Is there such a thing as practical accessibility magic?
Inspired by October, Practical Magic, and a “Lime in the Coconut” Milkshake Sour DIPA from Blue Owl Brewing, Amber, Chris, and Steve open their “spellbooks” and dive in… They’re looking for the changes that can make a real difference to a website’s accessibility conformance.
Speaking of conformance levels, the conversation begins with the latest WCAG 3 draft. What might replace the familiar A, AA, and AAA conformance levels? How could reporting change? Listen, or read, to find out.
Then, our hosts put accessibility overlays under the “spell or curse?” test. The conversation draws on recent overlay research, accessibility guidance, and lawsuit data, but it also makes room for the people who installed a widget because they genuinely thought it would help.
And it isn’t all about overlays, we talk about 5+ fixes that you can start implementing right now that are so impactful, the usability improvements can feel a bit like practical magic. Finally, the team discusses AI-assisted captions, translations, accessibility testing, and development, because these days what conversation is complete without a mini AI-related side tangent?
Episode Outline
- Why a lime-and-coconut sour IPA became an October drink.
- Our early reactions to WCAG 3’s proposed core requirements, supplemental guidance, and reporting approach.
- What overlays claim to fix, what the research measures, and why good intentions don’t magically make a widget a complete solution.
- “Spellbook” fixes with potential site-wide impact: What are the top things we’d fix?
- What AI can offer alongside human efforts, where it can support accessibility testing and remediation without replacing us.
Links & Resources
- Blue Owl Brewing’s Lime in the Coconut
- W3C’s WCAG 3 article
- WCAG 3 draft
- Overlay Research
- UsableNet Lawsuit Tracker
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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 through their work.
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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: Hey, everybody. It’s Amber, and I’m here today with Chris.
Chris: Hey everybody.
Amber: And Steve.
Steve Jones: Hello everyone.
Amber: And this is episode number 186 of Accessibility Craft, which means you can find show notes and a full transcript if you go to accessibilitycraft.com/186. I think we have a super fun episode planned that maybe will fit with some October vibes.
We’ll have a conversation about that and decide whether or not, but I hope you enjoy it, and I hope that after you enjoy this, you give us a like or a rating, or you share this episode with your friends. We very much would appreciate you doing that. We start every episode with a beverage.
[00:01:24] Today’s Beverage
Amber: What are we drinking today, Chris?
Chris: We are having from Blue Owl Brewing, Lime in the Coconut Milkshake Sour Double IPA or DIPA, sweet lime and coconut. We like sours, but we don’t like IPAs, so I felt like this one would be maybe a conundrum that sparks some conversation.
Amber: Yeah, please tell me what is a DIPA?
Chris: I think they just put double the amount of hops.
Steve Jones: Oh, gross.
Chris: Don’t… Yeah.
Amber: But it’s a sour.
Chris: Yeah, but it’s a sour
Steve Jones: Oh…
Amber: I thought sours were always fruity.
Chris: I mean, it’s got lime. Lime’s a fruit, technically.
Amber: So I was looking at the description on their website, it says… Well, of course, are you guys all familiar with the song, “You put the lime in the coconut, you drink it all up”? I was like, I wanna…
Chris: Yes.
Amber: But, then I’m afraid we’ll get banned from YouTube.
Chris: W- we’ll get taken down for sure.
Amber: Yeah, they’ll be like, “Copyright.” I don’t know, maybe you’re allowed to do five seconds or something. But, it was interesting because it says on there that it contains milk sugar, I guess because that’s the milkshake part, and maybe I guess they’re trying to give it more of the like coconut milk kinda vibe. I have no idea what milk sugar is.
Chris: Steve’s got the owl there. It’s also got pink flamingos on the side, which I think is kinda interesting, but it’s got a nice illustration of an owl with Blue Owl Brewing, and a couple of wheat things in the emblem. And it’s got a very festive, tropical, right, motif going on.
Amber: Yeah.
Chris: I’m excited to, I’m excited to experience this conundrum of a beverage maybe, or maybe it’ll just be… Maybe it’ll be awful. Maybe it’ll be delicious. I’m gonna crack it open.
Amber: Something because I think obviously I said a minute ago we’re gonna have some October vibes, and this beverage does not look like October. It’s like pink and lime green. It looks like Summer. But here is why I connect this beverage to October.
