#133 – Blake Bertuccelli-Booth on Automated Accessibility Testing in WordPress

Transcript

[00:00:00] Nathan Wrigley: Welcome to the Jukebox podcast from WP Tavern. My name is Nathan Wrigley.

Jukebox is a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress. The people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case, how automation can be used to monitor accessibility related tasks for your WordPress website.

If you’d like to subscribe to the podcast, you can do that by searching for WP Tavern in your podcast player of choice, or by going to wptavern.com/feed/podcast. And you can copy that URL into most podcast players.

If you have a topic that you’d like us to feature on the podcast, I’m keen to hear from you and hopefully get you, or your idea, featured on the show. Head to WP wptavern.com/contact/jukebox, and use the form there.

So on the podcast today, we have Blake Bertuccelli-Booth. Blake has been in the world of web design for over a decade, a journey that eventually led him to become an advocate for web accessibility. He’s the founder of Equalify, a company dedicated to enhancing accessibility across open source platforms, particularly within the WordPress community.

His passion for this cause was kindled through his experiences working with higher education organizations, where he saw firsthand the challenges faced by users reliant on assistive technology.

In this episode, we get into a tool Blake’s been working on. It’s specifically designed to crawl websites and identify accessibility issues. This tool has been used to survey over 120,000 pages across wordpress.org properties, and has revealed over 2.1 million accessibility issues, shedding light on the pervasive nature of accessibility.

We talk about the challenges of defining accessibility and why existing guidelines often fall short. Blake emphasizes the moral imperative of web accessibility highlighting the real world impact of individual’s lives and stressing the importance of education for developers and designers. He argues that accessible design isn’t just about adhering to regulations, but about alleviating, suffering and enhancing the online experience for everyone.

Our conversation also touches on the increasing prominence of web accessibility and the potential ramifications of upcoming legislation like the European Accessibility Act. Blake discusses his personal struggles with dyslexia, underscoring how properly formatted content can be a source of profound relief and empowerment.

We also highlight the collaborative spirit of the WordPress community in tackling accessibility concerns, and Blake extends an open invitation for all to join in with his efforts. He provides insights into practical steps, such as reviewing automated violations and developing tickets to contribute to this collective mission.

If you’re passionate about web accessibility or eager to learn how your work can make a tangible difference in people’s lives, this episode is for you.

If you’re interested in finding out more, you can find all of the links in the show notes by heading to wptavern.com/podcast, where you’ll find all the other episodes as well.

And so without further delay, I bring you Blake Bertuccelli-Booth.

I am joined on the podcast by Blake Bertuccelli-Booth. Hello Blake.

[00:03:58] Blake Bertuccelli-Booth: Hello. How you doing?

[00:04:00] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, really nice to chat to you today. We’re going to talk about the subject of accessibility, and Blake has got some really interesting data that he’s going to share with us. So it won’t be the normal conversation about accessibility, but I’m imagining that we’ll stray into those, in air quotes, normal bits and pieces as well.

But before we begin Blake, if you are going to be talking about accessibility, I guess we need to know that you know what you are talking about, that you have authority. So I’m going to give you an opportunity to give us your bio, and maybe in that bio, just paint a picture of what it is that interests you about accessibility, and what your posture is about it, and what you’ve done in the past related to it.

[00:04:36] Blake Bertuccelli-Booth: Well, I started web designing over a decade ago. It was how I was paying my way through college. Every piece along the way of me designing websites, was me trying to figure out how to communicate a client’s vision to the user they wanted. And this was all WordPress hacking and developing themes, or plugins that helped communicate a client’s vision.

And along the way, I was also working with a lot of higher ed organisations, and before I heard accessibility from anyone else, I heard it from folks who worked at higher ed organisations. And they kept telling me, you should really care about this. And it was the thing that, admittedly, I thought about, I looked into a little bit, but I didn’t really bring to the forefront of my mind. And that started to switch as I started to meet users who relied on screen reading technology.

One particular project that I was working on for a higher ed organisation, brought in users to come and use the websites that we were creating. And these users use what’s called a screen reader. So if you don’t have access to a monitor, you can’t see a monitor because you’re blind, or you have low vision, you use a screen reader, which basically reads what’s there.

And when this first user used my website on their screen reader, it was god awful. They couldn’t find anything, they couldn’t find any headers or anything like that. And watching this user use the website, it immediately clicked that I have to really understand this. And this was about, I don’t know, six or seven years ago.

And then from there, I started baking accessibility into a lot of the work that we did. And it just became a piece, while I was doing client work, that I was thinking about constantly, and usually letting the clients tell me, we don’t want it to be accessible.

