Live Session – Part 2 (2026-27)

OK, Steena said that the link should now work. If we look at the community. Let's try it out.

Reload. There we go. Yeah.

This is the community. And, yeah. And then there are pin posts which we do for things that are super important.

And we have here the specific chat room basically for our course. Yeah. And, Anna, for your information, the link only goes out when we log in and click on the live session is starting now.

We cannot schedule that in advance or anything like that. So unfortunately the platform doesn't support that, which is a little bit annoying. Because like I can also not like log in like 20 minutes early and do stuff.

Because you would get like information there. And you see there has been a like. Great inspiration, I guess.

Great. Awesome. So people might be finding this now.

Good, good, good. All right. I have a couple of things that I want to talk about.

Very high level things. Again, this is just like getting started. Giving you a foundation for the accessibility.

And yes, all the links that I'm showing today will be in the study resources for this week. So don't fear. And if something's missing, feel free to ping me and I will add that.

One thing I want to talk about is this article from 2018. Which sounds like a long time ago, but in accessibility terms, it's like nothing. And this is from DQ and specifically from Glenn who created an article called, yeah, an article called LE wars, the accessibility interpretation problem.

I always found this like a little bit of a problem. Because we don't really have wars. You know, maybe tug of war.

Like tugging on a string and trying to show, you know, who's right or wrong. But in general, like I don't think that there's really war. But it's more like figuring out what does things mean?

How do we talk about things in a way that it's useful, supportive for everyone? And as you have seen, the language of WCAG sometimes is hard to decipher. So you only get two good interpretations and routine by just doing it, just testing, looking at the text, like, trying to figure out what things mean.

And like, get to your own interpretation. And then, like, seeing if that interpretation matches up with other people. Right?

That's just how it goes. There's no way around it. This is a friction process.

Like it just takes time. And you have to look at it. But the article is actually pretty good, despite the little bit out there, in my opinion, title.

And basically, the idea is that there's a lot of talk about what is the correct interpretation of WCAG and least effort and how to comply with regulations and stuff like that. And basically what they are arguing is that it's totally fine that there are different interpretations of WCAG. And some of them are better in some situations than they are in others.

You know. And I think that is actually a good thing to think about. Because you get into this, you know, that's slightly ableist phrase, but this analysis paralysis where you go, like, oh, I cannot decide, is this correct for WCAG or is it not?

And you go, you know, and you can't decide. And I have that sometimes. I do this for, like, 15 years now.

Like doing audits and stuff like that. And even I am sometimes in the situation where I do an audit and it goes really nicely and I do a couple of things, a couple of pages here, a couple of pages there. And then I come across something and I go like, "Oh, shoot.

I don't know if this is a pass or a fail." And you get into this like, "Oh, but I should know because I'm the expert here. I should know what's going on."

And then you really quickly realize that, no, sometimes there are things and circumstances that you don't know. But then you just make your best decision. Like you look through the text of WCAG, you look at the thing that is in front of you that you think you need to solve.

And then you try to be as practical as possible. So you look at like, is this even covered by WCAG? Is any of the success criteria applicable to it?

If it's not, then it's probably a WCAG pass. Then you can look at does this actually create a barrier for people with disabilities? If it doesn't create a barrier for people with disabilities, it might be on the verge of like being, you know, not meeting WCAG, but it doesn't matter if it's not, you know, if there is no barrier.

Like if people with disabilities can just use it, you don't have to think about like does this meet WCAG or not. Especially if it's like a 50/50 situation, stuff like that. And the most important here is that you don't want to over interpret WCAG, right?

So this is basically what they have as the optimized interpretation. And I want to skip to that really quickly. Because it's basically on the spirit and intent of the normative technical requirement.

So you look at the minimum compliance and you say, oh, it meets that. And then you and if you are on the verge of like, oh, does it meet it or doesn't it meet it. You go by your spirit and intent of the success criteria.

Say, like, oh, what does this actually want to do? And then you go on there. I caution to, like, be too casting too wide of a net.

Like, you know, we have this, like, discussion a lot. That you can get into this mode where you see accessibility issues even though they are not WCAG failures. And then you want to put them into WCAG somehow.

And then you say, like, oh, this is about the right success criterion for this. What I want to show. That's a bad way to do it.

Because your clients and I have been in those situations. will, like, look at the success criteria and will argue back and will say, like, oh, this does not meet the success criteria. And then your whole credibility for accessibility audits goes out of the window.

