Webinar: The importance of accessibility in website success – Duda Webinar

Is your website turning away potential customers without you even knowing it?

Here’s the accessibility wake-up call your SEO strategy desperately needs.

Why you should care about website accessibility in your SEO campaigns, and how by ignoring it, you’re not only taking risks, but you’re also missing out on search traffic.

Join our guest panel of experts: Judith Lewis, Nik Ranger, Dejan Mladenovski, and your host, Peter Mead.

Full Transcript Of The The importance Of Accessibility In Website Success Webinar

Peter Mead:
Welcome to The Duda website accessibility webinar with some of the best experts you’ll find anywhere. First off the agenda is to wish everybody a happy International Women’s Day. So yes, website accessibility is a very important topic we should not overlook. It’s actually a very old topic and it’s needed for compliance reasons, but also, how can it help your SEO? Our experts will discuss on tonight’s webinar. So, please let me introduce our experts.

I’ll start with Judith. Judith, founder of DeCabbit Consultancy, an OG in SEO since 1996, spending her time consulting, writing well-known publications, and judging international search awards. She also loves chocolate and is one of the most amazing people I know. Welcome, Judith.

Judith Lewis:
Thank you so much, and thank you for the wonderful introduction.

Peter Mead:
Very welcome. So happy for you to be here and just really, really keen to find out your take on the whole website accessibility topic.

Judith Lewis:
Hopefully I’m going to make some compelling arguments, so hopefully there’ll be some things that people will be screenshotting, taking to their bosses, taking to their directors, you know, using internally in order to make that argument for website accessibility.

Peter Mead:
Very good. So, Nik Ranger. Nik is an award-winning senior technical SEO specialist at Dejan Marketing, an international SEO presenter, and is my friend and colleague. Welcome, Nik. So good to have you here with us.

Nik Ranger:
So good to be here. Absolutely delighted to be here with the Duda webinar, with Judith, Dejan, and of course you, Peter. Thanks so much for having me.

Peter Mead:
Absolutely, and yeah, really keen to hear what your research has shown, so we’ll be lining up to see that. So, head of innovation at Local Search, over 15 years’ experience specializing in enterprise and programmatic SEO, artificial intelligence, automation, and business growth at scale. He also now heads up the Sydney SEO Collective Meetup. Dejan, on a personal note, is the top SEO with a lot of experience who I admire. So, welcome Dejan to the webinar.

Dejan Mladenovski:
Thank you, team. What an honour, what a privilege. Who’s excited? Hopefully we’re going to learn something today, we’re going to take a bit away, we’re going to implement it on our site, we’re going to get that SEO growth we’re all after.

Peter Mead:
Absolutely. So yeah, I mean, website accessibility—as I said, I think we all understand this is not a new topic by any means, and it’s been around really for quite a while, with the W3C, this kind of thing. So, what we really want to think about is, how can we use this stuff in our SEO campaigns? What happens when we ignore this kind of thing? What risks are we taking? Also, are we missing out on search traffic? So, I’m very excited about what our experts have to say. Judith, you have prepared some slides for us?

Judith Lewis:
Yes. Well, you know, a webinar is never complete without a set of slides, especially ones that don’t work. So, let’s hope mine do work. But you know, I would only be fulfilling the destiny of all webinars if my slides didn’t work. Wow, they work! They’re there! Somebody else—I’m sorry, one of you guys, your slides aren’t going to work, so I apologize in advance for that.

But what I’ve done, I’ve taken a little bit of a different tack here. So, as you can see, the title is “The Business Case,” and I know we’re here about SEO, and my life has been SEO because I’ve been in SEO forever. I love SEO more than PPC even—I mean, you know, how many people can say that? Lots, I’m sure. But what I wanted to do is talk about the business case for accessibility.

Now, a lot of these stats that I’ve put in here, they’re not just for Australia. I have a lot of Australian-specific stats. I know, I’m sounding weird—I’m Canadian living in the UK talking about Australian stats—but a lot of these stats that I have in here talk about the potential size in the market. However, if you want to go global—and I’m Canadian, no Tino shade—there’s a bigger population out there we can sell stuff to, because you know, we all want to make money. And making money, sometimes we’ve got to expand our market beyond the local. And Australia’s not small to be local, but beyond the local Australian market and look globally.

So, what we want to be doing is always thinking: what could be the hindrance to selling lots of stuff or lots of services globally? We want to think not just about the Australian market, but also about the global market. And I do have a point that I’d like to make at the end, which I’m hoping will also be compelling, but we’ll see.

Now, the demographics in Australia—so this is specifically for Australia, and I’ve put my references in the slides as well, just so that anybody who wants to check these stats, or if you want to go in and dig into more stats in order to have something more for your boss, I’ve left the references there so that you can get them. But it’s hard to ignore that you’ve got one in every five people in Australia has a disability. There are five of us on this webinar—two of us sadly aren’t in Australia—but theoretically, there’s someone running the webinar and then four people, so that’s five people at least involved here. So, one of us theoretically has a disability and may—obviously, we’re all digital professionals—but if we pulled from the population, may have problems accessing stuff on the internet.