And flash forward to about two years ago, when I was able to leave my web development company that I started, and just focus on what I wanted to focus on. And when I was thinking through the skills that I built up and my interests, my personal interests, it all came down to web accessibility. Because this was a place that I could really lend my expertise of being a web developer, designer for many years, and someone who is very passionate about access to information and the community that’s built out of open source.

So I’ve built a company called Equalify, about two years ago, and we’re really heavily focused on building a better web accessibility platform, that really has accessibility at its heart. We’re very focused on being open source, and we really want to support the open source community like WordPress. So that’s why I’m here today, to help the community, and bring it along into an accessible future.

[00:07:25] Nathan Wrigley: It sounds like there was a nice bit of serendipity in terms of the timing, because you’re interested in a subject which, honestly, five years ago, I think not many people were talking about. It was a pretty edge case thing. But now, fast forward, we’re in June, late June 2024 that we’re recording this, and it genuinely is the topic of this year I think. Maybe there’s a couple of others, you know, there’s a couple of things that still hang on, like SEO, and what have you, but it’s right up there.

You go to WordPress events, and there’s always a talk about accessibility. And so this has now become what you do for a living. And I’m curious what your position is in terms of whether or not the skillset that you’ve got is possible for a, let’s say a freelancer. Let’s just pick somebody who’s building websites for a client, and they’ve got multiple clients to manage, they’re building a website with WordPress.

Would you say it’s possible for that individual to learn enough or is it more a case of, go out and find somebody like Equalify, find an organisation, find an expert and hire them out as a third party, if you like, to look at the websites that you are building? Is there too much to know, along with all the other things that you’ve got to know in the stack of being a freelance website builder, or is it possible?

[00:08:41] Blake Bertuccelli-Booth: Web accessibility is one of the most accessible, technical skills that you can grab. So there is a set of guidelines called the WCAG, Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. These guidelines are a little bit technical and difficult to read, but they boil down to basic concepts that you can, that anybody can really figure out.

A lot of it has to do with how you’re structuring your page. What those HTML things like H1, H2, H3 are for. You’re not really learning advanced skills, you’re more learning what the purpose of some of the early HTML pieces were. And you don’t need to be an expert at web accessibility.

I would say, my role a lot of times is scanning giant, humongous networks because I don’t think, if I was just hired to be a website accessibility expert, and work on five or six page websites like I did as a designer, I wouldn’t really have a job because it’s a pretty simple discipline.

But the larger scope pieces are really where my job comes in, where I’m scanning hundreds of thousands of pages, and looking at larger trends and finding interesting ways to interpret data, and create a culture of accessibility in large organisations.

[00:09:57] Nathan Wrigley: Kind of fascinating that that job does exist now, and that you can make a career out of that. And I’m guessing that there’s many prongs to that. And I’m thinking in terms of things like the European Accessibility Act, which is coming down the pike fairly soon. And we could get into that, and the dates that all of that is going to be happening, but that’s a bit of a stick.

You know, there’s legislation coming around which is going to compel websites, certain websites, and there are caveats around which websites are in, and which websites are out, if you know what I mean.

But also the kind of, the moral argument that everybody seems to be having now, that it’s just the right thing to do. Before we hit record, we were talking about how your father had been a big advocate for changing the physical landscape of where he lived, for putting in ramps so that people could access doors easily and what have you. And all of that is really easy for me to see. It’s so straightforward. Look, there’s somebody in a wheelchair, and they cannot get through that door. That needs fixing.

But on the web, I feel that most of it is disguised from people like me. I am able to use my eyes perfectly well. I wear glasses. My ears function. I have both hands, and my legs work. So basically what I’m trying to say is, when I go to a website, I’m using a mouse, I’m using a keyboard, I can listen to the videos and all of that. I don’t have any problems, so it’s disguised, so it does take somebody with that expertise like you to point it out, I feel.

And so even though the WCAG guidelines are there for everybody to read, it’s very easy to just say, I don’t know what that is, I can’t see it, it’s not a problem for me. But it does feel like the moral argument is becoming louder and louder, people are talking about it more. But also the stick that we mentioned. And I’m thinking of the European Accessibility Act, I don’t know if any similar legislation is coming down in the part of the world where you live, North America. But yeah, we seem to be on the precipice of some big change.

[00:11:51] Blake Bertuccelli-Booth: Yeah. There’s two points that I think you’ve really hit the nail on.

The first is the moral kind of argument around this. When you are witnessing a person who is suffering, whether it’s because they can’t navigate Facebook on their screen reader, or because they’ve just tripped and fallen and broke in their leg, you want to do something to help. And that is a moral impulse that I feel, and it’s a really cool impulse that I can work with in my profession.

