Training Support Staff on Accessibility: Donata Stroink-Skillrud

>> AMBER HINDS: Welcome to WordPress Accessibility Meetup, Training Support Staff on Accessibility, with Donata Stroink-Skillrud, who is the president at Termageddon LLC. A few announcements if you’ve not been before. We have a Facebook group, which is a great way to connect in between meetups. You can find that group if you go to facebook.com/groups/wordpress.accessibility, or you just search WordPress Accessibility on Facebook.

Everyone always asks, “Is this being recorded?” and the answer is yes, it is being recorded. It takes us about two weeks to get corrected captions, a full transcript, and the recording up with a written summary. You can find upcoming events and past recordings in one place if you go to equalizedigital.com/meetup. The other way to get notified when the recording is available is to make sure you are subscribed to our email list.

You can go there to get news and announcements at equalizedigital.com/focus-state. We send a weekly email newsletter on Thursday with a roundup of accessibility news from around the web, important things that you might want to be aware of, and, of course, all of our registration reminders go out to our email list as well. The other way that you can get the recording is on our podcast if you prefer to listen in audio format, and you will be able to find that in a couple of weeks on accessibilitycraft.com.

If you have any suggestions for the meetup or you need any additional accommodations to make the meetup work for you, you can contact the organizers at meetup@equalizedigital.com. I am Amber Hinds. I’m your moderator and the lead organizer for this meetup, and I am the CEO of a company called Equalize Digital. If you haven’t heard of us before, Equalize Digital is a mission-driven organization and a corporate member of the IAAP, and we are focused on WordPress accessibility.

We have a WordPress plugin called Accessibility Checker that helps you find and fix problems on your WordPress website. We also offer online courses for NVDA and voiceover screen reader testing, as well as a course for agencies on how to sell accessibility services. We do accessibility audits, remediation, and consulting, and you can learn more about us at equalizedigital.com. I do want to thank our sponsor for today’s event, and that sponsor is GoDaddy.

GoDaddy has generously covered the cost of both our live captioning with our captioner that we have here today and post-event transcription. GoDaddy’s mission is to empower a worldwide community of entrepreneurs by giving them all the help and tools they need to grow online, including a simpler, safer WordPress experience. GoDaddy provides a managed WordPress experience that is as easy as it is effective.

The latest version of WordPress comes pre-installed with exclusive themes, plugins, and tools to get you up and running quickly with automated backups, updates, and malware removal so that our pros can spend less time on monotonous maintenance and more time building their businesses. You can learn more about GoDaddy if you go to godaddy.com. We always ask if you are willing, on whatever social media platform you prefer, to send them a quick message or tag them somewhere and say thank you for sponsoring WordPress Accessibility Meetup.

Let them know that you appreciate them covering the costs of the live captioning and transcription to help make the meetup accessible. That is the best way to encourage our sponsors to continue contributing to accessibility of this meetup. A few upcoming events to be aware of. Our next meetup on Thursday, May 7th, at 10:00 AM US Central Time, which is a 90-minute meetup, will be with a presenter, Nora Guy.

She’ll be talking about Elevating the Web: An Adventure in Web Accessibility Through the Lens of Storytelling and Pixar Films. It should be really fun and interesting, so I definitely recommend looking into that. Then our accessibility specialist, Maria Maldonado, will be presenting Web Accessibility 101: Small Things That Make a Big Difference, on Tuesday, May 19th, in this same one-hour time slot.

The other thing that you should be aware of is that Global Accessibility Awareness Day, otherwise known as GAAD, is on Thursday, May 21st. I had hoped to have our landing page up for today, but I didn’t. It’s coming soon. Please watch for that. We’re going to do the same thing, where we ask people to pledge to volunteer time to contribute to accessibility on the web or in WordPress, if you are interested in doing that.

One of the things that’s going to be a little bit different this year is that, since I have spent a bunch of time rewriting the Accessibility Ready theme guidelines, we’re actually going to have a free workshop. It might be almost two hours long, but teaching people how to Accessibility Ready-test themes, following those guidelines for WordPress, with the idea that on that day, you will actually learn how to do it, test, and provide feedback to a theme developer for a free theme on WordPress.org.

I think it should be a really fun way to go beyond what we did last year and make it easier for folks who aren’t sure about how to contribute to accessibility in WordPress to learn how to do it. Please watch your email and our socials and all of that for more information, and we’ll send out how you can pledge time and how you can sign up if you want to learn more about Accessibility Ready testing and participate in that workshop.

I do have a quick call for speakers. We are looking at planning our speakers for the summer and early fall. Specifically, we are looking for speakers on Thursday, July 2nd; Thursday, August 6th; Tuesday, August 18; Thursday, September 3rd; Tuesday, September 15th, and they’ll sort of alternate between the 90 minutes on Thursdays and 60 minutes on Tuesdays. If you are interested in applying to speak, please fill out our speaker application. We would love to have you present. It is not scary, I promise.

