neak peak to what web accessibility looks like from the perspective of a web platform, the challenges and the responsibility, and the huge opportunity we have to make an impact on the accessibility of the web as a whole.

1. CSUN Conference 2023 March 2023
Creating an
Accessibility Machine
for 220 Million Users
CSUN Conference 2023
Twitter - @nirho
Linkedin - https://www.linkedin.com/in/nirhoresh/

2. Nir Horesh
Head of Accessibility at Wix
March 2023
Creating an Accessibility Machine for 220 Million Users
Hi,
I'm Nir Horesh, I'm the head of accessibility at Wix, and today I’m going to
be talking about “Creating an Accessibility Machine for 220 Millions users”.
I’m going to give you a sneak peak to what web accessibility looks like
from the perspective of a web platform, the challenges and the
responsibility, and the huge opportunity we have to make an impact on the
accessibility of the web as a whole.
My slides only contain words from my talk and do not add any
information.
They are mainly here to help me keep the story right :-)

3. March 2023
A little bit about
Creating an Accessibility Machine for 220 Million Users
A little bit about Wix.
Wix is a platform for people to create websites and to manage their
businesses online.
A wix site is a partnership between us, the platform, and our users - the site
creators.
We provide the infrastructure - website editors and components to
create the core sites with a lot of templates and presets to help with the
initial design and a also variety business solutions - such as store,
restaurants, blogs events and more to add more complex functionally to
the sites,. and of course there are management systems for the site and
business,
The only thing our users need to do it to provide the content and if they
feel like it to adjust the design to their taste.
So if we want to create accessible sites on wix, both us and our users need
to do our parts correctly.
And this is where things are starting to become interesting .

4. BTW - Note that for us the users are the site creators and not the site
visitors who are the users of our users. Our users and us, work together to
make the sites they are building accessible for their sites visitors.
Currently more than 220 million people use Wix. and the number of visitor
to the sites they build is much much higher

5. March 2023
Wix is a website creating
machine
Creating an Accessibility Machine for 220 Million Users
Let’s start with the first part of the partnership - our side, the platform side
of the accessibility
We can refer to Wix as a website creating machine.
If there is an issue on one of our sites, and it’s not just a content issue, we
can’t just fix it on that site, because the source of the problem is not in that
site and it probably exists on more sites.
Instead we need to figure out what part of our machine causes the issue,
and fix that part.
Once we fix it, it will fix that same issue not only on the site we saw it, but on
all Wix sites which had the problem.
Since accessibility is just part of how sites are built, The same goes for
accessibility issues.
When we identify an accessibility issue, we don’t just fix it on one website,
We need to understand the what the issue comes from, create the solution
and fix it in our machine - the accessibility machine.
Wix’s accessibility team, which I lead, is made up of accessibility experts
from all disciplines.

6. Our prime focus is to improve the accessibility level for all our products.
So you can refer to us as the mechanics of the accessibility machine

7. March 2023
An example -
the HTML lang attribute
lang=”en”
Creating an Accessibility Machine for 220 Million Users
To explain what fixing an issue in the machine looks like, I would like to use
the example of the Lang attribute in HTML.
A Lang attribute is an attribute usually at the beginning of the HTML tag
that describes the content language.
It is important for accessibility since the screen reader chooses which
speech engine to use based on the lang attribute.
Now, on one site - adding a Lang attribute is easy:
- Go to the HTML tag and Add “lang=en” (or whatever language the
site is in).
That is it. One step, one minute.

8. March 2023
For us at Wix, it’s a bit more
challenging
Creating an Accessibility Machine for 220 Million Users
But for us at Wix, it’s was a bit more challenging. It meant collaboration with
5 teams over 3 months:
1. Get the lang value from site settings
2. Store it in meta site parameters
3. Share it with all the applications on site
4. Send it to serverside rendering
5. Render it with the viewer
But that’s just the technical side. We still have more product decisions to
make.
Should we implement the fix only on site level, or also on page level, or
maybe even on component level? Should it be implemented for every
component? We want out system to help users avoid making mistakes
where possible so we try to think what are the right use cases? And those
are only a few of the things we need to consider.
We find the same level of complexity in most of the accessibility
improvements we do.
This is what i mean when i say that fixing the machine is more challenging.