And so what I’ve discovered, in becoming more and more in tune with accessibility rules and regulation, is that you really shouldn’t focus on the rules and regulation aspect. You should focus on that moral impulse. And you should try to educate developers and designers on these issues because of how they affect other human beings.

And so I’m really big into philosophy, and there’s a classic equation that got me really focused into accessibility. It’s the idea that, if you saw someone in distress, if a child fell in a pond in front of you and they were, needed help, you would definitely go jump in. But if you could pay $25, $50 to buy a bed net to prevent mosquitoes in Africa, that would be more of a decision to make.

And I see the accessibility equation in that same kind of moral framework, where, though I am not using a screen reader myself, or using eye tracking software myself, and though my friends aren’t around me. I know that my work is contributing to alleviating other people’s suffering.

And now that I’ve become more of an accessibility advocate, and have met folks that have agonized over navigating their bank statements, for instance, or applying for vital needs. I know that every day that I spend on this accessibility problem, I am doing good for others in the world. And I just have not found anything in web design or web development that gets me to that point of doing moral good day in, day out. And that’s what keeps me working hard.

[00:14:05] Nathan Wrigley: The word which is popping into my head is meaningful. You’ve given yourself a meaningful reason to build websites. If profit was the thing that you were after, maybe you would derive some meaning from that, but I think most people, when they examine life, they kinda quickly work out that profit is interesting, but it doesn’t really provide all that much meaning. Where, it sounds very much like this really does, on some very basic level, very core level in your being, it provides you with that sense of purpose and meaningfulness, which is really nice.

Another intuition that I just had, whilst you were talking was, using the example of the person in the wheelchair who cannot access the restaurant because the door is slightly above, and there’s no ramp and what have you. The crowd gather round, and in the real world you witness that, and you see it, and everybody’s taken aback. Hang on, that’s wrong.

But the internet is very often a fairly solitary thing. You know, you’d be sitting in a room, perhaps by yourself, you might be, I don’t know, on a couch, browsing on an iPad, or an iPhone, or something like that. But broadly speaking, you’re doing it by yourself. And so there’s never that sense of crowd watching and gathering that kind of moral outrage, that, whoa, hang on, this isn’t right.

But also, if you can’t access the web, because the web is the thing that you simply can’t access because it’s broken in some way, where do you even go to report this kind of stuff? How do you begin to say to a website owner, hang on, your website isn’t working because I can’t find the phone number, with the technology that I have, my screen reader, I can’t find the phone number on your website to report it?

So there’s all these strange things which somebody like me in the world, walking around, I can see the wheelchair problem, but I’m not encountering the accessibility problems because, A, I don’t experience them myself, B, it’s probably fairly solitary and, C, it’s probably really difficult for these people to have a voice because the technology itself is kind of like a gatekeeper.

[00:16:00] Blake Bertuccelli-Booth: That’s a really important note. You know, I haven’t really thought of it as like, the web is solitary and so that you’re not seeing the person struggle. And also, people are very polite in this world. My friends who use screen readers are amazingly polite, even though they’re sometimes called out as trolls.

I have a really good friend who I went to a conference with, and we were staying in the same hotel room, and I happened to be in the bathroom, he didn’t know I was in there taking a shower. I heard from the other room a string of curses, like it just went on this tangent. And I came out and I said, Kevin, what’s wrong? And he, his job, he had to use Facebook for a task in his job, and Facebook just wasn’t accessible to him.

They kept saying things to him, and it started to aggravate him in such a way. And like that aggravation, he’s never shown before. He is a very sweet person. I, you know, wanted to say like, I want to record you and bring this to the forefront of the internet.

The problem though with that, and this is something that I see a lot, is that, people who do raise the flags online, and they can do it in a very non-judgmental way, are immediately degraded to the place of trolls. So we have this culture online of trolls, and I see it again and again, where there are very justified comments to a website’s accessibility. And those comments are completely unanswered, in a way that, if someone was in a room expressing these comments to a group of others, they would be completely heard and really taken care of.

And I’ve heard this from my friends who do rely on assistive technology, they don’t want to speak up anymore because they’ve had a few experiences of being completely silenced, because they’re put in a place of trolls, because they’re put in a place of a complainer. When they’re just saying, we can’t access this website.

[00:17:51] Nathan Wrigley: And you can imagine, in my scenario, if I went into a shop, only to discover that every single item was on shelves 30 feet in the air, and there was no ladders available. Well, carry on, honestly do your shopping. What’s the problem? Look, everything’s there, I can see it all. Just get it into the cart and go and check it out.

