Accessibility Podcast Topic Links
- July 27: Accessible Tables – Class Registration
- August 9: Secrets of Writing Effective Alt-text – Class Registration
- August 23: Accessible Forms – Class Registration
- Adobe MAX
- International Association of Accessibility Professionals
- AODA
- PDF/UA
- EN 301 549
- Previous Podcast Episode
Accessibility Podcast Transcript
Dax Castro
Welcome to another episode of Chax Chat. Join Chad Chelius and me Dax Castro, where each week we wax poetic about document accessibility topics, tips, and the struggle of remediation and compliance. So sit back, grab your favorite mug of whatever, and let’s get started.
Chad Chelius
Welcome, everyone. Today’s podcast is sponsored by Chax Training and Consulting. If you’re interested in supporting the podcast, there are sponsorship opportunities available. So just reach out to us and we can discuss that opportunity in more detail. My name is Chad Chelius. I’m an Adobe Certified Instructor as well as Director of Training Solutions and Principal at Chax Training and Consulting.
Dax Castro
And my name is Dax Castro. I’m Director of Media Productions here at Chax Training and Consulting. And Chad and I are both certified as Accessible Documents Specialists by the International Association of Accessibility Professionals. So if you’re looking to get your certification, to let people know that you know about document accessibility, head on over to accessibilityassociation.org/certification, and you too can get your certification as an Accessible Document Specialist. Chad, how you doing man?
Chad Chelius
Doing well. Doing well. I have to say we’ve had a couple of really nice days of weather here in the northeast. It dropped down to like 68 last night. Can you believe that? I know, it’s insane. But that is going to end I think at the end of today. At the end of the day, if you ask me again, I’m gonna give you our very different answer.
Dax Castro
Well it was 99, 95 100, 101, 102, 99 here, so yeah, it’s been a bit of a hot one. And but we did get our air conditioner fixed for the rabbits so they’re nice and cool. Rabbits have to stay up below like 85 degrees. In order to be comfortable. They have a hard time letting off that heat. So it’s we have to keep special care when the temperature gets above 100.
Chad Chelius
It’s all about the rabbits, man. All that the rabbits.
Dax Castro
Tell you man, it sucks when they die. It’s terrible. It’s a whole thing.
Chad Chelius
Oh, I’m sure.
Chad Chelius
I’m sure. I know, I have a big black dog. And this of year is hard on big black dogs.
Dax Castro
Anyway,
Dax Castro
Oh yeah,
Chad Chelius
You know, he loves to sit out in the sun, but like he’s panting the whole time. So I’m sure some of our viewers can appreciate that as well.
Dax Castro
Well, a public service announcement though, I want to say, I was out at a local big box store and saw a lady walk, you know, with her dog that was actually very well behaved. But it was trying its hardest to stay out of the hot sidewalk. It had no you know, no foot pads or anything, you know, extra to protect itself against the hot concrete. So just remember all your dog lovers out there, if you’re I will get you want to bring your dog out to the big box store and it’s been 100, the concrete is probably like 115 or 120. So, yeah, that’s, uh, you know, be thinking about that.
Chad Chelius
Yeah, if you’ve ever tried to walk barefoot, like on the beach, you know, when the sun’s been baking? I mean it’s brutal, you know?
Dax Castro
Your dogs not gonna go, “oow, oow, oow, oow, oww, oww,” as it’s walking.
Chad Chelius
No, he’s not. Alright, man. So what do we got this week?
Dax Castro
Well, we have coming up our next training. You know, on our website, accessibilityunraveled.com, we have a series of trainings. And we have been doing, we’ve been getting a lot of interest in our Document Accessibility Testing with a screen reader, with NVDA. So we’ve decided that not only are we going to do a normal weekday session, but we’ve had some interest or people wanting to do a weekend session, because they’re like, hey, look, my boss won’t give me the time off to attend a webinar. So we’re, you know, we thought, you know what, let’s do a special session for the weekend, just for those people who want to do that. So, August 11, is our normal Thursday. And then August 13, is our Saturday session. So head on over to accessibilityunravel.com and register for that. And then Chad, you’re doing Accessible Tables, right?
Chad Chelius
Exactly.
Dax Castro
That’s gonna be a great one.
Chad Chelius
Yeah, I think that’s a topic that a lot of people struggle with. And, you know, hopefully, you know, hopefully, we can demystify some of the misconceptions about tables and how to make them.
