Real talk on SEO and accessibility

Mordy Obertstein:

It's the new wave of SEO podcasting. Welcome to SERP's Up. Aloha, Mahalo for joining the SERP's Up podcast. We're pushing out some groovy new insights around what's happening in SEO. I'm Mordy Obertstein, the head of SEO brand here at Wix, and I'm joined by the ever and accessible, ask whatever you want, out there on social media. She'll always be happy to answer your SEO questions because she is accessible. She's the head of SEO Communications, Crystal Carter.

Crystal Carter:

Hello, everyone. I will ask to answer some questions. I will not answer every question. I'm just going to put that out there right now.

Mordy Obertstein:

No, but you know there are people out there on the social media space, "I'm an influencer. I'm not answering your questions. I'm not talking to you."

Crystal Carter:

That's true. That's true. That's true.

Mordy Obertstein:

Yeah, you're accessible. You'll talk.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah, that's true. That's true. I talk to people. I don't hide away. And also, I get people in my DMs sometimes. Also, just want to shout out. Okay, so somebody messaged me and they were like, "Oh, can you help me with this thing?" Or whatever, and I was like, "I don't think I'm your girl for this particular thing," but I sent the recommendation over to Crystal Waddle. She was like, yeah, this is like a great recommend. So I think that sometimes-

Mordy Obertstein:

The great union of Crystals.

Crystal Carter:

Yes, she's one of the fantastic and SEO Crystals. We are shine brightly wherever we go. And yeah, I think that that's something that maybe just remember that if you're not able to help someone, then maybe you can point them in the right direction. That's always great and it's valuable for everybody, and I think that that's going to be a great project. So shout out to Crystal Waddle there, whose doing some cool stuff.

Mordy Obertstein:

She is. She's great.

Crystal Carter:

She's great.

Mordy Obertstein:

By the way, on the Crystal thing, is there a monthly Crystals of SEO media? Because I will tell you, I was talking to Crystal Ortiz about this, another SEO Crystal. I don't know any Crystals outside of SEO, but in SEO, I know tons of Crystals.

Crystal Carter:

Do you know why? It's because there's a lot of SEOs who are millennials. And basically in the eighties there was, I'm just putting myself out here, but basically in the eighties there were a lot of kids named Crystal because of Dynasty. So there was Crystal and Alexis on Dynasty. I met an Alexis and she was like, "I'm also named after Dynasty." So when I was growing up, there was Crystal C, Crystal B, Crystal L. There were Crystals in all the classes. I think it's like there was a lot of Kylie's who were born in the nineties, for instance. I'm guessing maybe there's some kids named Dua who are born around now. There's a lot of kids who were born in the nineties who were named Logan after Wolverine from all of the action-

Mordy Obertstein:

Oh really?

Crystal Carter:

... yeah, I know a couple of Logans.

Mordy Obertstein:

I like that name. That's a good name.

Crystal Carter:

It's a good name.

Mordy Obertstein:

By the way, the SERP's Up podcast is brought to you by Zales. No, it's brought to you by, Wix, where you can not only subscribe to our SEO newsletter Searchlight each and every month over at wix.com/seo/learn/newsletter, but where you can also run accessibility audit on your website with the accessibility wizard built into the Wix and Wix studio platforms. Catch instances where you left out alt text have poor color contrast and more all in one click with our accessibility wizard. There's no actual wizard of accessibility. It's not like a Merlin doesn't pop up. It's a tool. So if you're expecting a wizard to come out of nowhere and fix your accessibility, that's not what actually happens. But it would be amazing if there was a dude with a long white beard and a big stick who did. Also, accessibility Moses the way I'm describing it.

Crystal Carter:

That's all. He could part the traffic and separate the organic from the bots.

Mordy Obertstein:

Thou shalt not pass with thy poor accessibility. This bridge, right? Going with another wizard.

Crystal Carter:

Right. And it'll be easy to use if you're on a tablet.

Mordy Obertstein:

Oh, like, hey, we've gone off the rails. By the way, we're talking about accessibility in SEO this week in case you haven't figured it out. But there's an tremendous amount of overlap as we get into when optimizing for accessibility is optimizing for SEO. Why having an accessible website is both good manners and good marketing, and are there signals of a more accessible Google? WL strategies, Katherine Watier Ong stops by to share how to integrate accessibility into your technical SEO audits. Plus, Wix's own accessibility wizard, Neil Osmond joins us, talk about the future of accessibility and accessibility focused website technology. And of course we get the snappies of SEO news for you and who you should be following on social media for more SEO awesomeness. So we hope you are open for all as we hit great info for you on this. The 87th episode of the Surf's Up podcast as having a site that performs good and does some good is within your reach. You might say it's accessible. I might say it. Yeah, if you're listening, would you actually say it or you might say it?

Crystal Carter:

Yeah, we try to make the podcast accessible. It's on multiple platforms, it's success... We add a transcript to our podcast for people who want to read the transcript. We have it so it's Audible as well for people who maybe don't want to read the transcript or hands-free or whatever, things like that.

Mordy Obertstein:

Yeah. No, you are-

Crystal Carter:

High contrast in our visuals. We're trying. We're trying.

Mordy Obertstein:

You're absolutely... We are.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah. If people have recommendations for other things, like give us a shout. If you're saying like, "Hey, there's a bit that I can't access," let us know.

Mordy Obertstein:

And we also make the lowercase a, We make it our podcast accessible to all types of SEO learners, no matter your level. So it's accessible in the front.

Crystal Carter:

We're trying, we're thinking to everybody. You know why? Because we care.

Mordy Obertstein:

Deeply.

Crystal Carter:

A lot.

Mordy Obertstein:

Did that come off inauthentic?

Crystal Carter:

It's true, we do.

Mordy Obertstein:

Yeah, no, I do. I just want to make sure I didn't sound inauthentic when I said, "Deeply." Anyway, we should probably move on. Okay, so what is accessibility? What are we talking about? So in a nutshell, accessibility means making your websites and the elements contained within your website usable for all people, whether they have, let's say a visual impairment or hearing difficulty, whatever it may be. You want to create a website experience where everybody can access the information on your website. So what does making a site accessible actually mean? Or practically, what does it mean? So there are a lot of things and it's way too long of a list and it's way more holistic than you might generally think, but it means things like having a button that doesn't say click here because when you have a text to audio reader, they don't know what here is.