The outrage would be almost instantaneous. But the majority, and I think we’re going to talk about this 80, 20 split, and concentrate on the 20. I think that 20% is maybe not in conversation with the majority of people. And you are in a position where you see this more, and so you probably have a sense of that outrage, and a sense of that injustice, whereas, I imagine the people who are building websites typically, perhaps don’t.

And so there’s that empathic journey that you’ve got to go on. You’ve got to educate yourself, you’ve got to expose yourself to people who have these things. I don’t know, maybe that’s through YouTube videos, or listening to podcasts like this. But you have to go through something where you feel a sense of moral outrage, for want of a better word. Maybe that’s too strong a term, but you get the idea.

A sense of moral injustice, and that something needs to be done. And if you’ve never been through that, it may be hard to understand what’s going on. So maybe we need to talk about what you’ve just talked about, the whole troll thing and what have you. Anyway, there you go.

[00:19:04] Blake Bertuccelli-Booth: It’s very exciting to see when someone starts to care about accessibility, because it does click in a person’s mind, like a developer, designer’s mind, in a way that it goes beyond learning a new technical craft. And it does, to bring it back to morality, it does strike something deep, where like, oh, the way that I use headings will make somebody’s life better. And of course, I want to make somebody’s life better. It’s easy for me to use headings this way, I can use a heading instead of a div, or these type of really easy things.

And then it becomes so ingrained in the work that they do every day, that the work they do gains purpose. And this is something that I find really exciting about talking to lots of different developers and designers. And usually what happens is, it’s a developer, designer who’s doing it for many years like myself, and it’s just, I don’t want to design another website, I feel like this is pixel pushing.

When I start to talk about accessibility, or when someone who I work with who uses screen readers comes and shows a demo, and they show like how the work that you do can impact the life of someone, and how big the problem is. All of a sudden the work of the designer and developer has amazing meaning.

I have a call to action for any designer, developer that’s just like, oh, this is just work to me. Look into accessibility. Meet somebody who uses assistive technology, because your work can actually mean something to people in a very, very big way. And it’s very exciting to see when that happens because, like myself, I’ve seen others who’ve gone from, I want to start a farm and never look at a computer again. To, this is really vital, and now every day I wake up and I look at the numbers of websites that I’ve fixed and issues that I fixed, and I see how that’s affecting people every single day.

[00:21:02] Nathan Wrigley: I’m about to say something, and I don’t know if I’ll hit the target, or if it’ll land correctly, but I’m going to try, and that is to say that, life is already difficult enough for people who have accessibility needs. The world is already, I imagine, a little bit harder to manage in certain respects, and obviously there’s a whole spectrum of that.

And the internet offered this fabulous promise of kind of the world brought into your hand, or onto your desktop, or what have you. And so it kind of feels like a one, two punch really. If you have accessibility needs, that the very thing which promised so much is, well, not taken away from you because it was never there for you, but it’s not provided for you.

Life is hard enough. Here’s this fabulous thing, the internet, which could have made life so much easier, and yet it never was that easy for you. So it feels like that’s a double punch. Does that make sense? Have I overstated that a little bit? Did I go in the wrong direction?

[00:21:58] Blake Bertuccelli-Booth: No, I think that, I have dyslexia so I just confuse grammar and words, and I read a page and letters are flying around. And it does feel like a breath of fresh air when I’m looking at a page that is formatted in a more broad, large, fonted way. I feel like, oh, I can actually understand the concepts here. And it feels like a relaxation almost.

One thing I would say is like, the users that I work with, or my friends who rely on assistive technology. The bigger issue that I focus on, because they would go happily do something else, I’m thinking of my friend Jay, who’s this amazing blind fellow who loves oldie tunes he calls them, like old records and old vinyls. Usually, if he comes to a website that’s not accessible, he just shuts his computer and goes and plays music, and he doesn’t really go deeper.

The issue that I see though is less of like suffering, and we should help others because they have a life of suffering, and more of a idea that knowledge should be shared. And if we want to really focus on these values that have created the internet, of transparency, of free access to information, all the core open source values, if we really believe in those, then we’re going to make sure that that 20% of the world, the over 2 billion people, have access to that knowledge.

And with over 94% of the million most popular homepages failing accessibility tests, to me that is failing to give people access to vital knowledge, and that failing to give the potential to unlock new knowledge. And if we’re not doing that, then I just don’t understand what we really believe in. Then we don’t actually believe in these open source principles. That we don’t actually believe in the principles of a free internet, because we are excluding people. It’s much more of a moral problem than it is the headache of these people, because there’s so many other things that folks would rather be doing than navigating an inaccessible website.

