152: The Pressure to be Perfect: How Usable is Usable Enough? – Liquid Death Energy Murder Mystery

By /

Accessibility Craft returns for Episode 152 with a brand new look and a deep conversation about the weight of being an expert. This week, we explore the internal and external pressures of maintaining a perfect accessibility record in an industry known calling out digital failures. We also discuss how to handle the “hypocrite” label when balancing business speed with high standards. 

To fuel the restart of the show, we sample the Liquid Death “Murder Mystery” energy drink, a cherry and spice blend co-formulated with wellness specialist Dr. Darshan Shah.

Discussion Outline

  • The Liquid Death Pivot: Discussing the brand’s move from rock-inspired canned water to energy drinks and whether it fits their original mission.
  • Podcast Tech Upgrades: A look at the new local recording workflow designed to eliminate audio hitching and allow for faster, more timely news segments.
  • Expert Accountability: Analyzing the psychological impact of being watched by competitors and users through tools like Hotjar and the WAVE browser extension.
  • The Mega Menu Dilemma: A case study on trying to implement the Max Mega Menu plugin and the difficult choice between custom development, accepting minor flaws, or abandoning a feature.
  • Analysis of Deque’s Website: Observing accessibility regressions on a major industry leader’s site to understand their potential “iterative” approach to development.
  • Business Decisions vs. Compliance: Discussing when a micro-business should prioritize “usable” over “perfect” to avoid project paralysis.

Links and Resources Discussed

Tune in to Accessibility Craft conversation episodes like this one every other Monday.

Accessibility Craft is hosted by Amber Hinds, Chris Hinds, and Steve Jones. They are experts in digital accessibility and creators of software, courses, and specialized services that have made millions of websites more accessible.

To learn more about us, you can visit our website.

Listen

Watch

YouTube video

Transcript

Chris Hinds: Welcome to Accessibility Craft, where we explore the complex challenges and emerging trends that are shaping digital accessibility, while sipping on unique craft beverages. This show is proudly produced by Equalize Digital, The most trusted name in WordPress accessibility. Join us every week as we break down accessibility news and share the expert strategies we’ve used to help make millions of websites more accessible.

Grab a drink, the show starts now!

Amber Hinds: Hey everybody, it’s Amber and I’m here today with Chris.

Chris: Hey, everybody.

Amber Hinds: And Steve.

Steve Jones: Hey everyone!

Amber Hinds: And we are excited to be so back after our Accessibility Craft break. And this is episode 152. If you are looking for show notes and a full transcript, you can find those if you go to AccessibilityCraft.com/152, We always start every episode with a drink.

Today’s Beverage

Amber Hinds: What are we drinking today, Chris?

Chris: Well, we like many other families across the United States and maybe the world watched the Super Bowl this past Sunday and there was a certain drink advertisement on the Super Bowl that I think irked you a little bit, Amber, and we’ll get into that. But we are trying Liquid Death’s new, or at least new to us, sparkling energy drink.

So they have come out with this. And this one is their Murder Mystery flavor. Ooh.

And it’s supposed to have flavors like cherry, and cream, and spices. So, kind of interesting. But Amber, why did this stand out to you?

Amber Hinds: So as we were watching it, I was thinking back to when we first tried Liquid Death, which was way back episode 16 in the very beginning. And one of the things that I remembered when I was researching it back then was that they had told this whole story about how they came up with Liquid Death, which started as canned water and had these heavy metal looking logos. Like it’s a, I don’t know, a drippy skull. Or, skull is being eaten by worms. I don’t even know.

Because they were rock musicians, I think? And they didn’t like that they were forced to drink Monster Energy when they were on stage, ’cause they had to look cool. And so they would take the Monster Energy drink cans and dump out all the energy drink and put water or ice tea in it. And so they were like, let’s make water or ice tea that looks cool, for like rocky musicians to drink. So, I was a little bit like, why are you selling an energy drink? I don’t know, sellouts.

Steve Jones: Yeah.

Amber Hinds: becomes sellouts, and this might tie into our conversation later. I don’t know.

Chris: But Amber, they co-formulated this with known wellness specialist, Dr. Darshan Shaw, MD.

Amber Hinds: Does it say that on the can?

Chris: I don’t know. I don’t know, but I think we need to look them up.

Amber Hinds: Where are you reading this?

Chris: I’m reading it on the back. So it says it feels like a coffee, but it’s not an electric chair. That almost sounds like something AI wrote. Un-extreme caffeine. So this is equal to a single cup of coffee, a hundred milligrams of caffeine. And then they have some vitamins, some minerals and then the list of things that aren’t in it that some people that are health conscious don’t want.

So no sucralose, no aspartame, no artificial colors or dyes. And then it says it’s co-formulated with this doctor. So, I don’t know. I’m kind of curious. I’ve liked Liquid Death stuff previously, but it is odd for them to come out with an energy drink.