That would be a thing. Making sure you have descriptive headers that aren't overly relying on idioms or jargon or aren't visually centric or they're playing off an image that you have only having one H1, which is actually an SEO best practice. But Google said, yeah, you could have more, but for accessibility you can't. Alt texts obviously audio transcripts, avoiding low contrast text, text rather avoiding content that isn't only available inside of an image, which by the way is an SEO thing because Google can't read that content that you have in an image either. And generally avoiding things that are really only about or summarizing things that are only in an image. So if you create an infographic let's say, and you don't have a summary that describes the infographic in some kind of readable text that would be inaccessible to some of your users.

The A11Y project has an entire checklist. We'll link to that in the show notes so you have a more prolific list there and there are real implications and a ramifications to this. There's a precedent for lawsuits if your site's not accessible. And that's based on in the US at least it's based on the Americans with Disabilities Act and that's just the US. And the US is not nearly as strict as other countries, particularly the European Union, which has an act in an effect since 2019 that's founded on the WCAG standards and that European Accessibility Act, and I'll end with this and hand it over to Crystal, they're going to enforce compliance as of June 28th, 2025, which is not that far off in the future if your website is fundamentally not accessible. So accessibility isn't just good. Marketing isn't just good manners. I mentioned before it's going to be good avoiding lawsuits.

Crystal Carter:

It's good business. And I think that that's something that people overlook because here's the thing. So one of the ways that people talk about accessibility is there's that dropped curb thing. So basically you've all seen this, but apparently back in the day it's like suitcases with wheels on them. I remember before wheels were on suitcases.

Mordy Obertstein:

I remember that. What were we thinking?

Crystal Carter:

What?

Mordy Obertstein:

Why? It took us so long to figure out, you know what would be a great thing to have wheels for? This really heavy-ass suitcase that I need to shlep through the entire freaking airport.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah, let me take the steamer trunk on my back. It's insane. It's madness.

Mordy Obertstein:

That's madness.

Crystal Carter:

So I remember that and that was ridiculous. But similarly with drop curves. So people used to just build, they'd have a sidewalk and they'd just have a sidewalk. At some point, somebody was like, we should have a drop curve, which is basically so that somebody who has a wheelchair can go, who can cross the street and cross onto the other side and they don't have to do the bumping down or whichever and all that sort of stuff, which is really inconvenient and really unsafe as well. Well, guess what? Those are great for everybody. If you have limited sight, it tells you that this is a safe place to cross.

It's good for people who can walk but maybe have mobility challenges. It's good for people who are pushing push chairs. It's good for people riding bicycles. It's good for lots of people. And that's a lot of the things with some of the stuff that you were just talking about in terms of accessibility. So you were saying, "Don't say click here." I hate, click here. What am I clicking on? Tell me what it is. Tell me what it is. That's not easy for-

Mordy Obertstein:

Scammy, by the way. The click here, my mind the second you have that on your page, you could have the most prestigious product and service on the planet means you say, "Click here." I feel like you're a YouTube spammer of some kind.

Crystal Carter:

Right? So click what? Tell me what it is. Alt text images also really useful. Interestingly, interestingly, there's a lot of tools that are adding alt text automatically. So for instance, we have a great tool for helping you add alt text to your website into your web pages within Wix SEO tools. If you haven't gone back to the SEO, SEO set a checklist, please do that because they've added that in and it's really useful and it's really great. But similarly, if you're using PowerPoint, when you add an image into PowerPoint, it adds in alt text based on the thing. I added in that picture of John Cusack holding up that meme. And it was like someone holding up a sign and I was like, "Oh, okay. Thank you very much PowerPoint." These things are really, really useful." Audio transcripts. Sometimes I need to be able to search the podcast and say, "What was that thing that he was talking about?"

And I can just search it with Ctrl F and I can find the piece of text. That is great. And that's also great for SEO because you, and they transcript, they transcribe all the YouTube videos for the same reason because they are easier to find bits of information and things like that. So it is great business, business from an SEO point of view, it's also great because if you have users who are trying to come to your website, you want them to feel welcome, you want them to feel like they can use your website. And I will tell you right now that if you go to a website or you go to something and it doesn't feel usable, you just leave. You just leave.

Mordy Obertstein:

Totally.

Crystal Carter:

Whereas if there's one where it is accessible, then not only will you use it, but that will be your go-to, because you know that it's easy for you to use as opposed to these other ones that you've been, you don't want to trawl around looking for 17 other websites. This one works. You will go to that one and you will use that one. For instance, and again, this is a lowercase accessibility thing, but just something to think about. I have dietary considerations to think about. I'm lactose intolerant, and if I look at a menu and they don't tell me which things have dairy in them, it's like a whole pain in the butt. It's so exhausting. I don't want to have to talk to you about all the things. Just tell me what's what. If you don't have it, cool, that's fine. I will go somewhere else.

If you do have it, then great. And I think that it is very, very similar when people are thinking about accessibility stuff, the places where it's easy for them to go, it'll be really useful. And also I think that people forget that some of these things can be deal-breakers for wider groups. So if you have a client, we used to work with medical clients and the agency I was working at previously used to work with the NHS, and they have to be accessible. Everything has to be accessible for the NHS. Every single thing has to be accessible for the NHS. So if your website isn't accessible to the NHS, and guess what, you ain't getting that contract.

Mordy Obertstein:

We'll get into that later in a little bit with Katherine. Government contracts are very different. They have a different set of laws in the US at least, that they have to align with. And it's a good example of how you're limiting your audience and your potential market if you don't make your website accessible. I think one of the classic things you hear is, "Well, mean how many people are there out there with an audio or a visual impairment?" There's 26,514 nursing homes in the US as of 2023. My wife works in nursing homes, so I'm pretty familiar with this. I would like to go into a nursing home and see how many of the people don't have a visual or audio impairment.

Crystal Carter:

Yo, I'm wearing glasses right now and I-

Mordy Obertstein:

I can't see anything without my glasses on.

