WEBVTT

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Don Norman has a great quote about
that accessability is about making it easier for everyone. I like to say
that accessibility is the cousin of usability: they're

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sisters, and it's because you're optimizing your code, simplifying your
layouts, you know – maybe a little strategically for screen readers;
knowing that things like maps are going to get in the way or that a layout is
going to impact the way that a screen reader accesses it, and it's the same
for – if you've done any SEO or played around with the way Googlebot thinks and
parses a page, it's very structured; it's very strategic, and once you realize how
it does that, you can think that way when you're designing as well – so,

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plain English; consideration for the end user; browser and device compatibility;
you know, this is where usability and accessibility are combined with that
goal of useful, usable, searchable, you know, and the key is quick and
efficiently and painless – really, that's critical: like I said, for
accessibility, even more than usability. So, accessibility impacts SEO, and
the reason is because the better the experience and time on site is the main

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factor for – the Nielsen Net ratings, maybe ten years ago, set the standard
from, you know, number of unique visits to time on site, which is why Facebook and
other sites try to keep you locked in to view their content, because
their advertisers incentivize them with time on site. Well, the more you do that,
the more Google's algorithm likes your site. Making graphical information

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searchable – all graphical information: Google likes that, so that's
a ranking indicator. Screen reader testing can also
help you figure out what's missing from your SEO keywords. So, if you look
at your Alt text, you can be, like, "Oh, wait a minute; we haven't optimized
this." Now, the thing I should say is that if you optimize your usability,
it doesn't necessarily impact accessability, and if you optimize SEO, it doesn't

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necessarily impact accessibility. So, it's really the other way around: modify,
optimize accessibility can improve SEO, can improve usability, right. It's
not mutually exclusive. It's not mutually bi-directional – so, look to optimize areas
of SEO and accessibility overlap. What are those? So, video transcription, for
example, image captioning, Alt attributes, title tags, headers (H1, H2), link anchor

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text, on-site sitemaps, table of contents or breadcrumbs, content ordering, size and
color contrast of text, semantic HTML. So, this is an example from SEO Moz that, you
know – it's like if you went to this page and you're trying to, you know,
submit your taxes for tax season, which of these would – which
of these – if you didn't see the page, calculate your tax return or online

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tax return, tax return estimate, tax return refund / rebate, you know; it's that
the screen reader's literally reading all that out, so you're
starting to think about, hopefully, the experience – the optimization opportunity
as audible, you know, something you hear. So, what does it sound like? What does it
sound like? Does it have meaningful descriptive text that's just not going to
be a bunch of garbage? A lot of people when they're listening to screen readers,

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they get overwhelmed – it's totally overwhelming. It's because it's like "blah-blah-blah-blah-blah": most
blind users listen to their voices in a much, much faster pace like that.
So, it's like, you know: two, three times as fast – like, it's going like this, and
it's like all this information. But the reason why it's overwhelming for, you
know, someone who's not familiar with it is because – it's all the garbage that's in

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there, all the tags and all that – all this just raw web architecture is
revealed through voice, and it's totally nonsensical, and the reality is that
screen-reader users have to listen to all that, so they have to listen to, you know,
60 to 80% junk to find the one or two things that're meaningful and valuable to
them. Right, so you can help by the way that you order your titles, the way that

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you, you know, define your headers, define your title tags, your
your Alt tags, your image captions, and so forth and so on.