There is a movie called Practical Magic which came out in the ’90s, and it’s about… It has Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman and a bunch of super famous women in it, and they’re witches. And there’s this scene where they have midnight margaritas and they dance in their kitchen, and they sing the Coconut and the Lime song.
Chris: Mm-hmm.
Amber: And so when Chris got this that’s all I thought about, and I’m like, “It’s October,” so I don’t know.
Steve Jones: Yeah.
Amber: It looks like a summer beverage, but I’m calling this a Halloween beverage. Have you guys watched Practical Magic?
Steve Jones: Maybe 30 years ago.
Amber: Are you planning or is your wife planning to rewatch it and then go watch Practical Magic 2 at the movie theater? ‘Cause I think that’s out right now.
Steve Jones: Or was it at the movie theater? Yeah…
Amber: I think so.
Steve Jones: I don’t know.
Amber: I wa- I was sort of thinking maybe I’d introduce my older daughter it, see if she wants to watch it with me. How’s it smell?
Steve Jones: Mm, sour.
Chris: I like the smell. It’s got the hop, but there’s lime and there’s a coconut undertone. So it’s delivering exactly what the can promises.
Steve Jones: Mm-hmm.
Amber: It does smell good. Man, I wish I had brought a cup. I want to see what color it is.
Chris: Very tart, like a sour, like you’d expect. The bitter is there too from the hop. But the tart, the tartness like offsets it a little bit, makes it a little more fruity. I saw Steve’s face. What do you think, Steve?
Steve Jones: Holy smokes. It…
Amber: That a good holy smokes or a bad one?
Steve Jones: I mean, Chris is like, “It’s tart.” And I’m like, “It is super tart.” And…
Amber: It, yeah, it’s got good lime flavor.
Steve Jones: Once you get past the first, it hits you hard the first time. But it’s not too bad the second time.
Amber: Ooh, I like this. It tastes like a cocktail to me, not a beer.
Chris: You know, I can see that.
Amber: The hops or the IPA at all.
Chris: Oh, you’re not getting the, like on the end, you’re not getting like the bitterness at all? Or is it just…
Amber: No, on the…
Chris: Subtle for you?
Amber: The m- the taste to me is sweeter on the end. I get the tart, the sour up front, and then it finishes with that kind of sweeter, milky coconut. I can smell hops a tiny bit, but I don’t… this does not taste like an IPA to me.
Steve Jones: No.
Chris: Yeah. The sour really cuts it. I feel like if the lime wasn’t there, there would definitely be more hop. But I am getting a definite, on my palate, I’m getting a definite, like, constant and consistent undertone and finish of bitterness like you would get from an IPA, but it is very lime coconut, like you said. I’m gonna taste it again. I don’t know if I’m getting the lacto side of things, like the milk, but…
Amber: I kinda get that. I do kinda get the creamy
Steve Jones: I feel like it runs a wave, like it comes in sour, gets kind of creamy, and then the end is a little more sour again.
Chris: Mm-hmm.
Steve Jones: Yeah.
Chris: There’s a lot to think about with this one. I’m enjoying the complexity.
Amber: Man, where is this brewery?
Chris: They’re in Austin, Texas. Yeah.
Amber: Austin. I’ve never heard of this brewery, but now I suddenly wanna try more. That’s kinda cool.
Steve Jones: You remember those tearjerker candies we had when we were kids?
Amber: Oh, or Warheads.
Chris: Warheads. Yeah.
Amber: Warheads was I always thought they tasted a little bit like puke. But it was like weirdly like you want it. I don’t even know. It had the weird sour that was awful, and then it would get sweet, and it was like you hated it, but you still wanted to eat it.
Steve Jones: Why do I keep eating this?
Amber: Yeah.
Chris: There is a Warheads soda or maybe a beer. I’m, I can’t remember which one, but I feel like I’ve seen it around. Maybe we should get that sometime.
Steve Jones: I mean, I thought…
Chris: Just for Amber.
Steve Jones: … Leaving like a sourness on my lips and stuff.
Chris: Mm-hmm.
Amber: So it reminds you of that candy?
Mm-hmm. Alright…
Chris: (cross Talk)
Amber: … Two thumbs up. It’s unexpected, and it delivers on what it promises. I like it!
Chris: I’m two thumbs up. I’m two thumbs up also because it kind of gave me what I expected, but it subverted it in a lot of ways too. It’s very complex and I’m getting something different every time I drink it, so I’m two thumbs up.