Amber Hinds: Maybe they’re balancing it by making it less than a normal energy drink?

Chris: Yeah.

Amber Hinds: What do you think, Steve?

What do

Steve Jones: I mean, seltzer water has to be a hard sell, right? Like, when there’s, you know, beer…

Chris: And Diet Coke, let’s not forget.

Steve Jones: Diet Coke. Yeah. Yeah. Which, don’t know if you guys can see, but I have a Diet Coke sign in the background now. But it’s a little light up Diet Coke sign for the podcast.

Chris: That’s fun.

Amber Hinds: Emailed them yet to ask them to sponsor us,

Steve Jones: They need to, I’m waiting.

Amber Hinds: I guess we’re kicking off with an energy drink, is kind of good because, you know, it’s a new year, new restart of the podcast. And we’re bringing some extra exciting energy to the plugin right now that Steve’s been talking about on the Change Log live stream that we do on YouTube. So, I say we, but that’s Steven William.

Steve Jones: That’s right. Well, it’ll help us stay up and write more code. It’s called Murder Mystery. I’m not sure why, and it says,

Amber Hinds: taste like blood like blood?

Steve Jones: I know. It says flavored with other natural flavors. What do they mean? Other natural flavors.

Amber Hinds: Dead people!

Chris: Yeah, hopefully not. It doesn’t smell like dead people. Not that I know what dead people smell like.

Amber Hinds: I’m that, I wouldn’t even taste it.

Chris: It smells like cherry, tastes like cherry.

Steve Jones: Hm. Smells like cherry.

Chris: It says cherries, cream, and spices. I’m not…

Steve Jones: Hey, that’s not bad.

Chris: Yeah, it’s good.

Steve Jones: It’s kind of sweet.

Amber Hinds: I was having the same thought. It’s actually pretty good.

Chris: It doesn’t have that usual energy drink vibe where it’s like you’re drinking medicine. And I was a little nervous when I saw that the one I ordered was cherry. ‘Cause I was like, Ooh, it already tastes like medicine and cherry’s a popular cough syrup flavor. Is this just gonna be super gross?

But no, this is pretty good. I don’t get the spice at all. They say we’re supposed to taste spices. I’m not really smelling or tasting spices, but the cherry flavor is nice and it kind of tastes natural. Like not super synthetic cherry.

Amber Hinds: Yeah, I mean, it’s not really sweet. If I had to put this on a scale of like water, and this, and the Hello Kitty Cherry Pop that we tried once.

Chris: Mm-hmm.

Amber Hinds: Definitely on the water side. It’s got good flavor and it’s got some sweetness, but it’s not like sugar overload, which is nice. And, you know, tomorrow’s Valentine’s Day and it’s like red.

Steve Jones: Yeah.

Amber Hinds: The can is red and maroon, I guess. Uh, So it feels kind of appropriate to drink a cherry flavored beverage, even if it’s not your favorite flavor.

Steve Jones: I don’t typically like cherry drinks, but this doesn’t, I like this. This is like a pop. I mean, it tastes like a pop to me. A soda for you for you guys down south?

Chris: Well, what do we think? Do we want to do our rating?

Amber Hinds: Yes.

Chris: Yeah, so I’m a thumbs up. I would have this again and probably will.

Steve Jones: Yeah, it one thumbs up for the flavor and I’ll give it another thumbs up for the caffeine, so.

Amber Hinds: Two thumbs up from Steve. I think I’m a one thumbs up. think the flavor is good. It’s not too sweet, which I like, like I’ve liked it a lot better than ours. I’m always nervous about energy drinks ’cause I don’t drink them, so I’m afraid to give it a second thumbs up for caffeine. Because, don’t know what’s gonna happen to me in the next 30 minutes. ‘I also don’t drink coffee. So, you know.

Steve Jones: Yeah. Well, at least it’s not,

Amber Hinds: But…

Steve Jones: You know, THC infused or anything.

Amber Hinds: Yes, I will never drink that beverage ever.

Improvements to the Podcast, Format Changes

Steve Jones: Speaking of lessons learned, we took a little bit of a break after the holidays and Chris has been hard at work at revamping our podcast programming. Chris, you want to talk a little bit about what you’ve been up to?

Chris: Yeah. So fun fact, if anyone’s been watching the podcast in the last few months, but Amber and I have internet speed issues. And so if you’ve been watching the podcast on video or even listening on audio, you might have occasionally heard or seen audio or video hitching during recordings, which was super frustrating for us.

But I am pleased to share that we are on a completely different podcast recording platform that should alleviate that issue by recording locally and then uploading to the cloud separately while allowing us to still have a live call with each other. And preliminary tests show that should alleviate the quality issues there.

