Convince Your Clients of Accessibility: Arguments and Business Cases: Annelies Verhelst

>> AMBER HINDS: Welcome to WordPress Accessibility Meetup, Convince Your Clients of Accessibility Arguments and Business Cases with Annelies Verhelst. A few announcements before we get started. If you are not aware, we have a Facebook group that you can use to connect with other attendees in between meetups. You can find that if you search WordPress Accessibility on Facebook or go to facebook.com/groups/wordpress.accessibility. It’s a great place to share things you’re working on, get feedback, help other people, and just collaborate in between our meetup events. Everyone always asks, is this being recorded? Yes, it is being recorded. The recording will be available in about two weeks once we get corrected captions, and a full transcript and the edited video back. You can find upcoming events and all of the past recordings in one place if you go to equalizedigital.com/meetup. The other way to find the recordings is if you join our e-mail list, then you will get news and event announcements. You can join that at equalizedigital.com/focus-state.

Once the recordings are available, we send that out at the top of our weekly newsletter so that you can find them quickly there. Or you can tune into our podcast, accessibilitycraft.com, if you want to listen to the meetup episodes in audio format. You can also find it if you search for Accessibility Craft on any sort of podcast app that you prefer. We are seeking some additional sponsors for the meetup. This meetup is part of the WordPress meetups program, but they did not have any funding to help us with captioning or transcription or any of the wonderful things that we do to try and make this as accessible to everyone. They said, go out and find sponsors.

If your company would be interested in helping to support the meetup and ensure that it is accessible for everyone, please reach out to us. We would very much appreciate that. You can contact us if you email meetup@equalizedigital.com. This is the same e-mail address that you want to use if you have any suggestions for the meetup or if you need any additional accommodations to make the meetup work for you. I am Amber Hinds. If you aren’t familiar with me, I’m the CEO of a company called Equalize Digital. We are the lead organizer for this meetup.

Equalize Digital is a mission-driven organization and a corporate member of the IAAP. We are focused on WordPress accessibility, although we do do a fair bit of auditing work outside of WordPress as well. We have a WordPress plugin called Accessibility Checker that helps you find and fix problems on your WordPress website. We offer online courses for NVDA and VoiceOver screen reader testing. We do accessibility audits, remediation, consulting, user testing, all of that kind of stuff. You can learn more about us on our website, equalizedigital.com.

We do have a sponsor that I want to thank today, and that is Kinsta. Kinsta has generously covered the cost of our live captions so that we can have a human captioner here with us today. Kinsta provides managed hosting services for WordPress. It is powering 120,000 businesses worldwide. Based on the user reviews, it is the highest rated managed WordPress host on G2. It has everything that you need, including an unbeatable combination of speed, security, and expert support.

It’s powered by Google Cloud and the fastest C3D and C2 servers combined with CDN and Edge Caching. Your sites are secured with Cloudflare Enterprise, protecting you from DDoS attacks. All plans include free migrations. The first month of the starter plan is completely free, so you can try the service risk-free. You can learn more about Kinsta if you go to kinsta.com. That is K-I-N-S-T-A.

The other thing that I always ask, if you are willing, on whatever social media platform that is your preferred platform, if you can find Kinsta and tag them in some sort of message saying, “Thank you for sponsoring captions for WordPress accessibility meetup,” that does two things. One, it tells them I did what I said I was going to do, and two, it tells them that supporting accessibility and supporting this meetup and supporting captions is important and that people value it, and it helps to encourage them to want to continue to sponsor the captions, which is very helpful for us and all of our attendees.

If you are at all willing to do that, find them, tag them, say thank you for sponsoring captions for WordPress accessibility meetup, we very much appreciate that. There are two upcoming events that I want to shout out. The first one is WordPress Accessibility Day. WordPress Accessibility Day is a free non-profit event run by an independent non-profit organization. It is from October 15th through the 16th. It is a 24-hour live stream via Zoom. No matter where you are in the world, there will be some talks during your business hours.

The other thing that I am super excited about this year is that we are using the Zoom events platform, which means that as soon as a talk ends, and it processes, I guess, so relatively shortly afterwards, the videos will be available for instant replay, and then they will be available on Zoom events through October 31st. As long as you register, even if you can’t tune in live, you’ll be able to go and watch them on demand almost immediately. You won’t have to wait for us to finish our editing and transcription process like you normally do. I’m very excited about that.

You can go to 2025.wpaccessibility.day, and that’s the number 2025, to get more information, to see the schedule, and to register. Our keynote presentation this year is Vitaly Friedman, who is from Smashing Magazine. I’m super excited about that, along with many of the other talks that we’re going to have. Please go register if you have not already done so. Then the next exciting thing is that in November, we have Matt Mullenweg, who’s one of the founders of WordPress, coming.

He and I are going to have a live conversation during meetup about the past, present, and future of accessibility in WordPress. I do want to note that this won’t be the first Thursday in November. It’s going to be the second Thursday. It’s Thursday, November 13th, but at this exact same time slot. We just had to shift it back because of his schedule. There will be time for live Q&A. If you have ever had questions for Matt Mullenweg about accessibility, or his thoughts on accessibility, or feedback that you wanted to give, this will be the meetup to come do that at.

There should be a link in the chat, and you can register for it, and of course, you can find it on our website as well. I am very excited to welcome our speaker today. If I can get my Zoom to decide to cooperate and allow me to pull her up here. Maybe. There we go. Annelies is a passionate digital accessibility expert at Accessibility Desk, which has a Dutch name that I’m going to allow her to pronounce in just a few minutes. She is located in the Netherlands.

Her journey with accessibility started roughly eight years ago, and since then, the topic has become a growing subject in her work and life. Annelies developed courses and workshops to educate different target audiences and make them understand how they can help. As a new business manager, she’s also the co-leader of the European Accessibility Alliance. I had the opportunity to meet Annelies at WordCamp Europe this year, where she was a speaker and gave a phenomenal talk about accessibility there. I was so thrilled that she was willing to come and speak with us here today. Welcome, Annelies.