Dax Castro
Well, and there’s nothing I want to do more than spend three hours talking about table accessibility. But you know, when you leave this session, you will no longer be trying to figure out what is an accessible table. Which I think is the thing a lot of people struggle with. They’re like, I don’t even understand what it means when you say an accessible table. So I think your session is going to be great. If people are struggling, they definitely should go attend.
Chad Chelius
Well, part of what you’re going to learn is don’t do it this way.
Dax Castro
Right. Here’s the things to avoid to keep yourself from going crazy.
Chad Chelius
Yeah. To keep your sanity. Right. And I also last week I did a webinar on PDF Forms.
Dax Castro
That was great. I thought that was really well received. We got a lot of really good feedback on that session. So,
Chad Chelius
Yeah, great. Well, listen, I’m really excited today, because we have a guest on the podcast. We have Jason Wennet with us. Jason and I have known each other for several years now. And I would call Jason a friend as well as a colleague. And Jason approached me, it was actually at Adobe MAX. And we were trying to figure out, I think it might have been four years ago or so. And he said, Listen, my organization is embracing accessibility, we want to do this, but we need help, right. And so, Jason brought me in to his organization, his organization, is a large healthcare company. And that’s pretty much all I can say. Like many of our other guests that we’ve had on the podcast, we have to kind of protect the intellectual, you know, property of the organization. So let’s just say he works for a large healthcare company. But the reason I wanted to have Jason on the podcast is because his company really did a fantastic job of implementing accessibility within their organization. And I know that that’s a topic that a lot of other companies struggle with, you know? They’re like, how do I get buy in? How do I get people to take this seriously? How do I get them to implement this? And I wanted to get Jason’s feedback on that. But Jason, how are you doing today?
Jason Wennet
I’m doing really well. Thank you. And thanks for having me on. This is my first podcast appearance.
Chad Chelius
Well, you know, no need to be nervous. This is a very laid back podcast, and we’ll kind of prod you, you know, for answers, you know, here or there. But, uh, you know, I did want to talk about, you know, so again, you work for a large healthcare company. And this situation is a challenging one for many other companies. Because, you know, the question becomes, how do we approach this? How do we make this happened? And you guys, I have to say, I mean, I still work with you guys daily and you guys have done a fantastic job. So can you tell us, Jason, how this all got started? Right? Like, where did this come from within your organization?
4 milestones for implementing an accessibility program in a large healthcare organization
Jason Wennet
So the way I remember this, we’ll start with first thing is that, because we do a lot of work with the governments, our anything that any of our digital properties or assets need to be accessible. And, you know, at a national level, or at any level, and I think there was a lot of, at a, at a local level, not a lot of awareness of those requirements. They didn’t really impact our team. So much. And we became more, we became solely responsible for accessibility through a re-org, where we did have a limited capability of doing some minor remediation on PDFs, really just using the default tools with Adobe Acrobat. But as we had this reorg, we took on this in larger responsibility for accessibility, we realized that there was a lot more we just didn’t know. And we had to learn fast.
Jason Wennet
So this actually goes back to how I found you, Chad, which was doing some research for my team and coming across at the time, some of the LinkedIn videos that you were, you had authored. And those seem to be probably the clearest, most direct, especially with how it applies to creating accessibility within documents as you’re creating them. So building it into that workflow. So initially, I asked that my team, watch your videos, we had a like instead of an organizational subscription, and then one of, to the credit, to her credit, one of the designers on my team said why don’t you reach out to Chad, see if he’s actually available to do this? And I’m like, sure. And by pure luck, or serendipity, Chad was in Pennsylvania, we’re on the east coast a couple hours away, and it wasn’t going to be this monstrous feat of traveling to fly somebody in and then settle this up. It was relatively painless. Chad and I did exchange a bunch of emails, and I tracked him down at Adobe MAX. And yeah, it’s been a bromance ever since.
Understanding the accessibility gaps
Dax Castro
That’s great. It’s funny, because your organization really is in the same place that a lot of other organizations start with. They start with the Acrobat checker, they’re just doing the basics. They’re like, Okay, we know we need to do this. We know we need to make it more accessible. And how do we do it? So you start using the tools, we use the Acrobat checker, and then you do a little bit more deep dive. And maybe it’s a single topic or maybe it’s, you know, oh, is this all I need to do? A lot of times people end up kind of opening their, the doors of accessibility when they start dealing with forms, right? And they’re like, oh, I need to do a form. How do I do this? And then all of a sudden the floodgates open up and everything kind of go, you start to realize, oh, my gosh, there’s so much to this. And that’s kind of where you start. So can you think of maybe the types of different documents that you thought, oh, hey, we’re doing this great. And then once kind of you the knowledge became more apparent, you went, wow, I’m not sure we’ve got some more training to do. Maybe talk a little bit about that.
