Transcript: Designing for All: Ensuring Accessibility Compliance in AEC Marketing and Proposals

Lindsay Diven

00:03

Hey there, I’m Lindsay Diven and I’m passionate about everything marketing, productivity and career growth. With over 17 years of experience in the architecture, engineering and construction industry, I know firsthand the ends and the outs of this exciting field. For my early days as a marketing coordinator to becoming an award-winning marketing professional and firm principal, I’ve learned the ropes through countless late nights and challenging deadlines. Now I’m thrilled to bring you the Marketers Take Flight podcast. Here I’ll be sharing simple yet powerful, step-by-step marketing strategies that you can implement to achieve the same level of success. Consider me your go-to marketing mentor, someone who truly gets the unique challenges you face in the AEC industry. Whether you’re an AEC marketing pro or industry newbie, this podcast is your personal coffee date with your marketing bestie. Together, we’ll navigate the ever-changing landscape of online marketing and digital trends, ensuring you stay ahead of the curve. If you’re ready to unlock the marketing secrets they never taught you in college and tailor them specifically to the AEC industry, then you’re in the right place. Now let’s get started. Hey there, friend.

01:30

Welcome back to Marketers Take Flight, your go-to source for the hottest trends and game-changing insights in the dynamic world of AEC marketing. I’m your host, Lindsay Diven, and boy do I have an absolute gem of an episode lined up for you today. Get ready to dive deep into a topic that’s so important and it can’t be ignored Accessibility compliance in your AEC marketing and proposal documents. So I’m not going to waste any time. Let’s head over to my interview with Dax Castro. Okay, well, welcome to the show, Dax Castro. He is the director of media productions and a partner at Chax Training and Consulting, and just before we hit record, Dax reminded me I knew we worked together a long time ago. It was way back when Carter and Burgess still existed, which was my first job in the industry and then along at Jacobs Engineering Group.

02:29

So Dax and I go back, I don’t know. 10 plus years, yeah, 2007. I would say it was 2007. So yeah, so welcome to the show, Dax. We are covering a very important topic that I, honestly, don’t know a lot about, so I am so eager to learn from you. But before we get into that topic, for the listeners who don’t go way back with you, why don’t you tell us a little bit about yourself, your background, your career path and how you help firms today?

Dax Castro

03:00

Yeah. So I started, like we said, way back in 2007, working for Carter and Burgess back then and really had been using InDesign and all of the Creative Suite programs for quite a few years prior. I came from the sign industry, so vinyl cutting and all of that kind of thing, but I really loved document processing it and fell in love with the AEC, the RFP right, the whole idea of putting together an RFP response. that was like detailed and you follow the criteria. It was like winning a game for me. And full disclosure.

03:35

I have ADHD, so for me my brain works a little differently And the need for me to process information in a way that is unique is important, and so it really fed all aspects of my brain. I had the analytical, I had the creative. you know you’re building your battlebook and your cover and what’s the graphics look like And you know what’s the statement. Did you do your SWAT analysis? All of that stuff just really fed me on all cylinders. And you know, as we do in the AEC community, sometimes we move from place to place.

04:08

I went to WSP for a bit and then actually had the opportunity to go back to Jacobs just recently in the last three years and help them get their accessibility program off the ground. So all of that ended with me finding myself in an accessibility firm. that wasn’t a good fit. and Chad Chelius, who has a great LinkedIn learning course on InDesign, and I were at the same company. We kind of looked at each other and said you know the writing’s on the wall And we had been doing an accessibility podcast for about a year at that point And so we were already working together And you know Jack’s training consulting was born. So it’s you know. now we do our thing. It’s been great.

Lindsay Diven

04:52

That’s great. That’s great And we’re probably going to get into later on in the episode, like what you guys do and the training that you offer. We’ll get into that, So stay tuned to the end of that to learn more about Chax. Today’s topic is all about accessibility And I know when I hear accessibility I think of you know, especially in the AEC industry the design of our buildings and our places and making them accessible. But today’s topic is about our marketing materials, our proposals and all of the documents that us, as AEC marketers, are producing. So, with that in mind, why don’t you tell us some of the key accessibility compliance considerations that AEC marketers should keep in mind with their marketing and proposal documents?

