#retroactively adding this tag so i can go back and see where i started

[loisfreakinglane]

Top 5 things/people you love about the buffyverse?

oh THIS is a fun retrospective. i haven't yet started buffyverse rewatch 2k24- but it's happening SOON. i've given myself a new edict to scrub away 27 years of btvs/ats opinions, loves, hates, fandom histories, annoyances, EVERYTHING- and go into this rewatch totally fresh, to let opinions form as organically as they can for a universe so near and dear to my heart since i was. god lol 6 years old. i'm personally hoping characters, ships, and plots that i've found hopelessly aggravating before, i find blazing passionate love for now. WOULDN'T THAT BE FUN THO??? i'm sick of negativity, i wanna embrace joy.

before i scrub myself clean, it's nice to remember why i was invested for so many years in the first place. SO. TOP 5 THINGS/PEOPLE I LOVE ABOUT THE BUFFYVERSE!!!!!!!!! not exactly my favorite 5 EVER about the buffyverse, but an assortment of 5. 5 separate top favorite things.

cordelia chase- my love my life my soul my queen c. the thing is. i adore her. i adore her as a bitchy mean girl, using her wealth and her beauty and her status to squash down our heroes. i adore her as a broke struggling actress, using a vampire detective agency as a stepping stone for international stardom. i adore her as a genuine hero, embracing her destiny, choosing to be a demon, and fully throwing herself into fighting the good fight because it fills her soul with purpose, belonging, and fulfillment. she has an utterly flawless character arc, one that parallels buffy's own in so many ways. (and fyi as a sidenote i am ENTIRELY POSITIVE that in ats s4 amnesiac cordy was 100% cordy, jasmine did not take over her body until she had the vision of the beasts eyes, and then it was real cordelia again in you're welcome. there's not question or ambiguity about it for me personally, not anymore.) my love for cordelia is all encompassing. i love her more than anything.

buffy&dawn, angel&connor- probably my favorite plot for both buffy and angel was when they each gained a kid who automatically became the most important part of their life (while my ultimate buffyverse otp is angel/cordy, i am very fond of bangel- and my biggest proponent for a postseries reconciliation revolves around this shared life experience) there is so much i love about both characters getting an auto-grown, magically created, blue eyed brown haired impossible teenager dumped in their lap (with bonus world-altering magical memories making their existence assimilated and accepted). giving them both not just another person to love, but another human being that is entirely reliant upon them specifically for love, protection. one person with the power to uplift or destroy them, through their own actions or the actions of another. buffy and angel both went through phases of being willing to destroy the whole world just to keep them safe- buffy in the gift, angel in forgiving. i just think it's NEAT. i probably spend more time thinking about angel & connor bc i do remain frustrated with a lot of choices made wrt them in s4 (the decision to lean far harder into whiney ungrateful teenager and less into feral hellchild raise by ultrareligious 18th century man in a barren wasteland of demons was in fact frustrating to me!) but hey, i still love connor in all his messy angsty ways. and origin/not fade away put a pin in that conversation in ways i will adore FOREVER.

the concept/importance of families of choice. for as much as i've waxed poetic over two of the series core biological relationships lol, the real center of both shows is always that love between a group of unrelated misfits. i've gone back and forth over the years on my opinion of many of the relationships within the buffyverse, and how successful those families can be- but it is still something i really love. and it's especially at the heart of what has been my 2 favorite seasons- buffy s5, and angel s3- which, only hitting me now, is also when dawn & connor are introduced, which brings the group much closer together. it's unfortunate tho, that in this world of two separate families of choice, with an assortment of characters from a large variety of backgrounds, that we only got one main that's not white. forever the biggest problem with both shows. and also why i won't shut up about how kendra should have been brought back. SHE ONLY DIED A LITTLE!

wolfram&hart as a main baddie. lawyers are evil. we know this. LOL BUT RLY THO. god! a perfect PERFECT villain, perfect way to use the fuckery of the legal world to impose your will upon broke private detectives. lawyers are everywhere, i'm p sure there's more lawyers in california than in any other state. we are very litigious. the mystery behind ~the senior partners~ that is always hanging over our heads, the horror that can be inflicted by these very human lawyers engaging in blood sacrifice, murder, every evil thing under the sun- and the fact our heroes can't exactly run around killing them because a. human and b. there's way fucking more where they came from. of course they were never defeated, of course they are a main villain from beginning to end. i have less fond memories about the state of wr&h in s5, but that's less about them and more about how our heroes try to utilize their resources (badly, it's badly). lilah morgan, one of the best antagonists EVER. holland manners, linwood murrow, gavin park. they come at angel investigations from every angle- sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. but they. never. stop. 10000% perfection.

okay this one is more...... idk. this is a random thing i've been thinking about. and it's set design. lmfao. maybe it's because these shows have been part of my life for so many decades, because i grew up watching and rewatching and rewatching, but there's so much i love about their main sets. the hyperion hotel is one of my favorite locations on tv ever. the magic box! the sunnydale high library! i feel like i too lived in these locations. and i wanna go BACK!!!!!!!

[thecircularsystem]

Just... for once, I would like to go one year without someone spreading bullshit about me and my friends.

TW for harassment, sexual content, sui, paranoia, etc.

Okay. So.

I want to preface this with something.

I do not want any messages about this. I do not want to see a single message sent to Dude. I do not want to see a single message sent to Blue-Bubonic. I ESPECIALLY do not want a single message sent to Sophie, or Hal, or fucking Nox, or anyone, just keep this shit out of your mouths.

I am so, so tired of being caught in perpetual, triggering trauma. I am so, so tired of being accused of shit I never did, of things I never said, of things I don’t think or feel.

I made this post up because I’m delusional and paranoid. I hear that SAS spread rumors and my memory is different from that.

Am I lying? Am I wrong? Was I gaslit? Did I dream it? What if Blue is right? What if I’m a horrible person? What if I should die-

I’m so tired of it. So I have to go through, and dig back in, just like always, until my nails bleed from how hard I’m clinging to syscourse. And I’m trying to stop. Genuinely, firmly, I do not want to talk about this shit 24/7. I like aspects of it, but I’m tired.

Blue is not going to let it rest. More power to them — it’s obvious they need to get this out so that they can work on recovery. Good for them. I’m proud of them, genuinely, and I hope that their 100+ something page document helps them. It never helped me.

In the meantime, I need to talk about my trauma too. I need to get MY side out. That’s only fair.

This post isn't for syscourse. It isn't for drama. It isn't for spreading. Please leave us all alone. Let us get it out and then be done.

(Note: post has been edited to preserve someone’s privacy.)

The Problemaddtic Era

A year and a half ago (May 2023), a user by the name of Problemaddtic made a post. They had made several, many of which I found to be bad or in poor taste. This one took the cake though. That blog has since been terminated, by the internet is, of course, forever, as this drama unfortunately proves.

Here’s the post again. This time, with Dude of SAS fame’s rebuttal.

Problemaddtic posted this somewhat paranoia inducing post, which did trigger multiple people at that time. This post was posted to numerous tags, including endo safe tags. Many users spoke out about this, but primarily anti-endos. Many pro-endos didn’t bat an eye. I posted this.

Blue made the post unreblogable. Dude responded:

Upset about being called out, they started posting numerous things to the endo safe and pro-endo tags. The original post, if I remember correctly, was changed to feature an anatomical picture of a penis and balls, telling anti-endos to suck it. This meant anyone going to the post — or to public endo safe tags — would see it. I can’t find evidence of this, sadly; seems most syscoursers avoided reblogging that shit for obvious reasons. Here’s another example (with Dude’s response). Sophie warned people to block.

An anonymous pro-endo ask came to Dude about how Problemaddtic’s post was weaponizing their trauma. Dude once again offered his inbox as refuge and safety to vent. Here’s that post.

After this, problemaddtic retroactively added DNI banners to their posts. Here’s Dude and a mod on Sysboxes commenting on the box. Dude was calling out how the box did not protect problemaddtic from criticism, while the Sysboxes mod made fun of the box. Dude did not make fun of the box’s design directly, but rather, the purpose of the box.

Here’s another anon suggesting Problemaddtic is a troll, and Dude refuting that claim. Dude encouraged people not to judge all pro-endos by a single person’s actions.

Someone said that dude’s actions here were leaving a bad taste in their mouth. Here’s dude’s post in rebuttal, where he says he made fun of the DNI banner. I beg to differ, but sure, if Dude wants to say he did, crucify him for that if you really want to.

And finally, to cap off the Problemaddtic era: the Cock and Balls post that got a TW.

I’m not screenshotting it. It was genuinely quite triggering for many people. Hearing “that’s all your good for” in reference to sexual things? Way to echo what so many of our abusers have said. What Problemaddtic did was incredibly triggering for many users. Dude rightfully called them out for this.

Here’s someone who was hurt by the Problemaddtic post. Here’s someone who said it felt intentional.

Meanwhile, Dude’s posts at this time (beyond allowing anons to be heard) were comprised of cat pictures to cleanse the tags, and reblogs of positivity. After that last anon link, I cannot find reference to this drama again. Problemaddtic was terminated after many, many people reported the blog for the sexual content.