So we should have nice, crisp video and audio. Also, completely overhauled the look of the podcast without deviating from color schemes. Don’t worry, the alligator’s not going anywhere. And you’ll have seen that already if you’re watching this.

And then the final thing that I added because of all this other work basically streamlining the podcast production workflow to squeeze it down into basically a week to a week and a half. It means we can have a lot more timely conversations. For people who don’t know this, we usually we’re recording what, like three, four weeks ahead sometimes?

Steve Jones: Yeah.

Chris: Now we should be able to have just a little warmup topic, which is what will go right here. Today’s warmup topic is just talking about the work I’ve been doing on the podcast. We’ll have some sort of timely, you know, news soundbyte or interesting new development, product release, something in the world of accessibility or accessibility related that we’ll talk about and reflect on briefly, before getting into the main topic.

It kind of lets all of us warm up. Let our energy drink, or our alcoholic beverage, but probably not our THC beverage ever again, settle. And then we can do a brief commercial break and then get into the deep topic. So, I don’t know, what do you all think are you all excited to have the format change?

Steve Jones: I think it’s, I think it’s always good to try to improve.

Amber Hinds: Actually I felt like it worked out. We had that 150 episode marker, which is kind of neat. And then it was like, all right, what can we do that’s a little different? And you took this on. I know one of the other things that we have a goal for this year is to be able to clip out more shorts. And be able to have the interesting or funny or thoughtful little snippets go up in tiny videos that are maybe easier for folks to consume.

So hopefully this will make that a little easier too. So I’m excited about that.

Chris: Very exciting.

Amber Hinds: I guess that means I should tease what we’re gonna talk about as our main topic today, which is something that we personally experience. And that is the pressure to be perfect. But I think that this isn’t just something that applies to us.

I think anyone who has created themselves or their business as an expert in any topic, which could be accessibility, it could be security, it could be performance, it could be marketing, right? Like you really feel like you have to represent. That can have implications. And so that’s what I wanna talk about.

But first, we’re gonna take a short commercial break.

Brought to you by Accessibility Checker

Steve Jones: This episode of Accessibility Craft is sponsored by Equalize Digital Accessibility Checker, the WordPress plugin that helps you find Accessibility problems before you hit publish. 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.

Pressure to be Perfect

Amber Hinds: All right, so I said that I wanted to talk about this pressure to be perfect and really thinking about us. You know, we put out a lot of content around accessibility and we do sometimes call other people out for being wrong. I’m gonna be honest, I do that. We do it on Equalize Digital channels. And I do think that rightly when you put out that kind of content and try to you know, say, Hey, other people aren’t doing this the right way. Then of course you need to be doing it right, because otherwise what are you? You’re a hypocrite.

Which is, you know, something we’ve talked about before. We had an episode, I think it was number 136 that was called Throwing Stones from Glass Houses where we talked about an attorney who had inaccessible websites himself and was teaming up with a plaintiff to target a lot of businesses for web accessibility failures. And he got called out on the news and like actual TV news, like five o’clock news, which I’m like, who even thought that they’d talk about website accessibility on that?

But they did because they were calling out this one attorney. I’ve seen in Hotjar, which is a platform we use to sort of watch our own website, make sure our marketing is working, but also it’s helpful because it gives us views of how people see it on all kinds of different devices that we don’t have access to. And I’ve actually watched recordings where people were running the WAVE browser extension on our website. Because I’m guessing they’re trying to figure out do they actually know what they’re talking about?

I’ve seen people on social media comment on posts that I’ve made, or just write a post about us or me and then say, oh, here’s this bad thing that is on their website or something that needs to be improved. And of course, you know, the second I see that I go talk to Steve and we real quick put out a fix. Both because we wanna be responsive to feedback, we appreciate feedback, but also because yeah, it’s a little bit embarrassing to get shouted out, right?

And we don’t wanna look like that hypocrite. So I feel like when you’re an accessibility leader or any other person who puts them out there as an expert in something, there is a lot of pressure never make mistakes. And I do think that this can slow us down. That means, you know, for us internally, a lot of tasks require extra review. There have been times when you know, me as an owner, and maybe Steve can talk about this, if he has this too. I feel like I have to review a lot of our team members’ work that comes through my part of the business because I’m worried about the risk associated with just letting them put stuff out there. And I think this is a spot that maybe a lot of our customers could be in too. And so I thought it’d be interesting to talk about this.

Steve Jones: Yeah, totally. And I mean, I think there’s a lot to unpack in regards to this in regards to the way that we handle this because we are accessibility specialists and of course we should be experts in what we do and we should be double checking what we put out. But also from the other end where the, we call calling out. And when you call out a company about something being inaccessible, so that company isn’t always necessarily an accessibility company like ours, right? So their main focus is not always that or it’s not their most top of mind thing. And to some degree they probably don’t even know about a lot of the issues.

