Cognitive disabilities are among the most prevalent types of disabilities, yet experts have struggled to provide web accessibility best practices around this area due to cognitive disabilities being such a broad category. However, recent work by standards groups has begun to address this deficiency. In this session, you’ll learn about the challenges people with these disabilities experience on the web and learn design patterns that will empower you to make your digital work more accessible. Presentation slides: https://speakerdeck.com/cahdeemer/embracing-minds-of-all-kinds-making-digital-content-usable-for-people-with-cognitive-disabilities/edit Track:Ethical Responsibility
Transcript
Unknown Speaker 16:07
Here's somebody crunchy not a snack so just check everybody to see if you're muted. Thanks. Okay, um, I'm just gonna go ahead and get started just so we can stay on schedule, um, welcome everyone to embracing minds all kinds making digital content, usable for people with cognitive disabilities. Quick hi from me. My name is Christina Deemer. I'm a developer at Ali, a full service digital agency. Some of our nonprofit clients include the American Association of museums. The Kauffman Family Foundation Direct Relief and Cooper Union, and I'm a web accessibility specialist certified by the International Association of accessibility professionals. I am autistic I only mentioned that because it's relevant to the topic here today. Um, I live in the Philadelphia suburbs, my interests include reading quilting and cooking and Star Trek, and you can find me on Twitter at ca h Deemer d m er, a couple of hosts, keeping items are that I'm a solo speaker so I will not be monitoring the chat during the talk on but we have McKeel here, so he'll be monitoring the chat during the talk, and there will be time for some questions at the end. And I can also enter questions or address questions on Twitter and I also plan to attend today's conference recap the session. Something I like to do when I start sessions is do a little bit of expectation setting and explicitly outline objectives and the agenda. So our objectives today are to identify some common access barriers that people with cognitive disabilities experience with digital projects to recognize design patterns recommended by that W three C for making content usable by people with cognitive disabilities. To learn how to utilize those design patterns in our digital work and advocate for incorporating the design patterns into your work during all life cycles.
Unknown Speaker 18:35
Our agenda today includes a brief discussion of terminology and language around web accessibility and the language of disability. We'll go through a toolkit of best practices, we'll look at an example, digital project in real life, and, and then look at some next steps and resources. So I want to start by defining some terms and talking about how we talk about web accessibility and cognitive disabilities. For starters, some clarifications around language around web accessibility. I refer a great deal to the W three C and this is the World Wide Web Consortium, the international community that develops and maintain standards for the web, including standards around accessibility. And I also refer to WIC hag, the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines Metatag are a part of a series of international guidelines published by a web accessibility initiative of the WBC. This isn't a talk about what CAG, we're not going to review with CAG, and I hope that you're already familiar with Rick hag, and that your projects are already struggling to meet those guidelines. Next I'll talk about some language we use when we talk about disabilities because best practices in this area are changing very quickly. And talking about disabilities require some sensitivity but I don't want that to ever mean that we avoid talking about these things. And MANY of the notes in this section come from the National Center on Disability and journalism's disability language style guide which was updated I think just in September, and there's a link to the style guide and the resources slide at the very end of the deck. So first of all I'm going to use the terms disabled and disability data. These are not shameful or dirty words and they're preferred over other words, including made up terms like specially abled or Handi capable, those words are considered offensive. And you may be wondering how we're defining cognitive disabilities here. We're gonna use the W three C's definition for it, which is that it's a very nebulous term that acts as a sort of umbrella term for neurodiversity, as well as neurological disorders and mental and behavioral disorders that may or may not be neurological. So if you think of Down syndrome in this category that's right if you think of ADHD or depression dyslexia anxiety, autism sensory disorders dementia aphasia, traumatic brain injury, PTSD, all of those things are in this category, but we're not really gonna use those terms today. Um, and I will switch between using identity first, and person first language. Identity first language mentioned the disability first An example would be saying something like, autistic person while person first language mentioned, the person for something like person with dyslexia person first language is no longer considered a default. And it's important to understand that some disabled people strongly prefer identity first language, and several disability groups have long preferred identity first language, including the culturally Deaf community and the Autistic rights community. So during this talk, you'll hear me use both. And whenever you can, you should ask people with disabilities, what language they prefer. And I'm going to use functional over clinical terms today, when we talk about barriers for people with cognitive disabilities. That means instead of talking about specific clinical diagnoses, I said we're not going to be talking about like, things like ADHD, but that can be helpful for people with when it comes to getting support or treatment and getting that right diagnosis but I'm instead going to talk about underlying cognitive skills. So instead of talking about ADHD I'll talk about issues with focus. I'm doing this because not everyone with a cognitive disability is aware of their disability or has a diagnosis. For example, some people spend years, unaware that there are problems with reading comprehension or due to dyslexia, they don't know that they have a disability, and some people don't have access to diagnosis, due to a variety of systemic barriers, and MANY people have more than one diagnosis if someone who lives with depression and ADHD has trouble focusing, does it matter to us if it's students with depression or the ADHD, and there also may be other intersectional issues at play.