>> ANNELIES VERHELST: Thank you. Wow, this is such a fantastic introduction. I am going to try and pull up my screen. [unintelligible 00:08:56] connecting a few cables to my computer because one of my co-workers was so great to– Oh, I’m sorry.

>> AMBER: No, we’re all good. You should be able to share. I am going to go away, but for everyone, there is a Q&A module that is down in the bottom of the screen. After Annelies is done, we will do questions and answers. Please do put your questions in there.

>> ANNELIES: I’m sorry. I’m fidgeting a little bit because of technique. Yes, this should work. I’m going to present. Correct. Now you can see my screen.

>> AMBER: Yes.

>> ANNELIES: Cool. I have a lot of other things in my screen, but that’s okay. Welcome, everyone. I was so happy to be here. Like Amber said, we met last year.

>> AMBER: This year.

>> ANNELIES: This year. Wow. It feels like such a long time ago. It’s only a few months at WordCamp Europe. Three weeks from that point, the European Accessibility Act came into effect, and that was the point where I thought maybe we should share a lot more information about this.

We’ve been doing that for a few months now. We got a lot of resistance basically from clients. I thought maybe this is a topic that a lot of people could use some insights on how we target that. That’s this presentation. A little bit more about me. I am a digital accessibility expert at the Accessibility Desk. In Dutch, it’s called Digitaal Toegankelijk. It’s difficult to pronounce, so call it Accessibility Desk. We also have a website that’s accessibilitydesk.com, but the Dutch one is more actual, basically.

My first encounter with WordPress was in 2009. I had my first talk at WordCamp Netherlands in 2010. Back then, it was just a very small WordCamp and super cute. I had a talk about WordPress for beginners. That was fun. I studied ICT. That was the moment I really noticed that IT and websites and everything around it is just not understandable, let alone accessible to people. That was in 2009. It’s been a few years. I made a switch to marketing. I’m also very interested in psychology. All that comes together in my current job.

I also love cats. I have two of them. I love me some board games and dancing and tennis. You can find me on LinkedIn if you want to connect with me. I also share some insights there occasionally. Fun fact, I recently started working on the WordPress Accessibility Docs with Rian Rietveld and Joe Dolson. Amber is involved also. I will also do a workshop during WordCamp the Netherlands this year at the end of November. If you’re there, I hope you will join me because I will try and teach everyone how to do quick scans yourself.

Today’s topics, we are going to look at how you can deal with client resistance when you say, “You should do something with accessibility,” or, “I want to build you an accessible website.” Client needs to say yes, obviously. I will give you some arguments that you maybe can use, depends on your situation, obviously. I will show you a little bit of how we do that here, and how to make a business case. I’m putting it like that because it was very difficult to find business cases. I will show you that later.

Dealing with client resistance. What I get back from colleagues, what I’ve noticed in a lot of my work with clients, even in the past when I was still in marketing, at some point, it can feel like it doesn’t even matter how hard you try, everything results in a no, or more resistance, or just maybe even ghosting from clients or potential clients, basically, they’re just like, “I don’t want to deal with you anymore.” That’s a shame because we all know that accessibility is very important.

There are a few types of resistance. I want to share those with you. There’s logical/rational resistance, and there’s psychological and emotional resistance, and sociological/political resistance. I will show you what all of those are later. Logical and rational resistance has a few displays, basically. I don’t know if that’s the right word. First one, and you might encounter this one the most, is a disagreement with facts because that’s what we all want to do.

We have a tendency to throw facts at people, like there’s 32% in the Netherlands that have a mild or severe disability, and all of the facts, like what kinds of disabilities those are. You could throw every fact that there is, but they still might not agree. It’s becoming more and more difficult lately to do that because they will not believe it’s that high, or they will not believe that their own customers may have a disability, or they will find arguments, and so you will end up in a continuing argument with them.

The other one is effort and cost. That’s one of the most pressing points of resistance because they will immediately ask you, “How much is this going to cost, and how much effort do I need to put into it to, for example, keep it accessible after you delivered me an accessible website?” The belief that the time and effort or economic costs to make the change are too high, even in light of clear benefits, is what’s going to get you a no.

When you start the conversation talking about money, that’s usually not a good way to go because you cannot discuss money with them, you cannot look in their wallet and say, “For you it’s easy to pay up this money,” or if you have 200 employees, of course, they can put in the effort. That may sound logical to you, but for them it isn’t. Another one is about the feasibility. I mean, you’re the one that knows how much effort needs to be put in, you know the timelines roughly, you know it might not be that difficult to make a website accessible, or to keep it accessible, or to do an audit, or whatever you want to sell them.

They’re just going to question, “Yes, but for us it’s different,” or, “This or that person needs to be available, and he isn’t, or they aren’t.” The practicality of making everything accessible, like why do we need to do this because no one’s going to use it, or they may have a lot of ideas about how feasible it is to have an accessible website, or app, or any other platform basically. Another one that’s within the logical and rational resistance realm is a lack of clarity because they may have received a lot of unclear communication about the purpose of accessible websites, or the benefits, or how it will work in the future.

That’s not just up to you because they can get communications from basically everyone. I have seen emails from hosting parties or hosting providers, and other parties, that just make a bunch of stuff up about accessibility. It creates a lot of– and clarity basically. Who are they going to believe in this case? You have to step it up there, and realize that not only you, but others too, may provide unclear communication. Things that don’t seem to be logical or rational result in confusion.

All of these things together, result in a confused client, and they’re just like, “Nah, not going to do it.” The second type of resistance is the psychological or emotional resistance. The first one, that you can categorize there, is the fear of the unknown. They may never admit to this, but your client, or maybe their employees, or colleagues, may fear the uncertainty, that comes with a change in the way of work because they realize that if you want an accessible website, or app, or platform, or whatever, they need to change their way of work.

