Latest / WP Builds / 483 - Why accessibility should be every WordPress developer’s priority with Danielle Zarcaro

Transcript

483 - Why accessibility should be every WordPress developer’s priority with Danielle Zarcaro · WP Builds

• 0:01
  Nathan Wrigley: Welcome to the WP Builds Podcast. Bringing you the latest news, interviews and fun for the WordPress community. Now, welcome your host, Nathan Wrigley.
• 0:20
  Nathan Wrigley: Hello there, and welcome once again to the WP Builds Podcast. You've reached episode number 483, which is getting pretty close to 500, it's just occurring to me. It's entitled Why Accessibility Should Be Every WordPress Developer's Priority with Danielle Zarcaro. It was published on Thursday, the 3rd of September, 2026. My name's Nathan Wrigley, and in a few short minutes, I will be having that conversation with Danielle. But before then, a few bits of housekeeping.
• 0:50
  Nathan Wrigley: If you like what we do at WP Builds, head to our subscribe page, wpbuilds.com forward slash subscribe. Get yourself on our email list, and we will notify you when we produce this. The podcast, it comes out on a Thursday, but also we do the This Week in WordPress show. That comes out on a Tuesday and we record it on a Monday. I've taken a few weeks off, but we should be back on the wagon, hopefully, this coming Monday. We'll have to wait and see how that transpires, but I hope it'll happen.
• 1:18
  Nathan Wrigley: But also, and curiously, I am releasing a podcasting app. It is an end-to-end podcasting solution. I'm not revealing too many details about it, but I can assure you if you are even vaguely thinking about running a podcast or already have one, this app does literally everything that you could possibly want to do with your podcast. I say that safe in the knowledge that there's probably a thousand things that it can't do, but you get the point. I'm fairly happy with it and pretty confident about it.
• 1:48
  Nathan Wrigley: If you'd like to find out more and get some founders pricing, a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to get some really incredible discounts on the pricing, we are looking for people to help us out with that. The URL is a bit weird because it's my personal website, nathanrigley.com forward slash app. So nathanrigley.com forward slash app. So Wrigley, by the way, has a W in it. So it's n-a-t-h-a-n-w-r-i-g-l-e-y.com forward slash app. Go there, fill out the form, and we'll let you know. I really, really would urge you to do it. It will be definitely worth your while if you hop on board at the beginning.
• 2:28
  Nathan Wrigley: Anyway, there we go. Enough of the self-promotional stuff. If you would like to sponsor WP Builds, head to our Advertise page to find out more about that. WPBuilds.com forward slash Advertise. Okay, what have we got for you today? Well, today I am chatting with Danielle Zarcaro. Danielle talks to us today about accessibility. That is the thing that they have made their life about. Accessibility, obviously very important in the WordPress space, so we get a bit of an introduction to Danielle.
• 2:57
  Nathan Wrigley: Talk about the interest in accessibility. Where did that come from? Where do you gain expertise? How do you gain that knowledge? What is the point of doing it? And what are the barriers currently? Whether there's a legal, moral component to it all? Whether you should be retrofitting or building new? Loads and loads in here. Plus, also, a little bit towards the end, about a tool that Danielle is building in the email space. So keep your ears peeled for that. I hope that you enjoy it.
• 3:25
  Nathan Wrigley: I am joined on the podcast by Danielle Zarcaro. Hello, Danielle.
• 3:31
  Danielle Zarcaro: Hello.
• 3:32
  Nathan Wrigley: We've been putting the world to rights. We've been learning about the way Elizabethan English sounds and all sorts of things in the background. And the way the internet gets used. Oh, we had a whole conversation about how the internet works. It's a miracle. But that's not why we're here today. Danielle is joining us. I think it's probably fair to say that the conversation will center around accessibility. And those kind of things, we may stray off into different directions. Time will tell, but thank you for joining me.
• 3:59
  Nathan Wrigley: And my first question to you, if that's all right, is it's a very banal one and I ask everybody the same thing and it's basically it's an opportunity for you to introduce yourself so that we know a little bit more about you. So it's over to you, really. Just give us your little bio. I don't know if you want to keep it in the text space or the WordPress space, but whatever you like.
• 4:17
  Danielle Zarcaro: Sure. Yeah, I can try to keep it a little bit short. I've been doing WordPress for, I don't know, at this point, 12 years, 13 years, something like that. And sort of happened upon accessibility and then started specializing it for about five or so years. And it's kind of been, you know, I've hopped from agency to agency locally. I, you know, came across an opportunity to leave a job that wasn't a good fit and found myself sort of searching for some contract stuff and then went out on my own.
• 4:54
  Danielle Zarcaro: Probably maybe eight years ago now. So it's sort of been a really interesting ride and I recently took up crochet as a way to not be on screens all the time because I do watch a lot of TV as well as a way to like decompress. And so it just became too much. And so I started crocheting too.
• 5:13
  Nathan Wrigley: Can I ask you about the crocheting? I'm so sorry. Does it involve your eyeballs? For example, my mother used to knit and that was like the de-stress, but the knitting was muscle memory. So she could be talking to me whilst knitting. But I get the feeling with crochet, like your eyes have got to be on the object that you're trying to crochet, if you know what I mean.
• 5:35
  Danielle Zarcaro: Yeah, I've seen people do it without looking. Oh, I think I did recently. Try knitting, and it's something I will continue to do, but it does seem slightly more difficult because you do have to insert into each of the stitches, so you do have to know. So I guess it depends on what yarn you're using, how much you can feel each stitch, how much you do a certain stitch, and so if you can, I probably could do it less. Sometimes I'll try to do it without looking for a couple of stitches and see if I can do it.