Crystal Carter:

And people forget about that. And on my phone, I have a little accessibility dude on the corner of my phone because, sometimes I forget to wear my glasses. I've only started wearing glasses in the last couple of years and so I forget that I can't see. And so sometimes-

Mordy Obertstein:

I'll pull up my glasses sometimes when I'm reading something because it's annoying on my phone to read it without, so it's like right in my face. I feel like an old person, but I'd say, Hey, I do that and that's fine. I'm okay with this. But the page, if the page is set up in a way that it's not accessible to the words, the font isn't big enough, it's super annoying. It's annoying with my glasses on because of the way the screen is set up and it's annoying my glasses off because I can't see it.

Crystal Carter:

So that high contrast thing, that's another point. The high contrast thing, that's just, that's everybody.

Mordy Obertstein:

That's just good. I was on a website with my wife the other day and the background is all black and the font is neon pink. It's like, why did they do this? It's killing my eyes.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah, so these are things to think about and I think that there's a lot of overlap with UX, so a lot of good UX will work well with that and a lot of good CROs. So a lot of CROs will think about things like high contrast, making sure that the clickable elements are not on top of each other. That's not good practice to have clickable elements like too close together, and good UX will flag that. So a lot of times there's a lot of alignment, but with good UX and good accessible websites. So I think that that's worth thinking about. But I think that sometimes you don't even know who's not coming to your website when you are not taking accessibility into consideration because people just won't... They just won't engage.

Mordy Obertstein:

They'll click and they'll bounce. Which by the way, from an SEO point, if you ever want to talk about user behavior, neighbor boost, whatever it is, that bouncing is a signal.

Crystal Carter:

And if you're looking at certain tools and things that you're finding that on certain situations or in certain places, a lot of people are bouncing or they're not coming through, that's something to think about. And I think that there are ways that can add in... You can use add-ons to make your site more accessible. Sometimes you see the little accessibility guy on certain websites and you can click on that and it can make it more accessible for people in that way. Another thing that I've started to see, and I think we talk about this as well, is making pages listenable. So people will add an audio, an audio file onto a long read article. I love those because I get tired, I get very tired staring at a screen for a long time and reading 3,000 words, 6,000 words of an article.

Mordy Obertstein:

It's like, listen in the background.

Crystal Carter:

Listen in the background like people would do to a podcast. Do some stretching, make a sandwich while listening to this article or just listen to, if it's something that's a new topic to me, I'll listen to it to sort of pick up the key phrases, pick up some of the things, and then go back into it to read the text, to get deep dive into the sections that I'm interested in. And this is something that is useful for people who have visual challenges. This is also useful for people who have temporary disabilities, I guess you would say, temporary things like when you don't have your hands because your hands are full.

Because you've got your shopping in one hand, you've got the kids in the other hand, you can still listen to the content in that way, or you're driving for instance, and you want to be able to search up the information. There's things like that where you can have speakable to speakable schema, for instance, where you can say, "Hey, is Denny's open right now?" And that your Tesla or something we'll talk about, I don't know if people in Tesla's go to Denny's, I'm sure they do sometimes. Anyway, your Tesla will say, "Yes, Denny's is open right now and stuff." You go, "Thanks. Thanks car."

Mordy Obertstein:

By the way, just throw another stat into this to show you how you're limiting your audience. You're not talking about the point about having a temporary impairment is a great point. 6 million people in the US had cataract surgery last year. It could be two years ago, whatever it is. 6 million people. My father had cataract surgery last year, actually. He's one of those 6 million. And he couldn't read anything for a few days or couldn't read anything well, for a few days. And so do you really want potentially 6 million of your customers to be like, oh man, this website is so much more annoying than I thought it was a week ago now. I just had cataract surgery.

Crystal Carter:

Similarly, I think the other is people will talk about, people who are doing accessibility will think about how can you experience this? Well, some people say, "Well, try to use your website without looking at it. Try to use your website without looking at it. Try tabbing through it, using a voice reader, using a screen reader, et cetera, and see what it's like." And I think that that is something that's worth thinking about because it's very difficult sometimes to pay attention to challenges that aren't in your first frame of reference. And even with the best will in the world, probably the best example I've had of this was when I was on maternity leave and I was pushing a buggy around, pushing a shoulder around, I suddenly was very, very aware of how many places had stairs everywhere, and it was impossible for me to get this push chair, this stroller.

Mordy Obertstein:

New York City subway.

Crystal Carter:

Right.

Mordy Obertstein:

Super annoying.

Crystal Carter:

And as soon as you have that, you're like, "Oh my gosh, this is a horrible way. This is horrible. Why isn't this like this? Why isn’t there an elevator?"

Mordy Obertstein:

That's an example, because the New York City subway does have an elevator, but just because you have the thing there, it doesn't work. Well, half of them are broken half the time. Where is the elevator? God knows where it is. So sometimes you think, "Oh, I created it. It's accessible. I have the thing there." But you haven't really thought about how you've rolled that experience out in a way where it's made the accessibility actually accessible.

Crystal Carter:

Right. Yeah. "Oh, I ticked the box." It's like, "Yeah, but have you tested it? Have you tested it? And is it okay?" Right, because there's lots of places, and again, wheelchair access is probably one that we're all very familiar with, but sometimes they just have the ramp, so they'll have the ramp. That's the way that you access the place. And there's lots of times where people prefer the ramp over the stairs. People who are perfectly capable of using the stairs will prefer the ramp because the ramp is better, and the ramp is easier for people to access. And certainly if you're pushing something heavy or you're doing whatever, these are the things. So have a look at it, have a look at it that actually tests your accessible features. Because like you said, making accessibility accessible, it's really important. I think what another example is on a bus for instance, you have those buses. There's some buses where you go to the bus stop and the curb is raised.

And so if the bus shows up and somebody needs to go on a wheelchair, they can just roll straight on. Then there's some places where the curve is dropped and the bus driver has to get out of their seat and they've got to take the ramp and they've got to put it down and then they've got to do all the thing. And it's a whole big thing. And it's like when I show up with my lactose intolerance and they're like, "Oh, let me get you this ring binder. Let me get you this trapper keeper notebook that's all covered in grease and grime and things and a million other people's smudges and have you flip through that." I don't want that. Just put it on the menu. Just put it on the menu. Then I know everybody knows, or there's an app or something. Make it accessible. Give people the information, give people the tools in order to use your content and to access your site, access your services really well.