[00:24:07] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I prefer your encapsulation of the argument a lot more than mine, and I thank you for sort of stepping in and saving me there. That was a much better way of describing it. Thank you.

So Project Eudiamonia is something that you’ve been working on. This is an automated web accessibility testing suite, which you’ve developed over at Equalify. First of all, we should probably get over the, what is the word eudiamonia? Both you and I had a fun chat about this before we hit record, but it’s called Project Eudiamonia. We’re going to get into the data and the stats of that in a moment but, what’s eudiamonia? Because it’s a real word.

[00:24:38] Blake Bertuccelli-Booth: So eudiamonia is a challenge to ask what, well, eudiamonia is. That’s why I’ve used it. And the deeper kind of concept that I like behind that is that, it’s like the end fulfillment of knowledge. It’s like this ancient Greek concept that says, this is really what you should strive after, and this is why it takes work to get to this end goal of like ultimate knowledge. And it’s really fulfillment, so it is a little bit selfish. But again, I’ve used it in this kind of WordPress sense in the WordPress world, because I like to challenge people to ask questions. And I love when people ask me, what is eudiamonia? And so that’s why it’s called Project Eudiamonia.

[00:25:20] Nathan Wrigley: Ideal, and I’ve fallen right into that trap, so that’s perfect. Great. So it’s more about the data I think, the next part of this episode. And the data that you’ve presented, to me at least anyway, is all to do with the WordPress properties, so specifically .org. And you have set your tool off, maybe we should actually explain what the tool is, and then we can get into the data. So, what is the project and the tooling that you are using to capture the data that we’ll get into?

[00:25:46] Blake Bertuccelli-Booth: So I’ve developed a open source accessibility platform called Equalify, and Equalify will use different rules that establish accessibility. One of the most popular ones is the Axe core rule set. And what it basically does is it scans websites against these rules. It sees how headings are used on a page, or how color is used, and then decides if a webpage passes or fails at these rules, to establish a baseline of accessibility.

Now, it’s really important to note that it’s not necessarily saying, you’re accessible, or you’re not accessible. It’s just saying that your page fails at certain tests around accessibility because you aren’t really, if you pass all of the tests of the best scan, you’re going to get around 40% of the issues, maybe 50%. You’re not going to get all the issues, but it’ll give you a picture of accessibility.

So what we’ve done is we’ve developed a piece of software that will scan a bunch of pages, basically it’ll crawl through, or look at a site map, and scan all of those pages. And then it will come up with a report on violations, or of rules that we scanned. And so we’ve created a framework. I like to think of it as like a WordPress for web accessibility, that we can plug in different rule sets, and we can customise our reporting.

And so for WordPress, what we’ve done is we’ve started to, keyword is started, because this is very early in our process, but we’ve started to construct a framework for how we assess accessibility within the WordPress space.

And we’re starting with just .org properties. So those are like wordpress.org and all the properties around that. We’ve established around 448 properties that we’re looking at, 448 URLs that we’re looking at. And then every week I’m trying to scan new pages. So I think the last scan we had over 120,000 pages. Then we’re kind of focusing in.

Right now it’s a little bit chaotic, where we just have all of this data and it doesn’t necessarily mean action. But what we’re doing is we’re taking this data, finding key patterns, and the things that the WordPress community wants to focus on, and then building out automated reporting of issues. So that when somebody, like right now, WordPress is going through a big redesign, so when somebody wants to assess the general accessibility of the thousands and thousands of pages that show different plugins in the WordPress directory, that they can quickly get a picture of that, and that the key issues can be reported automatically in GitHub.

[00:28:40] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, so I’m just going to try and reprise what you just said, and if I make any mistakes just please interrupt me. So your tool is a bit like Google Bot, if you like. It goes around and it crawls, and you provide it with certain rules. Almost like the plugin architecture of WordPress, you plug in what it is that you want it to go out and look for. And at the moment you’ve trained it on the wordpress.org properties, and you found 448, I think you said, of those, of which there are about 120,000 pages that you’ve been crawling.

And you’re saying also that no system is perfect. Even if it passes every single thing that your tool could throw at it, you’re still only at about 40%. There’s still going to be 60% of errors that it won’t catch. Is that simply because of the technical limitations, the kind of things that an automated tool just cannot find at the moment?

[00:29:27] Blake Bertuccelli-Booth: There’s a little bit of technical limitations. The bigger issue is how we define accessibility. So what I spoke about earlier, the web content accessibility guidelines, these like central guidelines. They’re not perfect and there’s a lot of gray areas, and leeway to how you define something as being accessible.