Unknown Speaker 23:20
And not everyone with a particular disability experiences it in the same way. There's a saying in the autism community that, if you meet one autistic person you've met one autistic person. So just because digital content is accessible to somebody like me, it doesn't mean that it's accessible to every autistic person, it just means that it's accessible to me. So there are lots of shades of gray hair. I'm using functional terms over cognitive error cognitive skills over clinical terms also helps us focus on aspects of cognitive disabilities that have an impact on the way people use the web. So it helps us focus on things like memory issues, problem solving and decision making, attention and focus, time management processing speed math comprehension, and language and reading comprehension. This is not a full list of cognitive skills it's just some examples and some other issues that people with cognitive disabilities struggle with on the web may include things like impulse control obstructions and sarcasm. So with that out of the way, let's get into our toolkit, these are seven recommendations from the W three see that you can implement to make your digital content more accessible to people with cognitive disabilities. They range in specificity and cover design engineering editorial and security. So a little bit of everything. The toolkits based on a working group know published by the WCC and April 2021 What I'm talking about today is just a subset of the practices they recommend, again, it assumes that that we CAG success criteria have already been met. So it's how did it does not replace the CAG and it's not part of a CAG, where CAG does include some guidelines and success criteria that can be applied to users with cognitive disabilities, but it's been pointed out by a number of experts and most important by disabled people, that the W three C has really struggled to establish guidelines that address the needs of users with cognitive disabilities, in part because that category covers such a wide range of folks. The working group note though has been a really positive sign that more attention will be paid to the barriers that users with cognitive disabilities face on the web, which hopefully will lead to more formal recommendations and time, and everything in the toolkit is non standard and or non normative you don't need to implement it to meet with CAG, and the things in the toolkit can be tested with existing automated tools, you can develop on the for the engineers in the room, you can develop tests around certain aspects of the toolkit. That's something that I would advise on but for the most part a lot of this has to be tested by hand or you have to come up with your own checklist. And you have to do a bit of that work yourself. But let's get into those toolkit items now. Um, the first tool is is common design patterns that include some basic things like putting the homepage in the top left and putting the search in the top right, and making links look like links and buttons look like buttons, links and buttons are not the same thing, links, navigate to a new page and buttons perform an action, and create an obvious visual hierarchy, it should be clear on any page in any section of the page. What's most important secondary information should be farther down on the page and smaller. It's important to do this, because new design metaphors can be hard to learn, and learning a new layout can be a totally unnecessary challenge for people with difficulties processing making decisions or numbering things to advocate this some do that during the design phase, and you want to do that so that you don't have to make costly remediation steps later after users complained that they can't find things. If you do user testing and this kind of issue is discovered great but it's even better if you can catch this. In the design phase of a project. The second tool in your toolkit is media that's in chunks. You want to divide your video and audio clips into chunks that are short and logical. The W three C recommends chunks that are six minutes or less. And again you want to provide unique navigation for each chunk, so that they're easy to jump into and out of.
