Selling Accessibility Panel Discussion with WordPress Agency Owners

>> AMBER HINDS: Welcome to Selling Accessibility Panel discussion at the WordPress Accessibility Meetup for Monday, May 19th. I have a few announcements. If you have not been here before, it is always good to know that we have a Facebook group you can use to connect with other attendees in between meetups. You can find that if you go to facebook.com/groups/wordpress.accessibility, or just search for WordPress Accessibility on Facebook. You can find upcoming events and past recordings in one place if you go to equalizedigital.com/meetup.

Everyone always asks, is this being recorded? The answer is yes. Takes us about two weeks to get corrected captions and a transcript and edit the video and put it up on our website, and that is where you will find the recording. You can also get notified if you join our email list. We send out a weekly email on Thursdays that includes a roundup of accessibility news and event announcements, and it will say the recap is available right at the top of it, because that’s what everybody always wants. You can join that if you go to equalizedigital.com/focus-state.

The other place that you can listen to this is just in audio format, and it will be up on our podcast, which is accessibilitycraft.com. We are seeking additional sponsors for the meetup. This is part of the WordPress Community Foundation, and it’s an official WordPress meetup, but unfortunately, they told us that they don’t have the budget to help cover the cost of live captions or transcriptions or sign language interpretation, or anything that we need in order to make this accessible for everyone.

If your company would be interested in sponsoring the meetup, please reach out to us. We’d be happy to share information with you and what that entails. You can reach us if you have any suggestions for the meetup, if you need any additional accommodations to make it work for you, if you have questions by emailing meetup@equalizedigital.com. That goes to myself, Amber, and Paula, and we are happy to help you however we can.

Who am I? I am Amber Hinds, as I mentioned. I’m the CEO of a company called Equalize Digital. We are the lead organizer for this meetup. We are a mission-driven organization that is focused on WordPress Accessibility. We have a WordPress plugin called Accessibility Checker that helps scan for accessibility problems and provides reports on the post-edit screen with the goal of making building accessible websites easier.

It also has some automated fixes for some of the things that can be automated fix, but it is meant to augment your manual testing because manual testing is a very important and vital part of building accessible websites. You can learn more about it at equalizedigital.com. I will give a short little commercial that through the 21st, it is 25% off, so if you’ve ever been thinking about upgrading to the pro version of our plugin, now is a good time to do that.

We do have a sponsor tonight for our live captions. GoDaddy is generously covering the cost of our live captions for this meetup. GoDaddy’s mission is to empower a worldwide community of entrepreneurs by giving them all the help and tools they need to grow online, including a simpler, safer WordPress experience. GoDaddy provides a managed WordPress experience that is as easy as it is effective.

The latest version of WordPress comes pre-installed with exclusive themes, plugins, and tools to get you up and running quickly with automated backups, updates, and malware removal so that their pros can spend less time on monotonous maintenance and more time building their businesses. Of course, you can learn about GoDaddy if you go to godaddy.com.

We always encourage attendees, if you are so willing, to go on whichever social media platform is your favorite, I’m sure GoDaddy is on them all, and send them a message or a tweet, or whatever it’s called, tag them, and say, “Thank you for sponsoring captions for a WordPress Accessibility Meetup.” It tells them that I did what I was supposed to do, and it helps encourage them to want to continue sponsoring. If you’re willing to do that and just say, “Hey, thank you for sponsoring captions,” we would very much appreciate that.

Two upcoming events to look forward to. On Thursday, June 5th at 10:00 AM US Central Time, Maria Maldonado, who is our accessibility specialist at Equalize Digital, will be giving a presentation on ARIA for beginners. These are HTML attributes that you add to things in order to communicate extra information to screen readers. If you aren’t familiar with ARIA, that will be a great presentation to attend.

Then, on Monday, June 16th at 7:00 PM Central Time, so this same time slot in June, Bri Norton, Ricky Onsman, and Amanda Mace, who are all from the Aussie Way Accessibility Association in Australia, will be giving a presentation about going from conference to an industry association and what they have been doing to grow the accessibility community in Australia. That should be really interesting if you’re into community building and networking and what you can do on that front. Definitely check that out as well.

Oh, I didn’t even know this slide was there. [chuckles] There’s my 25% off accessibility checker slide. I’m going to actually stop sharing my screen. Give me a second while I arrange a few windows. I’m going to pop up our panelists. Normally, I introduce our speakers, but I always like to, when we have panelists, give everyone the opportunity to really introduce themselves. I do have a quick note that, unfortunately, Bet Hannon was supposed to be here this evening, but she had a family emergency come up, so she is not able to be with us.