• 6:05
  Nathan Wrigley: do it. That's a crazy wobbly line. I love finding out what people do as hobbies, but anyway, we'll wrestle it back to the question in hand, which is accessibility. Can I ask a serious point? You said, I don't know, like eight years ago or five years ago or something like that, you found yourself being interested in accessibility. Why that?
• 6:27
  Nathan Wrigley: Have you ever examined, have you ever looked back and think, of all the things that you could have done, like you could have delved into, I don't know, specialising in graphic design, design or, you know, code development, plugin development. What was it about accessibility that sort of captured you and made you interested in it?
• 6:42
  Danielle Zarcaro: It's a really good question, too, because I did have the opportunity. I was never really good. I'm good at adjusting designs and even writing like I've written stuff and I'm good at editing and like starting from a prompt or so I knew that like creating from nothing was not really for me. And so I did go. I went to school for English education, dropped the education part, just did English, then found a community college that had the like web development side.
• 7:16
  Danielle Zarcaro: So I did start off going directly into the development, but I kind of had my hands in a little bit of everything and would do a lot of editing of sites. And so I think I was like building some kind of I don't know if it was an accordion or like something a little bit more advanced and I came across something related to like an ARIA label or an ARIA something. And I was like, what is like, what is this? I hadn't heard of it before. And then I got kind of mad that I hadn't been told it before.
• 7:45
  Danielle Zarcaro: And I was like, why is like, why is this not? It's a thing that makes it work for a whole portion of the internet. Like, why is this not a thing that I knew about? And then so I just sort of dove deeper into that. And then it became part of just what I was like, well, of course, I'm gonna do it now that I know it. And then it just sort of grew from there. So I think that was kind of the first moment. I kind of tend to do stuff because it irritates me and I want to change. Like, I don't want it things to like, this shouldn't be a thing. I need to change that.
• 8:15
  Danielle Zarcaro: Right. So yeah, I kind of included that in my sort of, you know, stuff going forward.
• 8:20
  Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. So this question may not land at all in that I might say it and you think, well, I don't think that anyway. But I was wondering, when was the moment where you realized that the knowledge that you had acquired was, how to word this, in excess of what most people have already acquired? And really what I mean by that is that there's obviously people out there who are, you know, this is just what they do. There's a handful of people in the WordPress space who do it and who's dedicated a lot of time to it. And so, you know, it's pretty clear that they've got all the chops and credentials to do that.
• 8:52
  Nathan Wrigley: I wonder when the moment was when you looked at your own backstory and thought, oh, okay, I've come a long way, maybe I've got something to share at this point, as opposed to, you know, instead of taking knowledge in, I'm now in a position where I can reverse that and give knowledge out. That may be recent, it may be years ago, maybe you don't identify with that at all.
• 9:14
  Danielle Zarcaro: Yeah, I think it's something that, as you're seeing, like, oh, wait a minute, nobody's doing this. And like, and then you just sort of see less and less stuff doing things the right way. And you're like, I don't think, I think most people who are good at what they do, or have a lot of knowledge, like, the more you know, the more you don't, you know, the more it's like, the more you know, the more you realize you don't know.
• 9:42
  Danielle Zarcaro: Okay, yeah, so like, there's the always going to be that, like, oh, well, these people know more than me, I'm not an expert in this, or like, you know, that it's like a version of like that imposter syndrome that sort of, I think you're always, you have to become comfortable with having and for someone like me. And so I think it did take a little bit to convince myself that I was knowledgeable enough, even though I wasn't as knowledgeable as the people have been doing it for even longer than me. But I think it's just something where you see enough people doing it wrong and you're like, wow, let me see if I can tell them to do it right. Like sort of taking that instead of trying to, yeah, I don't know, like, be like, you should know how to do this, that you're doing it wrong. Kind of being like, oh, oh, this is actually, you know, I don't know if you knew this.
• 10:37
  Danielle Zarcaro: But this is wrong and you should do it different. Like, you know, there's always that aspect to accessibility that's like, you should do it different now. And there's that struggle between like telling someone what to do and like being nice about it so that they don't get defensive about it. I think there's a lot of juggling that goes on in the accessibility space. And especially when you come across the same issues all the time, it does sort of wear on the people that are. So anytime you come across an accessibility person that seems like they're being crabby about something, it's probably not you. And try to just take it for what it is.
• 11:17
  Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Well, that's the thing about being knowledgeable, isn't it? Once you've gained like a weight of knowledge, so there's a couple of things here. The first one is once you prise open an aspect, for example, accessibility, and you begin to explore it, I imagine you quickly realize how much there is and you could probably spend a whole lifetime just, you know, just on that thing. And there are several people who do that. But also, once you get knowledgeable at a particular thing, irritation is the wrong word, but it's a little bit about what you were saying there. You know, you look around and you see people making the blonders that you used to make. And why wouldn't you?
• 11:54
  Nathan Wrigley: Put your oar in and say, well, hang on a minute, because there is a better way of doing that, but not only that. It's not just a superior way because it's superior. It's superior because there's a whole phalanx of people who, if you just do this one thing, can actually read that now or can actually open that or can actually click that, whereas before they couldn't. There was a black hole of a website completely unavailable to a class of people, and now it's available. And, you know, I think banging the gong on accessibility and being, how to describe this, being a bit forthright about it. Let's go with that. I think that's a good thing. So, yeah, that's great.