Paula can add the link to that in the chat for folks, but you can also find a call if you go to equalizeddigital.com/call-for-speakers-wordpress-accessibility-meetup-2026. Sorry, I should have made a short URL for that, but that is what it is. I am going to pull up our speaker for today so everyone can see her. I’m so excited to have Donata here with us today. Donata is an attorney licensed in Illinois and a certified information privacy professional.

She is the president and legal engineer behind Termageddon LLC, a Software as a Service that has generated tens of thousands of website policies and kept them up to date with changing legislation. We had the honor of working with Termageddon on a project that they were doing, and while we took part in that project with them, I got to see how she trains her staff on accessibility, and I was so impressed, and I said, “Donata, would you please be willing to come and present,” and I’m so happy that she said yes, so welcome, Donata.

>> DONATA STROINK-SKILLRUD: Thanks so much for having me here.

>> AMBER: Yes, I’m so excited to have this presentation for folks. I think it’s going to provide a lot of value. I am going to go off camera now and let her take over. Just so everyone knows, we do have a Q&A panel in the Zoom webinar. I will be back at the end to pass on any questions to Donata, so please put any questions that you have in the Q&A.

>> DONATA: Awesome. Thanks so much. Thank you, Amber. Thank you, Equalize Digital, for having me, and thanks for everybody who’s joining. As Amber said, today I’m going to talk about how to train your support staff on accessibility, and what I mean by support staff, it’s really anybody, regardless of their role, who is interacting with your customers or your potential customers. Maybe it’s somebody who’s answering tickets, answering emails, answering contact form submissions, really anybody that’s answering phone calls or scheduling video calls with customers, basically anybody that interacts with customers, regardless if their role is actually called support.

Amber already introduced me, so I won’t go through that part again, but I did want to note that outside of work, I’m also a fellow of the American Bar Foundation, and at the American Bar Association, I chair our ePrivacy Committee, and I’m also a board member of the Rule of Law Initiative. Quick disclaimer before I start. Anything that I talk about today is provided for informational purposes only and does not constitute legal advice.

I personally am not an accessibility expert. All the things that I’ve learned, I’ve learned from Amber and her team, and through doing research online. Most of my expertise is around privacy or compliance, so any actions that you take or don’t take should be confirmed with an expert in accessibility. The things that we’re going to talk about today, we’re going to talk about compliance basics, so really these basics are ones that apply to our support training for accessibility, but they also apply to any other type of compliance that you’re undertaking, for example, privacy compliance.

I really like to have a basic foundation for compliance in general. Our accessibility compliance journey at our company through working with Equalize Digital, my accessibility journey myself, because, to be honest with you, before I went through this audit, didn’t really know that much or didn’t really understand that much about accessibility. We’ll talk about the Accessibility Support Policy and what it needs to include, as well as accessibility support training.

We’ll talk about some final thoughts, and then also we’ll have some time for questions at the end too. Compliance basics. When it comes to compliance, we really want to start at the basic step, and there’s a couple of different things that apply to compliance overall. Whether you’re working with accessibility, whether you’re working with privacy, you’re doing tax compliance, you’re doing legal compliance, anything like that, I like to standardize my compliance measures, and I think in my mind, because I’ve been working in compliance for a very long time.

I did compliance for a company for the privacy program, and I was able to adapt similar standards or outlines to the accessibility program, which made it easier and less stressful for me to create these materials for us. Number one, you need to know your compliance requirements. That’s really the first step before you start anything, because if you don’t know your compliance requirements, you will have no idea what you have to do, right?

In privacy, we go through this by figuring out which privacy laws apply to us, and that’s how we know what our privacy policy needs to say, or what privacy rights we need to offer to individuals. Also, with accessibility, we decided what accessibility standard we want to meet. Because we have the accessibility standard that we need to meet, we know what its requirements are, so we know what we need to do.

If you don’t know what your compliance requirements are, the rest of your compliance program for that particular aspect will not work. You will not be able to meet the requirements because you don’t know what these requirements are. Step one, you need to know your compliance requirements so that you know what you need to do. Two, compliance comes from the top. I’ve had experiences where I worked in companies where you get hired as a compliance professional, and during the interview, they say, “Well, compliance is really, really important to us, and that’s why we’re hiring you. We’re going to make sure that you have all the support. We’re going to make sure you have all the resources you need.”

Then you start working, and you say, “Okay, I need a meeting with the CEO to figure out what’s been done for this so far. For example, I need to figure out your cybersecurity standards that have been applied,” and then that meeting gets pushed off, and the CEO doesn’t have time, or they act super annoyed when you talk to them, and compliance isn’t going to work that way. It has to start from the top.

Really, let’s say you’re running a company, and you have five support staff, and you’re the CEO. You need to live by the same standards that you put on your support staff, because compliance comes from the top. If you were to get a support ticket saying, “Hey, I’m trying to use your website, but it’s not working with a screen reader,” and the CEO’s like, “Well, we can just ignore this for now,” or “I’ll reply to this in another day,” or “Well, these standards, they apply to us, but we don’t really care about it,” your support staff, even though you trained them, and you told them to care about this, they’re going to see your attitude, and they’re not going to be as enthusiastic or as caring about this as they should be, because they know that you don’t care.