There was more at that time — I saw a few other posts about the drama that I skipped over from the tag, as well as knowledge that I went on an incredibly triggered ramble in a server I was part of warning people to avoid the tag. I don’t have access to that any longer so I can’t really share it.

Everyone moved on.

Blue-Bubonic Era

Sadly, I cannot seem to access an archive of Blue’s account. Trying to scroll back that far manually is not working, so I’m going to do what I can. Forgive me if I miss things, because tumblr's tag search is not the greatest.

Blue-Bubonic was revolving around the syscourse community for a little bit, reblogging SAS posts and generally staying mostly chill! I saw they were in syscourse, and I (somehow) immediately made the connection that this user was problemaddtic. This made me... incredibly uncomfortable. I just did my best to not engage much, as I really did not trust them not to explode as they had previously.

Apparently, I am one of the only individuals who knew who Blue was. Dude thought Blue was Elmani, actually, the "kill the anti-endo inside you" propaganda pusher. I hope Elmani's good wherever they ended up, it seems like they finally quit syscourse for good.

I believe Dude and Blue talked behind the scenes briefly. Dude had made the recent shift towards pro-endo. He was dealing with the aftermath of a catastrophic life changing event, one that he will always be dealing with the ramifications of, but which is still fresh. On my side of things, I was dealing with my first sessions of EMDR, chronic pink eye, multiple vacations (fun but stressful), and multiple traumaversaries on the horizon. We were all very, very tightly coiled, just doing our bests to stay calm and be gentle with ourselves.

On June 20th, Blue posted that they wanted to make a comprehensive document of why SophieinWonderland is "a shit person causing actual harm n hides behind the pro endo label when it comes to criticism regardless of which "side" is criticizing her."

Four days later, Blue posted that they had "Finished the draft, working on editing" and were "Thinking of letting some vet it before posting it publicly."

Discord Era

I can only speak about what I know.

Dude and me talk on Discord a lot. He shares things with me. For instance, that Sophie is a real breathing human person who has complimented me in private. Or that they talk, sometimes, way more than I would be brave enough to do (though knowing just snippets has made me actually able to respond to her again, and even reach out to her a bit. I'm happy to have more perspective now.)

He reached out to me, though, on June 26th, and said, "Want to take part in some Sophie drama?" And genuinely, I do want to see what's happening in terms of drama on tumblr. Especially since this took place after yet more insanely triggering posts from her. So I agreed.

Then Dude let me know he was adding me to a group chat with Blue and I said, "Oh boy. Alright." My heart sank. This was not going to end well.

It didn't!

Blue asked us to vet a document. I clicked into it and was immediately overwhelmed by the poor way the document was set up, the sheer amount of writing (the current iteration is 68k words), and the... lack of substance in that writing. I only looked briefly before immediately realizing just how triggering this would be for me. The last time I handled a long document like that, it was for the SN drama. It was when I was being accused of shit, callout posts that made me split a new part. I could not do this document or read more in that moment.

So I stopped, and said I would not be helping. I am not in the group chat any longer, but I do have the screenshots Blue took.

My point about callouts doing more harm: it would only lead to harassment, and it did. Not of Sophie, remarkably; I overestimated how much reach Blue's post would have. Instead, it led to Blue and Hal having all of Sophie's 2000 followers having their eyes on them. It wasn't fair and it wasn't right.

Sophie does make a lot of mistakes. A callout like this WAS exactly what she wanted, because it let her drag out the drama for Syscourse Points for over a month after it was posted. It let her attack "weak" (read: traumatizing) arguments for months, and really hurt my friend. The callout didn't help anything, just like I said it wouldn't.

I was too gentle about my last point. Keep my fucking friends out of your callout documents. Don't make callout documents at all. If you didn't experience, don't fucking talk about it, I'm tired of this shit. I have never once seen it end without the victims being hurt worse than they had been. I told myself it would be fine if you asked the victim for permission. Newsflash. It wasn't.

I didn't mention how fucking atrocious the points in the document were because, 1, I could barely remember after closing it, because my brain was actively trying to avoid Trigger Mode, and 2, because I didn't want to be too insulting to Blue. I mean, nobody likes hearing, "your formatting is shit, your points are largely nonsense, and for fucks sakes, it's spelled Syscourse, not SysCourse."

I did not want to be an asshole. So I politely and kindly dipped out, making my reservations known.

Blue did reach out to Hal, who gave permission for their blogs and past Sophiecourse Drama to be used in the document.

July 10th, Blue posted the Sophie document. A friend of mine (who I am keeping anonymous, since they seem to have mostly escaped this absolute bullshit) reached out to me and said: "We're going to make the call now: This will blow up in everyone's face and cause harm for everyone involved in the following days."

They were right.

I read through the entirety of the document over the following days. I do not remember most of it, particularly because the formatting is next to impossible for me to understand. It's simply too much. To (once again) quote my friend, "It felt like it was extremely bloated." I have to agree; much of this was trumped up or extended so long to make the document seem more intimidating, and by proxy, make Sophie seem worse. When people see 68k words, they shrug and say, "TL;DR Sophie is bad, got it." It's disingenuous.

I don't recall much also due to the fact that I am intensely triggered by this shit. Sophie is an insanely triggering topic for many people. Trying to read what she's done made me forget it all over again. I'm so tired of caring.

Anyways.

Sophie did what she does; she put Blue on blast for several months over several posts, ripping to shreds the document, triggering countless people.

Dude reached out to me and explained that he had promised a friend that, if this blew up, that he would "burn tumblr and sophie to the ground." And he couldn't. He fucking couldn't do that, because Sophie is a person, and he had just started to see that, and he was not ready to burn that bridge because of Blue's document.

So I took matters into my own hands. I called out Sophie's damage that she does. I called out that she's okay with it. I explained that Sophie is a person, as anyone else is, and that she is also Syscourse Incarnate. At the time, she was the most active syscourse blog, period, flat out. I also ripped into the document, because exactly what I was worried about was what happened.

Notably, in said post, Dude said he didn't blame the document author for any of this. I don't blame Blue either. The document did not cause Sophie to pull her triggering shit. Nobody is to blame for someone else’s actions. BUT FOR FUCKS SAKES. THE CALL TO ACTION ON THE POST WAS FOR PEOPLE TO BE FUCKING NICE TO EACH OTHER.

I predicted in that post that syscourse would get worse, and it did. I let people know that, if they stopped, they would be able to witness syscourse eat itself alive, and that's what happened.

Sigh.

I posted the post, and then posted my going away post. I was getting rid of my syscourse dedicated blogs, condensing, deleting, moving, archiving -- I WAS FUCKING DONE.

I also reached out to Blue to let them know I didn't blame them. They disregarded that and said my post was directly blaming them. I asked them to point out where I blamed them, and they said I "framed the situation" as blaming them. They blocked me, particularly it felt like because I wasn’t condemning Sophie enough. As if that would do anything at this point but feed her more attention.

I tried to leave! Blue brought me back, revealing I was a mod on SAS, which wasn't public information. They complained that I didn't mentally endanger myself to let them know why the document upset me so badly. Go figure, it was upsetting, so I didn't speak up.

I edited the original Blowing Up Syscourse Post to address Blue's post, which led to Dude later making a post that explained, "Wait, Blue-Bubonic wasn't the point of that post, THE POINT IS TO BE NICE AND STOP SYSCOURSING."

Nobody got the message.

Everyone continued to be assholes.

It got worse, just like I said it would.

Whatever The Fuck Era, Can We Move On?

Anyways, I was in the middle of moving at this point, with teaching suddenly being hell, EMDR falling through, suicidality spiking, relationship bumps, health scares -- genuinely, a lot of shit, none of which I owe you all. My therapist looked at me and told me I had to take time off work, because he didn't think I would survive until the end of the month. I looked him dead in the eyes and told him that if I took time off in October, it would lead to me killing myself.

That's where I've been these past few months.

Blue-Bubonic had some sort of drama with Noxsyscourse. I did not pay attention to most of it. I didn't want to pay attention to it. I just wanted to be left alone. I have so much more important shit than dealing with syscourse! I don't fucking stalk Blue's blog! I shouldn't have to write this shit!

But now we get to:

The Problemaddtic Plague

AKA, "The Plural Community Traumatized Us." That document Blue wrote strictly because Sophie is just such a monster that she needs to be deplatformed? Now includes me, nox, dude, sophie, I think Cambrian? I don't know, it's too many damn words for me to follow. I genuinely do not have the time to fucking reread the entire goddamn document. I cannot devote myself to someone else's blatant trauma spiral.

And yet, here I am, doing so, because I am at my limit.

Over the past few weeks, Blue has been having a very public meltdown on their blog about me and Dude's crimes. Primarily Dude, but the issues they have stem from my "Callout" of them. Reminder: I never once said their name in the original post. I did not focus on the callout, beyond saying it was poorly written. I only mentioned it as context for why Sophie's bullshit amped up.

I do not follow Blue, nor does Dude. Dude has been blocked for a very long time and does not look at Blue's blog. We were alerted to this by a very concerned friend. They wanted to warn me, October 23, that Blue was posting vitriol about Dude.

