Join hosts Natalie Garza and Natalie MacLees in the 36th episode of the AAArdvark Accessibility Podcast, as they continue their discussion on incorporating digital accessibility into web agency services. (This is the second part of the last episode!)
This episode delves into actionable steps for integrating accessibility into various services offered by web agencies, from web development and SEO to branding, marketing, and website maintenance. The hosts emphasize early incorporation of accessibility from the planning stages, known as ‘shifting left,’ and recommend hiring an accessibility consultant for those new to the field.
Welcome to Episode 36 of the AAArdvark Accessibility Podcast
Natalie Garza: Hello, everybody, and welcome to the AAArdvark Accessibility Podcast. This is episode 36. I’m 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 a digital accessibility expert here to talk about today’s topic, part two of last week’s episode, adding digital accessibility to your web agency services.
So last week we talked about why that’s important and why your clients might be asking for it now. And now we’re gonna talk about how to actually incorporate it into your services.
Incorporating Accessibility into Your Services
So, quick overview, what does it really mean to include accessibility in your digital services?
Natalie MacLees: Yeah, so it is something that you wanna start thinking about from the very beginning of the project.
What it does not mean is buying a huge multi-site license to an accessibility overlay that is not offering accessibility services and is not really fixing much of anything for anyone.
So I think we have another episode where we went over overlays and why they need to be avoided, but their marketing is so ubiquitous and so persuasive and so pervasive that I feel like we have to keep saying it over and over again, so that developers know, “Please do not consider that your solution for anything.”
Natalie Garza: Yeah, and I will also tack onto this section. Don’t just offer accessibility as an add-on or an upgrade.
Natalie MacLees: Yeah, it’s really something that should be incorporated into every project, and shouldn’t be an option. It should just be the way that things are done.
Natalie Garza: Exactly. So we’re gonna go over that in this episode. We wanted to lay out a few actionable steps and things that you can do to your services. And the first one is breaking down what services you offer and starting to figure out where accessibility fits in, because it might not be obvious, but it most likely affects all your services.
Natalie MacLees: Yes, it probably does.
So if you are building websites for clients, then you need to become familiar with WCAG or W.C.A.G, which is the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. So, most of the time you’re gonna be looking at AA compliance.
So either 2.1 or 2.2, depending on exactly what you’re doing , double AA is where you wanna be, so you do need to learn about what those requirements are and figure out how you can implement them on customer websites.
Natalie Garza: Yeah, so websites, I feel, are the most obvious ’cause this whole podcast has really focused on websites and web audits and developers’ websites, and all that kind of jazz.
Natalie MacLees: Yeah.
Accessibility in SEO
Natalie Garza: But, there’s less obvious ways accessibility incorporates into other services. You wanna go down that list?
Natalie MacLees: Sure. So we just recently did an episode on how accessibility and SEO overlap. So if you are offering SEO services, which a lot of agencies and freelancers do. You need to be thoughtful about accessibility there. Sometimes there’s a temptation to do things for the robots first, and what’s best for SEO first.
But you should always do what’s best for people first. And the traffic will follow. So you wanna make sure when you’re adding alt text to images, and choosing your link text,and choosing headings, and things like that, that you’re not just solely focused on what’s gonna work best for the crawlers, but what’s gonna work best for people.
And ultimately, that’s the best approach for SEO anyway, because you are ultimately trying to get people to come to your website and use it and read it, and not just the crawlers.
Accessibility in Branding
When you’re working on branding and identity, you definitely wanna give some thought to accessibility. Make sure that you’re choosing a color palette that’s gonna be at least reasonably okay to work with for accessibility.
I know I’ve been on some projects where, they didn’t think about it. You know, they brought me in too late on a project and there was a color that they wanted to use with white text and it was just too light it wasn’t gonna work. And it was a big, you know, it was a big thing to go back and revisit the branding and try to redo things.
So do think about that. It’s not that, like if you try to make it so that every single color in your brand color palette works with either white or black text, you’re just gonna end up with a bunch of muddy midtones. So what you wanna do instead is just be thoughtful. Like, have some colors that are light enough that they could be used with dark text, some colors that are dark enough that they could be used with white text.
