AAArdvark Accessibility Podcast

Join hosts Natalie Garza and Natalie MacLees in episode 28 of the AAArdvark Accessibility Podcast as they continue discussing web design for digital accessibility. Topics include the proper use of headings for creating meaningful hierarchy, text spacing and typography principles, consistent navigation design, considerations for limiting motion and animations, and the impact of videos in design. Learn about best practices and resources like WCAG in Plain English and the new AAArdvark Circle community. Natalie Garza: Hello, everybody, and welcome to the AAArdvark Accessibility Podcast. This is episode 28. I’m Natalie Garza, one of the co-hosts, and with me today is. Natalie MacLees: Natalie MacLees, the other co-host. Natalie Garza: And she is an accessibility expert here to answer all of our questions today. So this episode is the second part of the one we did last week on web design for digital accessibility. We’re gonna pick up where we left off. So starting with the next topic, which is headings. Natalie MacLees: Headings. Yeah. So you wanna make sure that you’re including headings in your design. And before you hand that design off to a developer, you would wanna put some annotations in the design. To let them know which heading levels should be used for each thing, and that way, you can make sure that there is a meaningful hierarchy to those headings. So I think we’ve talked about this before, but just a quick refresher. There should be one H1 on the page, and that H1 should be the main idea of that page. So the main reason that that page exists, it’s probably going to match or be very close to the title of the page. So that’s a good hint on which heading should be the H1 on the page.  Then each section of the page should be headed up by an H2, and if you have subsections under those sections, those would be H3 and so on and so forth. You can go all the way down to an H6, although it’s pretty rare to need much past an H3 or an H4. Natalie Garza: Yeah. And remember, headings are not stylistic choices like they’re there for a reason. Natalie MacLees: Yes, they do make text large and bold, but they also say this is a heading for the section of content that follows. So if you just need big, bold texts because you’re putting text over an image for a big banner or something like that, you have to think about whether that makes sense for that to be a heading or not. Like, is it actually heading up a section of content? ’cause if it’s not, it should probably just be a paragraph that’s styled to be big.  Natalie Garza: All right, so those are headings next on the list. Text spacing kind of goes hand in hand. Natalie MacLees: Yeah, and I would even maybe call this typography. So there are only a few official WCAG rules that deal with text and typography. Shockingly few, if you ask me, actually, because there’s no rule around minimum font size, for example, which is kind of surprising. And there are no rules around which typefaces you choose. And obviously, a typeface can be pretty difficult to read, for anybody like, let alone somebody who may have a learning disability or a reading disability.  But we do have a few rules around line heights. You wanna make sure...

18 Jul 13min

Join hosts Natalie Garza and digital accessibility expert Natalie MacLees in the 27th episode of the AAArdvark Accessibility Podcast, as they discuss important considerations for designers in creating accessible websites. They cover topics including color contrast, touch targets, responsive design, hover and focus states, and forms. Also, learn about resources like WCAG in Plain English and the AAArdvark Circle community. Natalie Garza: Hello everybody, and welcome to the AAArdvark Accessibility Podcast. This is episode 27. I’m Natalie Garza, and with me today is, Natalie MacLees: Natalie MacLees. Natalie Garza: And she is an accessibility expert here to walk us through today’s topic, which is web design for digital accessibility. So a lot of people think that digital accessibility falls only on developers’ plates who are building the websites, but that’s completely untrue.  Natalie MacLees: I mean, it does fall on their plates, but it’s not only on their plates. It falls on the plates of everybody who’s involved in making a website. So starting from planning, project management, design, user experience, content, copywriting, marketing, photography, and images.  Every part that goes into making the website, everybody has some responsibility for accessibility, but we’re not gonna talk about everybody today. We’re just gonna talk about the designers. Natalie Garza: Yeah, because the designers, a lot of the time, will set the tone for the website project. Natalie MacLees: Yes, the designers tend to come in pretty early in the process, so they have a lot to do with the direction that things go and making sure that things like color schemes and forms and all of those are designed to be accessible from the very beginning. Natalie Garza: ’cause you can’t always expect the developer to know how to implement a lot of stuff. Like the designer, they’re the one there to tell them how you should execute the website, whether it’s like a hover state that you don’t often think about or like the form errors that often get missed, like the designer’s there to say, this is how it’s supposed to look. Natalie MacLees: And to a certain extent, this is how it’s supposed to work. Also, there should be some accessibility annotations in most designs that explain a little bit about how something is expected to function to make sure that it’s accessible. Natalie Garza: Exactly. So in this episode, we’re gonna walk through all the different concepts or things that designers have to keep in mind when designing accessible websites. Starting with contrast.  Natalie MacLees: Yes. Probably the most common accessibility failure across the internet is insufficient color contrast between text and whatever background it happens to be on, whether that’s a solid background color, a gradient, a background image, something that changes, something that’s absolutely positioned over some other part of the site.  There are so many different ways that color contrast can fail. And there are also some trends in web design that are very inaccessible, like using very light pastel colors as a background with white text.  You know, it has a very fresh, fun feel to it, but it is not sufficient contrast, and it is very difficult to read that text. And sometimes people really get carried away with it on very, very light colors with white text, and it’s just too difficult to see.  So you wanna make sure to avoid things like...

