Making Accessibility Part of Your Design Process

As a designer, you’ve already got a lot to think about, and adding accessibility to the mix can feel overwhelming. But knowing accessibility matters and knowing what you’re actually supposed to do about it are two very different things. Where do you start? How much do you really need to know? And does accessibility mean putting limits on your creativity? These are exactly the kinds of questions we’re tackling today in a conversation with accessibility experts Colleen Gratzer and Chad Chelius.

Hi, design friends. Welcome to the Creative Pro podcast. I’m Theresa Jackson, CreativePro Program Manager.

I’m happy you’re here today. If you’re a design professional, well, you’re in the right place. If you’re new, make sure to hit the subscribe button.

And just for being here, you can save $15 off a one-year Creative Pro membership with the discount code PODCAST. P-O-D-C-A-S-T. That same code works for $100 off any upcoming event, including our upcoming Design and Accessibility Summit, which runs online October 20th through the 23rd. Our guests today, Colleen Gratzer and Chad Chelius, they’ll be speaking there.

I’ll hand it over to them now. Good morning, Colleen. How are you doing? Good.

I’m doing well. How are you? Good. Good.

How’s your summer been going? Good. I’ve been busy with work and busy coming back and forth to the beach and doing work. Sounds rough.

Sounds rough being at the beach. Yeah. I actually love going down to the beach and I’ll often work on the patio at the place we’re staying or something and just enjoy the salty air.

It’s always fun. It’s relaxing. It’s good to talk to you today, Colleen.

Just to introduce ourselves to our listeners, you are? Colleen Gratzer. And I have a business where I do the accessibility work and I have training for designers as well. So I do the work through Grotzer Graphics and I do the training and I have a podcast called Design Domination.

I do all of that through Creative Boost. Awesome. Awesome.

And how about you? Well, my name’s Chad Chelius and I work for Chax Training and Consulting. We do primarily training and consulting for our clients on accessibility. And part of our conversation today, Colleen, is really talking about what led us to where we are today, right? Because you and I are both in the accessibility space.

And over time, a couple of times in my life, somebody had asked me what my five-year plan was. Has anybody ever asked you that question? And I’ve never had an answer, right? I’m like, I didn’t want to get to tomorrow. You know what I mean? So I’ve never really had a five-year plan.

So being in the accessibility space was never part of my plan, right? It was really, I would say it was kind of an organic transition, right? And so with that being said, let’s just kind of talk about, Colleen, your journey from designer and design trainer to being in the accessibility space that you’re in now. Well, it’s really interesting because I was at a place with my business where I was doing all of the design things you can think of. I was doing print.

I was doing websites. I was doing these horrible HTML emails. Those are like the worst thing in the world.

They are. So I was designing. I was coding.

I was doing everything. I actually, I just got to a point where I was like just crying all the time out of frustration with my business because I just felt like nobody’s, I feel like people said they took me seriously as a designer. Like clients said that, but I didn’t feel treated that way.

And I felt like I was constantly low-balling my rates. I felt like I wasn’t, like I was confident in my abilities and my skills, but I wasn’t confident enough to sometimes charge more or to like explain or defend my design decisions so much. And like if there was pushback that made me nervous, right? So I just, I didn’t like that.

And like everything in my whole business just felt like it was falling apart. And I said, I’m just done. And I actually thought about a career change.

And I thought, well, I don’t know what I would do. I mean, in my degrees in foreign languages, I thought maybe I could do something like that, but I just got really fed up. I thought about niching.

I couldn’t figure out what to niche in. And then just like, and this probably went on for like, I don’t know, maybe like a year or two. And then one time Bevy Shineon contacted me because we’re both in the DC area and we were on the same email list where she would send out emails talking about her accessibility courses.

And I would literally just hit delete when I saw the subject because not that I had anything about against her, I didn’t know anything about accessibility. And I thought it doesn’t have anything to do with what I do. So, you know, it’s just, I don’t know what that is.

And if I don’t know what it is, it doesn’t apply to me. And you’re like, I don’t need one more thing on my brain. I didn’t even know it had to do with design at that point.

I had no idea. So I would just hit delete. And then like one time she contacted me and she goes, look, you and I know each other from the email lists that we’re on.

And she’s like, I know that you’re a good designer. I know that you know how to code. And she’s like, I want you to take my training in InDesign because you would be really good at it.