And just be thoughtful about how you use those throughout the design. So you can’t choose like a pale green or a pale yellow to put white text on, for example. So just giving that some thought at the point that you’re. You know, hashing out what all the different color combinations are gonna be. Giving some thought to accessibility and ensuring that there’s sufficient color contrast somewhere in there, right? Like, you don’t have to be able to put every color on top of every other color, but you do have to have at least a few different accessible color combinations.
Natalie Garza: For the branding and identity services, is the main concern readability?
Natalie MacLees: The main, yeah, the main concern is the legibility basically of text over a background color. Yeah. That’s the main thing that you’re working on there.
There are also some concerns around colorblindness. So if you choose, you know, like red and green or yellow and brown, or like really common colorblindness palettes, then some people might really struggle to see your content.
So you wanna be thoughtful about that too and give some thought to the different types of colorblindness and how that might impact your color palette.
Natalie Garza: Okay. And also fonts.
Natalie MacLees: Yeah. Yeah. Nice readable fonts instead of very highly stylized ones are always gonna be a lot more friendly for everybody to read. But that becomes especially important for users who have reading or learning disabilities.
Natalie Garza: Okay, so branding and identity make them legible.
Natalie MacLees: Yeah.
Accessible Marketing and Emails
Natalie Garza: Next marketing.
Natalie MacLees: So I think we could throw, like, social media in here. Any kind of promotion that you’re creating, whether it’s printed or it’s gonna be somewhere online. Do give some thought to how that can be accessible.
Make sure that you’re adding alt text to images. Make sure that you have sufficient color contrast if you do put text over a background or text over an image.
Just being thoughtful about how you do those things, like what link text you use, what links you use. We have episodes I think where we’ve gone over accessible social media. So just different things to keep in mind.
And I do wish that both design and marketing professionals got training in accessibility, but of course, web developers and web designers don’t even get that. So that, that’ll be maybe at some point in the future that’ll be included.
Natalie Garza: Mm-hmm. And even email content, too.
Natalie MacLees: Oh, absolutely. Yeah.
Your emails that you send out, ’cause those are very often a real nightmare for accessibility. So, giving some thought to the markup that you’re using in those nicely designed marketing emails and ensuring that you’ve got color contrast and link texts that means something and things like that.
Yeah, all of that same stuff applies to emails.
Natalie Garza: Yeah, not as obvious, right?
Natalie MacLees: Not as obvious. You don’t always think of that as part of your, like part of your website or part of your online presence, but it absolutely is.
Website Maintenance and Accessibility
Natalie Garza: Yeah, exactly. Alright, next is website maintenance.
Natalie MacLees: Yeah. So if you’re a web agency or a freelancer and you’re not offering maintenance packages to your clients. First, think about adding that because it’s a nice stream of income. Then also, you avoid that situation where you build a lovely website and hand it over to a client, and then they aren’t sure how to do it, and they end up making all kinds of mistakes, and your work kind of goes to waste, so you can avoid that situation.
Also, build a nice income for yourself and provide a valuable service for your customers, right? They’re not just out there struggling on their own, trying to manage their website. And you can offer accessibility monitoring as part of that service. So there’s all different stuff that you could include in maintenance.
You know, if you’ve built on a platform like WordPress or Drupal where there’s gonna be updates that need to be done, those could be included. You could test their forms on a regular basis, make sure their SSL certificate stays up to date, make sure that when content gets updated, it’s done in a proper and accessible way.
So there are lots of different things that you could offer in that, but you could also run automated scans for accessibility issues on the site on a regular basis.
Natalie Garza: Yeah, mainly just trying to see are their accessibility issues growing a lot? Are they pretty stable? I mean, it’s not gonna be a perfect picture, but it’s gonna give you some idea, “oh, maybe they’re messing with their site and they’re not doing things correctly.”
Natalie MacLees: Or they got a wild content editor who keeps putting pale pink text with the white letters on it or something.
Natalie Garza: Yeah. So, just a way to keep an eye on things, make sure things stay in line, how you built it.
Natalie MacLees: Yeah.
