Speaker 1: Hey, what's up, everybody? We got Steve Curtis here, I'm Joe LaPresti, we're from St. Pete Design, it's a web development agency based out of St. Petersburg, Florida. We build custom software and websites, but our main passion is helping the web become more accessible for people with disabilities. In this video here, or talk, we're going to help you understand what Section 508 is, and how to be compliant. So what's up, Steve? How are you doing today? Great. Hi, Joe. How are you doing? Good. Thanks. So I guess we'll just, we'll dive right into it. You want to, you know, you want to start off with explaining what Section 508 is?

Speaker 2: Yeah, so Section 508 is an amendment to the technical stuff. It's an amendment to the United States Workforce Rehabilitation Act of 1973. What it was is a federal law that mandates that all electronic information and technology that's developed by government agencies must be accessible to people with disabilities. And that's what Section 508 compliance is all about.

Speaker 1: Yeah, that's right. And really, one of the first things that it mentions in the recommendations or the guidelines that they give you is providing alternative text for all non-text content. This is important because this is how screen readers tell impaired users about files, pics, and videos and things like that. You know, if you could imagine closing your eyes and having somebody explain a picture to you, that's pretty much what the alt text does for the readers. So it's extremely important, and it makes a huge difference in the accessibility of that actual web page. What do you think about that?

Speaker 2: Well, that's absolutely the case. I guess I would go on to how do we as developers incorporate these ideas into our processes, right? So how do we start by putting the alt text on our site? You would start by having an action plan to make your sites 508 compliant. And prior to launching, you know, basically a checklist. What are you going to do? Number one on the checklist, alt text. That's the number one thing. That's what this video is about. So make sure that all of the videos, all of the files, all of the pictures on your website have alt text. It's very, very important for just what you said, for screen readers, so that visually impaired users can access our content or your content.

Speaker 1: Yeah, you know, and one of the ways we can do that as developers is you can either manually go through every single picture on your site and add the alternative text to it. I mean, you literally have to go through all the pictures in the media file, and you're going to have to go through all the individual photos that have been already published to your pages and your posts, and pretty much open those up and add an alternative text to that. And it just can't be any text. It's got to be a well, a very descriptive of the actual photo. It just can't be anything. You really want to convey what that photo is about to the individual who can't see. So you can either go through manually or us at St. Pete Design, we've created a plugin for this. You can go to the WordPress repository and just download our plugin, and it makes that much easier for you. It'll bring all the photos into one area for you, and you can just go through and just simply add all the text. So it's super easy. You'll be able to... We'll add the link to that down in the description, so you can check that out.

Speaker 2: Just to expound on that real quick, it's a really great tool. The name of it in the WordPress repository is Tool for ADA Section 508 and SEO. So if you look up Tool for ADA Section 508 and SEO, that's our plugin. It's brand new. Shameless plug, I guess, for our plugin, but it's a really good plugin. Works really well for your alt descriptions and text. Another thing, that's the next kind of thing we have is, do we use software to help us make our websites ADA compliant, 508 compliant? The answer is yes. Well, we just mentioned the plugin that we've developed ourselves, right? So that's one way that we help to make our sites ADA compliant. Another way, big way, is that we use testing software. You can use testing software, and it will tell you exactly where your site is not compliant. And again, we're keeping this talk just to alt text, so I won't expound on all those other things, but it'll tell you exactly where you need to add alt text. If you have a large site with a lot of files, a lot of photos, a lot of media, you can use testing software that will... And there's quite a few different countries, not a lot, probably three main testing tools that we use. But they will tell you exactly where you need to put your alt text, and it's very helpful, especially if you combine it with a plugin that helps you to add that.

Speaker 1: Yeah, pretty much. You can check out... We have a... We offer a list of free tools. You go to our website, our blog page, and you'll be able to... You'll see 508 Compliance Testing Tools for free. Check out that blog, and it'll have a full list of all kinds of free tools that you can use to be compliant, because it's important for us as developers to make the internet accessible to everybody, and we're just gonna have to do it one site at a time, and it's just a nice, easy way to help you do that. So that pretty much wraps it up for today. I appreciate your time, Steve. If we helped you in any way, please give us a thumbs up. It helps other developers find this information, because YouTube likes that. So if you could do that for us, it'd be great. Otherwise, that's pretty much about it. What I got, you got anything?

Speaker 2: Well, I'd just say our website is stpetedesign.com, and if you go to what we call the Berg blog, that's our blog, you'll see lots of posts, and that checklist that Joe mentioned will be on the blog on our website, stpetedesign.com. Cool.

Speaker 1: I guess that wraps it up, man. I appreciate your time, Steve, and we're gonna try to do this every week, so come back and check out our other videos. Thanks.

Speaker 2: Have a great day, Joe. See you.

Speaker 1: Bye.