In this conversation, Gen Herres, an accessibility expert, discusses the importance of web accessibility for developers, particularly in the context of WordPress. She emphasizes the need for developers to integrate accessibility into their processes from the beginning, rather than treating it as an afterthought. The discussion also covers the impact of upcoming legislation on accessibility standards, the role of AI in coding, and practical steps developers can take to improve accessibility in their projects.

Chapters
00:00 Introduction to Accessibility in Web Development
04:46 Semantic HTML vs. Complex Solutions
09:42 The European Accessibility Act and Its Implications
18:20 AI in Coding and Accessibility
23:05 Automated Accessibility Checks
26:12 Implementing Accessibility in Processes
Welcome. today I have Jen Harrys, who’s an accessibility expert and really focuses on developers and teaching accessibility for developers. welcome to the show. Do you want to give everyone kind of a bit of a background and bio for, what you do?
Gen Herres (00:14)
Yes. So I have been in the web development space since 2011 and I have worked with everyone from the small little solopreneurs up to companies doing a hundred million in revenue. So I’ve worked with a wide gamut of different companies and more recently since 2019 I’ve gotten into the web accessibility space and the real thing behind web accessibility is that
People are not perfect. We have imperfect people and they live in an imperfect world and either our websites can meet them where they are at or we can lose them to someone else. And those are our main two options. We can either be where they’re at and we can say, okay, you like big fonts, great. You can increase your font easily. It’s not gonna screw up our website.
Brian (01:08)
Mm-hmm.
Gen Herres (01:08)
Or we
can say, nope, everything’s screwed up and the person’s off somewhere else. I mean, those are our options. We can meet people or we can exclude them.
Brian (01:18)
and what got you into accessibility specifically.
Gen Herres (01:21)
So I’m a developer at heart. My degree and background is computer science. I worked at Boeing for several years as a software developer. And I got into accessibility because it was an interesting rabbit hole. And I’d heard about it. I’d heard some things about it. And I looked into it. And I was like, this is a fun rabbit hole. And it’s like this whole giant ecosystem and rabbit moron and everything. And it was just.
really intellectually exciting. And then after I got intellectually excited about it, I reminded myself that this also helps me. And this helps my family. And this helps my friends. And this just helps everyone. Because something that most people have no idea about me is I have brain damage. And I have difficulty speaking.
And I have had countless people come up and say, well, I can’t be a public speaker like you. I don’t have the talent. You actually have far more talent. I have years of speech therapy. I have years of public speaking training. I have years of work. You actually have far more talent than I do. But the difference is the work. And that’s what a lot of people who have various different disabilities have, is they’ve put in a lot of work to appear normal, to appear
that they don’t have issues so that society is more welcoming to them. And so that they can interact better with society and so that they can make money and they can be part of things and they can enjoy their lives. But that doesn’t mean that these people don’t have regular challenges that they face. And we can be nicer to them or we can exclude them and they can go somewhere where their people are nicer.
Brian (03:03)
And I you talked about like, you know, that it’s a lot of work. And I think that’s one of the first struggles maybe developers have when they start hearing about accessibility. Cause I know when I started, I did not pay nearly enough attention to it. I would not want to go look at some of the earliest code I wrote. you know, it’s a, you know, there’s, there’s no school that you go to a lot of times to teach you to be a web developer. You just start doing it. And when people see accessibility, they think, well, why do I need to put in all of this extra effort or why should I be responsible for?
Gen Herres (03:17)
Thank
Brian (03:31)
doing the work, what do you typically say to that sort of mentality?
Gen Herres (03:35)
So realistically, it is not a ton more work if you follow the guidelines. So if you aren’t trying to make flashing neon green buttons to start with, guess what? It’s not a ton more work. If you follow semantic HTML, you don’t have to go do a whole bunch of ARIA and testing. But if you try to make an entire website built of nothing but divs,
and JavaScript everything, you’re actually going to end up doing far more work. So do you really want to go down the far more work path by not using the semantic HTML button element and instead trying to code up a div and tie 15 pieces of JavaScript to it? Or do you just want to do it the easy way? I was building a toolbar for a website and
I could set up some buttons and tie them into some different JavaScripts, or I could just use the semantic radio buttons that are built into HTML. They’re sitting right there. They display all the options for everyone. And I could just use those. I didn’t have to write any custom code at all to handle.
