What to Know About Accessibility Compliance and Best Practices with WordPress

Robbie: Hello and welcome to Do the Woo. I’m Robbie Adair, one of your co-hosts here. I’ve also got Robert Jacobi with me. Good morning, Robert. How you doing?

Robert: Good morning. It’s morning? The whole daylight saving time thing drives me nuts. I’ve given up on trying to figure out whether it’s morning, evening. It’s always dark now.

Robbie: Yes, it is. Well, I am very excited today because we have a guest today that’s going to talk about this topic that is near and dear to my heart, actually, and it kind of frightens me, and that is accessibility. And we’ve got Bet Hannon here today and she’s going to enlighten Robert and I on accessibility. How are you doing today, Bet?

Bet: I’m great, I’m great. It’s good to be with you.

Robbie: Awesome. And tell us just a little bit about yourself, Bet.

Bet: Yeah. So I’ve run an agency since about 2008 and we’ve kind of made a shift over time, as agencies do. And in the last five years, increasingly focused on accessibility, web accessibility. And so, then last summer, we doubled down on that with a rebrand and a rename to AccessiCart and we are focusing on web accessibility and eCommerce, in particular, which is why we’re here talking about WooCommerce and all. And because a lot of eCommerce sites are a part of the targeted group getting sued by the predatory lawsuits.

Robbie: Yes, that was where I actually wanted us to start, because in looking at your website, I saw that in 2022, so just months ago, that 77% of all of the accessibility lawsuits involved eCommerce. That is huge. And so, anybody who is even just dabbling in WooCommerce, I think, needs to be aware of this and needs to be really crossing their T’s and dotting their I’s here.

Bet: Yeah. And that’s up a little bit from the year before us, 74% the year before. So it’s increasing, but it has to do with sites that have high user interaction. So it’s not, I mean, while they’re eCommerce, I think this applies too to membership sites or LMS sites, anything that has that high degree of user interaction is going to get targeted because if it’s not working for some people, they have a problem.

Regulations that allow attorneys into the accessibility sphere

Robert: Can you dive into, before we hit up the lawyers, we’ll get there, we will get there, what are some of the regulations that allow attorneys to get into the mix of this in the first place?

Bet: So it’s different based on your jurisdiction. So in the United States, we have the Americans with Disabilities Act. That was signed in 1990 before things were really connected with some … our daily lives really were so enmeshed in the web. So, it’s very clear what brick and mortar stores need to do. Your ramp needs to be this kind of degree of incline and you need to have these kind of grab bars and these kind of parking spaces. It’s not so clear with websites. And so, what we have been left with for a long time is really sort of a wild west, this is America, people can sue anybody for anything. But the enforcement of it was really left to people filing lawsuits in many ways. And those are both legitimate user has a problem, takes it to court, ends up taking it to court primarily because people aren’t responding when they bring it to their attention. And then we have some predatory stuff going on.

So, in the United States, although we do have, in the last year, the Department of Justice, which is where those regulations come out about what meets certain standards, they have said that websites do fall under ADA and that was part of the argument legally was does ADA even apply to websites? Justice Department says yes, but they have not yet been given us clear guidelines about what meets those standards. So, we end up going to court about that. If you live in Canada or the EU or pretty much any other developed nation that has … and those laws really are more around human rights and disability rights kinds of laws, that’s where they kind of fit in. Pretty clearly, there are standards that apply. They’re applying that to digital content. So not just websites but things like PDFs and other kinds of online content.

And in those nations, typically, people don’t get sued, they just get fined. So, in other nations, it’s the government that comes in and says, you’re not meeting the standard and here’s your fine. And there’s not been a ton of enforcement as countries have put these laws yet. Yet. And that’s the word to know. That they’ve put laws in place, they’re trying to get people to step up and make their stuff accessible, but it’s not quite been there. We’re coming up on a big kind of date in June of 2025 is when EU nations will start doing, we think, some pretty, a little heavier enforcement around some of these things, but it’s time to get your stuff together.

