Rachel: Hey everybody, glad to see you all. We're just going to give it a few minutes as we have some of our attendees jumping on as we speak. Very excited for today's talks. Just wanting to give a quick introduction as we let more people jump into the session for today. A big thank you for everyone that was able to come for this Vincit Talks focused on accessibility. For those of you that have joined us for webinars or in person events before welcome back. And for those of you joining here for the first time, just to give you a little bit of insight, Vincit Talks is actually a monthly webinars series that we host for anyone that's interested in staying up to date with what's happening in tech development, UX strategy, as well as business strategy.
Rachel: So a quick little introduction for those new individuals, Vincit we are actually a custom software development and digital product design agency originally from Finland. And we'll have two of our finest speakers joining us today, but we have US headquarters in Irvine. And so we created Vincit Talks really as a way to engage with industry leaders and passionate experts to help share the latest of developments in tech and important topics not to ignore. So especially important today with everything that we're going to cover when it's related to accessibility. So we hope everyone here that attends whether you guys are business owners, developers, designers, marketers, or even recruiters that you can walk away with some valuable information pertinent to your company or career, or just apply it to your business.
Rachel: So today, as I've mentioned, pretty excited to hear our speakers cover everything that you need to know on how to keep ADA compliant. We're going to have talks that focus on accessible design laws and policies surrounding the topic, as well as basics that developers really ought to know. And as we go along with the speakers, feel free to shoot any questions that you might have into the Q and A section or the chat, I will be monitoring it. So at the end of each session, we can be sure to try and cover those questions. If we do run out of time have no fear. We will be not only posting these recordings to our various sites, our vincittalks.com as well as our meetup pages. But we'll add sections to follow up on any questions that we weren't able to cover.
Rachel: So feel free to ask away and really without further ado and to keep things right on pace, I will get ready to hand things off to our first speaker. And I apologize if I mispronounced your name Jarno Ojala you can correct me. He is a passionate user researcher and service designer at Vincit and he specializes in service design, user studies, participatory design, social media, and user requirements. So over to you, Jarno.
Jarno Ojala: Okay. Thank you. Right. So I think that was a nice introduction and you got my name right, so it's good. Okay, good morning to all. I will give you a talk today and the topic is accessible services with user-centered methods. And I'm from Vincit Tampere office. And I have been in Vincit for three and half years. I have a research background from Tampere University of Technology and nowadays I do mostly service design and user experience research. Accessibility and user experience design are really close to my heart, and I have been grateful that I'm able to contribute to them in my work also. On my free time I play football and guitar and we have two lovely rescued dogs.
Jarno Ojala: So that's right, as Rachel mentioned we will have three talks today and my talk will mostly concentrate on the why and how sites of accessibility with a design twist. So I will give ideas on how to take care of accessibility in the design process with user centered methods. And Ismail Amin will give reasoning on details on the laws and policies, and Tuukka describe more concrete ways to incorporate accessibility into your development process.
Jarno Ojala: Accessibility is firstly about equality. When the services are built in the right way, there are no disabilities. World Health Organization states that one in seven of us face disabilities that create problems in the use of physical spaces, products, and digital services. So that then gives us a roughly, billion people globally. And when we also count that diverse educational backgrounds, different qualities in internet access and different situational aspects that affect the use of services, the number is even bigger. But most importantly accessibility is for everybody and it makes the user experience better for everybody. So it is important that we have a universal set of Web Content Accessibility Guidelines that make accessibility abstract and less subject checked in.
Jarno Ojala: So there are a few drivers that make accessibility even more important every day. As we may have come to know there are unexpected situations such as COVID-19, which causes expanding of remote work. And it can totally change the businesses and how to receive help business to thrive. With COVID-19 out, all these black swans can change the old ways of doing business and at the same time, make room for new businesses. Also well-known megatrends such as age and population can make accessible services a must. But luckily we have both software tools and methods to make any service accessible.