Brian (04:46)
Yeah, it’s like the simplest solution a lot of times is usually the best solution. and for some reason there is a branch of web design that has gotten so crazy and it feels like you’re building these huge sand castles of, components and, interactivity and stuff. you know, on the flip side, a lot of what I think people
Are we going right now that at least listen to this is WordPress specifically, which is more marketing sites, landing pages, content driven sites and stuff. What level of your work is WordPress versus say like other frameworks or just other parts of the internet.
Gen Herres (05:14)
Mm-hmm.
So most of my work is in WordPress. I started out in WordPress in 2011, and I have been a WordPress developer since then. I run the WordPress Meetup Group for Baltimore. So I’m quite involved in the WordPress community and in developing WordPress and working on WordPress. So it is mostly WordPress. But when it gets to a lot of front-end development and whatnot, I don’t need to
read the back end code necessarily that you’ve written to be able to tell you if what you’re producing on the front end is right or wrong. I need to be able to understand the code on the front end and say, okay, here are your main issues, here’s where stuff’s going wrong, this is the code you need to be outputting instead.
Brian (06:08)
like one of the big changes in WordPress has been the block editor, which kind of controls a lot of the front end semantic HTML. Like you can write custom blocks and custom plugins and that’s a separate issue, but for just a standard WordPress site that uses the block editor where you don’t really control the HTML as much anymore, do you see that as like an improvement that we’re able to have one sort of code?
you know, building engine that we can keep improving or, you know, is it causing problems? mean, what do you think?
Gen Herres (06:41)
Well, the block editor itself and a number of the recent things that have been introduced on the back end of WordPress, quite frankly, very little, if any, accessibility was even considered when they were put in. Quite frankly, sometimes in WordPress development, it ends up being a bit of mob rule. And sometimes that can lead to some bullying and some other issues.
Quite frankly, sometimes the loudest voices win and not necessarily what is truly good for long-term sustainability of a platform.
Brian (07:14)
Yeah, it’s funny because speaking about just the editing experience in WordPress, it’s a lot of times I will be in GitHub and I will see the issues and there’s usually two different things. Sometimes there’s an improve, like a user experience improvement that people want that conflicts with accessibility. And so there needs to be a solution. And sometimes there’s a user experience need that would actually help.
accessibility and just help most users because a lot of accessibility features just are just that’s going to help the majority of people because it’s about simplifying and using things the way they’re meant to be used. But in the situations where there’s a conflict, it feels like a lot of times what ends up happening is nothing. They, here’s a problem. We haven’t, we can’t agree on a solution. And then they just kind of, it just sits there and then.
the problem doesn’t get fixed for either user or not, it doesn’t really get fixed for anybody. It just gets ignored or something like that. At least I feel like that’s what I keep seeing.
Gen Herres (08:13)
Yeah, I’ve definitely seen that. I’ve spoken with Steve Jones. He’s a developer over at Equalize Digital and he’s actually put several accessibility fixes into various, you know, he’s contributed the code to some code to WooCommerce, some code into WordPress. And he said that there were two big obstacles. One was just the people and two was the legacy code.
So he was working on updating the table block, if I remember right. And he said, the actual fix was really easy. The problem was there’s this like mountain of legacy code hanging around in the ecosystem that you also had to deal with. And he didn’t realize when he went to go make the small fix that he’d have to also deal with that mountain.
Brian (09:00)
Yeah. And that’s made contributing a little bit harder because, you know, everything we can’t just change things on people. can’t just break existing sites. so there’s the hard work that has to be done. You would like to think that when we introduce a new block, we would have it, have it accessible by default. So that way we’re not in this situation. Obviously that would be the ideal, start there, you know, or don’t put it in. but.
Gen Herres (09:19)
Yes. That would.
Brian (09:25)
We are where we are for sure. Yeah. And I mean, it feels like whether WordPress wants to embrace it or not, which it really does sometimes feel like Core does really want to fight this against accessibility for some reason. It does feel like legally, like regulation is coming for accessibility.
Gen Herres (09:37)
Mm.