Robbie: Yeah, I was going to say, I’m marking that in my calendar now though, by the way, just because I don’t like to being surprised. You said something in there, Bet, that I think is very, very important and that is that one of the main problems is when people are contacted, they don’t respond. And that is what I’ve always heard is you need to respond immediately if someone hits you up with any kind of claim on accessibility, even just a user complaint. You better jump on that.

Bet: And so, Robert alluded to the attorneys. There’s some predatory kind of lawsuits. It’s kind of an equivalent of ambulance chasing. So there’ll be one attorney and one plaintiff, typically a blind person, who might sue hundreds of websites. And so they’re trying to go and there’s really no damages per se. It’s getting the attorney’s fees paid and then they’ve got some arrangement to share those somehow, I guess, I don’t know. But when you get those kind of suits, typically what’s happening is you’re getting in the mail what’s called a demand letter, and it’s just a letter from the attorney that says, hey, we found some accessibility issues on your site. And it may be very vague, not very specific.

Even if it is specific, it might say you’re missing some alt text. Where? We don’t know. But the letters can look super junk mail like stuff. They can look really … And we had a client get one one time and I looked up the attorney and he’d been disbarred three times for other kinds … So, it’s super easy to ignore those, just throw them away, because you just think it’s, well, I don’t even open my mail anymore. It’s so easy with mail to do that. If you do ignore that and they move for … Nothing may happen, but if they don’t, then the next thing you get is a summons to appear in court, and now you’ve got a court battle. If you let it go to court, that’s always going to be the more expensive way to have things work out because now you got … that’s really expensive.

Typically, if you get the demand letter, a lot of times your attorney will work with you on trying to get some sort of settlement done. We were just talking about a lot of times people will want to do the settlement and want to keep it super quiet. So we don’t even know that 4,000 cases last year that got filed is actually the ones that went to court. There are thousands more probably that settled out of court and they want to keep that really tight because they don’t want to just invite more. And so, you want to settle, do that. But then oftentimes, not necessarily as a part of the settlement, but often, you then are mandated to fix stuff, and you’re mandated to fix it on a pretty quick turnaround. Judges seem to have this illusion that the changes to the websites can happen just on overnight.

And so, you’re not only having to pay all the attorney’s fees, any kind of settlement, then you’re having to pay to have your website fixed, which you could have been doing before, but now you’re having to pay it and it’s on a short turnaround so you’re paying extra for the short turnaround. So it’s the most expensive way to deal with these things is to put it off.

Robert: Is there a set of acronyms we should have in the back of our heads when we’re thinking about accessibility, either from a business, legal, or technical side? I’m sure we’ll dive more into all of these, but.

Bet: That’s an interesting question. So ADA, of course, in the United States, ADA. We talk about while there’s not really clarity specifically about what meets ADA standards, everybody tends to be, in other nations, but also in courts here in the US, they tend to be coalescing around the Website Content Accessibility Guidelines, WCAG, and we are on version 2.1, and those guidelines are technical. If you go to read them, they’re technical pieces. And there are three levels of those guidelines, A, AA, AAA. AA is typically where people are focused on all of that. And there are some other guidelines. We talk about Section 508 sometimes. That is any kind of government website. So not just federal, but state, your little township, your county, and anybody that is funded out of those. So, your public library, your local law enforcement offices maybe. So those kinds of things. Section 508 stuff is pretty close to the, we say WCAG, or the WCAG guidelines.

Robert: Got it, got it.

Bet: And pretty much anybody that gets federal money, if you get a grant for something and you’re doing that, then you have some of those requirements. So, we worked with a startup that had gotten grants from the CDC and they had to have an accessible website as a part of that grant.