Building our accessibility knowledge
Jason Wennet
I don’t think there’s ever been a document where we said, wow, nailed it. You know, it’s it’s always been more of a fingers crossed, I think we got this and you know, not that we’re gonna go to accessibility jail. But I think this will pass. And as we started to get into more complex documents, brochures, things like that, we were just learning the things we didn’t know. And, again, I don’t recall exactly how it came to our attention. But there were some, we were informed by our program office, that there were some additional requirements, some other things that we need to be more aware of, like WCAG and think, is WCAG the would say, the umbrella for accessibility standards, or at least for PDF?
Chad Chelius
Yeah,
Jason Wennet
I know there’s the 508. That number comes into play. I don’t have all the details, but…
Understanding the relationship between WCAG, Section 508 and PDF/UA
Chad Chelius
Well, and I mean, you know, what you’re saying is what a lot of people struggle with, right? You know, it’s like, you know, that you hear all of these terms, you know, WCAG, Section 508, ADA, PDF/UA, right? There’s all of these, and it creates confusion, to be honest. Right? And, you know, but you’re right, Jason, I mean, WCAG is kind of the umbrella, right, of accessibility. PDF/UA kind of dives in a bit deeper and gets a little more on the technical end of things. But if you make a document PDF/UA compliant, as long as your content also has sufficient contrast, it will meet WCAG requirements. So in Section 508 is really particular to the US federal government. And that’s where you get into also like Canada has the AODA, Dax, what’s the European one?
How a VPAT evaluates Document Accessibility
Dax Castro
EN 301 549. And you know, what’s interesting? In Australia, it’s DDA, every area kind of has their own version. But what’s interesting is for Section 508, people, I just did a VPAT for for an organization. And a VPAT is a Voluntary Product Assessment. And basically what it is, is a report card, how well is, am I doing with my tool? And that could be a software, PDF, it could be a kiosk, it could be a ticketing system, it could be anything. But Section 508 really just has a couple paragraphs where it says, hey, your document must meet WCAG 2.0 AA Compliance. And that’s really all it says, there’s some other stuff but it’s basically the sum total of what it means. And I think a lot of people have the misconception that Section 508 has some set of its own requirements and for the built environment, when it comes to like a copier or kiosk or something like that, it does have a series of checklist items it does need to review. But when it comes to document accessibility, it just says, hey, meet WCAC. So…
Jason Wennet
You just taught me something new there. Thank you.
Dax Castro
Now, absolutely. Well, you know, it’s such a hard thing to wade through. So, you kind of, you know, I say there’s a few steps right, it’s awareness, right? First, we need to I understand that, hey, accessibility is a thing. Then knowledge, we need to know what it is that we’re supposed to be trying to do and an understanding of how to do it. And then implementation. And it sounds like you guys started down that road and you go, okay, here we are, we know we need to make these things accessible. We’re doing some of it, right? Let’s get some more knowledge. So can you talk about maybe some of the the strategies that your organization is using to keep people kind of fresh and learning when it comes to accessibility?
Strategies for maintaining accessibility in our workflow
Jason Wennet
Yeah, the first thing, well, one of the first things we did was starting with just learning about it. And through those videos that Chad authored with Lynda, then we brought Chad in to do a hybrid in-person and some remote. And this is prior to COVID, we still had some we had some remote people on the team to do this. And it was as much about the better ways to even use the tools like InDesign is our primary one to do that, because we generally we have a lot of stuff that just comes in really fast, and we throw stuff together and it all looks good. And it print it outputs fine when it’s printed, but there are some best practices for doc prep, that we just weren’t aware of. And there’s a lot of technical stuff, which had to we had to reevaluate how we were actually creating the work. So there was some, some reinvention of our actual workflow, and how we do stuff to keep that in mind, and in a sense, slowed down a little bit. So that, you know, that time that we take in the building process creates a cleaner, better end product and less time in the mitigation process or remediation process.
