**Jesse:** Welcome to Impressive Hosting, a podcast about the role hosting plays in shaping the open web. I'm your host, Jesse Friedman. On this show, we go deeper than uptime and dashboards. We talk about hosting as infrastructure, about ownership, independence, and what it takes to build ethical, high-end WordPress hosting that actually serves creators, businesses, and the internet itself. Before we dive in, head to impressive.host. That's where you can comment on episodes, ask follow-up questions, and help shape future conversations. You'll also find links to follow, like, and subscribe wherever you listen. And today, we have a continuation, part two of a great conversation we're having with accessibility strategist Anne-Mieke Bovelett, who has joined us to talk about a variety of things across the span of accessibility. But mostly what we've been focused on in the last episode is appealing to the folks who are making websites and hosting websites around the importance of accessibility beyond just the moral reasons, you know, the fact that humans deserve to have a good experience on the internet, and getting into the actual crux of the matter around revenue, driving traffic, better marketing, more sales, and all the pieces that go into it. Anne-Mieke, it's great to have you back on the show. And before we dive in, we promised folks at home we'd talk about AI, but first I just want to ask a quick question. One of the things that we keep going back to on this show is that I love the old internet. I love the weird, wild west, crazy, fun internet that we had in the early 2000s. I feel like a lot of times what we see now is that the internet is becoming a little more sterile, and a lot of websites tend to look alike. In the last episode, we were talking about how people who are facing accessibility issues, especially on mobile, things moving around and things happening on the site, elements that are loading only when you scroll down, it creates a pretty poor experience. But even as someone who has dyslexia, so I use the Open Dyslexic font with a browser extension, comparatively I don't need to worry about accessibility features for myself personally very much, but I still have a pretty terrible experience on the internet sometimes. When I'm browsing and just trying to read an article, I've got pop-ups and interstitials and cookies to accept, and my finger is playing this ping pong game where I have to get everything out of the way just to read. I can't even imagine having to deal with that if I didn't have hands, or if I can't see, and how do I know where to find that X to dismiss those things? It must be terrible.
**Anne-Mieke Bovelett:** Or maybe...
**Jesse:** Right. Exactly. So it leads me back to thinking that we can do a better job of making the internet more beautiful and a better experience for everyone across the board. But does being truly accessible, like getting a really high accessibility score, mean that my website has to look sterile, boring, ugly? No? Okay. So help us understand what that actually means in terms of the sacrifices you might need to make to your website, or the planning you need to get ahead of.
**Anne-Mieke Bovelett:** The one thing that gets sacrificed and slaughtered immediately is the ego of the graphic designer. I can't put it more simply, and that's the hill I die on. Because it starts and ends with the creativity of a designer, a graphic designer. That's what we go for, right? But the designer should actually have an easy job when the people who did the technical design have done their part well. Let's use that framing: technical design and graphical design. Because especially people who are not natively English speakers, when they hear the word design, all they think is colors and shapes and what it looks like. If the technical design has been thought through and done well, then that's where the designer gets their challenge. Here is the body, now go dress it. Things that people need to think about, for example, moving parts. If a designer or site owner is insisting on having animation, fine, because users can actually turn off motion in their system settings. It's called Reduced Motion on Mac, and I always forget what it's called on Windows. This is where the designer and the developer have to talk to each other. If the designer says, "We want this animated," the developer should actually be asking, "Do you like what it looks like when the animation is not there? Because we will add it into the CSS." It's actually just a media query. And it's the imagination of the designer that drives it. I once made a site full of rainbow colors, and the developer said to me, "That's an accessible website, Anne?" I said, "This site is super accessible." It's just important that the parts that are functional, like text, are accessible. Because that's where it matters. As soon as something lands on a mobile screen, where are your animations? Where are your images? Where are your backgrounds? Where's all that voodoo? It's nowhere. People are tired. People are impatient. People have to do things, they have to go places, which in itself is really sad. I mean, you and I are of generations that could still go play outside in the sand and no one took a photo, right? So yeah. The graphic designer should know that whatever they do has a very important impact on the conversion of the website. It is not about their ego. Neither is it about the ego of the founder of the company who happens to like pink text on a white background. Because if
**Jesse:** Right.
**Anne-Mieke Bovelett:** it's a shop for baby wear, for example, it's going to cost them millions in turnover if they do that. And I have a case to prove it, because we just had one. But it's a strong misconception. People say, "Oh, if it has to be accessible, it can't be beautiful." And you know what is one of the best examples ever? GitHub.