Steve Jones: Yeah. I think it’s an interesting beer. It’s a IPA that doesn’t– when you said DIPA and you said that it’s double the hops, I’m like, “Okay, so double the urine flavor,” right?
Chris: Yeah.
Steve Jones: But it’s actually not. I mean, it’s interesting, it’s fun. I like it. I’m like, I’m rarely ever interested to drink the extra ones you sent me.
Amber: But you might actually with this one?
Steve Jones: Yeah, I’m like, “Ah, this would be fun to like turn on Practical Magic 2 and sit at home watch it.”
Amber: I am curious, can you guys get with me on this as a Fall beverage, or does this still feel very Summer to you?
Steve Jones: Yeah, I don’t know why I feel like an owl is fall, but it… I mean, an owl can be around anytime, but it seems like an owl would be more Fall. The flamingos are definitely, you know, more summertime vibe.
[00:08:53] WCAG 3 Latest Draft: Our Reactions
Amber: So WCAG 3 has been making progress. There is a, an official draft available for people to review. We’ll post a link to it in the show notes if you wanna check it out. It has some stuff that is quite different and I think it would be interesting for us to talk about it.
Steve Jones: Yeah. Let me put on my WCAG thinking hat here.
Amber: Oh.
Chris: Oh, there you go.
Amber: Help you think better about WCAG?
Steve Jones: Yeah.
Amber: Yeah. So number one, what feels like totally big breaking change, which is I guess why we’re going from two to three, like a big … What did we call that whole version number? I don’t even know what that’s called in version control, but major ver- yeah, it is a…
Chris: mm-hmm.
Amber: … Major change, which is that we are moving away from A, AA, AAA for measuring conformance.
Chris: Oh, that’s interesting. All or nothing, kinda.
Amber: Yeah, so the, draft proposes a single level of conformance called core requirements that are then supplemented by additional requirements, recommended practices, and reporting tiers. Here’s my question for you all. Do you think this makes it easier or harder to measure your website?
Steve Jones: How’s that any different? ‘Cause…
Amber: yeah, I mean, I guess like it is weird because you could say was A the core requirement?
Steve Jones: Yeah.
Amber: But maybe I guess maybe AA was the core requirement and then AAA was all the recommended practices.
Steve Jones: Yeah.
Amber: I don’t know.
Chris: What’s the reporting tiers piece? Did they go into that much with what they mean by that?
Amber: So there is a blog post that Shawn Lawton Henry, who is the W3C Web Accessibility Initiative director, published. We can also link this in the show notes. And he did talk a little bit more about, like, how it’s going to be used both as kind of like a ruler for measurement of accessibility and compliance and how they’re planning to change all of that with reporting. You know, it will be interesting for us or anyone else who does accessibility conformance reports, ’cause this is a service we offer and the template that we use comes from a different organization, but it’s like the internationally recognized template. That whole thing is gonna have to be updated.
Steve Jones: Mm-hmm.
Amber: Because it is all based on the 2.2 version is the one that we use.
Steve Jones: For listeners, maybe the easiest way to break it down a little bit is you touched on so single level conformance is going to take in A and AA criterion, and then the supplemental isn’t necessarily the AAA, but it’s just things y- covers areas that cannot be objectively measured or do not apply to every situation.
Chris: So some of them are use case specific kind of or…
Amber: I think too in the blog post that I mentioned that Sean wrote, he talked a lot about how one of the shifts they’re trying to make is making sure that they’re balancing different disabled people’s needs because not everyone has the same needs. And he provides an example, for example, with sign language.
So sign is the first language of some people, and some people are not even fluent in written text, so just providing a written alternative is not sufficient for communicating to them. And so they said, “In an ideal world, perhaps having all text and audio content also available in sign languages would be most accessible, but that is not a practical requirement, not with today’s technology and resources.” So that is something where they’re trying to figure out how do you balance out these challenges because that is something that these people need, but practically implementing it is very difficult.
Steve Jones: Mm-hmm. The interesting thing is like where does AAA fold into? Or are they kind of like
AAA in its current state is not always something that can objectively always be measured accurately.
Chris: It seems like AAA kind of becomes this diaspora of different things that could apply or not.
Amber: Yeah, I think some of it can be very clearly measured. Like the AAA success criterion for color contrast, although that’s a whole other conversation maybe we should have when we get closer to WCAG 3, which is how is color contrast changing? But like that is… it’s very clearly pass or fail, can be measured numerically, right?