How establishing InDesign best-practices helped us work more efficiently
Chad Chelius
So to be fair, right, I mean, I’ll share a little bit about our relationship Jason, right. So, you know, I did come in and we did training, right, a lot of it was InDesign focused. And you probably remember Jason, I mean, a lot of what I was teaching the group was, how to use InDesign. Right? I mean, it wasn’t necessarily like accessibility, entirely accessibility focused. It was, hey, in order to achieve, you know, good results, you got to kind of use the product, correct?
Jason Wennet
Yeah, no, that’s a good point, I think we were patching our way through it. So we’re able to get stuff to look the way we want for the most part. But I guess, when you think of the structural aspects, like let’s say, for example, using something like bulleted lists and style sheets more religiously, versus just a character and a space, you know, the bullet character, things like that, that are a part of the actual tool set, but then are also inherent ingredients of accessibility. It’s stuff like that really helped us economize on our processes, and consolidate styles work more efficiently overall.
Dax Castro
So, Jason, when you guys were implementing that when you were making that shift from what you did before, to what you’re, you know, kind of what you’re doing now, did you create a series of style sheet, template documents or an SOP? How did you get that information across to the rest of your teams?
Balancing styles and good mechanics in design
Jason Wennet
Initially, I did create a document with style sheets and the tags. Chad helped me clean that up a bit. So that was a good starting points. But there was still some challenges when doing the long documents. So how do you have that proper reading order amongst throughout a bunch of disconnected pages or text boxes, right? So things like that were as the projects got more complex, style sheets only go so far, you still need to have that other mechanical knowledge. Yes, it’s almost analogous to setting up document for print and preflighting it or there are things that look good on screen and you just don’t know how they’re going to print because it’s just different mechanics involved, or different ways that computers and presses read the information that you have there. So it’s learning some just some of the backend of how that stuff needs to work or be set up to work properly.
Passing the accessibility baton to the experts
Chad Chelius
And so after I did the train thing, I want to say it was like several weeks later, Jason. You know, Jason and one of his co workers reached out to me. And so what they were discovering is, they’re like, Listen, you know, we agree that accessibility is important. But our people are spending a lot of extra time trying to make this work. Right, you know, and so it’s, and it’s now causing us, you know, we’re losing some production time. And so Jason approached me and said, Listen, Chad, what would you say if we just sent you our documents, and you kind of carried them over the finish line. And I said, I think that’s a fantastic idea. Because what it did, and I mean, the fundamentals are still important.
Chad Chelius
And I’ll speak for you guys, that the files I get from your organization are very, very clean. Like, by and large, they’re very clean, I think you do have a couple of freelancers that you’ve brought on. And you know, maybe they’re not quite as up to speed as others. But basically, what that did is, is it removed all of that extra work that they were having to do, right? You know, Dax, you and I teach us all the time, it’s like you building the functionality as you’re building the document. And that’s what your guys are doing. And they’re doing a pretty good job. But then they send it to me, and I just carry it to the finish line right there now, and where I see problems, I’ll just fix it, I’ll re export it, make it PDF UA compliance, send it back and say, Hey, here’s your fully remediated document. So, you know, when you’re when you’re making documents accessible, some accessibility is better than no accessibility. So even if you guys just kind of, you know, did what you’re doing and made the files, you are definitely better than where you were. But the fact that you’re kind of passing it on to me to take it to the finish line, I mean, essentially, every PDF that you now release, is PDF UA compliant, and WCAG compliant.
Dax Castro
Yeah, well, what’s interesting is, you know, I think a lot of people think they need to be experts. Matter of fact, we’re, by the time this podcast airs, we will have finished a webinar on Document Accessibility in Higher Ed. And in one of the handouts we give there is “The top 10 things you can do to promote accessibility without being an expert.” And the whole idea behind these 10 tips is that you don’t have to know everything, you don’t have to have all of the knowledge inside your brain and make every document perfect. But if you do some simple things, set alt text, use Styles, use bullet, you know, Jason, you talked about bullets, right? I just was remediating a document where all the bullets were manual bullets. If you just do some of those basic things, your documents like 80% of the way there, and it’s just such a better place to be. And imagine a world where everyone with a disability could download a document, and it was 80% accessible. How great of a world would that be, compared to the world we live in now, where it’s like, 90% of the documents are no tags available, or they use auto tag, and it just reads like a nightmare, you know.
