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Edlio ADA Webinar

Added Jun 17, 2019 •

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Ivan from the Edlio team discusses the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), and how it applies to your school's website. We go over some tips for administrators and teachers, as well as the built-in tools Edlio offers to help schools comply with ADA regulations. We also share details of our new partnership with AudioEye, for schools that want a more in-depth ADA solution.

Show Transcript

So I will be discussing our Edlio's brand new partnership with Audioeye we're very excited I'm Ivan been with the company for six years so glad to get a chance to speak to you guys about this new partnership. We'll also have Shannon, Colby looking at some of the chat if there's any questions to make sure that I or we are addressing those questions so feel free to ask questions what is in check, or if you can ask us verbally, anything's fine this is open. Let me just get this presentation started and we'll talk about Audioeye and what it's about. So Audioeye is a company that deals with web accessibility right, and so web accessibility. So a major difference between what Audioeye does and what you might have/be used on some of these automatic report generating site scanners is that Audioeye's solution actually not only checks your site to make sure that all accessibility issues are caught, it it does a manual check and it also has a has an automatic check it also has a manual check. So people actually go in to make sure everything is perfect. And not only is that reporting done, they actually also do the changes, or what they call remediation, to your site to make sure that it's accessible and compliant. So during kind of our presentation here, we'll be going over what it means to be accessible and what it means to be compliant, and this is another reason why we're all very excited to be working with this company is that they have a similar kind of vision of what accessibility really should be. To me, or the way I kind of visualize it is, it's the two sides of the same coin. So you have accessibility which means what? Well you have all these statistics that maybe sometimes we don't really think about too often. I personally have to admit, once we started dealing heavily with ADA, you know Americans with Disabilities Act, requirements of WCAG, all these legal issues at some of our clients were having, these OCR letters, right. So you get into this kind of rabbit hole of fixing legal and compliance issues like compliance compliance compliance which is basically what? It's your, your website is not sufficiently accessible, and that opens you up to legal trouble. But in reality, all these laws have been created to make sure that no matter what your disability might be, or no matter what your situation is, you should have a non-discriminatory kind of experience when you're consuming information on the website. So when we talk about accessibility, it's what's right; Who is our constituencies, who are our parents, who is our visitors to our site? You know speaking strictly on the Edlio site, we only work with K-12 schools. Audioeye is you know nationwide, they work with huge companies and organizations like the FCC, Kia Motors, things like this will go into that as well. But, strictly speaking on our end, we as a company do want to make sure that everybody has access to consume this information, which most of the time is parents. So, when we joined first with Audioeye, we also learned a lot more and more detail about disabilities. They have so many different types, they have motor disabilities, cognitive disabilities, visual, auditory, things like this. So all in all, it's about 41 million Americans have disability. That's one in five people that visit the site might have, or would have some kind of disability. So this is very important to make the site accessible for them, again so they can consume that information, right. So, on the legal end of course, what we have to protect all our customers from, are these legal issues right. So they are, you know everybody's familiar probably already in the Section 508, the 504, anything federally funded has to provide anti-discriminatory, again accessible ways of consuming that information. And basically, the website now is treated like a place of public accommodation, so it's like a brick-and-mortar building. The same way you're required to have ramps and things like this, or Braille, now your website has to also satisfy these requirements in the digital world. So this is what Audioeye basically specializes in. Again, the unique factor when working with Audioeye, we turn the product on for the website, it's a very simple process. We turn it on and there's a bit of coding that we have to put. And immediately they start doing after activation, they start doing the reporting by the testing and discovery, basically what is the current state of the site. Again, this is a great partnership because Audioeye strives for double-a level compliance according to the WCAG 2.0 currently moving into 2.1, so that's in the works. And as you might know from our end, at launch our sites are we go for that level as well, double-a level. So that completely protects you of course from legal issues and OCR letters, but beyond that it makes the sites extremely accessible as close as possible, right. So what happens during this period, right? After we activate the product, they start doing their automatic checking of the site with some automatic remediations. Remediation is their word for fixing issues, so they might capture things. So, I'll give you some examples of remediation. An automatic remediation that might immediately happen is let's say you have missing alt tags on social media icons, so they already know what those are, their AI catches that and fills that in. Other example, again you might have an alt tag missing from an image, they would plug in something just to you know, fill that gap, and then, the point is, then you have a manual process