What is an Accessibility Policy? An accessibility policy is a clear, internal framework that spells out your organization’s commitment to building accessible digital products. It defines the standards your organization follows, the...
An effective web accessibility strategy doesn’t happen overnight. It’s a long-term framework that weaves accessibility into everything from leadership and company culture to ideation and design, coding and content creation, and...
I try not to begin a blog post with a definition. In fact, some folks have told me it’s just not good form. But in this particular case, I feel it’s necessary. The subject of ableism, the word itself, even ...does a lot of work...
When you're building an accessible website, elements like headers, headings, and titles can seem similar and even inconsequential. But actually, each element plays a significant role in creating proper content structure that makes it easier for...
Imagine a student exploring a digital archive of 19th-century letters, or a researcher diving into an interactive map of historical migration patterns. Now imagine that a student or researcher can’t fully engage because the site...
Back in May of this year, I wrote a blog post about the importance of a sustainable, continuous accessibility monitoring strategy for ensuring long-term digital accessibility compliance and improvement. This blog post is a...
DubBot is proud to announce its sponsorship of the EvolveDigital Summit, taking place November 20–21, 2025, in New York City. No matter your role, a developer, designer, strategist, marketer, or AI expert, the EvolveDigital Summit brings...
Providing a safe, inclusive, and accessible environment at Halloween for your friends and neighbors involves making simple sensory-friendly adjustments, offering non-food options, accommodating communication differences, and ensuring that...
The Analyze feature just got an upgrade. Previously, full-site re-analysis was handled behind the scenes by the DubBot team. Thanks to valuable client feedback, account and site-level administrators can now run a complete Analyze across their...
New England Drupal Camp (also known as NEDcamp) celebrates its twenty-first birthday this November 14-15. DubBot is proud to be a sponsor, and I'm thrilled to be an attendee. NEDcamp is held at Rhode Island College in Providence, Rhode Island and...
As I do most evenings, I was scrolling through LinkedIn posts, looking for content that would inspire a blog post and, in the process, stay up to date with the accessibility space and all that it encompasses. I came across an excellent...
If you’ve ever flipped through a book, you’ve used pagination. On websites and in digital documents, pagination (sometimes referred to as breadcrumbs) works the same way. It breaks content into manageable pages rather...
DubBot is proud to be a sponsor for New England Drupal Camp on November 14-15, 2025! Our own Amy Helfman, a longtime Drupal user and developer, will be on-site for this outstanding event that offers a community-driven space to learn, share, and...
Who says conferences are all business? Some bring swag, we brought 150 Lite Brites as give-aways. At this year’s Digital Colloquium, DubBot traded laptops for pegs and let creativity take the lead. The results? A mashup of bold colors,...
Every October, we recognize National Disability Employment Awareness Month (NDEAM). It's a time to celebrate the contributions of workers with disabilities, raise awareness about ongoing barriers, and recommit to creating inclusive...
A well-crafted website accessibility statement is one of the most effective ways to demonstrate to visitors that your organization has made a genuine commitment to accessibility and inclusivity. Back in 2021, I wrote a blog post on...
Have you ever zoomed in on a website to make the text easier to read, only to end up scrolling left and then right, then to the left again, just to try and read the first sentence? That’s precisely the barrier WCAG 2.1 Success Criterion...
Broken links happen for many different reasons. And though they may seem minor, they cause ripple effects across accessibility, SEO, AEO, and user experience. Let’s break down how broken links affect accessibility, SEO, AEO, and user...
Digital accessibility, when done right, is designed to improve the experience for everyone, not just people with disabilities. But yes, there are cases where accessibility features can impact website performance. Those cases are primarily due to...
Task management is the process of overseeing a task throughout its entire lifecycle, from inception to completion. It is a fundamental practice for both individuals and teams, designed to enhance efficiency, productivity, and collaboration. So...
Let’s be honest. Most of us don’t give file names much thought. We choose names that make sense to us personally or for the project we’re working on, without considering how clear they are to others. But file names...
Drupal is a powerful, enterprise-grade CMS. It’s flexible, scalable, and trusted by organizations with big, complex digital footprints. Managing all that content and complexity can be a significant challenge. DubBot simplifies things for...
Accessibility isn’t just about color contrast, focus indicators, and screen readers. The way we write matters, too. Did you know the average American reads at a 7th- to 8th-grade level? That’s a helpful benchmark...
As I gear up to renew my Certified Professional in Accessibility Core Competencies (CPACC) certification, I'm currently taking a mini-course offered by the International Association of Accessibility Professionals (IAAP). The course...
