Amber Hinds provides insights into best practices for creating accessible content and the significance of user experience in the design process.
We dive into the essential and often misunderstood world of website accessibility with Amber Hinds, CEO of Equalize Digital. Amber is a leading force in digital accessibility, building tools and services that help organizations stay compliant and inclusive—while also improving SEO, UX, and conversions.
From her start in web development to leading audits for higher ed and federal entities, Amber walks us through the real impact of accessibility—from legal compliance and lawsuits to measurable business improvements like lower bounce rates, increased conversions, and fewer support tickets. She breaks down where automated tools fall short, why remediation matters, and how accessibility overlaps directly with SEO strategies.
We also dig into her Page Builder Accessibility Report, offering a transparent look at how major WordPress tools perform when it comes to inclusive design. Whether you're a dev, marketer, or site owner, this episode is packed with actionable insights that can future-proof your website—and your business.
🧠 In This Episode
• Why web accessibility is more than a legal checkbox
• Real-world examples of audits that led to increased traffic & conversions
• What makes automated accessibility checkers effective (and their limits)
• The overlap between accessibility, SEO, and UX
• How to audit, remediate, and maintain accessibility like you do with SEO
• Common issues with page builders, buttons, and form plugins
• Why choosing the right font, color contrast, and heading structure matters
• Legal risks and compliance standards (WCAG, ADA, European Accessibility Act)
• Tips on prioritizing fixes from the bottom of the funnel up
• How WordPress users can leverage Accessibility Checker for ongoing audits
Empower your business by designing for everyone. Accessibility isn't just ethical—it's a smart, scalable advantage.
📩 Subscribe to learn from top voices in SEO, UX, and digital innovation.
💬 What’s your biggest accessibility challenge? Drop it in the comments!
🔗 Mentioned Resources & Links
• Equalize Digital Website – https://equalizedigital.com
• Amber Hinds on Twitter (X) – https://twitter.com/heyamberhinds
• Amber Hinds on BlueSky - https://bsky.app/profile/amberhinds.bsky.social
• Amber Hinds on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/amberhinds/
• Amber Hinds on Github – https://github.com/amberhinds
• Facebook Accessibility Group - https://www.facebook.com/groups/wordpress.accessibility
• Accessibility Checker Plugin – https://equalizedigital.com/accessibility-checker/
• Page Builder Accessibility Report (2024) – https://equalizedigital.com/page-builder-accessibility-report/
• Page Builder Accessibility Report (2025) - https://equalizedigital.com/page-builder-accessibility-report-2025-update-amber-hinds/
• WP Accessibility Day Conference – https://wpaccessibilityday.org
• Deque Axe Core (Open Source Library) – https://github.com/dequelabs/axe-core
• Gravity Forms (recommended accessible form plugin) – https://www.gravityforms.com
• Highland Community College Accessibility Case Study – https://equalizedigital.com/from-complaint-to-compliance-highland-community-colleges-journey-to-website-accessibility/
• Failures and Successes - https://amberhinds.com/2025/12/2025-failures-and-successes/
• Accessibility Craft Podcast – https://equalizedigital.com/accessibility-craft-podcast/
• Belching Beaver Peanut Butter Milk Stout – https://belchingbeaver.com/beer/peanut-butter-milk-stout
Jon Clark (00:00)
What if the very thing that makes your website beautiful is also locking people out and putting your business at risk? Amber Hines is the CEO of Equalize Digital, a company focused on making the web more accessible through audits, remediation, and WordPress plugins designed to help site owners stay compliant and inclusive. But she's not just building software. She's navigating a fast evolving legal landscape, leading a community of accessibility advocates,
and challenging assumptions baked into the way we design for the web. In this episode, we're digging into the real mechanics of web accessibility, what it takes to audit a site, where automated tools fall short, and why compliance isn't just a legal checkbox but a competitive advantage. We impact how accessibility overlaps with SEO and UX, how poorly coded buttons and missing labels can derail both users and conversions, and how small improvements like changing a font or tagging your headings properly
can drive measurable gains in traffic, engagement, and revenue. We also talk about the hidden costs of inaccessibility, lawsuits, federal investigations, and lost customers. And we get into Amber's page builder accessibility report, a hands-on analysis that exposes where tools help or hinder accessibility compliance. Amber isn't just advocating for accessibility. She's building a business around it. But that means walking a line.
between strict standards and what's realistic for scrappy dev teams, between ideal user experiences and conversion focused design, and between what's legally required and what actually serves people. This conversation was a lot of fun from start to finish. And I definitely learned a ton from the specifics on implementation to a long list of recommended plugins and tools. If you've learned something new today, take a second to subscribe to the Page 2 Podcast, leave us a rating or review, and let us know what resonated. We'd love to hear your thoughts.
Okay, let's get into it.
Jon Clark (01:57)
Welcome to episode 102 of the Page 2 Podcast. I'm your host, Jon Clark, and as always joined by my partner in crime at Moving Traffic Media, Joe we are very excited to welcome Amber Hinds to the show to talk all things website accessibility. Welcome Amber.
Amber Hinds (02:13)
Thanks for having me. I'm excited to be here.
Jon Clark (02:17)
for this episode was, I don't know, I'll call it a joy. I know very little about accessibility don't have a deep understanding around it. And I think it's one of those things where you don't truly appreciate it until you have some sort of personal moment where it becomes real. And so for me, that was my mom. She recently had a health emergency.
lost a lot of her eyesight and sort of therefore can't easily navigate the was listening to a number of your podcasts sort of leading up to this and there was, I forget who mentioned it, but it was sort of the description of what you do for website accessibility is very akin to like physical wheelchair ramps or maybe even a beeping at sort of a crosswalk. And so I think just generally, thank you.
for what you do on behalf of, I guess, the internet as a whole. I think it's a very noble initiative and probably something that is often very thankless. It's sort one of those things that sort of works behind the scenes. So thank you for all that you do on that side. You've been, or I guess you sort of started on the web development side as a designer web developer.
Amber Hinds (03:05)
⁓ thank you.
