regardless of where it came from, I think is overall a net positive.
It’s kind of like when you know, SSL started being a thing. There was companies giving away free SSLs and selling SSLs. And there was this whole well, if you charge for an SSL, you’re bad. And I’m like, at the end of the day, we just want people that have SSLs. Now it’s super common that SSLs are just included in hosting, but that wasn’t the case 10 years ago.
So in my opinion, good content’s, good content, and if it gets people talking about accessibility, that overall is a net positive for the internet as a whole. But I understand people’s reluctance. But I also try to be pragmatic. Large companies have large budgets and sometimes they make things that are useful.
Amber: I really appreciate you sharing that kind of outsider take on it. I do think that this is a topic that, you know, some people in the accessibility space get very heated about and because they’re frustrated with marketing and so they just dismiss everything. But I think you know, your thoughts on that, like good content is valid.
I know there’s a gentleman who ran a very well known and trusted accessibility company for 20 years. One of the first people in the space, and he now works at an accessibility overlay. And a lot of people have struggled with that because they were like, we trusted him. He was a resource. And I’ve heard, you know, now he like has difficulty getting podcast interviews even though he’s literally someone who everyone would say knows what he’s talking about just because of his employer.
And it’s, it is a really interesting kind of side of that, right? We don’t necessarily want people to go to the blog and then go to the services page and get sold a bundle of lies.
Mike: Sure.
Amber: But at the same time, like there are still really good people who work at those companies who do care about accessibility.
Chris: That’s something that, ’cause we do have a fair number of people like that in, in the accessibility trenches who listen to this podcast. And I think this is a really good message for us and for them to hear is when we kind of, engage in just wanton mud slinging against a company that we don’t agree with their marketing practices or how they represent their product.
Just any mention of them and without looking deeper at what is actually happening I think it makes our profession look bad as a whole and maybe actually achieves potentially the opposite of the outcome we want, which is for people to pursue the true solution if what they see is a bunch of accessibility professionals just engaged in, as you put it, tribalism in a sense. Right. I really appreciate your honesty there. That’s a good message to hear.
Mike: Yeah, so it’s kind of similar to CMSs, right? You know, you ask a WordPress person what they think, a Joomla, I mean, immediately rolled their eyes and moan or vice versa. Why? Open source is open source.
But I could imagine a world right now, I don’t, I’m just making up a scenario where, let’s say you have a client. And your client found something on AudioEye’s website and they said, Hey, they posted this blog, what do you think?
If your immediate response is AudioEye can’t be trusted, instead of actually responding to their question, I could, if I was a client, I’d be like, I don’t I would be a little offended.
Because I’m like, okay, you’re telling me AudioEye is useless, but the Federal Trade Commission uses it. Yes, there’s conversations to be had about what products can and can’t do, and if it’s, you know, and why it’s good or not good, those conversations are perfectly valid. But having that really straight you know, it’s similar to, like I said, WordPress.
WordPress is the best. WordPress needs to be number one. No, it doesn’t. Tools are tools and you know, you need to have a discussion with a client that’s open and honest. But also not feeling defensive. ‘Cause then you’re not really gonna make the point you wanna make across. And that also is not gonna be good for the client.
‘Cause you know, they might’ve been asking about some blog about a lawsuit and they wanna be accessible. But if your first response is you can’t trust AudioEye, then they might not even continue that conversation on this scenario. At the end of the day, all this is nuanced. Nothing’s a hundred percent.
Amber: I think that’s, yeah I think that’s all really good thoughts and I like where you’re going on the like client side. And I know one of the other things we were gonna talk about is actually some of your experience doing some remediation for clients.
So I wanna go there, but first we’re gonna take a short commercial break.
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Mike’s Experience with Accessibility: Then and Now
Amber: All right, so we are back. Obviously I know from conversations with you that this project at Clouds was not your first experience with accessibility. So I’d love to dig a little bit into some of your experiences working with clients to help them make their websites more accessible using Accessibility Checker, ’cause I know you have done that.
So can you give us a little bit of background of what you’ve been doing with some of your clients on the accessibility front?