11 Jul 13min

Join Natalie MacLees and Natalie Garza for the 26th episode of the AAArdvark Accessibility Podcast, where they delve into the European Accessibility Act (EAA), discussing why it matters, who needs to comply, and what compliance involves. Natalie Garza: Hello everybody and welcome to the AAArdvark Accessibility Podcast. I’m Natalie Garza, one of the co-hosts, and with me today is, Natalie MacLees: Natalie MacLees, the other co-host. Natalie Garza: and she is an accessibility expert here to answer all of our questions. And in this episode, we’re going to cover the upcoming European Accessibility Act, or EAA. Natalie MacLees: Yes.  Natalie Garza: We will start with a disclaimer. We are not lawyers, but we will try our best to explain it and go over why it matters, what it is, who needs to comply, and what does it actually involve.  So to start off the episode, why does the European Accessibility Act matter right now? Natalie MacLees: So the day that this podcast comes out, the second part of the act will actually go into effect. So June 28th, 2025. Any new products, websites, or services have to be compliant with the law. If you already have an existing website, product or service, you have until June 28th, 2030 to make it compliant. But if you’re doing any major updates, redesigns, et cetera, that’s gonna trigger the law and you’re gonna have to make sure that that is accessible. Natalie Garza: Yeah. As far as June 28th, 2025, any new products hitting the market have to comply. Natalie MacLees: That date or after have to comply. Natalie Garza: So super relevant, especially if you’re watching the episode on the day that it comes out and you’re in the European Union. Natalie MacLees: Or you do business in the European Union, we’ll get to it. Natalie Garza: Yes. We’ll get to that here in a second. So why does the EAA matter in general?  Natalie MacLees: You are going to start facing legal penalties for having kiosks, digital devices, websites, web apps, et cetera, that are not accessible. So there will be legal consequences to having those on the market.  And of course, those are in addition to all the consequences you already have for having something in the market that’s not accessible, which is that you’re damaging your brand trust and your brand. You’re losing out on some competitive advantages and you’re not respecting everybody’s civil and human rights and not being inclusive. Natalie Garza: Yes, ’cause everyone has a right to information online. Natalie MacLees: Yes, they do. Natalie Garza: So, what is the European Accessibility Act specifically? What is it, what does it cover? Natalie MacLees: Yeah, so it covers any kind of digital products or services, so mobile phones, gaming consoles, kiosks like where you check in at the airport or at a hotel. Also, any kind of web apps or web services, websites, et cetera. All of those kinds of things are covered, and they all need to be made accessible. Natalie Garza: And every single European country has their own rules Natalie MacLees: Yes, yes. The specifics of what that means differs from country to country, so we won’t be digging into that today. But if you are dealing with a specific country, you need to look up and see how the EAA got implemented in that coun...