WordPress professionals on the low end of adhering to WCAG guidelines

Robert: Before Robbie gets, I got one more because you mentioned WCAG. In The Admin Bar’s recent WordPress professional survey, they actually show a decline in professionals adhering to WCAG guidelines year over year. And almost 14% don’t even consider accessibility. So we’re looking at close to 23%, 24% of WordPress professionals in this Admin Bar survey that really are … Wait, I just got my numbers wrong. It’s only 9.7% adhere. So, really, 90% aren’t even at the WCAG level.

Bet: I think a couple things about that. One is that’s way low and that’s exposing those clients then to some liability. I think you want to make sure as a web developer, and I know the audience is primarily people who build stuff. So as a web developer, you want to make sure, A, that you’re starting to stay on top of this. And some of it is just basic good practices that are not hard and it’s going to be easier at the beginning of projects than it is to kind of retrofit it on the end, but just do your basic homework, start doing these things. But also, as a web professional, you need to be sure you’re putting into your contracts, into your master of service agreements that you are not liable for the client’s website.

Couple reasons for that. One is it’s super unclear what meets ADA guidelines. So, it’s hard to say, well, if I build to WCAG’s guidelines, then that covers it, right? And the client’s attorneys are always wanting to put how can we be 100% certain we will not be sued? That’s their bottom line. And the other piece is the WCAG guidelines are really guidelines, and guidelines have a lot of flexibility into them. So sometimes, they conflict with one another and you have to look at them and you have to say, well, okay, in this case, what we’re trying to accomplish with this feature on the website is this thing, and now we’ve got to weigh these two competing things and figure out what’s going to be the best way forward. Sometimes, you’ve got to weigh the thing that’s better for the person with visual disabilities may not be the same for the person with reading disabilities or whatever. There’s sometimes things where you’ve got to pick something. You can’t do it all for everybody.

And then, any time, the website is changed, pretty much, any time. So not necessarily orders coming in for newcomers, but anytime new content is added and anytime plugins or themes that affect the front end display are updated, the website can go out of compliance. So you really, as a developer, should be putting in there in your contracts you’re released from liability, because there’s just no way to stay on top of that. And I’ll just be a little … I don’t think there is a way to be 100% compliant. There is no such thing as 100% compliant. It’s like saying my website is 100% top SEO. Well, in many ways, website accessibility is a type of user experience optimization. So there’s never an end to that. You’re always sort of tweaking at it.

So, I get what they’re saying. What they’re really saying is where’s the line where I won’t be sued, or where can I protect myself? And there’s a lot of low-hanging fruit that you can work on, but some of it is there’s no way to be 100%.

Robbie: I think also that in responding to things, if you are also being open that we are consistently updating and trying to maintain accessibility on our website, having that as an answer that you can have, having that maybe in your policies on your website as well.

Bet: No, not your policies. Well, yes, I mean, in your policies that you’re putting that out there, but this is something that we started doing when we were working with clients is you want to have ways that you’re continuing to work at that but that you’re documenting it. If you’re documenting it. And so then, if when you do get sued, then your attorneys get to come in and say, of course we know that there are some issues there, but look, we’ve been working on this for months, years, and we are making incremental progress and we’re happy to work on this particular issue that you’ve put up, but we’ve done all of this and you have that documentation. So, the documentation piece of it is huge.

Robbie: Showing that you are in good faith, trying to keep up with guidelines even as they change and as your website changes.

Bet: Exactly, exactly.

The high level areas for developers to address

Robbie: Awesome. So, now, this is, like we said, there’s just guidelines. There’s no like here’s your exact steps to become accessible. There’s just guidelines. And accessibility encompasses a lot from does this color lay on top of this color and have enough contrast for visual impaired? Can I use the keyboard to navigate through my menu? Are my image tags on there appropriately? I mean, it’s a lot, right? So Bet, if we could just have, what are the high level areas that web developers in particular need to be making sure that they’re addressing? And by the way, I love that you mentioned they should put it in their service agreement that they are not held responsible for this. It’s very important.

