#remedial math classes are where i shine

[borgeslabyrinth]

So like. I'm going back to school, I'm going to do college at almost 30 so I have to take a placement test. I have to take the PERT and I'm gonna fail the math portion.

"You can't fail the PERT!" I hear you say "it's not a pass or fail test!"

That may be true. And studying I may have done. But they're going to ask me to solve a quadratic equation and I'm going to start crying.

[mouwrites]

Hi! I absolutely love your writing (It's very tasty /pos) and I was wondering if I could request one where Movie!Lloyd (pre-movie events) had a bad day and he calls up reader to come comfort him and they're best friends but they're pretty obviously crushing on each other but they're just too shy to admit it? Thank you!

Yes!!! Awkward unspoken mutual attraction>>>

Word count: 721

Ninjago - Cheering Up Lloyd After a Bad Day

You rapped your knuckles against the door. It was open in a matter of seconds, and you were greeted with the bright face of Lloyd’s mother.

“Y/n! Come in, come in!”

She stood aside, allowing you to enter the apartment. As you passed she leaned forward to whisper in your ear. “I’m glad you came.”

You nodded knowingly. Lloyd had texted you half an hour ago to come over, and, judging from his miserable look at school that day, you had a pretty good guess as to why.

You made your way to his room and knocked. The door flew open before you could even land your fist on the wood a second time.

Lloyd’s brows were furrowed slightly, creasing the skin between them. His jaw was tight, too.

You plopped down on his bed, putting the plastic bag you were holding next to you.

He closed the door, keeping his back turned to you for a moment longer.

“I woke up late,” he began. He did—you remembered that. “I slipped and fell on the way to math class, I forgot my lunch, so I went hungry,” he was walking towards you now, counting off the unlucky instances on his fingers, “and I just know I flunked that history test.”

He planted his face into his pillow as he jumped onto the bed with an audible whomp.

You couldn’t help but crack a smile at his dramatic gesture. Patting his back good-naturedly, you reached for your bag. “Well, I don’t know about that other stuff, but I can remedy a hungry tummy.”

Lloyd turned his head just enough to peek at you. You whipped out a bag of gummy bears. Lloyd immediately scrambled into a sitting position and snatched it, tearing it open so violently that a few spilled into his lap.

“You are the greatest person in the world.”

You blushed a little, waving your hand dismissively. “Just some sweets for a sweet boy.”

Why did I say that. You turned away to hide your burning face. Staring out the window, you didn’t notice the way Lloyd’s face turned just as red.

Changing the subject abruptly, you plunged your hand into your bag again. “I brought something else.”

“Is it—”

At the same time you both said “comics” with huge grins. You pulled out a small stack and splayed them across the bed.

Lloyd gasped. “These are all brand new!”

You nodded. “That’s why it took me a minute to get here; I stopped by the comic shop on my way. I thought we could read them together.”

Lloyd nodded, scooting closer after taking his pick. He opened it, letting one page rest on his knee and the other on yours.

You subconsciously leaned in gradually as you read, and by the end of the comic you were literally cheek-to-cheek. You both bolted up, blushing furiously.

“That one was pretty good,” Lloyd murmured, a little dazed.

“Uh, yeah. I liked that one girl’s outfit.”

“The one in the crazy chrome suit?”

You nodded vigorously, eyes shining as you began to gush. You flipped back through the comic, pointing out all your favorite parts, making sure to let Lloyd interject his own opinions as he pleased.

You spent hours going through the comics in this manner. You were only called out of your stupor when Koko walked in, two plates of food balanced on one arm. She brought her free hand to her lips as if she’d stumbled upon a secret meeting.

“Oop! Sorry, I didn’t mean to interrupt you two. I’ll just leave these here.”

You looked at each other and giggled, turning at once back to your comics.

It was several more hours before you had to go home. It was getting dark, and you knew you’d get in trouble if you weren’t home soon.

“Hey, Y/n,” you heard Lloyd say just before you passed the threshold.

“Yeah?”

“Thanks.” He grinned, clearly having forgotten his bad day. “For being so awesome, I mean.”

You smiled. In the warm light of his lamp you couldn’t see the blush on his cheeks, nor could he see the blush on yours.

Your heart thudded as you walked home. He thinks I’m awesome, you recalled euphorically. I’m so glad we’re best friends. Your smile wavered a little bit. Best friends. Yeah.

Yay! Thanks for reading, and thank you for your request!! Take care honey bunches <33

(divider by saradika)

[nutzgunray-lvt]

An Attempt To Fly Under the Radar - Chapter 1

I'm attempting my first multi-chapter fic!

I got the premise of it after watching episode 80 and seeing Ectoplasm's tigonometry problem. I saw online that the anime had put a typo in the problem and it got me thinking about Izuku's intelligence. He memorized Gentle Criminal's INVISIBLE PLATFORMS and quickly figured out how to use them to his advantage, not to mention how he did mental trigonometry to defeat Lady Nagant. People in the fandom accuse Izuku's fans of overhyping his intelligence, and I don't really remember Izuku's intelligence ever being truly aknowledged in the story, so I wanted to remedy that!

I fudged around with the timeline of when the class happened to better fit the narrative, because in my fics, Bakugou is expelled after his and Izuku's fight at the dorms.

Flying under the radar had never been one of Izuku's specialties.

Ever since that day at the doctor's office, the universe seemed hell bent to thrust him in the spotlight whether he liked it or not. First, it was Bakugou turning his back on him (was it ever turned towards him?) for being Quirkless, bringing his classmates to his side. Then, it was the teachers turning a blind eye to the mistreatment while inflicting their own onto him. After that came the Sludge Villain attack, which fortunately brought him under the tutelage of All Might.

He thought that finally getting a Quirk would shut off the perpetual spotlight being shined on him, but if anything, it only seemed to make things worse. He'd maimed his arm on live television during the Sports Festival (how else was he supposed to use One For All?), and helped apprehend a notorious serial killer during his internship, becoming known as 'that crazy kid who broke his limbs with his Quirk' (it wasn't as if he had a name or anything.)

The limelight wouldn't even go away during normal school days.

In short succession, he had been both nearly expelled and assaulted during Mr. Aizawa's Quirk Assessment Test, and his assaulter - a certain blonde boy - took their teacher's half hearted attempt of reprimanding him as a green light to proceed with his ill treatment of him. That day, after collecting their syllabi at the end of the day, Izuku had been cornered outside of the UA gates as he waited for Ida and Uraraka. Bakugou had roughly shoved him against the wall, gripping his tie with one hand while popping explosions near his face with the other.

"Since you chose not to fucking listen to me about not applying to UA, you better not try and get ahead of me, Deku!" he snarled. "You already fucking cheated your way in here with your bullshit Quirk, and you're not going to fucking cheat with your grades! If you put a toe out of line, I'll fucking kill you like I said I would during that Quirk Test!"

And just like he'd been doing for the past ten years, Izuku listened. Sure, it took him fudging several quizzes and tests, and maybe it included getting several questions wrong during lectures, but he thought he was doing well enough to stay off of Bakugou's radar (at least in that regard). Izuku was ranked 4th overall while Bakugou sat at 3rd. Of course, that wasn't enough for his acquaintance, but it kept his attention off of Izuku for the moment.

That is, until one fateful Wednesday morning during Math class.

Looking back on it, Izuku blamed it on the fact that it was eight in the morning and he still wasn't fully awake from yesterday's training session. The dreary weather outside also wasn't helping any. Normally, the anxiety of just being in class was enough to wake him up better than any caffeinated drink could. Class was an exercise in survival where the objective was to not give the teachers any reason to pay attention to him. It was a game he was normally unrivaled at, until that fateful 1st period Math class.

Ectoplasm had them evaluate a definite integral written on the blackboard, and that was all well and good except for one thing: there was a typo that wouldn't stop nagging at the green haired boy. The second bracket shouldn't have had a '-', it should have had a '+'.

Did Ectoplasm mean to write the equation like this? Was it an honest mistake? Was this a test for their observation skills? Did he speak up about it?

No.

He wouldn't dare correct a teacher, especially in front of everyone. Aldera had beaten that lesson into him, sometimes literally.

"You think you're smarter than me?!" His seventh grade Math teacher had hissed in the middle of lecture, having roughly pulled him out of his seat and shook him like a can of spray paint, his fingers digging painfully into his upper arms. "You think I'm so incapable of teaching that I can't write the correct geometric proof on a blackboard?!"

"Why do you have to be such a goddamn problem to the other students?!" His ninth grade English teacher had shouted, roughly shoving him to the ground with the hand yanking on his hair. The hallway was empty, but that didn't mean he avoided landing face first, pain and blood blossoming from his nose. "By seeing that you cheated on this exam, it'll encourage them to do the same! How will they get into good high schools if you keep acting up?!"

"Midoriya," His eighth grade science teacher had said in a syrupy sweet 'I'm not mad, just disappointed' voice that he quickly grew to dread more than the yelling. "Do we need to have yet another detention for refusing to pay attention during lecture? Why are you getting such easy questions wrong?"

"Midoriya? Is everything alright?"

Izuku was shaken out of his memories to find his tenth grade Math teacher staring right at him. For that matter, so were his other classmates. Aside from Bakugou, who was giving him a glare that screamed 'don't you dare speak up', everyone else looked worried. His throat dry, all he could do was hurriedly nod his head, staring down at his blank notebook page as his face heated up to an impressive fire-engine red color.

"Midoriya, do you need to visit Recovery Girl?" Ectoplasm asked, concern lacing his voice.

He shook his head, pencil flying across his paper as he copied the equation down.

"No! I'm fine! I'm sorry for interrupting class!"

Please buy it, please buy it, please leave me alone -

"Very well," his teacher said slowly, clearly not believing him. "Does anyone have an answer for this integral?"

Izuku did. He not only had the answer, he had the correct problem written in front of him. He wasn't going to say anything about it, though. Nope, he was just going to stay nice and quiet, under the radar where he belonged.

[applesontheground]

don’t want me around 🕯️

this one goes out to @f1nalboys for reminding me i needed to write for this bitch. ♡

NSFW | Word Count: 2,893 | Nick Jones x GN Reader

contains teasing, fingering, hickeys, brief alcohol/smoking mentions

🎼: x, x

He didn’t seem like the type to be at a block party. It was dawning on you that his sister and friends had probably dragged him to it, seeing them give him looks from behind them that insisted he was about to have a good time. He had entered the scene dawdling behind the rest with his hood up, giving anyone that approached him a dry glance up and down before they even opened their mouth.

If they were lucky, he’d even say something just low enough for the two of them to hear. They were never nice things, judging by the way people seemed to avert him as he made his disposition known.

When the hood came down, you could see his buzzed blonde hair and the uncomfortable scowl in full view. Under the cheap tiki lights someone had strung up, he found his designated corner alongside a couple friends he came in with, nursing a beer that he had torn the label off in a bored move, occasionally seeing someone he knew across the way and flipping them the bird. Those at least seemed somewhat fun in nature, but you couldn’t be sure.

You caught yourself spacing, eyes turning back down towards the rum and coke that you were making and seeing that it was now at least sixty percent rum. Why were you zeroing in on all these things about some jerk-off from class in the first place?

“Saw that. You checking out Nick, [Y/N]?” The dawdling voice from over your shoulder, the same one that you heard two days a week in a frigid lecture hall at an hour you loathed to be awake at, made you instinctively scrunch your nose. Dalton Chapman – same grade as you, different volume control level. Despite that, he wasn’t the worst guy to be stuck with in your remedial math course. He at least kept you awake.

“No, dickmunch.” You playfully muttered, pouring yourself the rest of your drink, “Just surprised he turned up to this. Nick doesn’t even show up to my ragers.” Dalton laughed, clapping your shoulder a little too hard as he eased, “Aw, don’t be like that. Nick’s great…” You watched him from across the lawn again, seeing him pull a face at another man and flicking his eyebrows as he cursed at him and promptly walked away. Your tongue dug into your cheek as you squinted back at Dalton, and he then added with one less level of certainty, “When you get to know him?”

“Sure, sure. I’ll get to know him some time. I bet he’d love that.” You rolled your eyes, and Dalton scoffed, “Really, [Y/N]. Once he stops punching your leg and all that, he’s a great guy.” You laughed again, and it finally seemed to catch Nick’s attention, his eyes set on the two of you for a beat. It was like you could see the shitty remark building in his head, a smirk willing back as he squared his jaw. You took a half-sway, half-step back as he cut across the lawn to you two, and in that flat tone he muttered to his friend, “So, where’d you find [him/her/them]?”

“It’s [Y/N] from math.” Dalton replied, and you added, “The one you’ve maybe shown up to twice?”

“Got no reason to be there. Teacher’s already fuckin’ failing me anyways.” Nick scoffed, and you bit your tongue to tell him it was probably because he was never there. You had no idea why he was even in college when you saw him drag his feet everywhere. For a moment, your eyes danced back over to where his sister was standing, laughing with another couple of girls and shining in a bright yellow blouse.

Your eyes trickled back over as you shrugged at him, but he had seen your expression and you weren’t fooling him. “What?” The word came out bitter, and he finally let the ugly smile full of some sort of misplaced hatred spill onto you, “You think that that’s my fault. Right?” You looked over the brim of your glass, slowly lowering it and fighting the bite of the alcohol as you replied, “Never said that. Just think it’d help.”

He scoffed, pointing the neck of his beer bottle at your nose. “I don’t need your help. Got that?” You rolled your neck at him, Dalton mumbling something in a hopeless attempt to try and ease the tension as you retorted, “Wasn’t offering it.”

Dalton suddenly stepped in between the two of you. “What was that!?” He called out, a few nearby heads turning as he called, “Huh? Oh!” He slapped Nick on the chest, making him break his heavy glare into your eyes. “Dude, I think Wade’s calling us. Come on.” He paced off, stumbling on his own feet slightly. You turned away, leaving Nick to linger only for a moment more before sighing and following him.

Throughout the night, you stayed away from the sourpuss for his peace of mind. Parties like these weren’t the worst things for you, but you often found yourself weaving from group to group. Head spinning from your strong drink wasn’t helping anything, but by the time you could realize you had overdone it you were already too drunk and too blissed out to care.

You only gave a brief wave at a few idling classmates as you saw yourself out, even thanking the host who was holding himself up on the sofa and referred to you by the wrong name as you stepped out into the dark street. You could’ve sworn someone had said your name as you slipped under the string lights again, and finally found yourself on the suburban street, lit windows few in between along the sharp rows of dark houses as you trotted along.

“Dude, do you know where you’re going?” A familiar voice called from the lawn you were walking away from, and you almost had to double take when you glanced over your shoulder.

Nick Jones was walking into the dark with you. The hood was up again, eyes shining in the single streetlight up ahead as he merely stared after you. You laughed at the thought of him wanting anything to do with you. “No. No!” You sang out at him, but he only fell in stride beside you and muttered, “Shut up, I’m walking you home. Paige and Blake told me to, even though they’re the ones who don’t want you to go off alone.”

“And you listened to them?” You turned back around, looming houses on either side of the street swimming in your half-drunk peripherals and your feet barely adjusting to the uneven pavement beneath your feet. Nick was beside you in seconds, lighting a cigarette as he shot you another scornful glance.

“Like I have a choice.”

You had sobered up a decent amount by the time you made it back to the little two-story that you were renting out with some high school friends, and when you stepped in to hear nothing going on in -- even upstairs -- you breathed a sigh of relief: you were alone.

“So, this is your place?” Nick prodded, and you turned to look at him giving a glance around the living room. “Mm hm.” You hummed in reply, and couldn’t help but keep eyeing him for a beat, waiting for some rude comment or for him to abruptly turn tail. He looked back at you, and you finally suggested, “You probably want to go back to your friends, right?”

“Actually,” Nick held to the open doorway, halfway in and halfway out, “I was gonna ask if I could stay here for a little bit. Like, maybe ten minutes.” He winced, “I’ll be cool if you say no. That party wasn’t really my sorta thing. Needed to get out one way or another.”

After a pause, you rocked on your heels. Ten minutes could be ten minutes, or it could be an hour. You weren’t sure you were so mellow with the idea of just sitting around with some dude from your math class, but when you looked back at him you found yourself fixated on the way his expression wasn’t glowering as he traced the room over again you were agreeing before your rational thought could let him down easy. “Sure, actually. Roommates aren’t home, so-” You had been looking out the sliding glass doors on the other side of the room, seeing a neighbor turn their lights on and hoping they wouldn’t be looking over. When you looked back at Nick, he was closing the door behind him and pulling a couple beers out of an inner pocket in his jacket.

“Dude.” Your lips quirked into a baffled smile, eyes wide and trained into his, “Did you...?”

“It’s a frat house, [Y/N].” Nick scoffed, a grouchy squint forming on his face as he held one out to you, the chrome silver ring on his middle finger twinkling under the overhead light, “They had more than enough.”

You fell down on the couch with a soft slap against the worn fabric, watching him take a much more careful seat next to you. “So, you’d really rather sit in an empty house with a kid you don’t even know from remedial math?” You questioned, and he stopped staring at the floor to look at you again. “Uh, yeah.” He pretended to think on it, but then shrugged as he spoke, popping the bottle’s cap.

“What, you aren’t gonna at least try to steal something before sitting down?” You teased, feeling the blood rushing in your head again as you opened your own drink. It still had a remnant of warmth and had some dawning condensation from being in his jacket. Nick snorted, “Wow, way to make me feel welcome.”

A twinge of pity spurred in your chest, but you swallowed it down with a weak retort, “You were the one coming up to me asking where Dalton found me and being a dickhead when I tried to talk to you, dude. Don’t dish it out if you can’t take it back.” He ignored the way you smirked, and replied, “Wanna talk about something else, smartass?”

“To what? How you’re failing math and don’t need anyone to remind you?” You muttered, and before you could smile to show it was an ill-mannered joke he snapped his head to look at you. In a quick dive, the texture of his lips were grinding against yours and his breath was sliding over your face. You had to hold the bottle in your lap with two hands, leaning back at the force of him pushing into you. He finally caught you with a hand on the back of your neck, working even deeper and scratching his facial hair against your mouth as he lazily pulled off you with a huff into your eyes.

When you looked back, mouth still half open and eyes wide with a waning confusion, he replied, “I’m gonna get you to shut up for a few fucking seconds. You can do that for me, right?”

It was in those infinite few seconds that you realized you didn’t know why you had let this bastard stay in the first place, and you didn’t know why you only nodded when he spoke to you with such a fucking brash tone. Still, it got his mouth back on yours, so you didn’t have much room to complain.

The two of you started to sprawl out, him not able to get close enough and you unable to fall back any further. Before you knew it, you were laying on the couch with him on top of you, pushing his thigh between your legs as his hands held your sides. A gentle suck on his tongue made him murmur into your mouth, brow folding as he turned his head to keep in line with you. When your hand held his jaw to help, he seemed to relax against you, hands now on your neck.

“Where is this coming from?” You gasped, Nick letting you breathe as he pushed himself up and off from the sound of your winded voice. You admitted as you stared up, mouth twitching in another buffering attempt to smile, “Thought you hated my guts.”

“Well, I don’t.” He mumbled, and then looked towards the stairs in a pointed manner. “Can we?”

“Jesus, even now you can’t shut up.”

Nick murmured in your ear, breath close enough and hot to the point where you responded to the sensation with another strained hum. He was only fingering you, middle and ring fingers idly sliding in and out of your [hole/cunt] with a sweltering amusement glowing in his eyes. When you only gave him a dazed flutter of your eyelids, he began kissing under your ear, “Pretty cute,” He teased, “You thought you were so tough down there, talking to me like I’m fucking stupid.”

“I d-don’t think-” You groaned again as he hit your core with another long digited pump, “Y-you’re stupid. Nick, ple-”

“Hey. I’m fucking with you. You’re learning your lesson, that’s all I want right now.” He chided, and when he gently licked against the bruising spot that he had sucked into your tender skin, you felt an intense wave reach its tipping point and scatter as it fell to the depths with a single flinch of your body. Your knees began pulling together, stopped by his arm in between, and he only moved quicker as you came with a sharp cry, breathing audibly and grabbing the pillow under your head. You fell apart in the span of seconds, writhing beside him and letting him laugh without a snide remark to send him back into a shitty attitude.

He held your thigh as you stopped whining, swallowing hard as your eyes sealed shut and you grimaced at your own weak will. He had only been working on you for about ten minutes, and managed to pull you to the orgasm like he was trained to do it. He pulled out his hand, rubbing the remnants on the bed as he pushed off to find his shirt that had gotten lost between coming up the stairs with you and where you two had tumbled onto the the bed.

“How about when I get back from this stupid trip I’m taking next week, we can go out for drinks some time? Bars are more my scene, you know.” You stretched, glancing at the clock as he stumbled around in the dark to find his clothes. It was now well past three, but there wasn’t much on the agenda for the next day anyways. No remedial math, unfortunately.