If you’re running the company, or your management, or you’re towards the top, you need to make sure that you’re taking this very seriously, that you are following all the guidelines that you yourself have established for accessibility, because if you don’t do it, your staff is not going to do it either. Third, compliance needs to be in writing. This one’s really important, because people forget stuff, right?

If I were to have just a training where I didn’t share the slides, there’s no policy, there’s no written acknowledgement of you being a part of the training, people in two, three weeks, they’re going to forget what all these standards are; they’re going to forget what all these requirements are. What I do with compliance is that first, I write a policy, which is a written document of what we need to do; then I share that with the employees and have them sign off on it; and then I do the training.

After the training, I do acknowledgement of the training, and then I also share the slides. This way, everything is in writing, so employees can’t say, “Well, you didn’t tell me about this,” or “This wasn’t clear,” or “I didn’t know this was an official policy.” Also, in a couple of weeks, let’s say they forget what they need to do, they get an accessibility ticket. “Oh man, I forgot, who was I supposed to escalate this to?” They just take a look at the policy.

The policy writes out everything that they need to know, and it’s a great way to remind people of what their requirements are, what the obligations are, and what they need to do. I definitely recommend having any compliance requirements in writing. Four, compliance requirements need to be communicated in multiple ways and periodically. Obviously, we’re here at an accessibility meetup, we know that people learn in different ways.

For some people, for example, for myself, I learn the best way when something is written. For other people, they might learn in the best way if it’s told to them. Some people need slides that have a lot of information, like everything that you need to know is written in the slide. Other people like slides that are very minimal, but then it’s described more. You need to communicate these requirements in multiple ways.

Now, this could mean, okay, we have a written policy. We have the training slides. We have the training materials. We have somebody talk through the training. Maybe your staff also attends an accessibility meetup as well to reinforce this information. Maybe every month, you send a reminder in Slack about something related to accessibility or the compliance that you’re working on.

Us working in privacy, I’ll send occasional reminders of, “Look, this company got sued for doing this, or “Look, there’s new guidance,” or “Here’s a funny privacy meme.” Just to keep people on top and remind them that this is something that we need to be thinking about, and we also need to do this periodically. How we do the training is we do it when somebody’s first hired, and then we do it every year afterwards.

They’re reminded every year of what their requirements are, and then periodically, I’ll share different news or snippets or something like that, or little reminders just to keep everything top of mind for people. Because when you’re working your regular job and you have tickets, and you have emails, and you have client calls, and you have webinars, and you have all this stuff that you have to do, people forget about their compliance obligations.

Then number five, compliance must be personal. I personally am one of those people that if you don’t tell me how this affects me or you don’t tell me how this is important to me, I’m really not going to pay attention, which is probably why I didn’t do so well in organic chemistry or geometry in school because it wasn’t personal. Like, “What is the real-world application of all of this?” When we do our training, I like to start us with, “How does this affect me?”

For example, let’s say we’re doing privacy training. I’ll say, “Hey, don’t you love getting email or text spam messages at 3:00 in the morning that wake you up? Oh my gosh, that’s terrible. That’s totally happened to me,” or “Isn’t it annoying to get a letter saying that your bank account was breached and now you have to cancel all your cards and you have to monitor your credit score and all this other stuff?”

Maybe with accessibility, “Have you ever had a situation where a room is really, really loud, and you can’t pay attention to what that person next to you is saying?” I really like to make things personal, and that includes having examples in our training of real-life events that could happen that are relevant to the training. Let’s say you’ve got a ticket that says X, or you’re on a client onboarding call, and they say Y. Really try to bring it into the real world and tell them how this will affect them. Tell them what they will need to do, things like that. Make it personal.

Our accessibility compliance journey, how did we as a company get here? Right now, we’re working on a new product that will go on client sites. We know that for this product, accessibility is really important due to client comments and requests. This particular product will go directly on client sites, and their website visitors will see it. We know, based on previous tickets based on client requests for this product, that accessibility is going to be really important because this goes directly on their site.

We say, “Okay, we know this is going to be really important. What do we do next?” We know of Equalize Digital because they’ve been part of the community for a really long time, have a really great reputation, so reach out to them to perform an audit and prepare a VPAT report. Why VPAT? We do have customers in the European Union, so we know that’s a standard that we need to meet.

Honestly, at this point, we don’t really know much more about accessibility than that. We know that we need to meet some standard. We don’t really know what the standards are. We know that we want a third party to help us because we don’t have the knowledge or the resources necessary to do this ourselves internally, and we also know that our clients are going to expect this report, and they’re going to be expecting this audit to be performed by a third party because when you have the self-regulation framework, there’s a lot of mistrust that comes with that.

If we were the ones to do the audit ourselves, clients or potential clients may think that, oh, yes, it’s the fox watching the hen house situation. We knew that we wanted a third-party, Equalize Digital, to do this. Now, through the audit, they looked through the entire product, told us what was off with it, told us the items that we needed to fix, and how to meet the standard. Honestly, when we first started this process, I really thought that it would be– and this is through no fault of Equalize Digital.