9. March 2023
Changing existing
functionality
Creating an Accessibility Machine for 220 Million Users
The good news - After years of implementing accessibility fixes, we’ve
managed to solve most of the easy issues, and even most of the medium
ones.
The bad news - The improvements we’re tackling now are hard - they
require changing existing functionality, that is found in the deep deep core
of the machine.
This includes dealing with ancient product decisions, modifying intrinsic
architecture, updating content, UX, and changing the implementation of a
lot of what we did in the past. and even figuring out where the current
problems are coming from, can take a lot of time and effort.
Changing existing functionality can sometimes be even more
complicated than adding new functionality because it affects existing
website,

10. March 2023
Changing the way we work
Creating an Accessibility Machine for 220 Million Users
But the bigger problem is that fixing existing problems isn’t enough
anyway.
We don’t want to continue chasing issues, we want to change the way we
work, so that there are no issues to chase.
For all of our products to be accessible out of the box, we needed to
change how we design and create products from the very beginning of the
product cycle, what many of us know as the “shift left” approach.
Instead of finding problems in QA when the product is moments from
launch and changes are hard and expensive to make, we want to create
products that are accessible by design.

11. March 2023
Changing the company
culture
Creating an Accessibility Machine for 220 Million Users
Changing how we create products means changing our entire company
culture, which isn’t such a simple thing to do.
And changing a company culture isn’t just about changing processes, it
means changing the mindset of the entire company.

12. March 2023
Accessibility has a
fundamental problem
Creating an Accessibility Machine for 220 Million Users
But changing the mindset is not easy due to another challenge….
And that is that Wix, like any business, is driven by numbers and user
feedback.
Management looks at data, return on investment, support tickets, and they
prioritize what we ar Wix are going to do as based on these numbers.
If we have a critical feature missing, or a performance problem, or an SEO
issue - the users feel the pain and scream about it to our support.
But accessibility has a fundamental problem - it doesn’t appear in the
numbers.
There is very low awareness to accessibility and therefore there are very
few support tickets,
and in addition it is very hard to create a clear business case that connects
accessibility directly to revenue.
How can we change the mindset of the company if there is no measurable
need?

13. And if there is no need that is not priority, there are no resources dedicated
to finding high-quality creative solutions.
(BTW - before i continue - please continuously demand accessibility from
whatever platform you are using, every mail or call helps!!)

14. March 2023
Make them understand the
value
Creating an Accessibility Machine for 220 Million Users
So how did we deal with this challenge of no measurable need?
We needed to make everyone understand the value of accessibility.
We became accessibility evangelists, we do what it takes to change the
culture and the mindset, one manager, and one employee at a time.
We started with the top-down approach.
We made our case to management that Accessibility is beyond money, it’s
about inclusion and human rights, and we talked to legal that it’s about
reducing exposure, and we talked to Marketing that it’s about the brand, we
talk to anyone who can make an impact, To help them understand what
the numbers don’t show
And and at the same time we take the bottom-up approach.
We work with the people who are actually creating the products and
making the changes, the product teams, the engineers and designers, the
writers, and so on. We explain to them to that it’s about being a professional
and that accessibility actually improves the product for everyone and User
eXperience is for all users and not some user experience

15. March 2023
Accessibility isn’t actually
accessible
Creating an Accessibility Machine for 220 Million Users
And as we solve this major problem we hit our next challenge. Once we
succeed and manage to convince people that accessibility is indeed
important, they wanted to do everything NOW, and make their products
accessible right away.
But we can’t just send them to WCAG and wish them good luck, because
ironically, accessibility isn’t actually that accessible.
I mean, for those of us who live and breathe accessibility, who know
HTML and CSS, and who can quote success criteria from WCAG even when
woken up in the middle of the night, everything is clear.
But for people who aren’t accessibility experts, WCAG is complex and
hard to understand. It is multi-disciplinary, and assumes everyone is a web
expert. And there are a lot of fine details and ambiguity within the
guidelines, and even we, the experts, argue a lot of times about what is
accessible.
Bottom line - employees did not always understand what they need to do
to make their products accessible.

16. March 2023
We make accessibility
accessible
Creating an Accessibility Machine for 220 Million Users
So in order ro make accessibility more accessible for our employees we
had to due a few things:
1. Sharing Knowledge - Translate accessibility requirements into their
language. In the same way we had to show the value differently to
different functions - PM, Dev, UX or QA - have different roles when it
comes to accessibility so we created different guidelines and
checklists, do trainings and workshops, and so much more. To train
everyone on what they need to know about accessibility.
2. Reducing the friction - We work with our design systems, component
libraries, build testing tools, scoring system and automations, We
create an environment in which it will be easy and accessible for
everyone to create accessible products.

17. March 2023
Accessible building blocks
Creating an Accessibility Machine for 220 Million Users
This environment helps our employees create accessible product which
are the building block for our users sites
And by accessible i mean that for all of our components and business
solution:
we are using correct semantics, implementing keyboard behavior, adding
accessible names, building accessible contrast palettes in components
presets, using correct heading hierarchy in website templates and more.
So everything our users will add to their sides will be accessible.