I know we all think, you know, it’s easy, you just click a website, there’s nothing to it. But as we get older as a population—don’t forget the Baby Boomers—we’re a huge bump in the population triangle. So, you know, if you think about populations of the different generations, you’ve got this bump at the Baby Boomers, which is a huge population, and they’re all getting older. No Tino shade again, it’s not a bad thing to get older, as I myself am closer to 55 than 50. So, you know, it’s not a bad thing to get older, but it comes with challenges. And we all know the Silver Surfers have cash, and we want to access that cash. So, you know, we’re really focusing on what money can we make out of people here, and so you’re eliminating a huge portion—a huge number of people—if you don’t address their needs.

So, you really have to think: if we’re keeping up, closer and closer to half of Australia’s households will include a person with a disability. I know it’s not there yet, but it’s creeping up, and as the population gets older, we’re going to get close to half of Australian households having someone with a disability in them. You’re eliminating—at the moment, you’re eliminating almost 40 percent. But we’re gonna get—it’s more than a third—we’re gonna get to the point where it’s a lot of people that you’re just not going to be able to sell services or goods to. Do you really want to eliminate that big a population?

And it’s not just about the moment: “Oh, we’ll launch, it’s fine, we’ll fix it later.” How many of us in SEO have ever heard that phrase: “Oh, it’s fine, we’ll just launch and do the SEO later,” right? No. I’m sorry, you know, once it’s gone wrong, it’s dead. Well, it’s maybe not fully dead, but it’s harder to fix once it’s gone live and it’s wrong, because Google crawls, and Google doesn’t love you anymore. And once Google stops loving you—much like other people in my life—they stop loving you for a lot longer than you expected.

And so, you know what, it’s not just about the person that you’ve just turned away from your door, so to speak—your theoretical, metaphorical door of your website—you’ve turned away everyone that they talk to. Now, I speak at conferences around the world. There’s a woman named Safi, she’s blind and she works in travel promotion for people with disability, and so she is likely to go to conferences all over the world and say, “Oh, don’t use them, they’re horrid.” And so, she’s an influencer, she’s influencing people, and it might not be direct, but she’s telling people. And that is exactly what will happen if people can’t access your website, or if the images are wonky, or if they can’t use a screen reader. They are going to tell, because they’re in networks—we all are. It’s not like they’re living an isolated life. They’re gonna tell everyone, “Oh, don’t use them, they’re no good. Use someone else.” So, you lose someone for life.

But think about the flip side. Think about the flip side: if you manage to make your website accessible and it’s a beautiful experience—seamless, easy, fluid—you’re gonna gain not only that customer for life, but they’re gonna go off and tell everyone that they know, “Hey, you know what, they made an effort and it was great. It was a seamless experience. I had a problem here, but I called or tweeted or I used my screen reader and sent a message, and they responded immediately.” Come on, that’s an amazing thing.

So, why would we eliminate all these people from being potential customers? Because once we do it badly—I’m sorry, Mom, my English isn’t improving, I swear—once we do it poorly or badly, it is poor or bad in their minds for a lot longer. So, don’t eliminate these people. If you pull them out of your pool of potential customers, then that’s it.

So, we want to be thinking about what is happening in the bigger community, not just on our website for potential customers, thinking, “Well, you know, we have X, we sell to lots of people.” Well, you’re not going to be selling to many more people unless you get it right. And like I said earlier, internationally, you are going to have issues internationally. So, you know, Australians—almost, what is it, almost one-third—didn’t do something because of their disability. So, do you really want to be that business that is like, “Oh, you know, we don’t care about everyone, there’s a third of the population and a growing, almost, you know, getting up to a quarter, moving to a half, we have a third of the population households in Australia we just don’t care about.” Do you really want to be that business? I don’t think you do.

But we also—I’ve pulled this from the UK—we also want to think about the money, right? The money. I keep saying, “Oh, you’re not going to make sales.” Well, how much? Let’s talk about the actual numbers. Now, I couldn’t find these numbers for Australia, and I’m sure, you know, with a bit of math, I probably could have mocked something up, but I wanted to make sure everything that I gave you was verifiable by an external source and it wasn’t just me, so that you could say that it wasn’t just Judith said, it was a verifiable resource.

Now, I love it when people say, “Judith said,” or, “I watched your webinar and you were right, like four years ago, you got that right.” So, you know, let’s just be cautious here—I’m always right, or at least my husband tells me I’m always right.

So, how much money are we losing? Billions. Billions. It is not millions, it is not hundreds of thousands, it is billions. Billions of, in this case, pounds, but billions of dollars—Australian dollars—are being lost due to inaccessibility by you and other businesses. This is the loss: 2 billion a month in the UK. It’s not like, “Oh, you know, it’s 500 million, it’s not that big a deal,” it’s huge. You know, in the UK, there’s a huge number of people that are not spending money with businesses because they’re not able to access them.

Now, there is a qualifying factor here, that you have to be accessible in the UK, but websites still aren’t. So, you know, think about that—there’s more going on here than just not having people coming to your website. Unless you’re a magazine, in which case you’re losing ad revenue, but you’re losing money if your website’s not accessible. The billions of discretionary spend, or even, you know, non-discretionary spent—stuff you have to buy—is not being bought with your company if you’re not accessible. So, we’re not just talking about a small amount of money here, we’re talking about a significant chunk of cash. And although this is in the UK, the numbers percentage-wise still work for Australia.