Mike: Yeah, and just a caveat, I used to freelance, so I have some clients that are left over from that. It’s not something I actively do much anymore. I’ll try to point you in the right direction as best I can.
But my first crossroads with accessibility was probably 12, 13 years ago when I was at an agency and I was the main dev and we made bank and credit union websites. So we had hundreds of bank and credit union clients around the US and we noticed that one law firm started serving all of our clients, not all of them, but a lot of them lawsuits.
And so that got us to start looking into that. Because we had, we would issue a, you know, we had a certificate of compliance service, but that was for the banking requirements had nothing to do with accessibility. So that got me to start looking into it, and that’s where I met Interactive Accessibility, and we started, you know, which had testing services and things. And we, that’s kind of how I started with that.
And then, you know, doing different things to try to help the clients be you know, be compliant. So that’s kind of old school. How I kind of started most recently I had a friend who wanted to move from Squarespace, so I’m like, awesome.
So we moved them to, WordPress and we put them on Elementor Cloud because I wanted a solution that was similar to Squarespace where you could pay one bill that had hosting, plugins, everything you needed in one. ‘Cause that can be overwhelming for a lot of clients. So Elementor checked all those boxes.
I knew they wanted a page builder. And I wanted, and obviously you have an integration with Elementor, you’re listed on their add-ons page. And accessibility was something really important to her because their business had specialized classes for different types of groups of people.
Yeah, installed the Accessibility Checker and went down a very interesting rabbit hole to try to fix all the issues. Some were easy, some were not, some were related to core issues with Elementor that they have tickets on, but are still not resolved. So there’s weird workarounds that are published. But yeah, so I was using the plugin for a lot.
Chris: And for this customer, you moved from Squarespace into WordPress slash Elementor. Was that your your first time using Accessibility Checker? At least in a, like a really serious capacity?
Mike: For the most part. I played with it a little bit before we, I did some video recording with Amber and then she gave a license for the Pride Party.
Chris: Cool.
Mike: When I was helping to organize that in past years. So we had it on there, but that was like a three-page website with, you know, for just ticket sales. This is my first, I would say, commercial case that I’ve used the plugin.
Chris: So you probably installed it, ran a full site scan. That’s what most people do. What was kind of your reaction when you saw that full site scam report for the first time and, yeah, just curious.
Mike: Yeah. I mean, it’s a large number, but I was kind of expecting that. I was more surprised by how many things I had to ignore, you know, SVG icons for like decorative…
Amber: ARIA hidden.
Mike: Yeah. I was surprised how many of were just pages and pages of that. Right. Because obviously if it’s a footer item and it’s on every page, it’s gonna. But yeah, that was probably my first reaction that’s a big number and, what’s all this doing here?
Amber: Yeah. And that is one thing I think, you know, as a side note, like we are continually trying to figure out what’s the best way to do this, what to do it. But, you know, accessibility does have a manual component to it, unfortunately. And you know, you do have to be able to look at those reports and make some decisions on what to do.
So I’m curious, when you were looking at them and I don’t know if you just went to the homepage first or where you went how did you prioritize some of the fixes? And you had mentioned also that there were some that actually have open GitHub issues for Elementor. What was your approach on those?
Mike: Yeah, so I almost exclusively just used the backend version of the tool. I never really have used any of the built in, like on the page and post editor or on the front end. Just ’cause I didn’t personally find it useful. So what I would normally do is I would go to the report and then I would do, I forgot what the option’s called, but the thing that let to do, show things that are on, like effective…
Amber: !Oh, Fast Track.
Mike: Fast track, yeah. And I basically just prioritized the largest, to smallest. And then I would fix something, re-scan, see if it went away. And then just, I kept doing that cycle again and again. So I would fix something, do a full scan, fix something, do another full scan while, you know, while having backups, because I’m me on every time I would make a make like a template change or a theme change or, so I first tried to do as much global stuff as I could.
Then all the alt tag stuff, because they weren’t my images and, I did not have time to edit them. Look at them manually. I used an AI alt tag generator, you know, to have something. I let the client know, hey, you should probably rewrite these, do your own words. But in my mind, something was better than nothing.