Steve Jones: Right.
Amber: But yeah. I think it’s…
Steve Jones: But where does that fall here? Yeah.
Amber: I don’t know. It’s hard. I mean, they haven’t explicitly said that they’re gonna make it part of core requirements. They’ve only explicitly said that A and AA will be part of core requirements. So th- think the other thing that is interesting here is there’s this whole conversation now about whether accessibility requirements should depend upon context.
Because right now, Web Content Accessibility Guidelines c- can be equally applied to any website. And that means my personal blog, which I know fails because I have many images that I added 15 years ago of my children that have no alt text or probably even more horribly have image underscore 1-2-3-4 or something as a alt text, which I laugh, but it’s really bad, but also it’s blog posts from forever ago. But my website failing that is way different from I need to go pay my medical bill.
Steve Jones: Mm-hmm.
Amber: I need to submit an onboarding form to my doctor, right? That has a much different severity implication even for the exact same issue.
Steve Jones: Yeah.
Chris: I mean, I think we’ve always gauged severity at least a little bit as a society, right? What is public sector versus, you know, institutional private sector versus Main Street private sector ver- versus, you know, personal and private. So I think having these different contexts accounted for in some way is an interesting proposal and probably more reflective of, I guess, the real world versus having everything be black and white, all or nothing.
Steve Jones: Mm-hmm.
Chris: I– As a high-level comment I think I’m generally supportive of it.
Amber: Yeah.
Chris: Ultimately it comes down to how they implement it, right?
Steve Jones: Y- yeah, I think the li- like what you’re saying is the lines are currently drawn through regulation. I think what this does maybe is it takes a step further and helps define those lines in the criterion a little bit more than through regulation. So yeah, your water bill needs to be able to be paid because it’s a public utility that receives funds so they, there’s certain conformance levels they have to meet.
But you know, somebody that just a website, like a medical… A lot of times, know, sometimes medical can get away with some stuff, right? And because they’re not necessarily taking public funds and things like that. But so I think it kind of like tries to pull some of the regulatory things into the criterion, meaning that like, hey, if th- if this is where somebody goes to buy an essential service, even though it’s not publicly funded, it should still be accessible.
Amber: Yeah. I mean, I think honestly having it try to measure the severity based on how much this actually impacts someone’s life is probably really important, and I think it’s good that they’re doing that. And I mean, you know, if we step into WordPress land and we talk about all the work that I did with some other folks on the accessibility team about themes, like we didn’t say if it’s not accessibility ready it can’t exist on WordPress.org.
That is an optional thing that people can choose to opt into, right? Because there are some websites where maybe it doesn’t matter. I mean, there are websites that aren’t publicly accessible. I could decide if I wanted to, I’m gonna make a blog with photos of my kids and I’m gonna password protect it and only my parents and Chris’s parents can see it, and then I only have to create a theme that works for them. And maybe I wanna choose one that’s not accessible. I don’t think I would, but you know what I mean. Like I think recognizing that in how we measure things is important. So…
Everyone should go check out both the blog post and the draft which was recently updated in September. This is all open source. You can comment on it on GitHub.
You can contribute to the discussion or suggest edits if you don’t like what the rules are. I think I wanna talk a little bit…
[00:18:18] Practical Accessibility Magic Overview
Amber: i’m, this is me being a nerd. I wanna shift us into that magic that I’m pulling off of our beverage. But I wanna lean a little bit into this, and after the commercial break, I would like us to come back and talk about the kind of accessibility magic that doesn’t require witchcraft. Just a little knowledge and the right ingredients and what can we do that maybe feels like magic and gets some stuff done.
[00:18:49] 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.
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[00:20:03] Spell, or Curse? We Talk About Overlays!
Amber: All right, so we’re back. I wanna start with, for anyone who is a new listener, it seems like we should take just a short moment to address what is the most common magic wand of accessibility, which is accessibility overlays. maybe we should start with, for anyone who isn’t familiar, is an overlay?
Chris: I’ll take it. An accessibility overlay is a combination, usually toolbar plus maybe some JavaScript based fixes that are running in the background from a third-party server that inserts itself between the end user and the website they’re trying to browse and attempts to help solve barriers for them.