Setting realistic expectations and balancing time spent on design versus
Jason Wennet
So let me jump in here with something else, though, that I think may be helpful for your audience, because we’ve been circling around it, but I think I want to put a finer point on it. And it’s that it’s about setting expectations from a department level at an individual designer level, where we talked about what are the best uses of your team’s resources and time? You know, if I have a team of designers, and if they’re spending way more time trying to make a document perfectly accessible, or they’re spending more time focusing on that than the actual design, then I have to weigh, there’s a financial decision I need to make of am I paying them for this to design or my paying them to be accessibility experts and…
Dax Castro
Right.
Jason Wennet
If it’s affecting quality, productivity, if other things are getting held up by it, I have to look to see, this isn’t the these are not core functions of their jobs. And I have to find other ways around this and I have been fortunate enough to have support for my organization to build some budget in for accessibility. One of the things I remember Chad saying with our in person training is that at best or in the most optimal, you’ll get a better about 85 to 90% of your net native accessibility done in InDesign, but there’s always going to be a need for Acrobat remediation. So that’s, that was a huge takeaway from our training to be able to sell it through my leadership to say, look, it’s not a real expectation for our design team to be accessibility experts, you know. We invest to build it in, but even even our experts says that there’s only so much you can do with this tool, you know, so, you know, you could do a lot of things with the hammer, but you can’t do everything with a hammer.
Dax Castro
Yeah,
Jason Wennet
So there are certain points, you just need a special tool to finish the job and make it right. So that’s a big part of how we were able to, again, rethink as we are working through this process of implementation workflows, and just overall business efficiency, what’s the best use of our time and resources to be compliant? You know, if we have this new responsibility, it doesn’t take away, it’s an added responsibility, it doesn’t take away from what our normal work is. So in my core team, they need to design for us that needs to be there that needs to be there their bailiwick. So I think there needs, part of that is being able to set those realistic expectations of what a designer should be able to do and not do or not be expected.
Chad Chelius
Yeah. And I think that’s a great point, Jason, I mean, and that’s where, you know, that’s where, like, our relationship kind of grew. Because, you know, you saw that, as your people were trying to do this, and you saw the struggles, right. I mean, your folks are designers, and they’re very good designers at that. And adding the, I don’t want to call it a burden, because that’s not really a fair, but
Dax Castro
I would say the layer, adding the layers
Jason Wennet
Yeah, it’s another layer of other technical requirements.
Chad Chelius
Yeah, adding the layer, right, you know, adding the additional work. I mean, it does affect productivity, right. And so, this, the solution that you ended up with, you know, our relationship was, hey, listen, guys. Get it as as far as you can, without spending crazy time on top of it. And then, you know, and then I’ll take it over from there and make sure that it gets to the finish line, right. And I think it’s been a very, very good relationship, because your designers can focus on what they do best. Pass it on. And, you know, usually it gets turned around in a day or so. And they have their remediated PDF, and I, you know, we use Wrike, right, yeah, we kind of like the project management. And I say, okay, here’s the remediated file, and I see them, pass it on to other people. And everybody’s happy. Everybody gets what they need.
Understanding the learning curve risk for remediation.
Jason Wennet
Yeah. Yeah, it’s been interesting, because I think the lack of knowledge, and this is, I think, is just general human nature, that people think that having a tool, you can do anything with it, or that will, here’s this tool, so why can’t you just do this? And it’s more like, you know, tools have their limitations, every tool does. Everybody has their cognitive limitations on what they can balance between their core job and these collateral duties. And I think, you know, a lot of how the industry has shifted in general, especially for designers, they’re responsible for a lot more things, whether you’re a web designer doing front end and having to know coding or,
Chad Chelius
Oh yeah,
Jason Wennet
In times past, art directors didn’t have to make their own mechanicals and know all that stuff. Now, there’s a lot more of this technical, I will say it’s a technical burden, because there’s a lot, there’s a lot more thinking or knowledge that has to be applied as part of a core job now. So finding those opportunities to offload some of that that aren’t rethinking what is a core function of a job, such as ADA, has been a good way to manage those expectations. And also, from a business standpoint, it’s a matter of investment, right? If you’re trying to force one person or team to do too much, you risk being out of compliance and that could actually cost a hell of a lot more than what you’re paying for salaries or outside services to make things compliant. If you get audited by the government, the Feds especially, if an organization like ours does that, you know, the fines, the risk that’s involved for not being compliant are not worth just it’s not worth the actual cost of making things compliant.