27 Jun 12min

Join Natalie Garza and accessibility expert Natalie MacLees for the 25th episode of the AAArdvark Accessibility Podcast, where they dive into quick wins for making websites more accessible using WCAG’s Easy Checks, designed especially for non-developers. Natalie Garza: Hello, everybody, and welcome to the AAArdvark Accessibility Podcast. This is episode 25, I’m Natalie Garza, and joining me today is, Natalie MacLees: Natalie MacLees. Natalie Garza: And she is an accessibility expert here to answer all of our questions. And in this episode, we’re gonna talk about quick wins for websites in terms of accessibility. So, what do we mean when we say quick wins? Natalie MacLees: Yeah, so things that you could fix probably in just a few minutes, or things that you could at least test for very quickly and easily without having to have any kind of special equipment or special software packages or anything like that installed. Natalie Garza: Yeah. And I would even add that quick wins also include, you don’t have to be a developer. You could do this if you’re pretty new to working with websites or new to accessibility. Natalie MacLees: Yeah, so our list is based on the WCAG Easy Checks, which are specifically designed for non-developers. Don’t have to be technical. You don’t need any special equipment or any special software. Anybody could check these things and most people could fix most of them. Natalie Garza: Yes, so to get started, let’s kick off the list with page titles. Natalie MacLees: All right, so the page title is what shows up on your tab of your browser when you have a page open, and otherwise, you don’t really see it much. But it is the first thing announced to a screen reader user when they land on a page. So it is important that the page title be an accurate description of what the page is about. Browser window showing tabs for “Aardvark – Wikipedia” and “AAArdvark | The Fastest Way” with the Wikipedia URL in the address bar. So that if somebody lands there, they can immediately understand what this page is all about? And why would, why am I here? Natalie Garza: Yeah, and they have to be unique, because if they go between pages and they’re the exact same, it’s super confusing. Natalie MacLees: That’s a very good point. Yes. You want to be able to tell one page from another, just from the page titles. Natalie Garza: All right, next on the list, image text alternatives. Natalie MacLees: Yeah, so this is a huge topic. We could probably do a whole episode just on this, but basically, you wanna make sure that you have alternative texts for all of your images. That gives somebody the reason why the image is on the page, and if there’s any information conveyed by that image, to also convey that information. So your alt text for the exact same image might be different on different pages, just depending on the context that the image gets used in. And generally, you wanna avoid saying things like photo of or image of, because we already know it’s an image or a photo, and you wanna keep your description short and concise. And so cut out all of that filler stuff.

20 Jun 11min

Join hosts Natalie MacLees and Natalie Garza for the 24th episode of the AAArdvark Accessibility Podcast, where they discuss the various types of disabilities that affect web accessibility. They explore common misconceptions, highlight the specific needs and best practices for users with vision, auditory, cognitive, physical/motor, and seizure-related disabilities, and discuss additional considerations for temporary and situational disabilities. Natalie Garza: Hello, everybody, and welcome to the AAArdvark Accessibility Podcast. This is episode 24. My name is Natalie Garza, and with me today is, Natalie MacLees: Natalie MacLees  Natalie Garza: And she is an accessibility expert here to answer all our questions in digital accessibility. In this episode, we’re gonna talk about all the different types of disabilities that can impact your use of the web, and it’s not just blind people. So, to get started, why does everyone just think digital accessibility affects blind people? Natalie MacLees: I am not really sure exactly where that comes from, but you will have a lot of developers, I think, in particular for some reason, who think that making a website or web application accessible just means making it work with screen readers. So it’s not even just users who are blind, but actually specifically screen reader users. Right. So I’m not exactly sure where that, where that idea comes from, but you do hear it a lot. And then you hear a lot of accessibility professionals say it’s not just screen readers. Natalie Garza: All right, so we’re going to break down the different disability types or groups, starting with the first category of disabilities. Do you wanna talk about that one? Natalie MacLees: A permanent disability. So a disability that once it is acquired, will have for the rest of your life. There are many, many different types of these disabilities.  Of course, the first up would be some kind of vision impairment. Which could include being completely blind, but could also include being just low vision. So somebody who has some vision, but not, you know, obviously not 2020 vision, which is a lot of, a lot of people. ‘Cause everybody who wears glasses or contact lenses, right? But there’s a spectrum. There’s a spectrum of, maybe you just need to wear glasses to read. Right, would be kind of at one end, and then all the way at the other end would be you have very little vision in your eyes, and maybe can only distinguish general shapes or lightness from darkness. And anywhere in between.  And then we also have other types of disabilities that affect vision, like color blindness. There are many, many different types of colorblindness. The most common one being just red-green colorblindness. So people who cannot distinguish, red colors from green colors. But there are many other types including complete colorblindness where people, just see the world in black and white and cannot perceive color at all.  Sometimes, your vision can disappear from the middle outward, and sometimes from outward in, or sometimes you lose your front vision, but still have peripheral vision, or the other way around. There are all kinds of interesting things that can happen to eyes. Natalie Garza: Yeah. So, what do we have to keep in mind for people with vision impairment? Natalie MacLees: Sure. There’s a few different things. For colorblindness, you just wanna make sure that all of your colors have sufficient contrast, tha...