Unknown Speaker 28:10
And this is important because users with difficulties with attention and focus can really struggle with media that's too long. You'll want to talk to whoever's involved in cutting the videos, or planning the audio as early on as possible about accessibility so you can work together to make thoughtful decisions about how to chunk your content. Almost six minutes doesn't work, maybe there are other places where you can divide media files. You can also set expectations during project planning phases so there isn't an expectation that that the content will be in a 15 minute or having helped you like hour long chunks, set the expectations as early on as possible but media would be in chunks that are six minutes or less. The next tool in our toolkit is a friendly search mechanism that includes autocomplete and spell check. This becomes particularly important as the site complexity increases and people rely more on search to find things. This is important because search functionality that demands complete accurately spelled words can fill users with language impairments and memory issues. The great thing here is that you can advocate for this at any point in a project lifecycle lifecycle. And you can remind everybody on your team, This is an example of an accessibility improvement that doesn't have a big impact on visual design, and will be immediately valuable to a right, wide range of users, MANY enterprise level search tools. I think like Elastic Search comes with autocomplete and spellcheck, and depending on your CMS there may be plugins that will add this functionality to your search so just because it's not built into your site search doesn't mean it can't be added. But this is something where you should definitely, you know, if you're not an engineer, talk to the engineers on your team who will be the experts and identifying the right solution for your project, given your tech stack. The fourth tool in our toolkit is the humble back button, which should exist in every site in gallery interactive kiosk online exhibition game is great if you can rely on native browser back buttons but there are cases where a browser controls are hidden or don't work. And in those cases back buttons are critical. It's important that go back and start over controls are distinctive, the Back button allows users to review progress and correct mistakes and retrace their steps while starting over immune to resetting data. You may not need to think about this much for standard museum brochure site. Unless you're talking about like shopping carts or anywhere you have where you have a multi step form, but you may also need to consider this and gallery interactive, or any sort of kiosk that has a strict user flow or, you know, we're actually like the physical casing covers up the browser buttons intentionally home online exhibitions and games are also notorious for issues with going back. Back buttons are important because users need to be able to review their progress and correct mistakes. Mistakes can include things like touching a control by accident or activating a link by accident, enabling users to go back, can help users with anxiety and memory issues, as well as users who have difficulties following instructions can help them complete tasks successfully because they can review information retrace their steps. look at the responses again that sort of thing. And it's best if you can advocate for this during the design phase of a project, but I've had people call this suggestion, unnecessary only to have users bump up against it during testing. So, a little trick that I've developed is to, to ask a question in a format that something like, you know, how would you use our with like language comprehension issues go back and ensure that they enter data correctly and that tactic of of formatting the question that way can help convey the importance and impact of the that kind of feature.
Unknown Speaker 32:46
Our fifth tool is to employ a simple user interface. That means our interface doesn't include text that runs edge to edge that we can break up content with headings. So pages can be easily scanned and if there's a lot of text on the page. Consider putting a summary at the top. It also helps to make it easy to dismiss pop ups and banners and other distracting features and avoid including those things at all during critical steps in a process. And when it's time for users to make decisions, limit them to five or fewer choices, and if they're actually more than five choices, put them into subgroups so that the initial options are still five or fewer. And this is important because messages can just get lost when there's too much information, activity, those busy crowded screens can cause anxiety and users with attention issues can lose focus and abandon their task. It's most important to be aware of this issue during a project's maintenance phase with small features can get piled onto a simple interface without the team understanding their cumulative effect. So you have like a ribbon about COVID guidelines on the top of every page and then there's a membership pop up that comes up when the user scrolls down to third of the page, and an ad for a new exhibition feature some like exciting animations, and that's in the sidebar, and each of these things alone isn't a big deal but together they can create an unwelcoming experience that can actually prevent users from completing a task or accessing content. Our sixth tool is a login that doesn't rely on memory, so don't make users, memorize characters strings, perform calculations, solve puzzles or recognize characters on a screen and put them into a field. This is important because users should be able to login register and reset their credentials without more effort than it takes to navigate a standard web page inaccessible login or authentication mechanisms affect a variety of users with cognitive disabilities, people with memory impairments may not be able to log in if they don't remember their passwords people with language and math impairments may struggle to solve puzzles or input characters correctly with a limited number of attempts and time limited procedures may also block, just a number of users from accessing their accounts for advocacy I just poke your be dragons, because there are just a lot of competing priorities here and devising logins or authentication mechanisms that are both accessible and secure involves a real team effort and commitment of resources to sort it out. Even though this is, this one's just a little bit more complex, I wanted to mention it because accessible authentication is under consideration as a new success criteria for mcag for CAG 2.2 which is scheduled to become the standard at some point in 2022, and that would mean that if your login process doesn't allow people to paste in passwords or it forces them to complete cognitive test, it would be in violation of like hiding under the new guidelines, and you could be, you could be liable for legal action. But this is, um, that's not the case yet this is not part of this current standard. This is just really a hot topic and accessibility right now because it could be part of the standard, the details are still being discussed. And I just wanted to give you a heads up in case you wanted to do more research on it or get involved in those discussions of what accessible authentication means. Our final tool in our toolkit is help or instructions for complex and non standard controls. This includes complex forms unusual interactions, non standard controls creative interfaces and required actions that don't support autocomplete so surveys with complex interactions are definitely games, any sort of like game that you have in a gallery or on your site, data entry where there can be confusion about the required format. So in those cases, it helps to include accessible text next to the non standard control, and to use, very clear and unambiguous instructions. So those are our seven items in the toolkit, we're just going to do a quick little recap.