So, the previous slide did give percentages, I’ve given you the actual hard numbers here so you can see the massive amount of money. In the UK, 274 billion in spending power. Billions. This is hundreds of billions of pounds. So, there are hundreds of billions of dollars that are able to be spent and could be being spent with your business if you’re accessible. In the US, they’re talking about 13 trillion dollars. Am I convincing you yet? There is a lot of cash to be made if you’re an accessible website.

Holy cow, people, if this doesn’t convince you right now that you should be captioning your videos or other elements to help give access to people that otherwise wouldn’t have access to your website, to your content, whatever—I don’t know what to do. 13 trillion dollars—it’s like, what, the third largest economy on the planet? Seriously, this is just, you know, it’s larger than some countries’ GDP. You’re—yeah, 13 trillion, look at all those zeros, seriously. It is a huge amount of money, and I can’t believe that anyone would just not pay attention to the valuable money they could be making just by making some simple tweaks. It’s not even that hard. I know it’s dev time, but you know what, it is worthwhile dev time because you can put a dollar amount—Australian dollar amount—against it. In this case, it’s a US dollar amount, previously it was a UK pound amount, but you know what, the math is there, you can do it. Honestly, it is so worth it, just say yes.

So globally, their spending power is massive. Please do not ignore this population of people, they are super valuable. However, there is one other small little fact that might get in the way of things, and that’s the Disability Discrimination Act of 1992 in Australia. Oh yeah, it’s a legal requirement, people. I know, I know, you might be a little bit surprised and thinking, “No, no, it’s not, I don’t have to legally make sure that my website is accessible, I can do whatever I want.” No, no, you can’t.

And you know, in maybe a slight twist that you didn’t realize, if your website sells nothing at all or its services are free, you still have to make your website accessible because it’s the law. I know I’m talking about 13 trillion dollars, 274 billion pounds—I’m talking about a lot of money. I’m also talking about the law. Do you really want to be on the wrong side of the law? In the UK and in the US, there are groups that will specifically go out, find a website that is non-compliant, and in the EU too, and start legal proceedings. Now, I don’t think that’s happening in Australia yet, but this is something that is happening, and a former client of mine actually experienced it. And you know, there are only so many times you can say, “It’s really not accessible, it’s really not accessible, it’s really not accessible, our SEO is hurting because it’s really not accessible,” until the lawyers knock on the door and say, “You know what, there’s a lawsuit.” It’s not because someone couldn’t access it, it’s because a group came along and said, “You know what, your website is not accessible and you’re getting sued.” Do you really want that? No, you don’t.

So, moral of the story: we want to be making sure our websites are accessible. Now, if you want to confront me about this in any way, shape, or form, you can, but I’m saying to you: do not throw the money away, make it, don’t lose it. So, thank you very much for my informative seminar on how to make money online by being accessible. Thank you very much.

Peter Mead:
Let’s—wow—let’s just blow my mind to those stats, which is just amazing. A third of Australians being affected and just that phenomenal amount of money, business just going begging. Yeah, that’s a really compelling case. So, businesses should be just running, sprinting to their developers right now.

Judith Lewis:
Oh yeah, for sure. If you suspect your website may not be accessible, it doesn’t matter—just have your devs do an audit. I use something called WAVE in my browser. It’s not rocket science, you can use a plug-in, click it on your website, and it’ll go, “Hey, awesome job, really nicely done,” or, “Oh my God, it’s all red.” And if it is red, cue ABS or, you know, hire an agency that can do some analysis for you. Yeah, because it’s a lot of money and it’s the law.

Peter Mead:
Yeah, that’s—yeah. So, we’ve got a question from Hans. His question is, what is the expert’s opinion on layer software like AudioEye? Does anybody have experience with that?

Judith Lewis:
I haven’t got experience with that. I’ve used only one type of screen reader, and oh my God, let me tell you, in the old days of spam when we used to put alt attributes behind the pictures, you know, full of keywords—oh my God, it sounds so bad when it’s read back out to you: “chocolate chocolate bar dark chocolate bar chocolate bar 70 dark chocolate milk bar 55″—no, please don’t do that, it sounds horrible on a screen reader.

Nik Ranger:
Yeah, dead giveaway for keyword stuffing. So look, I don’t have any experience with that software, but obviously, the basics of accessibility are going to set you up to be able to be compatible with screen reading software, accessibility software.

Peter Mead:
Any other comments from the panel about Judith’s points that she made?

Nik Ranger:
Well, there is one point in the chat that of the five of us, one of us does have a disability. So it’s true, amongst the five of us, one in five has a disability. That’s absolutely wild, considering you now extrapolate that out to the Australian population and it’s like 4.4 million people are affected. Insane.

Dejan Mladenovski:
Yeah, and if your website’s not accessible, it’s not just them that you’re missing out on. As one of my slides said, it’s them and their friends and family that will also be told. And if 35–36 percent of Australian households right now, this moment, have a disabled person in them, that’s 35–36 percent of the Australian households, and that number of people in them—two, one, four, six, ten—that you’re losing. So you really have to think about the money side of things and how much business you’re losing.

