In this episode, we talk about WordPress Accessibility Day 2025 with special guest Ryan Bracey, who takes us through speaker selection, talks we’re looking forward to, tips for getting the most out of the conference, and much more.
Listen
Watch
Links Mentioned
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 onto the show.
Amber: Hey everybody, it’s Amber and I’m here today with Chris.
Chris: Hey everybody.
Amber: And we have a special guest. Welcome, Ryan.
Ryan: Thank you, Amber. Hello everyone.
Chris: Hey, Ryan. It’s good to have you. Would you mind just introducing yourself and giving our audience a bit of a rundown on who you are and what you do?
Ryan: Of course.
So my name is Ryan Bracy. I am the Director of Web Development and User Experience at a agency here in New Jersey where I live called Second Melody. We’re basically a full service agency. We do everything from naming, to branding, to verbal identities, content writing. I run the web department over there, so planning, designing, building websites, and we do social media marketing.
So the full gamut. And then on top of that, I am the lead speakers organizer for WordPress Accessibility Day, which is where I met Amber.
Amber: Yeah,
Chris: Woohoo.
Amber: And we are so excited to have you here today. We always start every episode with a beverage. Chris, what are we drinking today?
Today’s Beverage
Amber: So I was looking around. Because I think Ryan, you like ales and sours and that sort of thing, and…
Ryan: Yep.
Chris: I’ll be honest what caught my eye first with this drink, which is Great Notion Tiger’s Blood, was just the front of the can sitting on the shelf.
It’s got this very colorful illustration of a tiger. And then the name Tiger’s Blood also drew me in because when I, if I ever go get a snow cone, if I’m channeling my inner 9-year-old, tiger’s blood is usually my go-to. Give me all the artificial colors and flavors. But it promises to be a a sour or tart ale inspired by the shaved ice treat.
So I’m kind of excited to, to see what that’s gonna be all about.
Amber: Okay. I do have to ask a question ’cause I had never heard of this whole Tiger’s blood thing until a couple of years ago. Is that a Texas snow cone flavor?
Ryan: I was gonna ask the same thing as soon as you said it. I was like, is this something I should have known?
Chris: I don’t know.
Amber: So you haven’t heard of that either, right?
Chris: That’s interesting. Maybe it is like a Texas cultural thing, but I don’t know when we were, when we were traveling one summer up near Salt Lake City, the snow cone stand there had tiger’s blood also. But it’s it’s like a berry coconut mixture.
So it’s a little coconut coconutty, a little fruity, and usually it’s like bright red.
Amber: And this brewery is in Portland, so maybe it just hasn’t made it to the East coast yet.
Ryan: New Jersey’s a lot of Italian Americans, so we have Italian ice. I don’t know if the shaved ice has been able to penetrate the market yet, so maybe that…
Amber: Yeah, it’s not high quality enough for the Italians. They have very particular opinions about iced desserts, I think.
So I love this can design. I actually was thinking the tiger, I know you said it was colorful, but I think it’s worth describing. Maybe I like it because it’s got it’s the orange, but it has these hot pink highlights and it has teal eyes. I don’t know, it’s so pretty that I was thinking, I don’t even wanna put a koozie on this.
Like I just wanna walk around and hold it, carry it and it’s got a black background and then just has Great Notion, in a cursive font above it. It looks pretty simple and artistic on the front, I feel like. So I like the design, but I don’t know. You’re a designer. Ryan, what do you think?
Ryan: I also really like the tiger illustration. I think it’s great for all the same reasons you said. My big knock is that the name of the beer is not on the front of the can. So when I first got there, I was like, we’re drinking Great Notion. I didn’t realize it was the name of the brewery, thought it was the name of the beer until I turned it over.
Amber: Oh, that is a really good point. Well and then on the back, this is actually sort of reversed because there is an icon, which is so Portland. I think knowing this brewery is in Portland of a, like an X of axes with a beard and a stocking cap kind of graphic. Which I’m wondering now if that’s the icon for Great Notion Brewery, but they have it right above the name of the beer, Tiger’s Blood. So it does actually kind of seem reversed, doesn’t it?
Ryan: Unless the axes are how they got the tiger’s blood.
Amber: I don’t, I hope taste better than that.
Ryan: They’re sending a mixed message here. Yeah.
Amber: Yeah. So this is 8% alcohol by volume. And this is a big can.
Chris: Yeah.
Amber: How big is it? Oh, it’s a pint.
Chris: I’m not sure that I’m gonna drink this whole thing since I’m only about halfway through my Friday.
Ryan: I was, yeah, you guys sent me two. I can’t have two of these and then go back to work.
Amber: You don’t have to drink them bolts during this podcast episode.
Ryan: Especially two in an hour, yeah.
Amber: Well, shall we crack it open and see what we think?