where they get a report and use all the changes that have been made, and you got some human eyes on that as well to make sure that we don't have things like false positives. So what's a false positive? Let's say we plug in a placeholder alt tag into an image, but it just says image. That's technically compliant, there's something there, but is that accessible? So somebody needs to go in and put in the actual descriptor of the text. All in all, no matter if it's done automatically or manually, you as a client don't have to worry about any of this. So that's the real beauty about the product. On our end, Edlio provides these webinars that, or in our help center if you're familiar with Edlio's help center, we have some articles, that you know we'll do our best to be also educational, on the best practices to stay compliant and stay accessible. As you're of course as you're creating content, sometimes if you don't know about certain things you might you know, put let's say a bright yellow text on a white background, you need better contrast, right. So, we do have best practices, but when working with Audioeye, you don't really have to worry about that. The way the process works is their changes actually happen on top of the site, they don't really touch the code, so everything is done through the experience of the person visiting the site. No matter what reader, what it might be using, the fixes are done, again, either automatically or manually, and it's always on, it's always checking. As you continuously post content, the site is being scanned and their staff is being pinged if there's any potential issues. So this is step two and three; Remediation, validation, optimization, basically means "hey, we're getting these reports", again that's done on their end, "and we're starting to fix them." After everything is reached at double-a level compliance, you get your Audioeye trusted certificate, which gives you that piece of mind that moving forward from this point on, we do have reached that accessibility and compliance level identified by Audioeye as expected, or the needed level of compliance and accessibility. And again, that can take a few days because it is, or it might take a few weeks even, depending on the size of the site, you know how many pages you have, what are my potential issues. But again, as we discussed earlier, and you've been informed as well, Edlio takes accessibility very seriously and we have made plenty of changes to the code. A further benefit of this exciting partnership that we have is that Audioeye is also feeding us information back to us as a company to make sure you know that we are making the proper changes as well. We've been on our own so far, we're doing a very good job, of course, editing the code, making sure that you guys are protected, and to limit some of the things that your users can do so as to not to be noncompliant. So let's say we have a portion of the coding where if you're creating a page, header one is reserved only for the name of the page. Users can not use header one inside of the building of the page, right because that's not compliant. You have to use headers appropriately. Headers for the name of the page and then header 2 and 3,4 that follows inside of the page. So we do things like this. As we have this partnership now, Audioeye might send us a report saying, "Well this is something that you guys need to change system wide." And that's great because moving forward, these changes would be pushed across for everybody. That's that's the that's a portion of what Audioeye does basically to protect and again make sure the sites are accessible and compliant moving forward. And I just wanted to again reiterate the main difference between this solution and automated services that you might've heard  about. Site improve wave, whatever some free, some paid. A lot of these services first are automatic only, so this captures about 35 to 40% of issues because sometimes you have to have actual eyes on the information being created or the content being created so you protect against false positives, again. A physical example is if you have a ramp for wheelchair ramp, if it's like a 60-degree angle is that they can say you can technically say we have a ramp, but it's not usable, right. So you have to have a solution that actually is accessible, even though it might be technically compliant. So, Audioeye makes sure it does that to capture all issues. But the biggest difference is that we don't just provide you a report that says, "Okay, here's your issues go fix them", they do everything themselves. And if it's something that we need to do as your CMS provider, on our end, we again will get the report and will make these changes system wide. But, moving forward, once you turn this on, within a few weeks, you'll get your Audioeye certificate saying that you have reached that level of compliance. So that's the that part of it, scanning and keeping the sites compliant. The second part of it is their assistive tools, right. So once you turn on the site, the process of the following: you approve your launching of this, we're putting the code, they start scanning within 7 days, the initial scan is in the automatic changes are complete, and your little assist or allied tool, the man in blue appears on your side. So this is the fcc.gov, the government organization, they work with Audioeye, here is their assistive tool. So if I'm a visiter to the website, what do I see right, as a parent or a prospective parent, or just anybody from the community. what is happening Alright here we go. So again, within 7 days your site will be given this icon and then once I open it as a visitor, there's a couple things I can see it right. So one is the link just to Audioeye to see what they do, we can close this out. This is the place where we have your certificate. It clarifies that we are at level 2 or double-a level according to WCAG 2.0. And again, once that certificate is provided, it would appear here. We also have, we'll also plug in an accessibility statement for the district of school. Then