Jon Clark (03:20)
Was there a moment like that for you where you started to say accessibility is really important? I want to focus there. Like, how did you decide to sort of make that, that shift?
Amber Hinds (03:29)
Well, I'll fully admit I don't have any sort of personal contact, or I didn't at the time, in the accessibility community.
I really got introduced to it just because we were doing a lot of work in higher education for Colorado State University. has been a long time client of ours and higher ed was a little bit earlier to the accessibility game before like for-profit companies just because of some of the federal laws in the United States that require that. And so that was my first introduction.
Jon Clark (03:57)
Hmm.
Amber Hinds (04:00)
to accessibility when someone said, hey, this website you're building for us before it launches, there's going to be an accessibility audit. And I was like, wait, what does that mean? So that was when I learned about accessibility was 2016,
Jon Clark (04:09)
Yeah.
Amber Hinds (04:17)
I think maybe 2015. I really started like 2016, 2017 was when we started doing a lot more accessibility work. And then
we started realizing that, we wanted to do more user testing and actually have blind people test the websites that we were building. We started doing work
Jon Clark (04:36)
Hmm.
Amber Hinds (04:38)
for, Texas state entities. And, at this point we've now done federal work and it's kind of one those things when you're like doing a huge RFP with a state entity that you're like, I want to make sure I'm actually.
Jon Clark (04:45)
Okay.
Amber Hinds (04:52)
delivering what I'm promising to deliver. And so we wrote in a user testing into one of these projects and we brought blind people in and had them test our work. And that for me was, I mean, was mind blowing. don't know. Just like
Jon Clark (04:53)
you
Amber Hinds (05:10)
seeing a screen reader for the first time with a native user, not, you know, me very slowly poking around trying to figure out how to test with it.
And so that really, I think gave me more of that face to accessibility.
Jon Clark (05:23)
Got it, So I guess accessibility in general can be pretty abstract for people who aren't involved with it every day.
How would you describe like what you do on a day-to-day basis?
Amber Hinds (05:33)
So it's a mix of what we do. So my company, Equalize Digital, is both a services company in that we do accessibility auditing for organizations and government websites and
like e-commerce websites and that kind of stuff. We also do a lot of software auditing for people who develop software that they sell to others. And so there's that side, but we also have two WordPress plugins that help with accessibility on WordPress websites. And so I'm kind of a balance between doing stuff on our own products, working with our clients and advising them.
And then I run a lot of webinars and I do a lot of educational work as well. I'm on a board of a conference, WP Accessibility Day, that is an annual conference that has about 2,500 attendees every year. ⁓ So, I'm doing a lot in different pots around accessibility and education and helping to support that on the web. And then just general things that are fun like this showing up on podcasts.
Jon Clark (06:28)
Wow.
Yeah.
Joe (06:41)
As part of your audits, you also help with the remediation of any issues you find in the service.
Jon Clark (06:42)
Love it.
Amber Hinds (06:46)
Yes, so it kind of depends on the client. So a lot of times we're doing audits on things that have their own dev teams. And a lot of times the devs say, we're really good at coding, but we don't know accessibility. So they have us come in, we tell them what needs to be fixed, then they'll go fix it. They'll come back to us, have us retest, and then we'll deliver either an accessibility conformance report,
or just a letter of compliance if they need that, depending upon what they are. But if a website is a WordPress website, then we also can do remediation. So we do sometimes get companies and organizations that don't have an in-house dev team, or maybe they have a developer that they work with to do their maintenance and adding new features and stuff, but that person says,
Jon Clark (07:32)
you
Amber Hinds (07:37)
I'm more of a builder. Like I'm really good at this particular page builder or drag and drop editing experience. I can't custom code anything. So when we're like, well, you got to write JavaScript to do X, Z, they're like, right. So in that instance, we'll come in and we do do remediation as well. And we typically do those as part of a package where we space it out over several months, because one of the things we've been working really hard to do is
Jon Clark (07:48)
Yeah.
Amber Hinds (08:04)
help people understand that accessibility doesn't, it's not necessarily just this one and done kind of thing, a lot like SEO, like you don't ever say, I SEO optimize my website, I'm done now. Never again will I do anything for SEO. Accessibility is very much the same way. this also can help make it more cost effective because there are small things that you can do incrementally over time that will have a really big impact.
for people and so that's how we tend to do our audit and remediation plans.
Jon Clark (08:32)
That was one of the fascinating things that sort of popped out to me as I was...
you know, learning more about this is the similarities with SEO. Like there's a lot of things that are good for accessibility that are good for SEO. there's a lot of things about accessibility that are great for UX. And we always love the term like what's great for UX is great for you SEO. and there was, I think your partner, Chris had a blog post, I think it was around the idea of accessibility.
like maintenance plans and very similar to SEO, right? Like you go through this big audit, you do this implementation and then someone adds a new plugin or they add a new section to the site and all of sudden that accessibility work is kind of blown up. Is that a big part of what you guys are doing?
Amber Hinds (09:03)
hmm.
Yeah, as far as just ongoing maintenance and monitoring, or what specifically are you asking?
Joe (09:22)
I guess
what are the kinds of packages you put together? You probably can just do an audit where then you present the audit, but you can do an audit, some remediation, can do an audit plus just ongoing service. What are the typical packages that you provide?
Amber Hinds (09:30)
Mm-hmm.
Gotcha. Yeah, so with our auditing work, is definitely very much, it fits in two buckets. So sometimes it is a scoped, here's a price for a one-off audit and you get the audit and that's it and it's done. We do this a lot for other agencies.
where they're doing all the builds and they want to be able to include accessibility in their website projects. During their testing and debug phase, they'll have us come in and be an extra person. Like they're testing all the design and did it match the design? We don't care about that, right? And then, and then we'll test the accessibility, give them the report.
Jon Clark (10:08)
Right.
Amber Hinds (10:12)
They go fix things, maybe have us retest or not. And then they deliver and then they do all of the ongoing work.