Chris: Yeah. Yeah.
Amber: Oh, mine foamed up.
Chris: So at a distance, the first aroma I’m getting is like strawberry.
Ryan: Same, it’s berries.
Chris: Not so much the coconut, ,
Ryan: And I brought a glass if we wanna see what it looks like?
Chris: Yeah.
Amber: Oh yeah. I love that. I love when we get to see what it looks like.
Ryan: Now you can judge my pour too, if I did a good job.
Amber: Yeah, this is super fruity.
Ryan: I’m getting a little coconut smell now.
Amber: Do you, after you pour it?
Chris: It’s definitely got like a toasted coconut on the palate. With the tartness and the, this is…
Ryan: I like this.
Chris: I’m just gonna say it. This is really good.
Amber: Yeah.
Chris: In my opinion for my palate, this is really good.
Amber: It’s not super sour to me though. That’s the one thing I’ll say a lot of times with sours, they are legit tart. This, to me is fruity and I do get a little on the end of the coconut. Not as much as I would expect but I really like it.
Ryan: Yeah, I like it too. I really like the coconut in it. It’s a nice little offset to the strawberry.
Chris: Yeah, the thing that I think is interesting about this too, and I don’t know if it’s just like the way the fruit, the sour and the coconut are all intermingling that makes me think this or makes my palate think this, but it almost doesn’t taste fully dry.
There’s some unfermented sugar still in the beer and I’m getting a bit of what feels like sugary sweetness, even though it’s 8% ABV. So, I don’t know, I’m a little confused. ‘Cause usually when you. Have a high ABV beer, there’s no sugar left for the yeast to ferment. But it is, it’s really good. Very refreshing.
Amber: It is really sweet.
Ryan: This is good.
So. Chris, how does this compare to your memories of your favorite snow cone?
Chris: Less sweet. It’s got that fermenty funk, right? I feel like this is if I had a tiger’s blood snow cone and this beer in like a nice frosty glass next to it. I’m going for the beer. 100%. I feel like it’s like a grownup, a more grownup, tiger’s blood snow cone experience. But I will say too, it’s like it is reminiscent of tiger’s blood.
So they pulled that off. That was my concern buying this was like, is it really gonna be reminiscent of that or is it just like a gimmicky marketing thing to get guys like me who like that flavor, you know, go buy it.
Ryan: That’s cool.
Amber: So this is a question I always like to ask the chef, which is, what would you pair this beer with? Like what kind of food? It is very summary to me. So is that, does that just mean you like grill out or what kind of food would go well with this sweeter flavor?
Chris: I almost feel like this could work as a dessert beer. If you were to pair this with some kind of more creative rendition of a strawberry shortcake or something.
Okay. Like my head’s going to strawberry compote and then like a coconut shortbread and whipped cream with this would probably absolutely kill. But, it’s really good. I honestly, this beer to me does not even want for food. Like it’s it’s kind of like a, almost an on its own thing. Whereas other beers I have, I’m like, I want something fried with this, or, you know, I want, you know, whatever, X, Y, Z
Amber: Something to cut the flavor. Or balance it out in some way. Yeah. Yeah, this is the kind of beer that it seems like you could be standing outside on a hot summer day on the afternoon, just drinking and chatting with your neighbors and not like eating anything, but just hanging out and enjoying it.
Ryan: Yeah. I think this pairs well with the pool would be my guess.
Amber: You would pair it with the pool?
Ryan: Yeah, just with the pool outside by the pool.
Amber: We have a very technical standard here, Ryan, where we give things a thumbs up, thumbs in the middle or thumb down. So I’m guessing we’re all a thumbs up on this beer. We would buy it again?
Chris: I’m s up two thumbs up on this one. I’m probably gonna go buy more of this. It’s really good. It’s speaking to me.
WordPress Accessibility Day 2025, Mark Your Calendars!
Amber: Well, awesome. We’re gonna continue drinking this and we are going to talk about WordPress Accessibility Day. Our title for the episode was Mark Your Calendars for WordPress Accessibility Day, because it is coming up very soon, October 15th through 16th.
And that is why I was excited that Ryan could join us because I wanted to talk about our schedule and some cool things that people can expect this year. And of course, Ryan is the man behind the schedule.
Ryan: Thank you. Yeah.
Chris: So inadvertently we all matched today, at least with the color of our t-shirts, but mine’s blank. Your t-shirts have more going on with them. So before we dive too deep into this can we just talk about , this year’s vintage of WP Accessibility Day T-shirt?
Amber: Yeah. So, okay. I do have to call out. I don’t think we’ve ever shared this, but Second Melody did a rebrand for WordPress Accessibility Day a couple of years ago.
They came up with our logo and our website design and all of that kind of stuff. And then Joe Dolson and I built it. Mostly Joe. And, one of the things I loved about the logo was that it has kind of the accessibility guy in the middle, but then it has different colored blocks in a circle around it.