And the accessibility community kind of can get a little bit of a rap for calling people out. We’re real good at pointing fingers and instead of extending in a hand, right? And I think a lot of times reframing that is better, that we’re here to help rather than we’re pointing fingers. And from a development standpoint, I know a lot of times it’s a lot easier to identify an accessibility issue or even a performance issue on a website, right? People do this a lot with performance too.

It’s kind of easy to identify, especially things that can be identified through automated tests. And then to point a finger like , Hey, I’ve ran this WAVE tool and it told me that this is wrong on your website. You should fix it, you’re bad. But really the fix is actually probably a lot harder to implement than finding it. So a lot of times, maybe that calling out should happen in a back channel first before raising it to a public channel. I just think that reframing it from a finger point to more of a extending a hand to help is probably a good thing to do. But on our side yeah, perfection definitely can be paralyzing to us, sometimes. We wanna make changes to a menu on our website, and the menu is, I don’t know, 80% accessible or 90% accessible.

Can we put it out there? Can we release it? You know, I don’t know.

Chris: Yeah, and even in my involvement, like on, on the sales side or even on the marketing side, frequently thinking about accessibility does require slowing down, right? Just on the process side, there’s additional checks and steps that we take to try to make sure that the content we’re putting out there is accessible and is done well.

And that requires extra work. For instance, immediately after we record this the platform we’re recording this on is going to generate an automated transcript. And I’m going to manually review that word for word while listening to what we’re all saying, and I’m going to make sure it’s correct.

And that’s going to probably take an additional. 40 minutes to an hour of my time that maybe another company who either doesn’t understand the implications of just using automated transcription or who doesn’t care, they’re not gonna spend that time, right? And same on the sales side to an extent

I really take care in sales conversations, particularly early stage, to make it very clear that, for example, if I’m sending someone a PDF of a slide deck, I make it very clear, hey, if you need this in a better format that’s gonna work better for you or a different member of your team, please tell me and I will send that over immediately.

Or asking upfront if it’s a big call, does anyone need to turn on their captions? Do they need help doing that? Right? Or if there’s a presentation asking ahead of that presentation, whether it’s a sales presentation or a webinar, Hey, do you need live captioning here? Would anyone benefit from that?

Being conscientious of those one-to-one or those one to few interactions where it’s not a big public event, right? But still trying to be conscientious, still trying to practice and show accessibility. It requires additional mental energy and additional time too.

And I think that, from a just wearing the entrepreneurial hat and not thinking about the fact that it is the right thing to do and that this is how everybody should be operating. Wearing the entrepreneurial hat, I do think that doing these things the right way makes us slower at times.

And that’s just a fact. And I don’t know, I’d be interested to hear your thoughts. Like at what point does that slowness become a disadvantage versus an advantage? And how good is good enough? It’s a really hard question to answer.

When is good enough, good enough?

Amber Hinds: So Steve brought up that mega menu, and I think this is a really good concrete example that is front of mind for me. So we had decided that we wanted to test using a mega menu on our website. We’re a small team. If you’ve looked at our team page, you know, we’re not huge. We’re not a company with a hundred employees or all that. So we’re always trying to figure out like many folks who use WordPress, what is the fastest way to do this? Okay, let’s see if there’s a plugin we can use.

So I identified a plugin Max Mega Menu that a lot of people have said, Hey, this one gets pretty close on accessibility. Or maybe they’ve used it on websites and they’ve done some patching on their own, but they said it can be used on an accessible website. I set it up on our staging site and then I accessibility tested it. There were enough issues that in that moment I did not feel comfortable being like, I’m just gonna go put this on our live website, right? Again, because of this history of, I have literally been called out. I think one time someone flagged for us that originally the button that opens and closes our mobile menu was outside of the nav tag instead of in it.

And so when on mobile, there was no nav tag, if the button was collapsed, which could make it harder for screen readers, which it’s not like a…

Steve Jones: Violation.

Amber Hinds: 100% breakable thing, it’s definitely not a Web Content Accessibility Guidelines violation. But yes, they’re right. It’s not like absolute best case, perfection. It’s been fixed. Steve fixed it, right?

But I’m like, okay, our nav menu is important. People have called us out. I’m not just gonna roll this out. So what I did was I first went and opened a WordPress.org support ticket for Max Mega Menu plugin team in hopes that they would fix the issues. That was a month ago. And so of course we haven’t rolled this out on our live site. And so now where I’m sitting, I think we’re looking at three different choices.

Option one, Steve and William, our dev could take time away from working on our plugin or our clients maybe to try and remediate that plugin or maybe say, and we’re not gonna remediate, we’re just gonna build a custom way to build mega menus for our theme. So that we can launch a perfect mega menu.