• 12:36
  Danielle Zarcaro: Yeah, it's hard because you're having to juggle different audiences, too, because you have, like, the people who build their own websites. And so your beef is with them to a certain extent, but the beef is with the things that are allowing them to build the sites. And, um... Like not making things that are available to them that are accessible. So like, you know, Squarespace does this in this way and you can't fix it unless you do this. And then, you know, Elementor does this in this way and you can't fix it unless you do this. So it's like that. But then there's also that sort of enterprise level frustration where people aren't empowered to make those changes.
• 13:12
  Danielle Zarcaro: Like I get, you know, advertised to the Woobles sort of like crochet kits and then I went on to see one of them and like the contrast was all off and like there's all these things, but you're not sort of empowering. Like you just have some person who's inputting something that some manager told them to put on a page. Right. And so you're not like empowering these people to like make decisions because if they need to change this color, they're going to have to go talk to the manager who's then going to have to go get the color approved who's going to like people just sort of do what they need to do to get through their day.
• 13:42
  Danielle Zarcaro: And so it's sort of like this really complicated web of like it's not just that the site has a bug. It's these like sort of systems that. Are making it a lot harder to change that.
• 13:51
  Nathan Wrigley: So I've been alive now for 50 cough years and during that time I remember walking around in the real world and I remember that there was almost nothing given over to accessibility in the real world, you know, like doorsteps and stairs, shops could open quite happily and they didn't have to provide a ramp or, you know, some kind of button which would enable the door to open and so on and so on.
• 14:19
  Nathan Wrigley: However, since I'm going to say kind of like the 1970s, maybe the 1980s, that began to change and legislation came in and not only was it kind of like morally a good thing to do, but it became a legal thing that you had to do. I find it so curious that the internet, which came along after that whole wave of figuring out that we need to make the world accessible, the internet came along and...
• 14:48
  Nathan Wrigley: That didn't happen. Why was it not mandatory from the beginning of the internet? The answer is I'll never know. I don't know why that was.
• 14:58
  Danielle Zarcaro: Yeah, well, I mean, I could speculate. I think it probably has something to do with the people who built it didn't have that particular need. Okay. And because of the way the internet was originally conceived as a sort of like text-based thing that you're contacting this place with. And then like the browser came along. And so you have like people aren't thinking about where we currently are, which is it's a bunch of people using this to communicate and get along and like do all these things.
• 15:26
  Danielle Zarcaro: And it was just sort of a way to like share your, you know, thoughts about this thing. And then so it just wasn't this thing. People who were maybe visually impaired in some way, they didn't have access to it in the first place. They were too busy trying to like get, you know, real world accommodations. And then so you just have this like sort of hobbyist in their garage making the internet. And then... It's sort of probably like I'd have to look up when things like ARIA and screen readers and other technology came along and then like then the people then it sort of became this runaway train where you know it got overlooked as a feature that should be included in things it's just sort of the nature of things it's the same with the laws right like it's not it's it's hard because you have like even like so if I'm you know renting it my you know I'm living in an apartment I'm
• 16:17
  Danielle Zarcaro: renting my apartment and I need my mother-in-law to get up the stairs well I can't do anything about that it's the same with like somebody who runs a shop who like is renting the space there it's already built it's already they can't it's up to the people who are building the things and they're trying to increase you know their revenue and cut corners and do all these things and so you know I think intentional legislation is is a way to get the people who People aren't us to care in a way that makes them accountable. And so hopefully the laws that are happening bring that accountability in the right way.
• 16:52
  Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I guess the nice thing about the internet, at least you can retrofit it easily. You know, you can't retrofit your apartment block. Well, not easily or inexpensively. I mean, really giant amounts of money to make that kind of thing happen. But the internet, you can do it. And I suppose one of the messages when you wrote to me and we got into, you know, exchanging show notes and things like that, one of the things that you were keen to discuss was that we can retrofit one bit at a time.
• 17:21
  Nathan Wrigley: It's not like we have to open up the jigsaw puzzle box and the jigsaw puzzle is done for us. It's more like, OK, there's all the pieces. Now it's time to sort of put the pieces together and slowly but surely we'll arrive where we arrive, which is the completed jigsaw puzzle, which is, you know, supposed to sound like that.
• 17:41
  Danielle Zarcaro: I mean, I like that because, first of all, all puzzles are different, right? Like there's this person who's started putting out all edge piece puzzles or whatever. And so, like, the difficulty level is a lot harder to start.
• 17:53
  Danielle Zarcaro: Yeah, I like their marketing and stuff too. I think it's like Yetch or something. They're a lot of fun. And if I had all the money, I would be buying every one of their products. So they put out an edge piece puzzle. So it's a website that's got a lot of complexity, it's a lot harder to put together, but there are still things you can do. And then, you know, when somebody sits down to put together a puzzle, everybody's got a different strategy. Maybe they put colors together or shapes together, or they start with the corners or, like, there's just so many ways to go about putting that puzzle together.
• 18:28
  Danielle Zarcaro: But the important part is the starting and you just have to be like, yeah, you know what, I think I'm going to put this puzzle together. And if you don't have a strategy to do it, then you probably shouldn't put together the puzzle and you shouldn't have a website if you're not going to, like, put the effort in. You put all this effort into creating content and making images and doing all this stuff and, like, don't you want people to see it? Yeah, right. Like, if you're not... Are you going to care about the people coming to your site? Why have it in the first place?
• 18:55
  Danielle Zarcaro: So the idea, I think, for a lot of people is that accessibility is a scary retrofit process.
• 19:04
  Nathan Wrigley: Maybe they've got a backlog of 50, 20, whatever, 100 websites that they've built over time.