That’s probably what you’re going to tell them as well because they need to think about how they are going to write their articles if they have a knowledge base, for example, or how they are going to build their pages, they might need training, they might need whatever. They just don’t know what that’s going to look like in the future, and they may also not know how much time it’s going to take to get there, or if you say, it’s going to cost you a certain amount of money, maybe that’s not true, and it will go up and up until they think, “Wow, this is a lot.”

The second one there is, it may be a threat to ego and security. That’s also one they will never admit, obviously, but you can sometimes sense it in their response to your proposals because they have a certain role within their organization, they have colleagues that have a specific role within their organization, and they may need to change that. They may need to step it up. They maybe need to do more work or different work.

A lot of people get a lot of value, from the work that they do. If they need to change it, they’re going to feel emotional about it. Some people, maybe the people that they are trying to convince, maybe there won’t even be a job for them later, or the expectancy for them changes a lot. That’s going to be difficult for a few people. They may also have an internal issue. I mean it could go your way as well. That’s mistrust. A lack of trust, maybe in their own management or in their organizational leadership, it makes people skeptical.

If they already know that their manager, for example, needs to sign off on a proposal to make the website accessible, and they know that’s just not going to happen because it’s a very untrustworthy person, or they said yes before, but it’s not what they said to another colleague, or whatever. They may seem enthusiastic at first. Maybe these are the clients where you got a yes from at first, so yes, sure, you should make our website accessible, and then later on when you check, “But can I make a proposal for you?” Then they’re like, “Not sure. I need to talk to someone.”

They might become vague and back out even. Then there’s also a sort of catch-all category within there, and that’s just an overall emotional response. You will have people saying, so your client, maybe your potential client saying, “I tried to talk about accessibility within our organization, and they just have very strong reactions to this subject. Maybe we should let it go for now, and maybe get back to it later. We need some time to smooth things out internally.”

That’s when you know we got work to do here because when people feel this strong about a fairly simple proposal, then there’s something else going on too. That’s difficult to deal with. Not knowing enough leads to strong feelings of uncertainty. Then there’s a third category, and that’s a difficult one to grasp, at least that’s also the one you have least control over, I think. That’s the sociological/political resistance. It’s similar to the threat of ego, but impact on status or power, it’s mostly triggered by external factors. It’s not their own emotions that triggered this.

I mean they might have a vision of themselves on how they see themselves in work, but they also have people around them that view them a certain way. This resistance that’s on this level that impacts their status is about how others view them. It could happen in a lot of corporate organizations when– I’ve seen that with some larger clients where people are basically the only person saying, “Accessibility is important. We should do more with that,” and people might start looking at them like, “What’s this nonsense? What are you talking about? Accessibility is not important at all. Why should we invest in that?”

They’re questioning, “Why are you the one to tell us that?” They are going to question their status like, “Who are you?” Obviously, that’s not great. You need to be a strong person to be able to deal with that. Another one, and that’s one I see often, is that they want to protect routines and teams. If you’re speaking to someone, a potential client or client, and he’s a manager of a team, maybe multiple teams even, there might be some resistance because changing a way of work, and working in an accessible way, it changes how they operate on a daily basis, and it changes the subjects they need to talk about. It has a lot of impact.

Maybe they already changed recently, maybe there’s something happened in the organization, and maybe it just calmed down, they know where they’re at, and now this is going to change as well. They might be a little hesitant to do that again. I think it’s valid, but you need to be aware that, that could be going on as well. Then there’s another one, that comes to our tables very often, and that’s the lack of buy-in.

Again, sometimes a client comes across very enthusiastic, like you have almost signed them, they’re almost like yes, it’s just an autograph away from happening, but then, all of a sudden, they’re like, “No, we don’t have the management buy-in. I obviously talked to the wrong person,” and then the manager of the manager came around, and he’s like, “No, it’s not going to happen, we don’t have the budget, or we don’t have the time, or the priority,” or a number of reasons.

Anyway, they might have trouble gaining internal support and buy-in from key stakeholders because that’s what they are, maybe even the IT department who manages the website or platform. They’re like, “No, we’re going to be busy in the next six months because of another large project.” Depending on the size of the potential client, this is happening a lot. Then there’s one I sort of already touched a little bit, and that’s cultural challenges. There may be a misalignment with the existing organizational culture.

If you don’t have a very inclusive culture already, and diversity and equality is not on the radar, and the person you’re talking to is basically the only person standing up for what’s right, then you have some cultural challenges to tackle because if it’s not in the DNA of the organization, you can make a website fully accessible, but within a few months, that’s undone basically. You have to make sure that, at least, a large part of the organization is buying in on this.

There’s another cultural aspect because when you’re working with international clients, there may be a broader issue. That could be in the communication department. Maybe they just don’t understand what you’re saying properly, or it could be all kinds of things. It could be that where you’re from, in general, it’s not important to be inclusive. We all know what’s going on in some places that just using the word inclusion may not be very smart at this point.

Let’s be fair, accessibility is part of that. It may be difficult to get there with a client or a person within an organization that wants to do it, but doesn’t have the support in that area. This type of blowback, so this internal blowback, where they’re the person at fault basically. In their eyes, this type of blowback shakes your client’s firm ground. With clients, again, I use that as a term to define the person you’re talking to. It could be an existing client, could be a new one.

You got to help them change. Low key, you’re becoming their change agent. Obviously, you cannot do that by getting in their face with, “Oh my God, I’m going to help you, and I’m going to do everything I can.” You can do that more subtle. There’s a lot of change models because we’re talking change management here. I think a lot of consultants use this. They may not know they’re using it, but they are. When you go through all of these models, what do they mean, and how do they work.

If you are in consultancy, or have been for a long time, you may recognize them, or at least some steps within them. If you’re in marketing, or have been in marketing like I have, there’s a lot of steps in here that are very familiar, even if you don’t use the model as is. A few of them are listed here. That’s Lewin’s three-stage model of change, McKinsey’s 7-S model, the Nudge Theory, the ADKAR, A-D-K-A-R, Change Management Model, Kühler-Ross Change Curve, Bridges’ Transition Model, Satir, S-A-T-I-R, Change Model, Kotter’s Theory, and Maurer Three Levels of Resistance and Change.

