WEBVTT

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Don Norman has a great quote about

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that accessability is about making
it easier for everyone. I like to say

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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

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layouts, you know – maybe a little
strategically for screen readers;

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knowing that things like maps are going
to get in the way or that a layout is

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going to impact the way that a screen
reader accesses it, and it's the same

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for – if you've done any SEO or played
around with the way Googlebot thinks and

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parses a page, it's very structured; it's
very strategic, and once you realize how

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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;

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you know, this is where usability and
accessibility are combined with that

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goal of useful, usable, searchable, you
know, and the key is quick and

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efficiently and painless – really,
that's critical: like I said, for

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accessibility, even more than usability.
So, accessibility impacts SEO, and

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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

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from, you know, number of unique visits to time on site, which is why Facebook and

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other sites try to keep you locked in
to view their content, because

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their advertisers incentivize them with
time on site. Well, the more you do that,

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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

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a ranking indicator. Screen reader testing can also

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help you figure out what's missing from
your SEO keywords. So, if you look

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at your Alt text, you can be, like, "Oh, wait
a minute; we haven't optimized

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this." Now, the thing I should say is that
if you optimize your usability,

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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,

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optimize accessibility can improve SEO,
can improve usability, right. It's

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not mutually exclusive. It's not mutually
bi-directional – so, look to optimize areas

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of SEO and accessibility overlap. What
are those? So, video transcription, for

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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

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color contrast of text, semantic HTML. So, this is an example from SEO Moz that, you

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know – it's like if you went to this page
and you're trying to, you know,

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submit your taxes for tax season,
which of these would – which

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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

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the screen reader's literally reading
all that out, so you're

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starting to think about, hopefully, the
experience – the optimization opportunity

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as audible, you know, something you hear.
So, what does it sound like? What does it

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sound like? Does it have meaningful
descriptive text that's just not going to

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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

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blind users listen to their voices
in a much, much faster pace like that.

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So, it's like, you know: two, three times as
fast – like, it's going like this, and

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it's like all this information. But the
reason why it's overwhelming for, you

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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

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revealed through voice, and it's totally
nonsensical, and the reality is that

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screen-reader users have to listen to all that, so they have to listen to, you know,

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60 to 80% junk to find the one or two
things that're meaningful and valuable to

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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

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your Alt tags, your image captions,
and so forth and so on.

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