That is kind of by design because the web content accessibility guidelines, for better or for worse, are largely made for user evaluations, to build tests for users to go through and evaluate, rather than a robot tool.

There is some work, and I’m doing a lot of it, around AI and how we can start to assess technology in a little bit more of a, we can start building tests in a more complex way. But it goes back to, when you say accessibility and I say accessibility, how we define what an accessible website is. There’s not really an agreed statement of, this is what accessibility is. And, if we are going to say the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines are what accessibility is, the rules aren’t good enough to have any technology, let alone any human being, understand every opportunity to break those rules.

[00:30:43] Nathan Wrigley: Got it. Right, okay, that’s cleared that up. So even the rules themselves, around accessibility, are still in a state of flux and need to be refined. And I’m guessing that’s going to be, well, we have this thing in the UK called the Forth Bridge, and it’s this bridge which never gets finished being painted. They paint from one end, two years later, they get to the other end and they finish painting it, and by that point, where they started was already starting to blister and rust, so they could go back and begin again. And it’s the Forth Bridge, never ever gets finished painting. It’s like that. These guidelines will constantly be updated, new devices will come out, new HTML specs, and things will come out, and upset the apple carts. So it’s a never ending kind of carousel of things going on.

[00:31:21] Blake Bertuccelli-Booth: And I would say that we shouldn’t expect that any accessibility guidelines, or anything around technology ever came to some kind of golden truth, because that’s not actually even good in my mind, because you are squashing innovation in this space, and innovation is really central to it.

I’ve heard so much critique around, well, like we don’t even know what accessibility is because it’s changing all the time. But like devices are changing, and the HTML spec that you mentioned is changing, and CSS is changing. Those changes, while it’s a pain when you’re a developer and you have to learn something new all the time, it actually is furthering our world because we’re getting a lot more new technology that’s doing amazing things.

My critique of the rule set is really that it’s not changing fast enough. That we should have much quicker changes, and it should be rapid. I think the 2.2 version was introduced not too long ago, or officially adopted not too long ago. And like 3.0 is kind of on the radar. It will be adopted, there’s not like a firm date set, but that’s deplorable. We should have new rule sets with at least the regularity that a new WordPress releases. I don’t understand why we can’t. That’s where I put my stake in the ground.

[00:32:37] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, thank you. So you’ve decided to go into the .org project and, is there a reason why you did that? Because obviously you’ve got a business, you could be doing this for clients. What was the theory behind that? I don’t want to put words into your mouth. Why pick .org and go at it? And we’ll get into the data in a minute.

[00:32:55] Blake Bertuccelli-Booth: I can’t ignore WordPress, and that is really the biggest reason why I feel like we have to focus on it. Over 40% of the internet is run on WordPress. And when I have dabbled in other CMS worlds, or open source worlds, it doesn’t feel as impactful to work on those projects as it does with WordPress every single day.

The other kind of main piece is, I really love the people working on accessibility in the WordPress community. I love Joe, I love Alex, I love Amber. They’re great people, and it’s really been fun to meet them and hang out with them. When you’re part of an open source community, I’ve found you really should like the people who you’re talking with, and like that ethos.

So there’s impact the people of the community, and the third and final piece, I think WordPress is a amazingly human centered technology. And when you blog, you’re having to deal with all sorts of amazing creative forces, and accessibility lends itself so well to that human-centric economy and technology.

And I think that we have not really tapped into that as much as we can. And so there is an amazing potential to activate, not only the contributors to the WordPress Core project, but to every user that uses WordPress. Because they are subscribing to something that says, we value human creativity, we value your kind of weirdness.

[00:34:32] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, interesting. So the numbers themselves though, we alluded to the fact that you found 448 .org properties, 125,000 pages. Now here’s the big numbers, I guess. The identified violations, and I’m just reading these off the show notes and you can add some context to these in a moment, just over 2.1 million, which seems like quite a large number. But then you break that down into something a bit more manageable I think, 1.13, so 1,135 issues, so it looks like many of those issues repeat multiple, hundreds, thousands of times. And that makes it a little bit easier to parse I guess.

But just tell us what this all breaks down to. Is it that wordpress.org has just done a really bad job, hasn’t kept up with the time? Is it simply that there’s just so much out there, you know, 125,000 pages, that’s not easy to fix quickly? What’s your takeaway from all of that data?

[00:35:26] Blake Bertuccelli-Booth: So, of the millions of pages that Equalify has scanned, we’ve seen around 40 issues per page. And this is not just WordPress, this is like all the pages that we’ve scanned on the internet that our clients, or that we’ve done ourselves. And then also the typical kind of web accessibility credo is that you get around 50 issues per page.