The last one, the Maurer Three Levels of Resistance, is what I just explained basically. I’m going to dive into that a little bit deeper because that helped actually. Maurer. The first level of resistance is basically around, I don’t get it, I don’t understand the purpose of accessibility, and how to do it anyway. That’s where the logical rational resistance is. The second level is, I don’t like it, it’s just going to be tons of work, I need to change a lot, and it takes forever. That’s about the psychological or emotional resistance, is what they believe, or what they feel.

The last level is, I don’t like you, I don’t trust you, you’re as commercial as everyone, or any other thing that they can just have against you as a person, or at least they portray it as something that they have against you. That might not be specifically the case, but some people are like that, like, I don’t like you. That’s the sociological and political resistance. That’s in that area. Knowing this, you can turn resistance into actual support. You have your creativity at your disposal.

You have maybe colleagues, you have others that are with you in this. There’s a lot of people listening, or watching, or reading about this webinar. Reach out to others to just maybe join together like, “I have this very difficult potential client, or client already. This is the case. Can you maybe help me to find out what’s the real problem?” Maybe come up with a plan together, or if you are an agency, maybe partner up with experts, and see where you can go from there, share some experiences, or go to your client together, like, “Hey, we have new ideas for you.”

In Level 1, the I don’t get it, that’s the one that most people are most comfortable with. That’s the make your case part. You need to explain to your client, or maybe their whole organization, or at least to their stakeholders, make sure that they know why accessibility is needed, and put the why before the how. Don’t start with, we’re going to make your website accessible. No. First tell them, “This is important.”

What we usually do is just start at the inclusion exclusion part. Who are you excluding right this time, and could you do that differently, and why is it important? Not just because 32% of people in the Netherlands are having a mild or severe disability. No, it’s important because they cannot do the things they need to do on a daily basis. They cannot do what the government asks them to do, or they cannot shop online like everyone else can, or they cannot find the same information as everyone else. That’s important.

The second thing you need to consider is your language. Your client, or potential client, is not an accessibility specialist. Use a language they can understand, and be aware that it’s very easy to use language that they don’t understand because you’ve been in this for years. You know what you’re talking about. Be aware of your own bias, basically. Some things that are logical to you may be lost on them. Do it in multiple ways because people take in information in different ways.

Some may benefit from hearing information, some like to see it, like in animations, or in videos, or anything else, some of them learn from conversations. You can bring variety into your communication channels, and you can even combine all of them. For Level 2, the I don’t like it, the emotional part, you’re basically going to remove fear, but not only that, you’re also going to increase excitement because if the facts don’t already excite them, you can tell them what’s in it for them.

People need to believe that making services or products accessible serves them in some way. Them personally, maybe, but mostly the organization they work for. Try and figure out if you have something to share on that level where it’s beneficial to them as a business, or as a person, or both. Engage. I think that’s a difficult one, at least I feel so, because people tend to support the things they helped building. Give them the opportunity to change.

If you have a very strong advocate, like the client needs to convince their stakeholders, and they’re very willing to participate in anything, then you should work on a plan together, and just give them the opportunity to just work things out, and maybe even go a bit further than that, and just see if they’re able to get colleagues or stakeholders to also engage in the process. Maybe even filling out a questionnaire, or letting them fill out a questionnaire, is maybe enough, but maybe you have some more creative ideas because in this department, I’m not very creative, but maybe you are.

There’s a thing, be honest. Also, about downside because obviously their fear is not non-existent, and it’s not invalid. They have fears because there might be some truth in it. Also be honest. If you say like, “Yes, it is going to take a lot of time at first,” and then talk about how you could solve it, and how they could take control of that. Also, when talking about accessibility, there’s going to be a lot of rumors, and it may be about the timelines, or maybe rumors about how they feel about you as an agency or a developer or–

Just tackle it. Be honest. If you don’t know, if you do not have an answer to their questions, just say so like, “I don’t know this either because we are at the beginning of this process. We need to figure this out together, but as soon as I do know, I will tell you,” and then obviously do follow through. That’s a very important part. There’s a Level 3 because Level 3 was about I don’t like you. I have something against you. You need to tackle that very quickly as soon as you know that this is about your relationship.

Maybe it’s not specifically the relationship between you and your client, but it could also be that the client’s relationship with their stakeholders, or with their own organization is at stake here. One thing that you can do is take the blame. If the relationship is damaged, take the blame. Take responsibility. Say, “Okay, I’ve been unclear. I’ve been lacking somewhere.” Mention that specifically, and also mention what are you going to do to make it better.

I think that’s very important if you feel like this relationship with your clients is a bit damaged. It may feel awkward, or it may feel like your pride is going to take a hit because maybe you feel like you’re not at fault here because, I mean, people can be difficult to deal with. Do it anyway because it makes things better. This is not about your pride. This is about making things better for everyone. This is about more than just you. Like I said, within the previous level, commit.

Not only say you’re being honest, or just don’t be honest, but also be trustworthy and demonstrate it. Yes, prove that you are actually in this, and that you’re not going to back out if things become difficult, and just follow through on your actions. The final thing within this step is also take note of what the resisting people are saying. If it’s your client, just take note. Say like, “Okay, I think I heard you. I think your opinion is valid.” Even if you are wrong, admit that.

Just consider their ideas, or at least say that you’re considering their ideas. I will look into it. I will ask a colleague about this or whatever. Just say that, “Yes, I heard you. I’m going to do something with this.” Even if the answer is no later on, they ask a question, and they assume you can do it, it’s like maybe later on it’s no, but at least let them know you’re hearing them. Within all this, so I make it sound easy, I guess. Maybe even if not, even if it’s difficult, you have a thing you can use, and that’s your influence.