She is definitely a great wealth of information, so if you want to follow up with her on social media at some point in the future, I’m sure she would be happy to answer questions about how she approaches selling accessibility. Welcome, everyone. I am going to run through some questions that we planned in advance. For all of our attendees, there is a Q&A panel in Zoom, and I will also be watching that. Please feel free to put any questions that you have in the Q&A panel, and we will make sure to get to them as we go through.

Just to kick us off and have us all give everyone a feel of who’s on our panel, what their backgrounds are, and experience and the expertise that you’re bringing, I’d like to have everyone introduce themselves to start. Ron, do you want to go first?

>> RON ZASADZINSKI: Sure. Hello, everyone. My name is Ron Zasadzinski, and I started CodeGeek in 2002 23 years ago. We are based in Fort Collins, Colorado. As the leader of CodeGeek’s team of 12 amazing people, I help the team be the best we can be every day. We focus on relationships first, both with our clients and internally, as we build accessible websites for clients with regional, national, and global reach. Our primary services are web accessibility services, custom design, we build complex websites in WordPress, simple websites in Webflow, and we build web applications in PHP with the Laravel framework.

We have 12 teammates. They’re all employees. We do work with contractors and some outside organizations for specific projects and certain skill sets. I know we were asked to give the price range of websites that we work in. Our typical WordPress builds are anywhere from 25 to 80K. We’ve built projects for around double that range as well. We work with clients in a really wide variety of range of industries and sizes from small to very large.

We work with clients that do have global operations, and we’ve recently been specializing in transportation websites, including two of the larger transportation agencies in Colorado, as well as businesses in the tourism industry.

>> AMBER: Thank you. Gen, do you want to introduce yourself?

>> GEN HERRES: Yes. I even made notes. Hi, I’m Gen Herres from the Easy A11y Guide. We focus on helping freelancers and agencies with their accessibility. We focus more on the smaller end. Our packages typically start in the very base build, which is our one-day build, is 1,000, and we typically work up to somewhere between 10,000 all the way up to about 50,000 for the higher-end builds. It is myself and several contractors. We have a few different programs for agencies.

We have done with you and we have done for you. We have our accessibility partner program, which is more our white label done for you, and then we have our agency accessibility system, which is more for agencies who want to start implementing it and bringing it in-house. Work primarily in WordPress with a little bit of Shopify. Most of the work is going to be brochure sites, with a bit of work in e-commerce.

>> AMBER: Wonderful. Thank you. Scott, do you want to introduce yourself?

>> SCOTT TOBIN: Sure. I’m Scott Tobin, and my company is Sector45. We’ve been around for about 14 and a half years now. We are a medical marketing agency, and then we work probably 99% with plastic and cosmetic surgeons, medical spas across the country. We’ve got a handful of other medical clients, but we’re almost 100% medical. It’s been an interesting niche for us. We’re a full-service agency. We do website design and development and all the things to get you ranked in Google, obviously accessibility, hosting, email marketing, text message marketing, anything related to their digital marketing success.

Our prices range in between probably, I would say 10,000 on the low side up to maybe 30,000 for a larger site. We tend to build accessibility right into what we’re doing from the get-go. Unless we get a company that they don’t need a brand new site and they’ve already got something, then we’ll quote out what it will take to make their site accessible. It’s just my business partner and I as the employees, and we have contractors all around the world that work for us. We’ve been all working from our home space since day one, so it’s been a nice fit.

>> AMBER: Okay. Thank you. Well, I’m so excited to have you all here because I feel like you present a really broad range of what different agencies or dev experiences can be like, and working with any clients to working with agencies to working in a very specific niche. I’m really excited to hear what you all have to bring. I do want to start on that point of, do you include accessibility by default? Is it an add-on? That kind of question. Scott, maybe since you started there saying that it is something that you do just by default in all of your builds, could you tell us a little bit more about that? Can you start there?

>> SCOTT: Sure, sure. For us, we decided about three or four years ago, because there wasn’t anything that came out that said everyone has to do this. I mean, you saw the big box stores getting sued and settling for millions of dollars, but there were still two sides of the story of saying, “Well, you should do it. Well, you don’t have to yet, so why should we?” We decided as an agency we were going to just recommend that all of our clients do it, and then for new builds, we basically include that as part of what we’re doing.

Then, the ongoing upkeep or the scanning on a monthly basis we build into their marketing plan, so it’s just a part of their plan when they sign up with us. If it’s a client where they don’t need a new website, we have it as an offer, as an option. We strongly recommend you do it. You don’t have to do it. If budget is a big factor, that might be something they pull out, but we don’t recommend it, but we don’t tell them you absolutely have to do it. It’s worked really well.

I think that for us, it’s a little easier because we’re dealing with doctors, and doctors are already used to paying for malpractice and things like that, and the thought of being sued, they just say, “Do it.” It’s kind of an easy sell for us. I mean, we aren’t a hard sell agency in the first place, but it’s never really a hard sell for us to do. When we explain what it is and walk through why we think they need it, no one says, “Nah, don’t want it.”

