2017’s Internet Summit in Raleigh did not disappoint. Between keynote speaker Seth Godin, a session dedicated to marketing tricks we can all learn from Queen Bey, and a fantastic panel discussion that included some of the ways Netflix surprises and delights customers, our team left ISUM17 inspired, smarter, and pumped for 2018.
Accessibility must be top-of-mind for website design
Andy’s session communicated what makes a website accessible, why that’s important, and how accessibility is becoming so commonplace, it will soon be the norm in website design.
Organizations now have a corporate social responsibility to create and sustain an accessible digital brand experience, yet many are lagging behind. But in 2015, 70% of websites did not meet basic accessibility standards. Furthermore,
- 22.9 million Americans are blind or visually impaired.
- At least 7.6 million Americans with a hearing impairment are active online.
- In the next 30 years, the number of consumers who are blind or visually impaired will double.
A full recording of Andy’s session is below. We’ve also provided a full transcript of his session where you’ll learn about:
- Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG)
- Principles of Accessibility (P.O.U.R.)
- Levels of Accessibility and how you can achieve them
- What all digital marketers can do to get started
His full presentation is available for download on SlideShare.
Want to connect with Andy? Check out his profile on LinkedIn.
If you like what you’ve read and want to begin the conversation of how your organization can better reach a population the size of Australia for the first time, get in touch with us.
Watch the presentation now
Read the transcript from the video
00:05 Speaker 1: Are we good? Alright, welcome back everybody. Welcome back, we’re ready for another session. Maybe we can turn down the music. Thank you, sir. As much as I want to dance for all of you. Just a couple of quick things from me, you’re going to hear this a lot from us. Visit internetsummit.com/2017; we’d love to have you, rank, sessions and speakers throughout the two days of the event, it helps us program for next year. #ISUM17 is the hashtag if you’re posting, tweeting, that sort of thing. But otherwise, I’ll get out of Andy’s way and please help me welcoming Andy Didyk from Ntara.
[applause]
00:42 Andy Didyk: Hi everybody. Hi, yeah, [chuckle] thanks for joining us. My name is Andy Didyk. I work for Ntara, a Digital Agency out of Johnson City, Tennessee. Last year I actually sang part of the “Wagon Wheel” song where Johnson City, Tennessee is mentioned. After reviewing the footage of that video that was shot, my team has advised me against a similar performance this year. So, we’re going to have to decline that option. But we’re here to talk today, to talk about a very important topic called accessibility. And the title of our presentation is Accessibility First is the New Mobile First. And we’re going to throw a lot of things at you today, there’s a ton of information, this is a very complex topic that covers everything from law, to user experience, to design, to just being a human being and having empathy for others. We’re not going to be able to hit it all, but we are going to provide a good overview and survey of what’s going on and what you can do to make your site more accessible.
01:35 AD: But before we get started with that, I’d like to begin with a story. I’d like to talk to you about someone that if I can advance my slide, you will be interested in knowing what is happening and I can only banter and stall for so long, there we go, okay. Thank you. We’re going to tell you about a woman named Lise Pace. And Lise, many years ago, I’m not going to say how many years ago for me but many years ago, was just like us. And her story should be very familiar to probably all of us who are in the room. She was living the American dream. She had gone to high school, gone to college, had a background in finance, worked in the banking industry, had a house, was married, a child, everything that we have working in a career. And Lise was an extremely hard and diligent worker. And she started out in customer service, moved into the front lines of the teller position, and then was hand-picked for a management position at the branch that she worked in the bank that she was at.