The client will now look at each and everything and say, like, hey, does this need to be done? You've been too strict at some point. Like, you know, maybe that's your MO and you do it all the time.

It's a terrible situation and not a lot of fun. So while you want to be strict with the standard, you want to underline every reason why you failed them with a good, you know, reasoning on why to do that. And I think the optimized interpretation fits with that.

Yeah. And there's like an article. And then there's the Ellie Wars actually like, I don't know what's called, like paper?

Yeah, paper. By Glenda Selms and Wilco Fierce, who yeah, basically wrote it like in more detail and tried to make it look more official. I don't know.

I always find it funny when people do like papers. It's not my style of communication. But yeah, I think it's good to read through it, especially like later before the exam.

If you say like, how do I approach stuff? I think it's still pretty good to have. I want to talk a little bit, any questions about that?

Should ask for questions. Going, going. Okay.

I want to show a little bit about the WAI website because I'm very proud still. I haven't worked for W3C since 2020. But I'm still very proud of this website because it has so much really, really good content and really good information on there.

And yeah. I can only recommend it. If you search for something, there's a resource for that in the way on the way website.

You can look at resources for content writers, designers, developers, getting started, trainers, educators, like everyone can have, yeah, it's represented there and they have curated lists of articles. the training course that gives you like an intro in accessibility, which is like, you know, not too dissimilar to what we are doing here, but we're doing it a little bit different, of course. I hope a little bit more in depth.

Then you have the web accessibility perspectives videos here on the right. And the featured resource. And you have all the news on the left here.

Including the what we're working on page that basically describes everything that, you know, way and W3C are working on in accessibility for this month. So it's pretty neat. And then you can go through these top categories.

And like, especially if you're starting out and you haven't had a lot of interactions with people with disabilities, I always recommend going to accessibility fundamentals. And then accessibility is about people. And then how people with disabilities use the web.

And this gives you, like, three really important resources, sections of a resource. how people with disabilities use the web as a resource. On accessibility disabled people and also like the technologies and techniques that they use.

So for example, stories of web users. These are individual users that all have like a description, like who they are. There's also now a little video there showing how they use the web.

There's also examples for the barriers they encounter and so on and so forth. Like it's really, really good. So if you have like, you know, an hour or so just reading through all these like examples of people, samples of people, then looking at and these are all interlinked.

So if I go to Lexi here, I can see what the technologies and adapt to strategies are. In this case, customized font and colors. That goes directly to that page.

Accessibility features. For presentation. Tools and techniques for presentation.

And then gives you the overview what you can do there. And then there's also the diverse abilities and barriers. For example, physical barriers.

And then you find at the bottom, like, what are the physical barriers? Like arthritis or tremors or seizures. And then you see the stories linked here as well.

So it's very -- I think it's a very nice way to, like, get a whole overview of, like, Like, what different disabilities are there? How do they actually interact with the assistive technologies? Because most of the people that I know do not have, you know, might have a disabled person in their lives or might have a disability themselves.

But like, it's such a broad topic and there's so much to learn that it's like really good to go through here and say, okay, there's RSI and all these other abilities and disabilities that are important. Yeah. And now we have all these like small videos there as well.

So I really, really, really suggest looking at this resource. It's really good. That's how people with disabilities are using the map on the website.

The question in the chat. What's your view on workflow regarding automation when doing audits? I will talk about this in a bit.

So I will not forget it, I hope. But I will talk about this in a second. Just going through these sections a little bit.

Then we have planning and policies. Also really good for like approaches for interim repairs. This is your oh, no, we're not accessible.

What should we do resource? Planning and managing accessibility, roles and responsibilities. Stuff like that is in here.

Super good. Then we have design and develop. This is where you get tips for writing, design and developing.

and video media tutorial and other tutorials like images and tables and forms and we will talk about those a lot when we're, yeah, during this course. And test and evaluate. This is when you do the testing.

There are the easy checks. Oops. Easy checks, which is basically what we're going to let you do for your examination.

Then a little bit of evaluation tools. Like how do you evaluate and how do you, you know, ensure that like your evaluation is good. Creating reports.

Involving users. Stuff like that. That's under test and evaluate.

And there's teacher advocate, which is basically what I'm doing right now, you know, but also like making accessible checklists, curricula, developing training, and the before and after demo I will talk about this in a second. And the business case, which also is like a very good resource. So if your company, for example, asks why should we make software accessible, then here are good reasons why to do it and how other companies are doing it.