There was also no more anger and tension in the air that seemed to come and go before. An easy warmth was wading between the two of you as you hummed, “Didn’t you mention you were on parole?” Nick turned to look back at you, and you sat up to press against your bent legs, tangled in the sea of your own duvet and giving a tilt of your head. He shrugged. “...We’ll get beers and hang out here, or even my place if Carly isn’t around.”

“Wait, trip? Where are you going?” You then asked, smile quirking up slightly. Nick stood straight, his shoulders coming together in a stretch as he started to hook his belt. “Uhh, some football game in Baton Rouge. Blake wants to go. I wasn’t crazy about the idea, but…Dalton wants me to. Carly and her dumb boyfriend are gonna go, so it’s good for me to stick around. Make sure they stay out of shit.”

You nodded with a shit-eating smile on your face. “Uh huh, for sure. I bet you’d set a stellar example for that.” He gave you a dirty look, but when you only continued to laugh, he let the tough expression go and turned back to face you again. Your eyes caught on his body, something often swallowed in that huge jacket, before he closed the distance again and pressed another cold-lipped kiss onto your mouth.

“Really, though. I don’t want to sound like some kind of softie, but we should hang out more.” He insisted, and you finally gave him a genuine smirk. He stole another kiss, this time under your ear to make you shudder at how close he got to the hickey he had left. He then looked into your eyes, and meekly added, “Oh, trust me. Don’t you dare tell my friends about this yet. Alright?”

You sneered, but took it in jest. “Why, is crashing that car less embarrassing than fucking some [guy/girl] from your math class?” Nick’s expression tumbled into something you had seen earlier that night, but his voice didn’t get hard. It instead fell to a hollow murmur. “…Long story about that.”

He looked forlorn at the mention of it, some vague incident that you had heard through the whispers of his sister and his friends, and you were about to assure you were kidding before he looked back with a timid fold of his brow and a smirk that tried to play it all off. “Really, [Y/N]. I’ll tell you about it when I get back.”

You grinned at him again, and finally felt all the resistance cave as you murmured, “Sure.”

[anachilles]

» somewhere in the crowd, there’s you  ♪  julie/luke [ juke ]

If they weren’t already dead Julie swore she would kill them. Luke especially.

Actually no, that wasn’t fair. This time she couldn’t completely blame them for what was admittedly a dumb decision on her own part. But see it from her perspective - the boys hadn’t seen the Mamma Mia movies. They didn’t even know of their existence. That had to be remedied.

TL;DR - The boys are introduced to the Mamma Mia Cinematic Universe. Alex spectates, Julie sings ABBA, Luke falls further in love, and Reggie ends up reliving the horror of high school math class. Also BROT4 couch cuddles.

link to read on AO3: [x]

taglist: @wokealex @blueruby31

If they weren’t already dead Julie swore she would kill them. Luke especially.

Actually, no, that wasn’t fair. This time she couldn’t completely blame them for what was admittedly a dumb decision on her own part.

But see it from her perspective - the boys hadn’t seen the Mamma Mia movies. Didn’t even know of their existence. They had just been finishing up a group jam session when she’d made some off-hand joke about them hitting the big-time and having their music turned into a movie-musical series “like ABBA”. Reggie’s face had lit up and he immediately jumped on it, “Wait, they made a movie out of ABBA music?”

“Multiple movies?!” Alex had cut in, looking disbelieving but nonetheless delightfully intrigued.

Luke snorted with laughter, throwing his hands up as he turned to look at Julie. “That’s it - I know what we’re doing tonight” he exclaimed, and pointed at her “Do you have them on ta-”

He catches himself before he can finish the word ‘tape’, but Julie’s eyes still narrow, her own smile now challenging. The boys really weren’t that bad at picking up the basics of modern technology, but slip-of-the-tongues still happened and Julie loved to tease them about it. Luke most of all just because he always dogged the other two the most about it when they did it. Also, perhaps a little bit, because he was kind of cute when he got all defensive.

“On what, now?”

Luke floundered for a second, and Alex and Reggie traded a look between them. Suddenly though, a lightbulb dinged above his head and his expression turned smug.

“DVD! Do you have them on DVD”

Julie laughed, making what was meant to be a loud ‘buzzer’ sound. “Wrong answer! Not the most up-to-date form of media storage, but nonetheless thank-you for playing”. Her expression softened though when she heard Alex and Reggie hound him a little behind her, “However, we do have them on DVD because my dad likes having physical copies of stuff”.

She was about to leave to go grab them from the house, only the time on her phone caught her attention and her heart sank.

“Hey guys, I can go get them for you but I don’t think I can stay the whole way through both. I’ve got school tomorrow.”

All three boys erupted in protestations, Luke’s notably the loudest of all, though on Alex’s suggestion she conceded to stay for at least the first one, then they’d pick up the second one tomorrow or something. 

Honestly, it hadn’t taken nearly as much convincing as it should have. 

She just really needed to physically be there to witness the three of them watching Meryl Streep jump off a pier to the tune of ‘Dancing Queen’ and Pierce Brosnan absolutely butcher ‘The Winner Takes it All’ for the very first time. Also, talking to them about the movies had made her realise it had been way too long since she’d last watched them herself, and they always made her feel so light and happy. As silly as it may sound, the care-free, sunshiney tone but with genuine moments in them had helped carry her through some really dark days. Since then, they’d always been comforting to return to.

So that’s how she ended up squished on the beat-up old studio couch with three ghost boys from the 90’s, having the absolute pleasure of seeing them react to ‘Mamma Mia’ for the very first time. It was a bit of a tight squeeze, and required Reggie to be sitting with one leg straddled over the arm of the couch and the rest of him pretty much glued to Luke’s side, but they made it work.

Although just as she was getting herself comfy in her spot between Alex and Luke, something niggled at the back of her mind. Something she forgot to do? Maybe? She wracked her brain for a couple of minutes, but her attention quickly and all-too-easily drifted to the screen as the opening chords of ‘Honey, Honey’ sounded, like some sort of siren call, and she couldn’t help but mouth along to the words. She knew them pretty much by heart.

What certainly didn’t help with her cognitive functioning however, is when during ‘Money, Money, Money…’ she felt Luke shift where he was pretty much flush against her side and his arm stretch out behind her neck. His hand settled somewhere near her shoulder; teasingly close but not quite touching it. Her heart rate kicked up a notch, but she was determined to keep her eyes on the screen in front of her, daring not to look his way or even let on that she noticed.

The boys were touchy-feely and generally very physically affectionate with each other, she knew that just from generally being around them these past couple of months. Julie had always found it really sweet and endearing, how unashamedly tactile they were with each other, but at the same time couldn’t help but feel left out as her own friendships with all of them got deeper and she grew closer to them all. Now that they were corporeal, at least to her, suddenly she’d become privy to all that as well.

Now she couldn’t imagine not being able to do stuff like hold their hands during band circles, or not knowing the utter warmth of Alex’s hugs (it was undisputed that he gives the best ones) when he noticed she’d had a tough day at school, or even what it felt like to not have Reggie gleefully grab her hands, or arm, or shoulders when he got super excited about something.

She’d already been falling hard for Luke before when she couldn’t physically feel him under her fingertips. For all intents and purposes wasn’t fully there there, but now? When she’d felt the brush of his body behind her when he’d lean over her shoulder to look at sheet music, or his thigh press up against her leg as they shared a piano stool during their little lyric brainstorming sessions? When they could high-five, lean into each other’s side, playfully shove each other when one thinks the other is being annoying, grab each other’s hands and dance around the room in celebration when they manage to book another gig? All those little moments they could have now added layers to what she already felt.

However, even if she felt something between them, that spark,  and her gut told her Luke possibly felt so too, Julie also couldn’t deny that that kind of affection wasn’t any different to the kind he showed towards Alex and Reggie too. Plus, she didn’t really know how ghosts felt about having relationships, especially with the living, or if Luke would even want to go there. So she tried not to read too much into what kind of felt like Luke pulling that old “arm around shoulder whilst distracted by the movie” move.

So although she never really could forget how close he was, Julie let herself become immersed back in the movie. Her life was generally good, labels and certainty or not, she was happy. The happiness of the movie fed into that. The boys seemed to be having a hoot with it as well, if how much Alex especially was grooving in his seat was any indication.

Julie’s not quite sure what possessed her to say it in the moment, or what she expected to transpire when she did, but when they got to the ‘Super Trouper’ scene coming straight off of the, uh, heaviness of ‘Lay All Your Love on Me’ (during which Luke went weirdly quiet for some reason, prompting Alex and Reggie to share a fleeting look over the top of both his and Julie’s heads) and the opening chords sounded she blurted out 

“Oh, this used to be my karaoke song when I was a kid”. 

Luke’s eyes immediately went wide and she knew she was in trouble. He quickly urged Reggie to grab the remote and pause the movie, ignoring Alex’s soft “Hey, I was watching that!”, before turning his attention fully towards her.

“Well now you have to do the routine; get on up there and show us what you’re made of!”

Julie’s jaw hung open a little and she wasn’t sure whether she could really be annoyed at anyone but herself for practically handing this to him on a silver platter.

“No! I really don’t…” she tried to argue, though his mischievous smile was infectious and damn her lips threatened to twitch into a smile too. “It’s been years! And anyway, I only bust it out for audiences that are deserving of it”.

Luke met her with a challenging gaze. “Bet it’s cause you don’t know the words” he said, turning to Reggie, his tone dripping in antagonism. “Hey, did you hear that the great Julie Molina won’t perform because she doesn’t know all of the words to Super Trouper by ABBA?”. Reggie’s eyebrows shot up and he immediately played along. “Y’know what? I actually did hear that somewhere. Huh…”.

Julie shot a withering look at Alex, a wordless “Can you do anything?” shining in her eyes, but he has the nerve to just shrug (!) with a silent, smiling “I’ll allow it”.

She could’ve got them to drop it if she really had wanted them to, she knew that. Maybe Julie from three months ago would have. Actually, no, that version of herself definitely would have made them drop it; the darkness shrouding her life day-in, day-out smothering any semblance of silly, carefree happiness and convincing her that simply having fun just wasn’t for her.

But she didn’t feel like that anymore.

Julie pulled herself to her feet, eyes fixed with new determination. She crossed the room to the open space, taking a stance mirroring that of the one they’d paused Meryl Streep in and fixed Luke with a playful glare, even though she was addressing Reggie.

“Unpause the movie”.

The performance was one for the history books, if she did say so herself. The boys watched on in amazement as she remembered every word, near enough every step and dance move (the big sleeve shimmy was an interesting one though with sweater sleeves nowhere near dramatic enough to match Donna’s) and personally she thought she sold it.

About halfway through Alex snuck a glance at Luke by his side, and realised karma must be having a slow night given how fast it was paying the other boy back, because he was undeniably staring at Julie with what was clearly pure, open adoration.

“‘Cause somewhere in the crowd, there’s yooooou” she finished with a flourish, heart thumping, and lowered her arm to point at all three of them in turn, but finishing ultimately on Luke even though he was sat in the middle. His face scrunched up with a cheesy smile and he let out a loud whoop of appreciation, kicking off the round of applause before the other boys joined in, Reggie coming in clutch with the standing ovation and everything.

Julie felt breathless but joyful as she flung herself back into her seat, and Luke leaned forward to grab her soda, handing it to her with what looked like contrition.

“I guess I stand corrected, huh?” he said, defeated, but not entirely sorry to be so.

She shrugged, taking a sip of the drink. “I guess you are. It’s a good look on you”.

Luke snorted with laughter and they laughed together for a brief second, an apparent blush rising to sit on his cheeks (Could ghosts blush? How did that even work?).

Before the situation could get weird or questionable though, he turned back towards the movie, but slowly. Like he wasn’t quite ready to leave this moment just yet; like he wanted to stay looking at her just a bit longer. Julie just nudged him and settled back in, trying to go about it in such a way that would implore him to put his arm back around her like he had before.

It didn’t come until the scene where Bill confesses to Sophie that he thinks he’s her father, but eventually that now familiar weight settled behind her head again, setting off a whole herd of butterflies in her stomach.

The first movie came to an end, and things wouldn’t have been awful if she’d just called it a night there and gone to bed. But she was having so much fun and they were all so comfy, and the boys seemed very excited for the prospect of a half-prequel-half-sequel.

“Surely they’ve already used all the good ABBA songs in the first one though, right?” Reggie argued, causing Alex to swing round to look at him, scandalised.

“Are you insinuating that there’s a bad ABBA song?”

While they hashed it out in the background, Luke backing Reggie up just to get a rise out of Alex, Julie acted on impulse and jumped up, running towards the garage window. All the lights in the house were out, meaning her dad was already in bed and everything. As long as she was super quiet sneaking back in and remembered to bypass that squeaky floorboard on the stairs, he never had to know.

“Alright; Here We Go Again - let’s do this”.

Turns out Julie had kind of underestimated how late it was and how long the day had been. She could feel herself getting tired around the ‘Waterloo’ mark, eyelids growing heavier and heavier as she gradually sunk lower and relaxed deeper into the couch. By the time young Donna makes it to the Kalokairi her head had come to rest in the crook Luke’s neck, his flannel soft under her cheek as his cheek leans against the top of her head. Maybe it was a testament to how sleepy she was, but she couldn’t bring herself to move away. The posture felt natural.

She was so comfortable, surrounded by warmth and the soothing hum of the old second-hand TV they’d bought at a garage sale and moved into the garage, she was right on the verge of dozing off… when a realisation crashed into her mind, seemingly out of nowhere.

Julie shot up poker-straight, suddenly very awake. “Oh, crap!”

The three boys startled, most of all Luke when her movement meant he almost fell face-first into the couch cushion.

“What is it?!”

She groaned and fell forward into her hands. “I have a math test tomorrow. And I was going to study for it before bed tonight.”

So that’s how she ends up with Reggie hanging uselessly over her shoulder in the middle of math class, the exchange that came after the realisation still ringing in her ears.

“Hey, hey! It’s fine. Take Reggie - believe it or not, he was good at math” Luke offered up hurriedly.

Reggie himself looked a little stricken. “Yeah, 25 years ago, dude!”.

“Do the rules of math go out-of-date, or…?” Alex teased, though still placed a comforting hand on Julie’s back.

“No, Alex, they don’t - so relax, you’ll be fine, man! You can’t make the situation any worse by trying”

“Don’t give him that challenge, Luke”.

Though admittedly she loved him just for actually turning up and trying, he was staring down at the test with as much confusion as she was. Apparently math had changed over the course of 25 years. They exchange a mutually panicked look. Clearly, neither of them knew shit. Instead, Reggie just runs up to the front of the room and peeps on Mrs Ford’s answer sheet, Julie’s hopeful eyes following him as he dodges around desks and backpacks lying on the floor.

“Are you sure?” she mumbles to him under her breath when he gets back. Apparently not quite low enough though, when the guy next to her turns to give her a funny look, and she has to make a show of furrowing her eyebrows and counting on her fingers, muttering appropriately as she goes.

Julie can feel Flynn’s discerning gaze from across the room and she knows she knows there’s some ghost-like foolery happening. It’s a mess. She’s a mess.

Eventually the bell sounds and signals an end to the ordeal, and Julie takes out her (locked) phone to genuinely thank Reggie for his help all the same.

“Ehhh I’m not sure how much help I was, but you’re welcome” he says, laughter coloured with self-deprecation.

Julie smiles genuinely, and she would’ve nudged him if she wouldn’t have been nudging thin air in public. “Hey, I think we got about three quarters of those answers down and that’s 75% more than I would’ve gotten without you”.

Reggie looks pleased, and stands up a little straighter as he walks alongside her. “Do you mind if I hang out here for a while, by the way?”

Julie’s a little taken aback. “I mean, sure, but why would you want to? It’s just school”.

Reggie shrugs, and there’s something unreadable in his eyes. It’s weird for him; he’s generally such an open book. “I don’t know. I never graduated, we were still going when we… y’know…” he trails off, eyes scanning the halls and the throngs of students laughing and chatting together at their lockers, going about their normal day. “Kind of miss it”.

“Well, you obviously have free reign to look around wherever you want. If you want me to show you anywhere in particular, just let me know. I’m meeting Flynn for lunch now though, so that might not be as fun for you...”

The way he says it makes something ache in Julie’s chest, and she wishes she could give him a hug. With the boys so real now, and so immersed and predominant in her life, it was getting easier and easier to somewhat forget that they were actually dead and had both led and left lives behind. Being reminded of that was starting to hit her that little bit harder.

Reggie nods sincerely, mirroring her slight chuckle. “Thanks, Julie”.

Approaching the cafeteria, Julie sees Flynn in the distance, and is about to put her phone away when she suddenly stops in her tracks, and keeps it held to her face.

“By the way…” she smirks. “If Alex or Luke ask, I scored a 95 and it was all down to you”.

[ginger-and-mint]

Spill Your Guts (or Don’t)

Finally -- my belated Halloween fic! This is set in some kind of Real World AU and revolves around a friendship that hasn’t gotten time to shine yet in any other context. ^^ Thanks to @tiny-tum for helping me with the title!

This fic is part of the “Slice of Life” universe on the @tinymyx blog!

CW: nausea, feelings of rejection and loneliness, references to internalized homophobia

-     -     -

The knock at the door was almost impossible to hear over the clamor of voices and music, but Malia’s trained hostess’s ears managed to catch it. She ducked around a speaker blaring Spotify’s “Halloween Party” playlist, dodged a pair of costumed classmates laughing their way to the drinks table, and flung open the streamer-bedecked door to her apartment.

“Hey, girl!” Kara went in for a hug before Malia could even open her mouth in greeting. “Sorry we’re late, Grayson’s class went overtime. Your costume looks amazing!”

“Thanks!” Malia struck a little pose, fluffing out the feather boa of her Ms. Peacock outfit. “You both look adorable too! Love the ears, Grayson.” She reached out to poke one of the pointed cat’s ears gracing her friend’s head. “Although, I’ve gotta say…” She squinted at Kara’s magenta tank top and star-shaped hair clips and at the long trenchcoat Grayson had on. “…I’m not sure who the two of you are supposed to be.”

“We dressed up like characters from our favorite webcomic,” Grayson explained, reaching up to straighten his headband.

“The one I’ve been telling you about,” Kara added. “Just let me know if you want the link!”

“Is Bram here yet?” Grayson peered over Malia’s shoulder, as though somehow their giant friend could be hiding behind her.

“He came early to help me set up.” Malia stepped back to let her friends in. “I think he might’ve gone out onto the balcony for some air. You know how he can get overwhelmed around crowds.”

“Poor kid. Can’t blame him.” Kara grinned as the noise of the party enveloped them. “What a turnout! Looks like half your major is here! And hey, is that Sara and Ina from trivia night? And….” Her expression caught a little. “Oh. You invited him?”

“You mean Elliott?” Malia followed Kara’s gaze to where a tall figure, noticeably uncostumed and still wearing his black overcoat despite the heat of the room, was lurking in a corner over by the snack table. “Well, yeah. I mean, he is on my debate team.”

“The rest of your debate team isn’t here,” Kara pointed out.

“He’s the only one of them I actually like. And it seemed appropriate, since we know Grayson likes him too.”

Grayson’s face had gone bright red. His gaze, which had locked onto the figure by the snack table, darted back to his friends. “Uh… I mean, I guess so.”

“Come on, Ives, don’t pretend we don’t know. You should go talk to him!” Malia gave her friend a nudge that was meant to be friendly, but only caused the poor thing to stiffen.

“Maybe later,” he squeaked. “I wanna—I wanna say hi to Bramley first. Come on, Kara, let’s go find Bramley.” He grabbed Kara’s hand and tugged her off into the crowd, headed pointedly away from the snack table.

Malia shook her head as watched them go. Poor silly Grayson. He still hadn’t come to terms with the fact that his friends knew he’d been meeting up with his irritable math tutor for—well, more than just remedial algebra help. Surely he’d come around, though. He couldn’t keep that part of his life closed away from his friendships forever.

But then again… maybe he could. As the party wore on, and seemed to Grayson find every excuse not to so much as look in Elliott’s direction, Malia began to fear more and more that she’d made a horrible mistake.

-     -     -

The cold air wasn’t helping as much as Elliott had hoped it would. He sucked in slow lungfuls of it, holding them for counts of three before letting them escape back into the chilly October night as clouds of steam. But his stomach kept churning, sending up little sugar-tinged burps that burned with acid at the back of his throat. Ugh.

Good thing Malia’s apartment had a balcony, and that she had turned off the outdoor light and closed the curtain over the sliding glass door to hide it from most of the partygoers, and that he was enough of a bastard that he didn’t care whether he was intruding on a private space. He had slipped out about ten minutes ago, ignoring the wicker loveseat in favor of going straight to the railing, one arm tucked gingerly over his gurgling stomach. For a few minutes there, he’d been genuinely afraid he was going to be sick, and he had no intention of letting that happen in the bathroom where someone might overhear him. Even if standing outside meant he had the tolerate the chilly air and the shouts of the middle school-aged boys running around in rubber masks down on the street.