Bet: Yeah. Back at a WordCampUS when we were still online, Ryan Kenny worked with us and we had a release of liability example. Yeah. So, there are some low-hanging fruit and we estimate a lot of them are content-driven. So, there are things that are … of course, in WordPress, there are more content pieces and things that are more theme-driven. And the biggest piece of accessibility is going to be related to content stuff. So, if you make sure your H tag structure is in the proper … one in H1 and then everything else is properly nested. If you have alt text on your images and if you have your color contrast, right now, that’s a little bit of a design, but if you do those three things, there’s estimates that say that’s about 80% of accessibility issues.

Robbie: Wow, okay.

Bet: So, I would say paying attention to that is huge. And there are some ways that you can do that. Our friends at Equalize Digital, Amber Hinds and Steve Jones and Chris Hinds, they’ve put out a plugin called Accessibility Checker, and it is inside the WordPress dashboard in the content creation area. So then you’re getting feedback. The automated stuff checkers are great for these content issues. Because AI can check that. It can tell whether your H tag structure is properly ordered and whether you have alt text, but not maybe whether it’s good alt text or not, but whether you have it. And then, they can check for color contrast, sort of. The automated checkers don’t always do a great job when there’s text on top of an image where the background color changes. So sometimes you get false positives and false negatives as a part of all that. But checking for those things.

And then I would say, in terms of developers, using an accessibility-ready theme where you’re making sure that the navigation is all … is it keyboard navigable? Do you have skip links? Do you have good focus indicators? I don’t know why this was such a popular thing, but for a while, people would turn off focus indicators. And a focus indicator is when if you’re going to test out the keyboard navigation on the website and you just go to the website and you start pressing the Tab key, things should get outlines, discernible outlines, when it shows what’s activated, whether a link is activated or a button is activated, or where you are in terms of moving through the page, people used to turn those off and it’s like only people who needed them would be seeing them. It’s not visible for most users. But making sure you’re following through with those sorts of things. Yeah, there’s checklists out there of stuff that people can begin to do.

Thanks to our Pod Friend Avalara

Partnering with accessibility pros

Robbie: And what I suggest too to people is if they, as web developer, web development agency, don’t feel that they are good at this, that that’s when they need to find other companies that they can partner with and hire to do. I know your company offers an audit. And I think that’s a great place to start, especially like now, people that are listening to this are going back in their mind going, oh my gosh, in this client, we didn’t, in this client, we did, but going back and doing an audit on those. And maybe even, how often would you say websites should be audited for this? Because things change.

Bet: Oh, well, it depends. It depends on how much the site’s being changed. If it’s a super dynamic site where there’s content changes all the time, then we do … When we have some clients, we do twice a year audits on, some that we’re doing. Now, those are more big audit testing things. Typically, audits are you would do what’s called a sampling audit. So you would pick 10 or 20 or 30 URLs and then you would audit those, understanding that you’ve tried to pick a good representative sample of the content on the site. Different layouts, different … Maybe in a super active site, different content authors, different users that have put in content, some of those kinds of things. And so those can be a part of what you do. We’ve recently started going to the … The audits can be expensive, and that’s a part of figuring out how you’re going to manage that.

So I would say, don’t worry about going back to audit old stuff at this point, unless the client is interested in doing that. I would say, if the site is more … We like to say, well, the theme for a website or the design of a site or a site infrastructure really is three to five years or so before you’re really thinking about redoing that. If you’re already halfway through that, just bump that up and do a new project. Don’t spend the money on an audit and then the additional cost of doing that doesn’t make any sense. But we’ve started doing some productized services around combinations of instead of trying to do a big audit project as a separate thing, and then over there, people can deal with, and we still do that for some agencies and all, but we’ve started offering audit and remediation packages. So they can start with a certain number of … They’re just buying little buckets of, some of them big, buckets of hours every month. And we’re doing some testing and some remediation every month as that sort of ongoing way. And that spreads out the cost so that you’re not spending five figures and more to do big audits and then having to turn around and fix it, but you’re investing more slowly over time.