And I’m like, I don’t even understand what that means accessibility. So I got on a call with her. I went through her course and I said, okay, like I could do this, but I’m like, but nobody’s asking me for this.

So what’s, I mean, maybe I just spent money that I’ll never like, maybe, maybe, maybe I’ll never get my money back, but my return on investment for this. Right. So I just, I just started talking about it to clients and I was bringing it up to clients that I thought would really benefit from it, especially because of their audience, even if they didn’t have the legal requirement.

And I mean, some of them were not interested and some of them were, and then I just started talking about it more and then clients who did need it just started coming to me and it just started snowballing from there. And then it actually became so such a big thing that I decided to like, I decided like, I don’t know, but a year or so ago to get rid of websites, accessible websites, because I was doing accessible documents, accessible design and accessible websites and the code and everything. And I was like, this is too much.

There’s actually a lot to do in accessibility. So I just wanted to focus on documents. I mean, that’s how I started, but I was still doing websites at the time.

So I just kind of narrowed it back down to documents. And I just, then I started getting requests for, you know, for training, for people to, you know, well, for speaking, for speaking from, from creative pro and, you know, at the summits, the design and accessibility summits. And then I started getting a lot more people finding me and wanting me to do training for them, private training and things like that.

So it just kind of like, it just, it, it like changed my business. Like it took my business like out of the gutter and it’s like, made it like such a, such a natural thing. And it made me feel more confident and like everything about my business changed.

It was like really interesting how something that I was looking for so badly, then somebody shoved it in my face, you know, as it does. Yeah, for sure. Yeah.

And I know Chad, your story is totally different. I mean, it’s, it’s different, but the same in some ways. And, you know, I, I know some of our audience has heard me tell this story before, but, you know you know, my degrees in graphic communications essentially printing technology, right.

You know, and like, I really have never really considered myself a graphic designer, but more of a layout artist. So, so my skillset has always been more on the technical side of things. Like I would, I would get designs from art directors that between you and me were a hot mess and I would rebuild it and execute it with styles and, you know, with purpose so that it could actually be rebuilt, you know, in a, in an efficient manner.

And that’s what I always enjoyed doing. But, you know, prior to getting into accessibility, I think I had spent like the last 15 years of my life, probably 18 years of my life, you know, mainly as a, as a trainer, right. I would, you know, I’ve spoken at creative pro, I think I’m, I think I’m on year 10.

I think I’m coming up on year 10, speaking at creative pro, but you know, I was always a trainer in for graphic design for, for graphics applicants, all the Adobe applications. Right. And, and I was in Orlando at a conference speaking, I even forget the name of the conference right now.

I think it was called create, if I’m not mistaken. But I was, I was doing a presentation on the PDF format and at that time, Acrobat had Adobe flash built into it. So you could do video and 3d and like all this really cool stuff in, in PDF.

And that’s what I was talking about. And, and during my presentation, this very nice woman in the back of the room raised her hand and she’s like, this is all great, but is it accessible? And you know, that’s every speaker’s nightmare is to be asked a question that you would know nothing about. Right.

And that’s where I was. I’m like, I don’t even know. I have no idea what words just came out of your mouth.

You’re right. And, and somehow I talked my way out of it. Right.

And I continued on with my presentation, but afterwards she came up to me and we started talking and we became fast friends. The woman’s name was Vicki Richards. She’s retired now, but she’s from the DC area as well.

She worked for the social security administration, which was why accessibility was so important to her. Right. I of the nature of her work.

And I just, because I’ve always been very technical in, in like the work that I do, I was kind of fascinated by this idea of an underlying tag structure in a PDF file and, and like, and then like learning about the benefits of accessibility to people with disabilities. I was just like, this is awesome. Right.

You know? And I just really like a lot of I learned on my own, unfortunately I never had, you know, an official training, you know, like you had had. But I learned a lot from Vicki and all of a sudden, similar to you, Colleen, like in my business, all of a sudden people started like contacting me, be like, Hey, can you teach me accessibility? And I’m like, I think I can. Yeah.

You know, I, it didn’t even really dawn on me that it could be part of my business. And then before I knew it, it was a big part of my business, right? Like I wasn’t really doing the graphics training as much anymore. Everything was accessibility.

And so I had done accessibility work for many, many years. And then I don’t want to bore everybody with this story, but a lot of people know that Dax and I took a job with a company in Canada for accessibility work. It turned out to be a complete nightmare, hot mess.