It is. quite
frankly, these big companies like WordPress and Automatic as the major contributor to it, there’s a very good chance they will face the European Union in what’s coming up in June of 2025. And that’s the European Accessibility Act or the EAA. And in that, the tool makers
So the people who actually make the tools are going to be held responsible for the accessibility of the tools. And so under that new law, and I haven’t really liked this idea because quite frankly, you know, the end user trying to make a small little site for themselves, they don’t know much, but these big companies and these big contributors making these
big things that impact a huge amount of the internet, they do have the ability to know this stuff. They should know better. And they should be producing tools that make it, by default, accessible. Yes, the person can add a whole bunch of terrible content, and that’s on them. But the tool itself should be accessible. And the European Accessibility Act will say that
One, your tool needs to be accessible. And two, you have to give information about how your tool is accessible. And that is going to be a big thing as we come into this new legislation.
Brian (11:17)
So in like the list of, you when I launch a website, there’s maybe the developer who built it, maybe the plugin developers or the theme developers, there’s the hosting company, there’s WordPress itself, there’s the end client who by, you know, paid for the website or, and is updating content. There’s all these people. how do we know exactly who, because it feels like sometimes WordPress itself loves to play like the, you know, it’s not responsible for big.
Gen Herres (11:23)
Hmm?
Yes.
Brian (11:46)
things
game and so I mean how do we know where between the hosting company the developers the platform and everything where that like ultimate responsibility is going to lie.
Gen Herres (11:56)
So I think it’s going to come down to who created the actual bits on the site. So for example, the hosting company. Quite frankly, they’re not doing much that impacts the front end of your website. They’re not. Now, their own forms, for example, like signing up for their own services and all of that, those forms are 100 % on them.
those forms do need to be accessible because you’re losing sales if they’re not. And as a larger company, they will fall under the EAA. But the next part is, you know, the WordPress default themes, the WordPress default modules within the block editor, those all need to by default be accessible. Now, if the people inputting the content, if they are…
screwing things up, if they’re adding bad content, if they’re doing all of that, that’s then on them. But it’s really gonna come down to who puts it there. So if you have a block and let’s say it’s an accordion block and that accordion, the code itself, the semantic HTML, the JavaScript behind it, if that part isn’t accessible, then that is on the people who wrote that code. Because it doesn’t matter
how well you input content, it won’t fix that. So it’s gonna be on either the block editor or Elementor or Bricks or any of these other different tools in the ecosystem. It’s gonna be on them to produce by default the accessible code.
Brian (13:20)
Mm-hmm.
And so have you looked at like page builders like Elementor or like some of the newer ones do you and you know, and the block editor, which is its own page builder. Do you look at these different tools and do you feel like there’s a sense that they’re aware of this and, and working towards making sure their, output is semantic.
Gen Herres (13:56)
Some of them definitely are. So I did not personally do a review on the page builders, but I know Amber Hines did and she evaluated the different builders. By default, the block editor was doing the best and certain blocks, groupings like the cadence blocks were doing quite well. The cadence under the Stellar family has definitely put work into their accessibility. They actually have accessibility testing.
in their systems. So that part is really quite good. Then Elementor did quite well. Elementor, I’ve seen quite a bit of evidence from them that they are really starting to prioritize. And I mean, they have, what, 16 million installations now, maybe more. And they’ve really started to put it in.
Brian (14:42)
Yeah.
Gen Herres (14:45)
They have some handicaps because some of the legacy code that they have was really not semantic at all. And so trying to deal with that technical debt is definitely a challenge, but they have been moving and migrating towards a more accessible platform. And then some others scored really poorly, like for example, Divi. Divi scored terribly.
Brian (15:08)
Hmm.
Gen Herres (15:10)
the modules, the front-end code, there’s just a lot of big gaping holes that are currently there. Then I had done a review of the different WordPress form plugins, and what happened when you just grab their default forms, maybe toss a few different modules in to the form and see how they do, and no surprise really, Gravity Forms did the best, but some of the others like…
Brian (15:23)
Hmm
Okay.
Gen Herres (15:37)
WS Forum and Fluent Forum were also doing quite well. And of course, there are a few companies that are trying to stick their head in the sand. The WP Forums declined to participate at all. And that’s, of course, concerning because really, you’re going to decline to participate completely? That doesn’t give me a lot of confidence. And they are most definitely a company that is large enough.