Option two, decide maybe the problems that are there are minor enough that we’re willing to take the menu live without fixing it. And we’ll maybe go into those in a little bit. Um, basically being willing to not be perfect and accepting some risk that someone might call us out on it publicly in a way that feels embarrassing or that we have to then defend ourselves publicly, right? So that’s, I think option two.

Option three, is we decide that we’re not going to try this mega menu experiment because we aren’t willing to take the risk and we don’t have time to make it perfect, and there’s not an option available that doesn’t, you know, support that. And so we’re either not gonna do it at all, or we’re gonna wait however many months it might take for Max Mega Menu to fix things and do it then.

And it’s a tough place to be in to have these three options and have to choose what do we do? I feel like our customers are making these choices a lot of the times too.

And so I’m sort of curious and I don’t know, Steve, maybe you have thoughts on this, like do you weigh this decision point and not just for us, but also like how should our customers, like the people who are listening to this also weigh the same decision point if they have these three options in front of them?

Steve Jones: I think you weigh it differently based on the hat you put on. You know, if I put on the owner hat, like I’m an owner of Equalize Digital and there’s a certain reputation I want Equalize Digital to have, that’s when it’s more of a hard line. We need to fix this before we launch it. And because people are looking up to us, they are watching us. They may want to catch us in a gotcha.

We and we have had people, you know, open issues and some have been, you know, good hearted and some have been not as good hearted. But if I flip that around and put on my developer hat, my CTO hat, where software is iterative, software is a living thing that grows over time, that is constantly being updated, constantly being improved.

If we waited for perfection to launch a feature to or to you know, launch the whole plugin, we’d never do it. There’s no way to really get to perfection. It’s just always going to be a living thing that’s growing and improving. Should be improving with every release. So in that respect, sometimes adding a feature that is beneficial and helpful to people, even if there are a few accessibility improvements that could be made, even if they’re not, you know, compliance things. Sure, like compliance things are kind of major, critical that need to be fixed. But we do try to go well beyond that to create a good user experience. But yeah, I mean sometimes you need to get it out there and you need to fix it iteratively.

And that could have short term reputation harm. Accessibility Checker, getting this new kind of like sidebar interface to better integrate into the block editor. You release this and it has some you know, there’s some focus issues or there’s some tabbing issues.

And that’s a n interesting feature too, because, you know, we’re calling people out for certain things or people will calling us out for things and never said we’re integrating a third party thing here. Well, we’re integrating Accessibility Checker into a third party thing, which is WordPress. So we’re utilizing their components and their React components and things like that. And we’re taking on some of their technical data as well and trying to patch some of the, some of that along the way. And, you know, to kind of go back to Amber’s first point, not to ramble on too long, but to her first point, regressions happen.

And sometimes regressions are within your control and sometimes they’re not. So if we’re using Max Mega Menu plugin and they say they actually patched these things, but then they released a new release that broke something and you know, we confirmed it, it’s good on our website, and we launched it, but then a third party released a regression that Inaccessible in, in a sense. You know, then somebody might find that for us. I mean we’re constantly doing automated scans on the website to check for stuff. And a lot of times when you’re talking about menus, this is very manual testing. So there has to be a little bit of grace there too, because you never know what stack of what software somebody’s using there that may have introduced the regression without their knowledge.

Amber Hinds: We had that episode where we talked about like how accessible is accessible enough for like micro businesses. Let’s be honest, we are a micro business, not a multimillion dollar company that has a really big team. We don’t have a dedicated website person. Every person on our team, most all of us do something on our website. But no one person only does our website. And so it, you know, like we are a micro business too. And I think that is a thing that’s hard because I want it to always be perfect. We did do one thing, which is we don’t run auto updates on our website.

They always get done manually, but not super frequently. Which is funny sometimes. ’cause if we report someone to a plug developer, they’re like, well, you’re out of date. And we’re like, well yeah, because risk and people like having a human test, this can’t happen all the time. I think that is a thing that’s hard, right?

When you’re a really small team and you want things to be really good, but you also don’t have the resources, like that’s where it can become difficult. What were you gonna say, Chris?

Chris: I think one of the, I was just gonna say, I think one of the questions you posed is how do you weigh it, right? And something that I have thought about is: Where are you now with accessibility versus this new thing you’re implementing, what is it going to do for accessibility?

So, let’s say the situation was reversed in a sense, and we had a standard menu with dropdowns like we do now, but that was the thing that had, you know, let’s say it was 50% accessible. I don’t really know what 50% accessible means, just roll with me on this.

Steve Jones: Yeah.

Chris: And we were looking at implementing a mega menu, that is 70% accessible. So it’s still not perfect. I would say that if your trajectory of improvement is generally up, even if the next tier of improvement is not perfect, I think it’s logical to still make the switch if you’re still, if you’re going from 50 to 70 or 20 to 40 or whatever it is, right?