I'm not linking all of them here. These posts are very, very obviously a traumatized individual having a very public trauma spiral. They weren't tagged in main tags, and I can only thank God for that. However, I will address a few things from the 7 posts I can see about Dude.

My pronouns are They/Them. You repeatedly called me He/Him, and once They&, the latter of which can be incredibly triggering for my dissociation. Just... for future reference, for all those reading (which should not be Blue) -- I use They/Them.

Blue said they didn't WANT Dude to be nice, they NEEDED him to be nice. If you are this attached to an internet stranger for your emotional needs, then you are in desperate need of help. People online should not be your emotional crutch.

Blue did not "usher Dude into the pro-endo community." Blue welcomed him, along with hundreds of other people. Blue is not Dude's savior. They're a traumatized person, same as the rest of us, doing their best.

Nobody is weak for saying, "I'm too traumatized and fucked up to support this." Nobody is weak for saying, "The other side is a person too."

I did not publicly bash Blue. I never said their name. The document was bad in my eyes, but the post was not about Blue. It was about my friend, and the damage Sophie does, and the damage everyone in syscourse does, largely unintentionally -- though at this point, I have to think it's intentional.

Dude encouraged Blue to make the document which he told them he could not read, because he could not do it himself.

I do not "continue to bash Blue on SAS." I wrote a single post. One. Blue's the one who continues to bash us on their blog, writing post after post about me, when I have wanted nothing to do with them for months.

Someone can interact with a user who traumatized them, but still be too fucked up to work on a discourse filled triggering document. Those are two VERY different things.

Blue did post sexual content online. Blue DID post horrendous things. Dude did not get their blog terminated. They did that themselves, through their actions.

If years upon years of Dude fighting against Sophie and documenting her shit did not stop syscourse in its tracks to deplatform her, then Blue's document had no hope. To believe otherwise -- and furthermore, to blame Dude's lack of ability to work on a highly triggering thing on the document's failure -- is to be completely out of touch.

Anyways.

Me and Dude continued to ignore. We tried to keep Blue out of everything. We didn't want to draw attention to their public spiral. It was around this time, though, that I saw that the callout document was renamed, and that I was suddenly being listed as a traumatizer. Wonderful.

We still ignored it. Whatever, you know? People have spread lies about us since the day we became popular. Whatever. It's fine.

Nevermind that this is directly mimicking the trauma that Blue detailed about SN. Nevermind that this is exactly what happened before. Nevermind that we are trying to hold our tongues, just like last time, because we're trying to avoid once again retriggering a vulnerable person. Nevermind that we're both one step away from killing ourselves.

No, our feelings don't matter more than Blue's, clearly. And what does it matter, right? It's one person.

But then Blue decides to bring it up nearly a month later, in main tags, comparing Dude to Sophie, hurting everyone in the process. And then you started lying about what was happening, saying Dude still followed you.

Let's address that post briefly, actually.

The difference between Dude and Sophie's actions are that Sophie repeatedly brought it up to make fun of the trauma someone was experiencing, and to say that DNIs were pointless. Dude brought up Blue's DNI because it was added after Blue had already triggered half of syscourse, and Blue added it as some sort of shield for criticism. Dude was ignoring Blue's DNI because the DNI was being used in bad faith. Sophie was ignoring DNIs specifically to traumatize people (ahem, to "defend herself"). Those are not the same thing.

Blue did trigger CSA victims. That is not debatable; that is not something Blue can justify. "I only did it because I was triggered!" That's still not okay. That is still not justification.

Blue turned reblogs off on the post where they triggered anti-endos paranoia after it was already addressed and criticized. Blue then changed the post to have a cock and balls. This is bullshit.

"taking the piss outta the situation was all we had left." Reminder: "taking the piss outta the situation" was actually repeatedly tagging the public tags with things like "sucking my cock is all you're good for" and "sysmeds are just mad that im not dissociative," WHICH multiple people said triggered them.

"bc we were not traumagenic so its ok to dehumanize us." Nobody came after them because they weren't traumagenic. They came after Blue because Blue triggered them.

"mod dude doesnt have to take any accountability for their role in the whole thing because they r pro sys conversation now" They want the drama to be done. Blue kept insisting they draw attention to it.

And then a new blog formed calling Dude and me out in their pinned post, using Blue's document.

Snapping

Dude reached out to Blue via Discord. Everything finally came to a head, and Dude tried to get to the bottom of it, tried to understand what in the fuck was happening, tried to get Blue to understand what was happening.

Blue posted that Dude was trying to "silence them."

So.

Dude finally made a post. And spoke up. We weren't allowed to, last time this bullshit happened to us, so we finally are now, because for fucks sake, I don't want to die.

The post shows the discord conversation that Dude had with Blue. It isn't pretty. It's once again a traumatized person doing traumatized things.

Just like this post is.

Just like all of Blue's posts had been.

Just like all of this situation is.

Where's this leave us?

I don't know. It's Saturday. I have grades to do. I have a cold house with no heat. I have a partner to take care of, and hunger that needs fixing, and I'm so, so tired.

I'm actively suicidal. I'm trying to figure out how to stay alive long enough to marry my partner, if I still can.

But I also managed to update my fanfic last night. And I'm looking forward to seeing my kids rage about the end of the shitty ass novel we're reading. Maybe we can rage together. I'm looking forward to Thanksgiving with my real family.

I'm trying to move past this.

I hope Blue can.

I hope Dude can.

I hope Nox, and Sophie, and everyone else in that shitty document or affected by this bullshit can.

And I hope those reading this can understand these things:

Callout documents are worthless beyond hurting people. That's all they do. Evidence: every callout document ever.

Drama like this shouldn't exist, but if it does, it should be private. Not broadcast to the tags on tumblr.

Everyone needs to leave us alone. Everyone involved needs to be able to be left alone.

If I catch any of my followers breathing a word in Blue's direction, you will be blocked. If I catch anyone in my inbox with a word about Blue, I will either be blocking you, or likely, I'll be too kind and send you a private message of "hey fuck you."

Please, just leave us alone.

[malaismere]

C3 Ship Statistics for 2022 (monthly)

Second set of graphs! I have problems. I already posted a break down weekly/per episode but this time we're going by months. One key difference is that this includes fics where ship tags were retroactively added instead of what was being published That Week, as well as the broader range gives more general trends.

(for previous ship stats...check out my ao3 stats tag)

Starting out...a chart of the top ships. These are every ship > 50 fics on AO3.

C3 starts in late October 21; Dorian leaves at the end of February 22. EXU Calamity was in June of 22, and the fight with Otohan is in September.

So, Laudna & Imogen are the dominant ship. They started out strong, but trailed off through the early few months, before jumping high up with all the Gnarlrock drama...and then even higher with Laudna's death (which breaks the top of the graph here at 157). Dorym was dominant while he was around but drops off after the departure, staying mostly constant as the second ship.

Ashrym & Ashton/Dorian were tied back while Dorian was around, but Ashton/Dorina dropped off while Ashrym stayed constant (the rise at the end is for Ashrym week and may not be indicative of a long term rise). Doriax is an EXU top ship but while it got a resergence in early C3 really never took hold. And Orym/Will stands out as being background but with peaks during the Heartmoor arc (revealed story) and around Orym's death in September.

Now, for some more specific analysis, we're getting character by character below the cut.

Chetney Pock O'Pea

I'm doing these in table order but a part of me kind of doesn't want to because this is absolutely nothing. I put an ot4 with a single fic on here because there was literally Nothing Else. The only thing that has been excluded here is a Fearne/Chetney/Reader fic. These are Every Single Ship Tags Chetney has.

No one wants to ship this old man.

Laudna

Cutting off the top (which peaks at 150) so that we can actually see the other ships small though they may be. Laudna & Imogen start off strong and only get stronger in Basuras, and are only just now coming down from that high. Everything else is tiny.

So, Fearne is a background pairing that is strongly linked to the ot3 with Laudna and Imogen. For other ships, Dorian is strongest early on, dropping out when he leaves; there's a peak with Dusk when they're around that doesn't stick, and since then there's been a rise in Laudna/Ashton connected with her death although still tiny in comparison.

Fresh Cut Grass

So, FCG has more going on than Chetney but Not By Much. Ashton/FCG starts off strong but drops off severely, only recently picking up again. There is one fic in November, a drabble collection, that has Laudna, Fearne, Imogen, and Orym as well as some NPCs you can see all hiding under just Orym, but other than that it's just a few fics early on.

No one wants to ship the robit.

Fearne Calloway

So, Fearne has the widest range of popular ships...she's got higher counts than FCG and Chetney but nothing really breaks out as strongly as with Laudogen or Dorym.

Back in EXU, Opal was the dominant pairing, and it gets a few fics here and there following. Fearne/Laudna and Fearne/Imogen never really broke offthe ground, and both are highly linked to the OT3 pairing - although Fearne/Imogen is slightly stronger.