Nik Ranger:
It doesn’t feel like a big deal when you just think out loud, “Oh, you know, it’s just one part of the population,” but if I can’t hear, like if I’m deaf, then you’re eliminating me from your potential pool if everything is on video and I can’t read any of it. But also think about people in a crowded room, people without headphones, people who watch a video on mute for whatever reason—you’re also not able to communicate your message to any of them. How many of us have been scrolling through Facebook and a video comes on, or whatever—TikTok, anything—video comes on and it’s got captioning, and we’re like, “Oh great,” you know, but there’s no captioning and our speakers are on mute for whatever reason, we don’t hear the message.

I think everything you’re saying just makes so much sense, but really, people don’t think about it until it actually affects them. I’m thinking about the landmark case of Ms. Nange vs Coles—Coles Supermarkets here in Australia—and it was the first web accessibility lawsuit to actually even just reach the Federal Circuit Court. And in that, I think it was something that was really, really powerful that ABC News reported about that at the time. Basically, she said, “I don’t want special consideration, I just want the same consideration as other customers.” And that’s something that, even though it didn’t necessarily get settled in court, it got settled out of court, that was something that really started to have ripple reverberations through our legal channels around that. Just as an everyday example of that.

Peter Mead:
That’s a great point, Nik. So, Dejan, you’ve got a comment there.

Dejan Mladenovski:
Yeah, so I think it is interesting on the one in three. I think ordinary people like us, injuries happen all the time, and somebody maybe with a broken arm or maybe some sort of temporary visual impairment—these people are still, you know, worthy of being considered. And, you know, even looking at that, it’s not just people over 65, right? That can impact anybody at any age. So, you know, counting these people within the larger scope, I think it’s a very interesting point. And, you know, as you said, you would have—it’s big money that companies are missing out on by not implementing these strategies.

Peter Mead:
Great comment, Dejan. Nik Ranger, would you like to show us what sort of research you’ve been doing? I know you’ve been doing some work with some stats, running some experiments.

Nik Ranger:
Yeah, absolutely. You’ve got some fairly technical stuff to explain here. Not so much technical this time, though I do love that area of it. Just a really quick intro of me—that’s me, that’s my face. Go check out SEO in 2023 with the lovely David Bain, great book, but I’ll get straight into it.

So, we’re talking a lot about Australian web accessibility in 2023. Here in Australia, it is completely different to the US, the UK, and other parts of the world where international standards already have in place a lot of compliance and contingency and penalties if failure to actually be compliant with your website. So, currently, we have the Disability Discrimination Act that was made back in 1992. Now, we’ve got the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, and this is a second version, but that’s really only applicable to government websites, and we’ve got a revision on the DDA. So, I might refer to the DDA a lot, but that’s the Disability Discrimination Act, and it had one revision in 2014.

And I love that from Judith—great point. I was talking about the Ms. Nudge vs Coles case, and that’s actually in 2014, and that’s the only time that the DDA since 1992 has been revised. So, what’s that? Let’s talk about the DDA that was founded in 1992. I know I keep saying that a lot of the time, because just have a bit of a think—what was even happening in 1992? There was just a scattering of websites on the World Wide Web. From what I’ve researched about it, because I wasn’t necessarily in SEO during that time, so Peter, enlighten me. But really, from what I understand, there was between 10 and 20 websites, and the W3C page from that even just lists like 30 web servers online at the time.

Now, consider what the landscape of search looked like, the quality of websites and what they looked like. Consider that that’s where all the laws here in Australia are based around. It is not modern, it is not considering the multitudes, the variance, the richness that now the web and the way that we are building new computational science and coding languages are adapting and evolving. It is a completely different landscape, yet that is what is really on the basis of Australian law.

But surely we had that landmark case in 2014, surely there would be some amendments there. And yeah, there were some amendments that were put into place. They wanted to give some more advisory notes around certain specifications of that, but I just want to say from actually reading that document, these advisory notes do not have direct legal force, nor do they substitute for the provisions of the DDA itself. So, really, this is a, “Hey, if you’d like to, this is actually pretty good, we’re going to review it mainly because we don’t want to have more mega supermarkets be sued by individuals. We don’t want to have the Commonwealth Games be sued—not the Commonwealth Games, the Olympics—be sued by individuals with payouts of 20 grand. We don’t want to have consistent things of that, even though there’s a rise, you know, post-COVID of these kinds of conversations that we’re having.”

But the thing is, it is so frustrating when we consider what you’ve just said: one in five people have a disability, which extrapolates out to 4.4 million people, and one out of three people completely bounced because they are so frustrated that they just give up. Makes sense, right? So, from my opinion, the attitude here is just not good enough. Even our Royal Commission that walked into this case and made those advisory notes believe that, “Okay, where it is at the moment is fine, we don’t need to review it.” This is like, where’s the need? Where’s the business need? Obviously, they haven’t paid attention to what Judith has been saying or any of her wonderful research that she’s done in this area, because I would really, really love the two of you to have a conversation about this, because it’s so frustrating, particularly as a technical SEO.

Now, the thing that I love about SEO is that we are privy to cross many different party lines when we’re consulting with our clients. We can be able to talk to CTOs, we can talk to CMOs, we can sometimes even talk to CEOs if we need to, depending on the relationship that you have with your clients. And these are the kinds of things that I think, from an SEO, we have the responsibility to really start to look after this, because really, what they’re also saying here is that the onus is on the individual to make this assessment for them.