**Jesse:** Oh, this is where I was just about to ask you, like, who are great examples of platforms or sites that you hold up and say, "These guys are doing it right"?
**Anne-Mieke Bovelett:** Go to the homepage of GitHub. Think about three years ago, Elementor decided to put all their communication with their users onto GitHub. And I thought, "Wait a second, there are a lot of people who don't know what GitHub is, or they are afraid of it." So let me make a quick video about how to sign up on GitHub. I hadn't seen the login page for GitHub in I don't know how many years, like so many of us who are inside that bubble. I wanted to create a dummy account, and there I found myself confronted with a universe and stars flying at me with this really movie-like effect, and I just felt like Captain Picard with LSD in the water. I was like, "I can't stand this." And at the time, GitHub had just opened up a section where you could log your accessibility issues. So I said, "Can you adjust this experience? Because it should at least respect Reduced Motion, and this is going to lose people." I didn't hear back for a long time, and suddenly after about a year and a half or so, someone from GitHub reached out. She happens to be someone I'm very fond of in the accessibility world, and I thought, "Wow, you're at GitHub. This is really cool." I have this whole story on my website. I can share the link with you later if you like.
**Jesse:** Absolutely. Yeah, we'll put it in the show notes.
**Anne-Mieke Bovelett:** And then she said, "Give us some time. We're working on it." And then one day it said, "Anne, have a look. It's online." And I opened up that website, and it had this sweet little animation with their little puppets, and you could go down, and they had moving parts, and it was done aesthetically beautiful. It was modern. I was like, "Wow." And with Reduced Motion turned on, the animations are gone, but the information still comes through. That site is so beautiful. And every time I run into a web shop or a website that has been made accessible because some digital ambulance chaser has been after them because of whatever law, here in the EU with the Accessibility Act, it always breaks my heart. Because I'm like, "You didn't have to do this." This is fear.
**Jesse:** Right. You could have done it with that imaginative, creative love and brought it in under the design house of your entire project, instead of it being like, "I have to now address this because someone's forcing me to."
**Anne-Mieke Bovelett:** Yeah, and you can do wild stuff. Isn't it Nick Hamsy who's propagating about these things? And I love it when he does that. Every time I see that stuff, I'm like, "Oh, if I only had a few days to play around with this," because I would build the craziest, wildest websites, really flippy-dippy, that are still accessible.
**Jesse:** Yeah. That brings me back to conversations I had with Aaron Gustafson about progressive web design,
**Anne-Mieke Bovelett:** Mm-hmm.
**Jesse:** and this idea that your website should be viewable at all these different stages. It should be viewable, understandable, and accessible with just HTML and CSS. Then you layer in the JavaScript, then you layer in the motion and everything else, and you make sure it works as you progress through all those steps. And it makes me think about what you're saying with accessibility, about these methods for detecting someone's use of tools and settings. So with my browser, I can say my default language is English, and Chrome will make an attempt to translate the website into English for me. And I wonder if a website would actually be able to look at the browser's data and see whether English is the default language, and then default to making the website English. But are there things like that? And should we be getting into personalizing accessibility so the website looks one way for someone who needs a screen reader and another way for someone else? Or should we be thinking about this more globally?
**Anne-Mieke Bovelett:** You should think about it more globally, because you are putting yourself in a world of pain if you try to cater to different audiences. This is about universal design. Anyone watching or listening, go Google, or whatever LLM you want to use for search, the seven universal design principles. Because what you just described, how Aaron approaches this, everything should work with just HTML and CSS. That is the way. Make it work first, and then dress it. It's a fantastic approach. And another thing: it's also a massive privacy concern. This is why you can't track if someone is using assistive technology. Imagine you depend on assistive technology. It immediately makes you vulnerable to people who want to do bad things. If they can track you and know, "Oh, that person is using a screen reader." And by the way, screen readers are also used by people who have severe dyslexia, for example. There are many reasons to use screen readers. And especially now, I talk to a lot of young people, and even they like to use this kind of technology just because they're tired or overwhelmed. But you have to think it through.