And the way these numbers break down is that it’s pretty average. It’s not anything beyond the blue. It just looks like these .org properties just haven’t been super paying attention to the accessibility, but they’re not doing things that are like actively trying to thwart accessibility, so it’s not that bad.

So 2,112,224 violations is one of the last scans we did. These big numbers are really good because what these big numbers are saying is they’re basically capturing all the little HTML nodes, all the pieces of HTML that are failing the test. And then what you could do with these 2 million plus pieces of HTML is you can then see, okay, they’re patterns. Oh, look, this one plugin is creating this piece of HTML, and that piece kind of comes over, and over, and over again. And that’s when you can start to do really impactful things with very little work.

I am like most developers, where I want to be really lazy about my work, and I want to do something that is extremely impactful with as little work as possible. And so, like the other day, I think I found like something that 80,000 violations would be solved by fixing just like a small labeling of a navigation element.

And so what I’m hoping, and what I’ve seen in other communities is that, when you attribute these big numbers to issues, and then you actually have a really quick way of fixing these big numbers, that it motivates people to do the work, even though it’s a very small bit of work.

And I’m testing that within the WordPress community. I don’t know if it’s going to work. I don’t know if these big numbers are going to actually discourage work. We’ll see. Right now, it’s kind of at the point where it’s all a test. Maybe WordPress contributors like thumbs up emojis instead of numbers of violations they fixed. We’ll see.

[00:37:42] Nathan Wrigley: So is the idea then, from the data that you’ve gathered, to point it out to the community, blog posts, podcasts, things like this, and then hope to establish some sort of feedback loop. Where the people who can therefore change it, and that could be you obviously, as well as a whole bunch of other people, they become interested in this? They come and seek your data, and I’m guessing that you’re updating the data on a fairly regular basis. This wasn’t a crawl that you did back in 2023, and that was it, you’re constantly going through this. And that you set up what’s some kind of, like I said, feedback loop, channel of communication, team within WordPress that you can drop into. What’s the intended goal?

[00:38:19] Blake Bertuccelli-Booth: We have, in the Slack and the WordPress, Make WordPress Slack, we have an accessibility testing channel. And what I’ve started to see is now other teams working within WordPress, specifically on the .org, and now more specifically on the redesign, will ping me when they have something new and they want it to be tested, and I’ll go in and test it. My goal is to get automated accessibility testing into the culture of WordPress development.

So we’re starting with .org properties. I think it’s very realistic to say that we can make .org very accessible. And I was just guarded with my language because I was talking about how accessibility can’t really be defined, but like we can make it very accessible, a triumph of accessibility.

And so, once we make .org properties a triumph of accessibility, I think then we move, and we figured out how to work within the community. Then we move into the bigger thing, which is Core. And we figure out how Core can make all of the internet accessible, and how we can make Core as well accessible because there’s a lot of problems in that, but we’re not touching those yet.

[00:39:24] Nathan Wrigley: Can people use the Equalify tool that you’ve been using? Is it possible for people to download this? I can’t remember what you said at the top of the show, whether it was an open source piece of software, or what have you. If that’s the case, can people then do that, join the Slack team and what have you, and report back? I’m going to guess that the answer to my next question is no. Here’s the question. Are you inundated with volunteers wishing to help you do this, to the point where you are turning people away?

[00:39:49] Blake Bertuccelli-Booth: There needs to be more volunteers helping this project out. There are really easy lifts that we need volunteers helping with. So like one of the main things is looking at some of the automated violations that are reported, and just making sure they make sense. That requires some accessibility knowledge, but it’s nothing that I wouldn’t help someone with, or the accessibility team of WordPress wouldn’t help somebody with.

There is another way, if you don’t know anything about accessibility, that you could help, if you have some kind of technical background, and that’s looking at tickets that were developed. We’re developing tickets based off of these violations with some large language model help. And we are not going to actually publish anything that hasn’t been reviewed by at least one person, probably two people, because every time we look at these tickets, they look very good, but when you start to dig into the HTML, it doesn’t actually help that much.

So we really need help reviewing these tickets that are created by the large language models. And I think that’s a great way to also get involved, because you don’t have to be an accessibility expert. You have to just have common sense, and ask questions when you don’t know and something seems fishy, and just help with this process. So we really need help with that.

[00:41:04] Nathan Wrigley: Best place to go? Would that be to direct people towards the accessibility-text Slack channel? Is that the single best place?

[00:41:12] Blake Bertuccelli-Booth: Accessibility-testing, or accessibility Slack channel, yes. I’m active in the accessibility-testing channel. We have a meeting every Wednesday at 15:15 UTC, I’m always there. But the accessibility Slack channel is also really good. You can jump in there. Joe is there, I’m there sometimes as well. And so feel free to jump in there.