I think what makes this particularly challenging is that we would be intentionally introducing a regression if we decided not to patch it, right? So we’re going from, I don’t know, I’m gonna say our menu is basically 100% accessible. Some specialist out there is gonna go find some nitpicky thing, after I say that probably.

Steve Jones: 99.

Chris: Yeah, so let’s just say 99. If we are, if we’re going from 99 down to whatever this new implementation would be, let’s say it’s 85, that doesn’t feel good, right? And I think that’s where the pressure really starts to sink in for me. But I think the second way that I would think about it, besides the high level trajectory.

Is what what’s the severity or the criticality of the regression, right? So is it something gets read a little funky on a screen reader, but it’s still intelligible? Or is it, I literally can’t get through this menu with a keyboard? And those are two very different levels of criticality. And I haven’t read all the tickets you opened with Max Mega Menu or how severe the issues are, and I know we’ll probably get into that a little bit.

But yeah I think those are the two ways that I would think about it and I would encourage people to think about it.

Are we being too hard on ourselves?

Amber Hinds: Yeah, so, so here’s going off on that, how severe is it? Because of course, yeah, we would never, ever launch something that didn’t have basic functionality like being tab functional.

What made this especially interesting was after we started looking at this plugin, I realized that Deque, which for folks who don’t know, they’re a very well respected company in the digital accessibility space. Super large hundreds employees in lots of different countries. They do trainings, they have the AxeCon online conference, which is a phenomenal event. Like, very well respected.

They relaunched their website. It is a WordPress website, and I noticed only because I had been inspecting Max Mega Menu, so I was very familiar with the CSS classes that they’re also using Max Mega Menu on their website. And so I was like, huh, this is interesting. And I looked, and the issues that I had opened or flagged for Max Max Mega Menu are present on Deque. I mentioned that in our team Basecamp and Steve was like, oh yeah, I actually looked at this with William, and there are some other problems as well. And I’m curious, Steve, if you wanna explain some of the items that you saw on Deque’s site?

Steve Jones: Yeah, and just to frame this a little bit, this is not calling out. This is an…

Amber Hinds: No, we’ll circle back to why I am mentioning this.

Chris: We are trying to philosophically process our own decision making matrices with outside information, right? And this is an example.

Amber Hinds: That’s a great way of putting it, Chris.

Steve Jones: So actually, so the issues that you opened, I mean, these are just some observations that I noticed really quick without looking at the tickets that you opened. But I’ll just run through these really quick just to kind of get an idea.

But the search input has no visible label. Search input screen reader reads out: Search for, search, text field, search. It’s a little redundant.

Amber Hinds: Kind of verbose.

Steve Jones: Yeah. The logo should describe the link’s purpose. It it currently says Deque Logo. And I’m not sure if that’s part of the Max Mega Menu. I think it is, right? I don’t know, but maybe not.

Amber Hinds: It could be just next to it.

Steve Jones: Yeah, mega menu, sub menu doesn’t follow expected tab order. So it’s like a list. And the list is like columns so like it tabs from so if it’s a three column list, it tabs the first one, then it goes right, right. Then down to the next row. Kind of like a table?

Chris: Weird. So it goes like horizontal and then, like reading order, almost like if you were reading side to side?

Steve Jones: Yeah, but if you were reading a table. But…

Chris: Yeah, so it’s like it goes left to right and then it jumps down to the next row.

Steve Jones: Yeah. Instead…

Chris: That’s weird.

Steve Jones: Three, yeah columns. So that’s a, not a failure, but it’s just kind of weird. I’m guessing it’s just that’s how they were able to achieve the layout by just floating those list items.

But the mega menu, sub menu list items. Oh, there’s list items used as headers, so it’s not necessarily bad, but so you have a list and the first one’s like the header of the links below. It’s not necessarily bad, but it’s just. It’s weird because it’s telling me there’s more, in my head I thought there were more links than there really are. Like one more link than there.

Amber Hinds: The count is off by one. Get to the end of the available links and you’re like, wait a minute. It told me there were four, but I only read three.

Steve Jones: I have the, you know, I have the privilege of seeing that with my eyes and I can deduce, but if I had my eyes closed or if my eyes didn’t work, I’d be very confused.

Let’s see, the mobile menus where things get funny. And I’ll preface this a little bit too. We have done quite a bit of remediation with Max Mega Menu for clients, and the mobile menu definitely is where you start to really run into some problems. But the the hamburger is in the dom order before the logo, so it messes up the tab order. So if you’re tabbed onto the hamburger menu and then you hit tab again thinking you’re gonna go inside the menu. No, you’re back on the logo. And then you gotta hit tab again to get into the menu.

