Victor Font Consulting Group, LLC

The DEX Intranet Specialists

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Accessibility Compliance

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Accessibility icon

As of 2017, an estimated 253 million people worldwide are visually impaired: 217 million have moderate to severe impairments and 36 million are blind. (Source: World Health Organization)

Do you provide your site visitors with an inclusive experience? Does your site comply with the The Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990? Does your site meet accessibility guidelines for the visually impaired? How about other accessibility laws and policies?

Test your site with the Web Accessibility Evaluation Tool, then come back and talk to us.

Roman Numerals in Copyright: Genesis Framework

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Roman numbers board, Image from Pixabay

Problem

This article is in response to a question posted on the Studio Press Community Forum:

For the copyright in the footer, how can I change it to display as Roman numerals instead of the standard Arabic digits?

https://studiopress.community/topic/copyright-in-footer-displayed-as-roman-numerals/

Response

There is no native PHP function to convert integers to Roman numerals. To convert the Genesis Framework copyright shortcode output, we have to create our own function to convert the year and a shortcode to display the modified copyright text.

Solution

The best place to start is by copying the shortcode supplied by the Genesis Framework, renaming it, and modifying it to display the Roman numerals.

The source code for the Genesis Framework copyright shortcode can be found in the Genesis /lib/shortcodes/footer.php file. The copied and modified code is:

The source for the number conversion function is:

Finally, call the new shortcode.

Since this new shortcode is based on the Genesis supplied shortcode, the attributes are the same. Here's the list:

  • copyright – Default: ©
  • first – Text/markup to place between the copyright symbol and the copyright date.
  • before – Text/markup to place before the copyright.
  • after – Text/markup to place after the copyright.

How to use

Insert the shortcode as shown in the code above into the footer. Here's an example that demonstrates the new shortcode's output:

Copyright © MMIII–MMXXIII Victor M. Font Jr.

Keyboard Accessibility & Formidable Forms Collapsible Sections

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Formidable Forms logo
Formidable Forms Drag & Drop Form Builder

If you know anything about us, then you know we love Formidable Forms. It is our go to product for building any form related page or even complex applications for WordPress powered sites.

Today, many countries have some sort of accessibility laws enacted that are designed to provide full and equal enjoyment to the disabled who access our online offerings. In the United States, this is primarily the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 (ADA).

As a website owner, you are most likely required to comply with ADA Title III. Title III prohibits disability-based discrimination for “places of public accommodations”. Places of public accommodation generally include private businesses that are open to the public, such as restaurants, hotels, movie theaters, museums, and doctor’s offices.

U.S. Federal Courts and the U.S. Department of Justice hold that while the ADA does not specifically address web accessibility, its language is still broad enough to include websites as part of business operations. The global nature of the Internet ensures your website is a place of public accommodation.

Accessibility Standards

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) develops international standards for the Web: HTML, CSS, and many more.

The W3C Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) develops standards and support materials to help us understand and implement accessibility.

We can use W3C WAI resources to make our websites, applications, and other digital creations more accessible and usable to everyone.

The W3C WAI developed the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). It is the international standard for web accessibility. US courts recognize WCAG 2.0, in effect since 2008, as the standard for ADA compliance.

In the European Union, the EU web accessibility directive effective in EU member states as of 23 September 2018 references WCAG 2.1 as the standard to be used.

Accessibility is Good for Business

The Business Case for Digital Accessibility describes that accessibility can drive innovation, enhance your brand, extend market reach, and minimize legal risk. It includes direct and indirect benefits of accessibility, and the risks of not addressing accessibility adequately. It provides case studies and examples that demonstrate how continued investment in accessibility is good for your organization. Please take the time to read this important resource.

Keyboard Accessibility

To accommodate people with Physical or Motor Disabilities, a key WCAG requirement is to provide keyboard accessibility to any area that requires someone to click a mouse button to display its content. This means that anywhere you click to show content also has to work by using the keyboard alone, either by pressing the return key or space bar. Examples include, but aren't limited to, drop-down menus and collapsible areas.

While the Formidable Forms developers have done a great job in making their product accessible in a general sense, there's one area that appears to have been overlooked. If you create a form with collapsible sections, those sections are not accessible from the keyboard. You can't toggle them open or closed using the keyboard alone. Luckily, there's a pretty simple fix.

