WordPress And Accessibility: Where Are We At The Beginning of 2025?
WordPress accessibility in 2025: Discover the latest trends and improvements in making your website inclusive for all users.
In this insightful video, we explore the current state of WordPress accessibility as we step into 2025. We examine the latest tools, plugins, and best practices that enhance website accessibility for all users, regardless of their abilities. Join us as we discuss key trends, challenges, and the ongoing efforts within the WordPress community to ensure inclusivity. Don’t miss out—watch now to stay informed.
With Special Guest Steve Jones, CTO of Equalize Digital.
#1 – Steve, can you give the audience a more detailed introduction on how you got involved in web development, WordPress, and Accessibility?
#2 – Where would you say we regard accessibility connected to some of the leading website-building platforms like Wix, Squarespace, Webflow, and WordPress?
#3 – Regarding WordPress and Guttenberg, has accessibility generally improved or declined due to the code quality that this technology produces at the beginning of 2025?
#4 – What are some of the key things WordPress developers can do that would improve the accessibility of the websites that they are building for clients?
#5— What AI tools do you personally use to help you run your business?
#6—If you had your time machine (H. G. Wells) and could travel back to the beginning of your career, what advice would you give?
This Week Show’s Sponsors
LifterLMS: LifterLMS
Convesio: Convesio
Omnisend: Omnisend
The Show’s Main Transcript
[00:00:04.870] – Jonathan Denwood
Welcome back, folks, to the WP Tonic Show. This is episode 948. This episode will discuss accessibility, WordPress, Gutenberg, and other platforms. How do they rate accessibility in 2025? We’ve got a real expert on the subject. We’ve got Steve Jones, the CTO of Equalized Digital, with us, one of the leading WordPress agencies in accessibility and consultation. It should be a great show. So Steve, can you give us a quick 10, 20-second intro, and we’ll go into more depth about your background grounds in the central part of the show.
[00:01:03.050] – Steve Jones
Sure. Well, I’m happy to be here, Jonathan. Thanks for having me on. As Jonathan said, my name is Steve Jones. I’m the CTO of Equalized Digital. We are an accessibility services and product company. We’re the makers of the WordPress plugin called the Accessibility Checker.
[00:01:23.460] – Jonathan Denwood
That’s fantastic. And got my great co-host, Kirk. He has returned from his wanderings. Speakership in Las Vegas. He looks relaxed. I’ll soon sort that out, tribe. Don’t worry. Kirk, would you like to introduce yourself to the tribe quickly?
[00:01:41.960] – Kurt von Ahnen
Yeah. Thanks, Jonathan. My name is Kirk von Annen. I own an agency called Manana Nomas, and we focus largely on membership and learning websites. I also work directly with WP-Tonic and the great folks at Lifter LMS.
[00:01:53.930] – Jonathan Denwood
Steve’s been a champ. I had a total brain fart last week. I said to myself, Well, Are you coming to the show? He pointed out to me it was going to be the following week. I had one of my regular brain parts, but thanks for taking that. Well, Steve, as I say, it should be a great discussion, but Before we go into the main meat and potatoes of the show, I’ve got a great message and offer from one of our major sponsors. We will be back in a few moments, folks. Three, two, one. We’re coming back, folks. Before we go into the great conversation, I also want to point out that we have a great list of the best WordPress plugins and services and some great special offers. You can get all these goodies aimed at WordPress professionals by going to wp-tonic. Com/deals. Wp-tonic. Com/deals. What more could you ask? What’s for, my beloved professionals? Probably a lot more, but that’s all you get from that page. I’m sorry to disappoint. I’ve made a career of it. So, Steve, you’re supposed to laugh, Steve.
[00:03:12.490] – Steve Jones
No, okay. I’m laughing on the inside.
[00:03:14.940] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, there we go. You’ll be crying soon. No, no. How did you get into the world of web development, web design, and consultancy? And then how did it lead to being the CTO of Equalized Digital?
[00:03:35.730] – Steve Jones
Sure. So it goes back quite a bit. I might age myself a little bit here, but…
[00:03:41.100] – Jonathan Denwood
Oh, you’re much younger than me. Everybody’s younger than me, Steve.
[00:03:45.040] – Steve Jones
Okay, fair enough. Yeah, so I started dabbling in web development in the late ’90s, got serious about it in the early 2000s. I actually obtained a college degree in graphic design and then quickly pivoted from that over into development. I worked for a number of agencies, of course, starting out as a designer. And then around 2004, I think I switched over to be coming to a developer for a time. For about five years, I ran my own development agency, a little solo deal. I started working with WordPress in 2007 around version Accessibility came to the forefront when I was working for a company called Road Warrior Creative, which is actually the company that became Equalized Digital. So So we had a set of clients in the government in higher education space, and thus so, they have accessibility requirements that they have to meet, and they have to be compliant with WCA WCAG guidelines, which that required us as a team to study those WCAG guidelines and me on the technical side to learn how to develop and remediate websites for accessibility issues or develop from an accessibility first standpoint. So that led to us reincorporating the business, the three Amber Hines, Chris Hines, and I co-founded Equalized Digital, and I think it was early 2022.