Dax Castro

05:39

Well, I think we should start even a little farther back, because like you said the accessibility is like brand new.

05:48

We were just at SMPS Pacific down in San Diego and we were surprised at how many people were just had no idea what accessibility even was. And so, if you don’t know, accessibility is the process in turning digital content into formats that can be readable by anyone, regardless of their ability to see or hear or whether they have low vision or blindness or color blindness, cognitive impairments all of those things fall under accessibility. So as we create these and for us typically PDFs and Word docs a lot of the time we’re giving those to our clients as deliverables and they require them to be readable by the majority of the audience. So that’s kind of accessibility from a standpoint of what should people, what should the typical marketer in today’s AEC environment know about accessibility? Really it starts small. Get some basic knowledge. Understand that just adding image descriptions and using heading levels heading level one, two, three, et cetera in your document to structure it is a huge step forward in accessibility and making your document more readable for everyone. And then I think the other thing is that realize that Word and InDesign both have tools that allow you to export documents with accessibility features, and in InDesign you’ve got styles and those map. If you’re not using styles today, do please start using styles, and you can map those to accessibility tags and in Word it kind of does it automatically. If you use the heading levels that are up at the top, that’s going to equate to styles or to accessibility when you export.

07:37

The other thing maybe the second one I would say is get some training. The one fatal flaw with accessibility is there’s nowhere to go. There’s no one place currently we’ll talk about that later but there’s no one place currently to go to get all the training you need to understand accessibility. At least someone came in and knocked on your door and said, hey, accessibility is this thing. You now have to do it And it’s in the RFP that it must meet section 508 compliance and you’re like what’s that? And you start doing your deep dive on the web and you’ll get a little information here and a little information there. So formal training really is one of those things that I think really will just supercharge what you know and how you can apply.

Lindsay Diven

08:22

So I like that. So just to recap what you just said so start small. some things that I heard, maybe like three things that marketers can start doing today with starting small is your heading levels and using styles. Using headings, please, please, please, use styles and in design. I mean, come on, and then the photos. So making sure that you are labeling the photos, I guess Describing them, describing them So.

Dax Castro

08:52

So describing photos is called alt text, alternate text, and that’s the process of providing a two or three sentence description that tells a user what a photo or an aerial or a line map or a bar chart or pie graph is, so that if they can have to picture it in their mind what’s going on, you’re giving them bar chart with showing environmental concerns or CO2 emissions from 2017 to 2023, showing an upward trend of 30% increase. Right, that gives you a basic idea of what the bar chart is, without being able to see all the details.

Lindsay Diven

09:33

And where do you put these? I’m familiar with, like alt tags or alt text, like on the web, like on a website, or now even LinkedIn has them when you share a photo, but we’re like in word or in design, would you put?

Dax Castro

09:48

that. Yeah, well words, pretty easy Word. You just right-click on the image and go to Edit Alt Text. That’ll pop up a little box and you add that two to three sentence description. You don’t start with image of. If it’s a photo, you just describe it. If it’s something else, then you do want to say bar, chart, line, graph, infographic, etc. But photo is the default because for a screen reader, a person using voice technology to understand the image, it’ll say graphics. You don’t want to repeat graphic, photo of, it’s just assumed.

10:23

Then for InDesign you right-click on an image and you go to Object Export Options or you can go up to the Objects menu and then go down to Object Export Options. When you have that image selected That’ll pop up the Alt Text box and you can actually add your description right there. A key thing that people don’t always know is that you don’t have to close that box after you’ve entered your text. You can just leave it open and then go find your next image and click on it and the box will blank out or give you the next description if you’ve already entered one. A lot of people I see they enter the Alt Text and they close the box, go find the next one and do that whole thing again and you’re like, no, no, just leave it open, it’ll stay, it’s good.

Lindsay Diven

11:06

Yeah, that’s good. At the end, when you’re seeing the document or you’re finalizing the document, you can go through and check all of your graphics to make sure and just keep that box open and just do or sign it to somebody. Yeah, like this is your job on the proposal is to go through and add all of the Alt Text to the graphics.