02:40 AD: And it was about this time in Lise’s career, a time on the upward arc that hopefully many of us are in today, where she started having some trouble with her vision and thought that she might need glasses. She started experiencing some trouble driving at night, maybe a few issues with the peripheral vision and thought, “I gotta go to the eye doctor, I gotta fit it in my busy schedule and head on out.” So, she did that, went to the doctor. They did a few tests, sat down, thought that she was going to pick out some frames and the doctor looked at her and said, “Lise, you don’t need glasses. Lise, you’re going blind. You have retinitis pigmentosa and that means it’s a degenerative disease, there is no cure for it and you’re gradually going to lose sight until you’re completely blind. We can’t tell you how long it’s going to take or exactly how the symptoms are going to progress, but this is what’s going to happen to you. Head on home.
03:29 AD: So, this was a devastating diagnosis for Lise, and it’s one that could happen to any of us. In fact, in researching this topic, it was very interesting to find out that only 1% of people that are blind were born that way in the US. The vast majority of people experienced some type of traumatic event, degenerative disease, or otherwise brought into that from the life of seeing into one that is not. And Lise is not alone, this is a huge population. According to the CDC about 22.9 million Americans are blind or visually impaired. And that the definition of that is either complete blindness or have vision problems at the point where corrective lenses don’t help them anymore, they need more assistive technologies. That’s the size just for an example, that’s the size of the population of Australia, give or take a few extra people. It’s a huge population, that’s not small. And we’re going to see that population double in the next 30 years. That’s driven primarily by the baby boomers aging, and eyesight getting worse, and that sort of thing. So this is a massive contingency of people.
04:33 AD: And accessibility as a topic doesn’t touch just people with vision problems, but people with hearing problems as well. One of the largest traffic sites in the world is YouTube and we love our video content. But there’s 7.6 million Americans with hearing impairments that are active online as well. So, when you add all these numbers together, it’s pretty remarkable. And because this is kind of a nascent field, even though the rules have been around for a while, it’s hard to get a grasp of how many sites really are accessible. But the latest study we could find was that in 2015. Over 70% of websites did not support even a basic level of accessibility. So, we have this great and wonderful invention, this thing that we have dedicated at least part of our lives to feeding into our career, the internet. This thing that allows us to stay connected with our friends, to post cat videos, if you’re into that sort of thing, to make a doctor’s appointment or do things that are even more critical like pay your taxes and schedule important social events, coordinate funerals.
05:32 AD: All these things happen online, and this is a group of folks that need that service more than ever. And probably more than any of us that have few alternatives that are essentially shut out of a lot of this activity online. And I will be the first to tell you that Lise and those that are in a similar situation don’t want or need your pity. And that’s not what this session is about. There’s the International Blind Ice Hockey Federation that’s in the US specifically for blind and visually impaired hockey players. They go out and play blind hockey with each other, which is also really impressive for someone who’s nonathletic as I am.
06:28 AD: But these are folks that are out taking charge, taking control of their lives, they’ve experienced the change, and they are finding accommodation in the workplace, recreationally, on the athletic field, everywhere, but probably your website. So that’s what we’re here today to talk about is: What does a website look like for someone like Lise whose life has been transformed by a degenerative disease and who’s differently abled than you are?
06:54 AD: So, the primary way that folks are getting around on a site when they have some sort of visual impairment or not able to view things visually is through a screen reader. And this is an image of, there’s an icon for JAWS. JAWS is the most popular screen reading software in the world. It’s not the only one, not by a long shot, we’ll talk about that in a moment. But essentially what a screen reader is doing, it’s a piece of software that’s going through and reading every piece of text that’s on a page. And how you present that text that machine has a big impact on how it reads, which we’ll show you in just a moment, but it can also… Not only will it give you audio cues, but also there you see the picture, it can actually give you a tactile feedback through a braille reader, which is what the gentleman there is using. And if you’ve ever heard anybody… Has anybody here ever heard someone use a screen reader? Yeah, it’s incredible, and I talk fast, and it’s going five to 10 times the speed that I’m talking. It’s really incredible how quickly people are able to process that audio information.