And so we’ve been cycling through the colors, which is kind of fun. So we can distinguish here. So light blue is this year. Have you guys won an award for that design?
Ryan: I think we got
Amber: Or were nominated?
Ryan: Like honorable mention for this year’s Webbies, so… They said it’s pretty, yeah, not quite the win, but we got the honorable mention, which is also pretty hard to get for the webby, so we were proud of it.
Amber: Yeah, that is awesome. So this year our t-shirt is light blue because that is our color of the year. And it’s kind of fun because it forces us to not just have white or black t-shirts, right? Like we rotate through different colors, so they’re all unique.
And it’s got hands like illustrated outlines of hands in American Sign Language doing the letters WPAD and then the WordPress Accessibility Day 2025 logo on the front. And then on the back it just has text written in kind of like a coding style font. This says ALT equals WPAD, and American Sign Language on a light blue t-shirt.
So it has alt text on the back and sign language on the front. So we’re covering multiple disabilities here and it’s kind of fun.
Ryan: Yeah, I just love the idea that it was so clever. I think Michelle Frechette came up with the alt text on the back, and Amber, I think you recommended the sign language on the front.
Amber: I actually think that might have been Taco’s idea, the sign language, maybe.
We did, I did reach out to a couple of friends I have who are deaf and are part of the deaf community and sign to vet the illustrations. And that was a challenge in and of itself because we wanted to make sure that we were representing it appropriately. None of us on the organizing team speak American Sign Language but we did wanna make sure that was covered, so.
And of course we have ASL at the event, so it is representative of something we offer at the event.
Ryan: Yeah, I just love this idea and it was so interesting watching the process of illustrating the hands, going back to people who actually speak ASL, checking if that’s accurate to what they see or how they do it, kind of how to project it on a t-shirt was just a process I’ve never gone through before. So it was cool watching it happen.
Chris: Very cool. So Amber already mentioned, Ryan, that you’re the speaker’s team lead for WP Accessibility Day 2025. Can you tell everyone just a little bit about your role and what it involves?
Brought to you by Accessibility Checker
Amber: But before we do that, we’ll take a short commercial break and we’ll be right back.
Steve: This episode of Accessibility Craft is sponsored by Equalize Digital Accessibility Checker, the WordPress plugin that helps you find accessibility problems before you hit publish. Thousands of businesses, nonprofits, universities, and government agencies around the world trust Accessibility Checker to help their teams find, fix, and prevent accessibility problems on an ongoing basis.
New to accessibility? Equalize Digital Accessibility Checker is here to teach you every step of the way, whether you’re a content creator or a developer, our detailed documentation guides you through fixing accessibility issues. Never lose track of accessibility again with real time scans each time you save, powerful reports inside the WordPress dashboard, and a front end view to help you track down hard to find issues.
Scan unlimited posts and pages with Accessibility Checker Free. Upgrade to Accessibility Checker Pro to scan your website in bulk, whether it has 10 pages or 10,000. Download Accessibility Checker today at EqualizeDigital.com/Accessibility-Checker. Use coupon code AccessibilityCraft to save 10% on any plan.
Scheduling and Planning for a 24 Hour Accessibility Conference
Amber: And we’re back. Ryan, yeah, can you share a little bit for everyone what it actually entails to be a speaker’s team lead for a virtual conference like WordPress Accessibility Day?
Ryan: Of course. At a high level to just a lot of emailing. So, it is kind of everything that encompasses the speakers themselves, the sessions they’re putting on including the schedule. So it’s at the onset opening that call for speakers, collecting all of those submissions, reviewing them, not just myself, but we have a whole committee that reviews the submissions. That process is done in a way that is laid out so that it’s very I can’t think of the word now ’cause you guys sent me an 8% beer, but, it’s
Amber: Methodical.
Chris: Sorry, not sorry.
Ryan: Methodical. Yeah, no, it’s delicious. Where we can’t like input any of our own kind of discriminations onto ’em. They’re anonymized to the point where we are just reviewing sessions based on talk titles, talk descriptions.
We rate them based on that. After that point, we go and de anonymize these. Then we have a meeting where we talk through our top picks, and we look at now speaker demographic information to make sure that we are holding a conference that is diverse. And we’re capturing a range of people around the globe.
Different genders, different ethnicities, different disabilities. So we just want a very diverse conference. Then I have to notify all the speakers they’ve been selected, onboard them, keep communicating with them via email if they have any questions, put together the schedule and, up to that point, it’s kind of all happening behind the scenes once the schedule goes live.
Now everyone sees that we put that out there and it’s a lot of communication with the speakers in way of, do you need help with anything? This year for the first time, we are pre-recording sessions beforehand, so in years past, they have been live talks. This year we’ll be playing videos, so this will be the first year we’re going to have to collect those videos beforehand.