Mordy Obertstein:

And that's where the web is going. One of the things you pointed out, we were talking about this, was that Google started to add all of the audio readers to all of their, not to all of their, increasingly to their documentation. At a certain point, as the web becomes more and more accessible, you're running the risk of being left behind and created the optic. You don't care, which if you don't actually care, you should at a minimum care about the optic of caring. Because you're going to come off as, I don't know what, it's a good word I'm allowed to use on the, you're going to come out like a jerk. And people move off of your brand because they'll look at it. People who don't have any impairments will look at it like, "Oh, this website is... Come on, seriously?" And they'll move off the website because of it.

Crystal Carter:

And I think also, so speaking of Google, Google's also added in a lot of those accessibility elements to their Google business profile. So in Google business profile, you can declare this is wheelchair accessible. You can declare things like that.

Mordy Obertstein:

You see, that's where the internet is going. That's a big deal. All those attributes were a big deal. They are a big deal. In the local space, people will say, yes, a million percent, we add in those attributes. They're super helpful to the consumer.

Crystal Carter:

It shows your users that you care about them. Like we said, on our podcasts, we try to make sure that it's accessible in lots of different ways. For instance, because we care. We want people to be able to use it. And I think it's important to remember and to acknowledge the times when you feel like you're on a website and you're like, "Why can't I access this? Why is this too small? Why is this too close together? Why is this not accessible?" Take a moment, pause and experience the experience of that and think about that when you're building your website. Also, I think it's worth testing it with folks that you know who might be in that audience just to make sure that they are able to access it. It doesn't have to be a big deal. It's just like, "Hey, what do you think of this website? Your honest opinion." And I think that it can get you a lot. It can help you get really far in the process.

Mordy Obertstein:

You know what can also help you, some tips about how to integrate accessibility into your SEO audits and what that actually means, and why that actually makes sense and why there's an overlap to begin with. Here is the owner of WO Strategies, Katherine Watier Ong on just that.

Katherine Watier Ong:

I stumbled into checking website accessibility as an SEO when I started working on federal.gov websites. At this point, I've worked on three. Cancer.gov, healthit.gov, and the Fisheries Division of NOAA, so fisheries.noaa.gov. And there's just so much related to SEO that's important for accessibility. So I just couldn't help highlighting areas where I thought they weren't meeting 508 compliance, because the feds need to meet this level of compliance. And usually feds think they're fine and they have some obvious stuff usually handled like transcript for audio or video, but then having alt text for all of their images and text navigation, the screen reader can read, some of that stuff usually falls by the way of side. Right now I'm in the middle of a tech audit for a large international nonprofit looking at four of their websites, and I sense that they might need a full accessibility audit. So to make my case for that audit, I usually just use the default stuff in Microsoft.

So I turn on a screen reader, I use Microsoft's default, and then I video record my session using Microsoft's game bar recording functionality. And in one instance, I noticed that they had these instructional videos for how to use the website, but they didn't have unique link names. So when you listen to the screen reader, it just said, "Video, video, video." And none of the videos had transcripts. And then in another instance, the JavaScript that they're using on this website had garbled the navigation so much that you could just hear that garbled confusion in the screen reader. I think it's kind of powerful to see how an actual user would experience the website by using these recordings. Oftentimes I get a hint of whether or not there's trouble. I run a Chrome Lighthouse report, obviously that pulls some stuff, but then I also use WebAIM's Wave tool, the checker to check a variety of other stuff like low contrast issues, form field labeling, tech size, that kind of thing.

Now with the feds, you just have to mention 508 compliance, and usually they're motivated to fix the issues. But with this international nonprofit, I pulled together all of the regulating laws related to disabilities for every country they're trying to appear in, as well as the US laws. I'm also going to try to tie page speed to accessibility. As cheaper mobile phones have slower processors and obviously certain geographic areas don't have great internet speeds, and I know their goal is to be in front of everyday users in all these different countries. So we'll see how it goes with persuading them to take this seriously.

Mordy Obertstein:

Thank you so much Katherine. Make sure to give Katherine a follow over on X, over at K-W-A-T-I-E-R link in the show notes. And you see a second you start to a certain type of client. If you're not thinking about accessibility, you're immediately out.

Crystal Carter:

And I think that that's really interesting that she mentioned a few government spaces as well. Gov.UK is an award-winning site for both accessibility and for UX, and they keep it super simple. And I think that the accessibility that she's talking about in terms of device and data access is also really important. There are certain GEOs. For instance, I know that in Johannesburg for instance, data is incredibly expensive. It's like some of the most expensive data on earth or something. And I've had it before where we had a client who was working in that area and they were saying like, "Oh yeah, we want to have a video on the page." And somebody local was like, "Nah." Like what? It was like, "Nah, nobody's going to watch that video because it's too much on the data." So that should not be on the page. Don't put it on the page and things.

And I think that that's really important to think about as well because again, it will make your site more accessible to other users. I had an app recently that updated beyond the capabilities of my little phone, and I had a terrible time using it when I changed my phone, it was perfectly fine. But I think when you are thinking about accessibility both with a capital A and with the lowercase, you're also broadening the scope of your audience, which is what growth is about. And I think if you're like, "Oh, there's nobody who needs this." It's like, "Well, nobody, that's your current user that needs this."

Mordy Obertstein:

Tell you 6 million people got cataracts in the US, had surgery alone in the US.

Crystal Carter:

And I think you say, "Oh, people who don't have disabilities..." Honestly, by the time people get past 30 years old, tell me somebody who doesn't have a bum knee, or hearing-

Mordy Obertstein:

I can't hear anything. My wife talks, I can't hear anything. It's like as if I didn't hear it Hear, Didn't you hear? I'm like, no, I didn't hear.

Crystal Carter:

Right. Let's be honest here.

Mordy Obertstein:

I do. I can't hear. I have bad hearing.

Crystal Carter:

Let's be honest here, about what people need and how people access sites access the web. And yeah, I think that you'll only win. And chances are it's not even going to cost that much to implement.

Mordy Obertstein:

No, it could. Must be. It can be sometimes a big overhaul, but the truth is most of the times, not. And either way, you're going to end up at a point where you're exposing yourself to lawsuits if you're operating in the EU for sure.

Crystal Carter:

And that costs more.