Jarno Ojala: Laws and directives guide accessibility development globally. So I will give a few thoughts on how they are in Europe and in United States. For me, I'm really glad that there is now also the governmental post for better user experience and accessibility. And also in Europe, the directive that guides the way how the accessibility should be. A great amount of my work for a few years now has been making minds change on how to affect the business with user centered design and user experience. So my work is mostly minding usability, minding user experience and minding the users. After all, all the value of technology in the use of technology. So there is no software that users cannot use or simply hate. And for me, the situation seems actually brighter than ever since there is that governmental push to do accessibility better in the future.
Jarno Ojala: In Europe, there is the European Accessibility Directive and also Accessibility Act coming in 2025. And in the United States, there is Americans with Disabilities Act, ADA. And as you may know that ADA lawsuits are on the rise and that's makes the accessibility even more important for their companies. But I think Ismail Amin will give more insight on the legal side of ADA on how it applies the web services and affects your business. Anyways, there is Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. It is a set of rules that set the global baseline for accessibility design and development. If you're familiar with usability and user experience, there is quite much overlap in accessibility guidelines, but its operable approach days in user experience design, and make them also measurable and testable by introducing a success criteria, which its requirements need to fulfill.
Jarno Ojala: As we know the law and directives is not the only reason to do accessible design, but actually accessible services are also good for your business. Without accessibility your service is non-existent to large of group of users. The flaws in usability and user experience can lower your brand image and even cause your conversion rates to drop. Well, the situation where your user experience, is not just bad, but your services is also nonexistent to large of group of users, so that's a situation that can happen if you don't take care of the accessibility. And if you don't mind accessibility in your design and development, you may unintentionally lock large group of users of your service.
Jarno Ojala: In this slide, there are five main ways how accessibility improves your business. So as I mentioned, it expands the amount of your possible customers. It improves the user experience of your service for all users. Accessibility is part of user experience and when you take care of accessibility and user experience, you automatically build your brand and reputation on the line. Taking care of accessibility in your service can improve your conversion and reduces errors and frustration of users. So it makes users easier to meet the goals that you want them to meet in your service. It also can make your service easier to find. When you have better semantics in your service and for example, the text descriptions for images. You can also improve search engine optimization with the semantics. Generally, it makes your service more prepared for the future. It keeps you out of the legal trouble and it enables your service to thrive under different situations and with different technical aspects such as old technology, but also the future of technology and new devices.
Jarno Ojala: How you can to take care of that accessibility and user experience? User-centered approach is my tool of choice. We have a set of tools such as the standards and guidelines, the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, a set of rules. We have tools for automatic evaluation of accessibility. On top of that, we can do technical auditing, experts evaluation and then user testing to make sure that your service and mobile application is accessible. However, automatic accessibility can be a good start to check the accessibility, but it's not enough. And when you add expert evaluation on top of that, it makes the quality way better. But if you want to hire for really good quality and really excellence in user experience, be sure to do some user testing and participate your users in the development process and designing process. And of course, user testing makes it possible to evaluate accessibility and also user experience. And it also allows you to repeat the test all over again when you have developed the accessibility and user experience.
Jarno Ojala: It is important to see that accessibility is part of user experience and Web Content Accessibility Guidelines set the baseline. But if you aim for excellence, it's requires more, and this helps you do that. I will briefly present you one of the accessibility evaluation cases that we have in Finland. So we gave full accessibility audit to one of our biggest clients in Finland. The client has a digital family for unemployment fund, and we use three methods to evaluate the accessibility and user service. We did technical audit, expert evaluation and user testing for them.
Jarno Ojala: And with these three methods, we gave them a full on report about their accessibility and user experience. And also build a roadmap for how they can do the development and how they can incorporate those findings to their development roadmap. And when we did that road check, we found out that it is really important that a client has the right mindset to start with. They were saying that we will develop the best service in Finland and not just we want to fulfill the minimum requirements of accessibility. We got enough resources and participation from the client, and we had shared values with the client. They were all in for design for all thinking and helping people with challenging times in their life. And all in all that communication and shared goals were really important to make them successful.
Jarno Ojala: Lessons learned. So user tests can only cover the main parts of the service. So it's really important to select the most important and business relevant use cases, the best with users. Also including assistive technologies, a diverse set of users, making test repeatable so you can measure the results again after development and repeat the test. That's really important when doing user tests.