• 19:13
  Nathan Wrigley: The landscape has moved a little bit now where we've got a legal framework. We certainly do in this part of the world, and I'm sure the case is, you know, all over the globe. There's bits and pieces of legislation dropping in different locales. And I think a misunderstanding is that you've got to have the full jigsaw piece. You know, in other words, you've got to spend hours and hours and hours making it perfect. But that is not my understanding, at least at this point. So we're recording this in July 2026.
• 19:41
  Nathan Wrigley: And really, it feels like you can be much more thoughtful about this and sanguine about the legal hammer coming down. And you can... You tell me what it's like where you are, but it feels to me as if, really, the Rubicon here is that you've got to be doing something. You've got to, you know, demonstrate that your journey a year ago, where you were a year ago, is different from where it is now, but it doesn't have to be carte blanche. It doesn't have to be the entire thing. It can just be one little bit. Like, I don't know, you maybe pick a thing, like your contrast might be the thing, or underlining the links might be a thing, or whatever it may be.
• 20:19
  Nathan Wrigley: Is that the case where you are?
• 20:22
  Danielle Zarcaro: Yeah, there were legislation that was supposed to go into effect for, like, government websites and things that got government funding, and I think there are certain laws that apply to that, but certain deadlines got pushed back a year or two years, depending on who you are, and so it's like a very fuzzy area right now. I think certain states are trying to take steps to make the I think accessibility lawsuits be legitimate. So instead of just crawling sites and sending out things and then going into court and wasting everyone's time, it has to be like somebody who's actually going to use the site, and they actually have to have a problem and the person has to not have responded. And so I think maybe California is trying to do that and there's like, so there are certain states, we're sort of this weird countries within a country kind of thing.
• 21:11
  Danielle Zarcaro: So like you have these areas that are trying to do certain things, and then overall, you know, however the country is going to do whatever they're going to do. But the more it's kind of like privacy, right? So like, if you're going to have anybody who's going to your website in California at all, then you kind of have to pay attention to like what their privacy laws are and what their, you know, data takedown things are or whatever.
• 21:33
  Danielle Zarcaro: And so like it by having at least a couple of states care about that, it can then maybe You know, encourages people in all of the states to have to adhere to those requirements.
• 21:44
  Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I remember having conversations several years ago before any of the legislation was on the books, but it appeared to be coming. And there was a great fear that the ambulance-chasing lawyers were going to come out of the woodwork and just essentially do a Getty Images kind of approach. Just scrape the internet, find every single thing that could possibly be wrong anywhere, and then just with a really blunt instrument issue legal letters, which then people, you know, that's just a whole mess.
• 22:16
  Nathan Wrigley: That, I don't know if that happened, but certainly I don't have any experience of that happening. Like you say, perhaps government websites where, you know, you're filing your taxes and this is the only way to now do it is online. Well, sorry, you don't have a choice about that because you can't exclude. Yeah, it's the disability tax too, that like, yeah, you can do it, but you got to go hire somebody to pay.
• 22:41
  Danielle Zarcaro: In order to pay extra to then do it. Or there's just no alternative. I think for a lot of regular people, that doesn't matter as much because they're not providing that essential type service. And so it's more just the wherewithal to know, hey, this can't be read. I mean, people still do that in print. They're printing dark yellow on a bright yellow. And you're like, nobody can read that. Nobody can understand and visit your event because they can't see what the date is.
• 23:11
  Danielle Zarcaro: Like, so it's just sort of just basic, you know, usability things. Nobody can read your font like it's pretty and but use that for like background or whatever. Nobody. So it's just sort of the basic principles of good design. You know, you're never going to get everybody to do it right. But that could be what sets you apart in, you know, somebody making the difference between somebody being like, oh, hey, and it's like I said, it's just bugs that are on your site that you decide to care enough to fix.
• 23:38
  Danielle Zarcaro: Like if somebody is going to sit there and try to contact you and your form doesn't work. Well, what's the point? Your whole reason for this website is to have somebody contact you. I find forms and motion to be the most irritating aspects of things and they're the most complex for regular people. Forms are so hard to get right visually and to make sure that things are indicating when errors are there and what am I supposed to do with this field or it timed out and didn't tell you.
• 24:14
  Danielle Zarcaro: Now you have to refill it all out and you're like, screw this, I'm not going to fill out your stupid form. It's the most irritating aspect of websites anyway. Imagine you're trying to use this and hit enter and nothing happens. It's because there's an error but it didn't tell you that there's an error because you're not seeing the site, you're hearing the site. I think it's just these basic things that you care about people and wanting them to have a good experience when they come to your site. Why wouldn't you want that?
• 24:41
  Danielle Zarcaro: So let's use an example of something that you've done. So this may be a client website or maybe a website of your own or what have you. What's been your approach to it? Maybe low-hanging fruit, maybe that's a good phrase that we could use. What are some of the, I'm doing air quotes, the simple things that you could do that you would recommend somebody to take a chunk out of their website, to at least sort of feel like I did the first step.
• 25:10
  Nathan Wrigley: I've got myself, the journey has begun. I can do this. I can achieve this. What would you be recommending that people take a look at? Let's just say that they haven't looked at their site at all, from an accessibility point of view. What have you done?
• 25:24
  Danielle Zarcaro: Yeah, I think if it's somebody that's on their own without any sort of previous knowledge, I find I went about putting together a course because I found it very hard to get a hand. I was sitting there kind of looking through things and it, even for me to know, like... Is this something I already know? Is this a new thing? It's all very sort of scattershot where everybody's sort of telling you a lot of random easy things you can do and you don't know what to start with. And so it's a little overwhelming. There's like so much information out there, but it's still very overwhelming and people can ask their AI to do certain things. But, you know, AI has been trained on the websites that exist and not many of them are accessible.