[00:05:41.080] – Steve Jones
Although Equalize Digital was a DBA of the other agency for a little while, but we officially rebranded, and I came in as an equal co-owner of the company at that time. Through that, we created our WordPress plugin called the Accessibility Checker, which is a… It’s a accessibility scanner that sits inside of your poster page. So if you’re on the edit page of a The Edit screen of a page or a post, you can see at the bottom, your scan results. It’ll scan your page right there as you’re editing and updating. It can You can click over and highlight accessibility issues on the front-end of the website. It runs more than 45 different checks. It also will go further and actually fix some issues for you, too. We have 14 automated fixes inside the plugin to help you meet some of those WCAG guidelines and has full site scanning and can run an audit history. If you want to track your your accessibility compliance over time, the plugin can track that and you can see progress over time. It has much more features than that, but that’s the quick rundown of how I got into all this.
[00:07:12.980] – Jonathan Denwood
Right. That’s fantastic. Over to you, Kurt.
[00:07:14.820] – Kurt von Ahnen
I feel like the rest of the questions are going to be a fog for the listener if we don’t just ask accessibility, because I talk to different people in the industry and some people are like, Oh, yeah, you can run a plugin, it’ll inspect your site and give you some of the stuff to do. Then I talk to other people that are like, Well, for six figures a month, we can manage and oversee. Because they’ll describe accessibility as this thing like the goalposts are always moving, it’s always changing. You never know if you’re compliant or not. That’s a really difficult conversation to have with beginners in our field, but also professionals Because if you’re building sites for corporations, who’s really on the hook for the lawsuit when it comes in? Can we have that chat?
[00:08:08.990] – Steve Jones
Yeah, absolutely. What I’ll say is the goalposts The goal post doesn’t really move as fast as we would think it does. The WCAG guidelines actually moves at a snail space. We’re being WCAG 2. 2 AA compliant. That’s what most institutions have to strive for. And it really does not… Those guidelines don’t change very fast at all. But to speak to what you said about cost and can an automated tool really solve all of your issues? So the Accessibility Checker is a scanner, and there’s other ones besides ours. You could search the WordPress repo for other ones. Ours is a little more full-featured than most. But we have a free plugin, and all those checks and all those fixes are included in our free plugin. And that’s our part of supporting accessibility before profit. We want people to make their stuff accessible, and we want to be able to give that subset that can’t afford that huge cost to run an audit remediation plan with a huge agency, like you said, that costs $100,000 or whatnot. We’re trying to expand accessibility and make the tool itself accessible to everybody even regardless of economic factors. Now, what I will say is that an automated tool can only find what can be automated.
[00:10:00.790] – Steve Jones
This can differ on different websites, but the percentage, it could be 20, 30%. It’s 20 or 30% an automated tool can find. But then there is a vast percentage that has to be manually tested, and those issues have to be found by somebody, whether it’s you as a developer or a content specialist that have educated yourself in accessibility or, like you said, a professional agent that will go in and do that has the team to go in and do a professional audit, like equalize. We have on staff auditors and remediators that will help you bring you to compliance. But as you stated, that does come with a certain cost.
[00:10:49.840] – Kurt von Ahnen
Nice. Then to get us back on track with the interview, where do we stand in WordPress in comparison to other platforms, Wix, Squarespace, Webflow? How do we stand stacked up as WordPress professionals against those platforms?
[00:11:05.490] – Steve Jones
Sure. I will give a little bit of a caveat that I am primarily a WordPress guy. Excuse me, I got a little bit of a scratch in my throat. Got cold. I work primarily in WordPress, but we do look at other platforms, and we have talked about some other platforms. We have a podcast called Accessibility Craft, where we talk about these things sometimes. But for WordPress, I think WordPress is the most flexible in terms of accessibility because it’s so open and you as a developer can actually go in and fix things. You have access to all the code to be able to modify and change. You could even modify core or you could even submit a patch to core. If you contact the accessibility team and say, Hey, this isn’t accessible in core. Can you fix it? Or, Here’s a patch. It’s not that hard to get it in. The community actually helps support some of these accessibility efforts.
[00:12:17.130] – Jonathan Denwood
I thought they had been removed.
[00:12:20.780] – Steve Jones
The accessibility team? No, I don’t believe so.
[00:12:24.270] – Jonathan Denwood
I thought they’d… All right.
[00:12:25.440] – Steve Jones
I think you’re thinking about the sustainability team.
[00:12:28.090] – Jonathan Denwood
Yes, all these titles. Yes.
[00:12:30.280] – Steve Jones
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:12:31.860] – Jonathan Denwood
It gets a bit confusing, Steve. No, no. Especially when you get older.