And really, I went through—and your girl loves a little numbered list, writing for NLP—so this is really what they say: you want to become aware of the issue, you want to research relevant laws and regulations, you want to identify the relevant factors, you want to assess those benefits and detriments, you want to consider the financial circumstances, you want to develop an action plan if necessary, and again, you can then think about potentially filing a complaint with a commission. Now, this is what they say an individual with a disability must do to have their voice heard.

That is disgusting. That, to me, is absolutely disgusting. To even be aware of it—search works best when you have no idea what’s happening, that’s our job. We are the people in the shadows making these things happen, making these things accessible and usable and friendly. And yeah, we need to be quite heavy on the consultation with developers and UX designers and people who work in content teams to really be mindful of these things. This is our day-to-day job, all day, every day. And how on Earth would an individual, a, become yet further from just being able to be aware of it, but actually be able to articulate why that is? In the cause, they want them to articulate precisely—thank you—precisely why that is a problem. And then they’ve got to research the laws and regulations, but then identify the relevant factors that pertain to that, and then assess the benefits and detriments for the company, for the private company. They’re not SEOs. All of us here on this panel are technical SEOs with like a decade plus of experience, all of us here, and this is something that even us as experienced search professionals have to go through and collate all of this research to be able to give the advice. And we come at, you know, a price point—we’re not cheap, because this stuff requires years of experience, it requires years of being able to look at these numbers of accessibility from these scores and be able to consult with businesses and be able to unpack what they need to do about them. And you’re placing that onus on the individual? Are you kidding?

Considering the financial circumstances—well, go back and rewind, grab Judith’s amazing slides and use those, and I hope that that’s going to be helpful. But again, if you’re now taking blanket stats and trying to think about for a private enterprise, how on Earth would you do that? Even here in SEO land, I have to do complex data modeling with their search consults to really even consider what a forecasting model would even look like. How would we place that on the individual? And then they’ve got to develop an action plan for what they need to do about it—again, how would they even know how to do that? And then they’ve got to file a complaint with commission. Wow, that’s what it looks like here in Australia, and I find it so frustrating.

You know, global consultants working with large brands here in Australia, here in the US, here in the UK, here in some parts of Southeast Asia, having these conversations and basically trying to say, “Hey, when you are building them here, let’s just make sure that they’re all on the same rung,” because if you’re starting from Australia and going back outwards, it’s a completely different conversation, and a lot of people have no idea what this looks like. And they do incur penalties, they do incur fines, and they’re quite costly because they see it as, “This is your obligation as a business, as it is a human right.” Come on, Australia, what’s going on?

So, my personal opinion as a search advocate—I would love to see Australia come up to the rungs of the international community and have enforceable compliance, enforceable penalties to really meet that standard. Now, as someone who loves a nice little quick report, I really, really like to use Lighthouse, and I will talk about that. But really, Lighthouse looks at just really level A, the requirements of WCAG, and it’s not the worst. Triple A would be best—you know, kind of think about, you know, the car compliance and things like that of AAA if you’re getting insurance—but it’s kind of the same thing when it comes to web accessibility. AA, it’s okay, it’s not the gold standard, but she’ll do, and it’s really, really useful. Here, we’ve got some great accessibility scoring, but I wanted to—now, I love that we were talking about, again, that case, because the scores, they’re color-coded, they make it really easy.

Here’s a range that I’ve even pulled just from Google’s web blog around how it assesses its own Lighthouse scores and wants to be helpful to people using these audits. They’re very easy, there’s Chrome extensions for it, it’s marvelous, I use it all the time. But they do say, “Hey, to provide a good user experience, have a good score between 90 to 100,” and especially when it comes to accessibility, it’s not like the other ones. It’s not like, “Oh, this is like a nice to have.” This is like, think about that. Think about—oh, is her name again Giselle? Ms. Nash—I’m saying her last name incorrectly, I do apologize—but I just want to say that quote that she said to the ABC News all the way back in 2014: “I don’t want special consideration, I just want the same consideration as other customers.” This is Coles. This is Coles today, Coles online shopping. I use the browser and had a look and did a little assessment—it’s a 78. It’s a 78.

I also looked at realestate.com.au to rent a house—87. I looked at the Magistrates Court—so maybe you might get into a bit of an issue, and that actual link right there, that Magistrates Court, is there for lawyers, for barristers, for accused, so defendants, victims of crimes, and that’s the page that they need to use to find out what dates and time and location of their court hearing, and failure to do so implies some very serious complications for them as individuals. Most of the people that go through there are society’s most vulnerable citizens. Most of them probably have disabilities, just because statistically that’s what it looks like, at least when my partner comes home and tells me the story of their day and all the clients that they deal with. This is the score that they have for that page, and it is an actual nightmare. I’ve tried to use it, just to click around and have a look—it is an actual nightmare. So 83 is like, yeah, it’s not 90, it’s not 100, but it’s still garbage.