I’m mentioning this as another approach. Basically, in all of this, you can use influence. One way to do that is there’s this model. It’s based on some research from, I think, Harvard or Yale. It’s from an agency called [unintelligible 00:43:47] in Dutch. It’s very interesting because they talk about the energy you do things with. If you’re pushing, you’re doing different things than when you’re pulling. Make people come to you, basically.

The styles you can use, there are four of them. You can use persuasion, you can use asserting, you can use bridging and attracting. When you are persuading people, you can be proposing, and you can reason. Again, like I said, reasoning is one thing that I think most people feel most comfortable with, but reasoning is not going to get you everywhere you want to go. It’s very pushing in energy. It’s like, I want to win this discussion. I want to be right.

The same for proposing. Can we do this? Can we do that? Can’t you agree with this? It’s very trying to persuade someone. With asserting, it’s basically in a word, you’re asserting your point of view into their point of view, basically. There you can really add some pressure. It could be anything else. It could be peer pressure. You can say like, “Oh, everyone else is doing it, so you should too.” If you are a manager, you’re stating a lot, “I want you to do this or that,” or, “I need you to do this by tomorrow.” That’s stating.

There’s also where you state expectations, “I expect you to do this.” That’s not always the best energy if someone’s already in resistance. What you want to do is turn that energy around. That’s pulling them in. You’re going to start bridging. That’s where you start listening. You just have conversations. You’re listening to their fears. You’re listening to their objections. You’re doing something with it. That’s also where involving them is part of that too.

Disclosing too, that’s the honesty part. You’re disclosing you’re working on something new, and you want to try something, and you want to involve them in the experiment. There’s a lot that you can use there. Then there’s attracting. That’s basically inspirational. What you’re doing there is finding common ground. Like, what can we agree on? What are the things that we find important all of us? Not just us as an agency or developer, but also, what do you find important? Just go all the way there.

Even the tiniest thing could be a common ground. What you’re also doing there is sharing your vision. It goes beyond, again, the how to get there or the you should do it because all of those things because then you revert back to persuading. No, your vision is a world where everyone can do the things they want to do on a daily basis without getting tired or not more tired than usual. Share with them what you see. There’s a lot of things you can find in influence models like this or change management models like this.

To continue or actually to sum this part up, so if you’re dealing with client resistance, you need to really find out what the real problem is because they can say one thing, but it might be a totally different problem than what you’re actually looking at. Make a plan to tackle that, if really worth it. Because you could have just like a potential client or client where it’s just like, it’s not worth the energy, it’s going to make me feel bad about myself, or it’s just going to hurt our organization if this client looks at this differently because of this.

If it will really hurt the relationship, for example, then just don’t. Hopefully, there’s more fish in the sea, as they say. Within that plan, you can just use everything I just shared to figure out, “How am I going to do this?” It might take some time. Be aware of that. This is not just a one week plan. This may take some time. If the problem is that your client needs to convince their own stakeholders to help them because you have all this information. You’re the expert here. Don’t let them go and figure it out.

You’ll be like, “I’ll hear from you when I’ll hear from you.” It could take some time. No, just be there, and say like, “I’m going to help you no matter what. I don’t need money for this.” Obviously, you have to believe that they eventually will get to work with you. Just use the change management or influence models to help you with this. What also helps a lot is put your case into ChatGPT and ask them, how would you solve this using this management model or whatever model?

It is surprisingly good with this. I was surprised about that. You have figured this one out. Then what arguments can you use as a vehicle for your change efforts? This still may sound a little bit vague. There’s a lot of arguments, I think, that hadn’t also mentioned a few of these arguments. Forgive me if you’ve already seen this. All the reasons, I’m going to go through them quickly because I will stop by them later: a better experience for all users, higher revenue, saving costs, an influence on SEO and higher reach, better findability in AI or Deep Search, robust and sustainable products, comply with legislation, and one we all want, crush the competition.

Maybe you could think of a few more reasons, but these are the ones that I use most in different situations. The first one, a better experience for all users. If you need an example for that, there’s one that’s pretty old, and that’s the curb-cut effect. This is the effect that it happened like, I think, 40 years ago now. Late ’80s, maybe early ’80s. I’m not exactly sure. Back then, there were no curb cuts. Everyone in a wheelchair or carrying something else on wheels or a bike on hand or a luggage or whatever, they had to do very difficult things to get onto the sidesteps, creating dangerous situations, obviously.

I think it was an Oxford professor. I’m not very sure. You can read all of it on Sketchplanations or just Google the curb cut effect. There’s plenty of websites that explain how it came to be. Anyway, it was invented for wheelchairs. Now all of the sidesteps have points where it’s equal to the streets, basically. You don’t have to be in a dangerous situation to get yourself on and off the streets. It’s lowered. It was designed based on specific needs for people with disabilities, but it is appreciated by just more than the target group because people with luggage or whatever or trolleys or anything on wheels, they also benefit from this.

That’s the same with having an accessible website. It’s not just for 32% or 25% or whatever your percentage is in your country. It’s also for people who may not have specific disability, but do have difficulties with some things. I think you also need to consider that when you’re getting older, you won’t be specifically disabled, but you will have a problem with your fingers being rheumatic, for example. I mean, that’s difficult to explain, but maybe they start shaking a lot more or your vision gets a little bit worse.

If a website is accessible, it’s also beneficial for those people. Any person can get a disability at every time of the day. I mean, I could walk out of here and just stumble and fall, break my arm, and then not be able to use my mouse for weeks. It benefits me in the end as well. You just don’t know what’s going to happen to you. Maybe you get a brain bleed. It’s not to sound daunting or anything, but it’s good to realize that if you’re healthy right now and don’t have a disability right now, it just could happen to you as well. We just don’t like to think about that.

The second benefit or reason why you should make your website accessible is higher revenue because you create loyal customers when they find your website accessible. There’s this research, and I have a chart on my slides of that research. There was a question in there. It was asked to people with access needs, basically. It said, “Would you spend more online if websites were more accessible?”