[00:12:35.200] – Steve Jones
Yeah, that’s right. So the accessibility team is still there and still doing great work. So The flip side of being so open and flexible in WordPress is that WordPress depends very heavily on themes and plugins and developer knowledge. So if those things are lacking or And if there’s not a lot of checks and balances or review of themes and plugins going into the repo from an accessibility standpoint, then that could present a huge problem because WordPress is very accessible to people that are not developers. So if you introduce a theme and it makes it through review and it’s got accessibility issues. Now, in the theme repo, there is an accessibility flag. So there’s a tag that you can filter those by accessible themes. It doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re fully accessible. It just means that they’ve met the criteria that the accessibility team has set forward for accessible So the flip side of that are these more closed platforms, so like Wix and Squarespace and Webflow. Wix is a controlled closed environment. You have limited to accessibility fixes. If you’re in there and you’ve done some education on accessibility and you’re like, well, this really isn’t accessible.
[00:14:07.140] – Steve Jones
This this div or whatever should be a button, you really can’t change it. You can maybe submit a ticket to the Wix team, but most likely it’s not going to get fixed or it’s not going to get fixed in any timely manner. But Wix does have some accessibility, they do like what And what Gutenberg does now is they will have automatic color contrast checking, things like that to alert you, Hey, these two colors aren’t really readable for people with your lower vision or color this, things like that. I think Squarespace is similar to Wix in that regard. And I think with both of those two being a closed platform, what we’ve seen a little bit is that they can… I want to say this as as I can. Their tout, their Google Lighthouse Accessibility Scores, which we don’t really think that Lighthouse is the best accessibility check- Can you tell us a little bit about what Lighthouse is? In a Chromium browser, you can open your Inspector and you can go to Lighthouse. You can click on the Lighthouse tab and you can evaluate your website for performance, SEO, accessibility, And I think it just does a basic level of accessibility checking.
[00:15:36.910] – Steve Jones
And like I stated before, an automated tool can only check for a certain percentage of issues. But there is a potential to trick that a little bit. And some companies may be implementing strategies in their, I’m not saying that Wixom Squarespace doing this, but there is a potential to implement a strategy to make Lighthouse scores seem higher than they actually are. So as for Webflow, now Webflow is a very If you want to design something beautiful, I think Webflow is just amazing and flexible, but really the accessibility is on you for the most part. And I can’t speak 100% to what degree you can to actually modify certain components to achieve the accessibility that you’re trying to achieve. But I think overall, accessibility tools and automation within these types of platforms, I think they’re increasing. I think these companies are thinking about these things, but I think 100% true accessibility still requires manual auditing.
[00:16:56.830] – Kurt von Ahnen
Thanks. Thanks. Jonathan, over to you.
[00:16:59.970] – Jonathan Denwood
Thanks, Kurt. You talk about themes, but isn’t the reality, Steve, is that we live in the world of page builders, either Gutenberg or non-Gutenberg? Where do you think, because my perspective as a non-expert, but I do have, which I’ll go in to a bit more detail, maybe in the second half of this interview, Steve, I have got a bit of experience in this area. I sense that a lot of people that are really passionate about accessibility think over the last few years, that accessibility under the Gutenberg Rapper has declined. The situation’s deteriorated. Number one, this is going to have a couple elements to this question, but number one is What’s your own view of that statement? Number two, we have these page builders, we have animator. I like your opinion of that and how it affects accessibility if you use the elevator. Then you have page builders that are built on Gutenberg technology like cadence WP and Generate Press, which I think are two of the best of a whole quiver of similar type page builders based on Gutenberg technology. I like in the second part of this question, what’s your views of Alimator and some of these other page builders when it comes to accessibility?
[00:18:56.180] – Jonathan Denwood
So I’ve given you two elements to that question. Question, but I think I’ve explained it because you’re ill, and I appreciate you still coming on the show. I’ve actually explained my madness to you. I’ve given a question that’s had four bits to it, Steve.
[00:19:15.520] – Steve Jones
No, I understand. You asked what my personal opinion is with Gutenberg and stuff. I think a lot of developers that are very versed in development have very strong opinions about element. Never.
[00:19:32.050] – Jonathan Denwood
Never steep.
[00:19:33.360] – Steve Jones
The Gutenberg block editor. Yeah. So from a development pure standpoint, we are still building. We don’t do a lot of website build anymore, but we build our own stuff, like our own dashboards and websites and stuff. We are actually still building those with the block and a hybrid theme, not a full site editing We’re doing that from a development standpoint. I think in my mind, there’s a resistance towards building block themes. I’m traditional. I’d rather do it in a way I can control it 100%. I’m a developer. I don’t really need that page builder. But our team needs the block editor. Our marketing team finds a lot of value in having block editor. What we’ve done is we’ve come along and we’ve learned how to implement these types of sites. It is a very with theme. Json and CSS, writing I’m going to be assessing JSON. It’s difficult. Can you figure it out? I think so. But what I will say is that from an accessibility standpoint, I think what you were leaning towards was the actual accessibility of the editor itself in the back-end has become a problem, right? Or it is lacking an accessibility There’s fly out menus everywhere.