Mordy Obertstein:

Yeah. And that's going to cost more. And also you're setting yourself up to end up being looked at like you're behind the times, which is not what you want to do as a brand. And again, you're limiting your market. It makes zero sense most of the time. Things you are right are very simple. Again, don't have a black background with pink highlight neon text. I can't read that. And I can see with my glasses on. Now with that, we have a very special treat for you about talking about building your website and making it accessible. It's one thing to talk about accessibility, it's another thing to talk to someone who's actually worked on working to create all new ways for site owners and site matters to ensure that their websites are actually accessible. So join us as we go across the Wix-verse,  we talk to Wix's own accessibility specialist, Neil Osmond.

Mordy Obertstein:

Welcome to the show, Neil. It's an honor to have you here.

Neil Osman:

Thanks for having me.

Mordy Obertstein:

So there's a lot of talk about accessibility is becoming more in focus as we spoke about earlier in the show, but you've done a lot to help Wix site owners be able to create more accessible websites more efficiently and more accessibly, for lack of a better word. And before we get into it all, I just wanted to catch up with you. What have you done? What have you worked on? What have you done to help our Wix ecosystem? Because you're the man.

Neil Osman:

We are a team of specialists and I'm one of them. But yeah, our methodic, the way we try to tackle this complex thing in Wix is to do a shift left. And by shift left, I mean making everything accessible by design. So our users will not need to care about it too much, though they should as far as their content is concerned. So all of the viewer, the infrastructure, the components, the directionality, all this technical stuff, they're exempted from having to deal with it and we take care of everything. And by the way, internally also, that was a very laborious effort to do a shift left instead of fixing bags and vicious cycle of bugs and things like that. So we tried to do an organizational shift left.

Crystal Carter:

How difficult is it to get buy-in for that sort of thing? I know that there are some people who work in teams and they try to make the case for accessibility and they find it a little bit tricky. What is your top tip for making that case, for building that sort of access as a first port of call? What's your top tip for getting buy-in for that?

Neil Osman:

My top tip would be to consider all kinds of personas that might use your site. And usually we're not fully aware of personas type like blind users or visually impaired visitors or elderly visitors or users maybe with diverse, with new diversity, all kinds of, or just sighted keyboard users.

Crystal Carter:

And I think also, I think people sometimes forget that. I always call it, capital A accessibility. Thinking about that sort of thing also impacts lowercase accessibility, people being able to use it on their mobile or people being able to use it with voice search or things like that. So if I'm out and about with my son and I don't have fingers to type, or when Mordy sends me voice messages that are just like, yeah, okay. And I'm like, "You couldn't type that?" He was like, "I was busy." Making sure that people have different ways that they can access the information is-

Neil Osman:

Absolutely

Crystal Carter:

... great for lots of users.

Neil Osman:

Another common example that I hear a lot is you sit in a bar, in a cafe, you are looking at a video. So captions really help them with the noise around you.

Mordy Obertstein:

Yeah, no, for real. I look at YouTube videos and captions with the sound off all the time. A huge thing.

Neil Osman:

No, it's a common pattern that lots of accessibility enhancements take away to the mainstream. And usually when there are good accessible solutions, it helps everyone. It's not always the case, because not all accessibility solutions are great, but the ones that are great, in high probability, they will serve everyone.

Crystal Carter:

Right. And I think is that something that you think about when you're thinking about which accessibility optimizations to add to websites?

Neil Osman:

Absolutely. And most of the time it would be, let's take the simple solution, the straight one, let's not complex too much. But on the other end there's a notion that accessible sites are ugly sites and we want to tackle this one because it's not true. We can make everything accessible, even the most complicated application. So I think that it's kind of a philosophy, but things should be simple to the visitors and in that regard, yeah, I think it's more helpful for your visitors to not complex things too much, like invent the navigation, invent the visual conventions and affordances.

Mordy Obertstein:

I want to swing back to something you were mentioning earlier, because it's very similar to what we have on the SEO side, where we have the Wix infrastructure for SEO makes it easy for bots to crawl and discover your pages and so forth and so forth. But what you do with the content from an SEO point of view, is really on you. We can't write your title tags for, we have an AI thing that can write your title tags for you, but you still need to click to do that and then accept the AI suggestion. And it's a fine balance. And I'm wondering how do you go about tackling or deciding what guidance you're going to build for our users to be able to create more accessible websites? I know we have the accessibility wizard and so forth, but how do you sit down and say, "You know what? This is the next thing we need to tackle to help guide our users to making more accessible websites."

Neil Osman:

So I think that in this regard, we have three main areas of concern. One is headings, the other one is alternative text for images, and also choice of colors. So let's take one by one. So let's start with headings. Headings are very important. I like the metaphor of the book, the H1, the main heading should be a single one. And that's the book title. And then each chapter is the H two, the secondary headings. And then if the chapters are complex or have lots of content, maybe it'll be a good idea to split them into H3s. So when a visitor or user or reader wants to go straight to chapter three and to the second thing, so it can straight go to that chapter, chapter through headings.

Yeah, maybe I'm assuming that everyone understands why it's important for users with disabilities. So lots of users that use assistive technology, they have all kinds of shortcuts. So they cannot scheme the page and look at it and go straight well and point, and click the thing they're interested in. So instead of that, they have alternative mechanisms like navigating through headings. So headings should represent the structure and hierarchy in relationship of the content. And as side effects, it also helps the primary screen reader user of the web, which is Google, which works quite similarly.

Crystal Carter:

I mean, I, as a sighted user, I can't stand it when I go to a page and the headings don't make sense. If I look at the headings and the headings are just like, "And now read more related posts," I'm just like, "What is this?" I can't stand when they're, so I can't imagine how frustrating that must be for somebody with limited sight trying to navigate a page and it just makes no sense. You just leave. You would just leave. You'd just go to someone...

Neil Osman:

Absolutely.

Mordy Obertstein:

And the contrast stuff, the color contrast is something that I will freely admit. I've used the accessibility words under my own size. I thought it was fine. I thought this is fine. And you don't really realize because while I have many shortcomings, I can see with my glasses on. With my glasses off, I can't see a thing. I'm blind as a the bat.

Neil Osman:

By the way, that very substantial percentage of men are colorblind.