18. March 2023
Dedicated accessibility
solutions
Creating an Accessibility Machine for 220 Million Users
But some things are not related to how the components are built. They
are related to the composition or to the site as a whole.
So on top of the accessible building blocks. We also provide dedicated
accessibility solutions for our site creators,
like automatic DOM order, which is important in the flexible drag-and-drop
environment we provide, to correlate with the visual order
we are adding the lang attribute we mentioned before,
supporting reduce motion functionality,
adding a skip to main content link on every site, and so much more.
And again, All of this functionality is the default in every site on wix. they
don’t need to do anything about it,

19. March 2023
The more we do the better
Creating an Accessibility Machine for 220 Million Users
And this is the goal - The more we do behind the scenes for our users, the
less our users need to worry about accessibility and the more they can
focus on the content and design of their sites.
Furthermore - The more we take care of Accessibility the higher is the
quality of accessibility in Wix’s sites because We’re the accessibility pros -
when we do the accessibility for them, we will probably do it better.
But there is a delicate yet important tradeoff we need to consider and that
is creative freedom.
Which brings me to the second part - our users part - the content
accessibility
Now, everything i’ve talked about so far, happened in every other company
that started to work on accessibility. This part part is where things are
unique to platforms and becoming even more interesting. This is what we
couldn’t learn from others…

20. March 2023
We do not control the
content that they add, or their
design choices
Creating an Accessibility Machine for 220 Million Users
Even if we provide our users with all the accessible components and
solutions in the world,
We do not control the content they add to their sites, or the design
choices they do, because we want to allow them the creative freedom.
Creative freedom means design without limits, which also means we can’t
always prevent users from creating accessibility mistake on their sites.
We try to make everything to prevent accessibility issues from happen
(shift left with our users), but we can’t prevent everything without taking
their creative freedom away.
We provide them with beautiful accessible templates as starting points, but
they can choose to start from a blank slate and just drag and drop
components to wherever they want..
We provide them with accessible color palettes, but when they choose
other colors and they don’t always use colors with sufficient contrast.
We allow them to add alt text to images, but they don’t always do it or they
think the a file name is a good name or that alt text is only for SEO.
We let them add whatever text they like, but they they don’t always
structure their pages correctly.
And accessibility is even less accessible to these people then it is to our

21. employees, our employees went to university and got some internal
training.
most of whom don’t know that their sites need to be accessible or that a
like like WCAG even exists.
Some of them only hear about accessibility for the first time when they get
the demand letter.

22. March 2023
An accessibility guide for our
users
Creating an Accessibility Machine for 220 Million Users
So how can we end up with accessible content when people who know
nothing about accessibility are the ones designing the websites?
Well, if they don’t know what they need to do, we need to teach them,
But unlike our employees we don’t have direct access to them, so we went
for the next best things - a guide!
We wrote an extensive accessibility guide for our users, to explain what
accessibility is, and what they need to do to make sure their sites were
both beautiful AND accessible. It has examples and explanations and clear
instructions,
So obviously this is what our users needed to end up with accessible
websites, right?
Well, no…
Going through the guide was still complicated, and tedious, and for people
who knows nothing about accessibility - also hard to understand.
Accessibility is not easy…
We needed a better solution.

24. March 2023
The Accessibility Wizard
Creating an Accessibility Machine for 220 Million Users
So we decided to automate the guide. It was product time!
We gave the temp name “Accessibility Wizard” which of course is now the
official name and started defining requirements:
1. As first step -because context is critical for good accessibility - we
integrated the wizard into the site editor, the place where users
design their websites. Not another window, not another tab, the
same frame!
2. Second it needs to be quick - In the editor the Wizard quickly scans
sites in seconds for any detectable accessibility issues, like contrast
issues, problematic heading structure, missing alt text, and present
a report with all issues within seconds
3. Third It not only about easily finding the issues, it about fixing them
too - the wizard allows any user to fix all the issues on the spot,
while seeing their changes in context.
4. Fourth it needs to be simple - It breaks complicated accessibility
requirements into simple and easy-to-understand tasks, and
provides more information and detailed explanations, for those who
want to understand more.
5. We also check that essential accessibility functionality, like focus

25. 1. rings and skip to main content links, weren’t accidentally deactivated,
and if they were, make sure they are turned back on.
2. And as we all know, there are some accessibility issues that are not
detectable by scanners. So we also provide assistance with those
issue, with an entire section dedicated to manually finding and
fixing issues.
And this is what make the Wizard so special
It’s one thing to give users general guidelines about needing to add alt
text to all the images on their site
it’s another thing to show them exactly which images on their site are
missing alt text, and there are some great tools out there that do it. But
then the fix is in another tab or window and out of context
But the wizard takes it one step further, and actually supports our users
while they add the alt text from within the Wizard.
And it does the same with any other issue, not only showing where it is but
also helps to quickly and easily fix it on the spot.
This is the key to the Wizard’s success. It’s why anyone can use the Wizard,
and succeed in making their whole site content accessible in minutes.