And they do that through a combination of trying to automatically fix some things, but also giving the users additional options, which– I mean, the menu of options on some of these honestly makes me dizzy, and I don’t even use assistive technology. But it’s you know, high contrast, low contrast, dark mode, zooming in and out, screen readers, text size, all kinds of stuff that these solutions, try to offer.
That’s fundamentally what an overlay is, and they come in about as many flavors as ice cream. There’s all kinds of them out there.
Amber: All right, so this sounds great. Something recognizes I have a disability, it tries to fix the page as it loads, and it gives me a whole slew of tools that I can enable to further fix the page to my preferences. Is this the magic that we all need on our websites?
Steve Jones: Well, so let’s look at how magic actually is in practicality, right? Like in the real world, right? Magic is something that we as spectators sit back and observe, and it looks just like that, magic. Things are appearing where they shouldn’t be appearing. Things are disappearing, you know, all kinds of tricks, right?
And that’s really what they are. But behind the scenes, that magician is actually doing real things to make it appear to us as if it is magic. I think with the overlay, a lot of times where, one, the first step they get in trouble is that they are trying to present the magic, that they are trying to obfuscate the actual practical work that goes into making the site accessible. And it’s not that all the things they do (don’t) work. It’s just that they are presenting it as this magic. Click this button and magically your accessibility problems will disappear.
Amber: Within 24 hours.
Steve Jones: But I actually…
Amber: Yeah.
Steve Jones: I think it’s a little bit more of it should be presented a little bit more as practical magic.
Amber: So I think we should talk about that a little bit more in just a minute. But I do wanna say for folks that are questioning, you know, is this good or not, we have a whole episode that we can link in the show notes where we talk a lot more about accessibility overlays. But I am revisiting this today because I saw on October 8th, BugVisio… this is a company I wasn’t super familiar with. They do scanning and auditing. I don’t know how great their tool is. Use ours instead.
But sometimes we like to look at other people’s content because people put out really interesting content, and they actually published a study where they tested 62 websites that were already using an accessibility overlay. They measured each one with Axe-core twice. Once when the overlay was on, and then once they intentionally blocked all the scripts, ’cause it’s just JavaScript, so they could block that from running. And then they tested the website after to try and figure out was the overlay actually fixing anything or not.
And they found that on 90% of the websites, the overlay made no measurable difference to WCAG violations. 93.5% of overlay sites still failed at least one WCAG criterion. And said that this is actually slightly worse than the 87.7% they measured just in general because they had done a, like a control study of 219 homepages. So the ones with overlays were worse than their random sample of websites that don’t have overlays. It talks more. We’ll link to it if you wanna see what did it change, what did it not do, but I feel like just st- statistically this shows you that overlays don’t deliver on the magic they’re promising.
Steve Jones: Yeah. What I’d be interested… I mean, I haven’t gone super deep into that, that test that BugVizio did, but what would b- really be interesting to see is is it just not fully fixing the certain thing that it claims that it should fix, or is it fixing some things and breaking some things? Are we ha- is it actually introducing accessibility regressions at the same time?
Chris: Yeah.
Amber: I think that’s possible based on my anecdotal observations with overlays. I’ve seen things where you turn on high contrast mode and then it can’t fix everything and something fails contrast now. But I think, you know, the European Commission says that overlays are not an appropriate solution for meeting EN 301 549 and it’s also probably worth noting we could link to UsableNet.
They put out a lawsuit tracker every month, and their September data, last month, the last full month, they have 25% of the lawsuits filed in the last month were against defendants using accessibility widgets. So may not fix your website, may still get you sued.
Chris: Yeah, because there’s this there’s this amazing tool called BuiltWith, where you can run searches on websites and companies based on the technologies they use. And I guarantee you that the law firms and the serial plaintiffs doing these lawsuits are using BuiltWith to find targets, because that sticks a, you know, detectable technology element that says, “I know I have problems, and I’m trying to fix it as cheaply as possible” on your website, makes you a target.
I think that’s the reason that this 25% statistic, that it’s not unique to September 2026, folks. I’ve seen that 25% statistic for, I think since 2023. Multiple years in a row, it’s been 20-plus percent of websites that at the time they’re sued, they’re using an overlay.
Amber: I mean, we’ve had multiple clients come to us who have, who are using overlays and have been sued not just once, but like twice or three times.
Steve Jones: Well…
Amber: Yeah.