The Fearne/Orym/Dorian ot3 was the dominant ship through early C3, although Fearne/Orym had presence before that, although Dorian/Fearne didn't. It peaked in February with Dorian's departure and then fell off...although there's a resurgence of the OT3 specifically (and not really Fearne/Orym or Fearne/Dorian) in September with Orym's death.

But definitely the biggest show is Callowmoore. It doesn't hit off until March, and it's definitely the big showing there peaking in May at 15, although it falls off after August - as attention shifted towards every other thing happening then.

Imogen Temult

Laudna/Imogen is even more dominant with Imogen than it was with Laudna...Dorian drops off immediately after he leaves, and no one else ever takes the place.

Fearne/Imogen does have points of being stronger than the ot3 unlike Laudna/Fearne, but even then they're still linked and not big. You can see a bit of Orym again in February but not afterwards, and there's a small Dusk peak in August, but everything else is very low and flat.

Orym

So, first things first, Dorym is our big ship here. It existed in EXU, but hits its stride in early C3, December through February being the high points. It tapers off some after Dorian leaves, but stays the top ship for Orym throughout.

Ashton is pretty clearly the second runner up...Ashrym week pushes it to the number one spot in December 22 but I don't know if that'll stick around. It onlyy gets broken up by the less consistent Orym/Will peaks - in March with the full backstory reveal and in September at Orym's death/visions.

Fearne/Orym is a steady low-show in EXU and early campaign, mostly tied with the OT3, but both drop off after the Will reveal. Similarly, Imogen was an early small ship that vanished to basically nothing in February. And, the Orym/Ashton/Dorian OT3 is in the same range, highest in October 22.....for Kinktober.

Ashton Greymoore

Ashrym & Ashton/Dorian were pretty neck and neck up through January, before it falls off with Dorian's departure. Ashrym is the dominant save for the May Callowmoore peak, although Callowmoore falls back down while Ashrym stays steady. The December peak is for Ashrym week and may not represent a consistent shift.

For other fics...Callowmoore is definitely the main number two from March through August, but in September we start to see Laudna. FCG is pretty background, peaks, Imogen even lower. Callowmoore does seem to be on the rise again, but December is usually a peak for fics...

Interestingly enough, Milo never has any peaks but has been pretty solid in a few fics per month and hasn't really hit zero since introduction despite not showing up in stream.

Dorian Storm

Alright, so, as with Orym, Dorym dominates heavily, drops off after his departure. While lower, Dorian has a pretty wide range of ships - Ashton, Imogen, and Laudna are all pretty close during the November/December range, Ashton the strongest in January, altough they all fall off post-departure.

Doriax was the top EXU ship, and is comparable to peak Dorym but did not have staying power - close to Imogen and Laudna, really, and definitely has trailed off alongside them.

Fearne/Dorian is very strongly linked to the ot3 pairing with Orym; Dorian/Ashton is less connected to it's ot3 with Orym.

Dusk

Here mostly for symmetry; July and August is when Dusk was on the show and its pretty isolated to then, although Laudna gets a few fics trailing. All Laudna/Imogen/Dusk variants: my gut says the dynamic has no real staying power, but part of that is probably how Laudna-focused writers were very quickly distracted by her death.

Miscellaneous

Laudna & Imogen have been each others top ship for 100% of the campaign. This has not happened before; closest for the Mighty Nein is Beauyasha at 70%, and while I only used 3-month blocks for Vox Machina because it was after the fact, all three canon ships there were only 90%.

The top 10 ships have been pretty consistent; the order hasn't really changed since Callowmoore jumped up to be #5. Friendships are less stable, but that's mostly due to lower numbers, and even there the top 4 haven't changed since start of Jan 22.

Top 10 Ships

Laudogen (94% for both of them)

Dorym (76% for Dorian, 67% for Orym)

Ashrym (54% for Ashton)

Ashton/Dorian

Callowmoore

Fearne/Orym

Laudna/Dorian

Imogen/Dorian

Fearne/Dorian

Ashton/FCG (75% for FCG)

tied with Fearne/Chetney (94% for Chetney)

Fearne was the only character with ship tags for every other character (excluding Dusk, who isn't included for this section).

Fearne also had the widest range of ships, with Chetney, Imogen, and Laudna the smallest. Orym had the greatest share, and FCG the least.

Top 10 Friendships

Laudna & Imogen (73% of Laudna's, 62% of Imogen's)

Orym & Dorian (61% of Dorian's)

FCG & Ashton (77% of FCG's)

Fearne & Orym

Orym & Ashton

Imogen & Orym

Imogen & Ashton

Imogen & Dorian

Fearne & Imogen

Fearne & Dorian

Orym had the widest range, FCG the least. Orym also had the greatest share, and Chetney the least.

Most Romantic/Platonic

So, this is based off dividing the number of "/" tags by the number of "&" tags for the same pairing. Values greater than 1 are therefore more romantic, and values <1 more platonic. This doesn't take into account the fact romantic fics are often tagged with the platonic.

The top 5 most romantic pairings are Ashton/Dorian, Dorym, Callowmoore, Laudogen, and Chetney/Fearne

The top 5 most platonic pairings, excluding those which had no "/" fics (Chetney & everyone but Fearne and Dorian, Laudna/Orym, and FCG/Dorian) are Imogen/Ashton, FCG/Imogen, Chetney/Dorian, Imogen/Orym, and FCG/Ashton

The most contentious (closest to 1:1) are Fearne/Dorian, Imogen/Dorian, FCG/Fearne, Fearne/Imogen, and Laudna/Ashton

...next up I'm going to be refreshing my M9 & VM stats and doing a comparison between campaigns, so keep an eye out for that.

[sillydg]

Foul Play (Tobias X MC)

Book: Open heart, somewhere in book 3 Rating: 18+ Pairing: Tobias X MC ((Elisabeth Sarah Hughes (Liz))

Wordcount: 1169

A/N: This is my first time for the Wacky Drabble: “Two can play that game.” @wackydrabbles A/N: Sorry, it’s a bit longer than 1.000 ☹ I hope that’s Okay. A/N: English is not my first language, so there might be a lot of Grammarly mistakes. I’m sorry!

Warnings: A little bit of smut and flirting. Mild foul language.

Summary: It’s Friday night and Bryce, Rafael, Tobias and Liz are having their weekly laser tag battle going on!

Rafael, Bryce and Tobias belong to Pixelberry.

Foul play.

"All right Bryce, are you ready to kick some serious butt?" Liz walks towards Bryce who is waiting for her in front of the game hall.

He gives her his most bright smile; “We are so going to win. The seventh time is a charm right?! But on another note.. What the hell are you wearing?

It’s almost as hot as me this evening and you’re walking in a long autumn jacket, some weird boots, and what did you do with your hair?”

She wears her brown hair up, in a tight ponytail, with her tail braided down. “What? Don’t you like it? I just came prepared after the stunt Tobias pulled last week”

“Which you keep referring to, but Raf and I still don't know what actually happened. And yes, I do like your hairdo, but I might like it a bit too much. And to be honest I don’t think that distracting your teammate is the a winning strategy we are looking for.”

“Except, when you also distract the two enemies, right?”

“What are you talking about, Liz?”

“You’ll see, hon. Now let’s go inside, Raf and T. are waiting for us!”

They walk inside, to be greeted by Tobias and Rafael.

“I almost thought that you guys chickened out.” Tobias greets them with a huge grin. “But I'm glad we are getting the chance to kick your sexy asses for the seventh week in a row!”

Liz gives him a playful shove against the shoulder. “Well, that’s only because of the foul play you pulled last week.”

“Me? Cheating? Are you serious that desperate, Elisabeth? Shame on you, accusing me of such naughty things. Tell me, Hughes, how DO you sleep at night?”

“I sleep very well, thank you very much.”

The two of them keep bickering while Raf and Bruce are standing at the sidelines, enjoying the show.

Bryce lowers his voice and leans a bit toward Rafael; “How long do you think they can hold up this, ‘We’re only co-workers’ act.”

“Yeah, I give them two weeks before they end up in bed together.”

Bryce grins. “Tops.” He checks his watch. “Come on Raf, our game is starting.” He calls out to Liz and Tobias; Mom, dad come on we're running late and you know that we might break things without parental supervision.”

They enter the hall, and the boys start with putting on their laser tag gear. After finishing up Tobias starts with entering their names into the computer. “Last chance to switch to my winning team, Liz.”

“In your dreams, mister. I’m perfectly happy with Bruce. And besides, today you can enter Lara as my name, instead of Liz.”

Three heads snap in her direction as she opens her coat and lets it slip onto a chair. She is dressed in a black tank top, revealing part of her belly, combined with very, very short brown short and long brown boots.

Raf and Bryce stare at her as Tobias snaps his fingers in front of their faces. “I think that you broke them, Liz.”

Bryce walks up to her. “Are those strap-on holsters on your upper legs? And damn.. now I get the boots. Please forgive me for ever calling those weird.”

“Yeah, you like it?” She wraps her body armor around her waist before putting her laser guns into the holsters.

“God, do I.”

“You know what, I might need to warm up a little bit before going in.” She bends forward and starts to stretch.”