[00:21:17.540] – Steve Jones
There’s icon only buttons everywhere. You can’t really access everything you need with the keyboard tabbing through. So I think Gutenberg, for for a person that needs assistive technologies and they want to use Gutenberg, I think there’s a challenge there for them. I think that the classic editor had some issues, but I think that they were still able to access and use that fully, where Gutenberg, I think there’s going to be limitations on the back-end. But I will speak to the front-end of that. I’ll tie this into your comment about Elementor Cadence and Generate Press. The front-end output, when we’re speaking about Gutenberg core or the block editor core, right, is not bad. Is the accessible I think that they’re taking steps to make the front-end output much better. Kudos to the Gutenberg team for that. But I think as a development team, you have to be very I’m careful now because the door is wide open. This goes back to Elementor Cadence Generate Press. So Elementor is a full builder. We could talk about that. Real quick about Elementor is that I think Elementor, out of all the page builders, is the one I would prefer.
[00:22:52.240] – Steve Jones
And because from an accessibility standpoint, Elementor lets me get in there. And for the most part, I can change a lot of things and make it accessible. I still have to lean on my accessibility knowledge to do that, but they’ve at least opened it up to where I can add attributes to elements. If I need to add an Aria label or Aria hidden. So that’s my preferred page builder, if I was to use a page builder, and I will say that I generally do not ever use a page builder outside of the very Alex Saluguin part.
[00:23:31.680] – Jonathan Denwood
Well, I’ve had these conversations with Kirk about it’s driven by the type of agency and it’s driven by the type of clients that agency is doing work on a regular basis. I have had these conversations with you, Kirk, not around… He’s nodding. Not around accessibility, but around other issues that are properly expressed in the WordPress community. And I’ve said to Kerb, based on my experience, it’s really based on budget and type of clients that agency are working for. So the clients, if you’re working for government and higher education, it’s a bespoke consultancy building, which is different, I would say, to 90 % of the listeners of this podcast, which are probably doing work, either they are freelancers or they’re running boutique agencies, and they’re doing work for small to medium-sized private companies that don’t have the budget to build a fully custom solution and go through the whole process of discovery and all the other steps. But that is driven. I say that, but it’s a very broad statement because even that type of customer is driven by budget, so there’s overlap. What’s your response to what? And be honest if you feel I’m not correct.
[00:25:13.350] – Steve Jones
No, I think you’re spot on. I think to add some context to this. So we traditionally were a website company before we transitioned over to accessibility. It’s not to say that we won’t ever build a website again. It’s just if the When a client comes along and like if NASA comes to us and says, hey, we want to rebuild our NASA website. We did the accessibility on the current NASA website.
[00:25:38.590] – Jonathan Denwood
I think they’re finished. I think their budget for the car. Who needs that? I’m not going to go there. Right.
[00:25:46.790] – Steve Jones
That could change a lot, budget. When we did do this, we got to the point with the block editor that we would… We did use Generate Press for a time, and then we We’re actually to the point now where if we build a block editor theme, we only use core blocks. We don’t allow any third-party block libraries to come in.
[00:26:13.310] – Jonathan Denwood
Can I ask you why, before we go for our break, why you made that decision?
[00:26:18.270] – Steve Jones
Because, like I said, the output of that is generally pretty good of all the core blocks, and we can’t control block like Generate Press. We can’t control. We can make a poll request to their plugin, or we can make a support request, but it’s a little bit outside of our control. If we need something beyond a core block, we create our own block. I will just tag on, not to interrupt, but I will just tag on.
[00:26:50.300] – Jonathan Denwood
Oh, please do, because I interrupt all the time.
[00:26:52.060] – Steve Jones
When we build those types of websites that are very bespoke, like you said, I am talking the $100,000 websites above $100,000. To your point of Elementor has its place, and I think these bespoke websites have their place, too.
[00:27:12.740] – Jonathan Denwood
You’re the expert. I’m really surprised about you saying Elementor because the days that I used it when I was building, which I don’t anymore, it’s changing, Webflow, other technologies, but it was I’m notorious for what I call dividitis. I automatically bezoomed that because in my mind it just… But also a lot of those problems were caused by the temptation to add a enormous… There was an enormous ecosystem of third-party add-ons that you could add to Alimator. I think that, and it’s there with Gutenberg, but I think, especially with Alimator, adding a lot of add-ons really made it a very difficult situation. But if you’re dealing with a certain budget, you just code in-house. But I think for the lesser budget, because the budget isn’t there and there’s always this tension of feature below, is that… Having and not wanting to have a difficult conversation with a client. The temptation is just to go to the third-party world and just add an add-on, and then add another add-on, and add on, and add on to satisfy the client wanting ever more features to the website. What’s your response to that?