9 Jun 14min

Join hosts Natalie Garza and Natalie MacLees for the 23rd episode of the AAArdvark Accessibility Podcast as they celebrate Global Accessibility Awareness Day. They discuss the day’s origins, its purpose, and current statistics on digital accessibility from WebAIM. Listeners will also learn why accessibility is vital and find practical steps and resources to make digital content more inclusive. Natalie Garza: Hello everybody, and welcome to the AAArdvark Accessibility podcast. My name is Natalie Garza. I’m one of the co-hosts, and with me today is: Natalie MacLees: Natalie MacLees, the other co-host. Natalie Garza: And she is an accessibility expert here to bring awareness on this very special episode. What are we celebrating today, Natalie? Natalie MacLees: Global Accessibility Awareness Day. Natalie Garza: Yes, it is a special holiday that the accessibility community brought together, that we do every single year, and this year it happens to fall on May 15th, 2025. Natalie MacLees: Yes. The third Thursday of May.  Natalie Garza: Yes. Do you wanna talk about how it was founded, who founded it, and what year it was founded?  Natalie MacLees: Yeah. Yeah. So, it all started with a blog post from Joe Devon proposing the idea that we needed an accessibility awareness day to help raise awareness for digital accessibility. He tweeted about it, and another accessibility professional named Jennison Asuncion, saw that tweet and said, “Yep, we need this,  I’m on board.” And they co-founded Global Accessibility Awareness Day together. Natalie Garza: Yeah, a new holiday. I don’t know if it’s fair to say it’s a holiday, but I will say it’s a holiday. Natalie MacLees: Yeah. Yeah. A celebrated day, an observed day. Natalie Garza: Observational day! What is the whole point of Global Accessibility Awareness Day, if the title doesn’t already explain? Natalie MacLees: Yeah, in case it wasn’t already self-explanatory. We wanna get everybody thinking about digital accessibility. So, people who don’t know anything about it, we wanna try to get the word out to them, get everybody talking about it, thinking about it, learning about it, and committing to making anything that they make online a little bit more accessible. Natalie Garza: Yeah. So spreading awareness to turn into action. Hopefully. Natalie MacLees: Yes. Most people know. They will hopefully understand the importance of digital accessibility and want to take steps. To make their online presence more accessible. Natalie Garza: Yeah, because I think the problem is not that people don’t wanna be accessible or that they don’t think it’s important, I think they’re just not aware. It’s just not common knowledge.  Natalie MacLees: Yeah. You find that a lot. I think, you know, we’ve talked about how accessibility isn’t included in a lot of web development education or web design education. It’s just not included, which kind of silently communicates this idea that it’s not actually tha...