And then with the audit and remediation, is very much like we have a set number of hours and that could be anywhere from six on the low end to 50 plus hours a month where we're going in testing, fixing until we get the website to a good place where we say, this is what I'm gonna say like mostly or almost all the way accessible.
Jon Clark (10:41)
One, One,
Amber Hinds (10:42)
And at this point now we are entering maintenance mode and maintenance modes. Maybe we're doing a quarterly, a bi-annually, or maybe just an annual manual test where a human is going on the website, checking things with a screen reader and doing all of that. And then in between they're using our software accessibility the entire website, not just some selected pages that a human is going to look
Jon Clark (11:21)
Mm.
Amber Hinds (11:09)
On a regular basis an accessibility checker runs every time they're editing content. And so that helps them to remember, when I add images, I need to put alternative text or if I'm choosing the headings, I need to use them in the right order, that sort of thing. So it gives them that real time feedback, but then also it can do full site scans. if you're someone who has a WordPress website and you're getting those plugin updates, you could
say
run all your updates on a staging site, run a full site scan with accessibility checker, and then notice, did something change, and then you could decide, okay, no, it's safe, we can run all the updates on our live site, or you could go back to that plugin developer and say, hey, in this version of the plugin, you added an empty button that's now everywhere on my website and it's breaking my website, and you can get them to fix that before you have to introduce that problem onto your live website.
Jon Clark (11:50)
Okay.
Amber Hinds (12:03)
So maintenance is kind
of a combination of this manual and automated testing. Automated is great because it can look at way more pages than a person can ever look at. And it can find a lot of very common and very significant problems, but it's never gonna find everything. So you do still wanna have some sort of component where you have a human doing some testing as well.
Jon Clark (12:25)
Couple of places to dig in there. think one is, so for SEO, right, I'm sure you've heard of Screaming Frog or Sitebulb, maybe even use them. They have sections on accessibility that you can sort of check and I would guess look at very high level accessibility requirements. Do you see those as a stop gap for
starting an accessibility audit? or are those really just too top level to be like an in-depth audit? Does that question make sense?
Amber Hinds (12:54)
Yeah, so I've used Screaming Frog a little bit, but never the accessibility side of it. I didn't know it did accessibility these days. ⁓
Jon Clark (13:01)
Hehehe.
Amber Hinds (13:02)
So I can't speak a ton to that. Google Lighthouse has an accessibility score as well. I would say that that one is frequently my least recommended one. The thing that's interesting about all of these different tools, and there's a lot of different browser extensions, is that many of them are starting now to use, there's an open source library that comes from a company called DQ called Axe.
Jon Clark (13:11)
Hmph.
Amber Hinds (13:27)
And that's available on GitHub as a package that any sort of tools can pull in. One of the reasons why I was like, Lighthouse is not one that I super recommend is it has very few checks and it does use some axe rules, but only uses like a small percentage of them. So you could find other tools, including the axe browser extension that uses those rules plus way more. I think Google has been over time adding more to their accessibility types, but they're trying to balance this.
Jon Clark (13:41)
you
Amber Hinds (13:53)
How do we not scare people? And as someone who develops one of these tools, think, you know, that is, it is a valid thing, but you have to decide, like, am I are you and who is the website for? And how compliant does it have to be? I think, you know, maybe in a little bit we could talk about the difference between enterprise and like micro business, solopreneur websites and all of those sorts of things.
Jon Clark (13:54)
You're right.
Hmm.
Amber Hinds (14:18)
Obviously you want it to be as accessible as it can be, but if someone is a non-developer and they open a tool that gives them a ton of developer level feedback, they're probably likely to just go away. Right. And I think Google approaches it a lot of times with Lighthouse from the, I'm talking to a non-developer, right. With PageSpeed Insights or whatever that might be. The other thing to keep in mind with a lot of these tools and
Jon Clark (14:21)
right.
Amber Hinds (14:42)
And one that I use a lot that I think is a good intro to getting started is called WAVE. It's from an organization called WebAIM, which is out of a university in Utah. And that tool is one, they have their own rule set. They're not using Axe Core. So sometimes it's helpful to use multiple. Our checker, accessibility checker, uses Axe Core also, but we've
super customize the rules for a WordPress environment. And this is the thing that I think you want to be aware of in whatever tools you're checking is like, what are they understanding about the website or not? What baseline assumptions have the developers of those tools made? We found that there were some things about apps that just didn't work.
Jon Clark (15:14)
Hmm.
Amber Hinds (15:27)
in a WordPress environment and we went and talked, they are just an act slack and we talked them, we're like, here's why, for example, your skip link rule always fails. Like it can't pass in a WordPress environment. And they're like, yeah, you're right, but we're not gonna
change that, right? And so then we said, okay, well, we need to add our own rule because we can't rely on that one. So sometimes whatever platform you're building in, if there's a native checker for that environment, I would recommend going there first because it may be
thinking better about how you're building your website or things it knows about the platform that the website is built we'll give better
Jon Clark (16:04)
Got it. You mentioned
The benefit of the automated plugin is that it can look at significantly more pages. And I was thinking about that as it relates to what we do on the SEO side. Certainly we do broad-scale technical audits where we're looking at everything. But we also do individual page templates, sort of a page template
Amber Hinds (16:15)
Yes.
Jon Clark (16:23)
audit. And of course, the idea is you're trying to find something that you can replicate across.
you know, hundreds or even thousands of pages in the case of an e-commerce site. Is that a fair way to approach compliance or are there really nuances between or I guess across pages within a template? Does that make sense? So like you could miss something, I don't know, maybe depending on whether there are reviews added versus a page that maybe doesn't.
Amber Hinds (16:50)
That does make sense. So when we do audits, the way we approach is very similar.
we say, let's choose representative page types. So it's like, okay, well, we're always gonna look at the homepage. And then you say, well, you've got a product archive or product shop page that like groups all the available products and has search and filters. Okay, you've got to look at that. Then you look at a single product.
Jon Clark (16:59)
Mm-hmm.
them.