[00:28:53.600] – Steve Jones
Yeah, I mean, even with Element or like what you said about the div, all the nested divs, I’m not speaking from a performance standpoint. There is a performance implication when you run any page builder that nest all kinds of divs together. Unless their buttons are divs when they should be buttons, that’s a problem. But Yeah, so the add-on, I approach Elementor add-ons the same as I approach the blockader add-ons. I try not to use them at all costs. In Elementor, I can create my own… I don’t know. They don’t call them blocks, do they? I can create my own components in Elementor as well. But that definitely is a luxury of being a developer. From an accessibility standpoint, you should be evaluating your tools for accessibility. We’ve evaluated the block editor as core block editor on the front-end output. It’s pretty good for accessibility. If you’re evaluating Elementor for accessibility, you should evaluate Elementor. And if you bring in a component in the Elementor, you should evaluate that component for accessibility, too. Go to that plugin website, look for an accessibility statement, contact their presale support, and ask them, Hey, have you guys considered accessibility when you built this plugin?
[00:30:15.880] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, I’m grinning at you. Not disparagingly grinning, but it’s… Like I said to Kirk in previous relationship, it’s really down to the budget and the world. But we leave it at that. We’ve had a great conversation. Steve is a champion. He’s lubricating himself because he got a little bit of a cold coming on, but he still came on the show on the right week as well. Thanks for pointing out my madness, Steve. We will have a break and we will be back in a few moments, folks. Three, two, one. We’re coming back, folks, before we go into the second half, the continuance of the interrogation. But Steve seems to be doing well, though. We’ve had a great conversation in the first half. But before we move to the second half, I just want to point out, if you’re looking for a great WordPress hosting partner, a boutique hosting partner that specializes in membership, buddy boss, and higher-end community-focused websites, why don’t you look WP Tonic. We’ve got some great packages for you, the WordPress developer. You can find more by going over to wp-tonic. Com/partners. Com. Wp-tonic. Com/partners, and we love to build something special together.
[00:31:53.490] – Jonathan Denwood
So over to you, Kurt.
[00:31:56.590] – Kurt von Ahnen
Well, as I think about this question, which is really like, what can WordPress developers do to improve accessibility of the websites they’re building for clients? That’s the core question. But I think about some of the roles I fulfill in my weekly walk. So I consult in the Marine industry, and one of those consulting tasks is I actually review websites for Marine dealerships, not just for accessibility, but for other things. But accessibility is a part of that, right? And they’re not expecting that talk. And you can see the look on their faces like, I never even thought about a blind person wanting to shop for a boat. As an agency, when I’m selling a web build, I’ve tried to be really itemized. Like, these This is the plugins, this is the labor. This is an accessibility thing that we can do for you. And then it gets into, to Jonathan’s point, budget. And they start going, Okay, well, let’s take a look at these line items. Do we need this? No. Do we need this?
[00:32:58.510] – Jonathan Denwood
No.
[00:32:59.250] – Kurt von Ahnen
And then So then you try to include some accessibility features just in the build, right? Like, just make it part of the… Instead of a line item, you make it part of the thing. But then from the developer side, you have this weird feeling like, did I just make myself liable for this website forever and ever. So what is your advice here? What are some of the key things that a WordPress developer or implementer can do that will improve accessibility without putting your own neck on Yeah, totally.
[00:33:33.120] – Steve Jones
I’ll speak a little bit to your sales question, right? I’ll phrase it a little bit like this. In full transparency, I stay away from sales myself. Like, unless your partner I deal with that. Our COO, Chris Heinz, he handles all ourselves, and he’s fantastic at that. He’s actually spoken a lot about selling accessibility services. I But what I will say is I’ll frame it like this. Frame it with responsive design. Does anybody itemize out responsive design anymore? Responsive development. No, it’s expected. Would it be weird to go to a client and say, well, this is only going to work on desktops unless you pay this, then we’ll make it work on a phone or a tablet? And I think accessibility needs to be treated the same. Accessibility actually predates responsiveness, and it really should be baked into the core. It’s semantics and keyboard controls and stuff. We’re there very early on in the web. And then we created CSS and we created JavaScript, which is in a way, are elegant hacks to semantic HTML, and they impede on accessibility. So that’s how I would frame it, that responsiveness is just part of our jobs now.
[00:35:08.870] – Steve Jones
And I think that accessibility has to get to that point. But I think there’s a second point to that, right? How do we get there? What can we do? If we don’t have big budgets to implement this now, how can we get started in the educational process and the implementation process of accessibility? So my suggestion would be start with automated tools. Like I said, they can only do 30, 40 %. It depends on the site and the issues on the page. But you can only do a subset of the issues. But if we were to improve accessibility across the whole Internet or even WordPress, just 43 % of the Internet, right? 30 %, that is absolutely monumental, right? So I I would look into some of these automated tools. I’ve mentioned our tool, the Accessibility Checker, which will scan. Actually, when you scan and it notices an issue, it’ll actually say, We have a fix for this, and you can turn that fix on. And then once you turn the fix on, our plugin goes back and scans it again to ensure our fix did what we intended for it to do. Because if you’re implementing an automated fix, there’s a chance that it might not work depending on all kinds of factors, is there conflicting JavaScript on the page, things like that.