Dax Castro

11:26

Well, it’s funny that you bring that up, because I actually developed a script because of that exact process. I have a script on accessibilityscripts.com that is called the Alt Text Automator. What it does is it literally goes into an existing document and sucks out all the Alt Text and creates a database file, a CSV, that then either lists the Alt Text or just lists all your images. Then you can give it to somebody for them to write all the Alt Text. Then when they’re done, they give you back the CSV. You can insert it back into your document and literally I did a document that had 500 images. it took nine seconds to do the Alt Text for all 500 images. So it makes it so much easier.

Lindsay Diven

12:11

Yeah, and I love all the InDesign scripts.

Dax Castro

12:15

Yeah.

Lindsay Diven

12:15

Me and Julie Shaffer did a whole episode on InDesign scripts Oh awesome, so I’ll link that up in the show notes. None of them were about Alt Text. It was about a bunch of other things, and so I’ll link that episode up, because before I met with Julie and then talking with you, I didn’t even know such thing existed. They’re a great time saver And I’m sure with all of the AI, there might even be some AI in the future that will read what’s on the photo and make your Alt Text for you.

Dax Castro

12:43

We’re a long way from there.

Lindsay Diven

12:45

Just so you know, we’re a long way from there.

Dax Castro

12:47

I’d love to say that, but I read a Facebook group called PDF Accessibility. We have about 3,600 members in that group. I started it in 2016 and someone just brought up the whole. Look at this Alt Text description that AI was able to come up with And they said it was two cities, kind of one next to the other, And one city was really industrial smokestacks with a blue sky and a bunch of polluted stuff in the foreground, but it was green. The AI’s image description was a city with trees and a green grass and a river And you’re like, no, that’s not really what it was, so you know.

13:25

I think we’re a ways from there, but it is. You know, we being able to write Alt Text is a little bit of an art, and we teach a class on that, the secrets of writing effective Alt Text. But with 30 minutes worth of training you could. It’s not that hard.

Lindsay Diven

13:41

Yeah, and with your script too, you could do a longer document and update them rather quickly, it sounds like, instead of going page by page and doing it manually.

Dax Castro

13:53

Well, and you can get somebody else. Sometimes you know you get a lot of. You get technical documents, You get an EIR and it’s got a bunch of bar graphs and line graphs And you’re like I don’t know what to write for this, And so you can pass that back on to the engineers or on to the, to the people who wrote the content, and say, OK, here’s what you need, two to three sentences and let them go. Then it’s no longer you having to figure out the context and be the expert. You can have someone else do that for you.

Lindsay Diven

14:20

So OK, nice.

Dax Castro

14:22

Thanks.

Lindsay Diven

14:23

So we talked about some small ways that you could start with the alt text, the on the photos or the graphics, the heading levels. So making sure you have a heading one, a heading two, a heading three or whatever you call them, but it’s a hierarchy.

Dax Castro

14:38

No, that is right, yeah, that there’s a hierarchy there And you don’t want to skip. It’s like being on a ladder. We would never jump over a rung to go up right, you would never be on a ladder 10 rungs up and go. I think I’m going to skip that one. You would go to every single rung And if you want to come down, same way. you’d never skip over one and like jump down. So headings are the same way. You can go up or down one at a time, but you never want to skip one. So each one to each two, but not each one to each three.

15:07

And I think the biggest shift for people in the AEC community is that we tend to use styles for visual elements. right, we have a nice big heading and then we want a subheading underneath it, and so we’ll say, oh well, that’s heading level one, and then the one underneath it, oh, that’s heading level three, because it’s smaller. And you really have to get out of that way of thinking and start thinking of it as if I were building an outline in school. you know, roman numeral one, roman numeral two. how is my content being organized that way? And that’s a bit of a challenge for some people to shift that thinking.

Lindsay Diven

15:40

Yeah, that’s a good point, And if you’re using styles, you can always change the way that those headings look rather easily. The hierarchy is important is what I’m hearing you say.

Dax Castro

15:51

Yeah, we worked on a document for California High Speed Rail and we were doing Final QC and I’m like, and the accessibility checker gave me an error and it said we had skipped a heading. Well, what we come to find out was in one chapter we had forgotten an entire paragraph of this section. And so it was really awesome because had we not been checking accessibility, we would have never caught that we had missed an entire section before we published the report. So sometimes accessibility can help you really validate the structure of your content.

Lindsay Diven

16:25

And that you reference that accessibility checker. Is that a setting in design?