Amber Hinds (17:14)
then you say, okay, well now we have to look at a blog. in WordPress, we talk about custom post types. So anything where it's like this group of content all uses kind of the same template. Let's look at at least one of each of those. Our accessibility checker, when it does the full scan, it'll go out and get everything. The other thing is you can either test all of your terms, so like your category archive. So if you're like, here's all the products that are blue, I don't know, right?
Jon Clark (17:41)
Right.
Amber Hinds (17:41)
Like that, when I talk about taxonomy, that's what I mean. and,
but we also have just to speed it up. We have a sampling technique where basically the plugin will go get all of the taxonomy terms that exist. And then it will find an example of one that has no content. So it's going to return a like nothing matched your search when you load the page and one that has the most, which will ideally return pagination results. And so we'll do that.
like test those two, because then we've got like the two opposite ends of what you might expect on that kind of page template, as opposed to just
Jon Clark (18:13)
Got it. That's smart. Yeah.
Amber Hinds (18:15)
testing one over the other. But yeah, with our manual audits, we do very much that same thing. Or we'll say to people like, what pages have special functionality? And they might be like, there's a map on this one page. Like, OK, yeah, we should look at the map. Right. Or, you know, forms, looking at what the form pages are. And
Jon Clark (18:17)
Yeah. Okay.
Amber Hinds (18:35)
And then how you prioritize, we like to do bottom of funnel So
when both from an auditing and also a remediation standpoint. So we will always fix first header and footer. Those are global. They show everywhere. If someone can't use your navigation, they're going to leave your website, the end, right? If it doesn't work, they're not gonna try hard. They're gonna go find a different website that does work that also does what you do because
Jon Clark (18:53)
Yep.
Amber Hinds (19:01)
None of us are unique, right? And
so we'll do 100 footer first, and then we look at where do conversions happen. So on an e-commerce store, we're looking at and making sure that the checkout page works. On a service-based website, we're looking at wherever the contact form is, like the, I want your services, right? And so we start there and we'll fix those, then like moving up the funnel, whatever that looks like. So.
Jon Clark (19:17)
Mm-hmm. you
Amber Hinds (19:27)
Where were they before they got to where that conversion happened? you know, so e-commerce again, it's checkout
page. Then we go to the cart. Then we go to an individual product. Then we go to wherever they search products or filter them. That kind of thing, like trying to get bottom of funnel up, because that's where you're going to have the most important fixes.
Jon Clark (19:45)
That's really smart. Yeah.
Joe (19:46)
Get it.
I got a weird question about color contrast because I feel like this comes up a lot as we're starting to develop websites. Will you catch a color contrast issue in a, of course you can catch it in the manual review, but can the application, the plugin that you built catch color contrast issues?
Amber Hinds (20:06)
Yes, so accessibility checker can find color contrast issues not just in regular states, but also in like hover and focus states as well. So that's actually, it's interesting because color contrast can be difficult for an automated tool to catch. In particular, if you're thinking about you might have a container that has a background and then the button or the text is like many layers deep. And so it's not like every element always has the same.
Jon Clark (20:23)
Okay.
Joe (20:23)
I bet.
Amber Hinds (20:33)
But we're, we are pretty reliable even with like CSS variables. Our plugin is different from some of the plugins
in WordPress that just do like PHP based checks. Our plugin actually renders the page. You can't see it, it's off screen, but it renders the page and it gets the full page, which is also helpful with color contrast or anything where there's like a JavaScript action, because any of the tools that just do PHP
Jon Clark (20:48)
Okay.
Amber Hinds (21:01)
they're not going to get on if there's color up here in the style sheet, but then there's something further down the overrides it, it might flag the thing up here, but actually that doesn't show anywhere, so it doesn't matter, so you might get a lot of false positives. So we fully render, we're also able to test things that are visually hidden on the page. So for example, in the dropdowns in your navigation menu or mega menu, if you have those,
Jon Clark (21:09)
Okay. Okay.
Amber Hinds (21:25)
They'll all get tested even though when the page loads, they're not visible.
Joe (21:28)
That's awesome.
Jon Clark (21:29)
Got
Maybe it's a good segue to, I was really curious about the menu and footer. You mentioned how important they are, of course, and there's always a lot of conversation around, especially from the UX side where they're trying to figure out how to condense the menu or make it more actionable. Do you have any senses of, or a sense of the most important pages that are typically included in the menu?
Or are you primarily looking at how they're tagged or maybe how the menu itself is coded? Do you look at both of those things?
Amber Hinds (21:58)
So we do keyboard testing, which a lot of times comes out with like basic code reviewing. Can you use the tab key to reach all of the elements? Can you go across the top without being forced to tab through each dropdown?
Jon Clark (22:06)
Mm-hmm.
Amber Hinds (22:13)
because you can imagine if someone has a lot of drop downs, you don't wanna have to go through each one because you wanna get to the third item over, right? Can you go across the top, separate buttons to open and close the navigation menus? So a lot of structural functionality. We sometimes will say, hey, we think you're missing key stuff in your navigation that would be helpful from a UX standpoint,
Jon Clark (22:19)
Right.
Amber Hinds (22:36)
From our side, those are always just recommendations or best practices because they aren't, if someone's asking us for a web content accessibility guidelines audit, it doesn't fail. The only time it would maybe fail is there is a success criteria in WCAG that requires consistent navigation. So if the navigation menu is substantially different on certain pages or if it moves,
So
Jon Clark (23:02)
Right.
Amber Hinds (23:03)
we've seen this happen on school websites where maybe the district has a website and then they take sections of their site and they make it for the school. And on the homepage, you have like all the districts navigation. And then when you go to certain parts of the website, that jumps up above the logo. And now in the place where that was, you have school navigation or like, well, the order is totally different. And if somebody, could be very confusing for someone who's not sighted and they don't understand.
what just happened
and why the navigation moved. So that kind of thing will get flagged. Sometimes we'll sort of say, you know, there are cases where you just have this conversation with a client where they were using the phrase email us just to go to like their whole contact page. But like the email form and the email information is way at the bottom of the page. And it doesn't actually communicate to people that I can get the mailing address and like.
Jon Clark (23:33)
. .