Tobias rolls his eyes as Bryce and Rafael are almost drooling at the sight of her. “All right, guys. The show is over. Come on. In you go.” He utters them towards the entrance of the laser tag area.”

Liz brushes past Tobias and follows Rafael and Bryce inside.

He stays behind, hypnotized by the swaying of her hip.

She smiles and feels him staring at her. “Enjoying the view, Carrick?”

“One of the perks of being the last person to enter the room, Lara.”

Bryce and Liz, and Rafael and Tobias move each to their corner, at the opposites of the room.

“Okay, Bryce. We need to have a game plan.”

He just stares at her.

“For god's sake, Bryce.”

“You should warn me next time Liz when you’re pulling stunts like this. I was not mentally prepared. Where did you get this idea from anyway?”

“Three weeks ago we were drunken gaming with Elijah, Raf, and Tobias and we were playing Tomb raider.”

“Right.”

“And since we were very drunk and there was no filter, Tobias confessed that Lara was one of his fantasies.”

Bryce pinched the bridge of his nose. “Oh, God and dressing up like her was a great idea, how?”

“Bryce, are you kidding me. With both of them distracted, we are so going to win!”

BUZZZZZZ. Okay, that's the signal and she jumps up. “Come on Bryce. You take right, and I take left.”

She sneaks through the area when she feels someone grabbing her wrist and pulling her into a tight space. She looks directly into the eyes of Tobias as he locks her against the wall with his body.

“You are not playing fair here, miss Croft.”

She smiles at him teasingly “Well Tobias, remember last week?”

He smirks and his eyes start gleaming. “You mean, the moment where I took my shirt off to distract you and got the winning point?”

“No I mean, when you took your harness off, so there was no way for me to shoot you.”

“Tomato-tomahto'.

She grabs her harness and drops it to the ground. She pulls him close, and whispers in his ear “Two can play that game.” After a small bite on his earlobe, she frees herself from his grip and shoots him with her laser pistol.

He pulls her close and whispers. “God Liz you broke me. I honestly don’t care anymore about winning, I surrender and give up my wins retroactively. Such foul play, Hughes. And here I am, only caring about getting my hands on you, while being so confused about wanting to keep these clothes on, but also wanting to rip them of you...” He lets his hands drift over her body and looks her in the eyes, lips almost touching. Liz closes the distance and pulls him in for a passionate kiss. He picks her up and she wraps her legs around him as she gets pressed into the wall. In an instant, she feels his warm hands moving over her almost bare thighs. "God, yes, Tobias."

Tobias pulls back with some effort. “Yeah, Fuck it. I’m taking you home right now. We’ll return this stuff later.”

He carries her out of the area, leaving Bryce and Rafael behind, who both changed their bets after Bryce explained Liz's plan to Rafael.

Bryce starts smirking and claps Rafael on his shoulder. “Within the fifteen minutes. Well, I guess you pay our bill tonight at Donahue's bud.”

Rafael grins. “Come on. Let’s go.”

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

Taglist: @jerzwriter

@wackydrabbles @openheartfanfics @choicesficwriterscreations Please let me know if you want to be added or removed

[redbeardace]

Between Panic and Indifference

Okay, serious post time.

As you may know, I live near Seattle.  And if you’ve been paying attention to the news (in between the politics), you’ll know that we’re currently going through a bit of something.  I’ve been making jokes about it, but I sort of want to talk seriously about some of what it’s like here right now.

Quick recap:  About a month ago, it was announced that the first case of COVID-19/coronavirus had popped up in Everett, Washington.  Everett’s one of the larger suburbs of Seattle, home to a Boeing airplane factory, FunkoPop HQ, and Half-Price Books that I go to once in a while.  It was someone who’d been to Wuhan in China and got sick after returning to the US.  He went to the doctor, got quarantined, and that was it.  The system worked, the disease was contained, the guy got better.  And that was it.

Until last week.  Last week, they closed Bothell High School “out of an abundance of caution” in order to clean it, because a family member of someone who works at the school had gotten sick after returning from overseas travel.  Bothell is a smaller suburb than Everett.  It’s largely unremarkable, one of those places that takes up three exits on the freeway, but no one really understands why.  It’s also where I live, so hearing that the high school was closed was a bit unnerving, but also a bit ridiculous because it was all speculation.  It was a family member of a school worker, and that employee was staying home.  And it turned out that there was nothing to it, that family member did not have COVID-19.  But at least the high school got cleaned.

False alarm, back to your regularly scheduled--

Scoop Jackson High School in Mill Creek is closed on Friday, this time for a confirmed case.  Mill Creek is an even smaller suburb, sandwiched between Bothell and Everett, and it’s where my post office and a grocery store I go to is. A student had the “flu” earlier in the week, went to the doctor, the doctor said go home, get better.  So the student did that.  They got better and went back to school on Friday.  Unbeknownst to them, their doctor had performed a coronavirus test.  The student hadn’t been out of the country, hadn’t been around anyone who’d been out of the country, so they shouldn’t have had it, the doctor was just performing the test as part of some study.

It was positive.

They hadn’t been out of the country.  They hadn’t been around anyone who had been.  The only known case in the area had been contained.  There were a few cases in California that were mysterious, but at least those were linked to a possibly mismanaged quarantine situation.  But in Mill Creek, there wasn’t any of that.  Sure, it’s next to Everett where the first case was, but that was contained.  So what the hell?

Later that night, there was another case of “possible coronavirus” in Bellevue, the city where I work.

Then Saturday happened.  The first confirmed death, in Kirkland, Washington.  You know Kirkland as the Kirkland from “Kirkland Brand” at Costco.  I know Kirkland as the place I drive through on my commute that’s between Bothell and Bellevue.  Several more hospitalizations.  A news conference talks about the death and the hospitalizations and, almost as a side note, mentions 50+ people connected to a nursing home, also in Kirkland, as showing symptoms.  Fifty people.  I’m going to come back to that.  None of these people had been to China or Italy and I don’t think any of them knew anyone who had.  So what the hell?

Later that night, a scientist from a local research facility posts a short Twitter thread that potentially could have gone unnoticed.  It’s a Twitter thread for crying out loud, who knows what kind of crackpot this could be?  But it’s not a crackpot.  It actually is a local research scientist.  The thread kinda gets right to the point.  An analysis of a sample of the virus from the first patient genetically matches a sample of virus from the Mill Creek student, therefore it is highly likely that the virus has been circulating around the area, on the loose, for six weeks.

Oh.

That deadly disease that we’ve been watching cripple other parts of the world, killing thousands.  That’s here.  Now.  And it’s been here for weeks.

And by here, I mean HERE.  You may have noticed that all those cities I mentioned are places that I go regularly.  “Here” is literally right outside my door.  I am in the bright red bullseye of the hot zone, as this virus swirls around me.

After Saturday, it’s a bit of a blur what happened when, but the specifics really don’t matter.  More cases, more deaths, a Seattle skyscraper closes, Amazon closes, Microsoft closes, more schools close, including the entire Northshore School District (the district I live in), which closed today for the next two weeks.

--

So that’s the recap.  That brings us up to now.  But you could’ve gotten all that by watching the news.  I’m really writing this post to talk about what it’s like here at the moment.

I think the scariest thing about it all is that we don’t know how scared to be.  We’re used to thinking of disasters in terms of a concrete event.  Something happened, you can see the impact.  An earthquake, a school shooting, a hurricane, a terrorist attack, a volcanic eruption, a nuclear meltdown.  Most of the time, it ends, you can count the bodies, tally up the damage, and that’s that.  Even in a longer term event, you can see the lava coming and get out of the way or look at a map of the Chernobyl or Fukushima exclusion zones and avoid those places.

But this is an invisible disaster.  It’s literally in the air around us.  It’s on door handles and shopping carts and library books.  Your coworker or neighbor or roommate could be The Thing, and you have no way of knowing.  We’re playing a dangerous game of tag against an invisible opponent, and you have no idea you’re it until way too late.  

Even worse, we have absolutely no idea whatsoever how bad it actually is.  The latest official number I can find as of this writing is that there are 39 confirmed cases, and ten of those have died.  A significant number of those cases are associated with that nursing home I mentioned earlier.  So 39 isn’t bad at all, out of a couple million people in this region.  Even if you limit it to just the “bright red bullseye of the hotzone”, that’s several hundred thousand people.  So 39 out of that is nothing.  But you’ll remember that I mentioned that there were 50+ people connected to that nursing home that were sick, and only some of them are counted in that 39 number.  Then there’s a bunch of firefighters in the area who went to that nursing home, who are sick.  Family members who are sick.  And that student in Mill Creek and the first guy who died got it from somewhere...  And other random people just popping up here and there who had to get it from somewhere.  You add those all up, and it’s probably 100+ cases, but for some reason, they’re not yet confirmed (or even tested), so they don’t show up in the official counts yet.

They weren’t really testing people who hadn’t been overseas or been in contact with someone who had been, until this week.  It’s been here, on the loose, for six weeks.  There are probably thousands of cases that have gone undiagnosed.  For most people, it’s like the flu.  So how many cases of the “flu” were really COVID-19?  They’re retroactively discovering people who died prior to Saturday who had it.  Their deaths had been chalked up to some other respiratory disease.