Brian (15:41)
Nice. Okay.
Mm-hmm. Okay.
Yeah, you don’t even want to know? Yeah.
Gen Herres (16:04)
because the EAA doesn’t apply to micro enterprises. So you need 2 million euros a year or 10 or more employees to apply. But WP forms, for example, they are that large. They are large enough that it will apply to them. But right now, it appears they’re sticking their head in the sand.
Brian (16:09)
Okay.
Okay.
So,
I mean, if they’re not based in the EU, that would just mean that they would have to stop selling in the EU if they, for some reason, caught attention from regulators.
Gen Herres (16:35)
If they caught attention
from the EU, then they would basically need to choose between no longer selling in the EU or moving into compliance. So one of the things that I do like about the EAA is that the first line, the first thing that’s going to happen is you’re going to be told to fix it. You’re not going to be given a fine upfront.
you’re going to be told to fix it and you’re going to be given a specific amount of time and that varies by country and whatnot. But the first thing is you’re going to be told to fix it. Like you’re not going to be, you know, hit upside the head. But if you don’t, then fines can start at 60,000 euros in Spain, I believe the fines can be 5 % of your annual revenue.
Brian (17:28)
Wow. Okay. I’m.
Gen Herres (17:29)
Yeah. So
that’s big.
Brian (17:32)
Yeah. And you said that, you know, the comparing page builders, the block editor does pretty well on its front end markup. And I do think my theory is a little bit of that is that the block editor just doesn’t do a lot of things that other page builders do. So it doesn’t have carousels and it doesn’t have sliders and it doesn’t have accordions and it doesn’t have forms. A lot of these page builders have forms built into them and stuff like that. It doesn’t really have a lot of those. And I feel like in my mind, at least anything that’s
interactive or involves forms buttons, you know, animation, that stuff. That’s like the higher risk areas of developers, not writing accessible code. feel like when you get to those things that are a little bit more complicated, that’s where you start to see more mistakes. you think like, that correct? Or am I mistaken a bit about that?
Gen Herres (18:20)
Absolutely.
The simpler the elements, generally the easier the accessibility is. As long as you’re actually following HTML and you’re not trying to make everything a div. Because divs are not everything. DIVs have their place. I use plenty of divs, but they’re not headings, they’re not buttons, they’re divs. So definitely the fewer interactive elements you have, the easier the accessibility.
Brian (18:32)
Okay.
Yeah.
Gen Herres (18:46)
is to make and to verify.
Brian (18:48)
So then for a lot of developers, they’re in WordPress. Obviously page builders are a huge part of that, but there’s still a group that love to hand code their themes. Maybe they use advanced custom fields or something and they love to build their stuff from scratch. And I felt that there’s a large part of them that are leaning into AI coding. know I definitely am using, you know.
jumping into my code editor and letting the AI kind of scaffold some stuff for me or at least get some stuff down or make some fixes and stuff. Have you messed with AI code and do you have thoughts on it in terms of accessibility?
Gen Herres (19:25)
yes, I definitely do. The one I usually use is Claude, chat GPT and I have never gotten along. It’s just not a good relationship. Claude and I work much better together. With Claude, for example, I can go into the preferences area and I can give it a list of some different instructions that I want it to basically always follow.
Brian (19:50)
Okay.
Gen Herres (19:50)
So
I tell it my preferred programming languages. tell it that I like to work with WordPress a lot. And so it can use those inputs and it puts them in with basically every single prompt that I send. And that can help Claude give better responses. So for example, one habit that it had before I put in a note to fix it was
It never ended any bullet points with punctuation. It would always just give me a whole bunch of bullet points with no punctuation at the end. And that makes a screen reader just read the whole thing off super fast. And you’re like, I can’t process any of that. So what I did was I just told it to always end bullet points with a period. And then it’s followed that instruction because I put it in there and you can tell it to do specific things or.
Brian (20:28)
interesting.
Gen Herres (20:44)
to reference certain things every time it does something. And that really can improve the outputs that you’re getting to start with. The other thing is I always treat my AI as basically a really eager intern. And it’s going to enthusiastically execute whatever I give it. Lots of enthusiasm. Unfortunately, like most interns, it needs to be supervised.
