Tips Tuesday – Accessibility Compliance, WP 6.6.2 Releases

ByMaAnna Stephenson
Tips Tuesday – Accessibility Compliance, WP 6.6.2 Releases

Tips this week include:

  • Digital Products with Google Docs course is almost ready
  • WP 6.6.2 releases today
  • Class action lawsuit against AccessiBe
  • How to test your site for Accessibilities compliance and who to contact for fixes
  • Kadence has best accessibility compliance
  • WordPress Accessibility Day Conference in October
  • Compliance and SEO
  • Why pretty doesn’t help on mobile
  • QR code scam

This post contains affiliate links. Thank you for using them to support the helpful info you get from BlogAid.

BlogAid Happenings

Digital Products with Google Docs Almost Ready

This past week I finished recording all 50+ tutorials in the new course for making digital products with Google Docs. 

I’ve been so impressed with all you can easily create. In fact, they are so fast that it’s super simple to generate multiple varieties from just a few basic templates.

And I give you ALL of those basic templates in the course, plus teach you how to make them from scratch so you know how to quickly edit any part of them too!!

This week I’m building the landing page for it and I’ll have a launch announcement and discount for all BlogAid News subscribers soon.

WordPress Tips

WP 6.6.2 Releases

A minor release of 6.6.2 is expected to roll out today.

It has several bug fixes.

This should be an auto update for you.

If you see that it is available prior to it doing the auto update, you can do it yourself, or just wait a day.

And if you’re curious, WP 6.7 is scheduled to be released on November 10.

Accessibility Tips

Class Action Lawsuit Against AccessiBe

Those of you who have been following me for a while will remember when sites were getting sued for not being ADA, or Accessibilities compliant.

Some large/popular sites paid millions for not being compliant.

And some small site owners ended up paying $12k-$20k in fines before judgements were passed about how many employees a company had to have before they could be fined or sued.

You may also remember that there were some plugins and 3rd-party services that promised to make your site compliant by giving it an “overlay”.

And you’ll remember that I jumped up and down to tell you not to use those things because they didn’t work, and they put code on your site that the folks doing the suing simply searched the web for to see which site owner to sue next.

In other words, they were not only bogus, they put a target on your back.

Well, one of those “overlay” services now has a class action lawsuit filed against it.

According to this article on the Law Office of Lainey Feingold site, a blind person is claiming that the sites AccessiBe is supposed to be making compliant, isn’t making it accessible at all.

There are other such overlay plugins and vendors out there. So we’ll see if this triggers new lawsuits against them.

Thank you Dustin Hyle of Iridium Hosting for letting me know about this lawsuit.

Thank You to Michelle and Marcy

I want to say a huge THANK YOU to both Michell Phillips of Codefetti and Marcy Diaz of Amethyst Website Design for jumping in with me to do the ADA compliance research when all of these compliance lawsuits filed on sites first hit.

We were all in agreement that these “overlay” things, and most of the plugins, were a bad idea.

And these are the folks I call on for help to ensure my sites are compliant.

And I want to thank Michelle for going the extra mile, as she did a super deep dive into compliance, even to the point of certification courses and testing. 

Test Your Site for Accessibility Compliance

Michelle has some great posts on Codefetti to help you test your site for compliance.

Kadence Has Best Accessibility Compliance

The nice folks over at Equalized Digital tested most of the major theme frameworks and page builders and Kadence took the top spot for compliance.

None are perfect, but Kadence is far better than most.

And take note that Genesis is not on this list. It is compliant too. But not all child themes are.

I hope you will also keep in mind that all of my new sites have been built on Kadence and I paid money to switch all of my Genesis sites over to Kadence this year too.

Genesis is still being supported, but it is falling behind with advanced feature creation and fewer designers are recommending it.

Perhaps it is time for you to consider making the switch too, hint, hint.

WordPress Accessibility Day Conference

WordPress takes Accessibility very seriously now.

That certainly wasn’t the case when Gutenberg first released. In fact, the head of the Accessibility team at WP resigned over the sheer frustration of WP’s desire to release Gutenberg that was non-compliant. And then when the team tested and made fix suggestions, the very next WP release either wiped them out or caused new issues.

The team leader’s resignation finally got their attention as to how serious this issue is, and the millions in lawsuits that could be filed against top sites for lack of compliance.

And now there is a full conference to discuss what WP is doing and what else it needs to do.

This year, the Accessibility Day Conference will be held on Oct 9-10 and you can register for access to the live stream.

Compliance and SEO

Folks, don’t think for a minute that being a one-person website owner making you immune from lawsuits also makes you immune from caring about Accessibility compliance.

Google considers it good UX (User Experience), and it is an SEO ranking factor.

Beyond making it so screen readers can accurately read the text and describe the images on your site to visually impaired folks, you need to ensure that you are using fonts that every sighted person can easily read, and buttons and links that folks can easily click on their phones, where spacing is tight.

Those fancy, thin script fonts may look pretty, but nobody can read them.

And crowding your navigation with too many buttons/links causes folks to go to the wrong page.

These factors are not only UX, they are also UI (User Interface). And Google looks at that too.

There’s a LOT to be said for having a simple, or even plain looking site where the content and the images are the stars of the show.

Pretty Doesn’t Help on Mobile

I’ve seen plenty of gosh-awful-ugly sites make 5-figures a month.

People don’t care about the wrapper as much as they do the content.

And a WHOLE lot of the pretty on a site completely disappears on mobile.

In fact, if you go hunting for a new theme or revamp, ONLY look at it on mobile, not desktop. And you’ll see very little difference in anything other than how much the layout makes you have to scroll to get to what you came for.

That’s the REAL User Experience you are giving your visitors with your theme choice.

Security Tips

QR Code Scam

There’s a new scam going around.

You may get a package delivered that has no return address.

But it does have a QR code.

The moment that you scan it, everything is downloaded from your phone – and I do mean everything.

I don’t keep any banking or other monetary-related apps on my phone. I don’t log into my site with it either.

I got a QR code that leads folks to an About page for me to use at in-person events instead of giving out a physical business card. I’m guessing folks will still be okay using those at such networking events.

Just don’t scan one if you don’t know the person offering it, and especially on a no-name package.

blank

MaAnna is a geek who can still speak in plain English. She helps DIY site owners plus webmasters and designers create sites that are secure, perform well, and get noticed by search engines and readers.