Unknown Speaker 37:47
I forgot a five, There we go. So we'll talk about this, sorry about that. Um, so this is important, or health is important because it's easy to get lost or confused when something doesn't operate in the way that you expect. This affects users who have issues with anxiety cognitive processing these out and math or language comprehension, they may give up on a task or require additional assistance, and this is definitely an area where a little bit of user testing can go a long way, and can make a big difference, because you can through user testing, identify exactly where forms or controls or a game board or whatever, are confusing and make adjustments based on what you hear in testing. Okay, now that's it. Is that right, yes. Okay, so now we're gonna do our little recap of our seven tools here. So we've got design common use common design patterns users who struggle with decision making and memory don't have to learn new visual metaphors. Divide media into chunks. So users with attention impairments don't lose focus and can stay engaged, employ a search friendly search mechanism so users with language and reading comprehension issues can successfully find things. Ensure apps have a back button so users who struggle to follow instructions or have memory issues can check their work in practice mistakes. We use a simple interface so users who struggle to stay focus or get easily overwhelmed can successfully complete tasks. Provide options for logging in that don't rely on memory or tests so users with memory and cognition issues can successfully access their accounts and provide help for non standard and complex control so users who struggle with reading and math comprehension anxiety and decision making can complete tasks independently. Cool. So we're going to take all of those recommendations from the WCC and we're going to put them into practice by doing a brief exercise where all evaluate a, an award winning online project and exhibition through the lens of the toolkit. The project is called duty to country, and it was created by the Filipino veterans recognition and education project I actually didn't have anything to do with this at all not, I didn't wasn't involved in the planning, the design, the development, the anything about it, I just think it's cool. So, It's called duty to its duty to country.org I'm going to browse to the site right now, but feel free to look on your own and I'm going to give myself a three minute timer here. And.
Unknown Speaker 40:52
Okay, so here is the site, and you can see that they've got they're using the common design pattern of having the link to the homepage in the top left and search. And let's hop right on their media here we already can see from the timer is a short four minutes and five seconds so not too long there, scroll down we can see all the awards they've won, and my head is turned to the side right now because I'm, I have the exhibition up on a second monitor. I'm VCR interface is relatively simple we can focus on the content that's important. We're using headings, we've got lots of space here. Not a lot of distractions, we're just going to scroll down to the bottom here, we saw that for our online exhibition is there are MANY ways for us to find it. Scrolling down here. Okay. And before we go to that online exhibition we're going to check out the search. And I'm going to intentionally spell Philippines incorrectly, Philippines has one l's and a two Ps but I'm going to spell two L's. And one p, and see what happens. Okay, we've got no, No autocomplete and no spell check on that. So, um, so if there's something really specific that you were looking for on this site, you'd have to know on exactly what it is and how to spell it, because you wouldn't get any help from the search tool. We're going to use our Back button here we can rely on that browser control and go to our online exhibition. Sometimes, I have a little bit of problem with some extractions and I always don't know what explore means but I know from the heading that this is probably gonna go to our online exhibition. Okay. And maybe you don't know what to do here. Oh, but then we've got, we've got an animation with a, with helper texts there that lets us know we're supposed to scroll to begin interaction, so that helper text is very important. Click here on our introduction. Oh, and I'm scrolling down, it would have been helpful to have that helper text there again, letting me know where to go. continuing to scroll down. And again, our content is very nicely chunked up so that we know exactly what we're focusing on and things aren't too long, we have another bit of media here, just going to check my timer up my timer went off. Okay. Um, but I know that this video is 45 seconds so we saw that the media again was in nice chunks. Let's go back to our slides. There we go. Um, so here's sort of some of my takeaways from that short exercise that our example site employs common design patterns so users don't have to learn new visual metaphors, the media's and nice short chunks that are less than six minutes and users can stay focus, I sort of something that I would tell them needed to be remediated would be to add autocomplete or spellcheck to their search mechanism so users can find things more easily. The browser back browser buttons work as expected, so users can easily retrace their steps that interface is simple so users can complete tasks without getting overwhelmed. This is a case where no logging is needed so that one isn't relevant, and they have that nice that little bit of help text for the non standard control so you knew what you were expected to do. I maybe would have implied that sort of in each instance where you're supposed to scroll down to the user can really like learn what they're supposed to do, but that the little bit that they had there was nice, but something that I really hope that you'll take away here is that they do a lot of things right, accessible features can be beautiful and creative and sometimes even award winning sites are perfect, but really accessibility features can go hand in hand with good design. So some next steps and resources. It's really beyond the scope of this talk to get into the details about testing with real users with cognitive disabilities but I can point out some special considerations you may need to make.