And then the rest of it was just trying to chase down like weird bugs that were you know, open in Elementor. And it was interesting to talk to support Hey, I have this error. Oh, well this is how you can turn off that. Well, okay, I don’t wanna turn off the feature, or I just, how do I fix it?
And then once they pointed me to, once I found the GitHub issue which one of the support reps sent me to it had a workaround and then we were able to figure that out. But what’s kind of funny is that like you even wrote an article around the same time, about one of the, you know, the skip domain content, like not always working.
And it’s an issue specifically with certain ways that you nest the divs basically, in Elementor. The way you work around that is you turn off the caching.
Amber: Oh. That’s a solve for the fixing the broken skip links in Elementor?
Mike: So there’s like weird workarounds with things like that.
Chris: So when you did this migration from Squarespace into Elementor, I just have a couple of initial questions about that. Was there like a redesign as part of this or were you kind of doing like a one-to-one recreation?
Mike: No, it was pick a theme that kind of fits. And then I sat with her and we designed a homepage and we just kind of went page by page together. So you can call it a redesign, but we picked an Elementor template, started with the base one, used some of the block sets that were built in and just kind of built it.
We did export the user list, so subscriber list. And imported that because we were using a WordPress based mail system for newsletters that had integration with Elementor Forms out of the box. So we exported the newsletter list from there and imported to the other.
That was pretty much the only data that we migrated. And how long ago, how big was, did.
Amber: Did you import like blog posts and stuff in, and if so, how big was that? Or was it not like a huge content heavy website?
Mike: No, it was a very non-content heavy website. We did 301 redirect maps on it. So some of the URLs changed or we made the site map a little smaller and we just made sure there was 301’s before we cut over so that, you know, they wouldn’t get the penalty.
Chris: And approximately how long ago was all this work done or wrapped up? Just outta curiosity.
Mike: It was done in phases. The site kind of was spun up in November and then a lot of the accessibility work was done in January. So it was, you know, it was just kind of over time as they had time and budget and they added pages and things like that. So the first variation of the site was really simple. Yeah.
Chris: Since addressing a lot of the accessibility concerns, at least in automated tests and making the switch over into a WordPress stack, have you noticed any changes in, or has the customer or your client told you about any, you know, measurable improvements in like SEO or conversions or just their experience using the systems or just any reflection you have there?
Mike: Yeah, I mean it’s also hard when you have a non-technical clients that don’t always understand that, you know, branded links will always be, you know, rank higher no matter what. That’s just how it works, right? Yeah, traffic spin, you know, overall traffic was up the site speed was also improved dramatically.
So there was a lot of things that benefited the site overall. We, you know, use an FAQ schema, local business schema, all that. Yeah some months you know, traffic was up, hundreds of percent. Visitors were up to hundreds of percent, you know, et cetera. I don’t, I can’t point that to the accessibility because it was all kind of done over a multi-month period.
But it was definitely one of the things and. I think on Google Page Speed Insights or Lightspeed or whatever it’s called now you know, we’ve got a hundred percent a hundred on and the accessibility area was also a hundred yeah.
Amber: Yeah. Which I think increasingly we see things from Google that indicate that all of those things they have on the page speed, including the accessibility, can impact your ranking. Yeah, it is hard to specifically say, oh, I can draw a connection from accessibility work to improvements when you also do a redesign and a platform rebuild and all kinds of stuff. it’s probably all of everything. But I do think it’s great that your friend client was willing to invest in that and put some work and time in.
I’m curious, as someone, you know, like that was your first time really diving into it. Obviously you’ve done accessibility on a different front a long time ago. But I’m curious what your thoughts would be for a freelancer or an agency, like maybe some of the ones that you talk to at Hosting.com that are like starting to improve accessibility on their websites that they build.
Do you have any advice for them on how to get started with that and anything about improving that?
Mike: Yeah. Have an open and honest conversation. I would say kind of think about what your philosophy on accessibility is similar to, you know, maybe SSLs or whatever the case is gonna be. Be like, you know, hey, we only do this or we do this. What a lot of people do is they try to price accessibility as an add-on, as like a fear mongering thing.