>> AMBER: What about you, Gen? What has been your experience with how you package accessibility? All at once or add on?

>> GEN: Yes, so typically the point that it comes for packaging is what level of accessibility does someone want? At the base point, we start with, you’ll pass the lightning audit, which is a seven-point simple audit, which catches a lot of the big blockers, and you’ll get a clean score on the AX test. That’s the DQ test from AX. DQ is the company, and AX is the browser extension that does the test. We get a zero there, which is a nice, simple, clean score, easy to explain to people. That’s where it starts.

Then, depending on how much risk the company has, how much budget they have, we then start adding on more testing, more accessibility, a more thorough process, but there’s always that baseline. We don’t drop below the baseline.

>> AMBER: The baseline is like more of the automated score, looking at things like empty buttons, empty links.

>> GEN: [Inaudible 00:14:56] [crosstalk], yes. Yes, so we’re making sure that things actually work with the keyboard and things actually work with color contrast, and getting some of the baseline in there so that it’s not going to be a dumpster fire. It’s going to be decently usable for people out of the box. It may not be great, but it’s going to really put you in a very low likelihood of having a lawsuit. If someone does come to you saying, “Hey, I have a problem,” it’s probably going to be a small problem that’s not going to be a big deal to fix.

Then, in terms of phrasing it and how I talk to people about it, I like to start by asking them, who are your customers? Are they moms who have kids? Are they commuters who are on trains and changing light conditions and ambient noise and they can’t play videos with sound? I start by talking to them about who their actual people are that are using their website, who their customers are. If they’ve got a veteran base, half of veterans in the US have some form of disability. Who are their people?

Then, once we dig into who their people are, I then bring accessibility in as the pathway so that their people can actually use the website.

>> AMBER: Yes, that’s a really great way to look at it. Ron, how about you? Are you packaging it in on every website you build or not necessarily?

>> RON: We do include what I call baseline accessibility in every build. What we don’t include in every build is WCAG conformance. Over time, we use our own custom theme, which is originally based on the Jace theme, which is a developer style theme, very clean and lean, and over many years, we have worked to make that more and more accessible. Our developers are all very– use accessible techniques on a regular basis.

If you think about the three areas where work needs to be applied, design, development, and content entry, so on the design, especially the development side, we’re doing core things because it’s built into our theme and our developers code that way anyway. What we don’t do is do all the testing that’s required for WCAG compliance. If a client does want that, then we add that on, and we test at several different points in the process.

Our developers test along the way in that case on their own using a command line interface tool, and then our in-house testers test when the core theme is completed, and then again, test before launch. We’re doing, of course, automated testing, keyboard testing, and screen reader testing in those cases.

>> AMBER: Maybe this is a question for all three of you as a follow-up on this. The things that you are doing more as an add-on, has that typically been because of budget?

>> GEN: Yes, typically it’s budget.

>> RON: Yes, same here.

>> AMBER: I know everybody always wants to know pricing stuff, so we’ll probably follow up on this a little bit, but I just wanted to clarify on that there. I am curious though, are clients coming to you asking for accessibility, or are you introducing it to them? If you are introducing it to them, how do you typically frame accessibility to clients? Are you talking about compliance, inclusivity, performance, SEO, something else? I’m not sure if anybody wants to jump in on that one to start.

>> SCOTT: I know for us, I mean, we’re including it in. If we’re doing a website redesign or a brand new site, we’re including that in doing so. It doesn’t actually really come up until they’re reading our marketing plan, which is what happens after the site goes live and the monthly tactics we’re doing. Then, they’re looking at the line item, because when they’re looking at the initial proposal, they read the first page and they go straight to the price. They’re not looking at all the details in between, but when they’re looking at the marketing plan, and what am I paying every month? That’s where the questions start to come out.

That’s where we start to explain what we’re doing, why we’re doing it. It’s always an option. Like I said, it’s not really a hard sale for us. I don’t have to spin it up or anything. I talk through it, and everybody agrees and says, “This is the right thing to do.”

>> AMBER: I’m curious, on the doctor’s side, have anybody said anything about Affordable Care Act compliance? ‘Cause I feel like there’s some stuff in the Affordable Care Act that suggests effective communication, or are the doctor’s just not even thinking about that?

>> SCOTT: They’re not even thinking about it. They’re not even thinking about it. Occasionally you’ll get somebody that’s sending out letters to medical practices saying, “I’m going to sue you if you’re not compliant.” We always recommend they talk to their own legal counsel but give them recommendations as well. If it’s not even in their state and they’re suing into another state, it’s like, “This is probably not legitimate, but talk to your legal counsel.” Other than that, it doesn’t really come up.