**Jesse:** I never thought about the security implications of that. But if you have a lower ability to detect things like phishing schemes, at least for me, when I see a website, a lot of my signal antenna goes off from a visual component. A spelling error, or something seems off or wrong, I can get the sense that I'm not in the right place. But I would imagine that's a lot harder with a screen reader. And if somebody's intentionally manipulating what the screen reader is reading, it'd be pretty easy to phish someone into giving up credentials or something like that if they could detect that.
**Anne-Mieke Bovelett:** It is easy to phish. But also, let's look at the phenomenon of short links. If
**Jesse:** Yeah.
**Anne-Mieke Bovelett:** you have to be mindful about using short links. It actually reminds me that it's on my to-do list, because I have my own short link generator with my vanity domain name, and I should put an article out there that says, "Look, this is my short link. I stand for this short link. I use this." Because people, and this is not even just about using assistive technology, it's for everybody. It's just about humans. If they can't recognize a link, or they don't see what it really is, and they take a short link and land somewhere malicious, this is horrible. And a very small but at the same time incredibly huge detail for people depending on assistive technology is the title of your site. People click on a link, they come onto a site. If the title of the site is a bag of garbage, it's unsafe to them. It doesn't feel like, "Oh, I know where I am." This is the first slap in the face
**Jesse:** Right.
**Anne-Mieke Bovelett:** that they get.
**Jesse:** You know what's interesting, when you talk about short links, it's easy to put a link behind something or to buy a vanity domain that seems very close to the correct one. What I've actually been doing is I'm pretty lucky that I have a short domain for my personal blog already, jesse.blog. So when I post on social media, I create a redirect, a manual redirect. If you go to jesse.blog/a number, it takes you to one of the essays I wrote. That way it's a lot easier to share on social media, because social media really doesn't want you linking out to stuff anyway. A video I create, I watermark it with that shorter URL. It's a little easier, it reinforces the brand, things like that. But yeah, it's something to think about when you're building a website. There's another opportunity to do something that reinforces your brand, improves the experience for everybody, and makes things a lot easier if you're shortening those URLs with something associated with your brand rather than something like TinyURL that's accessible to anybody else.
**Anne-Mieke Bovelett:** Yeah.
**Jesse:** Yeah.
**Anne-Mieke Bovelett:** And this is all about trust, you know? And this is fundamental. In my talk, I do something called a clarity test. I show three different homepages, and people only get five seconds to look at each. It was really mean. And then they have to answer: did they immediately understand what the site was about? Do they understand what the site wants them to do? And do they trust it? The order is not important, but if none of those three work, you are just waiting for someone to walk away. And
**Jesse:** Yeah.
**Anne-Mieke Bovelett:** for me, accessibility is part of UX, and the UX and UI discipline. All these disciplines that work together to build an experience have to start talking to each other. They can't be islands anymore. But there's another thing I wanted to ask you. In the hosting business, do you see a lot of questions coming into support where the support team goes like, "Yeah, we've got an article about that on our website"?
**Jesse:** Sure. Yeah, all the time.
**Anne-Mieke Bovelett:** Yeah.
**Jesse:** Specifically about accessibility, or just in general? Yeah.
**Anne-Mieke Bovelett:** Just about the product.
**Jesse:** Yeah, sure. Right.
**Anne-Mieke Bovelett:** This happens all the time, right?
**Jesse:** Yeah, all the time.
**Anne-Mieke Bovelett:** It's expensive, very expensive. If you get that a lot, you can cut your support costs by I don't know how much, and not by using AI, because that's making it worse most of the time. You do it by looking at how clear is my website? How clearly can people get where they need to go? How do they know what to do? And what you said, I don't remember if we had this conversation or in the previous episode, about where the front end is really cool and nice and all juicy-looking and accessible, and then you get to the back end and you get this flat, disappointing experience. It happens to me. If the contrast is really bad, I have custom CSS loaded in my browsers just to make the contrast different. And it feels like a breach of trust. It's disappointing when you see that and then you can't get where you want because the navigation is unclear. Or maybe some days my arms just hurt, and I don't want to use my mouse or trackpad, so I keyboard navigate, and I'm a keyboard-generation person anyway.