We’re also at GitHub. You can look us up at github.com/equalifyeverything. And there you can get into the whole world of Equalify. And you asked earlier about downloading or using the software that we’re using. Yes, you can start using it right now, with the caveat that you have to be a little bit technical. You have to know how to use node and things like this.

We’ll eventually get as easy as WordPress’s one click install, but we’re not there yet because our focus is scanning and fixing. We don’t have enough people to help with the one click install. We will get there one day, and it will be just a one click install. Mark my word, please.

That said, Equalify has also donated our entire managed service to WordPress. We have literally said, you have it for free. We’ll do as many scans as you want, we’ll do anything you want, it’s yours. And so what we’re doing, right now people can ping me and I will happily do any scans they want, and get any reports they want. Pretty soon though, we’re going to incorporate an API that anybody in the WordPress community, and hopefully we’ll figure out how to get it so that anybody with a WordPress username can run these scans on their own WordPress related projects.

It will have to be WordPress related projects, so it will have to be one of the properties, or maybe even Core. But that, we’re giving like what we give to larger organisations for cost, we’re giving to the entire WordPress community totally for free. And anybody can get in touch with me if they’re working on a WordPress project and want to be scanned.

[00:43:07] Nathan Wrigley: I guess if in the year 2024, if we’re offering up WordPress as a credible CMS for all of the things that the year 2024 requires of the internet, then the .org properties being a shining light of that seems a bit of a no brainer. Having those properties in tip top shape seems like a really good idea. So Blake’s available. He would like your help. He’s offered his tools up for free. Blake, where would we find you personally? Where’s the best places to reach you if this podcast episode has made people interested?

[00:43:39] Blake Bertuccelli-Booth: I am pretty much everywhere the internet runs. I’ve been more active on X, formerly known as Twitter, lately, and that’s B-B-E-R-T-U-C-C. That’s kind of my unfiltered me, and a good place to get in contact with me. I’m also elblakeo31 in the WordPress community. Don’t hold me against that, that name, that was when I was 14 or so, put it together.

And then if anybody wants to email me or get in touch, Blake, B-L-A-K-E. @decubing, D-E-C-U-B-I-N-G.com. They can do that. So X, B-B-E-R-T-U-C-C. WordPress elblakeo31. Or email blake@decubing.com.

[00:44:19] Nathan Wrigley: Perfect. Thank you very much. Blake, what an interesting project. What a moral project. Let us all hope that in the years to come, 2025, 2026, we are, all of us, reaching a near state of Eudiamonia. Wouldn’t that be nice? Thank you for joining me today.

[00:44:34] Blake Bertuccelli-Booth: I love that. Thank you, Nathan.

On the podcast today we have Blake Bertuccelli-Booth.

Blake has been in the world of web design for over a decade, a journey that eventually led him to become an advocate for web accessibility. He is the founder of Equalify, a company dedicated to enhancing accessibility across open-source platforms, particularly within the WordPress community. His passion for this cause was kindled through his experiences working with higher education organisations, where he saw firsthand the challenges faced by users reliant on assistive technology.

In this episode we get into a tool Blake’s been working on. It’s specifically designed to crawl websites and identify accessibility issues. This tool has been used to survey over 120,000 pages across wordpress.org properties, and has revealed over 2.1 million accessibility issues, shedding light on the pervasive nature of accessibility

We talk about the challenges of defining accessibility and why existing guidelines often fall short. Blake emphasises the moral imperative of web accessibility, highlighting the real-world impact on individuals’ lives and stressing the importance of education for developers and designers. He argues that accessible design isn’t just about adhering to regulations, but about alleviating suffering and enhancing the online experience for everyone.

Our conversation also touches on the increasing prominence of web accessibility, and the potential ramifications of upcoming legislation like the European Accessibility Act. Blake discusses his personal struggles with dyslexia, underscoring how properly formatted content can be a source of profound relief and empowerment.

We also highlight the collaborative spirit of the WordPress community in tackling accessibility concerns and Blake extends an open invitation for all to join in with his efforts. He provides insights into practical steps, such as reviewing automated violations and developing tickets, to contribute to this collective mission.

If you’re passionate about web accessibility or eager to learn how your work can make a tangible difference in people’s lives, this episode is for you.

Useful links

Equalify

WCAG, Web Content Accessibility Guidelines

European Accessibility Act

EqualifyEverything on GitHub

Axe tool

WordPress Accessibility Team

Blake on X

Blake’s WordPress profile

Blake’s business website