Steve Jones: Specifically because they’re showing a widget on the front end of their we- they’re showing an overlay widget on the front end of their website, that draws the attention of potential lawsuits. And it’s kind of counterintuitive to, to what I think a lot of people think.
“Well, if I show this badge that I ha- or that I show this widget then it shows that I care and that I’m doing something.” But it, I actually think, you know, the good intentions may actually c- come back to harm even more.
Chris: Yeah. I think it’s great you pointed that out about good intentions, right? Because I don’t think that everyone installing an overlay has inherently bad intentions. In fact, I think plenty of people think that they’re doing the right thing. I’ve had plenty of those conversations. So don’t beat yourself up if you are.
You were probably taken for a ride with a bad sales pitch.
Amber: Yeah. think, I mean, I think the other thing on the, why it might get you sued is it it sh- not that ignorance of the law is an excuse, but it definitely, shows that you are aware of accessibility requirements, right? In a way that maybe not having that wouldn’t show, so I don’t know. So overlays are not our magic answer.
[00:28:19] Better Ingredients for Your “Magic” Accessibility Potions
Amber: Let’s talk about if there’s anything that does work. For example, I think it’d be really interesting if we could talk about some like small accessibility fixes that maybe have dis- disproportionately large impacts. So just me being a nerd. If we’re making our spell book for new to accessibility people, what would you put in it? What are the things that you think do kinda feel like magic or can fix something with a very small tweak that has a big impact?
Chris: Small tweak, big impact.
Amber: I’ll go first. Focus outlines. And that, so if you have WordPress website, you could use our plugin and turn it on, and it would just it should all of your focus outlines on everything back to your browser styles. But even if you don’t have a WordPress website, this is the tiniest little, I don’t know, two line CSS.
Steve Jones: Mm-hmm.
Amber: Three lines, ’cause I guess you’ve gotta have the opening tag, you gotta have the one line, and then you gotta have the closing tag.
So that’s three lines of CSS. So small. And it would… And if you put an important on it maybe, then it will fix everything on your whole website. It’s so small, and it really helps a lot of people that use keyboards to navigate.
Steve Jones: Yeah, I think a big one that I see a lot if you’re using WordPress should be very simple to fix is just clearly adding labels to inputs and making sure that error messages themselves correctly on all your forms throughout the website. Most people doing WordPress are using some kind of form plugin such as Gravity Forms, and Gravity Forms has settings in there if you actually have the labels turned off.
I think they’re on by default, so if they’re off, somebody’s intentionally done that or you’re using a kind of a legacy setup. Just making sure that those, all those input fields have visible labels.
Chris: Mm-hmm.
Amber: Yeah.
Chris: Yeah.
Amber: You think about going back to WCAG 3 and how they wanna talk about the things that have the biggest severity impact, like forms on your website are probably one of the most important things to get right from an accessibility standpoint. That’s where your conversions happen.
Chris: That and navigation, but I don’t feel like navigation fits tidily into small, fast things you can do, so I’m not mentioning that as an option. Usually it’s like the hardest thing you can do. It’s still very impactful. What I was gonna say wa- that feels like actually maybe kind of a l- light lift is most, maybe not all, but most themes, builders will have some sort of centralized place with settings where you can define colors. In core WordPress, that might be in the customizer.
Or in your theme, it might be in your theme settings. You might have to dig around or check documentation to find it. But once you find it, if you have light, washed-out colors with even lighter, more washed-out colors for your color scheme, increase that contrast until it’s a four-and-a-half to one ratio, and you can use a free contrast checker to do that.
And if you can roll those out at the site level, you’re potentially eliminating hundreds or thousands or even tens of thousands of accessibility issues with a few toggles in your settings area. So I think that’s a, that’s definitely something that can feel like a magic trick particularly if you’re trying to knock issues off of a really large full-site scan.
Steve Jones: Yeah, and I think another one real easy like that along those lines is your links. You know, what are your global styles on your links? You know, are they underlined? Do they have the correct color contrast? You know, are you u- are you differentiating them from your normal content in a couple different ways?
You know, such as color and un- and text decoration, putting an underline under it. So that’s a, that’s real low-hanging fruit that, like the same with what Chris said, could potentially fix thousands of issues throughout your website.
Amber: And so I think the pattern here is that the things that are most magical are the things that are global issues. If you’re in Accessibility Checker Pro and you go to our Issues Explorer and you group by code snippet or something. The things where you can see this oc- occurs almost everywhere, or in the header or the footer so it’s on every single page.