But when, when we were finished with that, he and I ended up being on the opposite sides of the table, him in Sacramento, me in Philly. And he’s like, well, what are you going to do? Oh. And cause we quit the job, right? We, we, we like lasted a year, we quit the job.

And he’s like, well, what are you going to do? And I’m like, I’m just going to go back to doing what I was doing, you know, and I said, what are you going to do? And, and Dax has always been in corporate America. So, you know, where, where, you know, Colleen, you and I have been self-employed, you know, Dax always, you know, was working for somebody. And, and I just said to him, I’m like, I was like, Hey, do you want to, do you want to give this a shot? You know? And, and like that, we, we basically that day I went and opened up a bank account with a zero balance and we’re like, we’re open for business, everybody, you know? And, and so I had some clients that I brought over and, you know, he’s, he’s really good at social media marketing.

So we’re kind of a good team that way. Like we each brought different skills to the table, but anyway getting back to the original question, I mean, now, you know, my, my life is primarily accessibility and, and that’s not to say, I mean, I literally just got a job that I’ve been working on recently where it’s, it’s a huge catalog of auto parts and the client brought it to me and it was all tab delimited text. Oh, wow.

Yeah. And I was like, this is, this is like a train wreck. This is, it couldn’t get any worse, right? And so I’m like, this needs to be converted to a table.

So they’re like, okay, do it. You know what I mean? I’m like, wait, wait, wait. I didn’t, I didn’t, I wasn’t offering, right.

But I ended up doing it. Right. And so now I’m converting it all to tables, building it so that it’ll be accessible.

So anyway, I mean, that’s kind of my pathway, right. You know, into accessibility, very similar to yours, Colleen. And you know, the, the, the next thing I wanted to talk about is, you know, getting it out of the way, our journey into this spot that we’re in now that we’ve been doing it for a while, how does accessibility change the way you think about good design? Well, that’s interesting because I have very few projects that don’t need to be accessible.

Like I, I do a lot of publication work and I really love that. And I’ve always done publications my entire career. Like I’ve worked on medical journals and lots of different technical books, and I love that kind of stuff.

So I keep those, but even when I’m working on those, even though I’m not adding alt text to images, because it’s not required to be accessible. And I, and I have brought, I have had the conversation with them. I’ve brought it up and all, but I still use, I still use styles.

I still name them H1, H2, H3 or whatever. I still use all of that because it’s, I don’t want to change workflows. So from that kind of standpoint, it has really simplified my workflow for all projects.

But I mean, the other thing is that when you think about what the core of graphic design is, I mean, it’s all about communicating, right? Our job is to communicate. And that is sometimes only a visual component. Like if it’s for print or, you know, if it’s a digital document or if it’s a digital website, you know, obviously, or a website, it’s obviously digital, but if it’s, if it’s something digital, then, you know, it has a, not only a visual component to it, but a functional one, a technical one.

And so I think that like, some designers are not going to like that I say this, you know, and I used to be the one that didn’t know about accessibility either. But, you know, when we don’t think about, you know, both sides of things, we omit people from the audience and that is a design fail when we do that. It absolutely is, Colleen.

And, you know, similar to what you’re saying, you know, again, I look at it a little bit more of it on a technical side. And, and before we hopped on this meeting, I was complaining about a document I was working on that somebody had built a bulleted list manually. And I’m just like, why do you do this? You know, because, because from an accessibility standpoint, that is going to violate WCAG 1.3.1 in foreign relationships, right? Because it’s not going to be tagged correctly.

And so I kind of feel the same way, right? Like, I think a lot of designers look at accessibility as this heavy lift, right? They’re like, oh, I got to learn this whole new thing, right? Right. But I’m like, hold on a second, right? Like you’re a designer and you’ve been taught to communicate visually. All I’m asking you to do is continue communicating, but structurally, right? So, you know, and so like as a designer, when you make this big heading in your document and you, you make it big font, bold, you make it stand out, you’re likely going to create a style for that text because who knows, you might use it later on in your document when you do that, map it to a heading tag, right? Like, exactly.

And so like, I’ve, I think similar to you, Colleen, I’ve incorporated it into my workflow to the point where I now do it, whether the job calls for accessibility or not. Right. And so even though the client is not really asking for it, it takes me literally seconds to achieve it.