When your web content appears as a solid wall of text, readers can feel overwhelmed and click away before they even start. That’s a missed chance to connect and share your message. This is where lists come in. There’s a reason...
The whole point of accessibility is to make things easier for everyone. So why are you okay with accessibility tools that are so complex only a handful of your team are willing to use them? Why settle for an accessibility tool that’s...
If you’ve invested in an accessibility platform, it should work for everyone on your team, including those who use assistive technology. So what happens when the very tool meant to help you meet accessibility standards can’t...
With current shifts in public sentiment and external pressures regarding DEI, some organizations have paused, rebranded, or scaled back their initiatives. The simple truth is, if you market, sell, inform, educate, connect, or build community...
I recently attended Digital Colloquium's Accessibility Summit—hands down one of my favorite events of the year. Niki Ramesh delivered this year's keynote, Using AI to Improve User Experience, which was both timely and...
At DubBot, great technology is just one part of our solution. True success comes from supporting our users with exceptional service and a genuine understanding of our clients’ accessibility goals. Our Client Support Team is at the...
Are the instructions on your website accessible to everyone? You can answer that question by testing your content against Success Criterion 1.3.3 Sensory Characteristics. This criterion requires that directions on a website or app don’t...
When the DOJ rolled out its final rule for Title II of the ADA for state and local governments, it brought some long-overdue clarity—and also raised critical questions surrounding the topic of archiving. Suddenly, it’s not just...
DubBot is proud to once again be a Platinum Sponsor of the Digital Collegium 2025 Annual Conference, where higher ed professionals come together to share insights, sharpen skills, and build the connections that drive your industry forward....
About a month ago, while catching up with the accessibility professionals I follow on LinkedIn, I came across a post by one of my favorite trainers and advocates, Dax Castro. The post was in response to feedback he had received from a previous...
With Custom Policies in DubBot, you can easily create tailored checks to keep your content on track. These policies can return a list of pages that either match or don't match a single rule or a set of custom rules. These checks can be...
At DubBot, we get excited when organizations blend accessibility and bold leadership into their digital strategies—and even more so when it’s one of our clients leading the charge. David Moretti, Senior Director of Digital...
Automated accessibility testing is a powerful tool for quickly identifying many common accessibility issues and should be an integral part of your accessibility testing workflow. But it’s only one piece of the puzzle. To truly understand...
Digital Collegium runs on volunteer power and the invaluable support of our sponsors! DubBot is proud to continue our sponsorship this year as a sponsor for the Accessibility Summit on Tuesday, July 29, 2025. The Accessibility Summit is a...
While working with a client to help customize the crawl on one of their sites, DubBot’s client support specialist, Joanie Chembars, discovered an area for improvement in the Ignore Path setup module. Joanie was helping this client...
When working with PDFs to make them accessible, one of the first steps we learn is to ensure they are correctly tagged. What are tags in a PDF? Tags communicate the structure and reading order of the document to assistive technologies,...
Believe it or not, the internet leaves a mark on the planet, not just in our browser history. The internet leaves a carbon footprint. The digital industry is now responsible for between 2-5% of global emissions, more than that of the...
Some of our best product updates didn’t come from a boardroom brainstorm—they came straight from our clients' "wouldn’t it be nice if…" moments. That’s precisely what inspired our latest product...
When we hear the term digital accessibility, many of us immediately think of web accessibility. And we wouldn’t be wrong. However, digital accessibility does not stop at the web. Many digital technologies operate outside of the web, and...
The AI Model Accessibility Checker (AIMAC) is a groundbreaking, open-source tool designed to hold Large Language Models (LLMs) accountable for how effectively they generate accessible HTML. By using neutral, nonspecific prompts, just...
Welcome to DubBot! We're excited to help you get up and running! Just because our software is self-service doesn't mean you’re on your own! Our Client Support Team works closely with you to get to know you and your team,...
There was an interesting conversation on the DubBot support line the other day. A potential client had asked one of our account executives to "compare and contrast" the accessibility checking features of DubBot with their organization’s...
DubBot is proud to sponsor this outstanding event where agency leaders, technologists, creatives, and higher education professionals converge to discuss accessibility, digital strategy, content, and user...
For most colleges and universities, commencement is over, signifying the end of another academic year. Summer term has arrived! For many faculty, this is a time of rest, reflection, and regrouping. That regrouping may include a new or updated...
A sustainable, continuous accessibility monitoring strategy is essential for ensuring long-term digital accessibility compliance and improvement. Here are some key elements that make such a strategy effective and sustainable. Build Accessibility...