Robbie: Yeah, I was going to say that also. If it’s documented, then that also is going to help them with if something does come up and they do need to spend more money to do something really quickly, but they also can just show in good faith, we’re slowly but surely working on this.

Bet: Right, right. There are some situations where if they’re on the lowest tier plan and they don’t have enough hours in a month to fix this problem, then we have to strategize about what we’re going to do about that. But that doesn’t come up that often.

Robert: Yeah, and I was thinking, it’s just like a maintenance plan. So other agencies could utilize accessibility experts as part of their ongoing maintenance.

Bet: And frankly, if it’s a shop where they’ve got their devs, their content people, I mean, we do do that kind of stuff too, where we come in alongside, we do some consulting and leveling up, basically training. And so, if we come alongside for a website project or two or three, then those devs, I mean, it’s just a little bit of a learning process and they get it, and then they’re sort of good to go, yeah.

Robert: But if I have a ton of content, can I just Google some JavaScript thing that I could just drop into my header and that’ll fix all my accessibility?

Bet: You aren’t already getting ads every time you load a page for those automated checker things?

Making sites magically accessible

Robert: Well, not even the checkers, just the ones that actually make my site magically accessible.

Bet: Yes. Those are called overlay plugins. So they’re using a bit of JavaScript to try and fix your accessibility issues on the fly. There’s lots of problems with those. First of all, they only fix about 30% of issues. So if you think that magically, everything’s going to go away, that’s just not going to happen. B, they sort of imply that they got your back, but once you get sued, that is actually not in the fine print, so they’re not going to stand with you in terms of the lawsuit. They also cause a lot of problems for people with disabilities. So if a person already has some disabilities and needs some tools for using websites, they already have them installed on their machine for the other 99% of websites out there that they need to access. And so then, your new little JavaScript thing conflicts and renders neither tool useful.

So we know a lot of people with disabilities that install browser extensions and use their routers to block the services that those JS tools, those overlays are using. Additionally, there is some question about privacy, because we know that those tools are, if someone goes into the little widget that they put on your page and says, I want to see this for people, I want this magnified for people with visual disabilities, the service apparently is storing that so that the next time they visit a service with that particular tool, they can already serve it up, but that’s protected HIPAA information, and they’re not notifying anybody, and there’s no way to remove that. And so there’s some pretty significant privacy concerns for that.

If you want to learn more about how overlays work and why they’re problematic, there’s a great website called overlayfactsheet.com. And it’s a fact sheet, like the domain implies, but it’s signed by more than 800 accessibility professionals in terms of … It’s not just some fly-by-night fact sheet. It’s pretty well-respected folks out there that are … In the end, it’s not about legal compliance. In the end, it’s really about making your website work for people with disabilities. And so, you want to do the right thing and not create more problems for people with disabilities.

Everyone can benefit from accessibility

Robert: Are there gentle benefits even for folks that aren’t taking advantage of the accessibility when you build that on a site?

Bet: Oh, absolutely. Almost always, when you improve your accessibility, you improve your SEO, because you’re doing some of the same things, alt text, heading structure, table of contents, all of those kinds of things improve your SEO. CDC in the United States, but also UN and other developed nations say that about 25% of all adults have some disability that requires an accommodation, 25%. So, if you’re talking about making your website, you hold the potential to increase the audience of your website by 20 or 25%, that’s huge. Why would you not want to do that as kind of reaching new people? And there’s always that argument about, well, blind people never come to my site. Well, that’s just not true, right?

Robbie: That’s not true. Right.

Bet: That’s not true. And the reality is all of us are just one accident or illness away from becoming disabled, and it increases as you age. So if your demographic skews older anyway, you have increased reasons to do that. Plus, it’s a good investment in your brand. If you are interested, if your brand wants to make a commitment to DEI, for example, accessibility is a great way to do that. And additionally, anytime you make the website easier for people with disabilities to use, you make your website easier for everybody to use. Because you think about, it’s not just people that have a permanent, we think of disabilities as kind of a permanent state, but disabilities can be, you can have a temporary impairment.