Right. And again, I still open those InDesign documents and I go to the styles pane and it says no paragraph styles. Basic paragraphs is the only style in there.

Right. Always. I’m like, really? Like, how did you get through this document? And there’s a lot of text in the document, you know? So I’m like, you manually formatted every single piece of text in this document, you know, like, I’m just like, you know, so, you know, you know, getting back to our question, you know, I, I think, you know, good design is good design.

Right. And, and I think the challenge for most designers who have been taught traditionally, right. And when they say traditionally, I mean, visually, right.

The, the, the, the, the trick, and it’s not a huge lift, is to execute that for all users. Right. And so like I said, when you drop an image into your document, well, everybody wants to know what that image is about.

So we need to describe it. And, you know, in InDesign now, new feature, if everybody’s not aware of this, when you place an image in InDesign now, it automatically writes alt text for that image. Oh, I hate that.

Yeah. How, how well it does is, is a whole other discussion. Right.

And we’re not going to get into that right now. I did a whole episode complaining about that. I mean, there are some cases where I like read the alt text and I’m like, yeah, that’s not bad.

Like I could actually run with that. Right. It’s not too bad.

And then there’s others where I’m like, oh my God, it had no idea of the context by which I’m using that image. Right. And so, you know, it, it has blinders on, right.

It’s looking at that image of being like, this is what this image is about, but the way that I’m using it, it’s, it has a whole other meaning. So yeah, it doesn’t take context into consideration. Exactly.

Exactly. Awesome. Well, the other thing too, though, you made a point about designers think accessibility is like such a big lift, but the other thing is that they really think it’s not their job.

Cause like a lot of times, like I have clients coming to me to do the work from beginning to end or to do the remediation after the fact, but I have designers come to me and they’re like, I don’t know what the heck to do. Can you just take my files and make them accessible? So they think it’s not their job or, I mean, they, they might, well, most of them, I think don’t think it’s their job, but a lot of times they’re like, I don’t know what to do with this now. And they think it’s at the end of the process, just fix it and finish it, do whatever, but they don’t think it’s their job as, as a designer.

But if our job is about communicating visually and technically, it is your job as a designer. It’s just, you never were taught it. Well, and the other thing, and again, I want to, I want to be sensitive to designers out there because the other part of that is in a lot of companies that I go into, these designers are, are being pressed to produce and get this work done.

And we’re now saying, oh, in addition to all of that that you’re already doing, we want you to do this other stuff as well. Right. And so I totally get it.

Yeah. I mean, I, you know, I personally have a client that I service where back in two, I was going to say 2000, that’s not right. Back in 2020, the whole millennium, just I’m like, you know, the whole millennium just messes me up.

But back in 2020, they had me come in and do training for them. And I did a full, you know, training, accessibility and InDesign and everything. And they really liked it, but they also felt again, overwhelmed.

Right. And so I think there’s, there’s a little bit of a balance between, okay, listen, as a designer, there’s certain things I’m expecting you to do, right? Like when you make a heading, map it to a tag. I always say with alt text, a lot of times the designers, the wrong person to write alt text for those images.

Yeah. Just the wrong person altogether. Right.

But there’s some things as a designer, I think you should be responsible for doing that are not going to add much to your workload. And then you just have to figure out your workflow. Right.

So in the case of this client, they contract me, you know, the designers will send me their files that are like halfway there. Right. And then I just take it to the finish line.

Yeah. Right. So like, yeah, there’s ways around it.

There’s, there’s ways to deal with that situation. Yeah. Not every designer wants to get into that stuff either.

That is true. And you know what, then there’s people like us that don’t mind the technical. So it’s like, okay, we support you in that.

Absolutely. Yeah. As I said, everybody has a role, right.

And, and, and you’re right. Maybe some of this stuff is not a good role for certain designers and maybe it’s a role for somebody else within the organization. Right.

So, yeah. So along with this topic, like, what do you think about the idea that accessibility limits creativity? Yeah. A lot of designers think that, and I, and I hear this from designers and I hear this from clients.

In fact, like, cause a lot of times they think, oh, I’m going to be limited in my color choices. And I actually one time had a client who needed, it was for an HTML email design of all things that had to be accessible. And she sent me their color palette.

And so I do the design, I get the proofs ready. I sent it to her and she’s like, well, everything just seems so dark. And I’m like, these are the colors in your color palette.