Dax Castro

16:30

No, so when you’re using Acrobat, so when you make a PDF of your document you’re going to run the. Your first step is running the accessibility checker. It’s not the only step, but it gets your low hanging fruit. What are the basic things that are wrong with your document?

Lindsay Diven

16:46

Great great. I love it when technology can help us make our jobs easier.

Dax Castro

16:52

Well, it’s always so overwhelming in many cases. It’s nice when it actually works to our benefits.

Lindsay Diven

16:56

Yeah, or at least sometimes, when it doesn’t work, you’re like, okay, why isn’t this working? And then you can backtrack that way and figure out where the errors are, and most of the time it’s like human error.

Dx Castro

17:07

Yes, almost all the time. I will tell you here’s the little, the dirty little secret of accessibility that most of the time when people complain about accessibility being hard, or I don’t understand it, or it’s not coming out right, or Acrobat documents are garbage, when it comes to accessibility It’s almost always, like 80% of the time, user error. I’m not understanding how to use a program correctly, and then you start digging into the source file and you’re like, oh, let me help you here. And it’s just. You know, a lot of us are self taught. You know, when it comes to our InDesign skills and we’ve just picked them up, we move from word InDesign and just kind of made that flow change And we may not be aware of some of those other advanced features in InDesign, like things like nested styles or automatic tables of contents. Those things can sometimes be foreign and I see so many documents with manual table of contents because people just aren’t aware of how to set up an automatic one.

Lindsay Diven

18:07

Yes, yes, you’re preaching. So that leads me to my next question for you is some of these examples of common accessibility barriers that arise in our marketing and proposal documents? It sounds like the first one is user error. What are some of the other common barriers or examples that you see of common barriers?

Dax Castro

18:30

Sure Well, usually it’s missing. alt text is a typical one. The other one we see most often is reading order. So when we create inside word, word has a flow. It doesn’t allow you very much flexibility in how the content moves across the page.

18:50

But in InDesign we have text frames and we can do whatever we want with those text frames. That’s a great benefit, but it’s also more of a challenge when it comes to accessibility. So we teach people to use a panel called the articles panel inside InDesign and you can actually drag those text frames in order and anyone that’s threaded to another one automatically get attached to the other text frame. So you’re able to just go through and drag the first one in. So if you’re one of those people who threads your entire document, you actually don’t even have to use the articles panel. It’s the other form. So either using the articles panel and grab all your bits and pieces and put them in the right order, or thread all your text frames And then when you export the document, all of the objects will be in the right reading order that they’re supposed to be in.

19:39

But you know that’s a definite barrier. We see a lot. And then maybe a third common barrier would be the heading levels being skipped. Where they’re just you know, or misapplied. Bullets tend to come out as paragraphs. Someone might do manual bullets, or they’ve accidentally changed the style mapping to a paragraph And so, instead of it being a bullet list, it will just be paragraph.

Lindsay Diven

20:05

So okay, yeah, yeah. So back to the articles panel. So I know, like back when I used to do proposals, I would thread whole sections text thread to whole sections, like the approach section or the history, but, like when it came to our project sneak pages or our resume pages, those wouldn’t be text-threaded because those were just, like you know, a one page resume And there might be like two or three text boxes on that. So would each one of those you would put into an article, or put them all into one article.

Dax Castro

20:37

Well, if you’re, any box that’s linked. So if all of your chapters are threaded together, you just have to grab the first frame. You can actually grab any frame. It defaults to the first frame in the thread and that’s your object. And then, so if you were to thread every chapter in your document and you had no tables that were set on top or images that were set on top with WordWrap applied, then you’d be good to go. You’d be fine. If everything’s anchored and you’ve threaded all your chapters, you’re okay. But if you’ve threaded your chapters but you placed a table on page four and you used text wrap or you placed images on these other pages as sidebars and you didn’t thread it and you didn’t anchor it, then yeah, that’s going to make those items are going to appear at the Well. if you’re using the articles panel, they won’t appear in your document at all for people using assistive technology. But if you didn’t use the articles panel, they just get dumped in at the end of the document.

Lindsay Diven

21:37

That’s why. So yeah, so they’re just, they will still be in the document, just out of order. Right And so and won’t make sense.