And sometimes fixing that is relatively simple and you only have to do it one time, and then it improves your website on every URL. That’s the best we can answer for magic, I guess. Is you gotta do some work, but there are certain things that do feel a little magical. But wait, what about AI?
[00:33:06] Can AI Help Us Cast Our Accessibility “Spells” Faster, Better?
Chris: Yeah. So we can’t not talk about it these days, no matter what we’re talking about. So what role does or could AI play in doing some accessibility magic?
Amber: All right, so I’m gonna share an anecdote, and I hope this isn’t secret information because I’m gonna share it on our podcast. Everyone, don’t tell WordPress Accessibility Day organizing team that I shared this on our podcast.
Chris: On our public podcast.
Amber: Shh. No, it’s just the three of us here talking.
Chris: Yeah.
Amber: Enjoying our practical magic beverage. We’ve been having some interesting conversations about captioning, I do think AI captioning has come a really long way. And we have continued for WordPress Accessibility Day to use CART captioners. At Equalize Digital, we have CART captioners come to all of our meetups that we run and our sales webinars that we run because historically AI captions have not been that good. But there’s two things that are happening here, in particular with Zoom, that’s motivating us to kind of look at is AI captions the magic we need?
One is that in May, annoyingly, of 2026, Zoom decided that the transcript of the session is different from the captions. Now if you are using a human being to caption, is no transcript view where someone can view more than just the little box of captions.
They can’t view the whole history of it, and it doesn’t save it as anything separate, which became an issue for us at Meetup and also during WordPress Accessibility Day. There were people… I mean, there was one person who was typing in all caps in the chat like, “Why did you turn off the transcript?” And we were like, “We didn’t. We promise. We have the transcript on. It’s just Zoom is not going to show you the captions in the transcript.”
So there’s that, but then the other thing that does feel a little bit magical is that Zoom, as part of that change, they implemented the ability of if you’re using AI to caption and you have it turned on in your account then, the AI captions could be delivered in one of, I wanna call it 25 languages. That number could be wrong.
Steve Jones: Mm-hmm.
Amber: Which does feel like magic to me.
Steve Jones: Yeah.
Chris: Yeah.
Amber: During WordPress Accessibility Day, there was someone who joined I’m kind of guessing based on their name, I could be wrong, but they might have been from Germany, and they were like, “Wait, why can’t I change the captions to my language?”
‘Cause they wanted to be able to read them because they’re not English isn’t their first language, and they wanted to support that, and we were like, “It really sucks, but Zoom doesn’t support that when we’re using human captioners. We have to use the AI cap-” So now we’re having all these discussions, and I will preview, and probably we should come back for another Accessibility Craft episode about this because I’m planning to run diffs the next couple months on both our meetup, and then for the ones I can get from WordPress Accessibility Day where we have a transcript to compare and see is the AI good enough?
Could we stop paying… Sounds horrible. I wanna pay humans. I think that’s good. I don’t wanna take jobs away from humans. But if it provides this extra magic of now all of a sudden our content can be available in all these extra languages. That to me feels like worth exploring, so…
Steve Jones: i’d like to expand on that a little bit too, ’cause I’ve had my own little kind of epiphany with you know, AI transcriptions and stuff. So I just recently went through many rounds of interviews with people all around the world. In doing so, I was transcribing the, you know, the, the interviews so that I could have it after the fact to review, not necessarily for the transcript itself, but I got in a few… I got in several calls with pe- you know, people from India and Egypt and, you know, different places around the world, and where their accents are very thick and their English is not super fluent.
There was definitely two or three calls that I was on where if I didn’t have that transcript on, I would’ve had no idea what the person was saying. I could’ve caught a few things here and there maybe put, pieced it together. But when I got in those calls, I pulled the transcript up and I was watching it. And the interesting thing about it is it goes two ways, Amber. It’s not just that it takes my English transcript and provides it in these different languages. It’s that the, the AI transcription understands those accents…
Chris: I was gonna ask. Even with the accent, like the transcript itself made sense as you were reading it? Like it wasn’t getting words wrong, at least as far as you could perceive?
Steve Jones: Yeah, I mean, it’s not perfect, but I don’t think any transcription service is perfect. But I’m listening going, “I can’t understand any of this.” And…
Amber: But the AI could.