[00:36:38.540] – Steve Jones
But we actually go through and revalidate our own fix. And if it doesn’t fix it, it still flags for you as an issue. There’s other tools like Wave. There’s a browser extension for Wave. You can actually go to the Wave website and you can run an evaluation on one page at a time. And there’s axDev tools, extension extension that can run an accessibility scan in your browser as well. And like I mentioned, I would validate, you’re building a toolkit for your agency, right? You’re building a toolbox of tools that you’re going to use. Have a barrier of validation for those tools that you use. Like I said, if you use Elementor, you’ve evaluated it for accessibility. You maybe even contacted Elementor and ask them, Hey, do you have an accessibility statement? What are the known accessibility issues that still exist? And what are you doing to help the accessibility? And then, of course, like I said, the add-ons. So you almost have your validating these as part of your toolbox. I know it’s so easy to go to that repository and say, I need my website to do this, or I need a block for this, and you search, Oh, here’s an accordion.
[00:37:54.640] – Steve Jones
Install it. And really, the accordion is not keyboard-focussable and things like that. Then I think education. I think education in everything that we do as technologist is important. We run the WP Accessibility Meetup, and you can go to equalizeddigital. Com/events, and you can see upcoming meetup events where we speak on all kinds of topics related to accessibility into WordPress. I mentioned we have the Accessibility Craft podcast where we talk about accessibility and people like us, like running agencies or micro agencies or solopreneurs, trying to implement accessibility into what we do. That’s where I would start. I can go through some really granular things if you want me to.
[00:38:52.100] – Jonathan Denwood
Well, I want to put Cherp in because I know more about this than I should do Because I don’t do a daily. I’ve got a very major client I’ve been working for for over eight years, and they received a letter. I’m not going to give you details because it wouldn’t be appropriate, but it’s a large organization, and they received a legal letter. We We did not build the website for them. I was part of the process as an outsider giving some advice, and I warned them. My warnings were not, in the end, I wouldn’t say listened to, but they were downgraded. Then a year after almost $200,000 had been spent on this website, they received the letter. The letter is from a legal firm that specializes in suing organizations. Based on my experience, this is what triggers. The letter got to the chairman of this organization, and then all hell broke loose, and I got sucked in to this mess, and I did okay out of it, but I would have preferred not to have got sucked in. But this is the reality. I’m not trying to be negative, but based on my personal experience, this is triggered by the letter.
[00:40:46.660] – Jonathan Denwood
I call it getting the letter. Is that the reality? Because there are legal firms that are checking organizations that have… No legal firm is going to sue you if you haven’t got money. That’s the first thing they check. Does the organization have money that we can get our hands on? This is what’s driven, isn’t it? Is these legal firms that sue organizations? Or would you disagree with that? But based on my experience.
[00:41:24.530] – Steve Jones
No, I think it is. I think it is to a degree. It is driven by I think a lot of accessibility stuff is driven by the need for compliance. If they are a government institution or if they’re a public university, that they’re required to do that. If they have the right people on their staff, those people are pushing for the accessibility compliance.
[00:41:54.350] – Jonathan Denwood
I just want to butt in. The other part of this story is that is that they got rid of their internal IT staff to save money, and they brought in a external Microsoft consultancy. They first went to these people first, and their answer was to use a SaaS-based accessibility service. I told them, and I’m going to get in trouble using this term, but I think it’s… I told them it was putting lipstick on the pig. But they They were pushing and they’re saying, I didn’t know what I was talking about. They can just utilize… I’m not going to name because there’s a couple of these SaaS-based services, and they say, If you use our service… I’ve got to I’m not attacking your plugin, but they provide plugins that work with WordPress. They say, And amazing, if you sign up for their SaaS subscription service, it’s amazing. As soon as you use their service, the plugin says everything’s fixed. That’s surprising, isn’t it, Steve?
[00:43:09.670] – Steve Jones
Yeah. Without naming names, you’re speaking of what’s called an overlay, right? In a lot of times, overlays come with toolbars. More recently, a lot of overlays are touting the benefits of AI. I know it. The benefits of AI and their widgets. We’ve all used AI, and we all AI is great, but we know it gets things wrong a lot. Never. You’re right. The problem with the overlays is their claim. It’s the marketing. That’s where they get in trouble. They get in trouble by claiming their tool is going to make you compliant. Their tool is not going to make you compliant unless there is a full manual audit of that website as well. It’s not to say from a technology standpoint that you can’t utilize JavaScript to solve some problems. Sometimes that’s our only choice because we can’t modify a WordPress plugin. Sometimes I have to use JavaScript to modify something to make it accessible in a plugin and then submit a ticket to that plugin developer, Hey, I did this. Can you fix it? But you would really need a full manual audit. There’s no magic bullet. There’s no one click install that’s going to make your website 100% accessible.
[00:44:33.610] – Steve Jones
Action for accessibility does get driven by organizations a lot by lawsuits.
[00:44:41.970] – Jonathan Denwood
Well, when they receive a letter from a very large national legal firm that have successfully sued a number of organizations for tens of millions of dollars, and they hit the letter and it gets the chairman of an organization, all hell breaks loose. Does it not?