So it’s here and it’s killing people.  But...  It’s been here for six weeks and we’re not all dead yet.  So what does that mean?  Is the disease not actually as bad as people feared?  Sure, it sucks if you get it and it’s really bad if you’re old or already sick, but so’s the flu, and we haven’t panicked about that since Seattle made it to the Stanley Cup.  If that’s the case then maybe this is as bad as it gets, which, frankly, isn’t that bad at all and we’re all overreacting.  Or are we just at the start of the spread and it’s about to go Beast Mode on us and lay us flat for two years?  We don’t know.

Everything’s shutting down except huge gatherings like ECCC and the Sounders games.  King County just bought a motel to use as a quarantine site.  Stay in your car on the ferry.  Awkwardly jab elbows instead of shaking hands.  But only ten people have died out of 4 million, and all of those ten had “underlying conditions”, and it hasn’t been bad enough for anyone to notice until now, so...

So what are we supposed to do about all this?  Raid every store for every last bottle of Purell and every last roll of toilet paper and hunker down in our homes like it’s the end of days?  Or do nothing in particular because enh no biggie?

It’s like we’re standing on a beach and we’ve been told that maybe a tsunami is coming.  We’ve been standing here for a month and a half, and the water is up to our ankles and we’ve just noticed our feet are wet.  Is the tsunami still coming?  Is this the tsunami?  Or is this just the tide?

It’s weird living like this.  You find yourself doing things in different ways, noticing things you never noticed.  Every morning now, I’m checking my work email before driving in, just in case we’ve been told to work from home “out of an abundance of caution”, or worse, told that we need to self-quarantine because someone in the office tested positive.  Every night, I bring my laptop home in case this is the last day I’m in the office for a while.  Everyone’s telling a lot of morbid jokes.  Traffic is amazing.  There are even spots on the second level of the parking garage and there are NEVER spots on the second level when I get in.  Every cough is treated with suspicion, and your coworkers cough a lot.  Every door handle is treated with suspicion, and there are a lot of door handles. No one from the other offices is allowed to travel to our office and we’re not allowed to go elsewhere.  I’m getting targeted ads for hand sanitizer and Windex. I had a slight tickle in my throat that might just be allergies, but I started mentally doing contact tracing of everywhere I’d been and everyone I’d talked to over the past two weeks.  I’ve never even considered that I might have allergies before.  I have a day off tomorrow, so do I risk going to the store to make sure I have at least three weeks of supplies, instead of only the two weeks I currently have, just in case?  Or do I go to the store just to see the circus of empty shelves?  Or do I go to the store to buy an Xbox One X so if I do get quarantined, at least I can be quarantined with True 4K Gaming?

--

I was listening to the radio this morning, and they were interviewing musician Dave Matthews about the coronavirus.  He was talking about touring while this is going on, and how he might come home to Seattle between the legs of his tour, and he said something like “We’ve got to find a balance between panic and indifference”.  And I just felt like that’s the best possible way to describe where we are right now.

Seattle:  Somewhere between panic and indifference.

[indiaalphawhiskey]

PU Drabble #1

Note: This plot has been sitting in my mind for a while, but I really, really cannot afford to start another WIP. So, as a writing exercise, I’m just going to keep writing in this universe in short drabbles and posting them under the tag “Political Unrest ABO”. Please excuse my self-indulgence. xx For @theficwritersblock​. I love you very much, friend! :D ----- “This is ridiculous. You’re being ridiculous,” Louis said, enunciating each word rather pointedly. “Niall, tell His Royal Highness Prince Liam James Geoff Bartholomew, Prince of Wales, Earl of Chester, Duke of Cornwall, Duke of Rothesay, Earl of Carrick, Baron of Renfrew, Lord of the Isles and Prince and Great Steward of Scotland that he’s being ridiculous.”

Liam sighed and leaned back in his chair, so, so tired. “You know I can have you tried for treason for using my title like that, right?” 

The threat was drastically dimmed by the way his hands slid frustratedly down his face, making him look like a modern version of Van Gogh’s ‘The Scream’.

“Please,” Louis scoffed, over his shoulder. He looked back out the window at the expansive, rolling grounds. “You didn’t even have me tried for treason when I told the Headmaster all of Niall’s Playboys were yours in secondary.”

“I remember that,” Niall chuckled, uncapping the glass decanter in the corner. “Think that saved me from expulsion, honestly.”

“Glad I could help,” Liam deadpanned, still behind his hands. “Nevermind that Jamie Langford called me ‘His Royal Pervert’ for the rest of sixth form.”

“Mm,” Louis hummed thoughtfully, turning to face the boys, and resting his arse on the windowsill easily. His eyes sparkled wickedly. “Maybe you should have him tried for treason, retroactively.”

“Louis,” Liam whined to the ceiling, and it amazed Louis how dignified Liam could be, even while whining. “I swear I’ll have every single one of your ex-boyfriends locked in the Tower of London tomorrow if you just promise to go.”

Louis paused, pretending to consider the tempting offer, but when Liam sat up, eyes alert and wide with hope, he dropped the act.

“Li,” Louis tried, his guilt skyrocketing as he watched Liam’s face fall. “You know I can’t. The first Omega candidate for Prime Minister running scared three weeks before the election? That’s playing right into the oppositions’ hands.”

Liam stared at him, his eyes wide. “Louis, you woke up to a death threat nailed to the headboard of your bed and no sign of forced entry, for fuck’s sake. I couldn’t give a rat’s arse about the opposition right now!”

“I can’t run every fucking time someone threatens me, Liam,” Louis argued, voice sharp but even. “That’s exactly what they want, and you know it. God,” he chuckled humorlessly. “I can see the tabloids now: ‘Prime Minister Hopeful and Supposed Gender Equality Advocate Louis Tomlinson Locks Self In Bunker and Sets Omega Rights Movement Back Three Centuries!’”

“Probably too long for a headline, that,” Niall mused, unhelpful. When both men glared back at him, he only shrugged. “What? I majored in Journalism, sue me.”

“You majored in Financial Journalism, Christiana Amanpour,” Louis shot back.

“‘S the same ––”

“Louis, listen to me,” Liam cut in, standing up from his desk and striding smoothly towards him. “I know you would do anything for the good of this country. I know you want to change it, I know you want to fight. But you can’t do that with a fucking bullet in your back!”

“No one’s going to assassinate me –”

“You don’t know that!” Liam screeched. “You saw how those stuck up misogynists reacted when you inherited your father’s seat in the House of Lords. I thought they were going to straight up strap a bomb to your chair –”

“Well I fucking survived, didn’t I?” Louis yelled back. “I showed up without security every bloody day, and fought my fights, and I’m not going to back down now!”

“This is different, though, Lou,” Niall interrupted from where he was standing, his voice suddenly somber. “This isn’t one seat in a hundred. You’re the most controversial candidate for Prime Minister in the last century, and it looks like you’re going to win. The opposition is going to get desperate.”

“So you want me to run away? Are you mad?” Louis asked, unable to accept the words that were coming out of his mouth. “Why don’t I just put on an apron that says ‘Mate Me, I’m Pretty’ and set the Omega flag on fire, while I’m at it?”

“You’re not running,” Liam said firmly. “You’re lying low. You’ll go to the cabin for a week, just to give us some time to talk to MI5 and come up with a game plan without a target on your back.”

“It’s campaign suicide--” “Better than murder,” Niall threw in, face stern, and if Niall was being this serious, maybe it was dire. Still, Louis rolled his eyes. “I don’t really get how dumping me in a cabin in the middle of nowhere, by myself, is going to deter assassins from finding me,” he answered, voice bordering petulant. “If anything, they’ll have me cornered where it’s easy to dump the body.”

“Do not joke like that, Louis William Tomlinson,” Liam barked, immediately paling as the Alpha timbre slipped out. “I’m sorry,” he rushed to say, raising his hands towards Louis in surrender. “You know I didn’t mean to do that.”

Louis swallowed, trying to fight the familiar nausea of displeasing an Alpha that was curling thickly at the bottom of his belly. God, fuck biology. Fuck biology sideways, honestly.

“It’s okay, I know,” he managed to say, feeling placated by the sheer amount of guilt pouring out of Liam’s eyes. Liam stepped forward then, and put a hand on his shoulder.

“Louis, please,” he nearly begged, looking more pained than Louis had ever seen him. “You know I would never pull rank – gender or otherwise.” He looked straight at Louis, apologetic. “But if this is what it takes to keep my best friend safe, I will command you to go.”

Louis paused, biting his tongue between his teeth as he thought this through. Admittedly, he was shaken – the image of him lying alone, asleep and vulnerable, while a stranger, possibly armed, traipsed comfortably through his flat was enough to make his stomach turn – and though he knew his campaign would take a massive hit if he lay low even for a week, Liam was right. He would be of no use to Britain if whomever was threatening him got their way first.

Slowly, he smirked, the left side of his lip curling upward.

“I have been meaning to take a holiday,” he joked, weakly.

“Oh thank God,” Liam sighed in relief, pulling Louis into a hug.