• 26:04
  Danielle Zarcaro: And so like I've had it like give me something that I think I was trying to make, I don't even remember, something. And it was like adding an ARIA to it. And I'm like, yeah, normally that would be the case. But you're having me add this like a hundred times and it's gonna like read it out weird. And in this instance, ARIA shouldn't be used. And so sometimes it should. And so, you know, AI can maybe help you figure out the basics. But when I find doing is easier because it integrates it. It integrates the idea. So, yeah, reading and learning is good. But I think, yeah, just taking a look at your site, start with a new thing that you're adding. You know, you don't have to like go back and.
• 26:46
  Nathan Wrigley: Oh, that's a good idea. If you're adding a blog post, you're like, okay, what about what I'm doing? Can I do better? And so you're like, oh, well, heading levels, okay, so I'm adding, you know, don't add two H1s, add one H1. Okay, cool. And then you're like, well, so what heading should come next? And so you're sort of learning about this thing that you're doing anyway. Oh, I'm adding an image. Okay, well, alt text is fine. I've never really thought about what that means, necessarily.
• 27:14
  Nathan Wrigley: I just kind of describe an image. And so you maybe do a little bit of research on that. And there's a lot of great people who do a lot of great work on these sort of really granular aspects. So it's like, okay, is it decorative or is it not? What's the context of this? How can I describe this? It's a chart. Should I do this? So it's like you're sort of learning these little individual things as you do them. And then if you get a little bit of experience with how that process works, you can then apply that to the other aspects of the site.
• 27:43
  Nathan Wrigley: So. You're not maybe making the most impact with like a single blog post, but it does help you get used to that behavior of like adding that to your thought process and then you can sort of go back to like your most used pages like what's the number one page people go to is it the homepage is it this particular service page it's like what's your main page and then you go visit that page and see how you can improve it and so it's you kind of need that base level of knowledge in order to be able to look at something and know how to fix it.
• 28:14
  Danielle Zarcaro: If I'm auditing a site, that's a different process because I know what I'm doing and I can point somebody to it's usually like I'll do it and then categorize it into like high priority high impact you know areas that's going to be the most important anything that you can do globally headers footers you know. So anything that is on multiple pages, if you have like a sort of like a little widget area that's like a pre-footer that's on all the pages, do that. Like, and then you sort of drill down into like, it's like there's a third vector there. It's like high priority, high impact, easy, right?
• 28:52
  Danielle Zarcaro: So you want to get all those out of the way first. And then if you can, do the hard stuff. Like sometimes you need someone else to come in and do the hard stuff. So maybe you take care of all the easy stuff that you know you can take care of.
• 29:02
  Nathan Wrigley: There's a lot of ways to approach it and it just sort of fit it into whatever your process is. Yeah.
• 29:08
  Danielle Zarcaro: But yeah, when I'm doing an audit and it's like priority for that particular site, right? You're not, I'm not talking about like, in all of accessibility, this is the highest priority. It's more like your site and based on all of the items that I have here, start with this one or start with these or, yeah.
• 29:25
  Nathan Wrigley: I like the idea of doing the thing, just carry on doing the thing that you're doing, only do that thing better. And then make that part of the muscle memory, and then maybe tackle another thing better. And then once you've got, I don't know, five or six different approaches, you know, new, improved approaches, then maybe start scanning around for the things to do. And obviously, as you said, if you're an accessibility expert and you're doing coaching, all of that kind of thing, well, that's different.
• 29:54
  Danielle Zarcaro: Your job is to go and find literally everything, I imagine, within reason, and then categorize those for them so that they can take chunks out of it. Yeah, it depends too. So what I was talking about is helpful for anybody, but mostly for people who just sort of have their own site. If you're like an agency, a lot of it is, if you can audit your templates, that's usually where I start with people.
• 30:20
  Nathan Wrigley: So like...
• 30:23
  Danielle Zarcaro: So there's people out there who have created ways to talk to your clients that you've already launched their sites, right? So that's a topic that you have to feel confident enough to be like, hey, I've learned about this new thing and how important it is, and so I would like us to bring your previously launched sites up to the new standards. And however you want to approach that with your past clients. But the easiest way is obviously sites you haven't launched yet. You could just sort of do it going forward.
• 30:49
  Danielle Zarcaro: And so start with that template that you use with every single site, all those components that you have, all those different things. You can't account for everything. You might need to change your heading level, but making sure that the tab order is right, or making sure that your starter has enough contrast, or just sort of having those standards built into the template.
• 31:11
  Danielle Zarcaro: And then you can take it from then you already have that foundation built. So that's usually where I try to get people to start. Or a lot of times I'll audit somebody's recently launched site to start so that we can get a good baseline.
• 31:23
  Danielle Zarcaro: And then like, yeah, anytime we can get to those templates, that's or, again, you know, a lot of accessibility people will say it's start as early as possible to if you can bring me in for a 30 minute call that we talk about your design, and I can give you, oh, hey, this is going to be an accordion, there's a, you know, a block editor now widget or block that it's an accordion built in, it's got the accessibility in there. Oh, this is going to be, you're going to want to bump up the contrast on this, you know, background overlay color. Oh, you know, make sure that this font size is this because of this, like, it's just I can call out things in a design that you can hand off to your developers.
• 32:06
  Danielle Zarcaro: And then they, you know,
• 32:08
  Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Can take it from there, hopefully. So, with all of this, it feels like you've obviously implemented this in the past in your business. Are there any bits where you think, well, let's talk about it in the WordPress context. So, let's just go for this. It's a pretty blunt question. WordPress is no one thing. So, you could build with the block editor, you could build with page builder over here, or another page builder, or, you know, whatever. There's a million ways.