**Jesse:** Yeah, yeah. Yep.
**Anne-Mieke Bovelett:** And then I try to keyboard into something and I can't. Jesse, I have actually canceled hosts over their interface, not because of their
**Jesse:** Right.
**Anne-Mieke Bovelett:** I don't care if I have to pay double the price somewhere else, as long as I can use it. And I'm not alone.
**Jesse:** Right.
**Anne-Mieke Bovelett:** You win so much in support costs from accessibility and great usability, because accessibility is part of usability. The problem is that people treat it as a separate thing, and it shouldn't be. Same with security. I mean, if you buy a car, and I'll use my analogies again, if you buy a new Mercedes, are you going to go to the salesman and say, "Can you show me the security certificate for that, and the tests, and how did it do?" Of course not. You're buying a Mercedes and you're counting on the fact that it's been tested for security and that they tried running it into a wall without killing the driver. But
**Jesse:** Oh, yeah.
**Anne-Mieke Bovelett:** for websites, no one is thinking about that.
**Jesse:** Well, and I think it gets even simpler than that. When you build a car, they're building it for the average-sized human being, but it also allows you to move your seat forward and back. It allows you to move the steering wheel up and down. The idea that you would make a car fit for just one person, for the person who fits into that 70-80% category, and that everyone else has to pay for some third-party customization to move the seat forward or adjust the steering wheel. Because why would I want to make it for everybody when I could just save money and make it for the 80%?
**Anne-Mieke Bovelett:** They feel very unwanted, right? And now
**Jesse:** Right.
**Anne-Mieke Bovelett:** if you feel unwelcome or unwanted, you're going to tell at least 13 people about this.
**Jesse:** Well, that's the thing. A lot of people forget about this. They look at the population. In the last episode, you mentioned that 0.5% of women have color blindness. But if you cross that across the entire planet, that 0.5% ends up being roughly the population of the United States, 350 million people worldwide who have some form of color blindness. Now, if you're a small mom-and-pop shop making a website for your local area, that population is significantly smaller of course. But there are so many other things we're talking about here in terms of accessibility beyond just color blindness. And I think you touched on something I maybe don't want to think about. We talked a bit about how I'm in my 40s now, and sleeping wrong means I wake up sore. We're all kind of starting to get up there. We have a new generation of people who were introduced to the internet a certain way. When I think about how I introduced the internet to my parents or my grandparents, they had very specific needs and I would show them around. And you mentioned how if you make your website accessible, you get fewer phone calls from your grandmother asking you to do things. But the reality is my reading vision is not as good as it used to be. There are other things I'm dealing with. In a few years I'm going to be one of these people. And I think we're going to start to see that the people who cared about the internet, the people who built the internet, are the ones who are going to need this most. So maybe there's an opportunity there to help the internet be a little more empathetic, to help the people who build the internet be a little more empathetic, because they're going to be facing these things firsthand, you
**Anne-Mieke Bovelett:** I just...
**Jesse:** know? No, go ahead. Sorry.
**Anne-Mieke Bovelett:** Yeah, sorry.
**Jesse:** No, I was just going to say that we promised in the last episode we were going to talk about AI, and believe it or not, we're almost at the end of this episode. I have two things I wanted to ask about. One is, when we talk about security, we talk about using AI to detect malicious files, to find backdoors, to find vulnerabilities. In that way, AI is doing a really great job. So I'm wondering, and you mentioned there's a natural use case for AI because AI crawls your site in a certain way, and if you want AI to see everything on your website, you need to be accessible. But are there AI tools we should be using to traverse websites and give us back an accessibility score? Are they good at it? And then from a different angle, this is a two-parter, we're seeing so many hosting companies building AI tools to help you build your website. A lot of what I get from people working with these tools is that they're very focused on trying to make it look good and make it physically work, because it's so new and fresh. But are they building accessibility into these site builders? I haven't seen it yet. Maybe it is there by default, but I haven't seen anyone run an accessibility check in the same way I've seen responsive design checks.