So we’ll see how that process goes. But that’ll be me coordinating with them when to get them, where to put them for us, us reviewing, making sure they get to our other teams so they can be played on the day of. So yeah, it again, just a lot of coordination with the speakers, making sure we’re getting them everything they need, they’re getting us everything we need, and then we can put on the conference.
Amber: Yeah, I think it, it would be interesting. I know I didn’t pre-write this, but you said prerecorded, so I’m like, Hey, maybe we should follow that tale for just a second to talk about this decision. Because we debated it so much. The pros and cons of going with prerecorded speaker talks, verse just given live in the moment.
And I don’t know if you wanna give any thoughts on that and then I’d be happy to follow up with some of my thoughts, but do you wanna share why we made that decision?
Ryan: Yeah. So because of our kind of global demographic there, it’s coordinating a lot of people over a lot of areas of the world through a lot of time zones. We’ve had not a lot of issues with this, but in the past we’ve had people who have missed a session or not been able to attend the session, and then it’s us at the last minute seeing what organizers are available to fill in.
And it’s always a does someone have a talk ready? Maybe we can throw a panel together real fast. We have had speakers in the past who have had unstable internet connections, so they’ve maybe dropped out in the middle or had some trouble connecting. So to try to alleviate these challenges, we, someone pitched the idea of prerecorded and Amber, like you said, there was a lot of debate back and forth on if we wanted to go this way.
Because that interaction with the speaker was so nice, especially in a virtual conference. So ultimately what we landed on was let’s go prerecorded for talks and we’re still gonna have the speakers there the day of hanging out in the chat so they can interact with people in the chat. And we’re still gonna do a live Q&A session after, so people can still ask questions to the speaker, get answers live.
And we think it’s just gonna really help with some of those tech issues we’ve had in the past, but still not take away from that in the moment interaction you get with the speakers on the day of.
Amber: Yeah. I’ll say as someone who has run the stream and been like the behind the scenes, we call them tech admins. It’s, I think going to reduce some stress because there’s definitely a lot of stress at the beginning when it’s okay, you have to share your screen to do speaker or the sponsor slideshow, and then you’ve gotta make sure the MC is on to do the introduction. And then you gotta make sure the speaker’s on and make sure that they’re sharing and and the whole thing has to run well and you have to manage the captioner and the sign language interpreters and all that stuff.
And so I think for me, I’m looking forward to having less of all of the noise at the beginning. And so I feel like it’ll make the beginning a lot less stressful. And then, yeah, I think last year we had someone who was in the middle of a hurricane that literally just didn’t show, but yeah, I am looking forward to a little bit less stress on the day, maybe.
Chris: It does sound so much less stressful to starting a session just means you hit the play button. That sounds very nice. From a backend I’m calling it backend side, but I can also comment from the speaker side.
I’ve done a couple now various little virtual conferences. And the prerecorded sessions for me on the speaking side, have been particularly nice because they, let me focus on the chat and answering questions. And so I can be there and I can be fully engaged in the chat while past me is talking.
And that’s really great. ’cause I feel like people get 2x the information basically, so it actually increases the value for the attendee if the speaker can be there. But you had mentioned placing a priority on diversity. So doing this kind of agnostic evaluation method of, just evaluating everything on the merits of the topic and the description. And then pulling back the curtain and doing more work on making sure that there’s representation, not just across time zones, but ability, disability other factors that make us all unique as people.
So could you speak to the diversity of the speaker lineup this year and what you know so far? Who are the speakers? Where are they located? Just any stats you can share.
Ryan: Of course. So, yeah, like I said it’s always that anonymous stage and then the diversity stage where we look at all that stuff. So this year of our selected speakers, so it is 23 sessions plus our keynote, 24 sessions, and this year we have four sessions with co-speakers.
So we’re doing my math at 27 speakers we have this year, plus our keynote. And of those we’re…. have representation across 11 different countries, which is pretty great. It’s about average what we’ve had. I think we had 11 in 2023. We had 12 last year. So we’re 11 again this year. Of those speakers, about 41% of them are male identifying. 48% identify as female. So we’re a little heavier on the female side.
Amber: Which is common, I think.
Ryan: It’s very common for us.
Amber: It’s every year. It’s interesting.
Ryan: I feel like in past years even it’s been way more off balance to the point where we’ve had to go back and be like, we don’t have any men speaking. We need to pull some in.
Amber: But I have noticed with accessibility, because we have this same trend and you could look at our organizing team page and you could look at our volunteers page, which when that’s out and all the volunteers are there. It’s heavily female, and I don’t know if that’s something about the accessibility industry as a whole or don’t know. It’s kind of a, an interesting anecdote I think.