26. March 2023
Our users have fixed more
than 3.2 million accessibility
issues using the Wizard
Creating an Accessibility Machine for 220 Million Users
And what makes it even better, is the power of the platform to reach an
incredible amount of users.
When we released the Wizard, it wasn’t available for just one site, it was
automatically available for millions of site creators to use on their sites.
That’s the beauty of the accessibility machine.
While it more complicated to fix things in the machine, when we do release
fixes and incredible products, like the wizard, everyone who uses Wix
benefits instantly, and the impact is immense.
To date, on top of all the issues our employees improved on all of Wix’s sites
through improvements in products and components as i’ve mentioned
before, our users, who in most cases know nothing about accessibility
whatsoever, have fixed more than 3.2 million accessibility issues on their
sites using the Wizard.
3.2 million issues that would otherwise be out there on the internet,
blocking people with disabilities from using those sites. And more issues
are being fixed every day.

27. That’s hundreds of thousands of sites that are way more accessible for
people with disabilities, providing them with much reacher internet with
more variety and options.

28. March 2023
We want more
Creating an Accessibility Machine for 220 Million Users
But of course we didn’t stop there. We want more users to make their sites
accessible.
The Wizard is a great product, and we’re continually adding new
functionality and features to it,
but it’s impact is limited to people who already know about accessibility
and who actively look to make their sites accessible and finding the wizard
as out suggested solution.
But since awareness to accessibility is not great, we need to reach more
users, so to increase discoverability, we created more entry points from
several more places within our system,
but still when users who know nothing about accessibility see the entry
point it means nothing to them. They assume that it is not relevant to their
sites and ignore it.
Millions of issues fixed with the Wizard on hundred of thousands of sites is
nice.
But, How do we make it millions of Wix sites Accessible?

29. March 2023
We flip the narrative
Creating an Accessibility Machine for 220 Million Users
So we decided to flip the narrative. Instead of users having to look for the
Accessibility find the Wizard, actively open it, scan their site, and only then
know if they have issues to fix, why not bring the Wizard to them?
Why not create a product that scans all sites created on Wix and actively
notifies people if we find accessibility issues on their sites, tells them how
many issues we found, and gives them a direct link to fix the issues?
Make it proactive and make it personal.

30. March 2023
Proactive accessibility
monitoring
Creating an Accessibility Machine for 220 Million Users
So we started working on proactive accessibility monitoring.
This is our current big project.
This is how we are planning to grow the numbers in at least an order of
magnitude
And it has one more great benefit in addition to increasing the numbers -
We know that every accessibility audit, no matter how good it is, is only
valid at the time of the audit.
The second someone changes something on a page or site, it has the
potential to create a new accessibility issue.
Our new accessibility monitoring tool looks out for changes on a site, and
when it identifies changes, it automatically scans the site for new issues.
If it finds an issue, it notifies the site creator straight away.
The notifications include a direct link to the Accessibility Wizard, so issues
can be fixed almost immediately after their creation.
And of course, this accessibility monitoring will be instantly available for all
of Wix’s 220 million + business owners and site creators, and for all the
sites they create on Wix.

31. March 2023
With great power comes
great responsibility
and opportunity!
Creating an Accessibility Machine for 220 Million Users
And after the monitoring tool, our challenging and never ending
accessibility journey will continue
We’ll continue with all of our accessibility efforts, working on improving our
products accessibility, create solutions to complement our accessible
products and do whatever we can to end up with as many accessible
websites as possible
As i hope i’ve managed to show you in this talk
As a platform we have this incredible power to improve the accessibility
of the web on a scale that no single site creator can.
With this great power comes great responsibility and an incredible
opportunity!
This opportunity to make a real positive dent on internet
is what gives us the motivation every single day to continue solving all
the challenges we are facing on the way!

32. March 2023
Let’s build an
accessible
web for all
Creating an Accessibility Machine for 220 Million Users
One final note…
I saw somewhere a meme saying that in time travel we are alway afraid that a
small change in the past will alter the future but in the present we feel that it’s
impossible to make a great impact.
We - the accessibility team in Wix - are a team of less than 10 people
harnessing to power of 6000 employees to support our millions of users to
create miilions of accessible sites that are being visited by Billions of visitors
And if we - all the people in this room and all the platforms, products,
websites, apps, creators, developers - keep looking for more ways to make
a big impact, we can really make the internet a place for everyone
regardless of their ability.
Its a solvable problem and we can reach it faster then you can imagine .
So let’s work together, to build an accessible web for all.

33. Thank you
March 2023
Contact me
Twitter @nirho
Linkedin
https://www.linkedin.com/in/nirhoresh/
Mail: accessibility@wix.com
Creating an Accessibility Machine for 220 Million Users