Jarno Ojala: So how to get started? If you have an existing service or application, you can start with accessibility audit, and the work will be a little bit higher when the accessibility is corrected after the service is already built. But if you are building it, it's important that you bring in the accessibility design and participation of the users in the early phases of the project. And you can always improve the quality by user-centered approach and that continuous development mindset. So here is the heart of my speech, some three main points. Accessibility simply makes your business stronger. Compliance with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines keeps you out of trouble. And I recommend that you let users guide your design on your development. And so I recommend you participate users in process from the early phases of the project. That's all. Thank you for your time. I'm open for questions on chat around the topic. So, please do.
Rachel: So one question that just came in for you Jarno. Kavi asked, could you briefly explain the difference between a technical audit and an expert evaluation?
Jarno Ojala: Okay. So, for example, in this particular case, with the technical audit means that with different parts of the service with automatic tools and tested it with keyboard usability, and example screen to reader usability and all these assistive technologies. That was part of the technical audits. And we did expert evaluation to that part of the service, where we, for example check visual accessibility such as contrasts and readability of the texts and all of that stuff. So that's the rough idea, how they differ.
Rachel: And how do technical audits affect Hackathon culture?
Jarno Ojala: Oh, that's interesting stuff. I guess there are quite a lot of views, for example in these Hackathon kind of situations for different kind of automatic tools for finding accessibility. I think it makes sense to have a Hackathon with that theme for building new automatic devices in detecting the accessibility flaws.
Rachel: And just to be mindful of time, this will be the last question. But what tools do you recommend for auditing a project?
Jarno Ojala: Totally recommend that you start the audit by using one of the tools that do all ultimately all the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines and then come in with expert evaluation. So basically checking all the user flaws, the different screens and all those by the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines so that they fulfill all the responsiveness and all the different requirements that are included in the guidelines.
Rachel: Great. Well, thank you so much Jarno. And just as a reminder to all attendees with us if you have other questions for Jarno around the topics please feel free to continue to put them in the chat or the Q and A session. When we upload this video tomorrow, we will be sure to also answer the questions we weren't able to do live today, but without further ado we are going to switch over to now Ismail Amin, the founder and partner of TALG Law. And he's going to be talking to us about web accessibility, laws and policies, and really what you need to know for your site. And just a quick introduction on Ismail. He has legal experience encompassing working with Fortune 500 companies, midsized privately held companies, as well as entrepreneurs. He presently serves as the corporate and litigation counsel to large and midsize businesses throughout California and Nevada and Texas, as well as works as a general and personal counsel to high profile hospitality operators within California and Nevada. Ismail's practice emphasizes business and intellectual property matters with a focus in healthcare, biopharmaceuticals, biotechnology, and hospitality. So now over to you Ismail.
Ismail Amin: Rachel, thank you for the generous introduction. Good morning everyone. The speakers were excellent. And I think Jarno's technical statements were very appropriate for what we're going to discuss today. And we're going to discuss what's happening right now with respect to websites and potential liability for companies related to the Americans with Disabilities Act and other state law issues as well and how that impacts your business. So just as by way of background these ADA website type claims focus on accessibility to websites that means they want their clients to have the ability to navigate your website without any impediments. And the folks that we've seen litigation be sourced from as plaintiffs are traditionally people with either a vision impaired disability, blind or partially blind. And then the second category would be someone who is impaired with hearing or deaf.
Ismail Amin: And so since 2018, there have been over 2000 lawsuits filed each year. Last year in 2019, there was almost 2,500 lawsuits filed throughout the country, ADA compliance lawsuits. We are seeing a trend this year where there's an explosion of ADA compliance based lawsuits related to websites because people are staying home more often and they're accessing the web more often and they're buying products and services off the web. So, the purpose of today is not to give you a long, boring treatise of what the law says and what it is, but just to give you some broad strokes from a 30,000 foot perspective of what's happening in the law right now. And the issues that we as lawyers on the front line are facing especially representing businesses.And my clients are across the board publicly traded clients to small Mom and Pop businesses. And to varying degrees, they've all been hit with either demand that their website be compliant, to be accessible and accommodate those who are disabled or worse a litigation matter or a complaint.