Ryan: Yeah. I don’t know what it, if it’s more empathy. It could be. But yeah, we always seem to have that. And I think that was last year where we did it and we’re like, there are no men in our picked schedule. We need to fix this.
And that is the work we do. And we de anonymize to make sure we are having a diverse conference. There are also 15% identify as being members of the L-G-B-T-Q community. 30% of our speakers are non-white identifying. 26% of our speakers identify as living with a disability. And two of our speakers self-identified as living in poverty.
So, like I said, we do try to put together a very diverse conference, both in the speakers themselves, but also geographically where they’re located. And just looking at our stats, I think we were successful. And it is always nice ’cause you get those different perspectives and inputs and that’s what really helps us actually achieve our goal of making things more accessible.
‘Cause if you’re only hearing one perspective, it’s, you’re only addressing that one perspective. So it kind of goes hand in hand with our mission too.
Chris: On the scheduling side, this is, it’s the only event I know of that runs 24 hours continuously. Sounds like a nightmare to me. How do you schedule this thing?
Ryan: Okay. So I have a system where so our speakers themselves will give us a range of times that they are available. So they’ll say, I’m available these times, and they can select any of the 24 hour long slots of the day. I will also do a little extra work of figuring out what times of each day based on their time zone or their waking hours.
So, even if someone says I’m available at 3:00 AM if I can give them a spot at maybe 10:00 PM I’ll try to do that. So, I’m trying to be convenient for them. So I will look at what their waking hours are and then what their availability is. I’ll try to lay it out that way, roughly first.
Then I start looking at, okay, are we backing up topics? So I don’t want two of the same topic next to each other. So I try to then mix around that, we have some diversity in topic, even so if someone’s watching straight through, they don’t have to listen to two topics in a row about the same thing. And then once I get that all settled, I’ll usually have someone else look at it just to say, okay, this looks good.
Makes sense to me. It flows well. We’re not backing up those topics. Like I said, everyone is within a range, they said is okay for them. And yeah, that’s about it.
Amber: How much time does that take you, Ryan?
Ryan: It’s a few hours. The hardest part is the time conversion. I’m, it still gets me to this day.
Amber: It’s so hard for me to the point that I have force as a lead organizer.
All of our sheets and schedules have UTC, which is what our website and everything operates on, but it also has central, because I’m like, but. I get to control this. So we’re also gonna have a column that translates everything to Central.
Ryan: Yeah, that’s my I first, I put all the times in Eastern so I have some context of what I’m talking about.
Then I look at their local times. But then this caught me last year. Our conference happens during daylight savings time for any country that observes it around. So, oh no, I could be looking at times today, that are not the times they’re gonna be in October. So even last year I got to learn kind of what countries observe daylight savings time and when some switch and some don’t.
For instance, I remember Italy and Germany, like one of them switched right before the conference started and one was right after. ‘Cause one of our speakers lived in Italy, but was giving her talk from Germany and I was like…
Amber: Yeah. It’s really hard. We ended up, it was in November, I think in 2022, when we revived it and we realized we needed to move earlier, I mean, we can’t hit all of them, but we are before most of them change times. ‘Cause a lot like in the US and UK and most of Europe, I think changes in November.
But that was a huge motivator for why we moved it to October was we were like, ’cause I think one year we were in between the US had switched, but a bunch of Europe had not. And that just like really threw everything,
Ryan: Everyone’s off an hour.
2025 Keynote Speaker Announcement, Sessions We’re Excited About
Amber: So, okay, let’s I feel like we should talk a little bit about the schedule, of course.
‘Cause we’ve been talking about making it. But let’s talk about what’s on it. For anyone who missed the announcement, Ryan, can you share who our keynote is and what that talk is about?
Ryan: Oh, yeah. So I’m actually very excited for our keynote. I am, as I mentioned, director of Web Development, but before I was a web developer, I was a web designer. I still do design web. So for as long as I’ve been working, I have been a reader of Smashing Magazine. It’s an online magazine for people who do UX design. And this year for our keynote, we got the CEO and co-founder of Smashing Magazine, Vitaly Friedman, which I am extremely excited about.
Chris: Wow.
Ryan: Yeah, he’s a good guy. He is also…
Amber: Yeah, I’m so excited about this too.
Ryan: Bringing, I think along one of the larger audiences a keynote has ever brought with them. So we’re kind of excited to see how that works for us even. As announcing him as our speaker, having him kind of cross promote through his channels and yeah, I’m just really excited to hear him talk this year.
His talk is called Accessible Design Patterns for 2025. Like Amber said we did announce him already, so we do have a news post up on https://2025.WPAccessibility.Day if someone wants to go read that. There’s a little bit more about his background, what he’s gonna be talking about with some links. So yeah, I’m just really excited for him to come talk for us this year.