Like I can’t, I’m not, you know, I can’t do anything with them. I mean, unless you want me to start creating like second, more secondary colors for you that are lighter to go with these. And she’s like, well, I didn’t send you all the colors in the color palette because some of them are lighter.

And I thought you could only use the darker ones. And I’m like, wait, what? You didn’t send me all the colors. No, I had more options, but I mean, so I think that too, that like that also comes from like, obviously the contrast, you want to have sufficient contrast, but it’s always about how two colors are used together.

It’s not, it’s not like, Hey, this color is not accessible. I mean, no color by itself is inaccessible, you know, everything, you know, doesn’t have to work on its own against white. Like there’s creative ways to get around that.

So, I mean, I think there’s that, you know, that designers really think is an issue is that you have to use the dark colors or can’t use certain colors. And I think that’s the big one, right? Like when, when, when they feel that you’re like limiting their design ability, it’s usually in the form of color contrast requirements. Right.

Yeah. And you’re right. Like, like the problem is that everybody looks at every color only against white.

Yeah. And I’m like, well, sure that, and, and you and I know orange and yellow are the absolute pits when it comes to color contrast, right? Like, like, like the worst, right? If you do yellow or orange on white, good luck, because I got to make that orange, like a muddy brown before it’s actually going to be, you know, accessible. But if you, if you think about it in a more broader spectrum, if you put that lighter color on a darker background, now all of a sudden you’re, you’re conforming, you know, now all of a sudden you can make it work.

So it’s, it’s, isn’t it just really about being creative? I mean, at the end of the day, it’s just about being creative, you know? Right. I think so too. I mean, I think that too, Chad, from not only a visual standpoint, but also even when I go to lay something out, like I have to really, I have, I mean, I know the paragraph style attributes really well.

So sometimes I’m thinking about how could I do this where I don’t, especially in a long document, how can I do this purely with paragraph styles or object styles or a combination thereof, right? And, and make things easier to deal with from an accessibility standpoint, instead of having to readjust text frames, right. Or, or add in, you know, text or frames with background colors that I’m going to have to artifact later or something, you know, I try to think about how could I do this in the most efficient way where I have to touch it the few, fewest amount of time. Yeah, a hundred percent.

I mean, you know, like when I, even when I teach accessibility and InDesign, I often incorporate other tips for, for the students because like my favorite is like, okay, you’re creating a subhead in your document, right. You know, some, some subheads. Do you ever want those subheads to hyphenate? No.

The answer is probably no. Right. So when you build that style, turn off hyphenation and then you never have to worry about it again.

Right. Like that alone is a super powerful tip for people because I can’t tell you how many times I see documents where there’s like a million soft returns where they’ve gone in to eliminate the hyphenation. And I’m like, you know, InDesign can do this for you.

Right. You know what I mean? Like with it. Right.

So, so Colleen, like, what would you say? Like if, if somebody were to say like, where should I start when accessibility feels overwhelming? Right. Like, like what would you say would be like step one? Like what, what would you tell somebody to do? I always say, I always say, just start with contrast, checking contrast, because if you can understand the guidelines around normal text and large text, and then any meaningful icons, if you can understand those guidelines, then that’s serving visual users. And a lot of designers think that, you know, accessibility is for the blind, but actually there’s more people who have low vision and colorblindness combined that are going to need that help.

And so there’s a greater amount of people you can help just by addressing contrast. It’s a very widespread problem. Even if you, they don’t even want to get into like technical stuff that is solving like a huge problem right there.

And it’s a huge problem, even if you’re not even thinking about accessibility. And I’ll a while ago, and we were just kind of perusing some restaurants, you know, in the area. And this one restaurant had a menu out front.

It was on yellow paper. All the headings were yellow. What? And I’m like, for the love of God, right? Like you’re a designer, right? Like, please, you know, like how, how are we making this bad of a mistake? You know what I mean? And, and like, I mean, we, we are really talking about accessibility there.

I mean, like, like you said, like I wear glasses now, I’ve only worn glasses for like two years, maybe three years now, but like, I can’t see a damn thing. Right. Like, like if I sit at my computer and I try to work without my glasses now.

And so when we go out to eat in the restaurants, in the dimly lit lighting, Right. And they hand me this menu that’s set in six point font, right. I just want to like strangle somebody, you know? Oh, I know.