He was trying his best not to hate the kids for being so obnoxiously loud. It had been pointed out to him that hating children for acting like children was one of the many uncharming habits that made him so difficult to be around. But it was hard. There was a lot of hatred in him at that moment. He hated the cold air, the screaming, the headache-inducing backbeat of the party raging on inside. Most of all, he hated the lump of sugary crap that was currently sickening his stomach, and his naive decision to show up to this stupid party in the first place.

He’d gotten the invitation over the Facebook account he almost never logged into, and at first he’d been convinced it had been sent to the wrong person. Malia was a fellow member of the university debate team (which Elliott only participated in to placate his mother.) She was the only person on that team he could stand talking to—the rest of them were pompous jerks with overinflated estimates of their own intelligence—and they had had a few conversations that had verged on pleasant. But Elliott was still shocked that she apparently considered him worth inviting to a Halloween party, of all fucking things.

In most circumstances, he would’ve turned the invitation down without a second thought. But… Malia was also friends with Grayson Ives. The boy Elliott had met through his work as a math tutor (which he did because it would look good on grad school applications, his mother insisted.) The boy who, despite the mild antagonism of their first few sessions, had seen something in him, apparently.

The boy who had spent all evening very very obviously avoiding him. Grayson had stuck like glue to his friends: Kara, who Elliott knew disliked him; that giant boyfriend of Malia’s whose name Elliott could never remember because it was so strange, who was dressed like the world’s bulkiest version of Captain America; and then Malia herself. Every time his eyes had happened to roam in Elliott’s direction, they had gone shrinking away with an unmistakable tang of something that hurt worse than the silence itself.

Shame. The thought made Elliott’s stomach churn harder. He grimaced and hunched down over the balcony railing, tightening his arm over the foulness in his belly.

Stupid. He should’ve known that it’d be different here. Theirs was a relationship that played out in empty classrooms, not crowded apartments. Alone, away from the public eye, Elliott could be loved—or if not loved, tolerated out of appreciation for his body. Whatever. That wasn’t perfect, but it was fine. But clearly here, out in the view of Grayson’s real friends….

He should’ve known. But somehow, he hadn’t. Somehow, he’d convinced himself that maybe if he showed up to the damn party, maybe if he tried to act like part of Grayson’s ordinary world… maybe… maybe he’d be properly welcomed into it.

But that hadn’t happened. And so Elliott had parked himself by the snack table, even though he’d already stress-eaten a heap of miniature chocolate bars before leaving his own apartment, and he’d cracked open a hard cider and polished it off in five minutes, and then he’d washed it down with a tide of sweets. Honestly, he couldn’t even remember everything he’d eaten. There had been cupcakes frosted in violent shades of purple and orange. There’d been some kind of candy corn-flavored popcorn abomination, which Elliott had hated but eaten anyway. There had been gummy worms and chocolate eyeballs, ghost-shaped sugar cookies and pumpkin muffins, and of course tons of those little individually-wrapped chocolates that were pervasive on Halloween.

It was all a blur. He’d just refilled his stupid bat-patterned paper plate over and over until he’d felt abruptly sick—suddenly aware of his swollen stomach pressing heavily against the buttons of his coat, of the light-headedness of too much sugar in his bloodstream, of the nausea rising in the back of his throat. And then he’d ducked outside, and now here he was—trapped on this fucking freezing balcony, feeling too ill to leave the party and too miserable to go back inside….

He was jerked out of the haze of self-pity by the sound of screen door sliding in its track. The muffled din of the party grew abruptly louder, and a voice asked, “Bram? Are you out here?”

Elliott whipped around to see Malia standing in the doorway. Her eyebrows shot up at the sight of him. “Oh, sorry.”

It occurred to Elliott that he was the one who had intruded on a closed-off space of her home, and that he was the one who should be saying sorry. But he didn’t. He said nothing at all, and for a long moment, they just stared at each other.

Malia’s expression creased slightly. She reached for an unseen switch, and the outdoor light suddenly blinked on. Elliott felt himself shrink back a little, and then again when she stepped out onto the balcony and slid the door shut behind her.

“How’s it going?” she asked. “Everything okay?”

“Mmm.” He turned his back to her, hunching over the railing, as though maybe that would make her forget she’d seen him.

It didn’t, of course. She came to stand next to him, fluffing up the feather boa of her costume against the chill. “It’s kind of cold to be out here, isn’t it?”

“I just needed air.” He swallowed heavily as the sludge in his uneasy stomach swirled. “Don’t worry, I’m going to leave soon.”

“Are you? That’s a shame. I was hoping you’d get a chance to talk to Grayson. How are things going between the two of you?”

Elliott’s cheeks burned. He couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “Are you fucking kidding me?” he spat. “Why don’t you ask him? He’s your friend!”

“Look, as much as I love the guy, we both know that Grayson is way too oblivious to have a useful answer to that question.”

Elliott opened his mouth, but before he could retort, a sickly gurgle pulsed through his stomach. Pressure squeezed up behind his ribs and into his throat, and he pressed one hand over his mouth, stifling what thankfully came out only as a deeply uncomfortable belch.

Fuck. He wanted to sink through the floor and die—especially when Malia dashed his hopes that maybe she hadn’t noticed by fixing him with a look of concern.

“Ah,” she said. “Is that why you came outside?”

“I—uh—I’m not—I didn’t—” Too mortified to respond coherently, Elliott stammered the beginnings of sentences that had no ends. Fuck, his brain wanted to say, I’m so fucking sorry, but the words wouldn’t reach his lips. He was prepared for a look of disgust, or a sour expression of disapproval, or at the very least, to be abruptly left to deal with his repulsive misery on his own.

But Malia continued in the same steady voice. “Too much alcohol or too much sugar?”

Elliott heard his own voice mumble, “…Sugar.”

“Well, hey. No hangover in the morning.” She shot him a sideways smile, as though she found the predicament of a grown fucking adult having eaten himself sick of Halloween candy immensely relatable. “Why don’t you come inside? You can lie down in my spare room.”

“No,” Elliott snapped, and then he caught himself. Ugh. Manners were so fucking hard. “…Thanks. But I’m fine out here.”

“Well, sit down at least! I’ll duck inside and bring you some Pepto. Hopefully that’ll settle your tummy enough that you can get home to your own bed.”

Elliott felt his cheeks burning, but the grumbling in his belly prevented him from protesting. If she wanted to bring him drugs, then fine. It was true that the sooner he felt better, the sooner he could get out of here and go home. Obligingly, he turned away from the railing and sank onto the wicker loveseat, swallowing hard as the movement jostled his upset stomach.

“I’ll be back in a minute,” Malia said. “I’m just going to figure out where my boyfriend is, and then I’ll get you the medicine. Sit tight.” And with that, she vanished back into the apartment.

It was more like five minutes before she returned. Elliott cleared his throat at the sound of the sliding door. “Did you find Captain America?”

Malia chuckled as she sank down onto the loveseat next to him. “Yes. He’s fallen asleep on my bed. Poor Bramley. He doesn’t really like parties.”

Relatable, Elliott thought to himself. Bramley. He was going to have to remember that name.

“Here’s the Pepto.” Malia passed him a little cup of pink liquid, which he downed immediately. “And take this too. It might help.” She held out a mug, which was steaming furiously in the cold air. “It’s peppermint tea. My mom tells me it’s good for digestion.”

Elliott took the mug. Its warmth felt good against his fingers—he hadn’t realized how chilly his hands were until this precise moment. The tingle of blood rushing back into his extremities felt almost as good as the sensation of the hot, sharp liquid on his tongue and in his throat. The first sip hit his stomach like a warm blanket, pressing down against its rebellious contents and urging them to settle. He sighed and stifled a soft burp against the back of one hand.

“I was happy to see you here tonight,” said Malia. “You should come hang out with us more.”

Elliott was silent. How was he supposed to explain that it was awkward to hang out with the friends of a casual lover who didn’t seem to think he was worth so much as saying hello to outside their little trysts?

Malia seemed to read his mind. “I mean it. Don’t worry about Grayson. It’s not your fault he’s acting that way. I don’t know if you know this about him, but he grew up out in the sticks. You know, the kind of place where people claim to be just fine with ‘the gays’ as long as they don’t have to see them, talk about them, or otherwise acknowledge their existence.” Her tone went from sardonic to sadly sympathetic. “Grayson seems to have internalized that a little. He’s still got it in his head that seeing guys is this shameful thing he has to do without letting anybody know he does it.”

Elliott absorbed this information silently. He hadn’t known that. He’d known almost nothing about Grayson’s background.

“We’re working on him,” Malia added. “I’m positive it’ll get through his poor skull eventually. Until then, you should hang out with us more. Maybe that’ll help him feel more normal about the whole thing. What do you usually do on Friday evenings?”

“Um.” Nothing, really, ever—but Elliott knew that would sound pathetic. “I’m often available. What happens on Friday evenings?”

“Grayson, Bram, Kara, and I go to a trivia night at one of the campus cafes. You oughta come sometime.” She caught the look on Elliott’s face and laughed. “No, really! We could use you! I’m the only one who ever knows anything that isn’t pop culture. And it’d be nice to see you outside of the debate team, because I think I’ll quit next semester.”

“Wish I could quit,” Elliott said. “I hate that debate team.”

“So do I!” Malia let out a little huff, crossing her arms as she leaned back in the loveseat. “They’re all a bunch of self-important idiots, aren’t they?”

Thus began a fifteen-minute conversation in which the two of them aired their various grievances against their teammates. And as they talked—to his immense surprise—Elliott found himself feeling better and better. The antacid seemed to be doing its job, and the peppermint tea felt warm and soothing in his belly—and most shocking of all—the more he talked, the less the sting of rejection he’d been carrying all night ached under his breastbone.

When the conversation had died down, Elliott leaned back in his seat and sighed. Things were… better now. His stomach felt so much better, it was almost unbelievable. He was warm from the tea. And he could feel Malia’s shoulder lightly touching the side of his arm. It was such a slight touch she probably hadn’t noticed. But he did.

He cleared his throat. “So… you think that…. Grayson actually likes me?”

“Oh yes.” Malia chuckled heartily. “He talks about you all the time. In this hilariously nonchalant way that fools absolutely no one. He never calls you by name, only ‘my math tutor.’ My math tutor did this, my math tutor said that…. That boy is completely taken with you.”

A few moments passed in silence, aside from the muffled music from the party inside.

“I have a proposal for you,” said Elliott. “I come to this trivia night. I help your team win. In exchange, you make it so that Grayson Ives will fucking talk to me.”

Malia laughed. “Deal,” she said. “But I get to keep the voucher for free food you get for being part of the winning team.”

“Hmm. You drive a hard bargain. But I suppose I accept.”

“Let’s shake on it,” she said, and they did, her small fingers grasping his tea-warmed ones and squeezing tight.

[grailacademy]

Welcome To Grail Academy - Chapter Twenty-six: Momma’s Place

Finally, the exams were over. No more stress, no more classes, no more teachers, no more lectures. A wave of relief swept over the entirety of Grail Academy, the hallways of the school had never been so calm before. Where there was once petty squabbles and panicked studying, now was students exchanging contact information and hugs before the winter break set in. Everyone, except for Esmerelda and her teammates. They all stood huddled around Nico’s locker while he maneuvered the lock on it. He had forgotten the combination years ago, but the paper clip he wiggled in the slot between the combination wheel and the locking mechanism was working just fine. A small click, and the lock popped off. “So, what’s the plan again?”

Esmerelda crossed her arms, a look of thinly veiled disgust crossing over her face as she watched her teammate hook the lock onto a belt loop on his pants. Something felt...different. She was about to speak, but trailed off as she pondered, looking around at the lockers and the passing students. “We...haven’t we done this before…?” She muttered. Nico gave her a strange look, questioning “What?”

The same wave of realization washed over himself and Bernard, and they straightened up. The three of them watched the sea of students part around them as they turned in confusion, like fish lost in the ocean. “...Have we?” Bernard wondered and looked to Esmerelda. She didn’t have an answer for him. Nico shook his head and scratched at his hair, frustrated. He squeezed his eyes shut while he tried to think and stammered, “W-wait. This isn’t...what’s going on?”

Esmerelda rubbed her temples, “Okay, what’s the last thing you two remember?”

“Uhm...we were on the quad, I think.” Nico grasped for the answer by tracing for clues in his memory. Bernard nodded, rubbing his chin silently. “That can’t be right…”

--------------------

Hari struggled with the controls on the old projector. The buttons stuck and the toggle never fully focused. One of the feet was broken so the machine always leaned to one side, so the image looked like a stretched diagonal square. After a few slaps to the side of the projector and a couple of tries at turning it off and on again, the inner fans sputtered and whirred, and Hari stepped back to flick the lights off. He left Yorick and Sable alone in the office, shutting the door. With the white window of projector light shining on the wall acting as their only light source, the two of them were wrapped in a blanket of darkness. Strangely, it made Yorick feel safer.

“I offered you a home here. Offered you training. Offered you purpose.” Sable’s face was a thin sliver of pale white within the cloak of tangled hair as she circled the loveseat, running her slender arms along the back. She spoke softly into Yorick’s ear, standing behind him with her hands slowly making their way to his shoulders. “I expect you to repay my generosity.” She sang to him like a siren, holding him in a gentle grip like that of a mother. Yorick’s cheeks were stained with droplets of cold sweat. He couldn’t understand why he was suddenly anxious, but he didn’t dare turn his head to look at Sable as she spoke. Don’t look at her. Look at the light. Look at the light, he told himself.

“You’re strong, Yorick. But you lack restraint. You need to learn control.” Tendrils of pitch black hair snaked themselves around the boy’s body, his arms and torso tied down to the seat. Yorick didn’t notice. The grip was barely tight enough to constrict the breathing of a fly.

A click. A soft tap of a button press. And a video flashed on the wall. It was a little boy, no older than two years, blowing out the candles to a birthday cake. He was struggling, his child-sized lungs provided only enough force to make the flames flicker. The room was dark, but his face and the faces of those around him were illuminated by the soft glow of the fire. He was laughing. A man with thick glasses reached around and helped him blow out the candles, and everyone clapped. A woman with mousy hair began to cut slices from the cake while the man lifted the boy out of his chair, and the child screamed in happiness.

Yorick shuttered. “H-how did you get this?” He wanted to face Sable, but his body refused to let him turn away from the video. Sable did not answer his question, and continued. “How old are you in this? Two? Three? Did you have your semblance at this point? Did your family know?” She asked, and quickly changed the screen instead of waiting for an answer.

It changed to photos of a crime scene. A car on the side of the road, flipped over, smoldering. Sheets on a soft patch of snow next to it. Another slide. A woman, matted hair, bloodied, half her face missing, her dress torn and burnt, parts of her exposed skin flaking off the bone. Another slide. A man, shattered glasses, covered in soot, soaked in blood, red blisters, right hand burnt to a crisp and disconnected from his arm. Another slide. Yellow police tape, a series of broken car parts, an organized pile of numbered evidence. A shiver crawled up Yorick’s spine. He shut his eyes. He was shaking, his fists clenched so tightly that his nails were making indents in his palms. He felt his gut growing hotter, bubbling. He was going to be sick. He held back tears.

“Your parents.” Sable grumbled, “Look at them.” Her freezing cold hands grabbed the sides of Yorick’s head, and straightened him to face the pictures. “You did that. You did that.” The words she said cut him like a knife, but her tone was gentle and passive the entire time. “You’re not just lethal. You’re a cancer. Spreading rapidly.” The slides changed again, to photos of a burning building. A school. One of the rooms completely collapsed and engulfed in smoke. “Everything around you succumbs to the infection. You have to control it.” Yorick’s eyes were watering and red, his breathing grew labored. It took everything he had not to start crying. Small wisps of smoke trailed from the corners of his mouth. “There is no cure for your type of malignancy. No permanent remedy. It’s an irrational anxiety surrounding a rational fear. But you can learn to live with it.”

Tears were streaming down his face. Yorick’s quiet weeping did nothing to waver Sable. She persisted. A photo of his parents, smiling and alive, shone down at him from the wall. He felt another knife in his gut, making him boil hotter. “This pain, it never leaves you. But you can survive it.” Another video, this one of his parents' wedding, the guests dancing and clapping and laughing. “A senseless tragedy. One with no closure, no justice. You know the feeling of that purgatory.”

Yorick nodded slowly and repeated her words, his voice shaky, “Senseless tragedy…” Sable loosened her hold on him, and let the video play out. “What other kind is there?” He asked. Sable stood up from her stooped position and whispered, almost sadly, “Necessary.”

“Was Buck necessary?” Yorick snapped, the smoke pouring from his nostrils. The images of the body washed over him again, and he tried to stand to face Sable. His restraints kept him down in the loveseat, but he squirmed. Was he angry? Was he scared? Yorick had no idea. But whatever he was feeling, it was something he had been burying deep down for a long time.

“You’re searching for conspiracy because the truth is far more painful,” Sable retorted.

“Is it conspiracy if it’s true?”

“You wouldn’t know.”

“Well, is it, then? Is it true?”

“I am not the enemy, Yorick. We will navigate the consequences together, but you are angry at the wrong person. I didn’t kill your parents. I didn’t send you away.” She pulled one of the slides out of the projector and showed him the small photo of police officers crowding around the car wreck. “Be angry at them. They wanted to control you, to make you submissive. They’re afraid of you. I’m not. I know you. I know your power, your strength.” She repeated again, “I am not the enemy.”

Yorick shoves the loveseat to the side, removing the barrier between the two of them. He was panicking. He was angry. He was panicking because of his anger. He had no idea where to direct his hate. “You do not want to lose me. I’m the only person willing to help you. I have been kind, have I not? I can be cruel as well. I will turn my back on you forever if I like. No more friends, no more home.” She placed a hand on his shoulder to keep him from shaking more. “Not all authority will disappoint you. Not all parents leave. But let me be very clear, this is your last chance. Your next words will define your future.”

The rage, pure, unfiltered, untainted, erupted inside him. His stomach felt like a grenade, and Sable just pulled the pin. The pain clawed its way through his body, up his throat, dancing on his tongue. Sable lifted her hand and watched a blue light fill the room, both sudden and slow. Yorick’s insides were on fire, like he was drinking hot magma, but on the outside he was cold. The fire was no longer inside him. It wasn’t even outside him. He was the flame. Sable began to smile, and Yorick sighed. He was tired. “...I’m thirsty.”

--------------------

Esmerelda’s head was spinning. She tried to calculate the math in her head, once, twice, three times. It just didn’t make sense. “We were...already here.” She muttered. Looking to Bernard, who was staring blankly at the wall of lockers in front of him, she attempted to apply some form of logic to the situation. “Try harder, think back. What’s the very last thing you remember happening?”

Nico guffawed, “I told you! We were on the quad, and then those…” He suddenly grew quiet as he lost his train of thought. But Bernard finished his sentence for him, announcing, “...Those people. The Hedge Witches.” The three of them nodded in unity. The story was becoming more clear. “And then there was an explosion, and…” Nico hit his fist on the side of his head, as if he was trying to shake the memory loose. When he mentioned the explosion, a figurative light bulb flashed on over Esmerelda, and she let out a gasp.

“The clocktower.”

Bernard began to look over his shoulder and behind his friends, checking to see if anyone was listening in on their conversation. “Wait, this could be a good thing! Like a reset button! Now we have a second chance to do things right,” Nico grasped around as he tried to find a silver lining to the predicament, “Maybe we can fix this whole mess.” Esmerelda only sighed, eyeing the stairwell that led to the tall oak doors of the headmaster’s office at the end of the hallway. “We need to find Madehold.”

[epackingvietnam]

An Introduction to Accessibility and SEO [Series Part 1]

Welcome back to Whiteboard Friday! To start us up after our break, guest host Cooper Hollmaier has put together a three-part series that shows how SEO and accessibility go hand-in-hand. 

In part one, he introduces us to what accessibility in SEO means, goes through some common myths associated with the work to make websites optimized and accessible, and discusses some of the major impacts that work can have. 

Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high resolution version in a new tab!

Video Transcription

Hey, Moz fans. Welcome to the latest edition of Whiteboard Friday. I'm Cooper Hollmaier. Today we're going to be talking about SEO and accessibility: the idea of optimizing not just for some of our audience, but all of our audience.

I've been doing SEO since 2016, and I started out working on small businesses, local mom-and-pop shops. Then I found the allure of e-commerce SEO, and I've been doing that ever since. Today I work on an in-house team doing technical SEO for a large outdoor e-commerce retailer.

The relationship between SEO and accessibility

Now, if you're anything like me, you know that SEO is a little bit more than just code on the page and copy that's crafted to meet searchers' intent. Whether you're a seasoned SEO pro or you're looking for the latest tips as that mom-and-pop shop, or you're maybe starting out in an SEO role for the first time, you understand that we have to take our content that we're producing and we have to, in some way, make sure that it shows up in search engines.

So for me, as a technical SEO, maybe I'm thinking about things like my H1 tag or my paragraph tag or my title tag, for this example page here for Mozville Dog Rescue. 