Chris: That is so, so cool, and I’m sure that keynote’s gonna be fantastic, but that’s not the only session. There’s 23 others. I think we should each share a couple of sessions that we’re really looking forward to. Amber, maybe you could start.
Amber: Sure. I will say, I always feel, I know like we planned this podcast and so I knew we were gonna do this, but everyone always asks this and I always feel bad ’cause I’m like, how do I only pick two or three?
Right, so one is called Creating a Hyper Accessible Website for Blind Low Vision and Sighted Users. The reason why I am excited about this talk is because this is a website built with Divi. And if you follow this podcast, which if you’re listening, I’m sure you do, or you have seen our massive page builder accessibility comparison report that I spent a bunch of time on, you know that Divi is horrible at accessibility. And this is a website that was built for the Braille Institute. I’m not gonna say it’s perfect ’cause Alex Stein and I were looking at it the other day and it has a few things could be improved, but it is really good.
So I’m super interested to know. I literally think, I just wanna ask them like, how much work and time did you have to put into doing this? And I think that’s, it’s interesting and it goes to show you can build an accessible website with anything. So I think that will be interesting. I’m also interested in, we have a talk from a Australian speaker who is deaf and he speaks I’m probably gonna say this wrong, but Oslan.
I think is maybe how you pronounce it, which is Australian sign language, and he is giving a talk called Oslan Accessibility in WordPress, Themes and Plugins for the Whole Deaf Australian Community. I’ve never seen Oslan. He is going to, for his Q&A, we’re gonna have an Oslan interpreter for him because if you aren’t familiar, not all sign language is the same.
So even though our conference is going to have American Sign Language. He may not even be able to understand any of it. It could be 100% different from Oslan sign language. So we will have our American Sign Language interpreter and he’ll have an Oslan sign language interpreter, and he’ll be presenting it. So I think that will be really fascinating just to see, what is the difference?
I always enjoy, even though I don’t need the sign language, opening the sign language in another window and being able, ’cause you can move it all around to just have it on like my extra monitor and being able to glance at it occasionally. I find it really interesting and cool.
And then I think the other thing that I’m looking forward to is a talk about AI, Websites and How Accessible or Not They Are. Everybody, it’s the hot topic, right? We were like, how can we not have this? Everybody’s talking about building websites with AI. And so you can come to that session and find out if they’re actually accessible.
But Ryan, what do you’ve been digging through these, what are you most looking forward to?
Ryan: I feel even worse about picking any than you do. ‘Cause I’m like, I’ve been talking to these people. I had to pick them. I like them all.
I also did kind of key in on that, Creating a Hyper Accessible Website for the Blind. I just thought it was such an interesting concept too, of so much of accessibility is like, how do we meet accessibility standards where there’s this, that’s not even good enough for us. It’s how do we exceed these expectations?
So kind of going so far above and beyond and I thought that was just a really cool approach and I’m interested to hear they did it. The other one I really liked, kind of the premise of was called A Game Changing Approach to Accessibility Education, which is kind of flipping the script of, instead of trying to get people to empathize with disabilities by kind of talking about what it’s like to live with a disability, their approach is, what if we got people to empathize by simulating barriers?
So making it harder for people who don’t have disabilities to interact with things, just to kind of see what it’s like to live in a world where technology’s not built for you. So I thought that was kind of a cool premise and I think it’s gonna be a good talk. And then the other one I’m really interested in is Being a Colorblind Designer.
Just because I myself am colorblind and a designer and I was like, that’s kind of a cool talk. I wish I had come up with that idea myself, but I did not. So I’m interested to hear someone else give it and see what they have to say about it.
Amber: Yeah. Maybe you’ll get tips that you could apply to your work.
Ryan: Can’t wait to see stuff, and it’s gonna be like a light bulb moment.
Chris: And those light bulb moments are so great when they happen, when you’re looking at a talk. So there’s two talks where I’m hoping I’ll get a light bulb moment. So, and my reasoning behind these, like being particularly interesting to me and listeners may or may not know this is like 30 to 40% of my job is business development and sales specifically for accessibility. And or accessibility related products or services. And so the first one is, I’m just gonna give the title. Accessibility Isn’t Extra Work, It’s Risk Management. And my understanding is this one’s being put on by a developer.
But I think I’m particularly interested in this one because it is that like developer’s perspective and that more technical perspective of why is it risk management? What are the considerations? And I’m particularly interested in that one from that angle mostly because I’m hoping it will continue to, round out my appreciation of what I already know about why accessibility is relevant for risk management , give me maybe more nuggets or tidbits that I can share or bring up in conversations with people.
And then the other one, just because I do like to have that eye on what’s coming and you know, new technologies and things like that. And Amber, this may be the exact same talk you mentioned is The Future is Automated, but Will it be Accessible? I don’t know if that’s the same one you were mentioning about AI and accessibility.