Steve Jones: The transcript’s just spitting it right out in perfect English for me. So…
Amber: That’s good to know because we had… This was a conversation with WordPress Accessibility Day, ’cause they were like, “You need to have speakers that don’t have that don’t just have American accents.” And so then everybody was like, well, they were looking at our upcoming, they were like, “Well, when William presents, maybe you could get him to really put on a Scottish accent the whole time just to see how the AI handles it.” I don’t know. But you’re already saying you think the AI can handle the accents?
Steve Jones: Yeah, it must be training with people with different accents, right? And, you know…
Amber: Yeah.
Steve Jones: How do people from different re- you know, countries throughout the world do like an English, you know, a translation. Because I mean, I found it extremely helpful, and I’ve never relied on transcriptions b- before that, and it was just…
It was quite eye-opening to me. Oh, this is not just for me to reference later, this is m- for me to actually fluently communicate with somebody that doesn’t speak with the same exact accent as me.
Amber: That’s really interesting. So maybe that is some magic. I’m always curious on the dev side, is there any AI magic happening there that people can be aware of on accessibility?
Steve Jones: Yeah, I mean, I think we would not be 100% truthful if we’re not saying that AI doesn’t help, ’cause it absolutely helps. You can use AI to test for accessibility issues. You can use AI to throw your solutions back and forth. You can use AI to help you identify the s- the success criterion that a certain thing is.
Or you can even use it to “Well, my auditor’s telling me this. I’m questioning it. What do you think?” Right? And you can have it help you create code snippets to help remediate accessibility issues.
We’ve actually entered into a, an experimental phase with Accessibility Checker. So Accessibility Checker will do front-end fixes on your website, like automated “magic” fixes on your website. Accessibility Checker will tell you how the magician is doing the tricks. If it doesn’t do them correctly y- you know, we don’t just apply a fix. We check it with the Accessibility Checker. So if our fix is applied and it actually didn’t work, then Accessibility Checker itself will flag it as an issue. We’re validating our own fixes, which overlays typically don’t do a lot of. So-
Amber: I don’t think overlays tell you, “Hey, we, it broke on the…” I don’t know.
Steve Jones: … it may scan…
Amber: Maybe they can at least tell you if it failed to load on the page.
Steve Jones: Yeah, I do…
Amber: I don’t know.
Steve Jones: … Think some of them offer separate scanning services and stuff too, but we’re experimenting with some things with Accessibility Checker and tying AI into Accessibility Checker. ‘Cause we’ve spent six years building up this data infrastructure for Accessibility Checker, these rule sets for Accessibility Checker, and now how can we expose that through an MCP server that you can connect with your AI to help you, get that information and then make a fix for it, and then apply it all through an AI interface.
So I think it’s, I think it’s worth going down that road, but I don’t think it’s worth giving up the… You know, there’s still– We still need humans to do the manual audits. We can’t w- see a time where we’re ever gonna get away from that. And user testing is always super important if, you know, if you’re dealing with, you know, testing for different impacted populations and things like that.
So the AI is a great tool to help supplement us, but it’s not a replacement for everything.
Chris: Well, that was the through line I heard in literally everything you said. It is helping me do this. It is helping me research this. It is giving me ideas for that. It is offering additional context from an accessibility finding I received to help me respond in XYZ appropriate way, right? It’s supplementing the human in the room, improving you, making you faster, making you better. But the intent is not to have it be a replacement, except for captions. Maybe, I don’t know. That’s the…
Amber: Yeah. It’s an i- it’s one ingredient in the spell.
Chris: Yeah. Yeah.
Amber: Yeah.
Steve Jones: Yeah and captions are something that lend itself AI very well. And AI, be, you know, just as overlays will present their solutions as one-click magic fixes, right? People making AI transcription services will present their transcripts as an AI solution, when in reality, I’m sure there’s a slew of software engineers, there’s a slew of people giving them data, testing this, right? Like, how do you find all those people with those different English accents, right? There’s probably still a ton of human involvement in the generation of that service.
Amber: Things that look like they would just work by magic are powered by lots and lots of works behind the scenes.
Steve Jones: Exactly. Yeah.
Amber: Yep. So, well, I don’t know. It’s kind of an, an interesting conversation and I would love to hear from other people. If you wanna leave us a comment, let us know if you found what you think is a little magic trick that helps make accessibility easier for you. Leave us a comment and let us know.
Chris: All right. Bye everybody
Steve Jones: Cheers.
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.