07:48 AD: So, in order to protect the innocent, as it said our websites that are probably not accessible, we went ahead and mocked up a fake site called Pet Shack. So, thanks for the creative team at Ntara for helping us do this. This is a pet supply company. And as people who can see, there a lot of visual cues on this site that allow us to very quickly parse this information. We take it for granted, we don’t think about it. If I said, “Well, I need you to find some supplies for a reptile.” You’re able to quickly go through, scan the images, scan the headers, scan the promos and go, “I can really narrow down that this is where I want to be, in this space right here.” To someone who has a screen reader for a website like this that’s not optimized for them, this is what the screen reader sees. And this is what the screen reader is going to read off.
08:32 AD: It is a one off with zero hierarchy, every single written letter that’s on the page. And not even… That’s not the worst part, you can see some silly things like repetition, shop now, shop now, shop now, shop now, that are going to occur, they’ve gotta hear over and over and over again. But there are also sections of the site that are probably not accessible at all. So, you’ve got… If the images don’t have descriptions of them, then they’re not accessible, they are essentially hidden from the person using the tool. There’s a carousel down here, things that are beyond what’s being displayed visually, even if the ALT tags aren’t visible through the screen reader. So, there’s lots of issues here, and lots of reasons why you’ve got to apply technology in order to make this a better experience.
09:12 AD: Now, if you contrast this with a site that has been, with just a few minor tweaks, optimized for a screen reader, then what the screen reader is going to see is something much more logical. You’ve got a clear hierarchy of content and information. You’re able to quickly go through. There are things called skip links, where if they’re navigating within the site, you can skip past things that you don’t want to hear repeated over and over again. Like the global menu, for example, if you just want to go further, a lot of the redundancies been taken out and you can see that ALT image tags have been added too. So, this is a really crude illustration that is necessary due to the short amount of time we have, but I want to do my best to explain how impossible it is for someone to use a site like this. This is the condition of most of the web, it’s hot garbage, and it’s really not something that is usable by people who, again, who need it the most.
10:06 AD: So, what does this mean for you? We are all here, we are at the Internet Summit as I said, we’ve dedicated a part of our lives to working on some of this. Well, I would guess that everyone here is in one of three camps. And those three camps are typically one, we see the benefit of making our site accessible to this population the size of Australia, and we’re ready to do it, and we want to do it because there are business benefits. Two is, yeah, we’re ready, we want to make our site accessible because we don’t want to get the pants sued off of us, which we’ll talk about in just a moment. And the third group is the group that’s like, “I don’t even know what this is all about.” And so, this section of the presentation is to help explain why it’s so important to do something, and it is about doing the right thing, but it’s about more than that.
10:50 AD: Tesco, is a grocery chain in Europe, and Tesco is one of the very first companies that did something about accessibility. They actually built a separate website in 2001 to make it accessible for people who are blind and visually impaired. This site cost them about £35,000, which back in 2001 money, I mean that’s still big money, but they were able to come out with $13 million in sales on that in the first year. And because the site was built accessibility first, with the function that the user needs to do built as the top priority on the page, it actually was much more usable than their normal site, which is heavy visuals and promos, and just junk everywhere. And so, what they did in subsequent years is move the accessibility features into their main site, and their new site is accessible first, which is why we talk about the accessibility first, being new mobile first.
11:40 AD: CNET, as many of you know, technology company, lots of product reviews, tons of video content. What they did is for those that were hearing impaired just simply took the transcripts of the videos that they already had, put it in metadata in their pages and made it available to screen readers to read the video content, and they experienced a 30% boost in traffic overnight from Google; so this was a huge opportunity. And it just goes to show you, if you build a page that is logical from the beginning and designed to be navigating to help people do the job, just like a mobile phone a couple of years ago really challenged us all to get rid of the crap that was on a page that we wanted to say about ourselves and get down to the function that was important. That’s what we want to do with accessible content. You’re stripping things down even further.