Now most of the time I would say my job revolves around the idea of making sure that what I'm doing, the stuff I'm producing, what I'm designing for, can be seen, digested, consumed, and then essentially regurgitated by our friend the bot.

Optimize for people, not just bots

But have you stopped to think about maybe there's a larger audience out there? Maybe it's more than just my bots. If you're thinking that way, you're moving towards the right direction. You're moving towards a more inclusive approach. You're thinking about more than just a search engine but also the users, the people that are consuming that content, engaging with it, and maybe even engaging with your business.

If you think about only optimizing for bots, you're thinking about something kind of like someone sitting in a spotlight on a stage. You can see that person front and center, but you maybe can't see the surrounding cast because they're out there in the darkness. What we want to do is we want to think about a larger group of people.

We want to take that spotlight away and give everyone a chance to shine, everyone a chance to consume, engage with, and be delighted by the content that you're producing. So as you're thinking about search engine optimization, as you're thinking about building a new product, service, experience, think about not just can a search engine bot see that. We know that's important as an SEO.

How do people interact with your content?

But also think about can other people interact with, engage with, or be compelled by this content. If the answer is no, you have some issues. But I can give you a few tips on how to solve those issues. When you're making some content, whether it's marketing material both digitally and on a website or offline in some sort of print material, ask yourself these four things.

Content should be perceivable, operable, understandable, and robust

Is my content perceivable? Is it able to be seen or understood, or does it exist for my user? Is it operable? Can they do something with it? Is it understandable? Am I writing at the right reading level? Am I explaining this in a way that's going to be consumable by a large audience and maybe not just somebody with a PhD? Is that content robust? Is what I'm building available in multiple different formats, fonts, sizes, etc., so that, regardless of who my user is, they're going to be able to understand what I've given them? 

These are the four principles of web accessibility. These are the guidelines that the Web Consortium has given us, and you can apply them every time that you're building something new, or even retrofitting something old.

For example, let's say you have this playbill or you have maybe a menu for a restaurant. If I don't offer that menu or that playbill in both a digital and a print format, I end up in a situation where someone who needs Braille, needs a screen reader, need some sort of assistive technology in order to understand and consume that content, is going to be kind of left out in the dark.

They're not going to be able to do those things. In the example of a menu, I can't order from a restaurant if I don't know what they offer for me to order. So it's important that we make sure that our content and the things we're producing, the marketing materials that we're developing, are perceivable, operable, understandable, and robust. 

But okay, I'm only talking about maybe one example of disability.

Types of disability

When I say "disability," what does that mean to you? You might think of an elderly family member who needs a cane to walk. You might think of your friend who has a hard time reading large words or gets anxious when there's a math test coming up in class. If that's the case, you'd be talking about only two types of disability, maybe body structure, shape and size disabilities for someone who's walking with a cane, or cognitive disabilities or even learning disabilities that your friend might be experiencing.

There are a bunch of different other types of disabilities that even I didn't know about until I learned about it. Those might include blindness, low vision, deaf-blindness, color blindness. I'm the first to admit here that this whiteboard being in blue and red and green and black may not be the most accessible for someone with colorblindness. That's why it's important that we have closed captioning and a transcript below this video. These all make this content more accessible. 

Auditory, cognitive, anxiety, mood, seizure. You can see that this list is long and it's not exhaustive. There are a ton of different types of disability, and many of them aren't even perceivable by you or I. People may be suffering from disability and dealing with this in their life that you might not know.

So it's important to recognize that we need to start optimizing content not just for bots but for people as well. We need to make sure that people are able to actually consume and engage with our content. 

So how does this relate to your world as an SEO? Well, there's a lot of similarities between accessibility work and SEO work, and I want to kind of break that down into some myths and legends.

Myths and legends

1. It has a small impact

Number one, commonly people will say accessibility only impacts a small group of people. We're looking at this through a lens of able-bodied individuals who we think, okay, they can see my content if I write it on the page. But the reality is one in five people in the United States are dealing with a disability. That's a lot of people.

That's almost 60 million people. So it's not a small problem if you ask me. For SEO, if I do something for SEO, if I write a tag title tag, if I write a meta description, if I craft my H1 in a certain way, I may not only be helping a bot, but I'm also helping probably other channels of marketing as well.

I'm going to help that email campaign have a better title. I'm going to have that pay-per-click ad that's going to have a better page to go to. So small impact is really a myth. Accessibility and SEO both fall into that bucket where they impact a lot more people than I think we commonly realize.

2. It’s a short-term problem

Number two, it's a short-term problem. For accessibility, the ability to be able to order from a menu or read this playbill is more than a short-term problem.

It's going to happen every time I go to that business or this restaurant. So it's important that we keep our accessibility work ongoing and continue to improve and evolve our practices. We know that for SEO it's a zero-sum game, too. We know that the world is always changing. Search algorithms are changing. User intent and behavior is changing.

So it's important that we stay on top of our SEO work and make sure that our business understands that SEO work if you're working in an enterprise situation. So that way we're not falling behind our competitors, and we're not disadvantaging people that we may not realize we're disadvantaging.

3. Worry about it at the end

Number three, we should do it at the end. I hear this a lot when we're talking about SEO but for accessibility especially, too.

Hey, I have this website. Maybe we should do an audit. Then we can do some work to remediate this problem so that the website becomes accessible. It's always faster, cheaper, and easier to make a website accessible from the get-go than to do it retroactively, and do this kind of retrofitting. For SEO, we know that it's way easier and also a lot more effective if we build content for users with SEO insights to inform what they're looking for, what questions we need to answer.

If you trying to optimize something after the fact, a lot of times I think you'll find that the content that you're producing feels like it's SEO driven. It's not going to feel like it's for a customer because it wasn't. You're coming in after the fact.

4. It costs too much

Number four, it cost too much money. You know what cost a lot of money? Lawsuits. If you don't work on accessibility first and foremost, in the beginning of the process and in an ongoing fashion, you'll find I think that accessibility lawsuits can cost your business a lot more, and they can be detrimental.

But so can SEO and penalties. If you take a shortcut, if you don't take the time to think about what your user needs, how this is going to be received by a search engine as well as customers in general, I think you'll find that those penalties are going to hurt a lot more than doing it right the first time and doing it in an ongoing fashion.

5. It’s distracting

Number five, it's distracting.

For accessibility, in a lot of cases the things that we're going to be implementing aren't going to be visible to your average user. They're going to be visible to assistive technology and the screen readers and the things that people with disabilities might be using to interact with the same content that someone else is. But in most cases, it's better to be correct and there and visible in terms of what a screen reader can see than be impossible to use altogether.

For SEO, we know that bad and unethical SEO is obvious. We've seen keyword stuffing. We've seen a bunch of links on a page that don't belong or don't really provide value to my customer. That is more distracting I think, than doing the work to make it right. 

Okay, so there's some similarities between accessibility and SEO.

In most cases, there is a very large impact if you do it right. It's not a short-term problem. It's ongoing. We shouldn't do it at the end. We should be doing it at the beginning. It really doesn't cost that much money if you do it right compared to if you do it wrong and get it wrong. Then number five is, in most cases, the best work goes unnoticed because it's organic, it's ethical, it's honest.

The impact of accessibility work

So what's the impact of doing accessibility work and also I guess doing SEO work that aligns with accessibility practices?

1. Makes the impossible, possible!

Number one, it helps people with disabilities first and foremost. It makes the impossible possible.

2. It helps businesses

Number two, it helps businesses. You as a business owner or as someone who's optimizing a website for a business or even maybe someone who is just trying to get into SEO and learn more, it's going to help your public perception.

If you make a website that's accessible, it's going to be obvious and people are going to thank you for that. They're going to say, "Oh, this company cares about all people and a diverse group of abilities." It's going to be a more durable experience for your customers. When you start to think about things like text alternatives and captioning and transcripts and you kind of build this practice up over time and you really build this habit of doing accessible work and inclusive work, you're going to find that your website is more durable.

It's less likely to be hit by these algorithm changes and things like that, where people have taken the short-term approach. I know you're going to love this. It's going to help your SEO. It's going to give you a bigger audience. You've now taken your spotlight focus on just your bots and you've expanded it to see the entire stage in front of you. So a bigger audience is going to be in front of you as well for a business, and that means more money and more people and honestly a lot less problems.

I think we all know this one, but lawsuits. If you do this, if you start implementing accessibility work, you start thinking about accessibility first and foremost as you're developing things, you're going to have a lot less lawsuits. People aren't going to complain. They aren't going to be upset by your lack of accessibility because you won't have any. It will be accessible and inclusive for all people.

3. It helps family and friends

Then number three, doing accessibility work, thinking about accessibility, thinking about whether my website, whether my marketing material is going to be able to be consumed and enjoyed by people is going to help those family and friends who are working with people with disabilities. It's going to make things possible for people with disabilities. It's going to make their lives more independent and therefore release a little bit of that burden on family and friends.

It's also going to allow you, as a practitioner, as an SEO or maybe another discipline, to have a chance to interact with people with more diverse perspectives, learn more, get a richer, more intimate experience with these different users and craft a better overall experience. 

So as you can see, accessibility and SEO are very similar, and it's important to recognize that we need to kind of shift our mindset from thinking about just optimize for bots, how can I get Google to see this, how can I get other search engines to see this, and think about people first and use the rich insights that we get from search engine optimization and the tools they give us for free to make a big impact on people and everyday life.

Now what?

Okay, so now what do I do with this information? — is the question you might have. Well, you can learn and test. So you can learn a little bit more about accessibility by checking out Global Accessibility Awareness Day. You can join a meetup. There are tons of people out there who are as passionate as I am about accessibility, who can show you the way and give you tips and tricks on how to think about this.

You can subscribe to a newsletter. I've included a bit.ly link here, bit.ly/wbf-week, for White Board Friday. You can sign up for a weekly newsletter from Accessibility Weekly and get more tips and tricks and really cool stories about how people are doing this and implementing this work on their own business. Then you can also test your actual pages. Once you kind of get this awareness and start understanding how accessibility fits into your workflow, you can use either WAVE or Axe, and I've included the bit.ly links here and down below, and you can look at those tools as just another thing you can do to make sure that the things you're producing are visible, they're accessible, they're able to be accessed by assistive technology.

Thanks for spending some time with me today and talking about SEO and accessibility. I really hope that this changes your perspective and gives you a broader idea of how you can impact people's daily lives with the SEO and the accessibility work you're doing for your own business. Thanks. Have a good one.

#túi_giấy_epacking_việt_nam #túi_giấy_epacking #in_túi_giấy_giá_rẻ #in_túi_giấy #epackingvietnam #tuigiayepacking

[bfxenon]

An Introduction to Accessibility and SEO [Series Part 1]

Welcome back to Whiteboard Friday! To start us up after our break, guest host Cooper Hollmaier has put together a three-part series that shows how SEO and accessibility go hand-in-hand. 

In part one, he introduces us to what accessibility in SEO means, goes through some common myths associated with the work to make websites optimized and accessible, and discusses some of the major impacts that work can have. 

Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high resolution version in a new tab!

Video Transcription

Hey, Moz fans. Welcome to the latest edition of Whiteboard Friday. I'm Cooper Hollmaier. Today we're going to be talking about SEO and accessibility: the idea of optimizing not just for some of our audience, but all of our audience.

I've been doing SEO since 2016, and I started out working on small businesses, local mom-and-pop shops. Then I found the allure of e-commerce SEO, and I've been doing that ever since. Today I work on an in-house team doing technical SEO for a large outdoor e-commerce retailer.

The relationship between SEO and accessibility

Now, if you're anything like me, you know that SEO is a little bit more than just code on the page and copy that's crafted to meet searchers' intent. Whether you're a seasoned SEO pro or you're looking for the latest tips as that mom-and-pop shop, or you're maybe starting out in an SEO role for the first time, you understand that we have to take our content that we're producing and we have to, in some way, make sure that it shows up in search engines.

So for me, as a technical SEO, maybe I'm thinking about things like my H1 tag or my paragraph tag or my title tag, for this example page here for Mozville Dog Rescue. 

Now most of the time I would say my job revolves around the idea of making sure that what I'm doing, the stuff I'm producing, what I'm designing for, can be seen, digested, consumed, and then essentially regurgitated by our friend the bot.

Optimize for people, not just bots

But have you stopped to think about maybe there's a larger audience out there? Maybe it's more than just my bots. If you're thinking that way, you're moving towards the right direction. You're moving towards a more inclusive approach. You're thinking about more than just a search engine but also the users, the people that are consuming that content, engaging with it, and maybe even engaging with your business.

If you think about only optimizing for bots, you're thinking about something kind of like someone sitting in a spotlight on a stage. You can see that person front and center, but you maybe can't see the surrounding cast because they're out there in the darkness. What we want to do is we want to think about a larger group of people.

We want to take that spotlight away and give everyone a chance to shine, everyone a chance to consume, engage with, and be delighted by the content that you're producing. So as you're thinking about search engine optimization, as you're thinking about building a new product, service, experience, think about not just can a search engine bot see that. We know that's important as an SEO.

How do people interact with your content?

But also think about can other people interact with, engage with, or be compelled by this content. If the answer is no, you have some issues. But I can give you a few tips on how to solve those issues. When you're making some content, whether it's marketing material both digitally and on a website or offline in some sort of print material, ask yourself these four things.

Content should be perceivable, operable, understandable, and robust

Is my content perceivable? Is it able to be seen or understood, or does it exist for my user? Is it operable? Can they do something with it? Is it understandable? Am I writing at the right reading level? Am I explaining this in a way that's going to be consumable by a large audience and maybe not just somebody with a PhD? Is that content robust? Is what I'm building available in multiple different formats, fonts, sizes, etc., so that, regardless of who my user is, they're going to be able to understand what I've given them? 

These are the four principles of web accessibility. These are the guidelines that the Web Consortium has given us, and you can apply them every time that you're building something new, or even retrofitting something old.

For example, let's say you have this playbill or you have maybe a menu for a restaurant. If I don't offer that menu or that playbill in both a digital and a print format, I end up in a situation where someone who needs Braille, needs a screen reader, need some sort of assistive technology in order to understand and consume that content, is going to be kind of left out in the dark.

They're not going to be able to do those things. In the example of a menu, I can't order from a restaurant if I don't know what they offer for me to order. So it's important that we make sure that our content and the things we're producing, the marketing materials that we're developing, are perceivable, operable, understandable, and robust. 

But okay, I'm only talking about maybe one example of disability.

Types of disability

When I say "disability," what does that mean to you? You might think of an elderly family member who needs a cane to walk. You might think of your friend who has a hard time reading large words or gets anxious when there's a math test coming up in class. If that's the case, you'd be talking about only two types of disability, maybe body structure, shape and size disabilities for someone who's walking with a cane, or cognitive disabilities or even learning disabilities that your friend might be experiencing.

There are a bunch of different other types of disabilities that even I didn't know about until I learned about it. Those might include blindness, low vision, deaf-blindness, color blindness. I'm the first to admit here that this whiteboard being in blue and red and green and black may not be the most accessible for someone with colorblindness. That's why it's important that we have closed captioning and a transcript below this video. These all make this content more accessible. 

Auditory, cognitive, anxiety, mood, seizure. You can see that this list is long and it's not exhaustive. There are a ton of different types of disability, and many of them aren't even perceivable by you or I. People may be suffering from disability and dealing with this in their life that you might not know.

So it's important to recognize that we need to start optimizing content not just for bots but for people as well. We need to make sure that people are able to actually consume and engage with our content. 

So how does this relate to your world as an SEO? Well, there's a lot of similarities between accessibility work and SEO work, and I want to kind of break that down into some myths and legends.

Myths and legends

1. It has a small impact

Number one, commonly people will say accessibility only impacts a small group of people. We're looking at this through a lens of able-bodied individuals who we think, okay, they can see my content if I write it on the page. But the reality is one in five people in the United States are dealing with a disability. That's a lot of people.

That's almost 60 million people. So it's not a small problem if you ask me. For SEO, if I do something for SEO, if I write a tag title tag, if I write a meta description, if I craft my H1 in a certain way, I may not only be helping a bot, but I'm also helping probably other channels of marketing as well.

I'm going to help that email campaign have a better title. I'm going to have that pay-per-click ad that's going to have a better page to go to. So small impact is really a myth. Accessibility and SEO both fall into that bucket where they impact a lot more people than I think we commonly realize.

2. It’s a short-term problem

Number two, it's a short-term problem. For accessibility, the ability to be able to order from a menu or read this playbill is more than a short-term problem.

It's going to happen every time I go to that business or this restaurant. So it's important that we keep our accessibility work ongoing and continue to improve and evolve our practices. We know that for SEO it's a zero-sum game, too. We know that the world is always changing. Search algorithms are changing. User intent and behavior is changing.

So it's important that we stay on top of our SEO work and make sure that our business understands that SEO work if you're working in an enterprise situation. So that way we're not falling behind our competitors, and we're not disadvantaging people that we may not realize we're disadvantaging.

3. Worry about it at the end

Number three, we should do it at the end. I hear this a lot when we're talking about SEO but for accessibility especially, too.

Hey, I have this website. Maybe we should do an audit. Then we can do some work to remediate this problem so that the website becomes accessible. It's always faster, cheaper, and easier to make a website accessible from the get-go than to do it retroactively, and do this kind of retrofitting. For SEO, we know that it's way easier and also a lot more effective if we build content for users with SEO insights to inform what they're looking for, what questions we need to answer.

If you trying to optimize something after the fact, a lot of times I think you'll find that the content that you're producing feels like it's SEO driven. It's not going to feel like it's for a customer because it wasn't. You're coming in after the fact.

4. It costs too much

Number four, it cost too much money. You know what cost a lot of money? Lawsuits. If you don't work on accessibility first and foremost, in the beginning of the process and in an ongoing fashion, you'll find I think that accessibility lawsuits can cost your business a lot more, and they can be detrimental.

But so can SEO and penalties. If you take a shortcut, if you don't take the time to think about what your user needs, how this is going to be received by a search engine as well as customers in general, I think you'll find that those penalties are going to hurt a lot more than doing it right the first time and doing it in an ongoing fashion.

5. It’s distracting

Number five, it's distracting.

For accessibility, in a lot of cases the things that we're going to be implementing aren't going to be visible to your average user. They're going to be visible to assistive technology and the screen readers and the things that people with disabilities might be using to interact with the same content that someone else is. But in most cases, it's better to be correct and there and visible in terms of what a screen reader can see than be impossible to use altogether.

For SEO, we know that bad and unethical SEO is obvious. We've seen keyword stuffing. We've seen a bunch of links on a page that don't belong or don't really provide value to my customer. That is more distracting I think, than doing the work to make it right. 

Okay, so there's some similarities between accessibility and SEO.

In most cases, there is a very large impact if you do it right. It's not a short-term problem. It's ongoing. We shouldn't do it at the end. We should be doing it at the beginning. It really doesn't cost that much money if you do it right compared to if you do it wrong and get it wrong. Then number five is, in most cases, the best work goes unnoticed because it's organic, it's ethical, it's honest.

The impact of accessibility work

So what's the impact of doing accessibility work and also I guess doing SEO work that aligns with accessibility practices?

1. Makes the impossible, possible!

Number one, it helps people with disabilities first and foremost. It makes the impossible possible.

2. It helps businesses

Number two, it helps businesses. You as a business owner or as someone who's optimizing a website for a business or even maybe someone who is just trying to get into SEO and learn more, it's going to help your public perception.

If you make a website that's accessible, it's going to be obvious and people are going to thank you for that. They're going to say, "Oh, this company cares about all people and a diverse group of abilities." It's going to be a more durable experience for your customers. When you start to think about things like text alternatives and captioning and transcripts and you kind of build this practice up over time and you really build this habit of doing accessible work and inclusive work, you're going to find that your website is more durable.

It's less likely to be hit by these algorithm changes and things like that, where people have taken the short-term approach. I know you're going to love this. It's going to help your SEO. It's going to give you a bigger audience. You've now taken your spotlight focus on just your bots and you've expanded it to see the entire stage in front of you. So a bigger audience is going to be in front of you as well for a business, and that means more money and more people and honestly a lot less problems.

I think we all know this one, but lawsuits. If you do this, if you start implementing accessibility work, you start thinking about accessibility first and foremost as you're developing things, you're going to have a lot less lawsuits. People aren't going to complain. They aren't going to be upset by your lack of accessibility because you won't have any. It will be accessible and inclusive for all people.

3. It helps family and friends

Then number three, doing accessibility work, thinking about accessibility, thinking about whether my website, whether my marketing material is going to be able to be consumed and enjoyed by people is going to help those family and friends who are working with people with disabilities. It's going to make things possible for people with disabilities. It's going to make their lives more independent and therefore release a little bit of that burden on family and friends.

It's also going to allow you, as a practitioner, as an SEO or maybe another discipline, to have a chance to interact with people with more diverse perspectives, learn more, get a richer, more intimate experience with these different users and craft a better overall experience. 