**Anne-Mieke Bovelett:** This is the sad part, because everyone comes with best intentions. And I'm really happy when I see hosting companies offering site builders based on the block editor. Because if you use WordPress core blocks, accessibility readiness is already getting better and better. I mean, the accessibility team is working hard on that. But if they are proprietary page builders, oh man. I don't want to cuss online, but what some of those are spitting out under the hood is a nightmare. And to get back to that first part, what can AI do? Look, it's a very mechanical check. The things that AI can't check are also what makes it impossible for AI to fully understand if something works or not. You have to test this with assistive technology. You have to try the screen reader, you have to try... I dream of the day where AI puts me out of a job. I have other things I want to do. I'm an artist, I'm a painter, I make music, I want to sing again. But unfortunately, AI can't get there yet. It can catch about 35%, some claim 40, but I think that's a very exaggerated number. And the thing is, Jesse, people are just lazy. Google already had accessibility in Lighthouse, and now they have this AI scorer, whatever it's called, that is one of the most misleading trackers in the world. I understand, and I don't want them to stop, because it will motivate people to do things better. But it starts with the stuff under the hood, the semantic code. Have you seen all these people in the last two years doing Duolingo language training? And they're like, "I have a 785-day streak on Duolingo." And I'm like, "But you don't know
**Jesse:** Yeah.
**Anne-Mieke Bovelett:** 50 semantic HTML elements. Wow, good for you." It's too funny to me. But every time I see some company with the best intentions bringing a builder to market, I'm like, "Get someone like me or anyone in my business." There are so many people doing accessibility these days, and there are still not enough, but get someone to guide you on it. Don't be afraid, because it's a win-win-win-win situation all around.
**Jesse:** Yeah. So we've talked a lot about agencies and hosting companies, but do you think a hosting company has a responsibility to someone who is just trying to build a website for themselves, to educate them on accessibility and provide tools? A lot of hosting companies bundle things. When you launch a WordPress site, it comes with a certain set of tools, certain plugins, maybe some pre-configurations. Are there things we could be doing, and is the host responsible for that?
**Anne-Mieke Bovelett:** Is the host responsible for that? Absolutely not.
**Jesse:** Okay.
**Anne-Mieke Bovelett:** Absolutely not, because that would be crazy. But if you are offering this tool, I mean, this is me and my cars again. It's like taking responsibility whether someone buys a car from you and then runs somebody over or not. You
**Jesse:** Right.
**Anne-Mieke Bovelett:** put up a sign: don't run someone over. But is it morally and marketing-wise a smart thing to do? Oh, yeah.
**Jesse:** Well, it's interesting. With the car analogy, there's usually a governing body. At least here in the United States, the government has laws that say cars have to have seat belts, airbags, certain levels of features that help protect you on the road. A hosting company doesn't have a governing body saying, "Hey, you're putting something out on the internet," the digital highway that we all use, "and you should have this." Now, WP Cloud has partnered with the Secure Hosting Alliance to help raise awareness around
**Anne-Mieke Bovelett:** Mm-hmm.
**Jesse:** ethically good hosting companies who are doing things around security, and it makes me think: should we have something like that for accessibility? Some governing body saying, "These are the things you should be doing for accessibility, and these are the hosting companies actually achieving it." Something that helps to solve these problems.
**Anne-Mieke Bovelett:** It would be great. In a perfect world, that would be great. Because this is how you welcome your user and say, "You want it, you can have it." But you can't tell someone, "No, you can't build an online freak show because it's not good," because that is taking away people's freedom. This is a big discussion going on, but people are just not informed. I think if hosting companies would get informed themselves,
**Jesse:** Yeah.
**Anne-Mieke Bovelett:** and then start bringing this information across, and not talk about, "Oh, you have to make it accessible," because then everyone is thinking, "I'm outta here." But if you talk to people and say, "We have this little guidance program, and if you watch those videos or read those texts," and make sure you have closed captions on your videos, right? Then