Misspelled words damage credibility and erode trust — they also disrupt user flow and negatively impact search engine rankings. Maintaining proper spelling across your website is a strategic advantage. Leveraging DubBot’s...
Tomorrow, May 15, is Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD)—a day to shine a light on digital access and inclusion for the more than one billion people worldwide living with disabilities and impairments. How will you be...
May 15 holds special significance for many of us in the accessibility community — it's the day we proudly celebrate Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD). Behind this crucial annual event lies a dedicated organization: the GAAD...
If you work in higher education IT, you know the Higher Education Community Vendor Assessment Toolkit (HECVAT). It can be a heavy lift at times, but it’s essential for keeping tabs on vendor risks around security and privacy. It helps...
What is meant by crawling a website? Just like a librarian who meticulously inventories every shelf in a library, writing down the title, author, and subject of each book, a website crawl, also known as a spider crawl or web crawl, is the process...
I first wrote about overlays in February 2021 in a post titled "The Problem with Overlays." The post is pretty simple. It defines overlays, gives examples of how they function, and explains why they are not an acceptable solution for your...
Last week, while scrolling through a social media channel, I stumbled upon an interesting article from NPR. The article's subject is "that more than half of the 1,260 Americans surveyed say they're watching shows with subtitles on because the...
Accessibility remediation work can be very detailed; a single issue can span hundreds of web pages. Effective task management is crucial for successful remediation projects and efficient workflows. Breaking a large project into small, manageable...
We've all been there. You click on a link only to be met with the dreaded "404 Not Found" page. Broken links leading to "404 Not Found" errors frustrate users. Beyond the inconvenience, these errors harm your website's search engine...
Making your PDFs accessible doesn't have to be a daunting task. By focusing on a few fundamental principles, you can significantly enhance the usability of your documents and reach a wider audience. Here are four key principles for making PDFs...
Before I discuss accessibility for mobile apps, I want to differentiate between mobile apps and mobile websites. A mobile website is like any website you visit on your computer, but it is designed to be responsive and function well on mobile...
Have you ever noticed that most WCAG accessibility standards emphasize how content is delivered, not the content itself? While Section Headings (2.4.10) and Reading Level (3.1.5) relate to content, they are Level AAA criteria. Generally,...
In March, I wrote a blog post focused on the importance of labels, specifically for familiar web components such as documents, icons, image maps, and form controls. These elements are often top-of-mind when creating accessible web...
I was offline all day last week for a small road trip. On the drive home, I was thinking about what the next blog post should be about. I keep a running list of topics on my computer, and while driving down I-95, I was running through that list in...
Achieving a comprehensive accessibility evaluation requires automated scans and manual testing. Manual testing allows for the simulation of how people with various disabilities use the web, which can uncover accessibility barriers that automated...
While automated tools, like DubBot, quickly crawl large amounts of content to rapidly identify common accessibility barriers, that represents just half of the complete picture. A comprehensive accessibility evaluation of WCAG compliance requires...
When writing a Request for Proposal (RFP), it is crucial to include clear and specific accessibility requirements to ensure that the products or services procured are accessible to all users, including those with disabilities. At a minimum, the...
If you are working to achieve search engine optimization (SEO), you know that "content is king!" Your website must have high-quality, informative, and engaging content. Proper spelling and good readability are two integral elements of high-quality...
While we often frame accessibility through guidelines and standards—WCAG compliance, screen reader compatibility, and color contrast—it can be easy to lose sight of the actual human impact of accessibility—real people...
Imagine a spice rack with only abstract symbols on the jars. You might recognize a chili pepper as "spicy," but what about a swirly symbol? Is that cinnamon or something else entirely? You're left guessing and potentially ruining your dish. Now...
DubBot is proud to be an exhibitor sponsor for DrupalCon Atlanta 2025! DrupalCon is the essential conference for advancing your skills with curated sessions and panels from the Drupal community's most influential contributors. Join us...
Imagine following a recipe with the baking instructions before the ingredient list, or trying to assemble furniture with the final step illustrated first. Or think of a GPS giving you directions to turn left after you've already passed the...
As accessibility considers users with disabilities, website performance considers devices and connection speeds. Optimizing for performance is critical to creating a genuinely accessible online experience. What is Website Performance? Website...
A well-placed quote in a blog post can significantly enhance its impact and effectiveness. Quotes are essential for providing evidence, enhancing credibility, and enriching the narrative while maintaining clarity and coherence. But when writing...
Sign Language Recognition (SLR) systems convert visual sign language—gestures, body movements, and facial expressions—into accessible spoken or written forms. This conversion is achieved through complex AI algorithms and...