So as you can see, accessibility and SEO are very similar, and it's important to recognize that we need to kind of shift our mindset from thinking about just optimize for bots, how can I get Google to see this, how can I get other search engines to see this, and think about people first and use the rich insights that we get from search engine optimization and the tools they give us for free to make a big impact on people and everyday life.

Now what?

Okay, so now what do I do with this information? — is the question you might have. Well, you can learn and test. So you can learn a little bit more about accessibility by checking out Global Accessibility Awareness Day. You can join a meetup. There are tons of people out there who are as passionate as I am about accessibility, who can show you the way and give you tips and tricks on how to think about this.

You can subscribe to a newsletter. I've included a bit.ly link here, bit.ly/wbf-week, for White Board Friday. You can sign up for a weekly newsletter from Accessibility Weekly and get more tips and tricks and really cool stories about how people are doing this and implementing this work on their own business. Then you can also test your actual pages. Once you kind of get this awareness and start understanding how accessibility fits into your workflow, you can use either WAVE or Axe, and I've included the bit.ly links here and down below, and you can look at those tools as just another thing you can do to make sure that the things you're producing are visible, they're accessible, they're able to be accessed by assistive technology.

Thanks for spending some time with me today and talking about SEO and accessibility. I really hope that this changes your perspective and gives you a broader idea of how you can impact people's daily lives with the SEO and the accessibility work you're doing for your own business. Thanks. Have a good one.

[nutrifami]

An Introduction to Accessibility and SEO [Series Part 1]

Welcome back to Whiteboard Friday! To start us up after our break, guest host Cooper Hollmaier has put together a three-part series that shows how SEO and accessibility go hand-in-hand. 

In part one, he introduces us to what accessibility in SEO means, goes through some common myths associated with the work to make websites optimized and accessible, and discusses some of the major impacts that work can have. 

Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high resolution version in a new tab!

Video Transcription

Hey, Moz fans. Welcome to the latest edition of Whiteboard Friday. I'm Cooper Hollmaier. Today we're going to be talking about SEO and accessibility: the idea of optimizing not just for some of our audience, but all of our audience.

I've been doing SEO since 2016, and I started out working on small businesses, local mom-and-pop shops. Then I found the allure of e-commerce SEO, and I've been doing that ever since. Today I work on an in-house team doing technical SEO for a large outdoor e-commerce retailer.

The relationship between SEO and accessibility

Now, if you're anything like me, you know that SEO is a little bit more than just code on the page and copy that's crafted to meet searchers' intent. Whether you're a seasoned SEO pro or you're looking for the latest tips as that mom-and-pop shop, or you're maybe starting out in an SEO role for the first time, you understand that we have to take our content that we're producing and we have to, in some way, make sure that it shows up in search engines.

So for me, as a technical SEO, maybe I'm thinking about things like my H1 tag or my paragraph tag or my title tag, for this example page here for Mozville Dog Rescue. 

Now most of the time I would say my job revolves around the idea of making sure that what I'm doing, the stuff I'm producing, what I'm designing for, can be seen, digested, consumed, and then essentially regurgitated by our friend the bot.

Optimize for people, not just bots

But have you stopped to think about maybe there's a larger audience out there? Maybe it's more than just my bots. If you're thinking that way, you're moving towards the right direction. You're moving towards a more inclusive approach. You're thinking about more than just a search engine but also the users, the people that are consuming that content, engaging with it, and maybe even engaging with your business.

If you think about only optimizing for bots, you're thinking about something kind of like someone sitting in a spotlight on a stage. You can see that person front and center, but you maybe can't see the surrounding cast because they're out there in the darkness. What we want to do is we want to think about a larger group of people.

We want to take that spotlight away and give everyone a chance to shine, everyone a chance to consume, engage with, and be delighted by the content that you're producing. So as you're thinking about search engine optimization, as you're thinking about building a new product, service, experience, think about not just can a search engine bot see that. We know that's important as an SEO.

How do people interact with your content?

But also think about can other people interact with, engage with, or be compelled by this content. If the answer is no, you have some issues. But I can give you a few tips on how to solve those issues. When you're making some content, whether it's marketing material both digitally and on a website or offline in some sort of print material, ask yourself these four things.

Content should be perceivable, operable, understandable, and robust

Is my content perceivable? Is it able to be seen or understood, or does it exist for my user? Is it operable? Can they do something with it? Is it understandable? Am I writing at the right reading level? Am I explaining this in a way that's going to be consumable by a large audience and maybe not just somebody with a PhD? Is that content robust? Is what I'm building available in multiple different formats, fonts, sizes, etc., so that, regardless of who my user is, they're going to be able to understand what I've given them? 

These are the four principles of web accessibility. These are the guidelines that the Web Consortium has given us, and you can apply them every time that you're building something new, or even retrofitting something old.

For example, let's say you have this playbill or you have maybe a menu for a restaurant. If I don't offer that menu or that playbill in both a digital and a print format, I end up in a situation where someone who needs Braille, needs a screen reader, need some sort of assistive technology in order to understand and consume that content, is going to be kind of left out in the dark.

They're not going to be able to do those things. In the example of a menu, I can't order from a restaurant if I don't know what they offer for me to order. So it's important that we make sure that our content and the things we're producing, the marketing materials that we're developing, are perceivable, operable, understandable, and robust. 

But okay, I'm only talking about maybe one example of disability.

Types of disability

When I say "disability," what does that mean to you? You might think of an elderly family member who needs a cane to walk. You might think of your friend who has a hard time reading large words or gets anxious when there's a math test coming up in class. If that's the case, you'd be talking about only two types of disability, maybe body structure, shape and size disabilities for someone who's walking with a cane, or cognitive disabilities or even learning disabilities that your friend might be experiencing.

There are a bunch of different other types of disabilities that even I didn't know about until I learned about it. Those might include blindness, low vision, deaf-blindness, color blindness. I'm the first to admit here that this whiteboard being in blue and red and green and black may not be the most accessible for someone with colorblindness. That's why it's important that we have closed captioning and a transcript below this video. These all make this content more accessible. 

Auditory, cognitive, anxiety, mood, seizure. You can see that this list is long and it's not exhaustive. There are a ton of different types of disability, and many of them aren't even perceivable by you or I. People may be suffering from disability and dealing with this in their life that you might not know.

So it's important to recognize that we need to start optimizing content not just for bots but for people as well. We need to make sure that people are able to actually consume and engage with our content. 

So how does this relate to your world as an SEO? Well, there's a lot of similarities between accessibility work and SEO work, and I want to kind of break that down into some myths and legends.

Myths and legends

1. It has a small impact

Number one, commonly people will say accessibility only impacts a small group of people. We're looking at this through a lens of able-bodied individuals who we think, okay, they can see my content if I write it on the page. But the reality is one in five people in the United States are dealing with a disability. That's a lot of people.

That's almost 60 million people. So it's not a small problem if you ask me. For SEO, if I do something for SEO, if I write a tag title tag, if I write a meta description, if I craft my H1 in a certain way, I may not only be helping a bot, but I'm also helping probably other channels of marketing as well.

I'm going to help that email campaign have a better title. I'm going to have that pay-per-click ad that's going to have a better page to go to. So small impact is really a myth. Accessibility and SEO both fall into that bucket where they impact a lot more people than I think we commonly realize.

2. It’s a short-term problem

Number two, it's a short-term problem. For accessibility, the ability to be able to order from a menu or read this playbill is more than a short-term problem.

It's going to happen every time I go to that business or this restaurant. So it's important that we keep our accessibility work ongoing and continue to improve and evolve our practices. We know that for SEO it's a zero-sum game, too. We know that the world is always changing. Search algorithms are changing. User intent and behavior is changing.

So it's important that we stay on top of our SEO work and make sure that our business understands that SEO work if you're working in an enterprise situation. So that way we're not falling behind our competitors, and we're not disadvantaging people that we may not realize we're disadvantaging.

3. Worry about it at the end

Number three, we should do it at the end. I hear this a lot when we're talking about SEO but for accessibility especially, too.

Hey, I have this website. Maybe we should do an audit. Then we can do some work to remediate this problem so that the website becomes accessible. It's always faster, cheaper, and easier to make a website accessible from the get-go than to do it retroactively, and do this kind of retrofitting. For SEO, we know that it's way easier and also a lot more effective if we build content for users with SEO insights to inform what they're looking for, what questions we need to answer.

If you trying to optimize something after the fact, a lot of times I think you'll find that the content that you're producing feels like it's SEO driven. It's not going to feel like it's for a customer because it wasn't. You're coming in after the fact.

4. It costs too much

Number four, it cost too much money. You know what cost a lot of money? Lawsuits. If you don't work on accessibility first and foremost, in the beginning of the process and in an ongoing fashion, you'll find I think that accessibility lawsuits can cost your business a lot more, and they can be detrimental.

But so can SEO and penalties. If you take a shortcut, if you don't take the time to think about what your user needs, how this is going to be received by a search engine as well as customers in general, I think you'll find that those penalties are going to hurt a lot more than doing it right the first time and doing it in an ongoing fashion.

5. It’s distracting

Number five, it's distracting.

For accessibility, in a lot of cases the things that we're going to be implementing aren't going to be visible to your average user. They're going to be visible to assistive technology and the screen readers and the things that people with disabilities might be using to interact with the same content that someone else is. But in most cases, it's better to be correct and there and visible in terms of what a screen reader can see than be impossible to use altogether.

For SEO, we know that bad and unethical SEO is obvious. We've seen keyword stuffing. We've seen a bunch of links on a page that don't belong or don't really provide value to my customer. That is more distracting I think, than doing the work to make it right. 

Okay, so there's some similarities between accessibility and SEO.

In most cases, there is a very large impact if you do it right. It's not a short-term problem. It's ongoing. We shouldn't do it at the end. We should be doing it at the beginning. It really doesn't cost that much money if you do it right compared to if you do it wrong and get it wrong. Then number five is, in most cases, the best work goes unnoticed because it's organic, it's ethical, it's honest.

The impact of accessibility work

So what's the impact of doing accessibility work and also I guess doing SEO work that aligns with accessibility practices?

1. Makes the impossible, possible!

Number one, it helps people with disabilities first and foremost. It makes the impossible possible.

2. It helps businesses

Number two, it helps businesses. You as a business owner or as someone who's optimizing a website for a business or even maybe someone who is just trying to get into SEO and learn more, it's going to help your public perception.

If you make a website that's accessible, it's going to be obvious and people are going to thank you for that. They're going to say, "Oh, this company cares about all people and a diverse group of abilities." It's going to be a more durable experience for your customers. When you start to think about things like text alternatives and captioning and transcripts and you kind of build this practice up over time and you really build this habit of doing accessible work and inclusive work, you're going to find that your website is more durable.

It's less likely to be hit by these algorithm changes and things like that, where people have taken the short-term approach. I know you're going to love this. It's going to help your SEO. It's going to give you a bigger audience. You've now taken your spotlight focus on just your bots and you've expanded it to see the entire stage in front of you. So a bigger audience is going to be in front of you as well for a business, and that means more money and more people and honestly a lot less problems.

I think we all know this one, but lawsuits. If you do this, if you start implementing accessibility work, you start thinking about accessibility first and foremost as you're developing things, you're going to have a lot less lawsuits. People aren't going to complain. They aren't going to be upset by your lack of accessibility because you won't have any. It will be accessible and inclusive for all people.

3. It helps family and friends

Then number three, doing accessibility work, thinking about accessibility, thinking about whether my website, whether my marketing material is going to be able to be consumed and enjoyed by people is going to help those family and friends who are working with people with disabilities. It's going to make things possible for people with disabilities. It's going to make their lives more independent and therefore release a little bit of that burden on family and friends.

It's also going to allow you, as a practitioner, as an SEO or maybe another discipline, to have a chance to interact with people with more diverse perspectives, learn more, get a richer, more intimate experience with these different users and craft a better overall experience. 

So as you can see, accessibility and SEO are very similar, and it's important to recognize that we need to kind of shift our mindset from thinking about just optimize for bots, how can I get Google to see this, how can I get other search engines to see this, and think about people first and use the rich insights that we get from search engine optimization and the tools they give us for free to make a big impact on people and everyday life.

Now what?

Okay, so now what do I do with this information? — is the question you might have. Well, you can learn and test. So you can learn a little bit more about accessibility by checking out Global Accessibility Awareness Day. You can join a meetup. There are tons of people out there who are as passionate as I am about accessibility, who can show you the way and give you tips and tricks on how to think about this.

You can subscribe to a newsletter. I've included a bit.ly link here, bit.ly/wbf-week, for White Board Friday. You can sign up for a weekly newsletter from Accessibility Weekly and get more tips and tricks and really cool stories about how people are doing this and implementing this work on their own business. Then you can also test your actual pages. Once you kind of get this awareness and start understanding how accessibility fits into your workflow, you can use either WAVE or Axe, and I've included the bit.ly links here and down below, and you can look at those tools as just another thing you can do to make sure that the things you're producing are visible, they're accessible, they're able to be accessed by assistive technology.

Thanks for spending some time with me today and talking about SEO and accessibility. I really hope that this changes your perspective and gives you a broader idea of how you can impact people's daily lives with the SEO and the accessibility work you're doing for your own business. Thanks. Have a good one.

[xaydungtruonggia]

An Introduction to Accessibility and SEO [Series Part 1]

Welcome back to Whiteboard Friday! To start us up after our break, guest host Cooper Hollmaier has put together a three-part series that shows how SEO and accessibility go hand-in-hand. 

In part one, he introduces us to what accessibility in SEO means, goes through some common myths associated with the work to make websites optimized and accessible, and discusses some of the major impacts that work can have. 

Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high resolution version in a new tab!

Video Transcription

Hey, Moz fans. Welcome to the latest edition of Whiteboard Friday. I'm Cooper Hollmaier. Today we're going to be talking about SEO and accessibility: the idea of optimizing not just for some of our audience, but all of our audience.

I've been doing SEO since 2016, and I started out working on small businesses, local mom-and-pop shops. Then I found the allure of e-commerce SEO, and I've been doing that ever since. Today I work on an in-house team doing technical SEO for a large outdoor e-commerce retailer.

The relationship between SEO and accessibility

Now, if you're anything like me, you know that SEO is a little bit more than just code on the page and copy that's crafted to meet searchers' intent. Whether you're a seasoned SEO pro or you're looking for the latest tips as that mom-and-pop shop, or you're maybe starting out in an SEO role for the first time, you understand that we have to take our content that we're producing and we have to, in some way, make sure that it shows up in search engines.

So for me, as a technical SEO, maybe I'm thinking about things like my H1 tag or my paragraph tag or my title tag, for this example page here for Mozville Dog Rescue. 

Now most of the time I would say my job revolves around the idea of making sure that what I'm doing, the stuff I'm producing, what I'm designing for, can be seen, digested, consumed, and then essentially regurgitated by our friend the bot.

Optimize for people, not just bots

But have you stopped to think about maybe there's a larger audience out there? Maybe it's more than just my bots. If you're thinking that way, you're moving towards the right direction. You're moving towards a more inclusive approach. You're thinking about more than just a search engine but also the users, the people that are consuming that content, engaging with it, and maybe even engaging with your business.

If you think about only optimizing for bots, you're thinking about something kind of like someone sitting in a spotlight on a stage. You can see that person front and center, but you maybe can't see the surrounding cast because they're out there in the darkness. What we want to do is we want to think about a larger group of people.

We want to take that spotlight away and give everyone a chance to shine, everyone a chance to consume, engage with, and be delighted by the content that you're producing. So as you're thinking about search engine optimization, as you're thinking about building a new product, service, experience, think about not just can a search engine bot see that. We know that's important as an SEO.

How do people interact with your content?

But also think about can other people interact with, engage with, or be compelled by this content. If the answer is no, you have some issues. But I can give you a few tips on how to solve those issues. When you're making some content, whether it's marketing material both digitally and on a website or offline in some sort of print material, ask yourself these four things.

Content should be perceivable, operable, understandable, and robust

Is my content perceivable? Is it able to be seen or understood, or does it exist for my user? Is it operable? Can they do something with it? Is it understandable? Am I writing at the right reading level? Am I explaining this in a way that's going to be consumable by a large audience and maybe not just somebody with a PhD? Is that content robust? Is what I'm building available in multiple different formats, fonts, sizes, etc., so that, regardless of who my user is, they're going to be able to understand what I've given them? 

These are the four principles of web accessibility. These are the guidelines that the Web Consortium has given us, and you can apply them every time that you're building something new, or even retrofitting something old.

For example, let's say you have this playbill or you have maybe a menu for a restaurant. If I don't offer that menu or that playbill in both a digital and a print format, I end up in a situation where someone who needs Braille, needs a screen reader, need some sort of assistive technology in order to understand and consume that content, is going to be kind of left out in the dark.

They're not going to be able to do those things. In the example of a menu, I can't order from a restaurant if I don't know what they offer for me to order. So it's important that we make sure that our content and the things we're producing, the marketing materials that we're developing, are perceivable, operable, understandable, and robust. 

But okay, I'm only talking about maybe one example of disability.

Types of disability

When I say "disability," what does that mean to you? You might think of an elderly family member who needs a cane to walk. You might think of your friend who has a hard time reading large words or gets anxious when there's a math test coming up in class. If that's the case, you'd be talking about only two types of disability, maybe body structure, shape and size disabilities for someone who's walking with a cane, or cognitive disabilities or even learning disabilities that your friend might be experiencing.

There are a bunch of different other types of disabilities that even I didn't know about until I learned about it. Those might include blindness, low vision, deaf-blindness, color blindness. I'm the first to admit here that this whiteboard being in blue and red and green and black may not be the most accessible for someone with colorblindness. That's why it's important that we have closed captioning and a transcript below this video. These all make this content more accessible. 

Auditory, cognitive, anxiety, mood, seizure. You can see that this list is long and it's not exhaustive. There are a ton of different types of disability, and many of them aren't even perceivable by you or I. People may be suffering from disability and dealing with this in their life that you might not know.

So it's important to recognize that we need to start optimizing content not just for bots but for people as well. We need to make sure that people are able to actually consume and engage with our content. 

So how does this relate to your world as an SEO? Well, there's a lot of similarities between accessibility work and SEO work, and I want to kind of break that down into some myths and legends.

Myths and legends

1. It has a small impact

Number one, commonly people will say accessibility only impacts a small group of people. We're looking at this through a lens of able-bodied individuals who we think, okay, they can see my content if I write it on the page. But the reality is one in five people in the United States are dealing with a disability. That's a lot of people.

That's almost 60 million people. So it's not a small problem if you ask me. For SEO, if I do something for SEO, if I write a tag title tag, if I write a meta description, if I craft my H1 in a certain way, I may not only be helping a bot, but I'm also helping probably other channels of marketing as well.

I'm going to help that email campaign have a better title. I'm going to have that pay-per-click ad that's going to have a better page to go to. So small impact is really a myth. Accessibility and SEO both fall into that bucket where they impact a lot more people than I think we commonly realize.

2. It’s a short-term problem

Number two, it's a short-term problem. For accessibility, the ability to be able to order from a menu or read this playbill is more than a short-term problem.

It's going to happen every time I go to that business or this restaurant. So it's important that we keep our accessibility work ongoing and continue to improve and evolve our practices. We know that for SEO it's a zero-sum game, too. We know that the world is always changing. Search algorithms are changing. User intent and behavior is changing.

So it's important that we stay on top of our SEO work and make sure that our business understands that SEO work if you're working in an enterprise situation. So that way we're not falling behind our competitors, and we're not disadvantaging people that we may not realize we're disadvantaging.

3. Worry about it at the end

Number three, we should do it at the end. I hear this a lot when we're talking about SEO but for accessibility especially, too.

Hey, I have this website. Maybe we should do an audit. Then we can do some work to remediate this problem so that the website becomes accessible. It's always faster, cheaper, and easier to make a website accessible from the get-go than to do it retroactively, and do this kind of retrofitting. For SEO, we know that it's way easier and also a lot more effective if we build content for users with SEO insights to inform what they're looking for, what questions we need to answer.

If you trying to optimize something after the fact, a lot of times I think you'll find that the content that you're producing feels like it's SEO driven. It's not going to feel like it's for a customer because it wasn't. You're coming in after the fact.

4. It costs too much

Number four, it cost too much money. You know what cost a lot of money? Lawsuits. If you don't work on accessibility first and foremost, in the beginning of the process and in an ongoing fashion, you'll find I think that accessibility lawsuits can cost your business a lot more, and they can be detrimental.

But so can SEO and penalties. If you take a shortcut, if you don't take the time to think about what your user needs, how this is going to be received by a search engine as well as customers in general, I think you'll find that those penalties are going to hurt a lot more than doing it right the first time and doing it in an ongoing fashion.

5. It’s distracting

Number five, it's distracting.

For accessibility, in a lot of cases the things that we're going to be implementing aren't going to be visible to your average user. They're going to be visible to assistive technology and the screen readers and the things that people with disabilities might be using to interact with the same content that someone else is. But in most cases, it's better to be correct and there and visible in terms of what a screen reader can see than be impossible to use altogether.