12:26 AD: And sometimes that does mean that you sacrifice visual design, but in the end, I don’t know very many people who buy from sites because they’re visually beautiful. And I say that with all due respect to our world class creative department, but really, it’s… And they know this too, that’s why they’re world class. It’s really about the task that they want to accomplish and enabling them to do that in the most efficient way possible. So, again, there’s a big opportunity here, population the size of Australia, huge gains to be made in SEO in services to this population and noncompliance is bad.
12:56 AD: So, there’s been over 250 lawsuits around accessibility in the past 15 years. 32% of those have been filed in the last three. There are new Department of Justice regulations that are coming out in 2018 that are going to be a lot more specific than the general guidelines we have today. We’re not going to get into all the different laws and case laws that are out there right now because I can do a two-hour session on it, and I’m also not a lawyer, so at some point you’re probably going to stop listening to me. But the important thing that’s here is that these lawsuits are coming not just from disgruntled plaintiffs, not just from people who can’t access the site, these are being filled by the Department of Justice. And the reason is that the philosophy that the US government has, and is developing through Congress, is that your website, which enables someone to transact a good or a service or perform a task, should be as accessible as a sidewalk that goes out in front of the county court house. These lawsuits started with companies that have brick and mortar locations like Target and Bank of America and then moved into spaces that are even completely virtual.
13:58 AD: And without, again, getting in to too much lawyer speak, this is a statement from the judge who awarded recently a case in 2015 on behalf of the plaintiff against Winn-Dixie, a chain of grocery stores. And the main point that he said is that “Winn-Dixie has presented no evidence to establish it would be unduly burdensome to make its website accessible to visually impaired individuals.” That’s the criteria for awarding the case for the plaintiff, in this case, okay. It’s not a technicality, it’s not because we don’t have the technology, it’s not even because we don’t have the money because it’s not that expensive to do this, guys. He’s saying there’s just no reason that it shouldn’t be done and so they are using case law until these DoJ instructions come out in 2018 to prove a point. And that’s happening over and over and over again.
14:51 AD: So, as I alluded to earlier, designing the site around accessibility first. Yes, it’s a great thing for blind and visually impaired population. It’s a great thing for people with hearing difficulties or other difficulties like cognitive impairment or the ability… Some people have issues with holding their hands still due to tremors. There’s lots of things that make traditional navigation of the web with a keyboard and mouse not accessible to a big percentage of the population. But by designing for accessibility first, we are also doing the right thing for SEO and we are doing the right thing for user experience in general.
15:25 AD: I’m going to hit you with a little bit of alphabet soup, again, this is meant to be a bit of a survey course on some things you need to consider. The web content accessibility guidelines, which are a series of guidelines and regulations that are supposed to help us make some sense of all of this and decide what do we really need to do. What do I need to go back to my office and tell my team to do with our website? It’s part of the WAI, the World Accessibility Initiative, which is part of the WC3 and this is the main international body that’s in charge of interactive web standards. They put these documents together to kind of give you an idea of what we need to do to be more accessible.
16:03 AD: The general principles of this are articulated by the acronym POUR. And the actual WCAG guidelines, there’s hundreds of them so I can’t cover them for you today, but I do want to give you just a survey of what they are. So, the P stands for perceivable. And what that means is you want to provide content on the page that is perceivable, that can be understood through various senses not just reading it. So, providing text alternatives for non-text content is really important. And probably the best illustration that I could give for this, it really opened my eyes when it was brought to me is that of a PowerPoint chart. And I mean a real chart with data and maybe you’ve got cones or a stacked bar chart or something really fancy like a donut chart. Those are a godsend to us in marketing because we can make our point visually instead of with a table. But to someone who has vision difficulty, it’s a wash, there is no information there. And what’s worse, there’s no real metadata strategy for it on an average web page. So, you need to make it available, even in audio description, of this is what the chart is saying or a text description, this is what the chart is saying, that’s underneath it. And by the way, that’s also really great for people who tend to misinterpret numbers like me. It’s another great usability item.