Amber Hinds (23:58)
a map to the location and we're like, you know, it might be better to just say, contact us because it has a better expectation. But again, it's not a failure. It's one of those like, how can we optimize this? I feel like less in our accessibility audits and more in our user testing sessions. So we'll do as an engagement, we'll do a live user testing session. They're usually between an hour and a half, like an hour and an hour and a half. And we get on Zoom.
Jon Clark (24:12)
you
Amber Hinds (24:20)
Clients can come if they want to. A lot of times they do with someone who is blind and either they'll be using desktop or mobile depending upon what we want. And those are not full audits. They're very much like we give them tasks to complete. Go search for this product. You want to buy men's hiking shoes in the size eight. Can you? Things like that. And then they're on the homepage. You figure out where did they go? How did they try to search?
Jon Clark (24:38)
Hmm.
Amber Hinds (24:45)
where did they get hung up? Can they add it to a cart? Can they check out? All those things. And a lot of times that's where that kind of stuff like in the navigation menu making search more findable will come up. It's not a failure to not have a search or to bury it somewhere, but you frequently find out that in certain scenarios, you really need to make your search super findable.
Jon Clark (25:09)
Makes sense. I thought one thing that was really fascinating from the page builder accessibility report, which hopefully we'll have a chance to dig into a little bit. So the 2024 version, you did not include contact forms. And I think the statement was around you really think a separate plugin, contact form plugin is better than often what the page builders provide.
I thought that was really interesting. Could you dig into that, like explain that for us a little bit?
Amber Hinds (25:34)
Yeah, for sure. So I come to this from the side of we're really, we don't really build websites very much anymore. But when we did, we were building websites that custom and they were intended to convert. Like they had specific goals behind them and they were, we were building a lot of enterprise sites.
The page builder forms are just super limited. Some of them, depending upon which page builder you look at, you can't even have a dropdown or a ⁓ checkbox field. It's like only text. You can put your name and your email address and your message. And so I already was approaching it from you can hardly do anything with these forms. But in general, I would say
Jon Clark (26:11)
It's like name, email, form.
Amber Hinds (26:20)
What I have noticed is that the companies who make form plugins are paying more attention to accessibility than the page builders might be. Not always, but in particular around forms. And there's a lot of nuances with forms and just a lot of things that I think you...
probably want to do with your form if you're trying to really track, like for example, having hidden fields that gather the UTMs that were on someone when they visited your website, right? Like those kinds of things that you just can't do with it. And so the first year I refused to test any forms because I was like, you just shouldn't be using the form in your page builder, the end.
Joe (27:00)
want to read my report, you're
going to follow my...
Amber Hinds (27:02)
Yeah, but last year we had a conversation about it and we were like, the reality is, that most DIYers and most small businesses that build with WordPress, they don't do custom. most of them don't, many of them don't even have a developer, right? And so what they do is they go choose a template or theme that they like and they set it up and all of these page builders that have some sort of template.
If they offer a form, it's going to have a contact form on the contact page. And are those people going to be like, no, I don't want this contact form. I'm gonna delete it and go find a different one. No, most of them are gonna be like, it can collect a name and email address and phone number, I'm good. And so I was like, the reality is I can't not test this because they are so important. And because they exist, people are going to use them.
Jon Clark (27:41)
Right.
Joe (27:49)
Just choosing the state has got to be the biggest pain in the butt. The drop down of all 50 states and territories, like even someone with pretty
good sight, I always struggle with that.
Amber Hinds (28:00)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Jon Clark (28:01)
It.
Joe (28:02)
Are there one or two great plugins, contact form plugins that you like?
Amber Hinds (28:06)
have been using Gravity Forms since, I don't know 2009 or something, a very long time. I love Gravity Forms, and they were one of the first form plugins to really start focusing
on accessibility. But I know that there are definitely some other ones. WPForms is one I know. think some people in our Facebook group use Formidable and say that they've done a fair bit. But Gravity Forms is always my go-to.
Jon Clark (28:31)
Got it. One other question before we jump into the accessibility report. So I was listening to the Learn Dash podcast episode where they talked a lot about what they'd implemented and what they'd sort of learned from that process. And, you know, I think, again, a similarity with SEO, there's always this challenge or question around if we implement X, what are we going to get from that? And sort of how do you sort of prove out that revenue?
And I thought some of the outcomes were incredible. I think I'm getting these percentages right, but support tickets were down, I think 30%. refunds were reduced to 42%. I mean, that's, that's incredible. And I was thinking experience sort of across these types of implementations. What do you look to as a measure of success? Like, are they some of the intangibles like that, or do you see it in
I don't know, cart values or revenue, of, what do you typically see when an audit is implemented?
Amber Hinds (29:29)
Yeah. So the reality is if you're trying to sell accessibility to, you know, a vice president at an organization or somebody who really cares about the bottom line, you have
to find a way to connect it to whatever their success metrics are, which are frequently numbers. Yeah, it was phenomenal that they saw decreased in refunds and fewer support tickets because there is that huge overlap between accessibility and UI and user experience, user interface. And so they were doing a lot of things that I think ended up also just making their plugin easier to use.
We also, so there's a case study on our website, which I can send you later if you want to include it in the show notes where,
Jon Clark (30:10)
Sure.
Amber Hinds (30:12)
and it includes a presentation that I did with this community college at a higher ed conference. And for them, what was interesting about their project was one, they got in trouble with the federal government. Their website, I'll be honest, hopefully they won't listen to this. It's ugly. I think they know it's ugly.
Jon Clark (30:27)
Yeah.
Amber Hinds (30:28)
It's really old. And they were like, we just need to make it more accessible, but we can't wrap our head right now around a rebuild. I think
it should have been a full rebuild. But why this actually made a really compelling case study for us was we did no design changes at all, unless it was like a color contrast tweak, like super minor. Like the whole thing, if you look at it, you'd like, this is a website from like 10 years ago, right? Yeah, it was like super minor.
Jon Clark (30:50)
But even that would be like CSS, right?