For SEO, we know that bad and unethical SEO is obvious. We've seen keyword stuffing. We've seen a bunch of links on a page that don't belong or don't really provide value to my customer. That is more distracting I think, than doing the work to make it right. 

Okay, so there's some similarities between accessibility and SEO.

In most cases, there is a very large impact if you do it right. It's not a short-term problem. It's ongoing. We shouldn't do it at the end. We should be doing it at the beginning. It really doesn't cost that much money if you do it right compared to if you do it wrong and get it wrong. Then number five is, in most cases, the best work goes unnoticed because it's organic, it's ethical, it's honest.

The impact of accessibility work

So what's the impact of doing accessibility work and also I guess doing SEO work that aligns with accessibility practices?

1. Makes the impossible, possible!

Number one, it helps people with disabilities first and foremost. It makes the impossible possible.

2. It helps businesses

Number two, it helps businesses. You as a business owner or as someone who's optimizing a website for a business or even maybe someone who is just trying to get into SEO and learn more, it's going to help your public perception.

If you make a website that's accessible, it's going to be obvious and people are going to thank you for that. They're going to say, "Oh, this company cares about all people and a diverse group of abilities." It's going to be a more durable experience for your customers. When you start to think about things like text alternatives and captioning and transcripts and you kind of build this practice up over time and you really build this habit of doing accessible work and inclusive work, you're going to find that your website is more durable.

It's less likely to be hit by these algorithm changes and things like that, where people have taken the short-term approach. I know you're going to love this. It's going to help your SEO. It's going to give you a bigger audience. You've now taken your spotlight focus on just your bots and you've expanded it to see the entire stage in front of you. So a bigger audience is going to be in front of you as well for a business, and that means more money and more people and honestly a lot less problems.

I think we all know this one, but lawsuits. If you do this, if you start implementing accessibility work, you start thinking about accessibility first and foremost as you're developing things, you're going to have a lot less lawsuits. People aren't going to complain. They aren't going to be upset by your lack of accessibility because you won't have any. It will be accessible and inclusive for all people.

3. It helps family and friends

Then number three, doing accessibility work, thinking about accessibility, thinking about whether my website, whether my marketing material is going to be able to be consumed and enjoyed by people is going to help those family and friends who are working with people with disabilities. It's going to make things possible for people with disabilities. It's going to make their lives more independent and therefore release a little bit of that burden on family and friends.

It's also going to allow you, as a practitioner, as an SEO or maybe another discipline, to have a chance to interact with people with more diverse perspectives, learn more, get a richer, more intimate experience with these different users and craft a better overall experience. 

So as you can see, accessibility and SEO are very similar, and it's important to recognize that we need to kind of shift our mindset from thinking about just optimize for bots, how can I get Google to see this, how can I get other search engines to see this, and think about people first and use the rich insights that we get from search engine optimization and the tools they give us for free to make a big impact on people and everyday life.

Now what?

Okay, so now what do I do with this information? — is the question you might have. Well, you can learn and test. So you can learn a little bit more about accessibility by checking out Global Accessibility Awareness Day. You can join a meetup. There are tons of people out there who are as passionate as I am about accessibility, who can show you the way and give you tips and tricks on how to think about this.

You can subscribe to a newsletter. I've included a bit.ly link here, bit.ly/wbf-week, for White Board Friday. You can sign up for a weekly newsletter from Accessibility Weekly and get more tips and tricks and really cool stories about how people are doing this and implementing this work on their own business. Then you can also test your actual pages. Once you kind of get this awareness and start understanding how accessibility fits into your workflow, you can use either WAVE or Axe, and I've included the bit.ly links here and down below, and you can look at those tools as just another thing you can do to make sure that the things you're producing are visible, they're accessible, they're able to be accessed by assistive technology.

Thanks for spending some time with me today and talking about SEO and accessibility. I really hope that this changes your perspective and gives you a broader idea of how you can impact people's daily lives with the SEO and the accessibility work you're doing for your own business. Thanks. Have a good one.

[camerasieunhovn]

An Introduction to Accessibility and SEO [Series Part 1]

Welcome back to Whiteboard Friday! To start us up after our break, guest host Cooper Hollmaier has put together a three-part series that shows how SEO and accessibility go hand-in-hand. 

In part one, he introduces us to what accessibility in SEO means, goes through some common myths associated with the work to make websites optimized and accessible, and discusses some of the major impacts that work can have. 

Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high resolution version in a new tab!

Video Transcription

Hey, Moz fans. Welcome to the latest edition of Whiteboard Friday. I'm Cooper Hollmaier. Today we're going to be talking about SEO and accessibility: the idea of optimizing not just for some of our audience, but all of our audience.

I've been doing SEO since 2016, and I started out working on small businesses, local mom-and-pop shops. Then I found the allure of e-commerce SEO, and I've been doing that ever since. Today I work on an in-house team doing technical SEO for a large outdoor e-commerce retailer.

The relationship between SEO and accessibility

Now, if you're anything like me, you know that SEO is a little bit more than just code on the page and copy that's crafted to meet searchers' intent. Whether you're a seasoned SEO pro or you're looking for the latest tips as that mom-and-pop shop, or you're maybe starting out in an SEO role for the first time, you understand that we have to take our content that we're producing and we have to, in some way, make sure that it shows up in search engines.

So for me, as a technical SEO, maybe I'm thinking about things like my H1 tag or my paragraph tag or my title tag, for this example page here for Mozville Dog Rescue. 

Now most of the time I would say my job revolves around the idea of making sure that what I'm doing, the stuff I'm producing, what I'm designing for, can be seen, digested, consumed, and then essentially regurgitated by our friend the bot.

Optimize for people, not just bots

But have you stopped to think about maybe there's a larger audience out there? Maybe it's more than just my bots. If you're thinking that way, you're moving towards the right direction. You're moving towards a more inclusive approach. You're thinking about more than just a search engine but also the users, the people that are consuming that content, engaging with it, and maybe even engaging with your business.

If you think about only optimizing for bots, you're thinking about something kind of like someone sitting in a spotlight on a stage. You can see that person front and center, but you maybe can't see the surrounding cast because they're out there in the darkness. What we want to do is we want to think about a larger group of people.

We want to take that spotlight away and give everyone a chance to shine, everyone a chance to consume, engage with, and be delighted by the content that you're producing. So as you're thinking about search engine optimization, as you're thinking about building a new product, service, experience, think about not just can a search engine bot see that. We know that's important as an SEO.

How do people interact with your content?

But also think about can other people interact with, engage with, or be compelled by this content. If the answer is no, you have some issues. But I can give you a few tips on how to solve those issues. When you're making some content, whether it's marketing material both digitally and on a website or offline in some sort of print material, ask yourself these four things.

Content should be perceivable, operable, understandable, and robust

Is my content perceivable? Is it able to be seen or understood, or does it exist for my user? Is it operable? Can they do something with it? Is it understandable? Am I writing at the right reading level? Am I explaining this in a way that's going to be consumable by a large audience and maybe not just somebody with a PhD? Is that content robust? Is what I'm building available in multiple different formats, fonts, sizes, etc., so that, regardless of who my user is, they're going to be able to understand what I've given them? 

These are the four principles of web accessibility. These are the guidelines that the Web Consortium has given us, and you can apply them every time that you're building something new, or even retrofitting something old.

For example, let's say you have this playbill or you have maybe a menu for a restaurant. If I don't offer that menu or that playbill in both a digital and a print format, I end up in a situation where someone who needs Braille, needs a screen reader, need some sort of assistive technology in order to understand and consume that content, is going to be kind of left out in the dark.

They're not going to be able to do those things. In the example of a menu, I can't order from a restaurant if I don't know what they offer for me to order. So it's important that we make sure that our content and the things we're producing, the marketing materials that we're developing, are perceivable, operable, understandable, and robust. 

But okay, I'm only talking about maybe one example of disability.

Types of disability

When I say "disability," what does that mean to you? You might think of an elderly family member who needs a cane to walk. You might think of your friend who has a hard time reading large words or gets anxious when there's a math test coming up in class. If that's the case, you'd be talking about only two types of disability, maybe body structure, shape and size disabilities for someone who's walking with a cane, or cognitive disabilities or even learning disabilities that your friend might be experiencing.

There are a bunch of different other types of disabilities that even I didn't know about until I learned about it. Those might include blindness, low vision, deaf-blindness, color blindness. I'm the first to admit here that this whiteboard being in blue and red and green and black may not be the most accessible for someone with colorblindness. That's why it's important that we have closed captioning and a transcript below this video. These all make this content more accessible. 

Auditory, cognitive, anxiety, mood, seizure. You can see that this list is long and it's not exhaustive. There are a ton of different types of disability, and many of them aren't even perceivable by you or I. People may be suffering from disability and dealing with this in their life that you might not know.

So it's important to recognize that we need to start optimizing content not just for bots but for people as well. We need to make sure that people are able to actually consume and engage with our content. 

So how does this relate to your world as an SEO? Well, there's a lot of similarities between accessibility work and SEO work, and I want to kind of break that down into some myths and legends.

Myths and legends

1. It has a small impact

Number one, commonly people will say accessibility only impacts a small group of people. We're looking at this through a lens of able-bodied individuals who we think, okay, they can see my content if I write it on the page. But the reality is one in five people in the United States are dealing with a disability. That's a lot of people.

That's almost 60 million people. So it's not a small problem if you ask me. For SEO, if I do something for SEO, if I write a tag title tag, if I write a meta description, if I craft my H1 in a certain way, I may not only be helping a bot, but I'm also helping probably other channels of marketing as well.

I'm going to help that email campaign have a better title. I'm going to have that pay-per-click ad that's going to have a better page to go to. So small impact is really a myth. Accessibility and SEO both fall into that bucket where they impact a lot more people than I think we commonly realize.

2. It’s a short-term problem

Number two, it's a short-term problem. For accessibility, the ability to be able to order from a menu or read this playbill is more than a short-term problem.

It's going to happen every time I go to that business or this restaurant. So it's important that we keep our accessibility work ongoing and continue to improve and evolve our practices. We know that for SEO it's a zero-sum game, too. We know that the world is always changing. Search algorithms are changing. User intent and behavior is changing.

So it's important that we stay on top of our SEO work and make sure that our business understands that SEO work if you're working in an enterprise situation. So that way we're not falling behind our competitors, and we're not disadvantaging people that we may not realize we're disadvantaging.

3. Worry about it at the end

Number three, we should do it at the end. I hear this a lot when we're talking about SEO but for accessibility especially, too.

Hey, I have this website. Maybe we should do an audit. Then we can do some work to remediate this problem so that the website becomes accessible. It's always faster, cheaper, and easier to make a website accessible from the get-go than to do it retroactively, and do this kind of retrofitting. For SEO, we know that it's way easier and also a lot more effective if we build content for users with SEO insights to inform what they're looking for, what questions we need to answer.

If you trying to optimize something after the fact, a lot of times I think you'll find that the content that you're producing feels like it's SEO driven. It's not going to feel like it's for a customer because it wasn't. You're coming in after the fact.

4. It costs too much

Number four, it cost too much money. You know what cost a lot of money? Lawsuits. If you don't work on accessibility first and foremost, in the beginning of the process and in an ongoing fashion, you'll find I think that accessibility lawsuits can cost your business a lot more, and they can be detrimental.

But so can SEO and penalties. If you take a shortcut, if you don't take the time to think about what your user needs, how this is going to be received by a search engine as well as customers in general, I think you'll find that those penalties are going to hurt a lot more than doing it right the first time and doing it in an ongoing fashion.

5. It’s distracting

Number five, it's distracting.

For accessibility, in a lot of cases the things that we're going to be implementing aren't going to be visible to your average user. They're going to be visible to assistive technology and the screen readers and the things that people with disabilities might be using to interact with the same content that someone else is. But in most cases, it's better to be correct and there and visible in terms of what a screen reader can see than be impossible to use altogether.

For SEO, we know that bad and unethical SEO is obvious. We've seen keyword stuffing. We've seen a bunch of links on a page that don't belong or don't really provide value to my customer. That is more distracting I think, than doing the work to make it right. 

Okay, so there's some similarities between accessibility and SEO.

In most cases, there is a very large impact if you do it right. It's not a short-term problem. It's ongoing. We shouldn't do it at the end. We should be doing it at the beginning. It really doesn't cost that much money if you do it right compared to if you do it wrong and get it wrong. Then number five is, in most cases, the best work goes unnoticed because it's organic, it's ethical, it's honest.

The impact of accessibility work

So what's the impact of doing accessibility work and also I guess doing SEO work that aligns with accessibility practices?

1. Makes the impossible, possible!

Number one, it helps people with disabilities first and foremost. It makes the impossible possible.

2. It helps businesses

Number two, it helps businesses. You as a business owner or as someone who's optimizing a website for a business or even maybe someone who is just trying to get into SEO and learn more, it's going to help your public perception.

If you make a website that's accessible, it's going to be obvious and people are going to thank you for that. They're going to say, "Oh, this company cares about all people and a diverse group of abilities." It's going to be a more durable experience for your customers. When you start to think about things like text alternatives and captioning and transcripts and you kind of build this practice up over time and you really build this habit of doing accessible work and inclusive work, you're going to find that your website is more durable.

It's less likely to be hit by these algorithm changes and things like that, where people have taken the short-term approach. I know you're going to love this. It's going to help your SEO. It's going to give you a bigger audience. You've now taken your spotlight focus on just your bots and you've expanded it to see the entire stage in front of you. So a bigger audience is going to be in front of you as well for a business, and that means more money and more people and honestly a lot less problems.

I think we all know this one, but lawsuits. If you do this, if you start implementing accessibility work, you start thinking about accessibility first and foremost as you're developing things, you're going to have a lot less lawsuits. People aren't going to complain. They aren't going to be upset by your lack of accessibility because you won't have any. It will be accessible and inclusive for all people.

3. It helps family and friends

Then number three, doing accessibility work, thinking about accessibility, thinking about whether my website, whether my marketing material is going to be able to be consumed and enjoyed by people is going to help those family and friends who are working with people with disabilities. It's going to make things possible for people with disabilities. It's going to make their lives more independent and therefore release a little bit of that burden on family and friends.

It's also going to allow you, as a practitioner, as an SEO or maybe another discipline, to have a chance to interact with people with more diverse perspectives, learn more, get a richer, more intimate experience with these different users and craft a better overall experience. 

So as you can see, accessibility and SEO are very similar, and it's important to recognize that we need to kind of shift our mindset from thinking about just optimize for bots, how can I get Google to see this, how can I get other search engines to see this, and think about people first and use the rich insights that we get from search engine optimization and the tools they give us for free to make a big impact on people and everyday life.

Now what?

Okay, so now what do I do with this information? — is the question you might have. Well, you can learn and test. So you can learn a little bit more about accessibility by checking out Global Accessibility Awareness Day. You can join a meetup. There are tons of people out there who are as passionate as I am about accessibility, who can show you the way and give you tips and tricks on how to think about this.

You can subscribe to a newsletter. I've included a bit.ly link here, bit.ly/wbf-week, for White Board Friday. You can sign up for a weekly newsletter from Accessibility Weekly and get more tips and tricks and really cool stories about how people are doing this and implementing this work on their own business. Then you can also test your actual pages. Once you kind of get this awareness and start understanding how accessibility fits into your workflow, you can use either WAVE or Axe, and I've included the bit.ly links here and down below, and you can look at those tools as just another thing you can do to make sure that the things you're producing are visible, they're accessible, they're able to be accessed by assistive technology.

Thanks for spending some time with me today and talking about SEO and accessibility. I really hope that this changes your perspective and gives you a broader idea of how you can impact people's daily lives with the SEO and the accessibility work you're doing for your own business. Thanks. Have a good one.

[ductrungnguyen87]

An Introduction to Accessibility and SEO [Series Part 1]

Welcome back to Whiteboard Friday! To start us up after our break, guest host Cooper Hollmaier has put together a three-part series that shows how SEO and accessibility go hand-in-hand. 

In part one, he introduces us to what accessibility in SEO means, goes through some common myths associated with the work to make websites optimized and accessible, and discusses some of the major impacts that work can have. 

Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high resolution version in a new tab!

Video Transcription

Hey, Moz fans. Welcome to the latest edition of Whiteboard Friday. I'm Cooper Hollmaier. Today we're going to be talking about SEO and accessibility: the idea of optimizing not just for some of our audience, but all of our audience.

I've been doing SEO since 2016, and I started out working on small businesses, local mom-and-pop shops. Then I found the allure of e-commerce SEO, and I've been doing that ever since. Today I work on an in-house team doing technical SEO for a large outdoor e-commerce retailer.

The relationship between SEO and accessibility

Now, if you're anything like me, you know that SEO is a little bit more than just code on the page and copy that's crafted to meet searchers' intent. Whether you're a seasoned SEO pro or you're looking for the latest tips as that mom-and-pop shop, or you're maybe starting out in an SEO role for the first time, you understand that we have to take our content that we're producing and we have to, in some way, make sure that it shows up in search engines.

So for me, as a technical SEO, maybe I'm thinking about things like my H1 tag or my paragraph tag or my title tag, for this example page here for Mozville Dog Rescue. 

Now most of the time I would say my job revolves around the idea of making sure that what I'm doing, the stuff I'm producing, what I'm designing for, can be seen, digested, consumed, and then essentially regurgitated by our friend the bot.

Optimize for people, not just bots

But have you stopped to think about maybe there's a larger audience out there? Maybe it's more than just my bots. If you're thinking that way, you're moving towards the right direction. You're moving towards a more inclusive approach. You're thinking about more than just a search engine but also the users, the people that are consuming that content, engaging with it, and maybe even engaging with your business.

If you think about only optimizing for bots, you're thinking about something kind of like someone sitting in a spotlight on a stage. You can see that person front and center, but you maybe can't see the surrounding cast because they're out there in the darkness. What we want to do is we want to think about a larger group of people.

We want to take that spotlight away and give everyone a chance to shine, everyone a chance to consume, engage with, and be delighted by the content that you're producing. So as you're thinking about search engine optimization, as you're thinking about building a new product, service, experience, think about not just can a search engine bot see that. We know that's important as an SEO.

How do people interact with your content?

But also think about can other people interact with, engage with, or be compelled by this content. If the answer is no, you have some issues. But I can give you a few tips on how to solve those issues. When you're making some content, whether it's marketing material both digitally and on a website or offline in some sort of print material, ask yourself these four things.

Content should be perceivable, operable, understandable, and robust

Is my content perceivable? Is it able to be seen or understood, or does it exist for my user? Is it operable? Can they do something with it? Is it understandable? Am I writing at the right reading level? Am I explaining this in a way that's going to be consumable by a large audience and maybe not just somebody with a PhD? Is that content robust? Is what I'm building available in multiple different formats, fonts, sizes, etc., so that, regardless of who my user is, they're going to be able to understand what I've given them? 

These are the four principles of web accessibility. These are the guidelines that the Web Consortium has given us, and you can apply them every time that you're building something new, or even retrofitting something old.

For example, let's say you have this playbill or you have maybe a menu for a restaurant. If I don't offer that menu or that playbill in both a digital and a print format, I end up in a situation where someone who needs Braille, needs a screen reader, need some sort of assistive technology in order to understand and consume that content, is going to be kind of left out in the dark.

They're not going to be able to do those things. In the example of a menu, I can't order from a restaurant if I don't know what they offer for me to order. So it's important that we make sure that our content and the things we're producing, the marketing materials that we're developing, are perceivable, operable, understandable, and robust. 

But okay, I'm only talking about maybe one example of disability.

Types of disability

When I say "disability," what does that mean to you? You might think of an elderly family member who needs a cane to walk. You might think of your friend who has a hard time reading large words or gets anxious when there's a math test coming up in class. If that's the case, you'd be talking about only two types of disability, maybe body structure, shape and size disabilities for someone who's walking with a cane, or cognitive disabilities or even learning disabilities that your friend might be experiencing.

There are a bunch of different other types of disabilities that even I didn't know about until I learned about it. Those might include blindness, low vision, deaf-blindness, color blindness. I'm the first to admit here that this whiteboard being in blue and red and green and black may not be the most accessible for someone with colorblindness. That's why it's important that we have closed captioning and a transcript below this video. These all make this content more accessible. 

Auditory, cognitive, anxiety, mood, seizure. You can see that this list is long and it's not exhaustive. There are a ton of different types of disability, and many of them aren't even perceivable by you or I. People may be suffering from disability and dealing with this in their life that you might not know.

So it's important to recognize that we need to start optimizing content not just for bots but for people as well. We need to make sure that people are able to actually consume and engage with our content. 

So how does this relate to your world as an SEO? Well, there's a lot of similarities between accessibility work and SEO work, and I want to kind of break that down into some myths and legends.

Myths and legends

1. It has a small impact

Number one, commonly people will say accessibility only impacts a small group of people. We're looking at this through a lens of able-bodied individuals who we think, okay, they can see my content if I write it on the page. But the reality is one in five people in the United States are dealing with a disability. That's a lot of people.