This is before we met with them to start the process. I thought, “Okay, we’re going to give this product to them. They’re going to do the audit. We’re going to fix it, and then that’s over,” but through the audit, we actually learned that there’s documentation and training requirements, like the requirement to train your support staff or your staff that interacts with customers on accessibility requirements.

Through the audit, we also learned that our accessibility journey is more than just this one particular product. There’s also items outside of the product, and I like to think of it as similar to privacy because that’s my world that I live in. You don’t just prepare a privacy policy to go on your site. If you have to offer people privacy rights, you also need to have some procedure in place for what to do if somebody contacts you and says, “Hey, I want you to delete my data,” or “I want you to opt me out of email marketing.”

It’s not just the documents that you have on your site; it’s also training your staff on how to spot those requirements and what to do when they see those requirements. Now, in terms of me myself, my accessibility journey, honestly, before we started working with Equalize Digital, I had a lot of misconceptions about this. Obviously, I knew that there’s people who have accessibility issues. I don’t live under a rock, but I had this idea in my mind that there’s some kind of stamp of “You have a disability,” right?

Maybe you have the little sticker on your car, or you have to have a doctor’s note, or somebody has to certify that you have inaccessibility, and I didn’t necessarily think too much about how accessibility comes into play in the online world, right? Think of it more as a physical thing, rather than something that affects every single aspect of your life. I was reading articles, attending talks and meetups, and learning more about what accessibility actually means, and also having some understanding and grace, not necessarily for others, because I already had that, but for myself.

I was filling out the form to be a speaker here, and it says, “Do you have accessibility issues, like an extended illness?” Like, “Yes, I’ve been sick since Thanksgiving.” I’ve had an illness since I was 18 years old. Some of these things, where you’re like, “Man, I think I have this too,” versus something that you don’t really think about it that way, because you never got a stamp from a doctor, or a letter, or you don’t collect disability insurance income, or things like that, and I think through this process, learned of a great plan for the future of how we can support this as a company, and also how to support this outside of the company as well, for people that we work with, or people that we meet online, or in the world as well.

Let’s start off by talking about the Accessibility Support Policy. What is that? This is an official internal document that outlines your company’s commitment to accessibility, as well as outlines the requirements for your support staff to make sure that all support is accessible. I like to start this off with formatting standards, and I know that sounds really boring, but I personally like to keep all my compliance documentation in a single format.

What does this mean? We use the ISO 27001 standard to keep our documentation consistent. This means that all of our compliance documents have certain parts to them, or a certain outline. It starts off with the name of the document, when it was created, who it was created by, then it talks about the purpose, “Who is this document for?” the scope, “What does this document cover?” it talks about the commitment, and then the actual policy of what needs to be done, and then lastly, we also have versioning control.

It talks about, “Okay, this is Version 1. It was created by this person. It was approved by that person,” and then let’s say we have Version 2, “Here’s what we changed, and here’s who approved it. Here’s who made the changes.” That allows us to keep all of our documentation very consistent, very easy to find, and then also very easy to understand, because if I need to know one particular portion of this policy, I can very quickly find it, because all the documents follow the same format. Technically, this is not a requirement, but I like to do this because it helps keep things consistent.

The document starts out with a purpose. What is the purpose of this policy? For us, it’s to ensure that all customers and potential customers can effectively access and use our support services. Why are we doing this? Scope: What types of communications does this policy cover? Now, this could be different for each company. For us, we’re entirely online. We don’t meet customers in person. For us, it’s Freshdesk, which is our ticketing portal, email, phone, video, and then our documentation portal. It’s really all types of communications that we might have with a customer.

Now, for you, let’s say you have an in-person office, this might be different, or let’s say you send your support staff to meetups or different online events, or different in-person events. It might cover those events as well. It just depends on how your support staff communicates with your customers and potential customers. Next, we have our commitment to accessibility. In this particular section, your support staff needs to know that you and the company are committed to providing accessible support, knowing that this is important to us.

This is basically just an affirmation of the fact that we care about this, and this is important. If we don’t tell our support staff that this is important, they might think, “Well, this is just a compliance requirement. We’re just trying to meet the bare minimum,” but through this section, we really impart the fact that we’re not trying to meet the bare minimum; this is important to meet these requirements, not just from a legal perspective, because we might be fined or sued for not meeting them, but because it’s the right thing to do.

The next section, we talk about the accessible communication practices. What steps do employees need to take to communicate in accessible ways? Here are some examples: using clear, plain language, avoiding jargon, offering alternative methods, being patient, and allowing additional time. In our case, when talking to customers and support, we’re talking to them about privacy compliance, which might have a lot of different jargon. It might also have a lot of complicated steps.

Our system can get very complicated. You need to log in, you need to click this, then you need to click that, then you’ll see a gear icon, then you’ll do this, and then you’ll do that. In our world, it’s very important when you answer a customer ticket, let’s say you have, they need to take 10 different steps to get to where they need to go. You need to outline each of these steps in clear and plain language. You need to say, “Step 1, click this. Step 2, do this. Step 3, do that.”