Dax Castro

21:45

Right. So what ends up happening is you know people, you walk into a document, all of a sudden it jumps to page 12, or you’re like, wait a minute, where did page six go? And six was a map that you had just put in, but didn’t anchor it into the threading. And so then what does InDesign do? It says I’m going to follow my threads and then dump everything in afterward, So OK, great, great.

Lindsay Diven

22:09

And whereas you were saying word, china already does that, because you can only go from start to finish in words.

Dax Castro

22:16

You can’t just be for help, love it or hate it? Yeah, love it or hate it.

Lindsay Diven

22:21

True, Okay, So we talked about and you might have already answered this next question but if you have any other best practices or techniques that marketers can employ to ensure that their marketing and their proposal documents meet these accessibility standards while still maintaining a visually appealing design.

Dax Castro

22:46

Well, it’s interesting because we hear this all the time. I hate accessibility because it has to be plain. I have to dumb down my content because it has to be accessible. We find that typically this is because people are unaware of the combinations of colors and ways that they can make their document still look great and be compliant, because the idea is that you’re not restricted by your color palette. There’s millions of accessible colors.

23:15

The problem is we can’t use certain colors together. Understanding what those colors are is super important. In fact, we mentioned one of my scripts for alt text. I actually have a strict script for InDesign for color contrast as well. Instead of having to sample your colors in some third party thing, it runs inside InDesign. You just run it. It samples every color in your palette, swatches and then compares them against each other and tells you which ones are compliant as combinations and which ones aren’t. That’s really powerful because you can take your color scheme and then figure out these are the colors that work together in a click. But otherwise it’s a manual process.

23:55

People feel restricted because they don’t understand the three-to-one color contrast or 4.5-to-one color contrast for different sizes of text and different things. The rules can be overwhelming if you don’t understand them all, Then the other thing is is that if you’re using a lot of decorative elements in your document, you can mark those as decorative and use them. They’re just hidden from people using a screen reader. It’s really just understanding how to use that technology in a way that allows you freedom.

24:24

The hardest thing, I think, is most people use red, green and yellow but that stoplight syndrome for tables or some bar chart or something to show on time and behind schedule or at risk. The problem with that is that you need a label that goes along with that. Someone who’s colorblind can tell the difference between one status and another without only using color. If you just think about that, add a circle in the green ones and a square in the red ones and a triangle in the yellow ones. Give them some other symbology to go by or just write the word in there in reverse text inside your table. You get the nice colors, but then you also make it more readable for everyone.

Lindsay Diven

25:10

Nice, yeah, those are some really good tips. In your experience, you do a lot of training, you work with a lot of firms. What are some of the most significant challenges that you’ve seen in-house marketers face when they have tried to incorporate this accessibility compliance into their documents? How can these challenges be overcome?

Dax Castro

25:32

Great question. I think the first one is understanding that this is not overnight success. You’re not going to learn this in a day. I think managers don’t understand the time it takes for this to happen. You need to be thinking about accessibility at the very beginning. As soon as you know you’re going to do another report from the same that you did last year. Start looking at last years and go, okay, what are the things that we need to change? How can we inject? What color palettes need to change? Or how do we need to maybe reformat our table so that they’re more accessible? All of those kind of forethought. The farther up the stream you can go, the easier it’s going to be. At the end, We have this saying.

26:08

That I always say is that accessibility at the beginning adds 20% to the time it takes to create a document. But if you’re considering accessibility at the end, it could be up to 80% of the time it took you to make the document to go back and restructure or edit in the PDF. It’s just so much more of a time suck when you have to consider it at the end. I think that’s the biggest thing people don’t understand is you’ve got to start at the beginning. It’s not something you do. Okay, we’ve created the document, Now let’s make it accessible.

Lindsay Diven

26:42

Yeah, that makes sense. It’s kind of just like any kind of new strategy If you plan for it in the beginning and you set it up in the beginning, the implementation of it is just. If you take the time to do all that planning and that research and the strategy and the planning before you start implementing, the implementation goes a lot smoother Right At the end. It’s like a lot of similar to a lot of things in life. I feel like.