Amber: No. The one I was talking about is Built the Website with an AI, but is it Accessible? So what’s the one you’re looking at?
Chris: The Future is Automated, but will it be Accessible? So this one strikes my interest because in conversations, a lot of the time I will hear about automated tools that claim to solve accessibility or just the deeply held belief by some people in technology that, well, automation’s gonna solve all of this in the next five years or whatever. So I don’t need to care.
It’s just gonna solve it for me and I can just keep continuing with like the bad habits that I currently have around how I deal with code or content. So I’m also interested in that one because I’m curious to see what that speaker has to say and what their findings are right now and kind of what concerns they bring up.
Those are my big two at least right now. Although as both of you alluded to, all the speakers that have come forward for this, I’m sure are going to have amazing talks and provide a lot of value. And I feel WP Accessibility Day is one of the most value packed accessibility conferences in existence.
And that’s in no small part thanks to you two and the army of volunteers and organizers that make it happen.
Ryan: Yeah, that’s great. Yeah, and it is a full 24 hours, 24 different sessions, so we just named a few. We really try to also make sure that the conference is for everyone as an attendee.
So just because we named some things that were maybe some designer focused events or developer focused events, or even business development focused events, we do have things targeted towards people who are content creators, designers, developers. We even have stuff that are people who are just maybe community members who attend events.
So, to make events more accessible for people or is a topic we have this year. So we really do try to make sure there’s something for everyone. We also make sure we have a nice mix of beginner, intermediate, expert level events. So even trying to meet attendees where they are in their own journey through accessibility.
So just because we named a few that we are interested in doesn’t mean there’s not something for you if you’re gonna attend. We try to make sure that there will be something for everyone if you wanna come. There will probably be something that will key into what you’re looking for.
Other Exciting Improvements for 2025, Final Thoughts
Amber: Yeah. You know, there’s actually even a talk about the creating accessible in-person WordPress events.
So it’s not specifically web accessibility, but it’s accessibility and it’s related to the WordPress community. And so we decided that was an important talk to have. So we really do try to cover a breadth of topics.
Maybe we should talk a little bit about the attendee experience. And some things that people can expect, ’cause of course we’re gonna pitch you all to go register. We’ll talk more about that in a minute. But I wanna highlight a couple of things that are different this year.
Previously we’ve done Zoom webinars. This year we decided to move forward with, Zoom Events and our wonderful sponsors, everyone, please go check out the sponsors on our sponsors page because they are helping to cover the increased cost of doing that.
‘Cause it is significantly more expensive than running a webinar or four webinars in a row, which is what we did last year that we’re six hours long each. And, I’m really excited about this because it’s going to make it much easier for people to find individual sessions, join individual sessions.
It’s also going to reduce the amount of emails you get from Zoom because people got a lot of emails from Zoom last year and I think that was overwhelming. So I’m really excited about Zoom events.
The other thing with Zoom events that will make it different, which is neat, is we will have through the end of October 31st, you’ll be able to continue logging into that platform and watch talks that you missed. So if there’s a really awesome session that’s at 1:00 AM your time, you don’t have to be up, you know, in your pajamas trying to watch that session. You can just wait and watch it the next day or the next week.
Of course we’ll still put them on YouTube, the final videos and have those on our website forever for free. But it’s nice that people don’t have to wait with the delay and they can go and get that content right away, which I am really excited about. And we’ll have the continued accessibility like we talked about with having live captioners and sign language interpreters and different views and things like that.
Is there anything else about the attendee experience we should be calling out Ryan?
Ryan: I don’t think so. You covered a lot of it and way more technically than I could have.
Amber: Only because I just spent a whole bunch of time setting up Zoom, getting it all, like running the way I think it should be run.
So I’m sure there’ll still be hiccups. There’s always hiccups with doing a new thing and a new platform and a new way of using a platform you’ve used before, but I think it will be better.
Ryan: Yeah, my only thing I’m excited for this new format of prerecorded session kind of Chris, for the reason you said is I think it will really improve the attendee experience to be able to interact with the speaker directly in the chat.
‘Cause we even see during sessions, people ask a lot of questions and then it’s trying to filter through what can even get asked in the q and a at the end. But if we have a speaker there now. Who is able to live, respond while their past self is presenting. I think it’s gonna make a lot more of an interactive experience for the people attending.
So I think that’s gonna be really nice this year.
Amber: Yeah, for sure. So I think as a final question and this is a question I think you should answer too, Chris. I think it would be good for us to talk about how first time attendees can make the most of their experience at WordPress Accessibility Day, because virtual conferences, and on one hand they can seem really easy, like I’ll register for it. I don’t have to go anywhere. It doesn’t cost me anything, which WordPress Accessibility Day can be free, totally free, and you get all the same content. But in other ways they’re also more difficult than going to an in-person conference. So I’m curious, what advice do you all have for first time attendees?