We need to make that we’re very, very clear as to what they need to do. We also can offer alternative methods. For example, let’s say you’re not able to get on a video call because you can’t hear. Okay, we can offer a method where we get on a video call that has captioning. We can write everything out for you in written text. What do you prefer? Also, being patient and allowing additional time. You might not be able to resolve this ticket in the usual manner or within the usual period of time. If usually something like this takes 30 minutes, maybe it might take an hour, and that’s totally okay.

How do we handle accommodation requests? In this section, we talk about examples of accommodations. We might turn on closed captioning. We might write out the instructions. We might send you the policy setup questions via email instead of doing a call, or we may ask you what you want to do in the system, and we may go in and do this for you so that it’s easier instead of asking you to do it yourself.

We also talk about what you should not be doing. For example, you should not require customers to disclose medical information. You should never say, “Well, prove it,” or “Well, it works for me. Why doesn’t it work for you?” or “None of our other customers have problems with this. Why do you?” Those are examples of things that our support staff is prohibited from saying to customers that need disability accommodations.

What to do? Escalate if needed. If you’re not sure how to handle a particular issue, escalate it to me or escalate it to somebody else on the team. Don’t be scared to ask for help and tell the customer, “I’m sorry, I’m going to have to escalate this to another member of our team. They will follow up with you shortly.” They should know who to escalate this to. You never want a support member looking at a ticket that needs accessibility help, and they’re like, “I have no idea what to do, and I have no idea who to call,” because chances are that this customer isn’t going to get the help that they need.

Tell them right up front, right now, while you’re training them, “This is who you escalate this to and how.” Handling issues: how to handle an issue with accessibility. First, start off with acknowledgement. Have the customer explain the issue to you. Don’t explain it to them. Have them share their experience. Document. What is the problem? How can we fix it? Escalate it to the right person and provide updates.

Let’s say you have an issue that needs to be fixed by your development team. You would tell the customer, “Thank you so much for sharing this with me. I’m so sorry. I have escalated this to our development team, and I will let you know within the next few hours once this particular issue is resolved.” Don’t just leave the customer hanging and waiting. Let them know what’s actually happening. Provide them with updates.

Next, the policy should talk about training and awareness. When will training take place and what will it include? For us, we say that training will take place every time a new person is hired and then annually thereafter, and then it also has bullet points of exactly what that training will go over. Roles and responsibilities, who’s responsible for what? Support staff is responsible for answering tickets, answering emails, talking to customers or potential customers, figuring out what the accessibility issue is, and then escalating that issue and updating the customer until that issue is resolved.

Management is responsible for communicating all of our accessibility training, our requirements, and then also supporting the support staff in making sure these accessibility issues are resolved. That means providing the right resources and the time to resolve these issues. One example of something that we do on our team is we have development hours. For us, our development team is working on specific issues during the day.

Maybe they’re working on bigger projects and bigger tasks. As you know, working at any company, there might be tickets that come in on a daily basis, saying, “I can’t access the billing page,” or “My billing information is incorrect in your portal,” or that something is broken, or “I can’t access something.” There’s always small development issues that come up. We specifically have development hours that are 11:00 to 12:00 and then 3:00 to 4:00 Central, where support can submit a ticket to the development team for a resolution, just on quick issues, and then they work on bigger projects in the meantime.

With accessibility issues, what we decided to do is that the dev hours concept does not apply to those issues. If somebody has an accessibility issue where it relates to something that development has to do or fix, you can put that in the development channel on Slack at any time, and they will look at it immediately without you having to wait for the dev hours that we have set, which is a really nice way to prioritize accessibility issues because we don’t want customers to wait hours and hours and days and days; we want to make sure we put a high priority to accessibility tickets so we can send those to the development team at any time, and they have a high priority.

Lastly, what you want in your support policy is enforcement. What does enforcement mean? What happens if you violate this policy? For example, what happens if one of the support staff sends a reply to a customer saying, “I don’t believe that you’re disabled. You need to send me a doctor’s note.” Well, we know that enforcement could be disciplinary action up to and including termination. There’s actual real consequences for violating this policy or for not following this policy, just to reinforce the fact that this is important, and we take this seriously.

Next, we have accessibility support training. This is the training that you go through to teach your support staff of what their obligations and responsibilities are, and provides an opportunity for posing questions and discussing real-life scenarios. What I like to do with my training is I create slides, and I use a very similar template for all the training that we do. We do cybersecurity, privacy, and accessibility training.

In this portion, we’ll talk about what’s actually in my slides and “What am I talking about during this training?” I’m training people on training other people. It’s training-ception. First, we’ll talk about purpose and frequency. What is the purpose of this training, and how frequently will training be presented? Why are we talking about this at all? Why is this important? We have the legal obligations like lawsuits and fines, and then also, we want to make sure we treat people how we want to be treated ourselves. We do this training when somebody’s hired and then once a year after.

Next, we talk about “Why does accessibility matter in support?” We talk about the fact that support staff are the front line. They’re the ones that are talking to the customers or potential customers. If somebody has a question, if somebody has an issue, if somebody’s having a hard time using the website because of accessibility problems or using the products because of accessibility problems, they will talk to the support staff first.