• 32:37
  Nathan Wrigley: Do you find, on the whole, though, that WordPress, as a tool, is assistive with this? Or do you find that, you know, it's a bit of a nightmare? You've got to go through, like, okay, where's that? Where do we discover, even, where the ARIA label is going to be kept? I know you won't be able to answer that, because every interface is going to be slightly different. Maybe if we just take it as core WordPress. So, you're using the block editor, just a vanilla version of WordPress. How does it actually do, in your estimation?
• 33:04
  Nathan Wrigley: Is it a benefit, net benefit, or is there a lot of unpicking and additional learning that you've got to do?
• 33:14
  Nathan Wrigley: The great thing about WordPress is it lets you access everything you need. So, at the base level, it is the easiest platform that I've found to make accessible.
• 33:25
  Danielle Zarcaro: Even ones that give you access to the code, like Webflow, they still have certain things that are just a lot harder to do because you just don't have all the files. You don't have all the access. Things aren't global where they should be. You only have this little box for code. WordPress, I think, anytime I'm remediating a site, it's just a lot easier if it's in WordPress because I don't have to care. It's going to be easier if it's using core WordPress because it goes through this specific check of accessibility before things are launched.
• 33:59
  Danielle Zarcaro: There's an accessibility team. Whereas, you know, builders, they may be relying on their developers who are doing all of the features to then also...
• 34:09
  Danielle Zarcaro: There's no sort of maybe official policy on accessibility or they just say we care about it and there's no like formal sort of process to check and make sure that that's happening. And so, you know, you have these maybe overworked developers that are also trying to like do this thing that they're not knowledgeable on and, you know, don't have any formal training because they're too busy keeping up with all the bugs. And so it's I think core WordPress, because of the way that it's structured, is going to give you a better baseline. And there's less technical debt from the perspective of, you know, having to maybe rebuild from scratch.
• 34:44
  Danielle Zarcaro: You're getting a lot of these because of like the wherever the maturity point is right now, you having these these builders that have been around for a long time. And so there's quite a few of them that are doing these like sort of full rebuilds, like you have Divi, what is it, five, and you have Elementor's rebuilding in their version, and then you have like oxygen relaunching. And so you have a lot of these things that are redoing it. And...
• 35:08
  Danielle Zarcaro: Maybe caring about accessibility, some more than others, and so you have to kind of, but there are people, like, there's somebody that, like, just sort of has a bunch of fixes for Divi. And so, like, there are people that, because there's so many different types of communities and stuff, you do have people that are trying to make these individual pockets more accessible as well. And so I just think, from the community as a whole, it's a lot easier. I mean, you know, you have the sort of the beacon of, you know, Equalize Digital, who has this plugin that does a lot of great things in terms of, like, exposing people to accessibility in the way that it should be approached, rather than sort of, you know, overlaying it or doing whatever, you know, there's no special interest in that. They just sort of want sites to be more accessible.
• 35:59
  Danielle Zarcaro: And so it's, like, introducing people to the concept and trying to guide them through fixing and testing things. And, you know, I, you know, it's just how it should be sort of approached. And then, you know, then you have to kind of do a hands-on thing afterwards. Not like... There are certain things that you just can't find without doing it manually. Because they have a free version, it's a really great way for people to get introduced to that concept that I'm talking about, where you're like, I'm going to fix some of these things that I know what a heading is, and so I can go dive into that one. It helps incrementally introduce this concept to people.
• 36:33
  Nathan Wrigley: Well, it's nice to know that WordPress does a fairly decent job. And like you say, there's a whole team of people, interviewed many of them, Joe and Amber and Rian and Mika and various other people who have been involved in all of that side of things. And it may be an uphill battle for them to get the accessibility things in, but they are there, they are blowing the trumpet and sounding the alarm when things don't go well. And okay, so that's really interesting.
• 37:02
  Nathan Wrigley: Now, I know that you've taken this a little bit further than just being sort of like an interested party and doing this for yourself and your clients. You were mentioning before the call was recorded that you've got a course out there and you would obviously therefore like to share your expertise. Do you want to just tell us a little bit about that? So, I don't know, you might get into what the course covers. Maybe it's like halfway through being completed or prepared. Maybe some URLs so that we can put those into the show notes and anything else that you think is relevant. So, just go for it. Blow your own trumpet.
• 37:40
  Danielle Zarcaro: Yeah, like I said, I learned by doing and everything felt a little like sort of fuzzy in terms of a pathway and just sort of doing stuff as you learn them. And so, I wanted to create this sort of easy way for somebody to start to make a site more accessible.
• 37:58
  Danielle Zarcaro: And so, whether that's your own or you're trying it with a client site, a lot of times, you know, if you're an agency, your own site is a good place to start because you can sort of play around with things and you know, not have to worry about it impacting the client. And so, I put together an email-based course. Basically, it sends you a task every Monday that you can do 15 minutes, whatever it is. And then this way, it's on Monday, so you can do it on whatever day you need it to. But it's like 52 weeks of a task that you can do that will, at the end of it, get you a much more accessible site.
• 38:30
  Danielle Zarcaro: And I don't go into anything too advanced. I try to keep it for, like I said, baseline, let everybody be able to do this so you're not necessarily going over an accordion or a slider, but you are going over maybe a lot of the components that make up these things, that hopefully you can either see maybe whether something is accessible, even if you don't necessarily know how to fix it, and be able to sort of evaluate these things before you put them on your site.