Mordy Obertstein:

Yeah, interesting. Wayne Gretzky was colorblind. I don't think I'll realize that. Yeah, a little hockey fact for you. I'm pretty sure that's true. Wait, don't take me to the bank on that. I'm pretty sure it's true. But yeah, there's a lot of issues there. And you don't think about it because you're designing it. It looks nice. It looks like I could read it. I see it, by the way, in kids' books all the time.

Crystal Carter:

Yes. Yes. Facts. Yes.

Mordy Obertstein:

They put the black text on a dark color character and you can't read squat.

Crystal Carter:

No, no.

Neil Osman:

Interesting.

Crystal Carter:

I can think of the one right off the top of my head. It's an astronomy book and they're telling me about Saturn and its black text on a dark purple cloud or something, and I'm like, "I don't know anything about this planet anymore." We just have to think there's no hope for me.

Mordy Obertstein:

Was it one of the real planets or was like Pluto, who cares?

Crystal Carter:

Pluto can't keep itself together. It's a helper belt. Guys, guys manage your orbit.

Mordy Obertstein:

Pluto's that crazy uncle who comes over for Thanksgiving, you don't want there anyway.

Crystal Carter:

He's like, "Hey." And you're like, "Are you still around? I thought were in Florida."

Mordy Obertstein:

"I thought we got rid of you."

Neil Osman:

But at least at Wix, all the presets and templates are designs-

Mordy Obertstein:

That's amazing.

Neil Osman:

... as needed, but when users start playing with it might have contrast issues. And for this, we have the Wizard to detect these issues.

Crystal Carter:

Yes. The Accessibility Wizard is turning three this year.

Mordy Obertstein:

Is it really?

Crystal Carter:

Yeah, it's turning three this year. And I think it such an amazing thing. And I think that, can you just tell us about what the goals are for the Accessibility Wizard and how it works for people that aren't aware?

Neil Osman:

Absolutely. Absolutely. So as I said before, all of the infrastructure should be accessible by designs and users should not care about. But as Mordy mentioned, user content is their domain and they should take care of it. So the Wizard scans all of the site pages and detect these kind of issues and allow users straight in the editor to fix it. It's not just a reporting tool, it's a product that help users fix things on the spot. Yeah, and we have big plans for the Wizard, but we leave it as a surprise.

Mordy Obertstein:

Not even a little? I know we're working on a lot of stuff for accessibility. It's really in focus for us right now, not even a little tease?

Neil Osman:

So we have partners in mind, we want to tailor something for them. They have multiple sides and we work hard on a new architecture, so to work on all editors and there's going to be a very fancy engine rules and better coverage and sorting and filtering.

Mordy Obertstein:

I don't think you've said too much. No, I think it was perfect, because I don't know what you're talking about and I work here.

Crystal Carter:

But I think that the making it really easy for website builders and website managers to manage your accessibility is really key. And the best example that I've seen of that is adding the alt text updates into the SEO set of checklists, like the blog assistant so that you go onto your blog and they're like, "You're missing alt text." And you're like, "Where?" And they're like, "Here, here, here and here. Do you want to fill it in?" And you're like, "Yeah, okay." And then you just do. And we've seen an incredible number of users take that up, which has been fantastic.

Neil Osman:

That's fantastic. What do you think about the AI enhancements?

Crystal Carter:

I think that some of those, we've been using vision AI, Google's, vision AI to add tags or to make images more searchable in Wix for years. And I think that it's very good at categorizing images, so it makes sense that it would make help, that it would be a big help for adding alt text images.

Neil Osman:

Truth is, I'm a bit ambivalent about this because on the one hand, yeah, we see uplift and that's great and no alt or partially good alt for sure, partially good alt are better than nothing and gives more value. But I think we should up our game a bit because user rely on this. So let's consider an example. Okay, you're a merchant, you have a store and you sell Nike shoes, and for each model you have a few products. Okay? Now what the alt, because one from the front, one from the side, one from, I don't know, from behind. What kind of alt can you give? And I think AI is not...

It's very challenging to write, to do good prompt engineering to good results, but it's doable. I think it's doable and it's a challenge, but I think that, hey, if the merchant chose to include a photo from the front, so maybe it communicates them, it gives this source the information they're looking for, oh, that's the model that you see, I don't know, something like this. And that should be the alt text, right? Not just the Nike and the model number or what have benefit.

Mordy Obertstein:

If you understand the page better, you can pull in all sorts of stuff to the image, one would assume. Well, you can take a product description and have AI summarize a product description and pull that in to be, if you know that's the image. Also, it's one image. Just make it really simple. You have, I don't know, a pair of socks, which is complicated when it's more than one image.

Neil Osman:

Right. Exactly.

Mordy Obertstein:

Right. But if it's a page with one image, you can take the description and summarize it and put that as the alt text, theoretically.

Neil Osman:

Absolutely. Absolutely. Absolutely. I think, yeah, you are correct.

Mordy Obertstein:

Bottom line is you should not be using more than one product image now is what I'm saying, which is not what you should be doing. Don't take that advice.

Neil Osman:

Absolutely. Yeah. We have the gallery for this and-

Mordy Obertstein:

Yeah, that's more challenging.

Neil Osman:

... it gives our office lots of value. Yeah.

Crystal Carter:

I have a question which is slightly off-piece. So Mordy, forgive me for going on a tangent.

Mordy Obertstein:

That's what this podcast is about.

Crystal Carter:

So I've been seeing a lot, and this is something that I've noticed and something that the first time I saw this was I was reading an article on, it's called Guardian Long Reads, and they're really long articles, I don't know, 7,000 words or something like that. And they had an audio of it and it was like an excerpt for a book or an interview with an author who'd just written a book and they had basically the author reading the article. I've started also seeing these snippets on Google. They've started listen to this article, and I think Hacker Noon also does it Medium had it for a while. What's your opinion on those in terms of making content more accessible?

Neil Osman:

Oh, I think that these are great enhancements because many, many user prefer to consume the content in audio format. And having a few options to consume the content is great. That's useful by the way, listening and reading at the same time. Usually people with attention deficit and things like that and the context changes. Sometimes you want to consume the content on the way to work or when you're running. Yeah, it's great. So if the content is available only in audio, it's very important to have a transcription. And by the way, there are two kinds of solutions. A synthetic one and a natural one, someone reads it and you have a ready-made audio. But nowadays, screen readers, not the traditional ones, but those maintained by Google, Microsoft, and Amazon, they are and they're powered through AI. It's a revolution. It's so much better than it used to be. It's really natural with all them.