Tabindex

The first step is to add tabindex="0" to the h3 element rendered as the collapsible section's title.

Collapsible Section HTML Before

Navigate to the form's customize HTML page and find the HTML source code for the collapsible section.

Collapsible Section HTML After

Add tabindex="0" to the h3 element.

tabindex="0" allows elements besides links and form elements to receive keyboard focus. It does not change the tab order, but places the element in the logical navigation flow, as if it were a link on the page.

Collapsible Section jQuery

Add the following jQuery to the after fields area on the form's customize HTML page.

This jQuery monitors the h3.frm_trigger keydown event and fires the element's click() event that Formidable uses to open/close the collapsible section. The keydown event is fired for all keys, regardless of whether they produce a character value.

However, since the keyboard accessibility standard specifies the Enter key and Space bar only as the triggers, we have to limit the keydown even to those two specific keys. That's what the "event.which" line in the code does. The events that fire are 13 for the Enter key and 32 for the Space bar.

Since, we're monitoring a class that is part of every collapsible section, using the "this" keyword to trigger the click event ensures that this simple jQuery snippet will work for all collapsible sections on your form.

There's one last thing about the jQuery code. The event.preventDefault(); is necessary to prevent some strange behavior with the Chrome browser. In testing, we found that pressing the space bar causes the entire page to scroll. This is unexpected behavior and limited to Chrome; preventDefault allows the page to behave as expected.

There you have it! Your collapsible sections are now keyboard accessible.

Care Plan Essentials

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Care Plan essentials - the right tools for the job, pliers and screwdriver image
The right tools for the job
Care Plan Essential Maintenance icon

Upkeep

Dedicated support for your site includes backups, software updates, security and performance scans, spam and revision clean up, database optimization, and detailed monthly site upkeep report.

Backups

We'll make sure an up-to-date backup is always ready. Backups are stored on servers located in the United States, but if EU Data Protection compliance is required, we've got you covered, too. Let us know and we'll store your backups on servers in the EU.

Backups run daily and are kept for 90 days. If you cancel your plan with us, backups are stored for 7 days after cancellation before permanent deletion. If you want backups stored for a longer period or post cancellation, optional 3rd party storage (e.g., Dropbox, Google Drive, Amazon S3, OneDrive) is required.

Care Plan Essential Backups icon
Care Plan Essential Reports icon

Executive Dashboard & Reports

At the beginning of each month, except for the first subscription month, we'll send you a report detailing the upkeep, analytics, and keyword search activity that we performed on your site in the previous month.

Keyword search reporting is available if you've subscribed to our SEO Ranking add-on. Reports can optionally be scheduled to be sent weekly or bi-weekly. Click here to view an example of our monthly maintenance report.

The Safeguard plan includes a Basic Client Dashboard that displays 5 key metrics at the click of a button.

Our Nurture and Thrive care plans include an Executive Dashboard tailored to your business needs. Anytime you want to see how your online business is thriving, your most important metrics are just 1-click away. See example here: Executive Dashboard

Support

Your dedicated support time can be used to address a majority of your needs, such as: bug fixes, performance improvements, image optimization, content updates, design updates, newsletter curation, etc.

If you are on the Safeguard plan, you may use your 45-minute support time for a consulting call.

Care Plan Essential Support icon
Care Plan Essential Training icon

Training

Professional Training Videos: Unlimited access to step by step video tutorials on managing your content.

Monthly Newsletter: Our monthly newsletter includes targeted articles specific to website growth and digital marketing.

Webinars: Coming soon! Live and recorded video workshops where we explore topics such as email marketing, search engine optimization, blogging, lead capture, and more.

Consulting

Consulting Calls (included in the Advanced plan): Sessions designed to get hands-on with your website growth strategy, live editing, or any other type of training needs. We review website performance, talk about your business goals, and lay out the path to help you use your website to its fullest potential.

Care Plan Essential Consulting icon

Let’s observe a few facts

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  • John is your hardest working employee.
  • John labors 24/7 every day of the year, never asks for time off, gets sick, or complains that he’s tired. Even You have to sleep once in a while!
  • John's work/life balance is all work and no play, and he's happy about it.
  • John continually generates leads, drives conversions, and produces revenue (or at least he should).
  • John is a primary channel through which customers, suppliers, potential new staff, and partners can find and engage with you.
  • When John does his job, he is a profit center, not a cost center; he earns you more than you spend on customer acquisition.
  • John is indispensable to your on-going success and growth, and it's critical that he remains available to your audience without disruption.
  • John is your website.