Understanding there is no “Easy Button”
Dax Castro
Well, you know, it’s interesting, the, you know, a lot of people think, you know, it’s like we talked about previously in the, in the conversation here, Jason, that you know, you start with the Acrobat checker. But I think a lot of people think you just need the Acrobat checker. That oh, well, Acrobat’s Acrobat. And it’s supposed to make an accessible PDF, and you run the checker and it passes the checker. And we’re good, right. And, and I, you know, Chad and I say this all the time, accessibility will always be a series of automated tools and manual checks, right? Because Chad and I see it over and over again, we’ll get documents that completely pass not only the Acrobat checker, but the PAC checker, which is even more stringent checker. And yet the document’s a train wreck, it is got all sorts of accessibility issues in it. And and I think a lot of management or a C-suite think that, well, the tools just work. And there should, why are you spending eight hours on remediating these five documents? And you’re like, look, you don’t understand, this is what’s going on. And there’s all these barriers. And and I think that people are shocked sometimes when they find out that you can’t just say, save as an accessible PDF, and it’s done.
Jason Wennet
Yeah.
It’s harder than it looks
Chad Chelius
And that was a really good analogy you mentioned Jason, about, like web development. Because I’m on taking myself back to 2009. But I mean, the reason I remember that time is a because I lost my job. It was kind of an impactful time for me, and I had lost my job. And I ended up, you know, continuing to do training on a freelance basis. And at that point in time, everybody kind of were reevaluating what they were doing. And we had a lot of print designers who said, I now need to learn web design. So I was teaching a lot of HTML, CSS classes. HTML and CSS is a far cry from print design. Right? It’s like night and day, right? And so I’d have people come into class, you know, and I teach them HTML and CSS, and they get done with the class. And they’re like, yeah, I don’t want to know HTML and CSS. You know, because it’s such a drastic shift from you know, what they were doing? And I think, Jason, what you were saying was, like, accessibility, in some ways can be that way, too. Because it is quite technical. And for the designer who is, designers are right brain? I forget, but I know designers are one and technical is the other. And, you know, basically, you know, it’s it’s really a paradigm shift, you know, and some people really struggle with, you know, the complexities of accessibility.
Accessibility knowledge versus design implementation
Jason Wennet
I think what happens too, is it compromises the design, because now you’re designing to your knowledge of accessibility, versus what’s good design, per se, or it becomes a limiting factor, because you, you may not know how to achieve a certain design, and that sense of accessibility. So when that when those resources aren’t available, it does create compromise.
Dax Castro
Well, I think you bring up a good point, Jason, a lot of people say, I can’t do this, because it won’t be accessible. I can’t use bright colors or I can’t use creative design, because it won’t be accessible. And I think you hit the nail right on the head, in that it’s not about whether you can or can’t. It’s do you have the skill set and the knowledge to make it happen? Because the truth is that most, top most often, you have lots of creative freedom, you have lots of ways to present the data. But if you don’t have the skill set to understand, okay, if I want to create this infographic in this very specific way, here’s how I’m going to, here are the steps I’m going to take to make it accessible to give people access to all the information versus just sticking a PNG in there and going hey, I guess I’ll just give it some alt text, right?
Jason Wennet
Yeah. Yeah, it’s it’s been a challenge. And, again, that’s been the big reason. And again, I’m also fortunate we do have the support, to be able to shift how we work to be more logical and rational that we need to be designers first and then get the accessibility support, not the other way around.
Chad Chelius
Yeah. And I will say, I mean, I have the privilege of, you know, working with your documents, you know, on a regular basis. And, you know, you guys create great, great designs, great looking pieces. You know, the one area that is a little bit of a struggle is, you know, you guys have corporate colors that you use, some of which don’t quite meet minimum color contrast. Right. And, you know, but you know, overall, you know, the documents are just, they’re very well built. And, you know, my job on the back end is not very difficult, you know, I’m just kind of massaging things, you know, as they, as they go along.
Jason Wennet
To, to your point about the contrast that, to your point about that specific issue, we actually are piloting a tweek, couple of the tweeked colors for our major for our main brand. And so I don’t know if you’ve come across them yet or not. But it was something that was brought to the attention of our program office. So they were experimenting and I can’t imagine anybody who’s not involved with it, even noticing the difference. So hopefully, it’s one of the things because it was part of it was a contrast issue. But then also, how do we have one color that works in the RGB and CMYK space? Are they pretty true? So knock on wood.