I had a surgery on my thumbs and I couldn’t use a mouse for a while. So people like that can be in those temporary situations. But also just sort of circumstantial or situational things. Somebody’s in a loud place or they’re in a quiet waiting room and they can’t listen to the video that you’ve put on there, have your captions. They say about 80% of the people who listen to videos on social media with captions turned on are not hearing impaired. And so, you’re getting more people to look at your content when you do those kinds of things. Making it easier for everybody.

Robbie: Absolutely. And you are correct about that, by the way, that most video is not heard on the web. It is read.

Bet: And people more and more are turning on … I watch TV all the time with captions on.

Robbie: I do too. There was a really great podcast about that, by the way, about why are more of us listening with captions on. There’s a lot of factors to that. And it’s not that we’re all going deaf, which is what I thought was happening to me, but it’s also because our technology is so much better with filmmaking, and because the speakers inside of the movie theaters got Dolby surround and all that, they can be whispering and doing their very dramatic acting, and it’s going to carry through in a movie theater. But then when you put that on your Sony TV at home, it may not come through unless you’ve got a $3,000 sound system attached to it, or if you’re watching it on your phone on Netflix, it’s not coming through. And that’s why more of us are having to turn on captions because the sound is actually so well done at the beginning for big sound systems, it doesn’t pair down nicely to these smaller devices.

Bet: I started actually about 10 years ago turning it on when we were watching British crime dramas, though, and the accents were like …

Robbie: Oh yeah, absolutely.

Bet: Some of the accents were just wild.

Robbie: Yeah, that was the other thing. We’re listening to a lot more, because of streaming video, a lot of us were watching more international content too, and there’s a lot of … Yeah, I know, especially, boy, the Scottish accents, when those start happening, I’m like, what did they say? I don’t know.

Robert: Oh, Robbie, I have captions on for you all the time.

Robbie: Oh, yes, because I’m from Texas. Everybody needs their closed captioning on for Robbie.

Bet: Oh, absolutely, absolutely.

Robbie: Yes. So, Bet, I want to also give you kudos because the content and the blog on your company website is actually fantastic, and I highly recommend that people go there.

Bet: Thanks.

Robbie: I mean, even you guys did a blog on the 2023 design trends and how that’s impacting some accessibility. I really love that you all brought up the animated cursor.

Bet: Yeah. We’ve been doing that for a number of years now. Every year, our lead design person really loves doing this post about what’s the new trend and then how are these things impacting accessibility, and we love doing that. But yeah, so it’s a good mix, I think, of tips, but also some business strategy and things like tax credits. You can get tax credits for making your website more accessible.

Robbie: Really? Oh, did not know that. I missed that blog. I might have to check that out.

Bet: You have to be under 30 employees or under $1 million, one or the other. So, it’s not huge corporations that get it, but yeah, that’s a lot of small businesses and a lot of businesses that can take advantage of that. You can get up to a 50% credit. It’s not refundable, you don’t get it back, but it can take off from what you owe up to 50%, including a full website design project if you have made accessibility as a part of that.

Robbie: Awesome. That is nice. Yeah. Of course, agencies are noting that down for all their clients that are small clients. That’s a great benefit.

Bet: Exactly, exactly.

Robbie: Now, you also mentioned to me, you and I were chatting beforehand, that you guys offer a free e-book. How would people find that on your website?

Bet: Oh, we’ve been putting that out on … I’ll give it to you for the show notes. We’ve been putting it out on social media and just an introduction to accessibility for site owners, and in particular, for eCommerce folks. There’s a few things that are different about eCommerce in terms of putting things together. So we try to highlight those and put it together all in a little e-book. So yeah, I can give it to you for the show notes.

Robbie: Cool. And so, I’ll also ask you, and I know this isn’t as important because this isn’t what is publicly seen on the websites, but if we’re talking about for our clients going in and working on the backend of WordPress and in WooCommerce and stuff, how do you guys rate the accessibility of that?