[00:44:59.970] – Steve Jones
When these organizations are putting out their RFPs, they need to ensure that accessibility is a topmost requirement, and they need to have the knowledge or partner with the right company to be able to validate the vendor that they’re choosing actually can implement an accessible website to that degree. But I will say, too, like you said early on, you tried to warn them. I don’t know what your full relationship is with this company, but for us- I’ve been doing work.
[00:45:32.800] – Jonathan Denwood
We have been doing work for them for 10 years, and it’s a major client for me. And this whole thing, but I had a very strong relationship, and I still do with the Chief Financial Officer to serve the organization. But it fronted a sizable part of my income, and I didn’t need it. So this is why I know too much about this. Yeah, I don’t want to know about it because I’ve got mixed feelings about the whole accessibility industry because it’s just driven, unfortunately, by these law companies.
[00:46:12.670] – Steve Jones
Unfortunately, If you go back and listen to our accessibility craft, you see my opinion a lot about the lawsuits. A lot of times my opinion on the lawsuits is the only people that really make out in the lawsuits are the lawyers, the bureaucracies and the lawyers. But a lot of times the money doesn’t really make it to that end user that had standing and not being able to use an inaccessible website. Or sometimes it’s just crumbs that gets down to that disabled user. But yeah, I mean, the legal… I’m always weighing the legal and the ethical. I want to be ethical. We should do this because it’s the right thing We’re all on a path. We’re all on a degenerative path as humans. We’re all going to need some level of accessibility at some point in our life. Our eyeballs are going to get worse. Our vision is going to get worse over time. We should be building something not only for people with different abilities, we should be building a future web for ourselves as well. That’s the ethical thing to do. We need to educate ourselves in this. The legal comes in and actually does move companies in a direction of compliance.
[00:47:36.540] – Steve Jones
Quite frankly, a lot of times the outcome of that is just fines. It’s not necessarily compliance. I would love to see the outcome of those lawsuits be full clients of their product or website.
[00:47:47.030] – Jonathan Denwood
Don’t get me wrong, Steve, I’m not having a go at you or your- No. I’m just pointing out the reality of the landscape. I think I sense you feel like me. It is what it is, and it’s It’s just regrettable. But there’s lots of things like that. I’m going to throw a more happier question over to Kirk before he has to leave us. Kirk, you can have the next question.
[00:48:11.920] – Kurt von Ahnen
Well, Steve already alluded to AI in his response earlier, but this question really is, in your scope of work, Steve, what are some of the AI tools that you personally use to run your business? What would you say that the advantage has been to going to that?
[00:48:29.580] – Steve Jones
Yeah, Yeah. So which tools? There’s a lot of them these days. And it is quite amazing to think that we did this stuff without AI at some point in time. But of course, yeah, we’re using ChatGPT, Cloud AI, Copilot to a great degree. From a development standpoint, these tools are fantastic for helping augment our development. And I will say having a team of senior developers on our team and then adding in these AI tools is just this rocket feel. I get a lot of people like, AI, you It can use cursor AI and you could just build a whole application. I was like, I don’t know. As a software engineer, you got to have a little bit more of a vision for your product than just the AI is just going to do it all for you. But I will say that it definitely has augmented our development within our company to a great degree, and it has increased our speed, our output to a great degree. It just does things that you don’t commit messages and get commit messages. It just click a button and it writes my commit message or my PR message.
[00:49:53.050] – Steve Jones
It just generates a PR. And you can use a tool like we recently started using CodaRabbit AI. So we submit poll request to our repository and this AI goes out and it reviews the code. It’ll draw diagrams. It’ll put a poem on every review, a little poem about what you did, funny related to rabbits.
[00:50:20.790] – Jonathan Denwood
What more could you ask for?
[00:50:23.200] – Steve Jones
I think beyond that, there are a lot AI tools out there to generate alt text on your images and for transcripts, for podcasts and things like that, where I think those tools are good and I think they’ll get better over time. But I’ll put a little bit of caution that they still require a human evaluation because we’ve tested some alt text AI generators and they don’t always get it right or they describe a part of the image that’s not the subject of the image. So you could use those things to speed up your development or your writing of alt text, but you still want to really human evaluate that to make sure that what it’s describing that image as is accurate. In the Accessibility Checker, we put together a proof of concept. This is a feature that’s not released yet. So you can generate what’s called a simplified summary in our plugin. So you write your blog post and And the simplified summary is a summary of your blog post below a ninth grade reading level. And we’ve written this proof of concept feature for the plugins, like I said, it’s unreleased, but it actually utilizes cloud AI to generate that summary for you.
[00:51:48.860] – Steve Jones
And it’s based on we use a certain evaluation to give it a grade level, like a ninth grade level. And I found it to be, I’ve been using it my on my own blog just as testing and dogfooding my own product. But it works pretty well. I click a button and it summarizes my blog post and I read through it. I don’t just submit it without reading it. I read through it and that sounds pretty good. Make a few edits and hit publish and there we go. So a lot of AI these days and it’s very exciting and very scary at the same time.