That's almost 60 million people. So it's not a small problem if you ask me. For SEO, if I do something for SEO, if I write a tag title tag, if I write a meta description, if I craft my H1 in a certain way, I may not only be helping a bot, but I'm also helping probably other channels of marketing as well.

I'm going to help that email campaign have a better title. I'm going to have that pay-per-click ad that's going to have a better page to go to. So small impact is really a myth. Accessibility and SEO both fall into that bucket where they impact a lot more people than I think we commonly realize.

2. It’s a short-term problem

Number two, it's a short-term problem. For accessibility, the ability to be able to order from a menu or read this playbill is more than a short-term problem.

It's going to happen every time I go to that business or this restaurant. So it's important that we keep our accessibility work ongoing and continue to improve and evolve our practices. We know that for SEO it's a zero-sum game, too. We know that the world is always changing. Search algorithms are changing. User intent and behavior is changing.

So it's important that we stay on top of our SEO work and make sure that our business understands that SEO work if you're working in an enterprise situation. So that way we're not falling behind our competitors, and we're not disadvantaging people that we may not realize we're disadvantaging.

3. Worry about it at the end

Number three, we should do it at the end. I hear this a lot when we're talking about SEO but for accessibility especially, too.

Hey, I have this website. Maybe we should do an audit. Then we can do some work to remediate this problem so that the website becomes accessible. It's always faster, cheaper, and easier to make a website accessible from the get-go than to do it retroactively, and do this kind of retrofitting. For SEO, we know that it's way easier and also a lot more effective if we build content for users with SEO insights to inform what they're looking for, what questions we need to answer.

If you trying to optimize something after the fact, a lot of times I think you'll find that the content that you're producing feels like it's SEO driven. It's not going to feel like it's for a customer because it wasn't. You're coming in after the fact.

4. It costs too much

Number four, it cost too much money. You know what cost a lot of money? Lawsuits. If you don't work on accessibility first and foremost, in the beginning of the process and in an ongoing fashion, you'll find I think that accessibility lawsuits can cost your business a lot more, and they can be detrimental.

But so can SEO and penalties. If you take a shortcut, if you don't take the time to think about what your user needs, how this is going to be received by a search engine as well as customers in general, I think you'll find that those penalties are going to hurt a lot more than doing it right the first time and doing it in an ongoing fashion.

5. It’s distracting

Number five, it's distracting.

For accessibility, in a lot of cases the things that we're going to be implementing aren't going to be visible to your average user. They're going to be visible to assistive technology and the screen readers and the things that people with disabilities might be using to interact with the same content that someone else is. But in most cases, it's better to be correct and there and visible in terms of what a screen reader can see than be impossible to use altogether.

For SEO, we know that bad and unethical SEO is obvious. We've seen keyword stuffing. We've seen a bunch of links on a page that don't belong or don't really provide value to my customer. That is more distracting I think, than doing the work to make it right. 

Okay, so there's some similarities between accessibility and SEO.

In most cases, there is a very large impact if you do it right. It's not a short-term problem. It's ongoing. We shouldn't do it at the end. We should be doing it at the beginning. It really doesn't cost that much money if you do it right compared to if you do it wrong and get it wrong. Then number five is, in most cases, the best work goes unnoticed because it's organic, it's ethical, it's honest.

The impact of accessibility work

So what's the impact of doing accessibility work and also I guess doing SEO work that aligns with accessibility practices?

1. Makes the impossible, possible!

Number one, it helps people with disabilities first and foremost. It makes the impossible possible.

2. It helps businesses

Number two, it helps businesses. You as a business owner or as someone who's optimizing a website for a business or even maybe someone who is just trying to get into SEO and learn more, it's going to help your public perception.

If you make a website that's accessible, it's going to be obvious and people are going to thank you for that. They're going to say, "Oh, this company cares about all people and a diverse group of abilities." It's going to be a more durable experience for your customers. When you start to think about things like text alternatives and captioning and transcripts and you kind of build this practice up over time and you really build this habit of doing accessible work and inclusive work, you're going to find that your website is more durable.

It's less likely to be hit by these algorithm changes and things like that, where people have taken the short-term approach. I know you're going to love this. It's going to help your SEO. It's going to give you a bigger audience. You've now taken your spotlight focus on just your bots and you've expanded it to see the entire stage in front of you. So a bigger audience is going to be in front of you as well for a business, and that means more money and more people and honestly a lot less problems.

I think we all know this one, but lawsuits. If you do this, if you start implementing accessibility work, you start thinking about accessibility first and foremost as you're developing things, you're going to have a lot less lawsuits. People aren't going to complain. They aren't going to be upset by your lack of accessibility because you won't have any. It will be accessible and inclusive for all people.

3. It helps family and friends

Then number three, doing accessibility work, thinking about accessibility, thinking about whether my website, whether my marketing material is going to be able to be consumed and enjoyed by people is going to help those family and friends who are working with people with disabilities. It's going to make things possible for people with disabilities. It's going to make their lives more independent and therefore release a little bit of that burden on family and friends.

It's also going to allow you, as a practitioner, as an SEO or maybe another discipline, to have a chance to interact with people with more diverse perspectives, learn more, get a richer, more intimate experience with these different users and craft a better overall experience. 

So as you can see, accessibility and SEO are very similar, and it's important to recognize that we need to kind of shift our mindset from thinking about just optimize for bots, how can I get Google to see this, how can I get other search engines to see this, and think about people first and use the rich insights that we get from search engine optimization and the tools they give us for free to make a big impact on people and everyday life.

Now what?

Okay, so now what do I do with this information? — is the question you might have. Well, you can learn and test. So you can learn a little bit more about accessibility by checking out Global Accessibility Awareness Day. You can join a meetup. There are tons of people out there who are as passionate as I am about accessibility, who can show you the way and give you tips and tricks on how to think about this.

You can subscribe to a newsletter. I've included a bit.ly link here, bit.ly/wbf-week, for White Board Friday. You can sign up for a weekly newsletter from Accessibility Weekly and get more tips and tricks and really cool stories about how people are doing this and implementing this work on their own business. Then you can also test your actual pages. Once you kind of get this awareness and start understanding how accessibility fits into your workflow, you can use either WAVE or Axe, and I've included the bit.ly links here and down below, and you can look at those tools as just another thing you can do to make sure that the things you're producing are visible, they're accessible, they're able to be accessed by assistive technology.

Thanks for spending some time with me today and talking about SEO and accessibility. I really hope that this changes your perspective and gives you a broader idea of how you can impact people's daily lives with the SEO and the accessibility work you're doing for your own business. Thanks. Have a good one.

[gamebazu]

An Introduction to Accessibility and SEO [Series Part 1]

Welcome back to Whiteboard Friday! To start us up after our break, guest host Cooper Hollmaier has put together a three-part series that shows how SEO and accessibility go hand-in-hand. 

In part one, he introduces us to what accessibility in SEO means, goes through some common myths associated with the work to make websites optimized and accessible, and discusses some of the major impacts that work can have. 

Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high resolution version in a new tab!

Video Transcription

Hey, Moz fans. Welcome to the latest edition of Whiteboard Friday. I'm Cooper Hollmaier. Today we're going to be talking about SEO and accessibility: the idea of optimizing not just for some of our audience, but all of our audience.

I've been doing SEO since 2016, and I started out working on small businesses, local mom-and-pop shops. Then I found the allure of e-commerce SEO, and I've been doing that ever since. Today I work on an in-house team doing technical SEO for a large outdoor e-commerce retailer.

The relationship between SEO and accessibility

Now, if you're anything like me, you know that SEO is a little bit more than just code on the page and copy that's crafted to meet searchers' intent. Whether you're a seasoned SEO pro or you're looking for the latest tips as that mom-and-pop shop, or you're maybe starting out in an SEO role for the first time, you understand that we have to take our content that we're producing and we have to, in some way, make sure that it shows up in search engines.

So for me, as a technical SEO, maybe I'm thinking about things like my H1 tag or my paragraph tag or my title tag, for this example page here for Mozville Dog Rescue. 

Now most of the time I would say my job revolves around the idea of making sure that what I'm doing, the stuff I'm producing, what I'm designing for, can be seen, digested, consumed, and then essentially regurgitated by our friend the bot.

Optimize for people, not just bots

But have you stopped to think about maybe there's a larger audience out there? Maybe it's more than just my bots. If you're thinking that way, you're moving towards the right direction. You're moving towards a more inclusive approach. You're thinking about more than just a search engine but also the users, the people that are consuming that content, engaging with it, and maybe even engaging with your business.

If you think about only optimizing for bots, you're thinking about something kind of like someone sitting in a spotlight on a stage. You can see that person front and center, but you maybe can't see the surrounding cast because they're out there in the darkness. What we want to do is we want to think about a larger group of people.

We want to take that spotlight away and give everyone a chance to shine, everyone a chance to consume, engage with, and be delighted by the content that you're producing. So as you're thinking about search engine optimization, as you're thinking about building a new product, service, experience, think about not just can a search engine bot see that. We know that's important as an SEO.

How do people interact with your content?

But also think about can other people interact with, engage with, or be compelled by this content. If the answer is no, you have some issues. But I can give you a few tips on how to solve those issues. When you're making some content, whether it's marketing material both digitally and on a website or offline in some sort of print material, ask yourself these four things.

Content should be perceivable, operable, understandable, and robust

Is my content perceivable? Is it able to be seen or understood, or does it exist for my user? Is it operable? Can they do something with it? Is it understandable? Am I writing at the right reading level? Am I explaining this in a way that's going to be consumable by a large audience and maybe not just somebody with a PhD? Is that content robust? Is what I'm building available in multiple different formats, fonts, sizes, etc., so that, regardless of who my user is, they're going to be able to understand what I've given them? 

These are the four principles of web accessibility. These are the guidelines that the Web Consortium has given us, and you can apply them every time that you're building something new, or even retrofitting something old.

For example, let's say you have this playbill or you have maybe a menu for a restaurant. If I don't offer that menu or that playbill in both a digital and a print format, I end up in a situation where someone who needs Braille, needs a screen reader, need some sort of assistive technology in order to understand and consume that content, is going to be kind of left out in the dark.

They're not going to be able to do those things. In the example of a menu, I can't order from a restaurant if I don't know what they offer for me to order. So it's important that we make sure that our content and the things we're producing, the marketing materials that we're developing, are perceivable, operable, understandable, and robust. 

But okay, I'm only talking about maybe one example of disability.

Types of disability

When I say "disability," what does that mean to you? You might think of an elderly family member who needs a cane to walk. You might think of your friend who has a hard time reading large words or gets anxious when there's a math test coming up in class. If that's the case, you'd be talking about only two types of disability, maybe body structure, shape and size disabilities for someone who's walking with a cane, or cognitive disabilities or even learning disabilities that your friend might be experiencing.

There are a bunch of different other types of disabilities that even I didn't know about until I learned about it. Those might include blindness, low vision, deaf-blindness, color blindness. I'm the first to admit here that this whiteboard being in blue and red and green and black may not be the most accessible for someone with colorblindness. That's why it's important that we have closed captioning and a transcript below this video. These all make this content more accessible. 

Auditory, cognitive, anxiety, mood, seizure. You can see that this list is long and it's not exhaustive. There are a ton of different types of disability, and many of them aren't even perceivable by you or I. People may be suffering from disability and dealing with this in their life that you might not know.

So it's important to recognize that we need to start optimizing content not just for bots but for people as well. We need to make sure that people are able to actually consume and engage with our content. 

So how does this relate to your world as an SEO? Well, there's a lot of similarities between accessibility work and SEO work, and I want to kind of break that down into some myths and legends.

Myths and legends

1. It has a small impact

Number one, commonly people will say accessibility only impacts a small group of people. We're looking at this through a lens of able-bodied individuals who we think, okay, they can see my content if I write it on the page. But the reality is one in five people in the United States are dealing with a disability. That's a lot of people.

That's almost 60 million people. So it's not a small problem if you ask me. For SEO, if I do something for SEO, if I write a tag title tag, if I write a meta description, if I craft my H1 in a certain way, I may not only be helping a bot, but I'm also helping probably other channels of marketing as well.

I'm going to help that email campaign have a better title. I'm going to have that pay-per-click ad that's going to have a better page to go to. So small impact is really a myth. Accessibility and SEO both fall into that bucket where they impact a lot more people than I think we commonly realize.

2. It’s a short-term problem

Number two, it's a short-term problem. For accessibility, the ability to be able to order from a menu or read this playbill is more than a short-term problem.

It's going to happen every time I go to that business or this restaurant. So it's important that we keep our accessibility work ongoing and continue to improve and evolve our practices. We know that for SEO it's a zero-sum game, too. We know that the world is always changing. Search algorithms are changing. User intent and behavior is changing.

So it's important that we stay on top of our SEO work and make sure that our business understands that SEO work if you're working in an enterprise situation. So that way we're not falling behind our competitors, and we're not disadvantaging people that we may not realize we're disadvantaging.

3. Worry about it at the end

Number three, we should do it at the end. I hear this a lot when we're talking about SEO but for accessibility especially, too.

Hey, I have this website. Maybe we should do an audit. Then we can do some work to remediate this problem so that the website becomes accessible. It's always faster, cheaper, and easier to make a website accessible from the get-go than to do it retroactively, and do this kind of retrofitting. For SEO, we know that it's way easier and also a lot more effective if we build content for users with SEO insights to inform what they're looking for, what questions we need to answer.

If you trying to optimize something after the fact, a lot of times I think you'll find that the content that you're producing feels like it's SEO driven. It's not going to feel like it's for a customer because it wasn't. You're coming in after the fact.

4. It costs too much

Number four, it cost too much money. You know what cost a lot of money? Lawsuits. If you don't work on accessibility first and foremost, in the beginning of the process and in an ongoing fashion, you'll find I think that accessibility lawsuits can cost your business a lot more, and they can be detrimental.

But so can SEO and penalties. If you take a shortcut, if you don't take the time to think about what your user needs, how this is going to be received by a search engine as well as customers in general, I think you'll find that those penalties are going to hurt a lot more than doing it right the first time and doing it in an ongoing fashion.

5. It’s distracting

Number five, it's distracting.

For accessibility, in a lot of cases the things that we're going to be implementing aren't going to be visible to your average user. They're going to be visible to assistive technology and the screen readers and the things that people with disabilities might be using to interact with the same content that someone else is. But in most cases, it's better to be correct and there and visible in terms of what a screen reader can see than be impossible to use altogether.

For SEO, we know that bad and unethical SEO is obvious. We've seen keyword stuffing. We've seen a bunch of links on a page that don't belong or don't really provide value to my customer. That is more distracting I think, than doing the work to make it right. 

Okay, so there's some similarities between accessibility and SEO.

In most cases, there is a very large impact if you do it right. It's not a short-term problem. It's ongoing. We shouldn't do it at the end. We should be doing it at the beginning. It really doesn't cost that much money if you do it right compared to if you do it wrong and get it wrong. Then number five is, in most cases, the best work goes unnoticed because it's organic, it's ethical, it's honest.

The impact of accessibility work

So what's the impact of doing accessibility work and also I guess doing SEO work that aligns with accessibility practices?

1. Makes the impossible, possible!

Number one, it helps people with disabilities first and foremost. It makes the impossible possible.

2. It helps businesses

Number two, it helps businesses. You as a business owner or as someone who's optimizing a website for a business or even maybe someone who is just trying to get into SEO and learn more, it's going to help your public perception.

If you make a website that's accessible, it's going to be obvious and people are going to thank you for that. They're going to say, "Oh, this company cares about all people and a diverse group of abilities." It's going to be a more durable experience for your customers. When you start to think about things like text alternatives and captioning and transcripts and you kind of build this practice up over time and you really build this habit of doing accessible work and inclusive work, you're going to find that your website is more durable.

It's less likely to be hit by these algorithm changes and things like that, where people have taken the short-term approach. I know you're going to love this. It's going to help your SEO. It's going to give you a bigger audience. You've now taken your spotlight focus on just your bots and you've expanded it to see the entire stage in front of you. So a bigger audience is going to be in front of you as well for a business, and that means more money and more people and honestly a lot less problems.

I think we all know this one, but lawsuits. If you do this, if you start implementing accessibility work, you start thinking about accessibility first and foremost as you're developing things, you're going to have a lot less lawsuits. People aren't going to complain. They aren't going to be upset by your lack of accessibility because you won't have any. It will be accessible and inclusive for all people.

3. It helps family and friends

Then number three, doing accessibility work, thinking about accessibility, thinking about whether my website, whether my marketing material is going to be able to be consumed and enjoyed by people is going to help those family and friends who are working with people with disabilities. It's going to make things possible for people with disabilities. It's going to make their lives more independent and therefore release a little bit of that burden on family and friends.

It's also going to allow you, as a practitioner, as an SEO or maybe another discipline, to have a chance to interact with people with more diverse perspectives, learn more, get a richer, more intimate experience with these different users and craft a better overall experience. 

So as you can see, accessibility and SEO are very similar, and it's important to recognize that we need to kind of shift our mindset from thinking about just optimize for bots, how can I get Google to see this, how can I get other search engines to see this, and think about people first and use the rich insights that we get from search engine optimization and the tools they give us for free to make a big impact on people and everyday life.

Now what?

Okay, so now what do I do with this information? — is the question you might have. Well, you can learn and test. So you can learn a little bit more about accessibility by checking out Global Accessibility Awareness Day. You can join a meetup. There are tons of people out there who are as passionate as I am about accessibility, who can show you the way and give you tips and tricks on how to think about this.

You can subscribe to a newsletter. I've included a bit.ly link here, bit.ly/wbf-week, for White Board Friday. You can sign up for a weekly newsletter from Accessibility Weekly and get more tips and tricks and really cool stories about how people are doing this and implementing this work on their own business. Then you can also test your actual pages. Once you kind of get this awareness and start understanding how accessibility fits into your workflow, you can use either WAVE or Axe, and I've included the bit.ly links here and down below, and you can look at those tools as just another thing you can do to make sure that the things you're producing are visible, they're accessible, they're able to be accessed by assistive technology.

Thanks for spending some time with me today and talking about SEO and accessibility. I really hope that this changes your perspective and gives you a broader idea of how you can impact people's daily lives with the SEO and the accessibility work you're doing for your own business. Thanks. Have a good one.

https://ift.tt/3tMAP66

[kjt-lawyers]

An Introduction to Accessibility and SEO [Series Part 1]

Welcome back to Whiteboard Friday! To start us up after our break, guest host Cooper Hollmaier has put together a three-part series that shows how SEO and accessibility go hand-in-hand. 

In part one, he introduces us to what accessibility in SEO means, goes through some common myths associated with the work to make websites optimized and accessible, and discusses some of the major impacts that work can have. 

Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high resolution version in a new tab!

Video Transcription

Hey, Moz fans. Welcome to the latest edition of Whiteboard Friday. I'm Cooper Hollmaier. Today we're going to be talking about SEO and accessibility: the idea of optimizing not just for some of our audience, but all of our audience.

I've been doing SEO since 2016, and I started out working on small businesses, local mom-and-pop shops. Then I found the allure of e-commerce SEO, and I've been doing that ever since. Today I work on an in-house team doing technical SEO for a large outdoor e-commerce retailer.

The relationship between SEO and accessibility

Now, if you're anything like me, you know that SEO is a little bit more than just code on the page and copy that's crafted to meet searchers' intent. Whether you're a seasoned SEO pro or you're looking for the latest tips as that mom-and-pop shop, or you're maybe starting out in an SEO role for the first time, you understand that we have to take our content that we're producing and we have to, in some way, make sure that it shows up in search engines.

So for me, as a technical SEO, maybe I'm thinking about things like my H1 tag or my paragraph tag or my title tag, for this example page here for Mozville Dog Rescue. 

Now most of the time I would say my job revolves around the idea of making sure that what I'm doing, the stuff I'm producing, what I'm designing for, can be seen, digested, consumed, and then essentially regurgitated by our friend the bot.

Optimize for people, not just bots

But have you stopped to think about maybe there's a larger audience out there? Maybe it's more than just my bots. If you're thinking that way, you're moving towards the right direction. You're moving towards a more inclusive approach. You're thinking about more than just a search engine but also the users, the people that are consuming that content, engaging with it, and maybe even engaging with your business.

If you think about only optimizing for bots, you're thinking about something kind of like someone sitting in a spotlight on a stage. You can see that person front and center, but you maybe can't see the surrounding cast because they're out there in the darkness. What we want to do is we want to think about a larger group of people.

We want to take that spotlight away and give everyone a chance to shine, everyone a chance to consume, engage with, and be delighted by the content that you're producing. So as you're thinking about search engine optimization, as you're thinking about building a new product, service, experience, think about not just can a search engine bot see that. We know that's important as an SEO.

How do people interact with your content?

But also think about can other people interact with, engage with, or be compelled by this content. If the answer is no, you have some issues. But I can give you a few tips on how to solve those issues. When you're making some content, whether it's marketing material both digitally and on a website or offline in some sort of print material, ask yourself these four things.