Clients dabbling in accessibility

Bet: Oh, that’s a loaded minefield.

Robbie: Okay. I didn’t mean it to be a loaded question either, by the way.

Bet: So, with accessibility, typically, the focus and the work has been on the front end display for customers and site visitors. With the block editor, there was a lot of stuff around accessibility on the backend for content creators. And it’s still not ideal for content creators with disabilities. It’s better than it was. But it’s not ideal. I would say by and large, WooCommerce by itself, and we’ve been doing some things in Shopify too, when you do accessibility, because it’s mostly front end, you can think about different platforms too. But by and large, by themselves, out of the box, WooCommerce, Shopify are fairly accessible. And of course, for all of these, you’ve got to add on additional plugins to add those additional functionalities. You’ve got to customize it to do all these things. That’s where you start running into a lot of accessibility issues, is that the plugins that you’re using to customize things may or may not have had some accessibility given to them.

Robbie: Right. And I was going to say, that’s, by the way, with all the platforms too. You’re right. The core plugins or components of things typically do. They’re bigger, they have bigger teams, they can think more about accessibility, but then when you start looking at the smaller little plugins, it’s harder. They’re smaller teams, they may not have the knowledge base and the man-hours to work on their accessibility.

Bet: For some people, it just hasn’t occurred to them and they just haven’t heard yet about accessibility. Yeah, you want to take great care when choosing that. And I tried to talk with … Maybe we could start a little movement, but I tried to talk about the WooCommerce folks finding a way for there to be some assessment about the accessibility on WooCommerce plugins. The WooCommerce ones that they sell in the store. But you’d want to make sure it’s not just the developer saying, oh yeah, we’re accessible.

Robbie: Exactly. That there has to be some sort of test of that.

Bet: Yeah, yeah. I don’t know how that happens. But at the very least, that would be great. We’re starting to do that, of course, in the theme directory in wordpress.org, that accessibility-ready themes. But again, I don’t know how vetted those are really, but.

Robbie: At least it is a topic that is now you’re hearing it at all of the events and things like that. You’re starting to hear this more and more accessibility. Mind you, that’s probably … I was going to say it’s probably because of the amount of lawsuits.

Bet: Oh, you’re going to hear more and more. We’re only starting. It’s the tip of the iceberg.

Robbie: Yeah, yeah, exactly. No, they do say that accessibility, over the next decade, is going to become majorly important. And again, it’s because of mitigating lawsuits.

Bet: Well, and in other places, fines too.

Robbie: Mm-hmm, fines.

Bet: I think we are going to see our … Well, while we fear the lawsuits, the fines are going to start coming for folks in other places.

Stop and think what it means to make a site accessible

Robbie: Yeah. I feel like the accessibility, I liken it to seatbelts in cars. I mean, I remember when I was a little kid, I just got thrown in the backseat. Man, I was like all over that car. There were no car seats, there were no seatbelt being used. They were there. We didn’t use them. And then everybody was moaning when they had to put on that seatbelt and they could get a ticket if they didn’t. But through all that moaning and all that pain of doing it, in the end, when we look back at the number of deaths that were stopped by wearing your seatbelt, we see in the end that it’s very, very important. Not that we’re going to save someone’s life on a website, but it could mean that we open up their life some if they can actually see and access your information.

Bet: Well, and it’s important to stop and think about what it means when you make your website accessible. It means that someone who has a disability does not need to depend on someone else to make the purchase, to find the information, to set up an account. I mean, it’s about human dignity, really. That’s a huge deal. I think a lot of site owners moan and groan about the cost or the extra steps or whatever, but these are the people who wouldn’t slam a door in someone’s face or push somebody out of the way at Starbucks. These are kind people. And so it’s just really an extension of that. It’s about making your website welcome everyone and make everything usable for everyone.