[00:52:28.560] – Kurt von Ahnen
Yeah. So my follow It’s a follow-up question to the AI thing, because it sounds like you’re someone that has a little more knowledge about not just the tool, but the outcome, with the human touch part of it. Have you experienced an AI downgrade on your content because you’re using AI? Or does that not matter in the space that you’re in?
[00:52:50.440] – Steve Jones
Well, I mean, a downgrade on content, you mean?
[00:52:52.440] – Kurt von Ahnen
Like- Like SEO or Google. Google comes by and slaps your wrist because it’s identified AI on your page. But you’re using it as a tool that’s adding a summary for accessibility or something. It’s like I’m doing something that’s the right thing to do, and I’m still going to get my wrist slap. This seems like a…
[00:53:09.210] – Steve Jones
Sometimes I get lost. I hear you.
[00:53:13.120] – Kurt von Ahnen
Yeah.
[00:53:13.220] – Steve Jones
So from From my technical standpoint, a lot of what we do with AI is validated over and over again before it actually makes it to production. I don’t think any code is being dinged by anybody. But on the marketing side, I I don’t think our team utilizes AI to help with outlines or things like that. But you can go to our blog and you’ll notice that Amber Heinz writes a lot of our articles, and our marketing content and writes a lot of our articles, and they have a voice, and I feel like the articles still have that voice. I don’t think AI is being used to- Well, you’re in a very specialized field, aren’t you?
[00:53:56.330] – Jonathan Denwood
It depends what your content is pitched at. I think in some ways, Google… Big surprise, Steve. Google wants its cake and also eat it, and a lot of content that’s aimed at the broader audience. Before, AI wasn’t particularly very good content anyway. It was written by Content Farms, Offshore. I’m not going to name… There’s certain players in the WordPress space that built up very large business services on very poor written content and using Link Farms and other great hat, SEO tactics. But it is what it is. It’s not a fair world, is it? So you just have to suck it up and try and keep at it. If you had your own time machine and you could go back and just have a little five-minute chat and give yourself a little hint Is there anything you would like to tell yourself? You can’t utilize not coming on this podcast. That’s not allowed. Anything else that you wish you could tell yourself? Believe in 2025 that could have gone back to the beginning of your career and told yourself?
[00:55:21.760] – Steve Jones
Well, I think… This is actually a hard one, right? But I think the reality of what a lot of us would do doesn’t match with where we are currently, because I definitely would invest in a lot of technology companies, and that would solve pretty much all the… That would just make me filthy rich. But I’d probably buy a bunch of domain names. But maybe on a more practical level, I think professionally, I probably would have obtained an MBA right away and dove into entrepreneurship a lot earlier than I did or a lot more aggressively than I did because I’m doing it as a little older. I’ve got a family, got people.
[00:56:14.740] – Jonathan Denwood
You’re a young man.
[00:56:15.760] – Steve Jones
I do it because I’m a bit unemploymentable.
[00:56:22.540] – Jonathan Denwood
I don’t give up, but I don’t give up because I don’t want to give up. I don’t give up because I’ve got no choice. I keep bloodied along. All right, Steve, we’re going to wrap it up. So, Kirk, what’s the best way for people to learn more about you, Kirk?
[00:56:43.180] – Kurt von Ahnen
For business, anything that says Llanyana Nomas generally leads back to me. That’s my tag on X, Facebook, and other things. But personally, if you want to make a connection, hit me up on LinkedIn. I’m on LinkedIn almost every day, and I’m the only Kurt von Ahnen on LinkedIn, so I’m easy to find you got the The Storm Master.
[00:57:03.330] – Jonathan Denwood
Steve, what’s the best way for people to learn more about you? Also, I like your podcast.
[00:57:10.340] – Steve Jones
Sure. We have a podcast called Accessibility Craft, where we try a craft beverage and then talk about accessibility. So we get a little drink on a Friday afternoon and have some fun. I do that with my co-owners, Amber and Chris Hines. You can find out more about Equalized Digital at equalizeddigital. Com. You can find me on social. I’m most active on X, but you can find me on Twitter. Yeah, Twitter.
[00:57:41.120] – Jonathan Denwood
I’m not going to call it X, so it’s always going to be Twitter. I don’t care where that prick wants.
[00:57:47.990] – Steve Jones
You can find me there and on most social at stevejonesdev. I have a blog, stevejones. Blog.
[00:57:58.370] – Jonathan Denwood
Well, I’ve enjoyed it. I know it’s been a bit of an interrogation, but you dealt with me quickly. We’ll be back next week with another great WordPress or SaaS individual. I appreciate your support of the show Tribe. The show has grown. We’re getting more listeners. Thank you so much for your support. If there are any guests or topics you want us to discuss, please contact me or Kirk and tell us what you would like to hear on the show. That would be great. See you soon, folks. Bye.
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