Ismail Amin: But first, just to give you some background on the complaints out there several of the complaints have alleged that people who are visually impaired or cannot access websites properly with the assistance of a reading software used to translate websites or navigate the internet properly. And that's because what the allegations have been from various plaintiffs that the website coding is improper, and it's designed in such a way that it's not compatible with frequently used assistant software.
Ismail Amin: So I'm going to start with a very famous case. It's called the Domino's Pizza Case. It was here in the Ninth Circuit and the Ninth Circuit has jurisdiction over the predominant West of the country including California and the plaintiff in that case was a gentleman by the name of Guillermo Robles. And he filed a suit saying that he was blind and visually impaired, he couldn't access Domino's Pizza's website and couldn't navigate it appropriately because of the coding not translating with his reading software. So his lawyer files a lawsuit in Federal Court. The court dismisses the claim and the court says that Domino's is right to say that, "We don't really have standards right now as to how to design our websites to effectuate the goals of the Americans with Disabilities Act.
Ismail Amin: And for a long time, just for brief segue, we were expecting guidance from the Department of Justice as to, what do we as business owners need to do to make our sites compliant with the ADA to be immune from these lawsuits? And the rumor was that the Department of Justice would impose a policy where sites needed to comply with the WCAG 2.0 guidelines in terms of website design and the acronyms of that are Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0. And if they did that, they would be immune from these lawsuits. Well, the Department of Justice never actually came down with that policy. And so business owners have been scrambling. They don't really have a way to defend these, other than voluntarily complying with WCAG 2.0 guidelines and then hoping for the best, hoping that it's sufficient to deter unnecessary litigation.
Ismail Amin: Coming back to the Domino's case, Domino's at that time didn't voluntarily ensure that its website complied with the WCAG guidelines. And it said that, "Look, there's no requirement that we do so, there's no requirement from the Federal Authorities or the state authorities that we do so. And so Mr. Guillermo's complaint should be dismissed." The court agreed. Now the Ninth Circuit reversed the district court and said that, "No." The Ninth Circuit said that the ADA does apply to Domino's website and any mobile apps that are associated with that website because the ADA applies to the services of a public place of accommodation, not services in a place of public accommodation. And so that distinction is important because that means, under the Ninth Circuit that if you are doing business and your website is out in the marketplace, as long as you have a location that allows people to come in either to purchase a product or a service and there's a nexus, that you can be held liable if your website doesn't provide accessibility and comply with the ADA and any state laws as well.
Ismail Amin: So the Ninth Circuit actually said that, "Look Domino's, we're not asking that you comply with the WCAG 2.0 guidelines, but you being Domino's, you can't discriminate against Mr. Robles by effectively excluding him from using the website." And it also concluded that the design compliance with WCAG 2.0 standards could be imposed as what's called an equitable remedy that means in the discretion of the court even if it wasn't required by law yet. So what's happened is, that case was a hotly contested case and everybody was following it and hoping that the United States Supreme Court would take it up and potentially reverse it. At least that's what all the business community folks wanted. But the United States Supreme Court declined to grant cert and the case is therefore good law and it's Ninth Circuit Law and it's pretty powerful stuff.
Ismail Amin: As a practical matter, there are two views right now for the ADA and applying it to websites. There's the majority view, which requires what's called the nexus test, meaning that there should be a place of physical contact with the consumer that has a nexus to the website. So Domino's is a perfect example, they have the website, they also have in-person locations where you can go pick up a pizza. So the majority of the circuits, the Ninth Circuit, the Third Circuit, the Sixth Circuit, the Eleventh Circuit, they require this nexus. And that's important because depending on where your businesses are in the country, you could do a risk assessment, you could do a cost benefit analysis as to your website and what you should or should not do and what's appropriate. Now, the First, Second and Eleventh Circuits, they're more welcoming to plaintiffs. They don't require any nexus or physical location to apply at all.
Ismail Amin: And indeed some of the judges that we've read about now state that if you try to knock out a claim early saying that, "Hey, my business has no nexus," for example, if you're a web based only business that, "We're not going to dismiss the claim based on that." So it's really encouraging more litigation and my prediction is this area is going to continue to explode, that we've seen a modest number, 2300 cases has been modest compared to what we're going to see, especially in the COVID era. And we think that it's going to pose challenges for business owners.