Including quotes from the head of Barclays Bank or here we have Apple and Google as representatives talking about their case studies. It's a very good resource. It's now a couple of years old.

But yeah, no, I think it's very nice to see like what can drive people to make their stuff accessible. Speak about before and after demo. This looks very old because it is.

This was the first thing I worked on at W3C in 2010. And it was published on 2012. In 2012.

And basically what you have here, this is a great way to train yourself on like testing and stuff like that. Is you have accessible and inaccessible versions of the same website. Like they look pretty much the same.

I think those are pretty good reconstructions of the inaccessible website. Although they look like being from the mid 20, you know, 2000s because these designs are. But yeah, you can click around and see the inaccessible version and show the annotation and see what has been broken and get a nice like which WCAG success criteria do they break and why is that important and stuff like that.

So it's really good. I really like this resource. And we're gonna look through it a little bit during the week because it has good examples for most of the things.

And you know, like a news page and a ticket page including like a little survey with a form, you know, stuff like that. So it's not the most polished and sophisticated example page. But I think that's actually helpful for teaching and getting to it.

All right. Now I take the question about the automation when doing audits. Automation is important when doing audits.

There's no way around that. There is a lot that can be found using like some automated tools. But it's also very basic stuff.

So what we know from the research is that around 30 to 50% of all issues can be found using automation. And the rest needs human interpretation. For example, you can find if an image does not have an alternative text at all.

Like there's no alt attribute. But you cannot find reliably if there's an old attribute and that's empty, does that mean it's a redundant image and you don't have -- you shouldn't have an empty old attribute? Or does it need to have -- to be filled?

If there's something like a text alternative for the image, then the question is, is this text alternative sufficient for the image? Stuff like that. There's always like a lot of manual review and also some of the interactions like, you know, you might say, oh, this is like not strictly, there's no strictly right or wrong answer.

But the way that they implemented it is good enough. Right? Or is like has enough.

It's understandable enough. So I can pass this. These types of decisions just cannot be done by automated, fully automated tools.

What I do do is that I use a lot of like helper tools. And we will look at those during the time when, you know, when we go into the details what the individual defects are and what we're gonna do. So there is a developer browser called polypane that I love to use.

But I'm today I'm too afraid to switch to it. Because we because of Hampus's ordeal last time. But it's basically this type of browser.

And you can have like this is an outline for headings. And then you have all the headings in there. You highlighted all the different, like, accessibility landmarks.

And that gives you, like, a really easy way to, like, make your determination. Is this good enough? Or is this not good enough?

It's also, like, I should have paused the thing here. Yeah. And then you have all the heading levels here.

So that makes it very easy to test heading levels and making sure that like do the headings actually match what's on the website, right? And yeah. And that makes a lot of sense.

And can help, you know, just making it easier to test. But that's all that automated testing can do is make it easier for humans to make those decisions.

>> Are we going to be using this tool later on?

>> Maybe. There are -- so this is a commercial tool. I mean, you can start a free trial and I think it goes 100 days or something like that.

So it's relatively generous. But there will also be -- and we're going to talk about that a little bit more. Bookmarklets to do the same thing.

So I talked about like the headings here. If I go here to the top and I click here, my headings bookmarklet, this highlights all the headings here. Like h1, h1 here, h2, h2 here.

And there are hundreds of these types of bookmarklets. Like if I go here, I reload, click the nd bookmarklet. Which is pretty cool.

I can here click on tab order and it will also basically like polypane will do it. It numbers the individual focus stops on the page. So yeah.

I like to use the polypane browser. But I have used the bookmarklets for a long time. And they work pretty much the same.

Yeah. And there's no. Here are the headings again. Like you can -- you have the headings list.

Which is basically what we have seen in the sidebar here at polypane. Like if you look at this, this is exactly what we have here. So yeah.

It's like different views, different things. Every accessibility person likes a different tool best. So I don't want to tell you like, oh, you have to use this tool or that tool.

Because in the grand scheme of things, it doesn't really matter. You know? You just have to be there.

And yeah, and we will talk like next time when we meet, I will talk a little bit more about these bookmarklets, where to get them, how to install them and stuff like that. Because they are basically like little Java scripts that live in your bookmarks. So they're actually super easy to install.

Like I should just show it now. Why wait? So the best ones are under letools.com.

And then you can go to tools and to leauditbookmarklets. And there you can then go to the individual bookmarklets. So for example, there is a show focused element.

Like if I use the tab key, I can see that here focus visible is the tab now. We see how it flows through the page. And this adds an additional focus indicator to focus elements that displays above all content to reveal obscured focus issues.