So again, this is really only looking at the mediocre standard when we’re looking at these accessibility ratings. The mediocre standard. And then of course we’ve got, say, your e-commerce brand Temple & Webster—you want to buy furniture—not great there either. The thing about web accessibility is it’s so broad, it also looks at websites and it looks at the way that you can navigate them. And the thing that I really, really love—again, I have to be a little bit of a technical SEO in here and just dropping the little things around what we can be able to do to really help people—we can look at navigational links, we can look at structured data, we can look at textual links, we can be able to have all those nice moments to really help, also in addition to web accessibility, better ways to navigate sites. Because if you have a better navigation of your sites, that has a direct correlation.

I love this because I actually wanted to do a study of using non-SEO data. So this is from the Baymard Institute, which is an American company that does massive studies of thousands of websites—tens of thousands of websites every single year. They’re not an SEO institution, they’re a research hub, and they look specifically around what is coming around with new changes, with new expectations that customers and users and clients and all kinds of perspectives of your target audience want to be able to see from their website. And they do very formidable, very wonderful, meticulous methodology of scoring those websites, and I took a nice little sample data and wanted to see whether or not my hypothesis was right in that it’s directly proportional, and the graph kind of speaks for itself there.

Again, I want to just say that it’s out of a hundred, and the best one still has scored a 40. So, come on, like, again, all four of us will never be out of work, but this is kind of what I’m saying as a standard—we have such a large gap to really make way, and I think if we can really start to look at that, that’s going to really be able to have much better accessibility for not just us, but for all abled persons. Thanks.

Peter Mead:
Well, Nik Ranger, you’ve convinced me, and not the only convincing, but hopefully there is no shadow of a doubt about this topic. So, on a practical note here, specifically, Judith, you mentioned about that tool WAVE, and we have a question here from Hans. He wants to know a bit more about WAVE. So, how can he get that and start using it?

Judith Lewis:
So, WAVE is a—I use it in Chrome, it’s a browser plug-in in Chrome. And what it does is, it will layer on top of the existing website a set of icons, and also it has a panel on the left-hand side that enables anyone visiting the website to see how well they’re doing from an accessibility point of view. So, do their images have alt attributes? Do their links contain specific text that enables people to know where they’re clicking to before they click, and things like that? Is the language correctly used and placed, and are the structural elements done correctly? So, what it’s doing is, it’s actually checking the web page that you’re on.

So, remember I mentioned earlier that there are agencies, companies who will go out and proactively find websites that are not accessible and start lawsuits. So, something like WAVE is a super easy checking tool to just see where the issues are and what issues need addressing. So, for any of the websites—whether it’s Coles, whether it’s that legal website, I mean, for the courts—it just looks like it’s no imagination.

Peter Mead:
Yeah, so we just stick it on our browser and we don’t have to think about it, it’s just sitting there as an add-on.

Judith Lewis:
Yep, and you just click it on a web page and it will pop up with its information—super fast and easy. And that’s why it’s easy to take people to court, because all you have to do is take a screenshot of what WAVE is showing you and boom, you’re done.

Peter Mead:
Wow.

Judith Lewis:
So, you know, I use a range of auditing tools, including Lighthouse and a range of others, to check website accessibility. So, thank you, Nik Ranger, for showing a lot of that data—you know, the Lighthouse stuff, but also that data you correlated there, which is very intriguing.

Peter Mead:
And Dejan, I know you’ve got some specific information here. You’ve got around W3C and also some stuff about Lighthouse as well. Would you like to get started on your slides?

Dejan Mladenovski:
Sure. So, yeah, I mean, you know, I’ve been tasked with accessibility for SEO, and you know what, I thought I’d put in some actionable items—maybe some things that, you know, you’re running a site or maybe you’re modifying a site, whether that’s Endura or any other platform—and just to give you an idea of what kind of elements you could change, things you should be looking out for, and the like. So, hopefully, everybody gets something out of it, learns a thing or two, and has a great time learning all about it.

So, just to give you an overview, there’s a lot to do with W3C—they’re kind of the proprietor in setting the web accessibility references, and they are sort of the ones that push the entire kind of movement forward. They’ve outlined quite a few specifications and techniques, which we’ll discuss in this webinar, and, you know, it should really help the web devs especially. If you’re an SEO, it’s feedback you should be passing on to the web devs in order for them to implement.

You know, we want to also make sure that people with disabilities do have a pretty good, I guess, view of the website, but, you know, there is also an implication for SEO. So, we want to make sure that not only we’re actually making the site accessible, but the SEO application does come into it—there’s a lot of overlap there. You know, Google and other search engines now do place a pretty significant value on accessibility, as seen in their Chrome accessibility tool that’s been mentioned before. You know, and it may help with search rankings.

So, additionally, overall usability and user experience of the website—it can lead to longer page time visits and lower bounce rates. Something that should be mentioned is, you know, a person that’s coming onto a website, and maybe they have some sort of an impairment—if they don’t have the correct requirements, like the screen reader, and your website doesn’t really have the correct attributes, well, they’re just going to bounce and go to your competitor. So, for that reason alone, it’s probably worth looking into. And to be quite honest, you know, it can drive an SEO rank in the improvement side, because, you know, time on site, although varied, is sometimes considered a factor. You know, SEOs out there do look at time on site, although it can be a bit of fun science versus art around that, but it is a consideration.