Mordy Obertstein:

I'm looking forward to the point in time where you can have a voice like, Waze or Google Maps, you have different voices redo the directions. I want Arnold Schwarzenegger reading my Google documentation to me.

Neil Osman:

What Apple push towards this goal. You can record for 15 minutes a voice and then it can be used as the voice that will.

Mordy Obertstein:

Perfect. This is all I want out of life. I'm glad. I'm glad it's already here then.

Neil Osman:

Why Arnold, by the way?

Mordy Obertstein:

I love Arnold. I think he's hilarious. Yeah, I love a big Arnold Schwarzenegger fan now. Old Arnold from way back when was kind of a creep, but yeah, new Arnold is way better than old Arnold.

Neil Osman:

Yeah. You are from California?

Mordy Obertstein:

No, Crystal is from California.

Neil Osman:

Oh. Where you are you from, Mordy?

Mordy Obertstein:

New York.

Neil Osman:

Oh.

Mordy Obertstein:

I mean now. Yeah, I'm originally from New York. Now I'm international. Where can people, we could find Crystal in California, which we can't anymore, because she doesn't live in California anymore. Where can people find you? Are you on Twitter? LinkedIn, TikTok?

Neil Osman:

I'm a bit on like Twitter, but I got tired of it. Yeah, but I still have an account and I communicate with professionals over there and.

Mordy Obertstein:

Oh, okay, cool.

Neil Osman:

LinkedIn properly is also active.

Mordy Obertstein:

So we will link to those in the show notes. Neil, thank you so much for all that you do to help our users and thanks so much for joining us today.

Neil Osman:

Thank you. Was a blast. Thanks.

Mordy Obertstein:

You know who's always making the SEO news very accessible?

Crystal Carter:

Whose that?

Mordy Obertstein:

Literally he has his articles, he has his daily video series called, It's New, which you can find right here on the Wix SEO Learning Hub, where it's indicated because Crystal and I do this daily with him. It's Barry Schwartz.

Crystal Carter:

Hey.

Mordy Obertstein:

He makes it accessible.

Crystal Carter:

He does, he does. He does.

Mordy Obertstein:

He's very accessible on Twitter as well. You reach out to Barry, is it new? No. Your birthday? Thank you.

Crystal Carter:

I think also we talked about language as well. I think language is also really, really important. I think Barry writes in a very matter of fact kind of way like this happened and this happened and that happened.

Mordy Obertstein:

That's true.

Crystal Carter:

And I think that's really, really useful. I think it's particularly useful when we think about accessibility in a lowercase a kind of way in terms of international audiences like, [foreign language 00:48:44] from school or whatever. But when I know my accent is-

Mordy Obertstein:

Espanol.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah, I know my accent is sometimes better than that. But anyway-

Mordy Obertstein:

That's a combination of, I don't know what. Texas, Espanol.

Crystal Carter:

Espanol, [foreign language 00:49:01]. Anyway, but I can't understand super complex sentences. I can understand smaller sentences in Spanish and straightforward sentences, but I can't understand super complex sentences. And I think that when you're speaking to an international audience, it's really important to think about that as well. Don't dumb it down, but don't make it overly complex for no reason at all. And I would say that Barry's very good at speaking very clearly and has a very wide-ranging international audience For that reason.

Mordy Obertstein:

What we're trying to say is its time for the Snappy News. Snappy News. Snappy news. Snappy News. You heard of the Yankee Clipper. Well now Google's the coupon clipper for the record, you may not have heard of the Yankee Clipper and that's Joe DiMaggio, but you may not have heard of either. Mordy, stop with the baseball references. I can't, I'm sorry. From Barry Schwartz on Search Engine Land, Google begins enforcement of site reputation abuse policy with portions of sites being de-listed. So as we spoke about on this podcast before, back in the beginning of March, Google when announcing it's March 2024 core update and the spam update said, "Hey, come May 5th, we're going to be targeting Parasite SEO." And indeed they are. Barry confirmed with Danny Sullivan from Google who said that right now they're only doing manual actions. Dan said the algorithmic component will indeed come as we've said, but that's not live yet.

What is Parasite SEO's, Google's calling on site reputation abuse. Barry writes, when third party sites host low quality content provided by third parties to piggyback on the ranking power of those third party websites. So for example, if I am, I don't know, coupon, superdupercoupon.com and no one's looking up, I can't rank for whatever keyword I'm trying to rank for. So I'll go to CNN, say, "Hey CNN, I'd like to host an article on your website because you rank for everything. So now I'll rank for my coupon keyword because you rank for everything. I will siphon off your authority." Google says, quote, "A third party might publish payday loan reviews on a trusted educational website to gain ranking benefit from the site. Such content ranking highly in search can confuse or mislead visitors who may have vastly different expectations for the content on a given site."

So the issue is, in my opinion, and maybe I'm putting words in Google's mouth, who knows. If I go to CNN and I see CNN's branding everywhere, and then I'm reading this article about whatever that this third party site is hosting on CNN, a reader might get confused, like, "Look at this, this is CNN," but it's not actually as trustworthy as CNN or whatever. I don't know. ABC News, wherever they're hosting this content. What Google did say, and I'm personally against me, speckling, I think this is why algorithmically it's hard. A lot of times you have content that's editorial content or surgeon and journal, they have advertisement, what do they call it? Oh, man. Announcements I think they call it. And it's articles like Crystal Carter, the host of this podcast has written an announcement article on search a journal, and it's all about SEO. It's great content because its from Crystal.

So it's probably the best content on the whole website, just saying, and it makes sense to have that on search a journal. It was about SEO, I think it was about a SEO checklist or whatever it was. So that's exactly the kind of content and the quality of content that you'd want to see on an SEO news and blog site. So that makes sense. So Google said, "Many publications host advertising content that is intended for the regular readers rather than to primarily manipulate search rankings, sometimes calls native advertising or advertorial. This kind of typically won't confuse regular readers of the publication when they find on the publisher's site directly or when arriving at it from Google search results." I think that makes a complicated algorithmically and I think that's why they need to implement the manual actions to train the algorithm. That's me saying that.