The contact button is visually at the top of the menu, but actually at the bottom of the menu in the dom, messes with the tab ordering as well. So you think the first thing you should hit is contact us, but it actually goes through the whole menu, then jumps back to contact us, and then jumps back to another menu at a, like a smaller menu at the bottom.

Mobile doesn’t focus lock. Tabbing past the last menu item closes the mobile menu which can get back to it by tabbing back. Well, you have to tab back and open it again. Then tab back…

Chris: Then go all the way through again. So if you accidentally left it, you wasted potentially a bit of time.

Steve Jones: Yeah. Yeah. So you gotta, you’re basically starting back at square one on the mobile menu if you tab really there’s no indication that I’m gonna lose everything and have to start over.

Let’s see, the search icon shows when the mobile menu is open, but it is not focusable, so that sounds like a Z index issue. You could actually open the search menu as well and then open the mobile menu and it like, you can’t then get to the input and stuff, but it’s still showing you some of the UI, which is…

Amber Hinds: It’s technically behind the mobile, but it…

Steve Jones: Visually that…

Amber Hinds: Looks like it’s above but you can’t tab…

Steve Jones: Yeah. Yeah.

Amber Hinds: Oh, or click on it with your mouse.

Steve Jones: Mobile menu, sub menu doesn’t lock focus. So the way this works is it’s like a mega menu. So you have your main menu items, you click on one, it actually like slides, like a panel over, so it’s like a secondary panel. It doesn’t lock focus either.

So if you go through that and you keep tabbing, you actually will end up back on the main menu, tabbing through it. But visually, you’re still on the sub menu. Really confusing at that point to figure out how to get back to, to where you wanna get back to. At least from a visual perspective, maybe for a screen reader that’s not as much of an issue ’cause I can’t see it.

But it still didn’t lock focus in the menu they were in. They’re back on the main menu and they’re probably like, what’s going on? Since it does that I’m, I didn’t look at this, but I’m assuming like the, you know, expanded and stuff is still open.

Amber Hinds: Yeah, and again, not that we’re trying to call out Deque, but it is so interesting like when I think about my dilemma on what do we do? I could be like, we could launch it and if anyone points out, I’d be like, well, Deque’s using it.

They said…

Steve Jones: Yeah.

Amber Hinds: It’s okay, you know what I mean? Like this is what’s hard when this big company that is so well respected is willing to launch it. And maybe these problems I mean, the Z index thing on the search does seem like a mega problem. That is kind of a blocker that you could see it and you think you could click on it, you can’t. Maybe the other issues are more like, well, they’re not total failures, like the…

Steve Jones: Yeah.

Amber Hinds: Tab order thing because they could still be reached. So it’s usable in some sense. And so maybe that means it’s usable enough. And I don’t know, maybe Deque had this whole conversation internally and they’re like, it’s usable enough. We should just launch it.

Or they’re like, maybe they’re working on their own patch and they’re gonna release it later to fix all these things. And like you said, Steve, they’re deciding to be iterative. I have no idea, because we’re not part of that team. We don’t have that conversation.

But as an outsider and someone who’s also considering using the same plugin, like I’m sitting here thinking, is usable good enough? Like, or should we, as you said Steve, like we’re leaders in the industry, we’re trying to set an example. Should we and Deque be doing better than that? And should they not have launched this?

And, you know, I don’t know. That’s where I’m sitting, like seeing that on that website. It made me more confused than it helped, I think.

Steve Jones: Yeah, compliance is one thing and then usability goes well beyond compliance. It’s hard to say. Do they plan, do they have issues open in their internal system to fix these things, right? And reputationally we do have a reputation and we do have, you know, responsibility to practice what we preach a little bit. And some of those things are like, I know that if I tried to pass this to you and say, Hey, can you audit this?

Amber Hinds: I would have been like, no.

Steve Jones: She’d be like, nah, it’s not happening, dude. Fix it. Right? So…

Amber Hinds: Some of those things definitely crossed my line of they’re not just best practice, nice to have, they’re literal expectations for the minimum.

Steve Jones: And I’ll tag on here too, that like when we do our own internal remediations, we can blow through remediations and just knock issues out, and we hit navigation. Especially if there’s a mega menu. It is just like it. Everything comes to a crawl. ‘Cause menus are, and mega menus especially, extremely difficult. To remediate one, you don’t have access to the source on, like this one, like Max Mega Menu is a plugin.

We don’t have access to the source. Now can I modify the source? Yeah. But the second it updates, it’ll override it all. I could re, I could verion their plugin, but then I lose the ability to update their plugin. We really don’t have access to the source. So what we’ll write is patches on top of that, like with JavaScript or if the plugin provides hooks that we can hook into. So we’re trying to kind of, I don’t want to use the word hack on top of something we don’t have access to the source on, to make it accessible. And it can really be really challenging. And I mean, I recently did that with, a plugin using Oxygen’s mega menu, which, you know, on its surface the issues weren’t that bad, but it took a lot of work to remediate it and get it working without modifying their source.