So, in terms of the exact standards, the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.1 is the latest standard—came out in 2018. As you pointed out, Nik, in 2016 is where we’re up to in Australia, so this is one for the more global audience, but it has been updated, and it’s been updated quite significantly. The guidelines provide pretty specific information—it’s just basically to help anybody that’s got any sort of issue or any sort of impairment just to make the content perceivable, operational, readable, and just make it easier to consume for them.

Another thing to also consider is the types of impairments that people might have. So, when we’re looking at accessibility, we want to be looking at visual, we want to be looking at any audible impairments, physical impairments, speech impairments, cognitive impairments, and potentially neurological impairments as well. So, accessibility pretty much covers all of that.

One thing we want to look at is the differences between the different standards. So, as we know, WCAG 1.0 was all the way back in 1999, and it wasn’t really updated up until 2008, and that’s really what Australia’s still relying on, and a lot’s changed since then. 2.1 is sort of the latest iteration, and it’s come out in 2018, and really what it looks at, it does look at things like mobile accessibility—which, you’ve got to think, 2008 to 2018, lots changed in terms of devices. So, a lot of people now have tablets, smartphones, laptops that have touch screens, all-in-one PCs—all this is sort of a new field, and this is sort of what the new standards tackle.

Low vision as well is a big one. So, what you’re looking at there is you’re looking at color contrast costs. You want to make sure that, you know, the text that I have right there on the screen—so, white background, but it’s black writing. What you don’t want to do is have very light gray writing, so it becomes quite difficult to read. That is also a consideration. And, you know, taking that to SEO, we do know it’s against guidelines to have white text on a white background, things like that. So, that’s kind of like the SEO accessibility crossover.

What are some W3 standards for both accessibility and SEO, right? So, basically, heading tags—when a screen reader comes in, they prioritize the order of the heading tags, and for SEO, we have the H1 tag, H2 tag, H3 tag—I mean, it goes up to H6. So, these are just tags that essentially, number one, tell the screen reader the order of those, most important to least important. Secondly, also, it tells the search engines, “Hey, this is what my page is about in the order of importance.”

We want to ensure that each kind of list item in a list, like such as a menu, is within an unordered or ordered list within the code. So, this is basically the correct structure of the HTML page, and if you throw this into the W3C validator, you’ll probably get a pop-up saying, “Hey, you’ve got a listed item and not broadly,” so something to consider.

The lang tag—so, if your site is a .com and maybe your site’s in Spanish, it’s probably worthwhile having the language tag “es” or, you know, insert language here. That’s just to give your browser and also the search engine the idea to know what actual language is on the page. They’re pretty good at reading it, but you want to give as much context as possible when you’re trying to improve your SEO rank.

You want to make sure all form fields have a label. This is a big one. What you’ll find is you’ll have a form on a page with no label—even worse, you might have a page with two labels, which may confuse the reader, so ensure you only have one.

The button, link, and menu items—you want them to all have a unique value. This is a pretty big one. Obviously, I’ll get into the SEO implication in a second, but there are many ways to do this. You can include a title within the link, button, or menu item. You can place the name of the button within the button or a href link itself. You can use an aria-label tag, and you can actually place them within the preceding div tag as well. So, there’s many ways to do it, but this is probably one of the biggest things in SEO, because as we know, internal linking, external linking, links in general, authority—it’s a huge SEO factor. And having the correct kind of context—let’s call it that—around these kinds of links and buttons is, particularly links for SEO, it is crucial. It’s crucial to getting your campaign correct.

We want any frame or iframe—a bit of a dying breed at the moment—but we just want to make sure that they have a title tag in the frame. You want to make sure that any new content added to the page has a focus for the user. So, this is just to make sure that the content’s prominent, and if it’s a screen reader, so they don’t skip over it or it’s not sort of on the side, hence to the last point of the content that’s not on the screen is hidden. There’s a couple ways you can do this: you can use a display:none tag, you can use aria-hidden=”true” tag, and you can use in the CSS or visibility:hidden as well. So, yeah, that’s to ensure that any content that’s on the page that the screen reader is not picking up and actually not including in the output.

So, what are some common issues for web accessibility? Image alt text error tags—basically here, we want to make sure that any image alt tag has context. We want to make sure that all images on the page do have the correct keyword associated. We want to use the correct labels—yeah, this is a common one I just mentioned earlier with the forms, having multiple labels, but it’s also you want to avoid duplicates, so you don’t want two forms having the same name.

Non-descriptive text for hyperlinks—if the hyperlink has no text, the user doesn’t really know where it’s going to go, so having that text is quite important.

Same descriptive text for different resources—you might have an image and you might have a video, and they both have the same description. Probably not ideal. Best to display, “Okay, one’s an image, one’s a video,” give it that context.

Embedding non-accessible documents—basically, you might have a PDF that you’re linking out to, but the user won’t be able to read that, so ensuring that any content that’s on an external resource is kind of easy to find on the page, or at least they can somehow get the context of it, whether it’s at the bottom of the page or wherever.

Links that are too small—this one’s self-explanatory. If you’re on a screen on a mobile phone and you click a link—we’ve all done it before—and you end up going somewhere else, it’s not ideal, right? And if we are doing that sometimes ourselves, imagine somebody with an impairment. So, definitely something that you want to look into and definitely something that will help the wider internet as a whole with their browsing experience.

