Hi friends 👋🏻

The big feature of my week is WordPress Accessibility Day, a 24-hour global event with speakers and attendees from around the world. Registration gets you access to all the session recordings through the end of the month. Sign up up now and join some sessions starting Wednesday Oct 7 at 11am ET / 8am PT.

To stick with the web accessibility theme, this week's email is a roundup of some favorite free accessibility resources for you to read and bookmark!

Want links to recent emails or a sign-up link to share? Go to The Digital Landscape sign-up page​

1. Making WCAG easier to understand

If you're a website owner (or designer/developer), you've probably heard of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG).

But when you go to the official WCAG website to look at the current guidelines, the amount of content feels pretty overwhelming. The actual standards documents themselves are long and complex (as you would expect), and even the "Quick Reference Guide" is daunting and technical.

Enter the WCAG in Plain English resource from the accessibility consultants at Aaardvark.

The WCAG in Plain English resource includes all 87 success criteria (yes, there are 87 of them), and provides simple summaries of what you need to do to meet the level A, AA, and AAA compliance standards.

2. Image Alt Text Decision Tree

Lots of web content managers know they're supposed to add alt text to every image, but don't know enough about the rules to do this well.

The Alt Text Decision Tree helps solve this problem! Bookmark this link to return to next time you have alt text to write. After a few times using it you'll know the rules and be on your way to providing more useful and meaningful alt text.

3. Wave Browser Extensions

This simple extension is available for most major browsers and allows you to get a summary of accessibility issues for a single URL at a time. Install the WAVE extension for your browser.

Note that this kind of automated accessibility checking tool can only detect some accessibility issues. For example, it can detect images without alt text, but can't tell you if an image is in fact decorative, and therefore doesn't need alt text. But it's a good place to start!

4. Screen Reader Testing

It's important to test how a web page will be experienced by visitors using a screen reader.

• For Windows, download the popular NVDA app.
• For Mac, use the built-in VoiceOver utility.

Until next time ✨

— Ed Harris (your digital strategy guide)

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