• 38:57
  Danielle Zarcaro: A little bit of, like, the decision-making around some of that, like... If you're going to do this, is it this or this? Just sort of helping guide the process of doing this, but doing it yourself. I have this course that I've been trying to do. I love the guy who made it. I love the platform that he made it on. I just can't get myself to sit down and do it. And it's because you sort of have to set aside this time to do it, whereas if I can just be like, here, do this right now for 15 minutes, and then if you want to learn more, most of them have some kind of links at the bottom you can learn about, or you can look it up yourself, or you can email me, you know, you can respond to any of the emails and be like, I don't understand what this means. What are you talking about?
• 39:42
  Danielle Zarcaro: But yeah, so I just tried to put it within a framework that would have worked for me, and that I think is a more hands-on approach to doing that. And so yeah, and I try to like, start at a place that, like we talked about, that has a little bit of a higher impact. So like, your, you know, header site logo. And, you know, but then, like, not just doing the header and we're diving right into, like, mega menus and stuff. So I was trying to, like, I tried to, like, organize it in a thoughtful way and make sure that, like, you're taking on some of those impactful things, but not being too advanced yet and sort of taking you through towards the end where you're sort of talking about, like, a little bit of strategy for implementing it in your marketing, maybe, or, you know, sort of widening the scope of this a little bit.
• 40:27
  Danielle Zarcaro: And so, yeah, it's kineticiris.com slash weekly-accessibility. And it's, yeah, you just sort of sign up. I did add the option to get them all at once, because I had a couple of people ask.
• 40:39
  Nathan Wrigley: Well, I was just about to say.
• 40:41
  Danielle Zarcaro: And so I was like, yeah, so if you're the kind of person that you're like, I just got to, like, motor through, like, I'm not here to tell you how to learn. You can learn whatever way you learn best. If you're unsure in any way whatsoever, I would encourage the weekly. And then if at some point, halfway through the year, you're like, yeah, forget this, just send me them, you can just, like, ask me, and I'll just send you the rest of them. But I think... Yeah, like, you know, it's your thing. If you want me to, like, send them to you and then, but then you also get the weekly so that you have them. I mean, however you basically want them is how I can provide them to you. They're all sort of, like I said, it's an email-based course, so you can have them all at once. But you get it as a zip. I don't send you 360. I don't send you 52 emails at once. You get them to download.
• 41:24
  Danielle Zarcaro: But yeah, I would encourage that sort of weekly, you know, thing, just to get in the habit of spending a little bit of time each week. Just like anything else, you know, you're trying to market more, you're trying to do things. Any kind of small incremental changes you can make to your own, you know, processes is going to help you. So that's kind of the approach that I took.
• 41:45
  Nathan Wrigley: So I've been on the internet now for, like, forever, basically, you know. I've never heard that idea. Like, I've never heard of that. Like, a year-long weekly sign-up once, just get a weekly task to do. Why? Like, what the heck? That's such a great idea. Is there some way to like, patent that and then make everybody pay me every time?
• 42:11
  Nathan Wrigley: No, I think the only thing that came closest to it was somebody had done some sort of landing page thing. And I don't think it was a full year, but it was like an email thing where they would send you like a tip each week. And I think that was, I had saved a bunch of those to revisit. And so I think that kind of prompted a little bit of that idea.
• 42:28
  Danielle Zarcaro: And then I talked about it in, you know, I meet with a group every Thursday and we all talk about each other's businesses. And so between that and like brainstorming, I want to do a course, but I don't want to do a course. I had done a course a while ago that I didn't do any, like, I just kind of did it. It was like how to finish your site, like basically if you had a site and it was taking you forever to like get it done. And then it was like a way to like, here's how to finish it.
• 42:54
  Danielle Zarcaro: And it was, it was a good, it was good, but it was just, it was typical, right? You're just sitting there watching 15 to 20 minute videos and you're like, okay. And then, but there's no.
• 43:02
  Nathan Wrigley: Real way to incorporate that into what you're doing. You're just like, yeah, okay, I'll get to that. And it just never happens. With so many things, it doesn't even have to be business-related. Any kind of personal development. It feels the gap between learning that you need to do a thing or you should or you want to do a thing and actually doing the thing. There's such a big gap for so many people, myself included, to just get started. So I don't know. It just sort of clicked and I did it.
• 43:32
  Nathan Wrigley: I think that is, genuinely, I think that's a really genius idea. I know the way it worked for me is that I would get them each week and I would put them in my note-taking app and then I would have like, I don't know, I would maybe tackle like three of them in one go and then the next few would arrive and I'd probably do the same thing. But the fact that they're just sort of just dropping in... And it's kind of like this helpful Monday slot where, you know, you're beginning the week, you maybe got a little bit of extra time that you could map to Thursday or something like that.
• 44:03
  Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. That's such a neat idea. Honestly, that's genius. I love that.
• 44:08
  Danielle Zarcaro: I appreciate you saying that. You wait, there's going to be some copycats coming off the back of this.
• 44:15
  Nathan Wrigley: Give us the URL again, because you said it was, so you said it, but you've got to spell it right, I suppose.
• 44:22
  Danielle Zarcaro: Yes, right. So Kinetic Iris is my agency. So Kinetic is like the energy kinetic. The movement, yeah. Yep. And Iris, like the flower or the goddess, and .com. And then it's weekly-accessibility. Okay. So I'm going to spell it. So it's K-I-N-E-T-I-C-I-R-I-S, so Kinetic Iris, .com forward slash, and what was it, weekly hyphen?
• 44:51
  Danielle Zarcaro: Mm-hmm. Accessibility.