17:12 AD: You want to provide captions and alternatives for other multimedia. So, this is as simple as providing ALT image tags, again, great for SEO. You want to create content that can be presented in different ways, including by assistive technologies, without losing meaning. So putting as much effort, there’s a sliding scale of return on this, but if it’s something that’s that complex, find a different way to say it so that it’s not, rather than having to create a super long audio transcript of a chart that’s got 100 different items in it. And then finally making it easier for users to see and hear content. I can tell from the folks in the room this is largely a younger crowd, but I think we’ve all been there when we’ve been in the room with a 65-year-old executive and a 25-year-old art director and the conversation is about the size of the text. And we all want it to go one way, they want it to go the other way and the truth is that in the end, again, people usually aren’t buying from the most visually beautiful site. They’re buying from the most accessible and functional site. So, make it easy. The technology is there for people to be able to make the font bigger, to be able to turn the volume up, to be able to pause it, that sort of thing. So that’s P for perceivable.
18:22 AD: O is for, operable. And remember we talked earlier about the idea that there are some folks who have physical impairments that make it difficult for them to access the web. That’s what this is all about. Your biggest tool, your biggest amateur tool in your toolbox, if you’re not a web accessibility expert, is your tab key. If you can go on your website today and you can hit tab and go through all the navigational items on your site, somebody’s done some work on purpose to make it accessible. If you’re not able to do that then you’re like at least 70% of most of the [chuckle] companies that are out there and that’s not too surprising to me. But tabbing is what the primary method by which people who are not able to use a mouse are going to be able to go through your navigation. So that’s really important.
19:02 AD: You want to give users enough time to read and use content. Don’t put timers on quizzes or if you do, give someone the ability to pause it or have a description read to them over time, especially if it’s a critical function like government function. Don’t use content that causes seizures. That’s like, I know, I know I could tell you’re bringing that in there. The flashing lapel pin. But this is really important. It’s a huge thing. Hopefully, we’ve all matured in our digital journey beyond using flashing texts and the light up gifs of the AltaVista days and those good times. But there are a couple of key guidelines that if you just don’t make your text have a certain color contrast and flash at a certain rate, you’re going to be great, you’re going to be just fine. So, pay attention to that. And then a general rule: Help users navigate and find the content. May the best most functional site win.
19:53 AD: The U part of POUR is understandable. So, making text readable and understandable by both the art director and the CEO. Making the content appear and operate in predictable ways. So, this is one of the big reasons why Reebok was sued. They had an absolutely gorgeous site, absolutely beautiful that was completely un-navigable by anyone who couldn’t really see and have strong control over a mouse. So, they were sued for that reason alone. Make it easy for people to use. Put the nav in a consistent place. It’s not that impressive to have it on the bottom versus the top like, come on guys, the web is the web. It’s not that we shouldn’t innovate but find ways to innovate around things that are useful rather than purely visual. And then help users avoid and correct mistakes. So, do it in real language on a credit card validation form. Don’t say, error number 6482, credit card is invalid. Say, “Hey, it looks like you may have entered your numbers incorrectly. Please check them and try again.” That’s another great general usability perspective that’s super helpful to people.
20:50 AD: And then R is robust. And that’s simply saying maximize compatibility with current and future user tools. This is where you’re probably going to need a lot of help because as of 2010, there were between 15 and 20 active screen reader technologies in the marketplace. And blind and visually impaired users, they’re just like you and me. They’ve got their phone, they’ve got their tablet, they’ve got their laptop. These are highly engaged, highly capable people. They’re probably rocking different browsers on each of those things. So, the permutations of creating a schema that’s going to work across all of them, you need some forethought and some capacity to know how to do that. So that’s a really important principle of accessibility.
21:29 AD: Now, the principles of accessibility are meant to be guiding but the things that are getting… The guidelines of the things that need to be in place, this is what the DOJ is starting to use to sue people over or to say your site doesn’t comply with these things. These are not set in stone. Again, there’s pending legislation in 2018 but these are some really good guidelines. Level A… And there’s three levels. Level A is what they’re saying, if you don’t have these things, it’s really, really bad and we’re going to take you down. And they’re saying websites must support this level.