Well, you might get sued, but yeah, you might not be big enough or any of those discussions, right? You know, we can make it accessible, we can not, and then it’s gonna add 50% of the cost or whatever. So I think it just, the conversation needs to be more deliberate, I would say. I also am curious to see what business, what end client’s perception of accessibility is, especially in the US with, you know, political climate changes.
‘Cause I’m curious to see if clients have different opinions on things like that. But I think at the end of the day, I always like to use the line that accessibility sites are easier for Google to read. I mean, it’s not untrue, right. I think it does kind of all impact it together, and I think you just kind of have to have just a holistic conversation and not have it feel like an add-on that is just a lot of money.
But talk about benefits beyond lawsuit protection because that’s a non-starter. People don’t spend money on security. They don’t, you know, we know this all the time when clients get hacked. They’ll just restore backup and hope for the best.
Amber: We had a whole panel discussion at our accessibility Meetup a couple of weeks ago with a few different agency owners, and it really did seem like the ones who are most successful are doing what you said, which is they’re just kind of building it in, not having it as a separate pricing line item, and then just figuring out how to talk to clients about it in that holistic way.
I think too, like what you were saying, just overall about the experience, you know, building the website and launching and iterating, obviously you did that as they were scoping in new pages, but also I think accessibility can be done in that way too. Which is like you can, you know, just work on it over time and gradually improve it.
Like I’m sure that alt text was not the first thing you fix, you know? And so I think, you know, that would be something I would say too for people who are getting started is don’t be overwhelmed by the big number. Just dive in and pick something to work on and that kind of stuff.
Revisiting Today’s Beverage: How do we feel? What do we think?
Chris: That was a great conversation. Before we close out, I do wanna segue over to what all the people who are still listening are actually waiting for, which I’m joking, but are are our rating of the beverage today.
Amber: How much of yours did you drink, Chris?
Chris: Based on, I can only do weight ’cause I didn’t pour it into a transparent container, but I think I’ve had about half. That’s what I was trying to do.
Amber: I don’t think I’ve had half yet. I don’t feel that much different.
Chris: I continued to enjoy the flavor. If I didn’t know what this was and I was having it side by side with other colas, I probably wouldn’t rate it the highest. I’d be like, there’s something weird about this one.
But, you know, I think I, overall I’ve appreciated the flavor and I’ve kept coming back to it, not just because of what’s inside of it. As far as like how I’m feeling, what I feel like is at the end of some conversations we’ve had where we’ve had a 5 or a 6% beer and I’ve, I had the whole thing kind of early, I feel like, about that level of relaxed right? Not really anything else, which I think is perfect. So I’m probably going to stop now. Because this is about where I would end a episode with an alcoholic beverage. But Mike, I’m curious what your overall impressions are at the end.
Mike: Yeah. I would go back to the root beer. They have a blue lemonade I think that I would probably try. I’ll definitely try other Mary Jones products. They do have a diet or a zero sugar Cola that I saw. You know, I’m, if this wasn’t full sugar, I would maybe live with it, but I don’t think the flavor is worth it for you know, a hundred for as many grams of sugar as it has. I’m I’m happy it’s real sugar and not fake sugar, but you know, corn syrup or something. But yeah. If I was gonna, if I’m gonna have full sugar with this, I would rather have a flavor I like a lot more.
Amber: Yeah. Yeah, and I’m probably a thumbs down ’cause I don’t like cola, so maybe I’d try another one of the flavors, but I definitely would not get this specific one ever again.
Chris: I’m thumbs in the middle on the cola if, but I really like cola flavor, so if it were in front of me again, I’d probably have it. But I would definitely be curious to try other flavors. When you had said you’d already had root beer, I was like, dang it. Because that was what I, that was totally what I was gonna order for this.
Amber: Well, it has been really fun having you on, Mike, can you share with us where people can find you online?
Mike: Yeah. So on X, you can find me at @mpmike. My website is demo.lgbt. So you can find all my other socials there. Although I’m most active on X, although all my socials are privatized right now. So you’ll need to request a follow. To be allowed to follow, and I’ll approve that most likely.
Amber: Well, thank you so much and thanks everybody for listening. We’ll be back in two weeks with another conversation. Bye.
Mike: Thanks.
Chris: Bye everybody.
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.