And like, people are not thinking about it and that’s accessibility at a very bare bones level. Right. Like situational accessibility.

Agreed. Agreed. You know what I mean? And we always say accessibility can be temporary, right? I mean, in my case, it’s not temporary unless I get LASIK down the road or whatever, but like, it’s really frustrating when every time I go into a restaurant, I need to pull out my glasses or I need to, you know, some of the restaurants are still doing the QR code on the, on the phone and you got to like zoom in to try to see everything.

They’re just not making it easy for me to enjoy the experience, you know? And so I think that’s an example of where accessibility, you know, like you said, clean, a lot of people think of accessibility like, oh, people who are blind. Yeah. That’s really only one portion of accessibility.

I mean, the other portion is people wearing glasses. The other portion is people who have a more severe low vision, you know, disability. So.

I mean, I don’t even wear glasses yet. I mean, maybe I should, but I mean, like you’re talking about the menu the other day, I went into a restaurant and I couldn’t read the menu because they had the text. It was black text, but it was over an image and the image was, it wasn’t like screened back enough.

And I mean, I’m like, I can’t read this. Who can read this? Like what? Yeah. What, what a poor choice.

And so what I would say, like, you know, if you’re feeling overwhelmed with accessibility, I would say as, as first step, I like the idea of color contrast, Colleen, what I would say is take baby steps, right? Like don’t try to swallow accessibility in one gulp. You know what I mean? Take baby steps. I would say like, like an easy, a really easy thing you could do is when you create headings in InDesign, map them to an appropriate tag that pays big dividends.

Headings in a, headings in a PDF file or on the web are hugely beneficial to somebody using assistive technology because it gives them landmarks that they can jump to, to read what each section is about. Right. Just like a sighted user can do that.

Exactly. They can list sighted users scanning, scanning visually, but that’s how we give the non-sighted users the ability to do that. Exactly.

I mean, like when I’m reading a menu, it’ll say starters or appetizers, right? Then it’ll say soups and salads, right? You know, I have the ability as a sighted person to go to those different sections. Maybe tonight I’m not into a salad. Maybe I’m looking for fish or chicken or whatever.

And those headings help me find them much more easily. Right. And, and it helps people using assistive technology equally as well.

Yeah. So I think those are, those are some great tips. The last question I have is how much accessibility does a designer really need to know? And I think we, we have touched on this a little bit in our conversation, Colleen.

I mean, I think the answer to that question really depends on your situation in the role that you’re currently in. Right. And, and I think, you know, I know a lot of times like we, as designers, you know, we’re, we’re kind of lower down on the, on the totem pole, if you will.

There, there’s a lot of people above us who are making different decisions. But what I would do is try to have an honest discussion with everybody and express your thoughts about how much work you think this is going to take, how much additional work you think this is going to add, and just have the discussion of what would be the best workflow in your organization to achieve the desired results, you know? And again, you know, I mean, you know, no company wants to hear we, we need to hire somebody, but if it’s going to allow other people to work more efficiently, and then allow that person to do, you know, the role that they’re hired to do, that could be a great balance, you know? I mean, I think as a designer, there are some things that you need to learn how to do to help with accessibility, right? I think mapping styles to tags, every designer should know how to do that. Yes.

Make your life easier. Yeah. Yeah.

And as I said before, you know, a lot of times I feel like designer is not the right person to write alt text for, you know, for the, for the images, but, you know, you know, at Chax, we’ve, we’ve written a script that’ll create a spreadsheet of all the images in your document, and then you can go in and add the alt text to those images. And that could be done by a copy editor or a photo editor, or, you know, somebody whose role is, is more aligned with, with, with that particular task. As a designer, reading order is really important, right? And so InDesign gives us the ability to set both the reading order and the tag order.

Is it additional work? Sure it is. But in order to, for this information to get communicated appropriately, it’s got to get done. And you’re the designer working in InDesign, you’re probably the best choice to make that happen.

You know what I mean? Yeah. And if you’re a solo designer and you’re being tasked with this work, you’ve got to learn the whole process because, you know, if they’re, if you’re not working like as an employee in a department of people where there might be somebody else who can check your work or, or do certain parts of it, like certain technical parts or remediate or something, or maybe they send it out to, you know, a remediator externally. I mean, if you’re going to, if you’re tasking, if you’re being tasked yourself to do this, you have to learn the whole process or, I mean, obviously, or you get support from somebody like us, but I mean, it’s like what you said, like, it’s depends on what your role is.

