Q4 Inc.

Good morning, everyone, and welcome to the latest in Q4's e-learning series. My name is Jay Bhatia. I'm a solutions engineer here at Q4. As always, we invite you to review our past events at media.q4inc.com under videos and share any questions for our panelists or the Q4 Solutions team by following the contact information in the footer. Today's discussion will be chock full of insights, tips, and guidance around website accessibility, how it operates on a site, and why it's critical to keep this a focus in 2023 and beyond. We're excited to bring together a group of undeniable accessibility experts from both Q4 and our partner, Essential Accessibility. I'll run through some introductions. First, Emily Olmsted, our Senior Manager in Client Success at Q4, our Manager in Web Development and Q4's Champion of Web Accessibility, Al Romano. From Essential Accessibility, Peter Loftus, the Program Management Lead at Essential. And lastly, prolific speaker, accomplished executive and absolute maven in the accessibility data, Randall. First, we'll meet up with Al Romano to discuss accessibility as a strategy here at Q4 and the role Essential Accessibility plays within that framework. Al?

Thanks, Jay. So at Q4, we understand that the best approach to accessibility is an ongoing and proactive strategy. And the main benefits of this strategy are in the four boxes you see before you there. Build inclusion and trust in your brand, mitigate business risk and improve SEO, improve the overall experience for your visitors, and the ability to deliver your story on assistive technology. To achieve these, we partnered with the industry leader, Essential Accessibility, to audit our website offerings on an ongoing basis in compliance with our WCAG 2.1 AA standards using both automated scanning and manual remediation methods. We also utilize EA's accessibility training courses to help upskill our teams on accessibility best practices across various business units where accessibility intersects with the various roles we play in our web delivery pipeline. So what this partnership means for Q4 clients is the multiple benefits that we provide from those four major tenants. So helping build inclusion and trust in your brand, accessibility, improving the overall visitor experience, including users of assistive technology, or people simply experiencing a various stage of a disability, whether it's temporary or permanent, having an accessible website helps to mitigate business risk while also improving your search engine optimization rankings on Google. Google crawlers kind of use your website much like someone who uses a screen reader would. And lastly, being able to deliver your story on assistive technology so that you can get the most amount of people interacting with your message. And so these are the main reasons why we've partnered with Essential Accessibility to help move forward our accessibility offerings. And now over to Dana over at EA.

Thanks. So to kick off today's conversation, I'd like to start with what is accessibility? So to understand that accessibility is really about ensuring that there are no barriers in providing an equitable user experience to all, regardless of disability or the way that they access technology. So when we talk about accessibility, it's important to understand the difference between accommodation and accessibility. On the screen, we have three different versions of the same scene, and the three pictures are labeled inaccessibility, accommodation, and accessibility. So the first picture to the left shows three people at a board, and one is shorter and can only reach a small area of the board. One is tall and can reach almost the entire board, and the third is in a chair and they cannot reach the board at all. And in this case, this is inaccessible because this design excludes people. Now, in the second picture, we show the shorter person standing on a box. The seated person has a ramp and that helps them get onto a taller riser. And now they can all reach the board. This is an example of accommodation. And accommodation provides reasonable alternatives and assistance to give each person equivalent access. But the third picture shows where all three people are on the ground using the board. In this picture, the board has been made lower and larger, and there's no need for boxes or risers, and this environment has no barriers. So this is a demonstration of true accessibility. So on the screen, I'm now showing a statistical graph or a normal curve. And the reason we're showing this is to understand the concept of universal design. So universal design is a broader concept. And we'll also talk about accessible design and sort of how these two play together. So universal design is the creation of an environment that can be accessed and understood and used by the greatest extent possible, by as many people as possible, regardless of their age, size, ability, or disability. So in universal design, we serve the broadest range of users possible, rather than trying to address individual accessibility or inclusion objectives. So a real-world example of this could be, for example, when selecting a brand color. I'll use the example of blue here. So, for example, blue is a color that's preferred by the widest demographic and also can be perceived by the widest demographic. Now, on the next slide, I'm showing a picture of many people standing, and they're in the shape of a fingerprint. Now I want to sort of touch on inclusive design or accessible design. So inclusive design considers the range of human diversity and understanding their abilities, their language, their culture, their gender, their age, and all other forms of human difference. And inclusive design recognizes that people's needs are diverse, and what works for the average person doesn't meet the needs of many individuals. So inclusive design focuses on exploring ways of serving the full spectrum of people who make up a diverse market. So while I use the example of blue in the previous slide, where accessibility comes into play is understanding, if you've selected blue, understanding how that blue works alongside other colors and as the contrast of that blue next to other shades of blue or perhaps black or white or dark blue are perceivable by people with low vision. And that would be an example of accessible designs.