Ryan: So, and I’m guilty of this myself, but when attending virtual conferences, like you said, it’s really easy to throw it up on your second screen and then continue working. 40 minutes go by, the session ends and you didn’t intake any of it. So I would say really try to set time apart from your day to actually actively attend a session.
I think you’ll learn a lot. Also look for sessions that are maybe not things you already know, or maybe a little bit outside of your comfort zone to make sure you are learning something new. And like I said, we try to tailor our talks. So whatever level you’re at there will be something for you. So maybe push a little above where you are or even below.
It’s good to kind of go back to basics from time to time too, and see, and just you learn something new or have a new realization. ‘Cause this stuff changes almost daily. So it’s always good to come back and readdress. But I think really just setting that time apart to be an active participant or an active attendee is really gonna be helpful.
Chris: And speaking of active participation, I mean, I’m wearing my biz dev networking hat generally, but I feel like that can even be done at a virtual conference. And I feel like virtual, like with virtual conferences, there’s this temptation to at worst, right? Like what you were saying, Ryan, like super passively not even consume the information and you led with what I was originally gonna say, so I had to think of something else, which is I’m guilty of that too.
I put it on my second screen. Which I’m pointing at over here. And it just, it sits there and I absorb maybe 20% of what was said. Or if something outrageous gets said, then I tune back in and watch. But I think the secondary to that is you, these have chats, right?
There’s gonna be some sort of engagement mechanism and pay attention to who’s commenting and what questions are being asked. And make note of the names of the people, right? And if someone makes a comment that you find particularly insightful or asks a question that you find particularly insightful or that you know the answer to. Engage, or if you have a question, definitely ask it and maybe someone else will engage with you.
But the reason I say make note of the names is there’s this wonderful thing called LinkedIn where you can probably find these people and based on their name and their job title or what company they’re with, and you can connect with them and you can, even if you’re not trying to network to do sales or anything else, like you can build real professional connections just based on the conversations that are happening in the chat in WP Accessibility Day.
That who knows, you know? Two, three years from now, that could be your next job that’s more accessibility adjacent, or it could be a future colleague, right? These kinds of connections are real, and it’s always the number one thing that I look forward to at any conference is just engaging directly with people and not just new people, but reaffirming or reconnecting with people that I already know.
And I think that can be done virtually. It just requires slightly more effort and direct engagement.
Amber: You know what’s worth calling out is that when people register, you have the option of selecting to be shown on our public attendees page. This is something that people who are used to WordCamps or have seen these before, but if they’re not used to WordCamps, I’ve heard people be like, wow, this is so amazing because a lot of conferences don’t publish attendee profiles.
They only publish speaker profiles or sponsor profiles. But we have a whole attendee page that you can find on our website and people opt in to being on that. And it includes their Gravatar image and their name and if they’ve provided it, their job title, their company, their location around the world, and links to their social media, including yes, their LinkedIn.
So this is a good place to go if you do see someone in the chat and you’re like, wow, that person’s saying really smart things. I wanna connect with them. You can go there and quickly see if they’ve put themselves on that list. I think we’ll also have with Zoom events, some ability to network with and see people within the Zoom events platform, but that remains to be seen, so don’t hold me to it.
But I agree with both of you. I would say if you can literally block a day of work, and I know we have our friend Ron over at Code Geek. He actually has had his entire team not work on client work the whole day and they just watch, WordPress Accessibility Day. And it is also worth noting if you have an IAAP certification that you can get continuing ed credits towards maintaining your certification for it.
So it is a valid, a very valid use of time to watch that.
Chris: Well, I think that about wraps us up. But before we go and Ryan, thank you so much for coming on and talking about all this stuff. I feel like the absolute least we could do is give you the opportunity to share with people anything you want them to know about you or how to connect with you or information about the things you’re working on.
Anything at all that you would like our audience to know .
Ryan: Oh yeah. Thank you. And thank you guys so much for having me. This was a blast. You can find me my personal website, RyanBracy.com. You can find me on LinkedIn. I’m on Instagram. I don’t really use it. That’s about everywhere I have presence online, so…
Amber: Oh, but if you do follow Ryan on Instagram, you get to see really delicious pictures of bread. Well, everyone, thank you so much for tuning in.
Please, if you have not already, go to https://2025.WPAccessibility.Day/Register and register to attend. It’s totally free. You can make a donation, we are a nonprofit, if you want to. You can get one of these amazing t-shirts that we are wearing if you want to, or you can just register to attend for free.
So thanks so much, Ryan, and we’ll see you all back here in two weeks for another conversation.
Ryan: Thanks guys.
Chris: 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.