And what you do to install those is you take them with your mouse and you try to not mark them. Come on. Why don't you get dragged?

Do I really have to use -- did he break that for me? Okay. This is weird.

You can just drag and drop them into your bookmarks bar. But I do the complicated thing now, which is copy link address and then you create a bookmarklet here. Like bookmarks.

Do I do that here? Yes. Here we go.

And then you add one. And you put the address in here. You don't have to do that.

You just drag and drop it to the top. How do I edit this? Okay.

Probably I should have just -- oh, here at the right. Okay. There you paste in thing and then you say focus.

What did it say? Show focused element. I should say that.

So focused element. This usually happens automatically. I need to save it somewhere.

No, it's okay. Right? It didn't do it.

This is embarrassing. Or do I need to do JavaScript? This is not the best way to do this.

Oh, yeah, then it works. Okay. Okay.

And now it's here on the top left in my bar. And now if I go to let's go to the poly pin app again. Website.

And now if I click on show focused element, it will show this focus outline and will also say what it is, like, what the accessible name is and what the type is. So, this is a button. This is a link.

The button again. Link, link. This is also a button.

It looks like an input field. Here is a button that only says four. That's not what we want.

Here's a link without any accessible text. Start free trial link. Match video link.

And so on and so forth. So that's basically how you use the tools. And I have to figure out why -- didn't let me drag and drop it to the focus bar.

But usually you just drag, you can drag any link to your bookmarks bar. But it doesn't -- oh, now it lets me. See?

Does it do it? Now I want to try again. No. Would be too easy.

Nope. There we go. Anyway.

This leads too much. But, yeah. So these are the tools that we usually use.

use. This is a long list of things. And you can also put them into folders.

So I think I do have -- no, that's not the one. Yeah, I usually have an accessibility folder that I use. This is not set up as I would have that.

But as I said, we will set this up over the next few weeks. I record a separate video. Couple of like just random things on accessibility.

This LE weekly newsletter is very good. If you want to learn more about accessibility, I can recommend to subscribe. It has like one featured link and then other links beneath it.

And there's a live that goes back to, I want to say, yeah, almost ten years. So I will not require you to read. But like it's really good to have these things and get them into your inbox and get like a little bit of a feel of like what's going on, what's discussed in accessibility.

I think that's useful. Yeah, Hilde did, Hilde de Vries, who is a friend of mine, he did an article, what's new in WCAG 2.2, a couple of years ago. I really like that.

But it's, yeah, it's WCAG 2.2 stuff. I don't know if I want to include that, but like his blog, also very, very good. And I recommend that.

Yeah. I talked about the free training course from W3C. Introduction to web accessibility. As I said, it matches a little bit of what we are doing here.

But it's, I think it's a nice supplemental thing to do. If you feel like, oh, I want something. And it also has like for, I think, 99 dollars, you get like a verified certificate that you can, I don't know, put on your wall and pretend that you are a doctor or something like that.

Yeah. And I think that's actually it. I have -- oh, yeah.

I want to talk a little bit about WCAG EM 2.0. And this is a brand-new standard. Look at that.

But Eric, it's not a standard, because it's not a recommendation. That's true. I should not call it a standard.

It's a working group node. working group notes is basically the working group just publishing articles. And this is one of those.

And this evaluation methodology gives you a little bit more context on like how to select what to test and how to report it and just make sure that when you do the test, you have picked all of the relevant things, like all of the relevant pages and, you know, maybe a few random pages as well. Which I have never seen anyone do. But it's in there.

And then like how do you define what you're testing against and stuff like that. Really good. Just want to place this here.

So you have it for future reference, basically. Yeah, and I think that's basically everything I have prepared. Any questions, anything I can do.

And yeah, you get everything here into, as soon as I have the videos ready, I will put them into the platform and I will also post in the community that they are ready. I don't think I can ping you in there. So I don't know how that works, but my goal is to have these ready at the end of the day when we have these meetings or, you know, early the next day.

Sometimes work and life comes in between that. Getting it out on the same day. But usually you should have the recordings at the end of the day.

the recordings, the pre-recorded sessions from Hampus for next week, they should also be published. Well, they will be published at three, I think. So, if the automated publishing works, who knows.

But it worked so far, so I'm positive. All right. Any questions?

Going gun. Okay. Thank you very much.

Have a really, really nice week. And take care. And, yeah, see you in two weeks.

Bye.