Tables markup—you might have your tables set up, making sure that the data is correct with the td, tr sort of setup, making sure that you’ve got your table headers as well. This is crucial to make sure that the screen reader can output the data correctly. SEO implications here as well—marking up any data in table format, you can actually end up in the SERP featured snippet or get kind of a SERP sort of feature, which is pretty cool. Wikipedia gets them a lot.

You want to avoid improper uses of heading elements—making sure that any heading element is correctly set. Just letting a CMS go to its own devices, sometimes you can end up with a heading tag that’s sort of irrelevant, like the email subscription one is notorious that you can just find on all sites—not great, want to avoid.

And also, the color contrast—making sure that the colors flow and they’re just distinguishable enough, just to not confuse each other.

One quick thing I wanted to also mention is WebVTT. This is something called Web Video Text Tracks. Essentially, if you’ve got a video or you’ve got some audio, basically what you have is you want subtitles that are displayed. The user won’t be able to know what these are, but with the file format I’ve just said here—which is minute, second, microsecond, millisecond—you can actually have the subtitles in a VTT format, that’s using the track HTML code, and this will link to a file which then you can access exactly what those captions are. And for SEO purposes, having this done and then transcribing it on your page, you know, it’s a no-brainer. Increases your content and just basically helps you rank a bit easier with more context.

So, some tools for web accessibility testing. Peter, you alluded to a couple—both you and Nik, Nik and Judith also mentioned a few of these—but tennet.io is one, pretty much checks your code base for accessibility issues, gives you the exact line where you’re going wrong. This one’s interesting, the Romeo kind of accessibility checklist—it’s pretty much a complete checklist, you know, you can filter between exactly which standards you want, which I found out very interesting. So, you know, Australia is on WCAG 2.0, as you alluded to, Nik, so you can actually find those standards.

The Google Lighthouse—that can be accessed by PageSpeed Insights or the Chrome Dev tab to do the audit. A lot of what I mentioned in the previous slide, this is included in that test. And, you know, if you want a complete full list, I believe the WAVE one was mentioned earlier—that’s a fabulous tool, it’s got the UI, so it’s very visually appealing for anybody that wants a visual kind of element when they’re doing the accessibility checking. It is a good tool, but the W3C has a ton of tools, probably over a hundred, so if you want to get deep, you want to learn more about it, that’s where you go.

And that’s me, everybody. Thank you.

Peter Mead:
Wow, thank you, Dejan, so practical. So really, there you have it—your full list, your full guidelines of what to do practically. We’ve been convinced by Judith about the opportunity lost, we’ve been convinced by Nik about how we need to get this underway in Australia, and now we have from Dejan exactly what we can do to make it happen.

So, I only have one question left, since we’re nearing the end of the hour, we have a few minutes left, and the only question I have left for the panel is: Does website accessibility equal accessibility SEO? What are the thoughts?

Dejan Mladenovski:
Oh yeah, sure, I think so. Accessibility, in a way, is SEO, right? It’s a lot of the basic principles that you’d find in any sort of accessibility document really fundamentally definitely apply to certain elements of SEO. So, without a doubt, if we were to completely strip away everything from a website that’s included in accessibility guidelines, I think you’ll find it a lot harder to rank. So, with that said, the opposite will be true, and there’s a good argument to say yes, it does help your SEO rankings.

Peter Mead:
Yeah, and Nik, you’re convinced that this is an essential part of our SEO work?

Nik Ranger:
Absolutely. I like to look at SEO as something that is brand building. It is something that you are working with the brands to really, one day, make that brand into a household name so that it has the ultimate authority, it has the ultimate playing field for its particular niche. And when I look at every single facet that could be underpinned from that—again, user experience, make it for the user, make it friendly, make it accessible, make it easily findable—all these things really boil down into what it looks like from a technical perspective, but also from an advocacy standpoint, particularly here in Australia where we don’t have it in any kind of formidable way of having a channel to get this happening for all sides. We need to, as SEOs, be the bridge, be there to be the guiding light, the guiding force in the meantime, essentially. So, I think it’s so important—shining a light on the past, illuminating the way, the SEOs lead the charge.

Peter Mead:
And that’s—I love that, Nik Ranger. So, Judith, can we even—I mean, are we even doing SEO if we’re not doing accessibility? Is that what we are forced into?

Judith Lewis:
In every agency I’ve worked for, with every client I work for, accessibility is an SEO line. So, it’s one of the SEO techniques we do, it’s as simple as that. If it’s not accessible, it’s not SEO’d. If it’s accessible, it’s been SEO’d, because a lot of the accessibility standards are Google spider necessities. So, if the Google spider can’t get at you, and people with a different ability can’t get at you, you might as well just stop and start anew.

Peter Mead:
Wow, that’s fairly convincing and concise. I love your opinions. I’d like to thank you, Dejan, for your practical walkthrough, Nik Ranger for your data and your Australian-focused approach, Judith, reminding us that we need to get busy and get those business opportunities. I think this has been a really great webinar, and so thank you all so much, and that’s all for now.

Thank you so much, guys. Thank you, everybody. Appreciate it. Subscribe to Duda.