Support staff can make sure that we improve outcomes for all customers. Let’s say, for me, I don’t have a visual disability, but whenever I go to a website that has a really low contrast ratio, I can’t see it, right? I have a really hard time with low contrast ratios. This is obviously a problem for somebody with a visual disability, but it’s also a problem for everybody else. I can’t read a policy. I can’t read your terms of service, or I can’t read your privacy policy if the font is light gray and the background’s dark gray, right?

It improves outcomes for all customers. Also, support staff helps us meet those legal obligations by making sure that these customers are taken care of. We talk about the types of disabilities that can take place, like permanent, temporary, or situational, and we also give examples for all of these, and then we talk about categories of disabilities, so visual, hearing, motor, cognitive, or neurological, and what these might actually mean, because, again, support staff might think that a disability is that you’re in a wheelchair and that’s it; they might not know that there’s a lot of different types of disabilities out there.

We talk about assistive technologies. What types of assistive technologies may our customers use? In our case, they might use screen readers, magnifiers; they might use transcripts, captions, voice control, et cetera. I want to make sure that our support staff, let’s say they get on a call with a customer and they see a tool like this captioning agent that’s on this call, join the call. I want to make sure that the support staff are not shocked or surprised that something like this exists. They know what it does, and they know how it helps the customer, so there’s no questions about it, and they don’t need to ask the customer to explain, “What is this, or why are you using it?”

We also talk about communication practices. How do you communicate with your customers? For us at Termageddon, this could encompass written, phone, and video communications, and then also, what should support staff do? For example, they might need to turn on captioning. They might need to turn on their camera if somebody is like, “I need you to turn on your camera because I rely on lip reading a lot,” or maybe providing directions in a different way, or providing directions that are more detailed than you would otherwise provide other customers.

Also, accommodation requests, what can customers request? What should you not do? Don’t ask to provide medical proof. How do you handle a request? Let’s say we have a customer that needs to do a policy onboarding call where we help them answer the policy questionnaires to help them set up their policies, and the customer says, “I really can’t do a call. That just would not work for me.”

Okay, what else can we do? Can we send them the questions in an email, or maybe, can we provide them a transcript, or can we provide them written instructions of what to do? What types of things can we offer? Then how do you handle requests? How do you make sure that you’re respectful, that you know what you’re talking about, that you know what you’re supposed to do? Then, handling issues, who should the issues be escalated to?

For example, let’s say this is a development issue. How do you escalate this to the development team? How do you write them a message saying, “Okay, this is an accessibility issue, which means that it takes high priority because of our policy. That’s why I’m sending this to you outside of dev hours. Here’s what the client needs. Here’s what we need to do to fix the issue. Let me know once this is fixed,” and then somebody from the development team will reply saying, “Okay, I’m on it,” and then they will let you know once it’s done.

Lastly, we talk about respectful language and tone. We want to acknowledge the issue. Let the customer describe the issue themselves. We don’t try to make assumptions for the customer. We ask them, “What would be the most helpful way for us to do this for you?” Escalate, so who you need to escalate this to, provide multiple options if possible. If a customer tells you, “I prefer this,” okay, we’ll do what the customer prefers, but if they don’t verbalize what they’re preferring, then we’ll offer them multiple options of what we can do, and then lastly, update the customer to let them know what’s happening.

We always provide realistic examples and scenarios to start a discussion. Like I said at the beginning, we want compliance to be personal. What I do is I call people out individually with different scenarios that they may be faced with, and then I ask for ideas on what we should do. Some of these are taken from real-life examples. Some of them are taken through things that have happened to me outside of work, things like that.

Here’s some examples of scenarios that we provide. In Example 1, Donata, so me, I’m taking a customer through an onboarding call, and I’m sharing my screen. At the beginning of the call, the customer says that they have difficulty seeing the text on the screen. What do I do? I could enhance the screen, so put it at a larger size for them, and I can also read off every single question that I’m asking them, instead of having them read through the different options.

Hans sends a video that goes through the client’s policies. This happens a lot. We get tickets. “Oh, I’m not sure where this particular item in my policies is coming from. Can you show me where that is?” Okay, we’ll send you a video going through the policies, but the client replies, saying that they can’t follow the video instructions because there are no captions. Well, Hans can turn on the captions, or he can write out the steps that he took to get to the right place.

Katie is introduced to a client who cannot do an onboarding call because they have difficulty hearing and have a hard time focusing on questions when they are read aloud. In this case, Katie could offer to write the questions out in an email and send it to the customer, and go back and forth that way. You’ll notice that these are actual real names and actual real people and actual real situations because we want to make this personal.

Ricky is having a call where the customer says that they have a hard time focusing because Ricky has a loud fan on in the background, and Ricky’s dog is barking. This is a constant situation in my house. Two large dogs, there’s always some kind of fan going somewhere. In this case, Ricky can offer to turn off the fan and then put the dog in the bedroom or something like that to reduce that noise.