Amber Hinds: And this is why historically, back when we used to build a lot of websites, when they wanted a mega menu, you had built like ACF based mega menu building tool.

Steve Jones: Yeah.

Amber Hinds: That we put into people’s themes instead of using an outside plugin. So that you could have full control over all the code and also it limited the clients. They could never go like stick a form, or like a Google map inside their menu because they pretty much could choose other menus or choose pages to link and that was it.

Steve Jones: Yeah, I think those, I think mega menu plugins try to be everything to everyone and , it’s a kind of a perfect recipe for poor accessibility.

Amber Hinds: Yeah, and I’ll be clear, I don’t wanna put weird things in our menu. I just wanna be able to have columns.

Steve Jones: Yeah. Yeah.

Should Equalize Digital launch something that’s not perfectly accessible?

Chris: Well, and that leads me to the thought that I wanted to share about, should we get over our fear? Right? How good is good enough? And I kind of wonder if what we’re seeing, what we would see on any website like this where there’s a few problems, you can still technically get through it, none of them are total deal breakers except maybe the one you mentioned with the search.

I wonder if it’s just a product of a conversation where business needs to produce certain outcomes or results are running up against, quality standards, whether those qualities are security, performance, or accessibility, or any of the others, right? And that’s frequently a point of friction that businesses will experience where they have to produce certain outcomes and they’re essential and the timeline that those outcomes need to be produced on, force a compromise somewhere. And that’s hard, right?

I don’t know if we’re at the point where we have to force a compromise in order to get a mega menu out because I think our website is still navigable. We can still surface what we need to surface. And wait and see. At least that’s kind of my position on it.

At least for now, you know, if it just continues to drag out then maybe we have to revisit it and put resources into it later in the future. But I think that was the tug of war that was probably happening is like a marketing team and a sales team being like, we have to get this new website out and the QA team basically being like, well, we can get through it. Nothing’s a total blocker. It’s not great, but it’s serviceable. Right?

And the main decision makers, the executives were probably like, okay, you know, put a pin in the calendar, we’re gonna come back and fix these other issues. But for now, it, it has to go live. And I feel like we’ve made decisions like that too in the past where it’s like it has to go out we have to iterate.

Steve Jones: Yeah. And I wanna call out one thing real quick too, but the reason why we choose Max Mega Menu and the reason why we have asked them to fix some of these things is because it already is the best mega menu for accessibility.

Chris: That is a very, thank you for, yeah. Yeah. That should be sung from the rooftops for sure.

Steve Jones: Yeah.

Amber Hinds: I mean, I started my support ticket on WordPress dot org with a thank you for all that you have already done because you are clearly, yeah, because some of them, you can’t even open a single dropdown without a mouse.

Steve Jones: Mm-hmm.

Amber Hinds: I guess that is interesting, right? And where does that leave us with our mega menu experiment? Maybe you’re right, Chris. Like it’s not a business need. Steve would argue that it is never a business need to have a mega menu on a website ever.

Steve Jones: Yeah, we haven’t talked about we…

Amber Hinds: So for us to push out something that isn’t perfect, it…

Steve Jones: Yeah.

Amber Hinds: Doesn’t make sense. Like we need to stick to our guns on, we wanna have a really great nav menu and….

Steve Jones: Yeah.

Amber Hinds: Not be willing to bend on that because Yeah, it’s not harming our business, I don’t think. I mean, who knows? Maybe we would put the mega menu on and then we would suddenly get a whole bunch more purchases and everybody would be like, oh wait, that was a business need.

Steve Jones: Yeah, because you know, accessibility’s one piece of the pie. You know, we haven’t talked about the user interface and user experience of using mega menus, so that’s a whole nother episode, and that’s probably a whole nother podcast as well.

Chris: Yeah.

Amber Hinds: I will say for anyone who’s listening, if you made it this far, I would love your thoughts on this whole, like where you think the line is. You know, you can find all of us on lots of different social media platforms, LinkedIn, Twitter we also have our Facebook group. Come in and leave us a comment on would you have launched the menu or would you have waited?

Well, we are excited to be back and we will be on our regular schedule, so you’re gonna be able to find another episode after this one in another two weeks. Thanks so much everybody.

Steve Jones: See yah!

Amber Hinds: Bye.

Thanks for listening to Accessibility Craft. If you found this episode valuable, please help us reach more people by subscribing, reviewing, or liking the show, and sharing this with your colleagues. Accessibility Craft is a production of Equalize Digital Inc. Steve Jones composed our theme music. To learn how Equalize Digital can support you on your accessibility journey, visit us at EqualizeDigital.com.