Ismail Amin: So what do we do about it? Well, I think the easiest remedy is to contact a great developer, web designer, you've heard from a few of them on this presentation this morning. And ensure that your audit is performed and the technical compliance is spot on. Even though it may create a cost, I think it's far cheaper to remedy or prevent the situation sooner than it is to deal with litigation. The cost of litigation is incredibly expensive. These plaintiffs, what they're doing is, they're always demanding between $10,000 to $25,000 per case and that you get your website compliant with WCAG 2.0 anyway. So, by the time you're done spending all that money and then you spend the legal fees associated with defending these claims, you're going to be into it for $50,000, $60,000, $70,000 sometimes, that's if a case ends early.
Ismail Amin: And unfortunately, there's not much insurance in the area either because insurance can't cover violations of federal acts. It can cover negligent claims and emissions, but generally not violations of the ADA. Although there are some policies right now that may have what's called ancillary coverage for these types of claims. That being said, I know I've thrown a lot out at you and I hope I didn't lose you and I welcome any questions or comments.
Rachel: Yeah. So we do have a question from an attendee about unreasonable accessibility complaints, for example, visually impaired people not able to watch Netflix. And I think that's a highly interesting question, but being cognizant of time and to make sure that we give to a full allowance, I was going to recommend that we be able to follow up with that specific question, both in the chat as well as in our follow-up recording. So if you're okay with that Ishmael, we can send any additional questions that we have over to you so that we can make sure that we're trying to keep our session, with three full speakers into the allotted one hour time.
Ismail Amin: Absolutely. I'm sorry I talk so much, that's what lawyers do, we like to talk.
Rachel: It was excellent and super helpful and knowledgeable and I hope everyone in the audience would agree. So, like I said before, continue to share questions everyone and we will be sure to follow up with answers after the session when we upload the recording. But to keep things moving, I will hand things off now over to Tuukka Ojala. He is a developer with us from Vincit and he's going to be discussing the basics for developers around digital accessibility. And just a little quick bio on him; he loves working with customers and learning new ways to problem solve, he has a very diverse background in a multitude of creative activities including designing data models and REST APIs, Tuukka also has a keen interest in user experience and in particular, making software accessible to people with disabilities. So over to you Tuukka.
Tuukka Ojala: Good morning, everyone? I almost say good evening because over here it's close to 9:00 PM and thank you very much for the introduction. I see you've been looking at my LinkedIn profile, which isn't quite up to date I must say, but that was close enough. For the purposes of this talk, it definitely was. Now, let's see if I can get my slides up. It's actually my first time doing this on Zoom, so please bear with me. There we go.
Tuukka Ojala: So what I'm going to talk about today is digital accessibility basics for developers. And by this I'm gearing my talk towards, well, not strictly to the developers of you out there, but this is probably going to be of interest to you the most. And I'm going to be discussing on what accessibility is from your point of view, what it means and some of the easiest and most fundamental ways you can affect a user's, and accessibility benefiting user experience by implementing accessibility the right way. Plus a bit of battering about me, I am a full stack software developer as mentioned before, I also serve the role of Accessibility Specialist in our company, or rather one of the Accessibility Specialists in our company. And what I do, primarily outside software development activities is technical audits like Jorna mentioned.
Tuukka Ojala: And about my background, I'm also blind, which gives me an edge on accessibility things, or rather knowing about accessibility things because I benefit from accessibility immensely and in some ways I've struggled with every day, but this is not the topic of the talk. I'd like to discuss with you on who exactly are going to benefit from digital accessibility and taking digital accessibility into account. So, most of the users that are going to benefit from this are users with different physical disabilities or impairments. These include; visual, hearing, mobility, also people who cannot use keyboard or the mouse. This doesn't have anything to do with any disability necessarily. There might be any number of reasons why they can't use either of these, but in the end, digital accessibility probably benefits all of you since I am willing to bet that most developers who I know, most developers in this conference have used keyboard shortcuts which indeed are huge important accessibility features for somebody who uses a keyboard primarily to get around, like me. So, if not for users like us, keyboard shortcuts, well, they might exist, but not in the capacity they exist now.