Donata receives a ticket saying that a customer cannot update their billing information because the page does not work well with a screen reader. Okay, in this case, Donata will send this ticket to the development team to have the development team test the page with a screen reader and see how they can fix it. You’ll see these are actual real-world situations that our staff may face on a daily basis. We go through these situations, and we talk about, “What should we do, what shouldn’t we do, who do we escalate this to, and how does this work?” so that it’s actually real and applicable to them.

Final thoughts. I know we don’t have a ton of time, and I want to leave time for questions. Some final thoughts. To me, accessibility means that we treat each other with the respect that we deserve, so we treat others how we want to be treated. If we have an accessibility issue on a website, we really don’t want to talk to somebody who’s annoyed that we have this issue. We don’t want to be told that “Well, this isn’t a problem for anyone else, so we’re not doing anything about this.”

We want to make sure that we’re treating people with respect. First, ticket resolution time limits. Some companies may have a time limit on tickets where support staff are punished if they don’t resolve a ticket within 24 hours. We don’t have this ourselves, but for companies that do, you should know that these resolution limits should not apply to accessibility requests. This does not mean that you can just ignore accessibility requests for days on end and not reply to the customer.

That’s not what this means, but what this means is that support staff should know that some people may need extra time, or extra directions, or extra guidance to be able to get an answer to their question. If a customer submits a ticket, you reply to them. You mark the ticket as resolved. Then they come back, “Hey, I need more thorough directions. I can’t really follow this.” Your support staff should not feel stressed that this customer needs extra help, so those time limits should not apply.

Tasks for resolving accessibility issues should be given a high priority. In this case, let’s say your development team needs to be involved. They should know this is a high-priority ticket because this is an accessibility issue, and they need to stop whatever else it is that they’re doing and put this as a priority. Customers should not be punished for needing accessibility accommodations. I get this sometimes at a doctor’s office.

I used to see this dentist, where you make an appointment, and then I get sick. I’m sick all the time, and I don’t want to go to the dentist when I’m sick because I don’t want to get their staff sick. I would call them and tell them, “Hey, I’m sick, can I please reschedule?” “Oh, well, our next available appointment is in eight months.” That seems pretty unrealistic. I feel like I’m being punished because I got sick and had to reschedule this appointment, even though I’m trying to be considerate towards you, your staff, and your other patients, but you’re punishing me by moving this out by eight months.

Customers should not be punished in that way. If they need to reschedule because of illness, if they need different accommodations, they should be helped, not made to wait eight months for the next appointment. “It works for me,” or “It works for other clients,” is not an acceptable thing to say; same thing of “Well, we need you to prove that you have inaccessibility,” or “This works for everyone else.” Those aren’t, really, right things to say. You shouldn’t be saying things like that.

Lastly, compliance is a journey of constant improvement. Your accessibility policy or your training may need to be adapted throughout time because when you talk to more customers or more customers come to you with accessibility issues, you may want to use those as examples, or maybe there’s new standards or something like that, so you need to make sure that the policy and the training are updated accordingly. All right. That’s the end of my spiel. I’m going to get us into questions.

>> AMBER: Yes. Thank you so much, Donata. That was fabulous. Folks, if you do have any questions and you want to put them in the Q&A module, I will happily pass them along. I am curious, just to kick us off, Donata, can you share a little bit about have you seen noticeable differences in just how accessibility is handled since you went through this whole process of creating a policy and training your support staff, and have they said they appreciated it, or any feedback that they’ve given you?

>> DONATA: Yes, definitely. Before we went through all of this, we don’t get a ton of tickets in general, but let’s say we would get a ticket saying, “This page doesn’t work with a screen reader.” Immediate panic. No idea what to do. We would wait for the dev hours, send it to the dev team, or maybe we would talk amongst ourselves with support, like, “What is a screen reader? How do we know what screen reader they’re using? How do we know this page doesn’t work?”

It was just basically panic and talking to everybody in the team that you could, in the hopes that maybe somebody would know how to handle this. After we went through the training, it’s very clear-cut what you need to do. You assign the ticket to me. I review the ticket. Then I send it to the development team, regardless of what time it is. Tell them that it’s an accessibility issue. Now they have all these different tools downloaded on their computers and on their browsers, so they know what to use to test, and they know exactly what to do to test or replicate the issue, and they’re a lot more aware of accessibility issues themselves, so they know how to fix it.

The first thing we’ll do, let’s say it’s an issue with a page and a screen reader, we’ll tell the customer, “Thank you so much for reaching out to us and for bringing up this issue. I’m very sorry that you’ve had this experience. I’ve sent this to our development team, and I will let you know as soon as this is fixed.” Then the development team works on it, and then we reply to the customer, “Thank you so much for your patience. This issue has been resolved. Please try again, and please let us know if you run into any other issues.” We have a very clear-cut process now of exactly what we need to do.

Also, I’ve noticed that support staff, when I look at past tickets with accessibility, it would be like, “Well, we can do this one thing for you.” Now I’ve noticed that support staff give them multiple options, or maybe they’ll say, “Okay, we can do this in written format, or we can do this on a call, or we can do this this way or that way.” I’ve noticed that they offer a lot more options to customers, which is really great to see. I’d say it’s a lot less chaotic.