we have our help desk where users can come here and if there's any issues/questions, this is how your visitors can contact the help desk of Audioeye. And then we have a couple of assistive tools here to help consume the site. So if the user is using already their own reader or whatever, they can keep doing that, but if they prefer to use the assistive tools provided by Audioeye, they have an option to do that. So we have some basic things here like the reader that, sorry let me just get rid of this, a statement, so we got rid of the statement, so this kind of converts the site into more of a basic view. You can change the contrast, so depending maybe if you're color blind and you need a different contrast to consume information, they have that provided. We also have fonts, so this is the dyslexia font that has proven to improve consumption of information by people with dyslexia, etc. You can zoom in and out. We also have a reader, the player, it's kind of hard to demo that during webinars like this, but this basically starts reading off from the top and then with "tab" and "enter" you can get anywhere on the site. Unless if they have the voice option, which is in beta currently,  which is kind of like Siri or Cortana, you're basically speaking to the site. "I want to go this link or whatever." They're still working on that, once that's officially launched, that will be announced. And then lastly, again we have several different options to present the website. So again, no matter what, maybe you have a motor disability, that you know prevents, that requires you to, you know do less clicks. So if I go into the site map, it basically breaks down the site in different ways. So this is "browse by category", what are the kind of topdown navigational menus, footer, footers like headers, footers, etc., and social media. Or, we can go into the page elements, which kind of breaks down also the main elements of the page in different ways. Like landmarks. the headings on this current page, whatever links are provided on this page, images, and I think those were all more forms, right. So again, we break it down in several different ways to make it as easy as possible for users to consume that information. So this is the second part of Audioeye, which is they are provided assistive tools. Just to kind of maybe clarify, again the process and the steps unless there's any questions because they're, I kind of went off and okay I don't see anything, you guys will let me know. I just want to make sure everybody is completely clear on how Audioeye works right. So with, again with this partnership, note that we do have discounted pricing. So if anybody's interested, reach out to your client success team, clientsuccess@edlio.com, is the email or give us a call to discuss that, but we do have preferred pricing because of our partnership. So what happens with your site when you're ready to go with Audioeye? Again, you give us the go, we plug in this code into our site, they turn on the service on their end, so it might take a little bit of time. What they do is they actually gather all the clients and then twice a month they switch it off. So if you sign up on the 7th, everything will be turned on the 15th, so that's one thing to consider. Once that's turned on, again, they start doing the automatic and manual reporting, and then the manual- automatic and manual remediations and changes start to take place. Which, again, that might take up to 3 months according to their statistics, but again there working with some humongous sites and organizations that have not necessarily done the changes that we have made, so we're very confident this will be done a lot sooner. But the point is, even if it takes 3 months, what does that really mean? It means that you have eyes like people actually working to identify and fix any potential issues. You as clients can request reports on what has been done if you're interested. Today, I had a meeting with a prospective client, and they said, "Well I would like to get maybe a monthly a report on what has been going on so I can use that as education for my existing team; My teachers, my admins, maybe adjust this behavior, this content creation process, so we are complying right off the bat or accessible right off the bat, we don't have to wait for Audioeye to help us." But, either way, Audioeye's whole philosophy is,"You just continue doing what you're doing, don't worry about being a master in accessibility. Add your content, your videos, your pictures, whatever you need, we'll take care to make sure that you retain that double-a level compliance." So you're protected, and, most importantly, 20% of your visitors fall within some kind of a disability. Again whether it's cognitive, motor, things we don't even think about that much, but now that it's in front of us, we realize how important that is. 1 out of 5, that's a big number. So making sure that the sites are accessible for those people is key. So, once that checking/remediation is done, you get your certificate, it gets updated on your guy, this little assistive tool again appears only a week after you turn on your Audioeye, and you have options. So if you want to hide some of these assistantive tools, that's fine, some clients only keep you know the certificate and the help desk. Or you can just use the full kind of list of products that they offer. And that's it! So that's a subscription-based model as well, it's pretty much out of your hands at that point, Audioeye does everything. I am pretty much done, it's pretty simple I mean that's we're super excited about this, because it's so simple. It's basically turn it on, we'll take care of everything. That's about it. If there's any questions, again if you're, anybody's interested to find out more information, reach out to our client success team or to me. I'm Ivan, Ivan@edlio.com. We're all available to discuss, maybe do further individual meetings with you, with your team's maybe, I usually handle those. But this is pretty straightforward.

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