Brian (21:02)
Mm-hmm.
Yes.
Gen Herres (21:12)
So you have to give it really clear prompts. You have to make sure that it, you you have given good instructions because it’s going to enthusiastically execute whatever you give it. And the other thing is I like to use the PASS acronym for performant, accessible, secure, and stable. So I want to always evaluate what it’s given me against that criteria.
Brian (21:13)
Yes.
Gen Herres (21:39)
Is this performant or did it use some really bad looping to, you know, four layers of loops to do this when it could have done it in far less? Is it accessible? Is it using semantic HTML? I have in my instructions for Claude to always use semantic HTML. Then is it secure? You have to make sure that you are, you know, filtering your inputs and filtering your outputs.
And of course, is it stable? Is this code that I can look back on, you know, in two years and actually be able to edit? Or is this going to end up as spaghetti code and a nightmare that I’m going to end up having just completely rewrite because I can’t even figure out how to edit it.
Brian (22:16)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah, that’s a good, I like that framework a lot because one of the things I’ve been learning in AI and especially as you move towards like what they call like agents where you’re trying to let your AI have a little bit more freedom and be a little bit more autonomous is there’s always like, you want it to like, you kind of want to break it apart where you want it to strategize, you want it to generate and then you always need that validation step and everything you do, you generally need like a second.
Gen Herres (22:32)
Mm-hmm.
Yes.
Brian (22:47)
prompt or something in the workflow that says like, okay, now validate it. And I wonder if we could get to a place where there could be some decent accessibility validations that are a little bit more automated, at least, I mean, just for stuff that you can tell by looking at code, which is not the whole picture, but for part of the picture, can you accessibility audit your code with AI, do you think?
Gen Herres (23:06)
Mm.
So there are some tools already available. For example, the company DQ has a product called the Axe Linter, which can be used on HTML and JavaScript to actually do accessibility checks on the code that you’ve created to see if it’s actually using things like semantic HTML. Did you properly structure your anchor link?
Do you not properly structure it? Did you put alt text on the image that you put into the code? And things like that. It can go ahead and check all of that.
Brian (23:39)
Mm-hmm.
Okay. But it’s all I have to imagine at some, I mean, like you’ve said, can never, nobody should be letting AI write code without understanding everything it does before you use. Like you have to know what it’s doing. There’s no, there’s really no alternative to that.
Gen Herres (23:56)
Absolutely.
It is a very eager intern and senior engineers have to review what eager interns do. That’s just how it works.
Brian (24:09)
So kind of big picture, like for WordPress developers, site builders, people who are building sites or even maybe building products and plugins and stuff, where are you sending them? What are you telling them to focus on knowing that the next few months are going to become critical for accessibility and knowing that, you know, that’s the EU now, but it’s, you know, we’re going to see an American probably similar.
you know, regulatory situation come, it’s not unreasonable to assume it.
Gen Herres (24:36)
Well, we have
in the US, we have the Americans with Disabilities Act and under Title II, which is what governs local and state governments, they’ve already put in that for most of them, it will be April of 2026 and for those and for a few, it’ll be April of 2027. But they will have to meet WCAG 2.1 level AA by those dates and that
is going to include a number of organizations that you might not associate with state and local government. For example, I work with a nonprofit and they produce educational materials for the Department of Transportation. They are producing things on behalf of a government agency or another organization. They get funding because they help with treatments that
Brian (25:23)
Mm-hmm.
Gen Herres (25:30)
help with public health. And so they are providing services on behalf of a government agency. And so there’s a whole bunch of little things that are gonna get kind of swept under this. And then the Health and Human Services or HHS, which governs Medicare and Medicaid, they released a statement that healthcare providers will need to meet the same WCAG 2.1 level AA
Brian (25:48)
Hmm.
Gen Herres (25:56)
by May of 26. So that’s going to impact a lot of healthcare providers because, you know, a lot of them accept Medicare and Medicaid because they like getting money.
Brian (26:05)
Yeah. Okay. so it is, so knowing that like, this is definitely coming and I do think in WordPress, especially government, nonprofit, local government, school district, like these are the, like a lot of the clients people have in WordPress, it’s where WordPress is very popular. So where do you think people should go to start preparing? Should they be thinking about how they’re building things and changing the tools they use or?