Working together to get the job done and accessible
Chad Chelius
But that’s what I love about you guys. Jason, is you know, and that’s a great example, right? Where a problem arose, right, where, you know, whoever made you aware of it, it doesn’t really matter. But a problem arose. And you’re taking action, right, you’re taking action to resolve the problem. And that’s what I love about you guys, is you, you take accessibility seriously. And I will say everybody on your team takes it seriously. Like I’ve never come across somebody who’s like, oh, here’s another file. I don’t know what I’m doing. Can you can you just make it happen? Everybody’s got a piece of the pie. Everybody has a vested interest in making this happen. So it’s really cool to work with people like that.
Jason Wennet
Thank you. Yeah, it’s been great. And I think one of the one of the reasons we also send you our native files is we sometimes use those for our own training with whatever if we do have a question, or we forget, some, some aspect of it, we can go back in and then just dissect what you the file to see what you’ve done or so it’s, they’re good. They’re good. Flash, flash points for us, or flashback points for us to just remind our…
Chad Chelius
They’re kind of a Cliff Notes.
Jason Wennet
Yeah, pretty much
Chad Chelius
Right? They’re like the Cliff Notes and how the file got creative, you know? And, again, it’s cool that you want to see that, right. I mean, you’re, you’re using it as a learning tool. So Jason, where do you see your team growing their skill sets in the future? Like moving forward? Did you see an area where they’re going to continue to evolve or continue to improve?
Dax Castro
Exactly. Yeah, no, exactly.
Shifting from PDF to Web Accessibility
Jason Wennet
I think we’re gauging how things are currently working and it seems to be going well. We’ve been in this multi-year transition, because we are doing a lot more web work as well. And we are actually now expanding that skill set even further with the migration to new platform. So there’s a lot more training there, but the rules of the road for WCAG still apply. And it’s web accessibility or web. If I remember correctly, the W stands for web, right?
Jason Wennet
Yeah and whatever the rest stands for I don’t care about, just as long as we’re doing it, right. So we’re the same, the same rules of accessibility apply.
Dax Castro
Well, you know, you bring up a good point, sometimes PDF, you know, Chad and I would love, can will tell you every time that a PDF can be made to be richer and more accessible than an HTML document, because we have a little bit more control over how, what’s presented to the end user. But there are lots of times where PDF isn’t the best vehicle to just disseminate information. And the idea that we have smartphones in our hand all the time, every single day, and that people use them as a really a liberating tool for people with disabilities. The smart, today’s smartphone is literally a freedom tool. And when you can present information via a web page or web app that’s accessible natively, then the time spent to remediate a specific document, to adjust all the tags, all of that goes out the window, and you now can just create content and do the thing that is your, you know, that you want to do. So, as much as we are proponents of PDF, there’s also a time where you ask yourself is PDF the right format? And sometimes that answer is absolutely. And other times it is no, it doesn’t have to be a PDF document.
Jason Wennet
Yeah, I agree. And part of my job as creative manager is talking to stakeholders and assessing what their needs are helping them parse out, you’re asking for this, but is it solving your is it solving your problem? The most efficient way?
Dax Castro
Well, you know, when I’m looking for a question, an answer to a question, I don’t usually go into my my rolodex of PDFs and try to find the right PDF to open up to figure out what the answer is. I go to Google and I say, hey, Google, right? Should I put hydrogen peroxide on my cut? And I get a series of answers or videos telling me, half of which tells me Yes, and half of which tells me no. And then I figure out what the best course of action is. But if I, if it comes from a trusted source, then I’m more likely to to, to do that, or listen to that advice versus some video on YouTube that got, you know 20,000 views, you know? And that’s where I think your organization comes in. Now, of course, we’re purposely not naming the organization, but as a large healthcare organization, you are, you have a responsibility to your members to provide information in a way that is accessible to them. And that doesn’t mean just PDF, it means a variety of things. And I think you’re you’re talking about this new shift to a more predominantly or at least a substantially HTML environment, I think there’s a lot of benefit there. And it’s, it’s always a balance, right? It’s always a balance between one item and another between web or PDF, and you have to find out what percentage of balance is right for you.
Jason Wennet
And just getting back to that point of how we’re shifting to HTML, because again, this, this goes back to managing realistic expectations of the team, where we’re using WordPress now, and there’s learned quite a bit of a learning curve there. But we get we as front end designers and the content creators, we get the site so far, but we still need that somebody helped us carried across the finish line, we still need to absolutely, or even 15%. So there’s only so much you can expect from from a designer that were or content creator in general, that you still need somebody who was dedicated job and knowledge is the actual implementation, you know, making sure that it’s right, making sure all the QA’s done and everything’s functioning properly, stuff like that.