The wait is over! We're thrilled to announce the official launch of the DubBot WordPress plugin. After a successful beta period, this plugin is live and ready to streamline your content quality workflow directly within your WordPress editor. For...
While the concept of chatbots has been around for decades (the first chatbot, ELIZA, was created way back in 1966), they've become a widespread part of the internet experience in the last 15-20 years. Chatbots are valuable tools that offer 24/7...
For many, searching, finding, and finally reading that really good book is a familiar, pleasurable experience. We stroll through the bookstore (or online), search for a specific title or browse the new releases, make our purchase, and dive into...
Color is a powerful tool. It evokes emotions, adds vibrancy to our surroundings, and significantly influences how we navigate the world. However, for people with low vision, color vision deficiency, or color blindness, color can also be...
With the recent update to the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) Standards, state and local governments must ensure that their web content and mobile apps comply with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 Level A and AA success...
Just like buyer personas help us understand our target audience, accessibility personas help us understand the specific challenges and needs of users with disabilities. Accessibility personas educate us about our users in ways other data cannot,...
In the DubBot app, you can create Sites. A Site is just what it sounds and reads like. You customize DubBot crawls for your entire website. Or, as best practices suggest, you can "break" your website into smaller sites to make crawling faster. For...
"What does progress over perfection mean when it comes to accessibility? It means to get started. Don’t wait until everything is done and perfect. The small steps make a big difference." ~ Collective Speakers, Meryl...
The digital accessibility team at Ohio University is launching a new initiative, "Accessibility Habits," to increase accessibility awareness across the campus. Last week, we spoke with Jill Bateman, the Digital Accessibility Coordinator and CPACC,...
Closed captioning has become an essential standard for deaf or hard-of-hearing individuals. Yet its equally important counterpart, audio description, often remains overlooked. Audio description provides narrated commentary that...
Toxic work environments are often characterized by detrimental factors such as: Siloed departments—Poor communication and collaboration between teams, hindering overall productivity and innovation. Excessive emphasis on...
The first item on the list in Jakob Nielsen’s "10 Usability Heuristics for User Interface Design" is the visibility of system status. This heuristic states, "The design should always keep users informed about what is going on through...
Destructive buttons aim to prevent accidental data loss. They are typically used for actions with irreversible consequences, such as closing an account, deleting files, or removing personnel records from a database. Destructive buttons usually...
Both ALT text and the <figcaption> element enhance image accessibility but require different writing styles. Let's look at the less familiar <figure> and <figcaption> elements to help clarify that requirement. What is...
By working together, hosts and guests can create a truly inclusive and enjoyable New Year's Eve party where everyone feels valued and celebrated. Here are two last-minute checklists for hosts and attendees to help ensure a successful and...
The new year is almost here, so it's time to get serious about those New Year's resolutions. 🥳 This year, aim to take your accessibility knowledge and skills to the next level. Resolve to earn an accessibility specialist...
Happy Holidays from DubBot!
While image maps are less commonly used than they once were, they can still be useful in some situations. An image map is a good idea when you want to create interactive elements within a visual image, such as a map, diagram, or product picture....
WCAG doesn't cover all possible accessibility issues and solutions. While it is the best place to start to make your website compliant, it's not the whole picture when it comes to accessibility. There is a substantial body of accessibility advice...
To wrap up 2024, our engineers have identified the top five accessibility hurdles the DubBot app reported to our clients. #1 Color Contrast SC 1.4.3 Contrast (Minimum) Level AA Have you ever struggled to read a website on your phone outdoors?...
Introducing the beta DubBot WordPress module. DubBot subscribers can now experience a simplified version of the DubBot interface directly within your WordPress editor. Using DubBot’s accessibility and content quality checks,...
Feedback mechanisms are essential for collecting and sharing constructive input, evaluations, or suggestions for improvement. They can be as simple as a quick chat or as formal as a survey or review and are instrumental in providing actionable...
Just last year, DubBot, in collaboration with our friends at Lullabot, announced the release of our Drupal module. The Drupal module offers comprehensive functionalities for optimizing your website’s accessibility and...
You might read the blog's title and think, "How much is there to know about links and buttons?" A hyperlink, or link, is for moving from one page to another, and a button triggers an action, like the submit button on a web...
There’s a misunderstanding that accessible design is inherently unattractive. However, accessibility and aesthetics are not mutually exclusive; achieving both is possible with thoughtful design. Let's look at some of the key elements...
After weeks of comparing schedules and two cancellations, my best friend and I were finally going to have dinner at the new vegan cafe downtown. I plugged the address into my GPS, and off we went, following the directions exactly, only to be...