22:00 AD: So, number one, that’s a content structure that’s easy to use, easy to follow. How many times have we heard that? Again, there’s actually like 500 requirements under this but that’s it. Number two is consistent metadata including ALT image tags. Again, if you don’t describe what’s in an image, it’s not just something for Google, someone doesn’t know what it is and there may as well be no point in having it there. The third is that content that tells an easy to follow story. Free of jargon and unrelated images. I think if there’s any crystal-clear connection between mobile first and accessibility first, it’s this right here. It comes back to our content and the way that we want to talk about ourselves, the way that we talk about ourselves within our respective offices. We don’t want to talk about ourselves in maybe the simplistic terms that our users actually think about us in. So, finding that out, who your user is, and being free of jargon is a huge deal.
22:49 AD: And then this is a cardinal sin that just we bust our clients on all the time anyway and I myself I’ve been busted on our own website. Having a link that reads, read more or click this link is just… There’s… Come on guys, we’re better than that. It should say, fill out the survey, download the white paper, submit, anything really other than click this link to read more is a critical thing. So that’s a basic level of accessibility.
23:12 AD: Level AA is a higher level of accessibility and this is where you start to get into impacting elements of site design as well as content strategy. So, this is… When you say no highly visual elements, that’s meaning highly visual elements that are essential for sight function. Doesn’t mean it can’t be beautiful, it just means that it needs to be taken into consideration when you’re building the overall site. No carousels or sliders. Again, this is 2017, if I’ve gotta tell you guys that, this may be the wrong conference to be at. Nobody makes it to the third slide in the carousel on purpose. Maybe 1% or 2% according to all analytics we’ve seen but, gosh, does it make executives feel great that they’ve got their piece of ocean front property on the website, when they’ve got their stuff on the… It’s on the carousel, it’s okay.
24:00 AD: No autoplay video and audio, news websites, CNN, gosh, there’s so many of these that are just terrible user experience anyway. Who hasn’t been in school or work or church and you have the audio pop up of a news site that you’re not supposed to be on. That needs to stop for that reason but also because people who have a hard time navigating can’t get to it quickly enough to shut it off or it obscures the screen reader because it’s going on at the same time that the audio is of the screen reader, so don’t do that. Don’t have text embedded in your images, again this is 101 SEO stuff. No features that are initially hidden on a page. So, I got busted for this one too because we had some really cool JavaScript trickery on our website. It was gorgeous, you scroll down a page then when you hit the footer and you scrolled down a little bit more, the actual footer peaked out with the call-to-action button on it, it was really agency like, it was very cool. And it was called the peek-a-boo footer, actually I didn’t name it, but I enjoyed it. And we had to take that off because you can’t see it, you can’t use it if you’re on a screen reader. And no labor-intensive UX. Don’t make someone walk circles or go through hoops to be able to get to where they need to go on the page.
25:06 AD: Level AAA is actually really hard to achieve. And there’s only two things that we have here but they’re probably the most important ones. Number one is you have custom code that’s written specifically for the BVI community, blind and visually impaired community. This is hard to do, and there’s not always a payoff in return on it although it’s always appreciated. It’s like everything else; you’ve got to find the right place to deploy this, and also having captions or voiceover on videos. So you have the original audio that’s in the video that might support the story that’s being told, but also additional content that’s saying here’s the context, here’s what’s going on, here’s the scene that the setting is in in addition to the audio that’s there. So, this is really taking things to a whole level where folks who are differently abled are your target audience. And there aren’t a lot of lawsuits being filed on this level and in fact, some folks we spoke to in the BVI community said, “We really like this but if we just had Level AA we’d be cool.