That's how Google's saying that. I'm a smart person, I think. Anyway, Barry also wrote this time on Search Engine Roundtable. "Google Site repetition Abuse isn't about linking." So Danny Sullivan, again, Google search liaison made it to quote Barry, "Crystal clear that the cyber petition abuse policy has zero to do with linking." This means that who you link to and or who links to you has no impact on this new policy that Google began enforcing with manual actions earlier this week. So it's not about links, it's purely about the content itself. Okay, so that's clarified. Thank you, Barry. Also, from Barry Schwartz and also from Search Engine Roundtable about Barry again with a monopoly on the news. Sundar Pichai Google CEO responds to Google's search quality issues. Google, CEO sat down with Bloomberg, did whole interview about the, and one of the topics that came up was obviously AI and the quality of Google's results.

I found personally that a lot of the ways that he answered the questions were very telling. We cover this on It's New, our daily news series with Barry Schwartz and Greg Finn, and of course Krista Carter when I cover this with Barry. And I said, "Look at his body language and how Sundar replied to this comment and to that question," Barry was unhappy. Barry did not like the read between the lines body language thing. So I think there were some interesting tidbits in there about how he answered the questions. Barry clearly thought I was wrong. He's making faces at me while we were recording, It's New, rolling his eyes at me saying that's the most ridiculous thing he ever heard in the chat. But I do think that you can learn a lot from the way that Sundar answered the questions. I think, by the way, for the record, the quality issue, which he answered it as anytime there's a transition, you get an exposure to new content, AI is going to do it.

Sorry, AI is going to do that. So for us, we view this as a challenge, yada, yada, yada, yada. That's totally true. I think we do give Google a little bit too much of a hard time. I was talking about Melissa Popp on an interview that's going to be released in a few weeks for this very podcast about this. It's hard. There's a bunch of AI content, but there's a ton of AI content being spun up. Content trends and consumption trends have changed, expectations have changed, which we covered on this podcast numerous times. Google's got to keep up with all of that at the same time. I think I mentioned on, It's New, which I'm basically pitching, you should check out, It's New each day on Monday through Thursday rather. There's another layer on top. And I think some of the things that Google's done to address those issues have been very thinking about the immediate and not thinking about the long term, which I'm not criticizing them.

It's hard to do that, hard to balance that, but I think that's also a layer. So it's a very, I think the quality of the results and the questions about the quality of the results, it's not a linear question or a linear equation. There's multiple layers to it and multiple people who are responsible for it, if you want to put it that way. But again, check out the interview. I was joking, by the way, Barry wasn't making faces at me and saying things in the comments, but he did say that he didn't think the body of language told him much, but I think it did. I think it did. I stand by that.

And that's this week's, Snappy News. Hope you found all of that news, super accessible to you. Hope you did a good job with that. If I didn't, let me know out there on the social media verse, and I'll do my best to fix it. We also wanted to make a person who talks about SEO and accessibility accessible to you by telling you that you should be following, Miracle Inameti Archibong out there on social media on X. It's at M-I-R-A underscore I-N-A-M on LinkedIn. It'll just be her name.

Crystal Carter:

And she is a fantastic follower. She is an SEO over at John Lewis, and she does some great work, and she's been speaking on accessibility for years, before it was a little bit of a buzzword. She was talking about how to do alt text in a sort of programmatic way and how to make things more accessible. So she talked about that at MozCon.

Mordy Obertstein:

Oh yeah, I was there for that. That was a great speech.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah, really, really good. And she demonstrated, and it was the first time I'd ever heard an Audible screen reader going through.

Mordy Obertstein:

That's right. She went through it and it got stuck.

Crystal Carter:

It got stuck. And I think that that's really, really important because the other thing is that it also tells you how bots might be getting stuck on your website as well. So it's really, really useful to think about and forth between these two buttons. And it's very possible that if the screen reader's doing that, it's very possible the bots doing that as well. So everything should flow all together. And the way she illustrated it made it really, really clear to me that we got to do better for folks using screen readers. And yeah, she's a great follower for lots of reasons, but that one as well.

Mordy Obertstein:

So make sure to give Miracle a follow whatever you consume social media. I don't know if she's on TikTok or not, so I don't know if that applies to all social media, but LinkedIn and Twitter, X for sure.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah. Yeah. No, Miracle is a great follower.

Mordy Obertstein:

When I say social media as an old person, I literally mean kind of Facebook, not really. Yeah, X and LinkedIn.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah, that's what we're talking about.

Mordy Obertstein:

Because I'm an old person, which is why need to have things accessible, because I am blind as a bat without my glasses. My grandfather was literally blind.

Crystal Carter:

Was he really?

Mordy Obertstein:

Yeah. And the curb thing was a big deal.

Crystal Carter:

Right. I think, oh, and also in England you get the bump, so-

Mordy Obertstein:

The bumps. They don't have that in the US.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah. Bumps on the brakes. And also, I don't like it when they don't have, when you press the button for walking and there's no sound.

Mordy Obertstein:

No sound, that's...

Crystal Carter:

I really don't like that.

Mordy Obertstein:

You can hear a click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah, because sometimes you're just chatting away anyway when you're perfectly able or whatever, able to see that you could cross the road. You're chatting away and you don't notice it or whatever. Whereas when there's a sound, you hear it, and then you know that it's safe to go.

Mordy Obertstein:

See, you're speaking to your audience in different ways and making things accessible.

Crystal Carter:

Right. It's better for everybody.

Mordy Obertstein:

And if the local municipality can handle it, so can you.

Crystal Carter:

On that note...

Mordy Obertstein:

On that... Thanks for showing us on the SERP's Up podcast. Are you going to miss us not to worry? We're back next week, the new episode, as we dive into a look at what is often known as Holistic SEO and what that actually means. Look for wherever you consume your podcast or on the Wix SEO Learning Hub over at wix.com/seo/learn. Looking to learn more about SEO. Check out all the great content and webinars on the Wix SEO Learning Hub at you guessed it, wix.com/seo/learn. Don't forget to give us a review on iTunes or a rating on Spotify. Until next time, peace and love and SEO.