But you got to be careful what you promise too, because you know, a lot of, a lot of designers are, they’re also not only promising accessible documents, they’re promising compliance. Yeah. Compliance, but they should be promising conformance.

Right. You know, we don’t want, because we don’t want to make lawyers out of ourselves. We’re not lawyers, we’re designers.

I’m not a lawyer, but I play one on TV. Yeah. Right.

You know? Yeah, no, I totally agree with you. You know, and again, for a lot of companies, I find that companies fall into one of two camps. There’s the company who just wants to check the Right.

And there’s the company that believes in this and believes that they’re doing something good and including everybody in their content. And yeah, you know, at Chax here, we teach a class we call designing with accessibility in mind. And in that class, we have some statistics about, it really just talks about the power of the purchase.

And there’s something like 2 billion people with visual disabilities in the world who have wallets and who buy things, right. And, you know, if you want to include everybody and you want to be included in, you know, the companies that they’re buying from, you know, it makes sense to, to, to make sure that the content that you create is accessible for everybody. As we were saying before, we’re not attorneys, but, but a surefire way of getting a letter from an attorney is to distribute content that can’t be read by a certain group of people.

Yeah. Even if they’re, even if your client is or workplace is not required by law to, to be accessible because there’s somebody could just, you don’t, anybody could sue anybody that doesn’t have, the law doesn’t have to apply to that company for them to get sued for inaccessible content. You’re totally right.

And, and the, the, what gets tricky about that, especially with the title two regulations that, that are coming next, is it next April? I think it is. You know, what it basically says is that if you’re doing work for any federal or state agency, your content has to be accessible. Right.

And a lot of us have state and federal agencies as clients. Right. So, so if you’re not thinking about accessibility right now, I highly encourage you to do so.

Right. You know, it’s, it’s coming, you know, it’s coming. If it’s not, if it’s not here now, it’s, it’s certainly going to be.

And you know, you just don’t want to be on the receiving end of that. You want them, you want them to open up your document or your webpage and they’re like, Oh shoot, I can read all this stuff. This is great.

You know, good job. You know you say you’re, you’re never going to get sued because your, your paragraph wasn’t tagged properly as a cat. Right.

Right. That’s not a thing. Right.

Or you’re age three, age two. Yeah. Right.

You know, there’s a, Oh, well that should be an H one. Right. You have it as an H3, I’m going to sue you.

No, that’s not a thing. Yeah. But like if somebody tries to read your content and they’re not able to, that’s when it’s going to become a problem.

So, so even as I was saying earlier, baby steps, right? Like even if you do accessibility at a fundamental level, it’s way better than nothing. Right. It’s not about perfection.

No, nope. It’s not at all. And I would say like, if you, I don’t know if I want to go out on a limb and say this, but I would say like, if you, if you map your styles to tags and you describe your images, that’s going to go pretty far.

That, that, that’s going to, that’s going to take you pretty far, but as long as you do it properly and make sure you tag the document, right. Make sure you, yeah. So, and, and to that point, Colleen, you know, you and I are going to be speaking at the design accessibility summit in November, October, I forget October, November of this year.

And there’s so many conferences coming up, but we’re going to be speaking there and there’s going to be a whole bunch of content talking about various levels of accessibility, right? I think I’m going to do accessibility and InDesign. I think you’re going to do advanced accessibility and InDesign and color. I’m going to be talking about accessible forms.

I’m also going to do a project based session on using InDesign for accessibility. So, you know, the, the, the content is out there guys for you to, to, to eat up. Right.

And, and so if you’re, if you’re like, I don’t know where to get started, how do I get in? How do I start learning about this design accessibility summit is a great place to start. So we hope that we’re going to see you there this year. Thanks everybody for tuning in today.

Colleen, thank you for having this honest and, and fun discussion with me. And I will, yeah, I will see you in a couple of months. Yep.

All right. Take care. Wow.

That was great. Thank you, Colleen and Chad. All right.

I know they momentarily forgot when the event was, so I wanted to come back and remind everyone, The Design and Accessibility Summit is October 20th through the 23rd online. And we really hope to see you all there. Thanks for tuning into the creative pro podcast and be sure to follow us.

If you enjoyed this episode, share it with your friends too. Until next time. Thank you.