As a savvy and successful business owner, how far would you go to retain this valuable and key asset?

High potential employees (Hi-Pos) see quality as a priority in the workplace. They stand out due to their associative thinking skills—which help solve problems and drive innovation. They focus on doing a good job to satisfy clients and customers. They concentrate on improving their skills and take initiative in decision making.

As a leader, you provide direction, clarity, and resources; you do your best to understand what drives your Hi-Pos and appeal to their motives. In other words, you nurture your Superstars. You develop strategies and focus on the traits that can help them flourish to continue to produce for you and thrive. You invest in their success.

Your website is a high performing employee, or at least has the potential to become one (remember John?). It requires just as much nurturing and care as its living, breathing Superstar counterparts, if not more. You've already made an investment to bring it to life, but once it's on the job, it needs nurturing to continue to produce for you. It isn't a set it and forget it proposition. It's the public persona of you and your company. It's what attracts customers to your business. In order to thrive, it has to remain healthy, vibrant, and relevant; you have to nurture it. This all takes work and yes, continued investment for its success.

See our Care Plans page to learn more.

Americans with Disabilities Act

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Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and Your Website image
Is Your Website ADA Compliant?

The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) is a 1990 law. The ADA is a civil rights law. It prohibits discrimination against individuals with disabilities in all areas of public life. This includes schools, transportation, and all public and private places that are open to the general public.

In 1990, modern communications technologies such as the Internet were still in their infancy. The past few decades gave rise to new channels like websites and mobile applications. This raises questions about the ADA’s original mission to make U.S. society more accessible to people with disabilities.

ADA Title II and Title III are the two sections most relevant for questions about web accessibility:

  • Title II prohibits disability-based discrimination on the part of state and local governments.
  • Title III prohibits disability-based discrimination for “places of public accommodations”. Places of public accommodation generally include private businesses that are open to the public, such as restaurants, hotels, movie theaters, museums, and doctor’s offices.

U.S. Federal Courts and the U.S. Department of Justice hold that while the ADA does not specifically address web accessibility, its language is still broad enough to include websites as part of business operations. The legal consensus is that if Title II or Title III apply to your organization, then they also apply to your website because it is a place of public accommodation. Title III specifically applies to your website.

Lawsuits Are on the Rise

For a website to be accessible to the disabled, the content must be compatible with screen-reader software that converts words into audio. Website videos must include descriptions for the deaf.

To meet this need, it's our practice to use both closed captions and provide a downloadable transcript for publicly accessible videos on this site. Also, all interface actions must be operable through keyboard commands for people who can’t use a mouse.

According to an analysis by Seyfarth Shaw, a law firm that specializes in defending ADA lawsuits, nearly 5,000 cases were filed in federal court for alleged website violations in the first six months of 2018. The firm predicted that the number of lawsuits would climb to nearly 10,000 by the end of the year, a 30% increase from 2017.

The government has not provided formal standards for private businesses to ensure ADA compliance. However, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has created guidelines, known as the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), to make websites more accessible to disabled people.

Government websites already follow these guidelines, but private business websites are typically loaded with images and videos. Experts say they're more difficult to overhaul to meet the guidelines. Estimates for bringing these sites into compliance can run from a few thousand dollars to a million or more.

ADA lawsuits filed in federal and state courts target the websites of retailers, supermarkets (including Winn-Dixie Stores Inc.), restaurants (including Domino’s Pizza Inc.) and universities (including Harvard and MIT). In December 2018, Inside Higher Ed reports that 50 colleges were sued in the previous month by a single blind person for ADA non-compliance. Could your site be next? Why even take the risk?

Get an Audit Done!

You can conduct your own cursory evaluation of your site's pages for ADA compliance with the web accessibility evaluation tool. The tool reveals a number of compliance errors and alerts that should be evaluated and repaired.

If you discover errors on your site, we recommended that a more through evaluation of the entire site be conducted to reduce your compliance risk and minimize the chances of non-compliance legal actions.

Of course, you can ask any of your web support resources to conduct an ADA compliance audit for you, if they have the resources to do so. But, we would love to earn your business. If you would like us to do the audit for you, order it from here: https://victorfont.com/shop/accessibility-compliance-audit/.