>> AMBER: Yes, it’s interesting coming from the WordPress space, which I know you’re not only a WordPress plugin, but you have a WordPress plugin, or integrations in that space, but I feel like there, maybe there even still is, but there’s been this like tendency in that space where support is only via a ticketing system, and we’ll never get on a call with a customer.

>> DONATA: It’s awful. I hate that.

>> AMBER: I feel like we’ve realized, actually, that if we’re willing to just be like, “Hey, here’s–” Our lead dev will sometimes just send out a booking link to someone that opened a support ticket. He’s like, “You know what, it’s going to get resolved so much faster if I just get on a Google Meet or a Zoom call with them and see it.” I feel like the fact that you do that too, even sometimes for people, it’s not necessarily even accessibility; it’s just, we’re going to go back and forth way less if we can just see what you’re seeing.

[laughter]

>> DONATA: Yes. There’s been so many tickets where we’re like, “Can we just call you?” and not necessarily accessibility-related, but sometimes you go back and forth and back and forth on these tickets, and it’s like, “Can we just talk?” Then we talk, and within five minutes, it’s resolved. Sometimes it’s just so much easier that way. I think nowadays support, at least the way that I experience it as a consumer myself, is just awful.

There’s no email-to-email. There’s no portal to submit a ticket. I have to chat with some AI agent that I’m asking, “Can I talk to a person? Can I talk to a person?” and it’s like, “Here’s 50 links to 50 different articles that have nothing more to do with your particular issue.” I’m like, “Come on.” At a certain point, as a customer, you just need help. You need to talk to somebody. Somebody needs to help you, and I feel like nowadays it’s so hard to get that help. It’s so difficult.

It’s always automated. It’s always articles and all that other stuff instead of somebody being like, “Okay, here’s just what you need to do.” We really try to do that for our customers, for sure.

>> AMBER: Yes, I saw Lorna Port in the chat. She says, “OMG, the AI automated systems are the worst,” and I feel the same way. Literally, if I get one, the first thing you do is type “human,” “representative,” “agent.” I try all the words to see, “Can I get to a person and just bypass this?”

>> DONATA: There’s just been so much for the automated AI systems giving me the wrong information, information that’s clearly, clearly false, based on the website. I’m like, “Come on, man, just let me talk to a person,” and then the person has to apologize, and it’s just like, “This doesn’t look good for your company, and it’s very frustrating for your customers. Let’s not do this. Let’s just have normal support.”

>> AMBER: Yes. I noticed there was another comment here, a couple that are on an interesting point. Meredith had said, “The emphasis on training Help Desk/support employees on accessibility best practices and needs is such a good point,” and Meredith has never heard a company talk about that aspect of accessibility, which is, of course, why we asked you to come here, because I thought you had done such a great job rolling this out for your team.

I do think it is interesting. Jessica had commented as a follow-up to that, that it’s a lot more because of the European Accessibility Act. I do think this came up because we did an international format of a VPAT for you, and that is a requirement under the EN 301 549 requirements for the European Accessibility Act and the international VPAT to do that. It is interesting. I don’t know if you’ve seen more of this with your customers. Do you have a lot of customers outside the US?

>> DONATA: Yes. Yes, we do. To me, in my mind, this makes perfect sense, because let’s say I were to have the accessibility policy, and I was meeting the standards and stuff, but I never trained my support staff on it. To me, like the support staff, they’re the people who talk to the customer. If they have no idea what the accessibility obligations or requirements are, they’re not going to do the right thing, not because they don’t want to do the right thing, but because they just don’t know what it is, and they just don’t know what the standards and the requirements are. They don’t know what to do.

To me, training the staff just makes perfect sense, because accessibility isn’t just like, “Oh, I put together this policy, and I just filed it away in a cupboard, and nobody ever saw it again. It’s actually a real thing when we deal with customers and potential customers.” To me, it made perfect sense as to why we would need to have this, and I would say that for anybody that’s not subject to the standard, I would recommend doing it anyway, because this is not just about legal compliance; it’s about your customers having the best possible experience with you, and you want to make sure that they stay as a customer and that they’re able to use your products and your services and that they have a good experience. To me, even if I wasn’t subject to the standard, I would still do this.

>> AMBER: Honestly, I can’t think of a better thing to say at the end of this webinar. That is a really great way of wrapping up and explaining why this sort of training for support staff is important. To close this out, if anyone has any questions or they want to follow up with you, what’s the best way to get in touch?

>> DONATA: I’ll put my email in the chat. You can also find me on LinkedIn, Donata Stroink-Skillrud, and you can also find our company on LinkedIn, or X, or any of that kind of stuff.

>> AMBER: Do you want to just put your web address out there for folks, too, if they’re looking for Termageddon and want to learn more about your privacy policies and other web legal policies?

>> DONATA: Absolutely. Yes, I put that in the chat, too.

>> AMBER: Yes, just termageddon.com. Thanks, everyone, and we’ll see you in a couple of weeks for our next meetup. Bye.

>> DONATA: Thank you for having me. Bye.

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