They did that research. I think it was the click away pound survey. In 2016, roughly 80% of those people said, “Yes, I would spend more online.” in 2019, it was even a little bit higher. It was almost nearing 90. There was only a small percentage that said, “Nah, it doesn’t make a difference for me.” For people with access needs, it makes a lot of difference if they discover websites are more accessible. They have money to spend. I think it’s in that same survey.

There’s lots of surveys that mentioned the average yearly spend of people with access needs. Potentially, they could spend a lot more if websites were accessible. That’s basically the gist of it. Once they do, they also will come back. They will also tell their friends and family, like, “Wow, this website’s really great.” Again because it works for other people, too, they also might find it easier to spend their money on your website.

Another one is saving costs. It may sound weird because you’re first asking for money to make a website accessible. They have to put in all that work. How’s that saving costs? There’s another research. I think it was Forrester and Microsoft. They researched within a few organizations that had accessibility in all of their services. They said, “Working accessible and having a website that’s easy to use, specifically for people who want to contact us, if they need customer service for anything. They now, or before, called us. Every call costs money, but they now can self-serve on the web. They can fill out a form that’s accessible. They can– anything else.”

It saves a lot of money in customer service calls. That’s something that Dutch research also found as well in, I think, some web shops. Basically, the number is pretty high, like 15% fewer customer service inquiries. That’s calls, that’s chats, that’s emails because those needed to be answered by actual people. Those people spend time doing so. Most of those calls were, “I cannot find something on your website. I cannot do something on your website. How does that work? How can you help me?”

If you have an accessible website, you don’t have all of those problems. They don’t have to come to customer service to ask them to help them. You can save a lot of customer service money there. Probably not the only way you can save costs, but that’s the most important one, I guess. I mentioned the influence on SEO, so search engine optimization, which results in a higher reach, obviously. There’s research of that, but it’s for a reason that Google and Screaming Frog, for example, and Screaming Frog is a tool that a lot of SEO specialists use to crawl websites and see what’s going on there. They have accessibility tabs since a few months or years, maybe, in the case of Google. You can check some basic accessibility things. I mean, it’s not 100% all of it, like every automated testing, but it is an indication that Google thinks it’s important. If you are in Chrome or in Firefox and you go to the developer tools, you have Lighthouse there and you can analyze the page. It also has a bubble for accessibility there.

It is for a reason, and I will mention said research later on, but it’s because some of the criteria for accessibility overlap with good websites for search engines, basically. They overlap and they work in the same way. If you do SEO right, it doesn’t automatically mean that you do accessibility right. The other way around, if you do accessibility good, it’s not meaning that you will be found better in search engine, but they have overlap.

The same goes for AI and ChatGPT and all of the other chats, basically, and Gemini. If you do accessibility right, because of all the good structure, the clean code, everything that’s helpful for, well, assistive devices, for example, or screen readers, it also means that those tools can interpret your website better and faster as well. The information you put in there is easier to interpret for those chats. Well, then there’s the question if you want that. Well, nowadays, a lot of companies want that.

I asked ChatGPT, actually, how they look at websites. I asked them, can you explain in detail how you read websites, how having a fully accessible website helps you, ChatGPT, and how it compares to how a search engine like Google works? Do you auto-render a website? It’s pretty detailed about how it looks at websites.

The response I get is on the slides, but it basically said, “Well, how I read a website, I do not run a website like a browser. What I can process is the raw HTML structure or the text content you provide.” It pays attention to things like headings and text and lists, alt text, audio labels and roles, metadata and structured data. Well, it also said, “JavaScript generated content is usually invisible to me unless it’s already included in the raw HTML or exposed to an API,” which is difficult for me to understand because what is it? Is it yes or no?

That’s what it basically said. You can help it by providing a clear structure and alt text and forms and buttons that are labeled correctly and logically and consistent semantics and whatever. There’s a lot of overlap with search engine optimization and accessibility there. It’s a good reason to pay attention to accessibility.

Then there’s the sixth reason, robust and sustainable products. Obviously, if you know what you’re doing in the accessibility department, you know how to write proper code. You know how to design things accessible and a way to make that sustainable. It’s put it into a design system so you don’t have to think about it every time you need to do an update or you build a new website or a similar website or a new part of a website. That’s why design system exists.

One of the most mentioned design system is the one of the government of the United Kingdom, gov.uk. I think it’s a very helpful one to browse through and just see what and how they do it. Since there’s already a lot of examples and there’s many tools that can help you set up a design system. I think if you make larger websites or have larger websites or platforms, that is very useful to have one if you don’t have one already.

Well, reason number seven is lots of clients, organizations need to comply with legislation. If it’s not the ADA or Section 508, it’s the European Accessibility Act. It’s pretty new. All of them will cost you money if you lose a lawsuit or if you get fined by the supervisory authorities, especially here in the Netherlands. Many other countries in the EU already have this in place, even before the European Accessibility Act became law. Some countries already had laws regarding accessibility, for example, Spain.

I found this article and it’s screenshotted in the slides of a Spanish website, news website, that mentioned that Vueling, the airline, basically the national airline of Spain, received a pretty big fine of €90,000 because they did not have an accessible website. Specifically, their terms and conditions were not accessible enough. Well, if you’re buying airline tickets, I think terms and conditions are pretty important.

That’s not the only one. There’s also a French supermarket chain that’s been warned that they need to make their websites accessible before the 1st of September. If they didn’t do it, they would also go to court for it. They are organizations that basically empower people with disabilities. Those organizations were like, “Yes, well, supermarket is a very important thing for people with disabilities, so go fix.” I’m very curious. I tried to find if they already went to court for this. I don’t think so, but I think they’re working on it. It’s very interesting that that would be the actual first case within the European Accessibility Law that would go to court for it.