Natalie Garza: So those are just a few examples of services that you can incorporate accessibility into. And there’s probably a lot more, and you would be surprised where accessibility still applies.
The Concept of Shifting Left
So next, we wanna talk about a concept called “Shifting Left”.
Natalie MacLees: Yeah. So if you read a left-to-right language, I guess shifting left makes sense. If you think of the process of building a website, right? Like you planning, and then wire frames, and then design, and development, and then launch, and you think of that as a linear process going from left to right.
You want to put accessibility as early in that process as you can. So the the first place people usually try to put it is at the end, like between the time that the website is done and launch or even after launch, which is even worse, and it’s so much more work and it’s so much more expensive and takes so much longer to do it at that point.
If you could move that earlier, and you start thinking about accessibility during development, and maybe you put an accessibility linter into your CI/CD pipeline. So it’s checking every commit that you’re making on your code for possible accessibility issues.
If you wanna move it back to the design phase, and you’re doing some accessibility reviews of designs that are being done and ensuring that all of the color palettes that are being used are accessible, and any color combinations used are accessible.
And you wanna move it back even further than that and start thinking about the best user experience and the most intuitive interfaces that you can at the wire framing stage, right?
So that you’re planning for that all along and including it in the process is the most efficient and the most cost-effective way of including accessibility into your process. So you wanna look at where we can move this earlier and earlier in the process so that you’re not scrambling to try to fix those accessibility issues at the very end of the process before the site launches, but you already feel confident at that point that you’ve done a pretty good job. And what you’re doing at the end is just some final checks.
Natalie Garza: Yeah. And by final checks, it’s like quick scans, quick manual audits, but since it was baked in, it’s not gonna be that much.
Natalie MacLees: Yeah. Tested it all along. Yeah.
Hiring an Accessibility Consultant
Natalie Garza: All right, so shifting left, but if you’re stuck, and if you don’t know where to even start with all this, what should an agency owner do?
Natalie MacLees: Yeah, I would recommend hiring an accessibility consultant. They could help you review your process, figure out where you need to be injecting accessibility into that process. They could help train your team. They could help guide you through a project or two so that you could really understand, here’s what we need to be doing if we wanna build accessible projects.
They could advise you on making accessible choices, like at times where, “well, we have to decide between this tool or this tool.” They could help evaluate those for accessibility and help you make those decisions. So there’s lots of different ways an accessibility consultant could kind of jump in and help.
And I think that’s a really great way to get started. If you’re just completely unfamiliar with accessibility and there’s no team knowledge of that within your team, bringing in somebody from the outside who could provide that training and then provide that process for you is gonna end up saving you a lot of time and headache.
Natalie Garza: Yeah, because once you get an accessibility consultant in, they’ll break down your services, they’ll give you all the information you need on where accessibility applies, and might even offer training for the designers, the developers, the content writers, the copywriters, whatever is that you have on your team.
Getting Started with Your Own Website
All right, so where can agency owners at least get started with their current projects?
Natalie MacLees: Yeah, so if you’re not sure and you don’t wanna start messing around on a client project, work on your own website. I know that web agencies tend not to have the best websites because of the saying “the cobbler’s children have no shoes.”
But work on your own website, do an accessibility audit. Maybe hire that accessibility consultant to come in and show you how you could do some manual testing or help you identify some issues and figure out how to fix them.
So start with your own website. Make that accessible first, and that’ll teach you a lot about the process. And then that way you’re also not, you know, making any false promises that you can’t keep to clients or anything like that, it’s just your own website. And then you can take the lessons that you learn from that and start incorporating those into client projects afterwards.
Free Accessibility Scan and Conclusion
Natalie Garza: Mm-hmm. So, with that, where can people go to at least get a scan on their website first?
Natalie MacLees: Yeah, come on over to AAArdvarkAccessibility.com. You can put in the homepage of your own agency website and get a free scan. Figure out what all the issues are, and some guidance on how you can remediate those.
Natalie Garza: Yes. So with that, thank you guys for joining us. This is the AAArdvark Accessibility Podcast. This is episode 36, and we will talk to y’all next time.