Tuukka Ojala: And here are some examples of assistive technologies and well, this is kind of controversial but I consider keyboards to be accessing tech, because for me and for others like me and for pretty much everyone else, keyboards aren't just for typing, they are for getting around. And because obviously I cannot use a mouse, well, I don't know it's obvious for me that's of course, then this is very much an accessibility device for me. Also screen readers, screen magnifiers, speech recognition software are very useful. For example, I use a screen reader right now and it's reading my slides to me as I switch between them. So this is a very, it's probably the most important and unfortunately, probably the trickiest of Assistive Technologies that you as a developer have to be mindful about.
Tuukka Ojala: Now, because time is short, I've decided to go through only two things, the two most important things that I think should be done. And this, by the way, this is strictly from a developer's point of view. I'm making a horrible amount of assumptions about what has already been done and the things that have indeed been done have been done right. But this is something that many people, probably all people who have some physical impairment, there is a word for it, lacking one or more senses come across every day. And this is relying on one sense to convey some information. Probably the biggest, most obvious thing that comes to mind is lack of image, alternative image descriptions on buttons for example, I see so many buttons all the time where there's no text whatsoever, there's just an icon, but I don't know what, it's obviously because, well, I can't see it.
Tuukka Ojala: And well there is some image recognition going on in different operating systems, but it's very primitive and it really can't be trusted. And this is just one example of developers assuming that all of the users can see, but there are many more examples of this than just lacking image descriptions, of course. So I've seen so many places where some piece of important information has been marked with red, for example, or required fields in a form have been marked with red. Well, that doesn't help me and that doesn't help color blind persons either.
Tuukka Ojala: Then there's the case of some important information gone through in a video with no closed captioning, so deaf people can't hear it, can't get the information, sorry about that. And so this is something that you have to be mindful about. Probably the easiest of course, is just adding text labels to your icon buttons. And this is something that the automated tools are very good at catching, but it's something that you have to keep in mind, for example, when making video instructions.
Tuukka Ojala: And now the real beef, which is probably the most important thing that a developer, especially a Web Developer has to be mindful about and that's going to do the greatest impact to Assistive Technology users, if done right. And that is correct semantics and I give you an example of this bright hair. On the title you see a snippet of code, and that's on form input element which is a check box. And that checkbox does a lot under the hood. So whenever a screen reader user encounters such a checkbox, they know that it is indeed a checkbox. They get told that it's a checkbox, they know its state, meaning that it's checked just like in the snippet above, they also can navigate to it via the keyboard, other keyboard users who aren't just screen reader users, but just anyone who navigates websites with a tab key, for example, can navigate to this checkbox and can use space bar to toggle its states. It's got all this information and same applies to Speech Recognition Software, people who use those kinds say that, "Toggle this check box, right there. Qualify that by its label," for example, and it just works. And that's literally, all you have to do is do this correctly.
Tuukka Ojala: And here's another example, this is something completely different and something that I see a lot, thankfully I'd like to think it's usage has come down in recent years, but there was a time about five years ago, four years ago, when pretty much these were in the Vogue as it were, everyone did check box and buttons and everything like this. So this span element, with just some CSS classes thrown in and then ID. And to screen reader users, to web browsers, to any Assistive Technology out there, this is nothing, this is just a piece of text, if you have a label inside that span for example, that's all that, well screen readers, for example, can perceive about this. They don't know that it's a check box, they don't know about its state. Keyboard users can navigate through this with tab key for example, meaning that most keyboard users can't navigate through this at all. Its state possibly can't be toggled with the space bar like you would do on a check box. So that's of course, terrible use of design. If you just knew that it would act like this, and I know that for example, checkbooks, they are incredibly hard to style right. And that's the reason why many people have gone for this approach but beware of the consequences, that's what you get.
Tuukka Ojala: And by the way, this can be made to work if you must, but probably by far the easiest way to happiness is to use a native element. And this is what I recommend everyone to do. So I'd much rather see everyone do is to use native HTML elements all the time because you get all this functionality for free that way. And if you have to invent something that doesn't have a native HTML equivalent, in those cases, there's a resource called W-A-I ARIA that's A-R-I-A offering practices. And that resource outlines all the requirements for custom controls. For example, there is an excellent chapter about designing usable keyboard, usable auto complete widgets like these called combo boxes. Well, nobody calls them that, but these that have an input element and the popup list that comes up when you type something. And that is something that I see designed wrong all the time, very few auto completes are completely keyboard accessible.