15 Mai 11min

Join Natalie Garza and Natalie MacLees for the 22nd episode of the AAArdvark Accessibility Podcast. In this episode, they delve into the history of Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), covering versions 1.0 through 2.2, and offer an in-depth discussion on the structure and objectives of the upcoming WCAG 3.0. They explore the changes in guidelines, requirements, and vocabulary and discuss the draft state of WCAG 3.0. Natalie Garza: Hello everybody, and welcome to the AAArdvark Accessibility Podcast. This is episode 22, and my name is Natalie Garza. I’m one of the co-hosts, and with me today is, Natalie MacLees: Natalie MacLees, the other co-host. Natalie Garza: and she is an accessibility expert here to answer our questions. And in this episode we’re gonna talk about WCAG 3.0. Natalie MacLees: WCAG 3.0. We did our best. Natalie Garza: We did our best to research and investigate. So we’re gonna share our notes with you guys and our thoughts. But, to start off, Natalie, do you wanna give us a quick history on WCAG’s versions? Natalie MacLees: Yeah, sure. So early on, people figured out that we needed guidelines to figure out how to make the web accessible. So WCAG 1.0 was released in 1999 to kind of help address that. It was pretty simple. It was just 14 guidelines, and they had a priority one, two, or three, which kind of roughly became A, AA, and AAA, when 2.0 came out in 2008.  And that’s where we got the structure we know now, where we have the POUR principles. Perceivable, Operable, Understandable, Robust, with the success criteria and the guidelines underneath those four principles. The web moved along, new technology came out, and people started buying smartphones left and right. They realized there was some things that didn’t get addressed in 2.0. So we got 2.1, which came out in 2018, which added some more rules around mobile devices and also added some more rules for people with cognitive disabilities and, low vision. Again, the web moved along new technologies and we got WCAG 2.2 pretty recently in October of 2023, which added even more guidelines for people with cognitive disabilities and also with motor impairments. So just addressing some things that got left out and addressing some new technologies and things as the web moved along. Natalie Garza: So do you want to give us a quick introduction to WCAG 3.0. Natalie MacLees: Yeah, so when we WCAG 1.0, it was really focused on HTML, ’cause CSS and JavaScript were so new at the time, like nobody was really thinking about them. And when we had 2.0, that’s when they really started thinking about, “Oh, there’s CSS and JavaScript.” And of course, we see a lot of the techniques and things. We’ll reference scripting and CSS. But the web has really kind of moved on. We have really robust, rich applications that can take the place of desktop applications, which we take for granted now, and we forget how revolutionary those were. And 2.0 doesn’t really do a super great job at addressing that. So 3.0 is coming along to help and bette...

9 Mai 13min

Join Natalie Garza and Natalie MacLees for the 21st episode of the AAArdvark Accessibility Podcast, where they delve into the realm of digital accessibility careers. They clarify the distinction between digital and physical accessibility, explore various roles within digital accessibility, and provide advice on how to start a career in the field. From the absence of formal education paths to the importance of continuous learning and certification, they cover it all. Also, get tips on resources and courses to enhance your knowledge and skills in digital accessibility. Natalie Garza: Hello everybody, and welcome to the AAArdvark Accessibility Podcast. This is episode 21. I’m Natalie Garza, one of the co-hosts, and with me today is, Natalie MacLees: Natalie MacLees, another co-host. Natalie Garza: and she is actually an accessibility expert here to answer all our burning questions. In this episode, we’re gonna talk about advice and how to start a career in digital accessibility. But before we dive into that, do you wanna make it clear the difference between digital accessibility and physical accessibility jobs? Natalie MacLees: Yeah, so we’re gonna talk about only digital accessibility today, but of course, there are lots of ways to work in accessibility, and a lot of people will have jobs working in the physical world. So helping to make buildings accessible, museums accessible, art exhibits, all, different kinds of things where people need to go and be in a physical space, you know, concert venues, things like that. So there is a lot of work to do in the world of accessibility that is not necessarily online and what we’re gonna talk about today, because what, what I specialize in, what I do for a living is digital accessibility and very specifically web accessibility.  And even within the digital accessibility space, there’s a lot of different things that that can mean because there’s mobile devices and mobile apps and websites and all different kinds of things like that. Accessible documents, et cetera. So we’re gonna mostly focus on web accessibility today. Natalie Garza: Yeah, and not even to count like the digital accessibility jobs with just like assistive technology devices or tools. Natalie MacLees: Yeah, I recently met somebody at an event who had had a job at one point, at a university where it was their job to go around and install assistive technology for the students who needed it, whether that was software or hardware. That was that was their job. They just went around and installed refreshable braille displays and screen reader software and those kinds of things, to support the students at the university. Natalie Garza: Right. Yeah. So all kinds of digital accessibility jobs and just a small subset of the whole accessibility space. Natalie MacLees: Yeah. Natalie Garza: What is it like to work in digital accessibility? Natalie MacLees: It can look like a whole bunch of different things. There’s not, it’s not a single kind of monolithic field where everybody’s job looks the same.  So that could look like a lot of different things. You could be a developer who’s building websites. You could be a designer who’s designing websites, applications, or user experience. You could be an auditor or a tester who’s testing websites, mobile apps, or any other kind of product for accessibility. You could be a consultant who’s advising people on how to be accessible or how to make their products more accessible.  So there are l...

2 Mai 13min