Content should be perceivable, operable, understandable, and robust

Is my content perceivable? Is it able to be seen or understood, or does it exist for my user? Is it operable? Can they do something with it? Is it understandable? Am I writing at the right reading level? Am I explaining this in a way that's going to be consumable by a large audience and maybe not just somebody with a PhD? Is that content robust? Is what I'm building available in multiple different formats, fonts, sizes, etc., so that, regardless of who my user is, they're going to be able to understand what I've given them? 

These are the four principles of web accessibility. These are the guidelines that the Web Consortium has given us, and you can apply them every time that you're building something new, or even retrofitting something old.

For example, let's say you have this playbill or you have maybe a menu for a restaurant. If I don't offer that menu or that playbill in both a digital and a print format, I end up in a situation where someone who needs Braille, needs a screen reader, need some sort of assistive technology in order to understand and consume that content, is going to be kind of left out in the dark.

They're not going to be able to do those things. In the example of a menu, I can't order from a restaurant if I don't know what they offer for me to order. So it's important that we make sure that our content and the things we're producing, the marketing materials that we're developing, are perceivable, operable, understandable, and robust. 

But okay, I'm only talking about maybe one example of disability.

Types of disability

When I say "disability," what does that mean to you? You might think of an elderly family member who needs a cane to walk. You might think of your friend who has a hard time reading large words or gets anxious when there's a math test coming up in class. If that's the case, you'd be talking about only two types of disability, maybe body structure, shape and size disabilities for someone who's walking with a cane, or cognitive disabilities or even learning disabilities that your friend might be experiencing.

There are a bunch of different other types of disabilities that even I didn't know about until I learned about it. Those might include blindness, low vision, deaf-blindness, color blindness. I'm the first to admit here that this whiteboard being in blue and red and green and black may not be the most accessible for someone with colorblindness. That's why it's important that we have closed captioning and a transcript below this video. These all make this content more accessible. 

Auditory, cognitive, anxiety, mood, seizure. You can see that this list is long and it's not exhaustive. There are a ton of different types of disability, and many of them aren't even perceivable by you or I. People may be suffering from disability and dealing with this in their life that you might not know.

So it's important to recognize that we need to start optimizing content not just for bots but for people as well. We need to make sure that people are able to actually consume and engage with our content. 

So how does this relate to your world as an SEO? Well, there's a lot of similarities between accessibility work and SEO work, and I want to kind of break that down into some myths and legends.

Myths and legends

1. It has a small impact

Number one, commonly people will say accessibility only impacts a small group of people. We're looking at this through a lens of able-bodied individuals who we think, okay, they can see my content if I write it on the page. But the reality is one in five people in the United States are dealing with a disability. That's a lot of people.

That's almost 60 million people. So it's not a small problem if you ask me. For SEO, if I do something for SEO, if I write a tag title tag, if I write a meta description, if I craft my H1 in a certain way, I may not only be helping a bot, but I'm also helping probably other channels of marketing as well.

I'm going to help that email campaign have a better title. I'm going to have that pay-per-click ad that's going to have a better page to go to. So small impact is really a myth. Accessibility and SEO both fall into that bucket where they impact a lot more people than I think we commonly realize.

2. It’s a short-term problem

Number two, it's a short-term problem. For accessibility, the ability to be able to order from a menu or read this playbill is more than a short-term problem.

It's going to happen every time I go to that business or this restaurant. So it's important that we keep our accessibility work ongoing and continue to improve and evolve our practices. We know that for SEO it's a zero-sum game, too. We know that the world is always changing. Search algorithms are changing. User intent and behavior is changing.

So it's important that we stay on top of our SEO work and make sure that our business understands that SEO work if you're working in an enterprise situation. So that way we're not falling behind our competitors, and we're not disadvantaging people that we may not realize we're disadvantaging.

3. Worry about it at the end

Number three, we should do it at the end. I hear this a lot when we're talking about SEO but for accessibility especially, too.

Hey, I have this website. Maybe we should do an audit. Then we can do some work to remediate this problem so that the website becomes accessible. It's always faster, cheaper, and easier to make a website accessible from the get-go than to do it retroactively, and do this kind of retrofitting. For SEO, we know that it's way easier and also a lot more effective if we build content for users with SEO insights to inform what they're looking for, what questions we need to answer.

If you trying to optimize something after the fact, a lot of times I think you'll find that the content that you're producing feels like it's SEO driven. It's not going to feel like it's for a customer because it wasn't. You're coming in after the fact.

4. It costs too much

Number four, it cost too much money. You know what cost a lot of money? Lawsuits. If you don't work on accessibility first and foremost, in the beginning of the process and in an ongoing fashion, you'll find I think that accessibility lawsuits can cost your business a lot more, and they can be detrimental.

But so can SEO and penalties. If you take a shortcut, if you don't take the time to think about what your user needs, how this is going to be received by a search engine as well as customers in general, I think you'll find that those penalties are going to hurt a lot more than doing it right the first time and doing it in an ongoing fashion.

5. It’s distracting

Number five, it's distracting.

For accessibility, in a lot of cases the things that we're going to be implementing aren't going to be visible to your average user. They're going to be visible to assistive technology and the screen readers and the things that people with disabilities might be using to interact with the same content that someone else is. But in most cases, it's better to be correct and there and visible in terms of what a screen reader can see than be impossible to use altogether.

For SEO, we know that bad and unethical SEO is obvious. We've seen keyword stuffing. We've seen a bunch of links on a page that don't belong or don't really provide value to my customer. That is more distracting I think, than doing the work to make it right. 

Okay, so there's some similarities between accessibility and SEO.

In most cases, there is a very large impact if you do it right. It's not a short-term problem. It's ongoing. We shouldn't do it at the end. We should be doing it at the beginning. It really doesn't cost that much money if you do it right compared to if you do it wrong and get it wrong. Then number five is, in most cases, the best work goes unnoticed because it's organic, it's ethical, it's honest.

The impact of accessibility work

So what's the impact of doing accessibility work and also I guess doing SEO work that aligns with accessibility practices?

1. Makes the impossible, possible!

Number one, it helps people with disabilities first and foremost. It makes the impossible possible.

2. It helps businesses

Number two, it helps businesses. You as a business owner or as someone who's optimizing a website for a business or even maybe someone who is just trying to get into SEO and learn more, it's going to help your public perception.

If you make a website that's accessible, it's going to be obvious and people are going to thank you for that. They're going to say, "Oh, this company cares about all people and a diverse group of abilities." It's going to be a more durable experience for your customers. When you start to think about things like text alternatives and captioning and transcripts and you kind of build this practice up over time and you really build this habit of doing accessible work and inclusive work, you're going to find that your website is more durable.

It's less likely to be hit by these algorithm changes and things like that, where people have taken the short-term approach. I know you're going to love this. It's going to help your SEO. It's going to give you a bigger audience. You've now taken your spotlight focus on just your bots and you've expanded it to see the entire stage in front of you. So a bigger audience is going to be in front of you as well for a business, and that means more money and more people and honestly a lot less problems.

I think we all know this one, but lawsuits. If you do this, if you start implementing accessibility work, you start thinking about accessibility first and foremost as you're developing things, you're going to have a lot less lawsuits. People aren't going to complain. They aren't going to be upset by your lack of accessibility because you won't have any. It will be accessible and inclusive for all people.

3. It helps family and friends

Then number three, doing accessibility work, thinking about accessibility, thinking about whether my website, whether my marketing material is going to be able to be consumed and enjoyed by people is going to help those family and friends who are working with people with disabilities. It's going to make things possible for people with disabilities. It's going to make their lives more independent and therefore release a little bit of that burden on family and friends.

It's also going to allow you, as a practitioner, as an SEO or maybe another discipline, to have a chance to interact with people with more diverse perspectives, learn more, get a richer, more intimate experience with these different users and craft a better overall experience. 

So as you can see, accessibility and SEO are very similar, and it's important to recognize that we need to kind of shift our mindset from thinking about just optimize for bots, how can I get Google to see this, how can I get other search engines to see this, and think about people first and use the rich insights that we get from search engine optimization and the tools they give us for free to make a big impact on people and everyday life.

Now what?

Okay, so now what do I do with this information? — is the question you might have. Well, you can learn and test. So you can learn a little bit more about accessibility by checking out Global Accessibility Awareness Day. You can join a meetup. There are tons of people out there who are as passionate as I am about accessibility, who can show you the way and give you tips and tricks on how to think about this.

You can subscribe to a newsletter. I've included a bit.ly link here, bit.ly/wbf-week, for White Board Friday. You can sign up for a weekly newsletter from Accessibility Weekly and get more tips and tricks and really cool stories about how people are doing this and implementing this work on their own business. Then you can also test your actual pages. Once you kind of get this awareness and start understanding how accessibility fits into your workflow, you can use either WAVE or Axe, and I've included the bit.ly links here and down below, and you can look at those tools as just another thing you can do to make sure that the things you're producing are visible, they're accessible, they're able to be accessed by assistive technology.

Thanks for spending some time with me today and talking about SEO and accessibility. I really hope that this changes your perspective and gives you a broader idea of how you can impact people's daily lives with the SEO and the accessibility work you're doing for your own business. Thanks. Have a good one.

[noithatotoaz]

An Introduction to Accessibility and SEO [Series Part 1]

Welcome back to Whiteboard Friday! To start us up after our break, guest host Cooper Hollmaier has put together a three-part series that shows how SEO and accessibility go hand-in-hand. 

In part one, he introduces us to what accessibility in SEO means, goes through some common myths associated with the work to make websites optimized and accessible, and discusses some of the major impacts that work can have. 

Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high resolution version in a new tab!

Video Transcription

Hey, Moz fans. Welcome to the latest edition of Whiteboard Friday. I'm Cooper Hollmaier. Today we're going to be talking about SEO and accessibility: the idea of optimizing not just for some of our audience, but all of our audience.

I've been doing SEO since 2016, and I started out working on small businesses, local mom-and-pop shops. Then I found the allure of e-commerce SEO, and I've been doing that ever since. Today I work on an in-house team doing technical SEO for a large outdoor e-commerce retailer.

The relationship between SEO and accessibility

Now, if you're anything like me, you know that SEO is a little bit more than just code on the page and copy that's crafted to meet searchers' intent. Whether you're a seasoned SEO pro or you're looking for the latest tips as that mom-and-pop shop, or you're maybe starting out in an SEO role for the first time, you understand that we have to take our content that we're producing and we have to, in some way, make sure that it shows up in search engines.

So for me, as a technical SEO, maybe I'm thinking about things like my H1 tag or my paragraph tag or my title tag, for this example page here for Mozville Dog Rescue. 

Now most of the time I would say my job revolves around the idea of making sure that what I'm doing, the stuff I'm producing, what I'm designing for, can be seen, digested, consumed, and then essentially regurgitated by our friend the bot.

Optimize for people, not just bots

But have you stopped to think about maybe there's a larger audience out there? Maybe it's more than just my bots. If you're thinking that way, you're moving towards the right direction. You're moving towards a more inclusive approach. You're thinking about more than just a search engine but also the users, the people that are consuming that content, engaging with it, and maybe even engaging with your business.

If you think about only optimizing for bots, you're thinking about something kind of like someone sitting in a spotlight on a stage. You can see that person front and center, but you maybe can't see the surrounding cast because they're out there in the darkness. What we want to do is we want to think about a larger group of people.

We want to take that spotlight away and give everyone a chance to shine, everyone a chance to consume, engage with, and be delighted by the content that you're producing. So as you're thinking about search engine optimization, as you're thinking about building a new product, service, experience, think about not just can a search engine bot see that. We know that's important as an SEO.

How do people interact with your content?

But also think about can other people interact with, engage with, or be compelled by this content. If the answer is no, you have some issues. But I can give you a few tips on how to solve those issues. When you're making some content, whether it's marketing material both digitally and on a website or offline in some sort of print material, ask yourself these four things.

Content should be perceivable, operable, understandable, and robust

Is my content perceivable? Is it able to be seen or understood, or does it exist for my user? Is it operable? Can they do something with it? Is it understandable? Am I writing at the right reading level? Am I explaining this in a way that's going to be consumable by a large audience and maybe not just somebody with a PhD? Is that content robust? Is what I'm building available in multiple different formats, fonts, sizes, etc., so that, regardless of who my user is, they're going to be able to understand what I've given them? 

These are the four principles of web accessibility. These are the guidelines that the Web Consortium has given us, and you can apply them every time that you're building something new, or even retrofitting something old.

For example, let's say you have this playbill or you have maybe a menu for a restaurant. If I don't offer that menu or that playbill in both a digital and a print format, I end up in a situation where someone who needs Braille, needs a screen reader, need some sort of assistive technology in order to understand and consume that content, is going to be kind of left out in the dark.

They're not going to be able to do those things. In the example of a menu, I can't order from a restaurant if I don't know what they offer for me to order. So it's important that we make sure that our content and the things we're producing, the marketing materials that we're developing, are perceivable, operable, understandable, and robust. 

But okay, I'm only talking about maybe one example of disability.

Types of disability

When I say "disability," what does that mean to you? You might think of an elderly family member who needs a cane to walk. You might think of your friend who has a hard time reading large words or gets anxious when there's a math test coming up in class. If that's the case, you'd be talking about only two types of disability, maybe body structure, shape and size disabilities for someone who's walking with a cane, or cognitive disabilities or even learning disabilities that your friend might be experiencing.

There are a bunch of different other types of disabilities that even I didn't know about until I learned about it. Those might include blindness, low vision, deaf-blindness, color blindness. I'm the first to admit here that this whiteboard being in blue and red and green and black may not be the most accessible for someone with colorblindness. That's why it's important that we have closed captioning and a transcript below this video. These all make this content more accessible. 

Auditory, cognitive, anxiety, mood, seizure. You can see that this list is long and it's not exhaustive. There are a ton of different types of disability, and many of them aren't even perceivable by you or I. People may be suffering from disability and dealing with this in their life that you might not know.

So it's important to recognize that we need to start optimizing content not just for bots but for people as well. We need to make sure that people are able to actually consume and engage with our content. 

So how does this relate to your world as an SEO? Well, there's a lot of similarities between accessibility work and SEO work, and I want to kind of break that down into some myths and legends.

Myths and legends

1. It has a small impact

Number one, commonly people will say accessibility only impacts a small group of people. We're looking at this through a lens of able-bodied individuals who we think, okay, they can see my content if I write it on the page. But the reality is one in five people in the United States are dealing with a disability. That's a lot of people.

That's almost 60 million people. So it's not a small problem if you ask me. For SEO, if I do something for SEO, if I write a tag title tag, if I write a meta description, if I craft my H1 in a certain way, I may not only be helping a bot, but I'm also helping probably other channels of marketing as well.

I'm going to help that email campaign have a better title. I'm going to have that pay-per-click ad that's going to have a better page to go to. So small impact is really a myth. Accessibility and SEO both fall into that bucket where they impact a lot more people than I think we commonly realize.

2. It’s a short-term problem

Number two, it's a short-term problem. For accessibility, the ability to be able to order from a menu or read this playbill is more than a short-term problem.

It's going to happen every time I go to that business or this restaurant. So it's important that we keep our accessibility work ongoing and continue to improve and evolve our practices. We know that for SEO it's a zero-sum game, too. We know that the world is always changing. Search algorithms are changing. User intent and behavior is changing.

So it's important that we stay on top of our SEO work and make sure that our business understands that SEO work if you're working in an enterprise situation. So that way we're not falling behind our competitors, and we're not disadvantaging people that we may not realize we're disadvantaging.

3. Worry about it at the end

Number three, we should do it at the end. I hear this a lot when we're talking about SEO but for accessibility especially, too.

Hey, I have this website. Maybe we should do an audit. Then we can do some work to remediate this problem so that the website becomes accessible. It's always faster, cheaper, and easier to make a website accessible from the get-go than to do it retroactively, and do this kind of retrofitting. For SEO, we know that it's way easier and also a lot more effective if we build content for users with SEO insights to inform what they're looking for, what questions we need to answer.

If you trying to optimize something after the fact, a lot of times I think you'll find that the content that you're producing feels like it's SEO driven. It's not going to feel like it's for a customer because it wasn't. You're coming in after the fact.

4. It costs too much

Number four, it cost too much money. You know what cost a lot of money? Lawsuits. If you don't work on accessibility first and foremost, in the beginning of the process and in an ongoing fashion, you'll find I think that accessibility lawsuits can cost your business a lot more, and they can be detrimental.

But so can SEO and penalties. If you take a shortcut, if you don't take the time to think about what your user needs, how this is going to be received by a search engine as well as customers in general, I think you'll find that those penalties are going to hurt a lot more than doing it right the first time and doing it in an ongoing fashion.

5. It’s distracting

Number five, it's distracting.

For accessibility, in a lot of cases the things that we're going to be implementing aren't going to be visible to your average user. They're going to be visible to assistive technology and the screen readers and the things that people with disabilities might be using to interact with the same content that someone else is. But in most cases, it's better to be correct and there and visible in terms of what a screen reader can see than be impossible to use altogether.

For SEO, we know that bad and unethical SEO is obvious. We've seen keyword stuffing. We've seen a bunch of links on a page that don't belong or don't really provide value to my customer. That is more distracting I think, than doing the work to make it right. 

Okay, so there's some similarities between accessibility and SEO.

In most cases, there is a very large impact if you do it right. It's not a short-term problem. It's ongoing. We shouldn't do it at the end. We should be doing it at the beginning. It really doesn't cost that much money if you do it right compared to if you do it wrong and get it wrong. Then number five is, in most cases, the best work goes unnoticed because it's organic, it's ethical, it's honest.

The impact of accessibility work

So what's the impact of doing accessibility work and also I guess doing SEO work that aligns with accessibility practices?

1. Makes the impossible, possible!

Number one, it helps people with disabilities first and foremost. It makes the impossible possible.

2. It helps businesses

Number two, it helps businesses. You as a business owner or as someone who's optimizing a website for a business or even maybe someone who is just trying to get into SEO and learn more, it's going to help your public perception.

If you make a website that's accessible, it's going to be obvious and people are going to thank you for that. They're going to say, "Oh, this company cares about all people and a diverse group of abilities." It's going to be a more durable experience for your customers. When you start to think about things like text alternatives and captioning and transcripts and you kind of build this practice up over time and you really build this habit of doing accessible work and inclusive work, you're going to find that your website is more durable.

It's less likely to be hit by these algorithm changes and things like that, where people have taken the short-term approach. I know you're going to love this. It's going to help your SEO. It's going to give you a bigger audience. You've now taken your spotlight focus on just your bots and you've expanded it to see the entire stage in front of you. So a bigger audience is going to be in front of you as well for a business, and that means more money and more people and honestly a lot less problems.

I think we all know this one, but lawsuits. If you do this, if you start implementing accessibility work, you start thinking about accessibility first and foremost as you're developing things, you're going to have a lot less lawsuits. People aren't going to complain. They aren't going to be upset by your lack of accessibility because you won't have any. It will be accessible and inclusive for all people.

3. It helps family and friends

Then number three, doing accessibility work, thinking about accessibility, thinking about whether my website, whether my marketing material is going to be able to be consumed and enjoyed by people is going to help those family and friends who are working with people with disabilities. It's going to make things possible for people with disabilities. It's going to make their lives more independent and therefore release a little bit of that burden on family and friends.

It's also going to allow you, as a practitioner, as an SEO or maybe another discipline, to have a chance to interact with people with more diverse perspectives, learn more, get a richer, more intimate experience with these different users and craft a better overall experience. 

So as you can see, accessibility and SEO are very similar, and it's important to recognize that we need to kind of shift our mindset from thinking about just optimize for bots, how can I get Google to see this, how can I get other search engines to see this, and think about people first and use the rich insights that we get from search engine optimization and the tools they give us for free to make a big impact on people and everyday life.

Now what?

Okay, so now what do I do with this information? — is the question you might have. Well, you can learn and test. So you can learn a little bit more about accessibility by checking out Global Accessibility Awareness Day. You can join a meetup. There are tons of people out there who are as passionate as I am about accessibility, who can show you the way and give you tips and tricks on how to think about this.

You can subscribe to a newsletter. I've included a bit.ly link here, bit.ly/wbf-week, for White Board Friday. You can sign up for a weekly newsletter from Accessibility Weekly and get more tips and tricks and really cool stories about how people are doing this and implementing this work on their own business. Then you can also test your actual pages. Once you kind of get this awareness and start understanding how accessibility fits into your workflow, you can use either WAVE or Axe, and I've included the bit.ly links here and down below, and you can look at those tools as just another thing you can do to make sure that the things you're producing are visible, they're accessible, they're able to be accessed by assistive technology.

Thanks for spending some time with me today and talking about SEO and accessibility. I really hope that this changes your perspective and gives you a broader idea of how you can impact people's daily lives with the SEO and the accessibility work you're doing for your own business. Thanks. Have a good one.