Tuukka Ojala: So if you do this right then that's like most of your case is already done, I would assume. And as Jarno said, by far, the best way to test accessibility is to have a professional go through your service or perform expert evaluation but it doesn't hurt. On the contrary, it actually is very beneficial if you do the groundwork for yourself. And there are automated tools as discussed in the chats already. What I always recommend people to use is called Axe and I think these days it's actually built into Chrome Developer Tools. So most of you already have that. It's an excellent set of checks that will catch most of the low hanging fruit up there. But of course it doesn't do... but maybe 50% of potential cases in WCAG 2.1. So it's not enough to do that alone, but adhering to the suggestions that it provides is already a tremendous help. But if you wanted something concrete, by far the easiest test for keyboard accessibility is just to use your site or app, or what have you with a keyboard. So just try do something with just tab and shift tab and arrow keys and the space bar or enter, and just see, can you get around? Does it feel intuitive? And do you know where you are? And because this is something where many services fall short.
Tuukka Ojala: Also, as for Assistive Technology itself, I think all the major platforms right now have built in screen readers and screen magnifiers. Windows has a feature called narrator, Mac has voice-over, Linux has a screen reader called Orca and same applies for mobile operating systems. And you can try them out right now. It's totally possible. It takes a while to get used to, but everyone who I've spoken to has viewed it as a very interesting challenge and definitely a different way to see the software. And then there's the why, now this has been said many times before, and I'd like to offer you kind of indie developer perspective on this question because it maybe doesn't seem worthwhile to you. Well, the truth is you necessarily don't know about your audience. You don't know how many of them have some disability, you don't know about, if they encounter some situation or accessibility thing. For example, if they temporarily can't use the mouse, or if they are in a place where they benefit from good color contrast, for example. This is something that just want to prepare for it in advance. And yeah, it's the right thing to do, obviously as has been mentioned before.
Tuukka Ojala: Because time is running out I'm not going through all these, but something that gets overlooked often are two things, accessibility, it's always harder to apply changes afterwards. It's very much easier if you do it before or right in the beginning. And the knowledge you gain this way is totally transferable, if you have to be mindful about accessibility on one project, then you can absolutely do that on another. There is no additional things to be learned, and I'd like to end this talk by saying that accessibility is often treated like a feature and it's often prioritized as a feature. Well, it's not a feature, it's a philosophy that has to be thought from top to bottom, from every tire of your product development phase because that's the only way for it to get right. That's all for me, thank you very much. And I'm open to your questions.
Rachel: Wonderful. And I really love that last point that you said, accessibility isn't a feature, it's a philosophy. And I think that's definitely an imperative that everybody can align to and hopefully takes away. I did notice a few questions, but being cognizant that we have one minute left, I'm going to send that to you afterwards Tuukka so that we can be sure we all followup.
Tuukka Ojala: Okay.
Rachel: It's specifically about, relating to radio buttons and check boxes for developers that are using Dragon NaturallySpeaking, or Dragon NaturallySpeaking users. So we will get that answered for you Gary. And with regards to the final few words, just thank you again so much to everyone that came here. We will have a recording going out tomorrow on our Vincit.com blog page so be sure to check it out. As a reminder, this is also a monthly webinars series for anyone interested in staying up to date with what's happening in tech, user experience, design, business strategy, we love to have different notable industry speakers and passionate experts to help us chat about what's going on in tech and important topics such as accessibility, that we shouldn't be ignoring.
Rachel: Our next Vincit Talk will be on September 24th and we're going to be having a focus on AR and VR. So if you're interested in that topic or just knowing what we have on the horizon, head over to our Vincit Talks meet up page and give us a follow and we'll keep you up to date on what's upcoming and we'll answer any follow-up questions and are also open to any ideas for future topics.
Rachel: So thank you everyone. We are right on the dot at 11 o'clock. And so with that, I hope everyone else has a wonderful rest of your day or to our Finnish speakers have a great evening. Take care.