Reason number eight is crush the competition. If your competition is not already making their websites accessible, then you definitely should, because, well, it helps, like all the other reasons, obviously, well, make you better than the competition. If they don’t take these reasons seriously, then you have a very big opportunity.

There’s this research from that. I’m not sure how to pronounce it properly. Obviously, they have accessibility tools as well. They do research every year on the WebAIM Million. It’s pretty automated. They also categorize it in types of businesses. There’s been a few categories that were better this year than over last year. The most strange one was that shopping.

Websites in the shopping category like Amazon were down a lot, 40% difference. They were becoming worse. That’s strange because the attention for making your website accessible was becoming very high. Now it’s just like, “Oh, no, there’s some categories that don’t bother.” Also, travel also gone down. Gambling and casinos, too, but I’m not sure if I mind that much. [laughs] There’s a lot of categories that still have a lot of opportunity that if you do it better in that category, then you will be better than your competition. It’s good for everything.

One does not simply convince a client. This is a meme from, I think, Lord of the Rings with this guy. One does not simply. I don’t know his name anymore. It’s been a while since I watched Lord of the Rings. If you’ve seen the meme, you know it. This is how we do it. I mentioned a lot of things, and well, I can imagine, okay, this is cool, but do you do all this for one potential client? Yes, sometimes we do. We take a client by the hand and do whatever they need to get convinced.

This is just for high potential clients, obviously. If they just want a quick scan, that’s fine, too, but clients where we feel like, “Okay, you should definitely have an accessible website,” yes, we do. We take a lot of effort to do all that because we believe very much that even one by one, we’re making the world a little bit better. There’s a lot of things that you can do that is not on a one on one basis. You can use that as a sort of catch all thing.

Obviously, one of the things is sharing information through webinars. How we do it is we have review videos, that we have an experienced expert. She’s, well, nearly blind and she reviews website for us. We can do that for clients. We want to reel in really slowly. We did that for the Dutch Railways, for example. They were like, “Whoa, this is super bad. Maybe we should talk.” That’s really cool to do. She just takes a website and we show it in the video and she talks us through it, how she uses it with a screen reader. It’s a pretty easy format to just tape and put online and tag the company in it.

The other thing we do is webinars just for potential clients. We talk to a lot of people every month in our sales pipeline, basically. It comes down to that. We organize webinars specifically for them because they ask us a lot of questions all the time. They’re like, “How does this work? What if we do this, then what happens?” We take those questions and we say, “Okay, next month, we’ll organize a webinar. We’ll answer your questions.” Just join us, and we do that for a bunch of them at the same time.

Obviously, blog posts. We take those questions there as well because it might help other people, too. You can spread the word even further if you post them on the socials, too. We have a knowledge base, which we also update regularly with new questions or with new insights. We do have personal calls if we feel like, “Whoa, this is going the wrong way,” or, “This is not the response I was expecting.” We’ll just call them sometimes with a consultant present or an auditor present because they have specific knowledge that maybe could help this client.

We share white papers. We did a white paper together with a law firm because they knew more about the European Accessibility Act and what that meant in legal terms because we’re not a legal firm. We cannot advise clients about what they should do from a legal point of view, but we do get a lot of those questions. We teamed up with them and said, “Well, this is where you should look at in terms of law and legal.”

Then there’s events. Obviously, on events, you can also take a lot of people at the same time and just share what’s important for those group of people. I’ve been on an event with cybersecurity specialists. Well, cybersecurity is not even remotely my expertise, but accessibility for cybersecurity is something I could talk about. It’s just also fun to think about ways that you can talk about accessibility that’s not your usual jam, basically.

After all that, you talk to your communications department, if you have one, or to your marketing department, or maybe you teamed up with a freelance marketing person and you did all that, you’re going to put in all this effort. At some point, your client will still be hesitant because they will put this off forever. They will still say, “But I still want to know what we gained from putting all this effort in. Do you have numbers, cases, proof? Specifically that last one. Do you have proof that this will work?” You’re like, “Well, it’s obvious.” For them, it isn’t.

Unfortunately, there’s not a lot of research that actually supports this. There’s lots of articles that mention the same old research, and it’s not been updated. I mean, the W3C has a page with business cases that’s not been updated since forever. We’re talking about early 2000s here. Well, the world has changed a lot since. There’s some more recent research, but it’s not all that fantastic. I’m going to mention the research and the things that I do have. Hopefully, it’s something useful. If you do find research that actually supports all what I just said with hard numbers, then please share it with the whole community because we’re all looking for it.

I mentioned the Click-Away Pound survey earlier, and you can find it on clickawaypound.com. The basic numbers that you can find in there is– it’s UK based, obviously, because pound. If you would look up the numbers for the US or any country, because it’s just general numbers, you can make your own case based off of this.

7.15 million disabled internet users in the UK have access needs. It basically means that not everybody who’s disabled has specific access needs. Some are disabled and can perfectly use a computer. They don’t need anything else. There’s still a large amount of people that do have access needs. The online spending power of people with access needs in the UK was at that time in 2019, 24.8 billion. That’s a lot.

The percentage of disabled people with access needs who say they click away from a website with barriers is 69%. What’s back then, I think by now it might be even higher, because there’s so much online that you can– even I do that a lot. Like, “This is not working for me. I go back to Google, find something else.”

Percentage of users with access needs who limit their shopping to sites they know are barrier-free are 83%. That’s the number I said earlier. That is super, super high. If your website is barrier-free, you’re going to notice it. I’m pretty sure of it. No one shares these numbers for reasons I do not understand. I hope that if someone’s listening and they are willing to provide some numbers after they made parts or whole parts of the website accessible, please share. It would be so fantastic.

There’s one survey I found to support that if you do accessibility right, you’re also better in search engines. That’s the research Why Accessibility Matters More Than Ever for SEO Performance. It’s research that’s done by Semrush and accessibilitychecker.org. What they saw is accessibility sites see 23% more visitors and more accessible sites rank for 27 more terms. Now, I don’t specifically believe in ranking for terms anymore because Google works so differently these days. Still, for as far as you can still rank, still get clicks for it, it’s a pretty steep number because 27% is a lot.