Gen Herres (26:17)
Mm-hmm.
Exactly.
Brian (26:35)
educating themselves? mean, how, do think people should be doing?
Gen Herres (26:39)
So there’s a lot of things you can do and it can be really, really overwhelming to a lot of people. And I completely understand that because accessibility is both wide and deep. It is not a small thing, it is a big thing. So it really starts with processes. You you have to take a look at your agency and you have to take a look at processes.
Because if something’s not in your process, it’s not getting done, as I’m sure you’re well aware. The big issue is that accessibility is frequently left for an afterthought. At maybe the end of the process, they’re like, can’t I use what I’ve been doing for the last 10 years and build it out to here? And then someone just comes in at the end and applies some shoe polish. No, you can’t.
Brian (27:08)
Mm-hmm.
Hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Gen Herres (27:30)
you need to go to the beginning of your process and you need to get it in at the early stages. I actually have a whole video on my YouTube channel about the evolution that an agency will go through from just barely hearing about accessibility to really having a truly accessible process at the very end. And it goes through the different stages of it. There are six of them and they…
You know, you start with very simple upfront. You’ve just barely heard of it. So at that point, you’re going to end up outsourcing a lot of it to someone who knows more because you don’t know what you’re doing. It may be at the very beginning, you are just bringing in a consultant and they’re helping you with a lot of steps. My company, EZ Alley Guide, what I do is I’ve got tons of
Brian (28:10)
Hehe.
Gen Herres (28:22)
processes for agencies that are basically ready to go. So we have processes on how do you talk to a customer about, for example, their current accessibility provider. Let’s say they’re using an overlay company. well, one of the departments of the US government just went after AccessiBee because they’ve been doing false advertising.
and they’re being fined and they’re being told to clean up their act because they have basically been lying and saying that they made something completely done and they did not. So one of the things is that you want to get them to say no to their existing provider and that’s one of the sales strategies that I have is you get them to say no three times to their existing provider so that you aren’t the bad guy.
Brian (28:53)
Mm-hmm.
Gen Herres (29:16)
you’re asking them questions that lead them to saying no to their existing provider. And so I have different things for auditing. So for example, I have a quick audit process and that takes you through pretty much the biggest issues. The whole 80-20 principle where you have 80 % of the results come from 20 % of the work. Well,
Brian (29:20)
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Gen Herres (29:42)
80 % of the accessibility problems come from about 20 % of the accessibility criteria. So if you focus on dealing with that, with those specific criteria and testing for those specific things, you can knock out the vast majority of your actual problems. You can find your problems. You can treat your problems more easily without necessarily going into a long, exhaustive, expensive audit.
Brian (29:48)
Okay.
Yeah. And I was going to say, have a lot of, you’ve done a lot of talks on this. I’ll share the link to that video you mentioned, but you, people should look as you have a ton of good talks and interviews kind of talking about this and, presentations and stuff. and so it’s like, the material is out there. I feel like the vibe is moving towards a lot of developers, especially when we’re pressed really do care. even if the platform doesn’t, I feel like a lot of the community does, and that’s really great.
Gen Herres (30:31)
Mm-hmm.
Brian (30:35)
And so, you know, I’m just grateful that we have advocates like you that are out there sort of like pushing the charge forward on this and just educating everybody. So I just wanna say thanks for giving us this tour. I bet we could go again one day and go deeper on any of these topics because there’s a lot of like really specific like nuts and bolts of this, but I hope this was like a helpful like overview of everything. So where should people go to maybe like a starting point to learn from you?
Gen Herres (31:00)
So you can visit me on the website at EasyA11YGuide.com and that’s where I’ve got tons of tutorials and videos and a whole learn section as well as the various different services that I have which include things like working with your agency and coaching you through the processes and dealing with getting into your actual processes and getting them up to snuff.
And then of course you can find me on LinkedIn. I am Jen Harries and that is Jen with a G. So it’s G-E-N-H-E-R-R-E-S. And that’s how you can find me.
Brian (31:40)
Awesome, thank you again for coming by today.
Gen Herres (31:42)
Thanks, Brian. It was great to be here.