Amber Hinds (30:56)
And they did not add any new content and they weren't even like their community college with a small marketing department. They're not really blogging or doing anything like that, but they saw an, and I can't say the numbers, so I'm not going to make them up, but they saw an increase in both their ranking, like on search console. So how high they were to the top of results, increase in clicks from search. And they saw.
Jon Clark (31:18)
Wow.
Amber Hinds (31:21)
I think it was only this might, I would guess, but it was like between one and 2 % increase in applications. But for them,
Jon Clark (31:25)
Wow.
Amber Hinds (31:27)
like that is a, and they were like, we didn't actually think we were going to get anything out of this except for don't lose our funding from the federal government. And then they were like, and wow, we actually like got more students applying to our college and more people coming to the community college website without changing any content, without doing any major design overhauls.
only doing underlying structural fixes to the HTML. And so I think if you can connect it to the KPIs, that's really helpful. And it really can make a huge difference. I've seen sometimes on our e-commerce sites where they come back and say, we are seeing an increase in checkouts. But we've also had
Jon Clark (31:52)
What?
Amber Hinds (32:07)
An e-commerce brand, Zero Shoes, we worked with them a couple of years ago and they are like a multimillion dollar, they had three websites, a US, a UK and an EU website. And so they would sometimes roll stuff out on one site and not the other. And they also had enough traffic from their paid ads that they were able to very successfully A-B test. And there were a few enhancements that we recommended to like the cart page or different things or like
Jon Clark (32:22)
Hmm
Amber Hinds (32:35)
They had in places on their website where they'd have like gifts that were
playing for videos would autoplay without like pause buttons and that kind of stuff. And they rolled that out and they would A-B test. And there were times when they were like, this is rough for us because when we A-B tested this thing, either we couldn't prove that it made a difference or there was one time where like they felt like pausing all the GIFs, they could see fewer clicks of people actually hitting play on the testimonial.
because it was a static image instead of like someone talking, but you can't hear the sound image. And they're like, we think this hurts us we're like fewer people watching testimonials. Maybe that means though, fewer people will buy shoes. I don't know. So I won't say that it's always like there may be instances where you're like, I don't know, but you know, so then we're like, okay, well, how can we make this a happy medium where you're still complying with all the laws you have to comply to?
Joe (33:25)
Kim can you a little more time on that? I'm really curious about
the laws you help clients avoid being in trouble with
Jon Clark (33:32)
Brian.
Amber Hinds (33:32)
Sure. So I'm not a lawyer, so I'm not going to give you any legal advice on your podcast. But I do have a lot of experience with both through research and then especially
here in the United States because we have clients who come to us that are already in legal trouble. So like the federal stuff with that.
That was under the Department of Education at the time with the Office of Civil Rights. And so I've been on a lot of calls with attorneys from that office. So basically what the laws look like, the biggest one right now that most people are talking about is the European Accessibility Act. This is a law that went into effect in June of last year, and it impacts any business that makes more than 2 million euros in turnover or has
employees were more.
Jon Clark (34:18)
Wow. So even pretty small businesses.
Amber Hinds (34:18)
this is for-profit
businesses. Outside of that, much any Western company, Northern Hemisphere, Western country is going to require that any government websites have to be accessible. Here in the US, there was a big push through the Justice Department and later this year, anything that falls under the Americans with Disabilities Act
Title II which would be like state and local governments, public libraries, K-12 schools, those all have compliance deadlines later this year. And Canada has a bunch of different laws. The Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act, and then there's the I can't remember what the exact name of that law is. But those...
impact for profit businesses as well. And a lot of outside of the US, a lot of them have fines. So in Europe, the fines can be over, it can be like millions of dollars. Europe, it can be like per country too. And with the European Union, like they talk to each other. So Germany can be like, you're violating this law. And by the way, we're going to tell all the other countries and they'll also find you that kind of thing.
In the U.S., it's not really fines. If they fall under any of the federal funding requirements, they can lose funding, which is why schools really pay attention to that because that is how they operate primarily. If it is a for-profit business or a nonprofit organization, then they would fall under the Americans with Disabilities Act, and those are typically enforced with lawsuits. And lawsuits...
Jon Clark (35:50)
and thank
Amber Hinds (35:54)
Basically, if someone with disabilities thinks that they can't access your website and it's not accessible to them, they're first, hopefully they'd reach out to you and contact you, ask for help. But if not, then there are recourses that they can sue.
Jon Clark (36:06)
Yeah, I think that's why the business or the bottom line business impact that, learned dash rec, mentioned was so interesting to me. Cause I think most times when businesses, you know, say they have to implement it, it is because of some sort of legal requirement. I don't think. Well, I'm sure they do at some point, but not always, they don't always connect it to actually, this is going to help our business from our revenue or, you know,
bandwidth perspective. So I thought that was really interesting. So let's talk a little bit about the page builder accessibility report. You have a couple of you have a YouTube overview of the report itself. I think there's a podcast episode about it as well. So I don't want to make you rehash the whole report. Those are two great resources that we'll link to in the show notes that people can can dig into. But maybe at a high level.
you talked a little bit about accessibility, compliant default text, and you sort of use that as the placeholder to evaluate all of the different, page builders, right? So you sort of started with a baseline. and something that jumped out to me was what is compliant text? And I heard you mentioned things like heading tags and stuff like that. Oftentimes what we talk about has
good SEO, are there other things about compliant text that we should be aware of? Like what makes text compliant?
Amber Hinds (37:19)
So first of all, the font you choose is really helpful. One of the things, the easiest way that I look at this when trying to choose a font is I'll put a one, a capital I, and a lowercase l next to each other, and then I'll put a d and a lowercase d and a lowercase b next to each other. And what you want to be able to do on the one, i, and l is they should all look different. If they're all just a straight line,
That's gonna be really difficult for someone with dyslexia or some other disabilities to read. The D and B, it's the similar thing because they flip. You don't want them to be a perfect mirror of each other. So if, for example, the D has a tail, then maybe the B doesn't. They wanna look slightly different. So choosing your font is really helpful. And this is something that happens in design branding discussions before you even build your website.