**Jesse:** Make sure we have closed captioning on our videos. I'm just talking to our producer.
**Anne-Mieke Bovelett:** They get indexed by Google like crazy, by the way.
**Jesse:** Yeah, yeah.
**Anne-Mieke Bovelett:** I'm always giving the extra incentive. But if you offer this information in several formats, and that's also very important, people are going to trust you. And if you tell them, "Look, your website will be experienced in a better way. You will get more conversions, or more people are going to like it, or it's not that hard." And if you offer a product to build with, and you ensure as a hoster that this product under the hood makes sure the output is accessibility-ready, then you can teach people on color contrast, on text. Because sometimes I see people post walls of text that are this wide. Well, we both have dyslexia. We know what that's like.
**Jesse:** Yeah, sure.
**Anne-Mieke Bovelett:** The official number on dyslexia is 7% of the world population, but the estimated number is 15%. And cognitive issues like that never come alone. So if people understand from a caring place, like, "Hey, if you make your design and keep the text not so wide, more people are going to enjoy it. So many people like it when you do it that way." Because you're coming from yes. But if you come like, "You have to be accessible because you're morally obliged, and the government is going to come get you, and if you don't..." Negativity never works.
**Jesse:** Same thing I found with security. Fear marketing and fear education do not work in security either. I think security has a layer of responsibility the host has to take on, because they're giving you access to basically computing power on the internet that can be used for malicious things. But I like your position on accessibility, that it's something hosting companies should be doing, something they should be helping make people more aware of, providing tools to help them be more accessible. But at the same time, let's not interrupt free speech or the freedom to launch and get things done. My brain is always going with ideas, and it certainly would be interesting: when I hit the back button, what if there were like three back buttons, each for different reasons? I'm hitting back because it didn't have the information I wanted. I'm hitting back because the experience was terrible. I'm hitting back because I couldn't actually see any of this, because there's an accessibility problem. That data would be so hugely helpful.
**Anne-Mieke Bovelett:** Absolutely.
**Jesse:** I don't know if there's anything we can actually do in the realm of reality, but I think the use of AI would be good to implement something into the WP admin and other areas where it's like, "Hey, if you made this page a little more contrasting, you might see an uptick in traffic," or, "If you made it easy to tab around this shopping cart, you might actually have more people checking out and buying things."
**Anne-Mieke Bovelett:** I was part of a project in Germany for a big baby products web shop, and we ported that one from a very bloated page builder to WordPress core blocks. We just took the basic 2025 theme and based a theme on that with the Create Block Theme plugin. Within three months, the owners of this website reported a 21% increase in turnover compared to the year before.
**Jesse:** Turnover meaning sales.
**Anne-Mieke Bovelett:** Sales.
**Jesse:** Yeah. See, that's great. And so maybe there's something there, because I really do feel like we're moving towards a situation where AI is going to exist as a personal assistant within the WP admin and help you understand things like marketing, sales, what plugins you should install, how to do X, Y, and Z. If we can incorporate accessibility into that in a way that actually helps users relate to the problem a little better, I think we could make a lot of headway there. Listen, it was absolutely fantastic having you on the show. We went over time both times because this conversation was so good, and I think it's so needed for everyone at home to be hearing this. I can't wait to see what people say when they comment. I would love to have you back on again, maybe at the end of the year or next year, and we can revisit and see what's changed and what we should all be thinking about going forward.
**Anne-Mieke Bovelett:** Yeah.
**Jesse:** Anyway, great having you on. Thank you so much.
**Anne-Mieke Bovelett:** Thank you for having me.
**Jesse Friedman:** Thanks for joining us on another episode of Impressive Hosting, where we uncover the core tenets of great WordPress hosting. Do you have a follow-up question for today's guest, a thought or comment on anything we talked about, a future guest suggestion, or a hosting horror story? What do you think makes great WordPress hosting? All your comments shape the show. Drop them on impressive.host. We also appreciate you following us on social media and subscribing to the podcast on your favorite platform. Finally, do check out our list of open-source projects that need support at impressive.host. Whether it's code, community, or cash, you can make a difference. See you next time.