Dax Castro

27:10

Well, the other thing would be is that this is a skill. It requires training. You can get into accessibility and fumble your way through And in two years you’ll be good at it if you just struggle on your own. But who wants two years worth of headache Because your first year is just? oh my gosh, this is crazy. I don’t understand all these rules and how it applies And the moment I think I get it, there’s three other things I now I need to do that I didn’t know I needed to do And just getting that training, getting buy-in.

27:43

There’s so many conferences that you can go to The CSUN Assistive Technology Conference down in LA. That CSUN Assistive Technology Conference is a great one to go to to learn all about accessibility for Acrobat And really to see people in a lived environment that are blind and low vision or think differently or neurodiverse. It’s really a great environment. The other one is, matter of fact, coming up. Next week it’s Creative Pro Week by David Blatner and his group at Creative Pro And that’s happening in Phoenix. And then we’ve got the Design and Accessibility Summit. That’s an online conference And David runs that as well. And then I’m speaking at Adobe Max coming up this year.

28:27

So I’m doing a 90-minute lab where we’re going to do InDesign for accessibility. We’re going to take a document, move it from creation to accessibility. So let’s get out there and get training, it’s you know, you’ll just feel so much better. Or find me on LinkedIn and ask me, because I’m I’m a sucker for helping people And you know I even posted a couple. Every couple of months, I make a post that says if you spend more than 15 minutes struggling on anything for accessibility, reach out to me, because I’ve been there, I can. I can definitely help you, yeah.

Lindsay Diven

28:59

And they should just follow you on LinkedIn too, because I know that you are always putting out like really quick kind of videos or how-tos in InDesign. Yeah, So, when it comes to accessibility. I know I I see a lot of your videos And so I always learn a thing or two, even though I’m not really in InDesign every day anymore. But I always like to keep you know fresh in it. So everybody go connects with Vax on LinkedIn. And then, before we close out today, I want to ask you my rapid fire questions.

Dax Castro

29:31

Are you up for those? I’m ready.

Lindsay Diven

29:34

Question number one what is your number one piece of advice for marketers who are new to the AEC industry?

Dax Castro

29:42

Absorb everything. Look around you. It’s all been done before. Look to the leaders in the community to get those answers. Don’t struggle on your own. It’s been done Everything you can possibly think of. every struggle you’ve had, somebody else has had it. Look for that mentor and that advice and you’ll just feel so much better. That’s awesome.

Lindsay Diven

30:04

Question number two what has been your favorite or most memorable win?

Dax Castro

30:12

Well, that’s a hard one because I’ve had quite a few. I’ll put it this way One of my most favorite projects has been the California High Speed Rail. I wasn’t involved in that RFP chase, but I was definitely involved in implementing the program and being an on-site staff for the project. It’s such an amazing project and it gets a lot of negative press and we could probably spend a whole nother podcast talking about that. but it’s going to get built and I’m just so happy to have been a part of it and it’s just amazing to be part of something that is going to change lives forever.

Lindsay Diven

30:48

Well, I am rooting for it. We’re getting I don’t know if we consider it a high speed rail in Florida, but we have the Bright Line and it’s connecting Eventually. You’re going to go all the way from Miami to Orlando, and so I can’t wait until that is complete. I hate driving. I’d rather take a train all day long. Sure, and then question number three what are you excited about? And this can be personal or professional.

Dax Castro

31:12

Oh, my wife and I have a micro farm. We have alpaca, two alpaca, 10 rabbits, 20 chickens, a desert tortoise. We have a garden that’s all sustainable and uses compost and all of that, and I’m building a 6,000 gallon Koi pond right now, which has been an interesting challenge and struggle. I have 400 fish and 13 aquariums. So if you want to talk about passion, I think animals and animal husbandry is a passion of mine outside. You know you have to balance right.

31:44

You can have, I can sit at a computer all day long, but I can go back out into the back and take an alpaca break and go sit with my two buddies and just enjoy.

Lindsay Diven

31:52

So you might have to send me a picture of you with an alpaca and we can use that for the episode.

Dax Castro

31:58

Yeah, if you’re on the TikTok or Instagram, we are ETR Farm. It stands for end of the road farm, because we are literally at the end of a road.

Lindsay Diven

32:09

Nice. Yeah, I would be the opposite. In the farming, I am terrified of most animal. Ah, I had a really bad petting zoo incident when I was like a toddler and I’m just a little skittish.