26:00 AD: So then the question is, if you know that it’s something you need to do, you understand this is really the start of something big, just as big as mobile first except legislation is involved and compliance is going to be jumping down everybody’s throats as soon as these new regulations come out, how do you get started? Well, there’s really four things that are required. Number one, you certainly need education. There’s a thousand great resources out there. This is not secret knowledge that only we have at Ntara or that only I have, this is information we want everyone to have because it’s incredibly important to get educated on what is required both from a content standpoint and from a technology standpoint. Two is that you have to have organizational commitment like all great change. Because this is something that will impact the way that you go to market, not just the way that you design your website. You’ve gotta make that content available to folks and again it’s about the way that you talk to them not just about what’s on the page. It also is going to require some financial investment somewhere. The further away you are, the more it’s going to take, cost you to catch up.
27:00 AD: If you’re in the middle of a site design right now, I urge you, stop, talk to your agencies, talk to your internal team and say, “What’ll it cost me to implement level two of accessibility right now or at least the majority of it?” Because it’ll be a heck of a lot cheaper now than it will be later. The third thing is that it requires technological expertise, as we already talked about, with the screen readers there’s a lot of front-end code that happens that’s very important. When we built our first site that met the AA standard a couple of years ago, it was a laborious process to not only build the code, but also to develop a QA process that was required to make sure that things were working correctly. And then I went ahead of myself, it finally requires a governance plan. This is like all other great change. If you build a site that’s accessible and then you don’t provide a way for people to keep it accessible, it’s going to end up being a mess where things are missed. So, as you democratize content creation, content administration, there’s gotta be a way to keep things governed and up to date.
27:56 AD: So, we have provided at Ntara a way to get started, it’s a high-level quiz in the same way that this was a really high-level conversation, there’s eight questions on it so it’s not overwhelming, it’s really easy. If you go to our website ntara.com/accessibility, you can do a quick checkup that kind of checks your site against this page to be able to know what your basic level of accessibility is although a lot of you probably know. If you’re interested, a more robust tool and this is something we’re happy to go through with you at our booth or give us a call, there’s a non-profit that’s created a plugin for Google Chrome called Wave that’ll actually go through and just murder your site [chuckle] and just tell you like, “This is all the stuff that is wrong with it.” This is delta.com which all this stuff’s… Actually, a lot of it’s pretty good, but they’ve still got 14 errors and a whole bunch of other stuff on the site. We can help talk you through what makes sense and what doesn’t and it’s a really robust approach to things. And there are lots of other great things as well, but the Wave plugin is great.
28:52 AD: I also want to give a shoutout to two of our clients that have helped us to understand this topic with greater understanding. Envision.us is an Ntara client, they’re the second largest employer of blind and visually impaired folks in the country. There’s a huge unemployment rate for folks that are blind and visually impaired. People like Lise who had it all and lost it. So, they help educate people and get acclimated to this new life that they’re going to lead, and also to bosma.org which does provide similar services in Indiana. And these groups also are beginning, and groups like them are beginning to provide specialized QA testing for accessibility as a service. So, we’re happy to talk to you about that and you can learn more about that too.
29:34 AD: And one more thing. I wanted to get back to Lise and our story about her because hers isn’t a story just about change and despair, hers is a story of hope. And this is Lise Pace now, she is on the executive management team at Bosma enterprises in Indiana. And she, after falling into depression and being at home, not able to do what she loved which was work, she started volunteering with the organization, eventually started running the volunteers, was brought on full time and was eventually promoted to the executive management team where she is today. She’s got a cooler job than I have. She’s overall public facing messaging and is just an incredible, incredible person. So, we really thank her. She’s a friend of Ntara. We appreciate letting her… Or her letting us use her story to help make this a little bit more personal of understanding of what web accessibility is all about. But she uses these tools every day to help to tell the story of folks that are in similar position to her and to really help people out. So, thank you very much for your time. I really appreciate your attention, and feel free to come and contact us to learn a little bit more if you’d like. Have a great conference.
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