Jon Clark (38:11)
Right. you
Amber Hinds (38:11)
Right? Like have a good font that's really legible. Color contrast, of course, can impact readability as well. As far as actually writing it, you want to think a lot about headings. And again, it really helps with SEO as well. But headings should create
a outline of the page. Like we're going back to college, we're writing an outline of our essay. Like what is it going to be? Similar concept.
you need to use headings in the right numerical order to represent an outline of the page. Don't choose it because this one's blue and bold, right? Like I wanted the big heading, so I picked, no, you have to pick it based upon the number. Link text, when you are writing links, you want it to be meaningful. So if somebody, one
Jon Clark (38:41)
Ready.
Amber Hinds (38:52)
of the things that's important to know about a screen reader user is that they're not getting to the page and just,
Jon Clark (38:52)
All
Amber Hinds (38:58)
on every web page they go to listening to it all the way from the top to the like you and I don't go read every word on every website that we visit, right? We skim, we jump around, we look for things. So there are tools built into screen readers. In voiceover, it's called the rotor. In NVDA, which is the Windows screen reader, there's a similar
Jon Clark (39:15)
you
Amber Hinds (39:16)
thing, but basically where you can see different things, like you could see all the headings on the page or you can see all the links on the page. And...
So if someone is looking at a list of your links in the context of their screen reader, not with all of the sentences around them, they should still know what the link does. So for example, learn more, here, download. This means nothing.
Jon Clark (39:35)
Hmm.
Amber Hinds (39:41)
Download what? Learn more about what? So there are ways that you can
If it's in a sentence, link the meaningful part of sentence. Don't say to contact us, click here and only link the word here. Just link that. If you are in a scenario where you have a link designed as a button and you don't want it to be really long, then you could add hidden screen reader text or an ARIA label, which tells a screen reader, don't just say learn more, say learn more about us, even though a sighted person only sees learn more.
So thinking about that as you're putting links is really important. Shorter paragraphs is very helpful for all of us. And another thing too that comes up sometimes, which can be done in the WordPress block editor in particular, but some page builders support this as well. If you're on a website, so for example, I live in Texas. We have a lot of
websites like for our kids schools and government where the first half of the page is in English and the second half is in Spanish. You need to actually tell the screen reader there's an HTML attribute called Lang attribute that you put on where you say, hey,
now I'm changing languages because that impacts how the screen reader pronounces the content or whether it can even read it at all in the case of some screen readers.
So making sure that you're tagging that content if you're switching between languages is really important as well.
Jon Clark (41:07)
The whole letter is fascinating. I mean, it makes total sense when you say it out loud, but as someone who would pick a font because it
looks cool. Like I probably would not have thought to look for the nuances between L, I, D, B. Like that's super interesting.
Amber Hinds (41:23)
another one is a capital
O and a zero.
Jon Clark (41:27)
Zero, right. Yeah.
I wanted to touch on buttons real quick. So in the SEO world, JavaScript often uses buttons. And oftentimes, they're using some sort of router to connect that button click to a destination. But don't always use an href link in the code. That's problematic for SEO and crawlers. Is that
applicable to accessibility as well? Or do they sort of understand that router connection without the link in the button? Does that question make sense?
Amber Hinds (41:59)
So yes, there, so basically we have a success criterion called name role value. It's a WCAG success criterion, which basically says things need to have a role that represent what they actually do or perform. And this is probably in our audits, one of the biggest things we flag is either buttons that were incorrectly coded as links or links that were incorrectly coded as buttons. So like the reverse. So a big thing to think about is that a link
Jon Clark (42:23)
interesting.
Amber Hinds (42:26)
takes you somewhere, somewhere else on the same page or to a new page. A button performs an action. So opening a modal or pop-up. In WordPress land, a lot of people like to use a plugin called Popup Maker, which is actually really great from accessibility on its own, but I see frequently where people will get confused because we have the button block in WordPress, which looks like it creates a button.
And they'll say, okay, I need to open my popup. I'm going to just like insert this button block and link the URL to the popup and that will make the popup open. So, but when someone gets there, they just here link this and they don't know, it's going to open a popup. They have no context about what's going to happen or what it's going to do. So you have to be careful just cause something looks like a button doesn't mean that it
sounds like a button to a screen reader user. The other thing too is so sometimes people will intentionally take a link that just looks like a link because stylistically they don't want the background and the border and all that stuff. They just want it to look like underlined text. And then they'll maybe give it a role of in the HTML, which then tells the screen reader this is a button, but buttons on your keyboard
can be triggered with both the space bar and the return key. And a link can only be triggered with the return key. So if you tell a screen reader user it's a button and they try and use your space bar, it won't work. So if you're gonna start remediating in that way, you also have to write JavaScript that says, also allow this link to be triggered with a button. It's always better if you can to use native elements. But this is where we get into like weirdness of how do you remediate a real website in.
Jon Clark (43:51)
Mm.
Amber Hinds (44:07)
and those sorts of things, which is why ARIA was created. It's never best to start with ARIA, but sometimes you have to add it later on. But no, it really is important that you use the right element, because it tells people how to interact with it. gives them an expectation of what it's going to do. Sometimes I've seen instances where people use a link, like an anchor tag, but without an href.
Jon Clark (44:30)
Mm-hmm.
Amber Hinds (44:30)
or just with a hash or something like that, or they'll put JavaScript in the href.
When you do that, it isn't keyboard focusable. You can't tab to it at all, which isn't just blind people. That's also people with mobility challenges that maybe can't use a mouse, but they can use a keyboard and they can see just fine. And they're like, I see the thing. I want to go to it, but I can't get there. You know, it's super frustrating. Yeah.
Jon Clark (44:50)
Can't get there.
other question on the page builder. You know, there's so much focus on WordPress, but we definitely have other platforms that are growing Shopify, Wix, right?
Have you ever considered expanding those reports to include other types
Amber Hinds (45:06)
you
Jon Clark (45:06)
of builders?