Robbie: Yeah, absolutely. One of our clients here, they’re Center for Independent Living. So they actually help people with handicaps, different disabilities, I should say, become independent by giving them job skill training, helping them get out of facilities and live on their own and things like that. And over the years that we’ve worked with them, it opened our eyes to what a difference it makes, just simple little things. I mean, here in Houston, when they finally got the ramps on the curb, it was like not all of them had it, even for years, even after ADA and all that, it was a battle to get those in place. And they make a world of difference to someone in a wheelchair.

Bet: We have had an interesting experience with … So we have this client, they’re a large nonprofit and they have a subgroup of people with disabilities, and they’re going to do this nationwide survey for people with disabilities within this kind of group. I can’t say much right now, but it’ll come out when … We have permission to share once it’s public. But anyway, so the first time we met with them, we sat down and they were testing, do you really understand accessibility, and we’re sharing a little bit. And they were just like, ha, developers, we don’t have to explain accessibility to. And then the conversation of folks was like, ha, people who really want to make things functional for people with disabilities and not just avoid getting sued. We had a little love fest there and we’ve been having a great time with them. But we’re going to do, yeah, the survey’s going to be, it’s going to be awesome. I’m so excited to share more about that. It’s in Gravity Forms, so it’s not a WooCommerce stuff.

Robbie: That’s okay though. We’ll have to have you back on to talk about the results after you guys have results and statistics.

Bet: Needless to say, we’re including people with ASL and low educational attainment.

Robert: It’s a slight tangent from all the actual very nice rah-rah about the human condition. But does that mean every website’s going to look the same?

Bet: No. No. And it doesn’t have to be ugly either. Oh my gosh, yeah, we have a just amazing, retro, almost ’80s vibe thing going with a new one. You can make really beautiful sites that are accessible. I think that’s kind of a lot of times developers feel like it’s restricted, but it’s really not … They feel like if they make things accessible, then they can’t just do what they want. Well, in reality, you don’t just get to do what you want. You have to do things that are going to be usable for people and that are going to convert for your customer, if that’s what their goal is. But within those parameters, there’s a lot of just gorgeous, gorgeous sites. Is that where you were going, Robert? You thought it was ugly?

Robbie: I think for designers too, that they have a bit more of an accomplishment when they’re done. If they have not only created a beautiful design, but it’s also accessible to the most people, they can make it accessible too. I think that that’s a big feather in their hat, and it’s something to be proud about.

Bet: Yeah. When you said that, I realized one thing we hadn’t talked about is that there are … If you’re an agency and you’re going to work on trying to make a site accessible, you’ve got to work with the development team, and you’ve got to work with the design folks, and you’ve got to work with the content creators. And a lot of times, there’s not a lot of cross … In a small agency, there’s a lot of cross-pollination, but in a bigger agency, there’s not. And so be thoughtful about how you are educating each of those teams around doing their part for accessibility. So developers can do this great job, and designers, but if the content people then don’t follow through with putting in alt text, then you’re not accessible. So, figuring out how you’re going to get everybody on board. It can be a challenge, it can be a challenge.

Robbie: It’s definitely a team effort, that’s for sure. Whether you’re a team of one or a team of 25 doing a website, it definitely has to be looking at all angles.

Bet: Yeah.

Robbie: Well, Bet, thank you so much for coming on the show today and sharing all this information. And we will have to have you back on when you’ve got your survey results in. That sounds like we’ll have some interesting things.

Robert: We need case studies, we need it all. We need to get the word out. So, really, I mean, a lot of people take it more seriously than they do today.

Bet: That’s true. Well, happy to answer questions, folks. If people want to reach out, I’m still on Twitter these days, @bethannon. And then, you can find us at the AccessiCart website. Just drop us a line through the contact form. And my confession is that I have a little bit of dyslexia about the word accessibility and I routinely misspell accessibility, including our company name.

Robbie: I like the candid honesty there, I like it. All right. Well, thank you very much and we look forward to chatting with you again in the fall.

Bet: Thanks.

Robbie: And for everyone listening in, tune in to the next episode of Do the Woo.