“Whoop whoop!” Niall added, joining in. They squeezed tight around him, rocking Louis back and forth like they used to when he’d scored a goal for Eton at a championship game and Louis smiled, knowing that no matter what the world threw at him, at least he had these two.

Then, Liam pulled away, slapping his shoulder twice. “I’ll tell Harry to pack his things.”

Like a record playing with a faulty needle, Louis brain skipped.

“Wait,” he said, holding his hand up. “Who?”

Liam blinked.

“Harry Styles,” he answered easily, like he had mentioned him all along. “Head of Royal Household Security, Alpha Cavalry. My bodyguard. Well,” he paused, his eyes happy. “I guess your bodyguard, now.”

[lesbeet]

not to be a nerd but i accidentally just wrote a whole impromptu essay about editing ndjsdksksk im throwing it under a cut bc it's fucking inane and really long but honestly... i just want other people to become as passionate about editing as i am lmaooooo

i also recommend 2 books in the post so if anything at least check those out!

quality books about editing... *chef's kiss* a lot of the basic ones (including blog posts online n such) are geared towards beginners and end up repeating the same info/advice, much of it either oversimplified or misrepresented tbh. but i read one yesterday and i'm reading another one right now that really convey this passion for editing + consideration for it as its own sort of art and i just!!

it's such a weird thing to be passionate about lmao but i AM and i've spent a lot of time the past year or so consciously honing my craft (ik i mention this like 4 times a week i'm just really proud of how much i've learned and improved) and kind of like. solidifying my instincts into conscious choices i guess?

and these GOOD editing books have both a) taught me new information and/or presented familiar information through a new perspective that helped me understand something differently or in more depth, and b) validated or even just put into words certain preferences or techniques that i've developed on my own, that i don't normally see on those more basic lists i mentioned

btw the book i finished yesterday is self-editing for fiction writers: how to edit yourself into print by renni brown and dave king, and the one i'm reading currently is the artful edit: on the practice of editing yourself by susan bell.

the former was pretty sharp and straightforward. the authors demonstrated some of their points directly in the text, which was usually funny enough that i would show certain quotes to my sister without context

("Just think about how much power a single obscenity can have if it’s the only one in the whole fucking book." <- (it was)

"Frequent italics have come to signal weak writing. So you should never resort to them unless they are the only practical choice, as with the kind of self-conscious internal dialogue shown above or an occasional emphasis."

or, my favorite: "There are a few stylistic devices that are so “tacky” they should be used very sparingly, if at all. First on the list is emphasis quotes, as in the quotes around the word “tacky” in the preceding sentence. The only time you need to use them is to show you are referring to the word itself, as in the quotes around the word “tacky” in the preceding sentence. Read it again; it all makes sense.")

and like i said, i also learned some new ideas or techniques (or they articulated vague ideas i already had but struggled to put into practice), AND they mentioned some suggestions that ive literally never seen anyone else bring up (not to say no one has! just that ive never seen it, and ive seen a lot in terms of writing tips, advice, best practices, etc) that ive already sort of established in my own writing

for example they went into pretty fine detail about dialogue mechanics, more than i usually see, and in talking about the pacing and proportion of "beats" and dialogue in a given scene, they explicitly suggested that, if a character speaks more than a sentence or two and you plan on giving them some sort of dialogue tag or an action to perform as a beat, the tag or action should be placed at one of the earliest (if not the first) natural pauses in the dialogue, so as not to distance the character too far from the dialogue -- bc otherwise the reader ends up getting all of the dialogue information first, and then has to go back and retroactively insert the character, or what they're doing, or the way they look/sound while they're giving their little speech

and like this was something ive figured out on my own, mostly bc it jarred me out of something i was reading enough times (probably in fic tbh) that i started noticing it, and realized that it's something i do naturally, kind of to anchor the character to the dialogue mechanic to make sure it makes sense with the actual dialogue

so like. ok here's an example i just randomly pulled from the song of achilles (it was available on scribd so i just looked for a spot that worked to illustrate my point djsmsks)

the actual quote is written effectively, but here's a less effective version first:

“Perhaps I would, but I see no reason to kill him. He’s done nothing to me," Achilles answered coolly.

see and even with such a short snippet it's so much smoother and more vivid just by moving the dialogue tag, not adding or cutting a word:

“Perhaps I would, but I see no reason to kill him.” Achilles answered coolly. “He’s done nothing to me.”

the rhythm of it is better, and the beat that the dialogue tag creates functions as a natural dramatic pause before achilles delivers an incredibly poignant line, both within the immediate context of the scene and because we as the readers can recognize it as foreshadowing. plus, it flows smoothly because that beat was inserted where the dialogue already contained a natural pause, just bc that's how people speak. if you read both versions aloud, they both make sense, but the second version (the original used in the novel) accounts for the rhythm of dialogue, the way people tend to process information as they read, AND the greater context of the story, and as a result packs significantly more purpose, information, and effect into the same exact set of words

and THAT, folks, is the kind of editing minutia i can literally sit and hyperfocus on for hours without noticing. anyway it's a good book lmao

the one i'm reading now is a lot more about the cognitive process/es of editing, so there's less concrete and specific advice (so far, anyway) and more discussion about different mental approaches to editing, as well as tips and tools for making a firm distinction between your writer brain and your editor brain, which is something i struggle with

but there have been so many good quotes that ive highlighted! a lot of just like. reminders and things to think about, and also just lovely articulations of things id thought of or come to understand in much more vague ways.

scribd won't let me copy/paste this one bc it's a document copy and not an actual ebook, but this passage is talking about how the simple act of showing a piece of writing to someone else for the very first time can spark a sudden shift in perspective on the work, bc you'll (or at least i) frantically try to re-read it through their eyes and end up noticing a bunch of new errors -

or she talked about the perils of constant re-reading in the middle of writing a draft, which is something i struggle with a LOT, both bc i'm a perfectionist and bc i prefer editing to writing so i sit and edit when i'm procrastinating doing the actual hard work of writing lmao

it's just this side of fake deep tbh but i so rarely see editing discussed like this--as a mixture of art and science, a collaboration between instinct and technique, that really requires "both sides of the brain" to be done well.

and because of the way my own brain works, activities that require such a balanced concentration of creativity and logic really appeal to me. even though ive seen a lot of people (even professional writers) who frame it as the creative art of writing vs the logical discipline of editing. but i think that's such a misleading way of thinking about it, because writing and editing both require creativity and logic -- just different kinds! (not to mention that the line between writing and editing, while mostly clear, can get a little blurry from up close)

but like...all stories have an inner logic to them, even if the writer hasn't explicitly or consciously planned it, and even if the logic is faulty in places in the first couple of drafts. when you're sitting and daydreaming about your story, especially if you're trying to figure out how to bridge the gap between two points or scenes (or, how to write a sequence of events that presents as a logical, inevitable progression of cause and effect), the voice in your head that evaluates an idea and decides to 1) go with it, 2) scrap it, 3) tweak it until it works, or 4) hold onto it in case you want it later? that's your logic! if an idea feels wrong, or like it just doesn't work, it's probably because some part of you is detecting a conflict between some part of the idea and the overall logic of your story. every decision you make as you write is formed by and checked against your own experiential logic, and also by the internal logic of your story, which is far less developed (or at least, one would hope), and therefore more prone to the occasional laspe

but while ive seen a number of articles that discuss the logic of writing, i don't see people gushing as much about the art of editing and it's such a shame

the inner editor is so often characterized as the responsible parent to the writer's carefree child, or a relentless critic of the writer's unselfconscious, unpolished drivel

and it's like... maybe you just hate thinking critically about your work! maybe you view it that way because you're imposing external standards too fiercely onto your writing, and it's sucked the joy out of shaping and sculpting your words until they sing. maybe you prefer to conceive of your writing as divine communication, the process of which must remain unencumbered by lessons learned through experience or the vulnerability of self-reflection, until the buzzkill inner editor shows up with all those "rules" and "conventions" that only matter if you're trying to get published

and like obviously the market doesn't dictate which conventions are worth following, but the majority of widely-agreed-upon writing standards, especially those aimed at beginners, (and most especially those regarding style, as opposed to story structure) have to do with the effectiveness and efficiency of prose, and, in addition to often serving as a shorthand for distinguishing an amateur from a pro, overall help to increase poignancy and clarity, which is crucial no matter the genre or type of writing. and even if you personally believe otherwise, it's better to understand the conventions so you can break them with real purpose.

so editing shouldn't be about trying to shove your pristine artistic masterpiece into a conventional mold, it should be about using the creative instincts of your ear and your logic and experience-based understanding of writing as a craft to hone your words until you've told your story as effectively as possible

thank u for coming to my ted talk ✌️

[gaynoctgar]

Thoughts about Prompto’s arc in “Brotherhood”

The real title, for now, is something like “Prompto being formerly fat was not even remotely necessary and was offensively handled” or “Haley rants about Brotherhood because it’s so fatphobic”

TW: eating disorders, fatphobia.  

It’s also incredibly long, but I really want to share my thoughts.