Unknown Speaker 45:48
Take time to figure out what accommodations testers will need and make sure there are no surprises in testing location the testing format or the content of the test. And if users need to bring caretakers or support, find out in advance and allow it, make sure that they're on security list, and ensure that testers know that if something goes wrong if they can't complete a task if something is confusing if there was any sort of bug in design, or develop or functionality that it's not their fault. They've done nothing wrong. This is something that we normally do with user testing, but it's important to just really make that abundantly clear. When it comes to these users, and make it clear that testers are in control, they can ask questions at any time, they can take breaks, and they can stop at any time and compensate disabled testers in the same way you would any other testers. You might even consider increasing compensation for these testers as they have specialized expertise. If this is something that you're interested in, there's a lot more detail about testing with users with cognitive disabilities in the working group note and that's included in the resources slides at the end of the deck. You may be saying this is great, Christina, but how do I get buy in from my team. How do I incorporate testing how do I make sure that people even care about users with cognitive disabilities, and no matter where you are in the lifecycle of a project my approach involves two steps. One is to make a multi dimensional argument for accessibility, you can talk about the legal case for it. And you can talk about the business case for it how as age increases disability increases. And you can tie accessibility into your organization's strategic goals mission and values you can make sure that disabled. Disabled users are considered when you're talking about Dei. And along with sort of that rationale for just for accessibility, you can make a specific plan. I think it helps tremendously if you can outline the specific measures that need to be taken to make a site more accessible. There's a misconception that accessibility is really burdensome time intensive and costly. So outlining the specific steps needed to remediate accessibility issues and prioritizing those issues based on severity and cost can help combat those misconceptions that can help to do an audit first. There's also a misconception that designers need to compromise their creative vision to make a site accessible, but as we just saw like accessible sites can be creative and beautiful. It's also helpful to point out when accessibility changes have no visual impact, incorporating autocomplete into search functionality doesn't have much of a visual impact for example. So our final takeaways for today are to focus on functional terms rather than clinical diagnoses, so consider how people with memory focus and attention, time management decision making anxiety processing speed and math and language comprehension struggles, how they might use your site or engage with your content and break up that content into pieces, chunk the media into six minute blocks use headings liberally don't have the page and make the implicit explicit make sure your buttons have texts along with icons, you may want to use breadcrumbs so users better know where they are just make things clear for folks and provide help where you can back buttons autocomplete and searches letting users copy and paste passwords and using magical links like be a good. Be a friend and advocate for accessibility throughout a project's lifecycle. You can use prompts like, I wonder how someone with a cognitive disability would do X, or this feature doesn't meet the needs of people with time management issues because of why. And remember that all of this can be done without compromising the creative vision of a project and it usually can be done without sort of breaking the bank. But it can't be done alone. A lot of this takes a team effort so involve everyone on your team to make your to make your project more accessible to people with cognitive disabilities. And I think that is it, and we have. So thanks everybody for
Unknown Speaker 50:44
for joining me today. I think we have some time for questions. The Cure maybe was going to, yeah, yeah,
Unknown Speaker 50:56
yeah so folks please put your questions in the chat, raise your hand or just chime in. I do have a few questions on my own that I can maybe throw. Throw out on the table while we wait for folks to chime their questions and so first just thank you so much, Christine, I appreciate the concrete tools that you provided us as we sort of tried to think about how to how to make our tools, platforms and applications more usable for a wider group of people, and I appreciate your framing of just be a friend, right. So you're looking at, you know, you see websites that museums and cultural institutions have created and also looking at websites outside of the museum sector. Do you feel like there's a website or two you could name that is doing this type of engineering and designing. Well,
Unknown Speaker 51:55
um yeah I think I actually did a bit of poking around and I think a lot of people are incorporating bits of this. Um, and, um, and I don't know if there's anybody out there who gets an A plus and I don't know if there's anybody out there that's failing, but I see a lot of people, a lot of organizations like making effort, and, and no matter where you are in terms of budget size or market, like, start with where you are and and, you know, implement the steps that are easier for you some of the larger institutions may be able to tackle something like accessible authentication, and, and that may be sort of a challenge to figure out, like all of the ways in which you can make it easier for people to log in. But I don't have any examples of anybody who's doing anything sort of perfectly but I know that people are definitely making an effort. Overall,
Unknown Speaker 52:56
we got a question from Marty, once you go ahead.