I’ve been in SEO for over 10 years, maybe longer. These are fantastic numbers. If you see 23% more visitors from your organic search, that’s huge. If you plot that on your conversion rates, then you would definitely see higher revenue in there as well, if your website is about revenue. If you Google it, Why Accessibility Matters More Than Ever for SEO Performance, you should find it. I also have a very ugly short URL. [laughs] I’m going to read it. It’s urlr.me/NHbzs5. I think that it will be in the transcript later.

Well, seeing that there’s not a lot of business cases out there, and trust me, I know Google and I can Google. [laughs] I didn’t find any and I asked around. There’s not a lot out there. Wouldn’t it be great to set up your own business case? We’re just starting to do that with our own clients. Unfortunately, I don’t still have anything concrete there. If I have in the future, I will definitely share it on all channels.

How do you set that up? Go to your client’s analytics tool if you already have access. If not, ask them for access or data because you can ask them this for a start. They want to do this as well because they want to convince their shareholders this is going to be something. At least have a benchmark there.

What you want to do is set a baseline. This is only an example. You can probably think of more data that’s relevant here. The first thing you can think of is organic search traffic on the homepage. Take an average in the past few months and see if that’s a stable number. Also the same for conversion rates. See the number of forms sent versus the bounce on it. How many don’t fill out the form but start, the number of accounts successfully registered, if that’s a thing, and also how many fail to do so, successful shopping cart processing versus the bounce rate there. How many do have stuff in their shopping cart but never pay for it and have a successful– we’re lost. [laughs]

>> AMBER: Annelies, we are about at time because we’re supposed to wrap up at 11:30. I’m wondering if you have a final thought that you want to share. Then I have maybe one or two questions we can do real quick.

>> ANNELIES: I’m nearly done. I think I have two more slides. I’m going to go through that quickly if that’s okay with you.

>> AMBER: Oh, yes. Our captioner, we have a small buffer time with our captioner. I don’t want to go too much over because I don’t want to run extra on these questions.

>> ANNELIES: Real quick then. I think this will be in the transcript as well. You can make a prognosis and just look at it three months later and see if that actually works after your client says yes. Make your own business cases and do that. It’s super cool. That’s it. You can now use the change management models to convince your clients. You have plenty of arguments and hopefully some inspiration for helpful methods and how to set up a business case for yourself.

If you need our help later on with doing all this, find us at we@digitaaltoegankelijk.nl. I’m sorry, that’s still in Dutch, or go to accessibilitydesk.com and fill out the form. That’s also great. I’m now ready to take some questions. I’m sorry this took so long.

>> AMBER: It was a great presentation. That’s good. Do you want to stop sharing your screen for just a minute? I did put some of those links in the chat. I know we’ll have them with the recap. You had said you were going to check and see if you can share the slides with us as well so we can include them. I appreciate that. I will also throw in the chat here, and maybe you would be interested in it as well, assuming I can get it in. Yes, there we go.

We actually do have a case study of a community college. This is a presentation from a higher ed conference that we did with that college about the results they saw for making their website accessible. It goes into the process because they got in trouble with the United States government. They talk a lot about what that was like for them, but there’s some results in that as well, if anyone is interested. I’m sort of curious. I really found the slide that you had where you were talking about how you attract customers. The review videos I thought was really interesting. I was curious, do organizations ever just get mad at you? I’m assuming you just post those on YouTube.

>> ANNELIES: Yes, we post them on YouTube. Up until now, no one got mad. I think some organizations didn’t even care. We did one a few years ago about an organization that does transport specifically for people with disabilities. You can just fill out a form and just say, “I want to go from A to B.” You can pay for that online as well. You can say, “I’m bringing a wheelchair. I’m bringing any other assistive device.” They’ll just figure out how to get you from A to B. It was totally inaccessible. It was a disaster.

Well, we tried reaching out and they were like, “Meh.” I don’t know. I think the website still didn’t change a lot since then. Most of them are really happy that we tried it and that we are reaching out to them at some point. They’re like, “Oh, this is very interesting. I will send it through to the right people or whatever.” Sometimes they follow up as a client. Sometimes they don’t. They just get lost in the organization, I guess.

>> AMBER: One of the things WooCommerce told us, because we’ve been doing a lot of auditing for WooCommerce for the past several years, is the part of what motivated them to work with us was I opened 50 GitHub issues related to accessibility, and it got their attention. It wasn’t just one or two. It was a lot. It is interesting. You have to invest time into that kind of lead generation, but it can work. I think you have to be thoughtful about what organizations you’re targeting.

>> ANNELIES: Yes, I think so.

>> AMBER: Sometimes the government ones, they won’t be, because they have certain requirements on how they can– they have to run RFPs and all that stuff, so it may not work. You have to be thoughtful about that. I really appreciate you giving this presentation and all of the effort that you have put into it. I’m sure that people will have a lot of follow-up questions. Where is the best place for people to get in touch with you? I know you mentioned your website already, but are you active on any of the social medias?

>> ANNELIES: On the first slide, second slide, I guess, I mentioned my LinkedIn profile. I’m on LinkedIn under my very difficult to pronounce name/Annelies Verhelst. If you just add me there and maybe mention in the message that you saw my presentation here and you have a follow-up question, then I will just accept and then you can send me a DM. If you’re only interested in my insights, then just follow me and I will post occasionally.

>> AMBER: Great. Well, thank you so much. Thank you to everyone who stuck around. If you’ve not done it yet, please go register for WordPress Accessibility Day. It’s in less than two weeks. We will also see you back here for another meetup on November 13th with Matt Mullenweg.

>> ANNELIES: Yes, so exciting.

>> AMBER: Bye, everybody.

>> ANNELIES: Bye. Thank you all.

>> [01:28:33] [END OF AUDIO]

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