Update: 10-4-2018: inspired by comments and tags, I added more examples of dialogue that exemplifies the problem

Update: 22-4-2018: accounting for the new “official profiles”...it got worse, everyone.

Oh Prompto.  Prompto Argentum.  My beloved, sweet, beautiful bi boy who could have had a much more satisfying arc.  They really tried, didn’t they?  They tried to give you a touching backstory and instead exposed their fatphobia.  And as for the bi part, well, that’s another essay in and of itself....stay tuned everyone. 

Yes, this is one of those posts.  That’s why I put all of this under a “Keep reading.”  It’s just something that has been subtly bothering me for a long time and I thought I’d give this short essay format a try.  There will be a TL;DR at the end, I suppose, but please read through this if you are interested in this aspect that I feel is both underexplored and overexploited about my most favorite character in anything ever.

A bit about myself before we begin: I am rather chubby.  I’m 5’4” (162cm) and 220 lbs (100 kg), and I have struggled off and on with eating disorders since I was in high school.  I do realize this makes me ��obese,” but this essay isn’t about that.  Rather, it is about how fatness and obesity is often portrayed in media as a character flaw, or something to overcome, and my own feelings about why this is harmful. To be clear, I want to make two major points with this: 1) Prompto being “formerly fat” is not something that was even remotely necessary for his character arc and its inclusion and resolution are nothing short of fatphobic and; 2) the fact that Prompto receives his character development via losing weight in Brotherhood is emblematic of every problem I have with how media chooses to include fat people.

These points are incredibly intertwined, so let’s start by exploring what was intended by the episode.  I want to be clear and demonstrate that I fully understand what the episode intended to show, and I will continue to acknowledge what the likely intent was.  This essay/rant is critiquing the execution.

If the point of Brotherhood was to suggest that Prompto had a lonely childhood until he met Noctis, that’s great!  I understand that that’s what Brotherhood was showing.  HOWEVER. I have been sickened, from the moment I saw his episode, with how his journey to lose weight was correlated with his journey to “be good enough” to be Noct’s friend.  Let me be clear.  I understand that we are supposed to interpret this as a character flaw on Prompto’s part, and we see in the gayest scene the rooftop motel scene that losing weight did not resolve Prompto’s self-confidence.  I know that.  What I am saying is that him losing weight was in no was necessary to include, at least not in the way that they did.  There are some ugly implicit implications here, not least of which is that eating nothing but salads is, I would argue, just as unhealthy as what he was doing before. The show treats it as a positive good that Prompto appears to be starving himself and thinking obsessively about losing weight, and that is what I am taking issue with.

I, personally, detest the “formerly fat” trope and all its incarnations.  Wouldn’t it simply have been enough to say that Prompto was painfully shy (he was) and very lonely (he was)?  Why do these feelings have to be justified via his body?  Was there no other way you could justify Prompto simply being too shy to talk to Noct? Noct’s the prince, Prompto is a commoner who feels that he’s nothing particularly special…would this not have been enough?  Doing it the way that they did implies that being fat is a moral and character flaw that needs to be corrected in order for you to be seen as a hero. That is what I am taking issue with.

And yes, I realize that the “weight loss journey” is jump-started by the fact that babby Noct says “heavy…” when trying to help Prompto to his feet.  Believe me, I understand first-hand how much that hurts. I faced many similar instances in my own life.  I can’t blame him for saying it, he’s a kid, but I do want to point out that Noct never apologizes for this.  You could say “he didn’t realize he was wrong” but maybe you could have had a scene where Noct wonders why the cute boy with the camera is avoiding him, and Ignis can say something like “well, did you do or say anything that might have upset him?” and Noct can actually apologize for hurting Prompto’s feelings.  This is not unreasonable to expect.  When I was a kid and people were avoiding me, my mom always asked me to think back on why that might be.  It’s part of growing up and learning that your words and actions have consequences.

TO BE FAIR: I do think the motel scene was an attempt to rectify all of this in the game.  While Prompto formerly being fat is not explicitly mentioned, he is mortified that Noct remembers him back in elementary school.  Now, I love Noct, but he’s stupid sometimes, and not very intuitive. This is, however, in his character, and I will allow it because the very next thing he says is “You should have said something sooner.”  This shows Prompto (and the audience) that Noct doesn’t give two shits about how Prompto looks, now or ever, and I am happy that this was included.  However, there is no given reason behind why Noct couldn’t simply talk to Prompto himself beforehand.  Like I said, Noct is an idiot, and also a lot more shy and awkward than he lets on. But this moment was sweet between them, even if you don’t ship promptis, and I do think it is fair to mention it.

However, coupling all of this with the fact that the “character sheets” show us that Prompto does, canonically, have a fear of gaining weight, as well as these little snippets of dialogue…

Prompto: Hey, let’s hit up the Crow’s Nest!

Ignis: If you wish to put on weight? Certainly.

Prompto: *sighs* Yeah, I know…

(I swear to god every time I get this dialogue I SCREAM at Ignis, how is this even remotely okay to say to your friend who you damn well know has problems with his weight and there’s no way you don’t know this--)

EDIT: The addition of this quote is based on the tags from @gentiuna, I knew I was forgetting something!

Noct: Why is your face so fat?

Prompto: I’m NOT fat!!

(I swear to Jesus you’re on thin fucking ice with me Noct, that’s not even remotely funny and you need a time out to think about what you’ve done--)

This one I have only gotten once in my ~400 hrs of play but I swear I didn’t make it up; if anyone finds the specific words, I will correct it:

Ignis: talks about food and how it’s “anything your heart wants” or something

Prompto: Yeah, it’s the wanting that’s the problem.

I think this was intended to be a nod to Brotherhood but (and @bernielu can back me up on this) I SCREAMED when I heard it. How is that REMOTELY okay?  Nobody even REACTS to this, or asks if Prompto is okay, or ask him why the FUCK he would say that.  

This is when it becomes pertinent, I think, to discuss my own experience with eating disorders.  I have wonderful friends and family, and I’m well on the road to recovery, but back when I was in high school, I just straight up wouldn’t bring food to lunch.  Retroactively, I realize they all brought extra, hoping I would get just hungry enough to pick at the scraps (I usually did), and that was their way of helping me and showing me that they cared.  It can be hard to want food sometimes.  As offensive as I find its inclusion, I do think that’s an accurate way of representing how it can feel: you know that food is good, and you know that you are hungry, but it’s wanting to eat it that’s a problem.  Here’s my issue: that should have raised everyone’s red flags, and the fact that nobody, NOT EVEN NOCT, WHO WE CAN EXPECT TO KNOW ABOUT THIS, says ANYTHING about this, and the game writes it off as another one of its Infamous Banters ™….it’s not looking great.  It’s not looking like representation, to me.  It’s looking like erasure and fatphobia.  

Babby Prompto is supposed to be viewed with pity but also, I think, with disdain: by the audience and by Prompto himself.  I’ve noticed in many fics that the fans like to almost romanticize this aspect of him, and explore that he has an eating disorder which is…I don’t’ like it because most of these fics come to the same conclusion: Prompto ends up skinny anyway and it’s just a quirk about him.  This is what I meant when I said that I feel this is overexploited, earlier in the essay, but also underdeveloped in the sense that they basically, in my opinion, show this as something that Prompto had to “get over” to be a real protagonist. They don’t go into how fucked up Prompto’s psyche must be from this.  It’s just kinda…ignored.  

UPDATE 22-4-2018: I’ve got to get this off my chest, the new “Official Works Profile” for Prompto made all of this worse.  It literally outright states that, after rescuing Pryna, Prompto “decided “to become the right sort of person for a Prince” and worked to change himself. It also refers to Prompto having a “pudgy youth” as if that were a bad thing.  It also says “Incidentally, Prompto’s photography hobby developed when he was dieting and took photos to record his weight loss progress.” Not gonna lie, this one made me physically ill.  There was literally no reason for that other than to imply that being fat is somehow immoral.  Why is Prompto’s “personal resolve” equated to losing weight? Why couldn’t it simply have been to be more outgoing? I’m fucking ANGRY, I’m done being polite about this.

My solution, then? Well, one of two things: 1) don’t make Prompto fat to justify his bad childhood if you know you’re just gonna make him thin and completely ignore that he was ever different, which is my preferred solution, or 2) have at least one character be bigger and that’s just how they are and it’s not made into a plot point or anything.  

A final note: I KNOW people can and do drop tremendous amounts of weight, and I want to be clear that I am not suggesting this is bad or that people shouldn’t do it.  A person’s weight and their relationship to it is their own business, and as long as people have a healthy relationship with their body, I’m not one to judge.  I know that we are supposed to see Prompto’s weight loss as heroic and a strong example of his dedication to Noctis.  And sure, we get that.  But maybe I have convinced you that the development we get comes at the cost of fatphobia, at least in terms of how it was portrayed here.

TL;DR: Prompto didn’t need to be fat to develop his character, and its inclusion and treatment in the narrative of Brotherhood suggest an uncomfortable degree of fatphobia.

If you stuck around for the whole thing, thank you so much for reading my thoughts.  It’s something that has been bubbling up in me for months, and now I am finally able to put it in words. <3

[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.