Dax Castro
No, you’re right, there is no magic bullet, there is no single source, hey, if we just do it this way, it’s always accessible. It’s always a collaborative effort.
Risk Management – The acceptable level of risk
Jason Wennet
No, I agree. You know, risk management is a big deal when it comes to organizations, and understanding what the expectations are, figuring out what the acceptable level of risk is, the amount of time that you’re willing to expand on that, and then reaching out to accessibility experts or others that can help you kind of bring it across the finish line, I think is a great approach.
Jason Wennet
Again, you know, from a larger work, from a large organizational standpoint, even with budgets being super tight, it comes down to investing in, if at the very least, protecting the organization, ensuring it being compliant, because the cost of not being compliant, can far outweigh the cost of trying to skimp on trying to hire a unicorn to do everything or to, you know, to fake it till you make it. If that makes sense.
Jason Wennet
Yeah, and unfortunately, it’s the right thing to do, but we’re also beholden to budgets and things, but healthcare organizations in general, are all about avoiding risk, because that’s totally that’s the nature of our business is health and there’s a lot of regulation there alone and just core business alone.
Dax Castro
No yeah, it’s the thing is, if there was more enforcement of it, it would definitely compel people to be more diligent, unfortunately. But I, it’s I imagined that it’s like an IRS audit. But to such, it would be such a more monstrous degree. All those documents, the whole history of documentation, things like that. So why would why would anybody want to…
Dax Castro
Well, you know, in closing, I would love to say I’d love to bring up one final topic here. There is no overarching regulatory oversight committee that is reviewing content in the United States for accessibility. It’s a very lit, we’re at a litigious state, right or litigious environment where if it’s wrong and there’s a risk, you’re you have the risk of being sued, right. And in the UK, they actually have an organization because they’re going through this kind of new restructuring of accessibility oversight and guidance, kind of following suit along the Canadian or the Ontario methodology of AODA. But they actually do have an oversight committee who’s going through and reviewing and auditing organizations, which I think is an interesting thing. And someone brought up on our Facebook group, PDF Accessibility, they asked the question, is there the similar organization in the United States? And of course, the answer is no, it’s the lawyer knocking on your door, you’re getting that demand letter saying cease and dessist, or, hey, why aren’t your 10,000 documents accessible? And which is the nightmare of any IT person? Or, you know, anyone out there.
Jason Wennet
Open that can of worms?
Jason Wennet
Yeah. Even if they were 100% compliant, just the process alone, of having to deal with all that is such a, I can only imagine how it would kill productivity in an environment, just getting flagged for one dumb thing can open that can of worms.
Dax Castro
Well, Chad, you and I have talked about this many times, right? The idea that accessibility is is sometimes subjective, and one person’s accessible feature is another person’s barrier. Right?
Chad Chelius
Right. Right. You know, I mean, we’re constantly, you know, making those those judgment calls, you know, what I mean? Like, we’ll have an element on a page, and we’re like, okay, how do we want this to behave? And you know, oftentimes it’s you and I, Dax, right, where I’ll propose something and you’re like, oh, but wait a minute, Chad, that becomes a barrier. And I’m like, crap, I didn’t think about that, you know. And so it’s great to have, you know, have other people that you could bounce ideas off of, because you don’t always think of every scenario, you know, and I think that’s important.
Chad Chelius
Well, listen, Jason, I just want to thank you, again, for taking the time out of your day to join us for the podcast today. I think our listeners, I’m sure have gleaned a lot of useful information from your experiences and your guidance as well. So we really appreciate it.
Jason Wennet
Cool. Thanks. It was fun being here. And thanks for being gentle on my first podcast appearance.
Dax Castro
Oh, you did fine. Well, we’ll send you the show notes afterwards.
Chad Chelius
So once again, we want to thank Chax Training and Consulting, ourselves, for sponsoring this episode of the podcast. We gave ourselves a significant discount, by the way, on the sponsorship. But seriously, everyone, thanks for listening. And just remember, if you’re looking for in person or online training or struggling to establish an accessibility program within your organization, head over to accessibilityunravelled.com. My name is Chad Chelius
Dax Castro
and my name is Dax Castro, where each week we unravel accessibility for you.
Chad Chelius
Thanks, guys.