• 44:53
  Nathan Wrigley: Accessibility. Okay, we're definitely putting that into the show notes. So I don't know what episode this will turn out to be on the WP Builds podcast RSS feed, but essentially the best way to do it would be to go to wpbuilds.com, search for Danielle. I don't know that we've had another Danielle on the podcast ever, so that's probably going to get you there. And then you'll be able to find in the show notes towards the bottom, we'll put a link to that in case you, I don't know, you've been listening to this on the train and you've just forgotten all about it. It'll be there.
• 45:26
  Danielle Zarcaro: Yeah. And it's something that I've already updated, like I provide you with a really simplified, like easy to use version of like an audit template that you can keep track of like changes if you don't like it, like you're saying, where if you're like, I'll learn how to do this and I'll just put like put stuff I got to do. And then you can go on later and sort of complete a bunch of them at once. And I had updated that template. So I sent out an email to everyone to kind of be like, hey, I added some columns and made it a little easier. So as I also put out more like maybe blog posts or content and stuff, I'll...
• 46:01
  Danielle Zarcaro: If you want, you can always opt out, but I'll send, hey, I'm adding this link to this topic if you've already passed that, and I can let you know that I've updated it, because the internet's always changing, right? So it's like I just wrote something on putting lists in columns, and so that can apply to this concept that I talked about in whatever email, and so I'm obviously keeping it updated and stuff. And if there's enough interest, I can put an advanced one out if it's something that people really find helpful.
• 46:30
  Danielle Zarcaro: I'd love to talk more about advanced issues and, like, you know, here's what it actually takes to make these tabs. Yeah, you'll have the 100. Here's how to actually test this with your keyboard, and, you know, I don't really go into too many of, like, here's how to test with a screen reader, do any of that. You know, that's just so much more complicated and too much demonstration required to do it in email form.
• 46:49
  Nathan Wrigley: Oh, I'm loving it. I think that's such a great idea.
• 46:52
  Danielle Zarcaro: Yeah, but also, like, from a creator's point of view, I mean, I don't know how you did it, maybe you wrote all 52 of them off the bat, but from a creator's point of view, so long as you're writing one a week... You're always ahead of the curve. I mean, apart from the few that want the whole download. You probably should do maybe make sure you're at least like five weeks ahead of time.
• 47:12
  Danielle Zarcaro: Because that for content creators, when they're making their course, you know how it goes. They offer the course, get a load of people to buy it, and then they've got this pressure to do it. And inevitably, it ends up being longer. You know, more topics need to be covered, or they figure out the editing process is much more of a nightmare and what have you. It makes it more nimble too, because like I said, if something changes, I'm seeing like there's the one guy who's got the Cloudflare course, and they'll like change their screens every two seconds.
• 47:41
  Danielle Zarcaro: And so anything that he's, you know, recorded is going to look outdated. Or, you know, if you're trying to teach something in WordPress and they've changed the admin area. And so it just sort of like it helps keep it more up to date without having to like cut up your videos and re-edit and re-record and do all this stuff. And I saw it as a way to like... Like I said, this way I'm able to put out content on something that's pertinent or, you know, whatever, and I don't have to do it and then, like, somebody has to figure out how that fits into the larger picture. I can, like, do that for you, basically, and you can get that update email and then just sort of, if you're, like you said, if you're keeping track of, like, links you like in a document based on this course, then you can, you know, add that link to this area. It's just, it gives somebody more flexibility to learn how they learn.
• 48:26
  Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. And you get it in an email. So, you don't have to have a membership for anything. You just get an email. Okay. I think we'll knock it on the head there, as we say, in the UK. So, go and check it out. So, Danielle, go and search for that on wpbuilds.com. The search icon's top right, usually. And you'll be able to find that out. That's really interesting. So, first of all, thank you for telling us all about your journey with accessibility and accessibility, he said, unable to say it, but also thank you for that.
• 48:57
  Nathan Wrigley: Holy grail of interest at the end there about how to, I'm going to go and do that now. I'm not, by the way. But I think that's a genius idea. I have thoughts. I'll tell you them in a moment after we've hit. Perfect. Yeah, and it's something that I'd love to, if there's an agency that's interested and wants to like, I think it could really be helpful if you have some people that you're hiring that are really great and then you also want to make sure they have this accessibility baseline. You know, it could just be part of their onboarding, right, like, whether you want to download it all at once and maybe give them a task a day or something so that you don't have to wait a whole year for them to be up to speed.
• 49:34
  Danielle Zarcaro: But if there's some way that you want to organize it to be able to, like, just give everybody that baseline, I just, I want as many people to be doing things excessively because it's second nature to them and not because they feel like it's a task that they have to check out.
• 49:47
  Nathan Wrigley: I can feel the next course coming on. So it's going to be kineticiris.com forward slash daily slash accessibility. 365 emails will be coming your way. Okay, Danielle, thank you so much for chatting to me today.
• 50:00
  Danielle Zarcaro: Thanks for having me. Yeah, you're welcome.
• 50:01
  Nathan Wrigley: Okay, that's all we've got time for today. I hope that you enjoyed that. If you did, head to wpbuilds.com, search for episode 483, 483, leave us a comment there. Just a quick reminder, if you would, and I urge you to, be involved in the new podcast app that I'm launching, it is very, very, very, very, like days away close, head to nathanrigley.com forward slash app, fill out the form there, and we'll let you know when it is finally launched and you'll get some seriously aggressive pricing.
• 50:31
  Nathan Wrigley: So that you can help us build the thing and refine it and shape it a little bit towards the beginning. It's a bit like a Kickstarter, isn't it? Feels like that anyway. So there we go. I hope that you enjoyed that. I'm going to fade in some cheesy music and say stay safe. You have a good week. Bye bye for now.