Dax Castro

32:22

That’s okay.

Lindsay Diven

32:23

My aunt lives down the street and they have chickens, and so when they’re out of town and we’re in town, I’ll go let them out, and they just freak me out.

Dax Castro

32:32

Well, chickens are little raptors, man They are. They can be brutal, right? I mean, it is definitely. They are not for the faint of heart, for sure, right, yeah.

Lindsay Diven

32:44

So between them and then when we used to live in Orlando, I worked downtown. in downtown Orlando has Lake Eola, which is a big lake, and then they have these huge swans.

Dax Castro

32:53

Oh.

Lindsay Diven

32:53

Swans are huge Totally And they just walk around, and so I would walk the lunch or take a walk around the lake on my lunch break And I just stayed clear of them because they were just they’re mean.

Dax Castro

33:06

Yes, They’re not nice. No, and chickens are not nice either. They’ll eat their own. They are definitely not. We do have some that are nice, right, like there’s several chickens. When you walk in, they come right up to you and they’ll jump up on your lap and be like hey, how’s it going? And then there are others that you’re like yeah, get away from me.

Lindsay Diven

33:24

Yeah Yeah, that’s so funny. They have all their own little personalities. So back to the episode the aggressive on my animal fear, feardom. Last question for today. So next, tell us a little bit about your company, the offerings that you offer marketers, and how everybody can get in touch with you or learn more about your training and your services.

Dax Castro

33:47

Well, I will actually start by touting SMPS. So I did a three part series called master this understanding, accessibility and compliance. So if you are an SMPS member, you do have access to this course And it is, like I said, three different sessions And it goes through a variety of different things. I would say, at a surface to maybe a little bit below the surface level for a lot of the items that we talked about. You can also find me and my partner, Chad Chelius, at accessibilityunraveled.com, and that there we have all of our training classes that we offer. Everything comes with handouts and manuals, so it’s not just show up and try to absorb as much as you can And then you get the recording afterward, which is really nice because then you can go back and kind of review you know what you learned And the topics like, in fact, today.

34:37

Well, when we’re recording this podcast is our accessibility for Adobe InDesign class. But we run those these drop in classes about usually three a month on Thursdays, and they’re normally 299 for the three hours, but we give you a discount coupon for 224. So it’s $75 off. So so if you’re interested in that, yeah, those that’s those are the places we have a YouTube channel. There’s new YouTube at symbols. Now you can search accessibility unraveled on YouTube or you can go to https://www.youtube.com/c/pdfaccessibility and get to our channel.

Lindsay Diven

35:16

Nice, nice. And for the drop in classes, for the training, they can sign up and find those at your website. accessibilityunraveled.com

Dax Castro

35:24

Exactly, exactly, and there’s, like I said, we rotate about 10 different classes. Our next one after this is June 1st. The secrets of writing effective alt text. So, if you’re interested in learning more about alt text, we got you covered.

Lindsay Diven

35:38

So nice, nice. Yeah Well, thank you so much for everybody that’s listening. I will provide all of these links in the show notes And so you don’t have to worry about trying to write those down. Just head over to the show notes page and click on them there. Don’t forget to connect with Dax over on LinkedIn, and thank you so much. This has been. I learned a lot, oh awesome today, so I really appreciate it. It was so great catch. I’m so glad we ran into each other.

36:07

Yeah SMPS PRC conference earlier this year and we’re able to get on this reconnect and record this episode.

Dax Castro

36:15

Awesome What’s been so great being here and thank you so much for the opportunity.

Lindsay Diven

36:19

All right, my friend. There you have it. This is a topic that I encourage you to start learning about because I envision more of your clients will be asking for it in your proposals, and I want to tell you this after we stopped recording, Dax told me about a proposal effort he had helped with to make it compliant, and that compliance, that differentiation, was a key aspect for that firm winning that project. So, if anything, making your proposal documents compliant with the accessibility elements that we talked about today could be a key differentiator for your firm. So make sure to connect with Dax and visit his site to learn more about his resources and his trainings. This way, you stay ahead of the learning curve for your own personal career development. All right, my friend, until we meet again, keep rocking those marketing strategies and chasing your goals Until next time. Bye for now.