Unknown Speaker 52:59
Hi. Thank you. This is really great, I would just, I'm often in a position of speaking to two designers at the beginning, beginning of a design process, and presentations like this really help them wrap their heads around what is otherwise. But I guess my question is, If you could elaborate sometimes I struggle to not make designers think that I'm limiting their options by bringing these things forward they get kind of prickly you know, and I wonder if you could say a little bit more about the conversations that you've had around these issues and how to make designers feel like, you know they're, they still get to do what they, what they do, you know,
Unknown Speaker 53:51
of course, of course, a lot of times I find that designers once they understand the. Once they understand the, the sort of restrictions they need to work with, they can often find creative solutions. I also, I can give you an example of how I, I've worked with designers on issues like color contrast. And, and I will sometimes all find a close like if they're blue if their shade of blue doesn't need, like what kags double A like all find a blue that does. And without a doubt they will come back with me with a better blue. And so sometimes I try to sort of meet them halfway if I'm, if I'm, I worked on a quiz project once the didn't, and I was doing the Back button thing where I was like what our users, you know, users are, or they're they're entering some sensitive information, or they're gonna want to go back and review it, how can we stick in a back button so I like sketched out, like here's where I would put it in the designer we, you know, I made it a back and forth with the designers make it a conversation with them and hear about like some of their concerns about it and I also try to speak their language. A lot of these accessibility practice. Best Practices go hand in hand with usability best practices I talked about, you know where things fitting in a certain way on the page if you can talk about whitespace you can talk about affordances, you can just sort of show them that you're not the enemy, but at the same time, I am very, there isn't, you know if there's, you know, I try to be the voice of the person that's not in the room like a dis if there's, if I'm talking about color contrast and there isn't the voice of somebody with low vision in the room like I have to be that voice. And, and I can be very stubborn about sticking up for the names of disabled people. So I want to make it a conversation I want things to look beautiful, but I'm also going to stick up for disabled people at the same time.
Unknown Speaker 56:20
You have a lot of folks echoing the question Marty raised in chat Laura asks something somewhat similar. Do you have any recommendations for trying to get your external designers up to speed on accessibility practices. So not necessarily sort of bringing a specific issue up, but how to bring folks in the role of a designer Ghanem broader understanding about some of these concerns are,
Unknown Speaker 56:49
um, right, so I've, um, some of the tooling that they view that designers use these days like figma has some accessibility checkers in them, so sometimes it's about like letting them know like what tools that they reminding them or letting them know about new tools that have these things, integrated into them. That can help to keep them up to speed on things. I've also done. You can also do sort of like workshops with designers where you bring up where you sort of do some training on on what things to look for that can help, without it being like in context of this particular project or point people to existing checklists, and that sort of thing. And, and you can also notice I'm sort of distracted because I see a friend of mine just asked a question in the chat so I just want to do a special like shout out to my friend Josh. Hi, Josh. Um, and so I hope that helps, like, help them learn about the tools that they have that can that can go through some of these accessibility checks for them and do training outside of some of the projects.
Unknown Speaker 58:09
Great and let's go to Josh's question, and we've got about two minutes left so this might be the last one. But if folks have a one last question that I try to squeeze in please get it in the chat. So, good friend of yours and mine Josh asks, What about working with content creators to improve content. If there aren't as you think, You know, accessibility, corrections, falling into either design development or content development. So do you have any thoughts on how to bridge the gap where design and development might be on a different track from editorial.
Unknown Speaker 58:44
Yeah, um, I think, again, like I think trying to handle that editorial feels like it's on a different track. If and trying to give them more direct, more teamwork, so that people don't feel like they're are working in silos in that way. I'm improving content again like some CMS is have built in accessibility accessibility tools that can help content creators understand the issues that may come up in their content but there also may be, again, some training that can be done on something that I've talked to content creators about is the importance of not using links that contain the words like click here or just here. So, just making sure that they all that content creators have a seat at the table as well, so that they're not siloed off can be helpful.
Unknown Speaker 59:47
Great and there's much appreciation coming your way, Christina, the chat. So thank you so much for your thought and attention in the session.
Unknown Speaker 59:58
Um, thank you so much, everybody. I really appreciate your being here and thank you so much for all that you do in your institutions.