Amber Hinds (45:07)
So I actually had a YouTuber, squarestylist hire me last year and she set up test sites on Squarespace, Shopify, Webflow, and I'm forgetting what the other one was, but it's one that I had never heard of and it was horrible.
Jon Clark (45:26)
Ha
Amber Hinds (45:26)
Um, similar to what I do with my page builder reports and I tested them all for her. I can probably find a link to that in some of that you guys, if you want to include it in the show notes, it doesn't have like a WordPress comparison with it. Like in the same table, it's just comparing all those different builders. Cause those are the ones she was interested in. In general, I would like Shopify did the best, which makes sense. Cause it's e-commerce and a lot of the laws target e-commerce in particular.
Jon Clark (45:33)
Sure, yeah.
Amber Hinds (45:51)
But it really depends, you know, with any of those on, you know, Shopify is the same as WordPress in that you can choose a theme and you put that theme on and that controls a lot of the output. Drupal as well, right? Similar things. So you really have to be careful in what themes or plugins or whatever your platform calls extensions that modify the platform, what you add, because really that's where a lot of the
problems are going to come from outside of the content that you create.
Jon Clark (46:19)
Yeah, that makes sense. Webflow was definitely another one that has been growing quite a bit. All right, I know we're bumping up against our time. Let's jump to some rapid fire questions. That works for you.
Amber Hinds (46:29)
Yeah, sounds good.
Jon Clark (46:30)
All right. So what would you encourage someone to focus on as it relates to a success indicator? Some sort of like compliance score? Or maybe it's like user happiness or user experience. Is there one that you sort of hold as the primary benchmark when implementation is done?
Amber Hinds (46:47)
So for us, we're typically looking at meeting WCAG compliance as the minimum. So making sure that you're passing all of those things in the audits, it's not enough to have a 100 % test in an automated testing tool. I wish I could say it was, but no testing tool is going to find everything. So you do still have to do some manual testing. sure, I think...
the actual KPIs are gonna be different based on different organizations. If you can see things like we get fewer support requests or fewer phone calls or people coming into the store saying, hey, I had to come in because I couldn't figure out how to order this online and I really need it, right? Like those sorts of things. So if you can get customer feedback, of course that is going to be your best measure.
Jon Clark (47:34)
Perfect. So you're doing a lot of things. Is there a productivity tool that you can't live without?
Amber Hinds (47:40)
So we use Basecamp internally and I will fully admit that we have a little bit of a love-hate relationship with it because there's some things that it just can't do. But that's probably how we track most stuff. We've moved to linear on the dev side to try and combine all of our dev tasks and things we need to focus on across a lot of different repos. But those are probably the two most product.
Jon Clark (48:02)
Okay.
Amber Hinds (48:04)
Yeah, productivity focused.
Jon Clark (48:05)
We were on Basecamp early, early on and picked up Asana. We're on Monday.com now, which I think we could say we have a love-hate relationship there
Joe (48:11)
Sana's done the
Amber Hinds (48:14)
feel like
none of them are good. I've looked at, sometimes we're like, maybe we should switch project management tools. And then we look at others and we're like, well, it doesn't have this, but it does have that, you know, and then we're like, you know how much work this would be? No, let's just stay with it. Our clients are on it too, so we'd have to teach them a new tool and that's a whole nother thing.
Jon Clark (48:22)
Mm-hmm.
Right,
That makes a big difference for sure. What
do you think is the biggest blocker to accessibility adoption today?
Maybe that's not a rapid fire question. Okay. Yep.
Amber Hinds (48:37)
Probably, I'll try and go fast. Well, number one is awareness. I think
there are still just a lot of people, including many web developers, who have no idea that accessibility is a thing. So that's probably the number one blocker. Number two is, I think even when organizations become aware of it, it is sometimes difficult for,
people to decide that they are willing to budget for it. And they see accessibility as a cost center and not something that could lead to increased revenue.
Jon Clark (49:05)
Right.
Yep. All right. Last one in this section. What is the highest rated craft beer or mocktail from the accessibility craft podcasts? Did you know?
Amber Hinds (49:16)
saw you were gonna ask me that. So
we have very poor like rating, like we don't numerically rate them, although we're gonna rebuild our website and we're talking about how we're gonna try and translate everyone's thumbs up down in the middle into numbers so we could then actually rate them. So I can't really answer that. But I will tell you as far as my favorite, we did a peanut butter stout once, I can't remember what it's, it might've been belching beaver, peanut butter stout.
Jon Clark (49:32)
Yeah. Okay.
Amber Hinds (49:42)
I like dark beer. It was really good and I really liked that one. That was one of my favorites.
Jon Clark (49:44)
Okay.
I'll
have to look that one up.
Joe (49:48)
We have time for one more.
I got time for one more. You're your mom. forecast. What is one like, rule that you try to follow to maintain your work life balance?
Amber Hinds (49:52)
Four girls.
Oh, I have no work life balance. I wrote a whole blog post about that last week. Oh yeah. I, I'll send it if you want to put it in the show notes for folks. Cause I was like, you know, I haven't looked at my time for a really long time. I feel like I've been working a lot and I did, I mean, I averaged like 55 hours or something like that a week, last year. was, it was quite a lot, but.
Joe (50:00)
⁓ I will end there on a great ⁓
I didn't see it.
Jon Clark (50:06)
We'll have to dig that one up.
The life of a business owner, right?
Amber Hinds (50:24)
Have a really good partner. So my husband is my business partner, but also my life partner. And I think that is probably the best way I can say how you balance careers and four kids.
Jon Clark (50:36)
Love that. Amber, this has been amazing. I've definitely learned a ton. I'm sure Joe has as well. So really appreciate the time. Before we let you go, where can listeners find you?
Amber Hinds (50:45)
So as far as social media, I am most active on Twitter, which I refuse to call X, and you can find me at HeyAmberHines. And you can also find us if you go to equalizedigital.com.
Jon Clark (50:56)
Perfect. Well, thanks again for joining us on the Page 2 Podcast. And if you enjoyed the show, please remember to subscribe rate and review. We'll see you next time. Bye bye.
Amber Hinds (51:04)
Bye.