>> AMBER: What about you, Ron? Have you been seeing, are people asking for accessibility? Also, I don’t know if you said this, do you respond to RFPs, any of you?

>> RON: We do. Yes, we do submit proposals in response to RFPs. A lot of the government work out there, whether it’s state, county, local, higher often is getting issued through RFPs. We do some of that for sure. Those are requiring it when it’s a government entity. For us personally, so I would say a very small minority of clients ask us about accessibility. It does happen, but it’s not the mainstream thing. The majority of the time, we are introducing accessibility to our clients and our prospects.

The way I like to explain it, there’s many different ways, of course, to think about and explain accessibility, so this is just one angle. I think it’s valuable to look at many different angles to get a more complete picture of it. This is just one way, but I like to build off of people’s personal experience. The short version is I’ll ask a prospect, What type of laptop do you use, Mac or PC? What’s your favorite browser on that? What type of phone do you use? What’s your favorite browser on that?

If we built a website for them, we could just test on those devices and browsers and they would think everything’s perfect, but they’re trusting us to test on all the other devices and browsers, and of course, we do. Of course, they understand that there are other people in the world who use other devices and other browsers. That’s easy, right? What you may not understand that they might not understand is that people are also trying to navigate their website right now just using a keyboard, and there are people right now on their website trying to use their website with a screen reader.

Then, the question is, can those visitors do what they’re trying to do? Can those visitors do what the business owner wants them to do? That’s the angle I take at it, and because it builds on their personal experience, I think they get it very quickly that, “Oh, this is a really good thing too. I should be doing this.”

>> AMBER: Yes. Gen, you said you– I’m guessing people come to you sometimes for accessibility because you have accessibility in the name and you’ve been putting yourself out there. I’m curious if you could speak a little bit to what that transition was like maybe before you were doing that, when you had more of just your marketing agency or web design shop. I don’t know the right way to describe it, so feel free to correct me when you answer. How were you introducing people, beyond when you were talking about connecting them, trying to connect them personally with personas?

>> GEN: Yes. I carry around my soap box, and I bring it around, and I hop on top of it regularly, which I’m sure a number of people know me hopefully by now with. I talk a lot about accessibility, and I try to bring in also how the reality is if people can’t use your website, they’re leaving, and so you are losing revenue. I’ve managed to get a couple of case studies together actually showing that by adding the accessibility, we, one, dropped the amount of work that the company had to do just in terms of their own operations, and two, we increased their revenue coming in. It was a very good investment.

Yes, a lot of people are now coming to me asking specifically about the accessibility, asking me to be the person who’s going to handle the accessibility for their new builds or handle things for that. Before I really got into accessibility, I just started working it in on a lot of websites. I wasn’t necessarily telling the clients how much I was doing with it and how much I was just making the whole thing work.

I mostly focused on the fact that I was going to make a website that worked for humans, and I just talked about lots of different types of humans, and when was the last time you sprained your wrist or had a problem, you went to the eye doctor and you got your eyes dilated? I remember when that happened, I’m like, “I cannot see my computer screen at all. I just can’t read this.” I was zooming way in and I’m like, “Oh, I can kind of see it now.” I remember seeing a group that I know had put out a banner, and it had all outlined text. I was like, “Oh my gosh, this is the most horrible thing ever.”

Just trying to bring in real-world, this kind of thing has actually happened to me, this kind of thing has happened to my friends, so that they can really tie it into actual humans. I think I answered your question in there.

>> AMBER: I think so, yes. John posted a really interesting question in the chat. He asked, “Do we think accessibility is driven more by compliance directives or market opportunities? Do either of you have an opinion on that?

>> GEN: I would say it’s a bit of both. I’ve had customers who come to me because they say, “We have literally have all of these customer complaints saying that our checkout is too hard to use,” and they’re like, “I know I am literally losing money on my checkout experience. Can you just fix it all and make it better?” And yes, we have fixed it and improved it greatly, and the customer service complaints have just dropped significantly. I also have people coming and saying, “Hey, I heard at my business networking thing that this person was sued under an ADA. I can’t handle a $15,000 lawsuit. What can you do to help me?

>> AMBER: Yes, which that’s more of compliance than marketing opportunities, right? Yes, I feel like in what I’ve seen a lot, it tends to be more compliance driven, unfortunately. I wish that I could say people are coming– Every once in a while, we have someone who’s like, “We just feel like this is the right thing to do.” They tend to be nonprofit organizations. A lot of times businesses, or we’ve had a couple of B Corps where they said that, which is a benefit corporation for anyone who’s not in the US that doesn’t know, which is for profit, but trying to do good for the world.

I feel like mostly what we hear is fear of lawsuits or fines, or just, even if it’s not fear, it’s just, “Hey, we know that we’re not in compliance with regulations or there’s a new law coming up in the case of European businesses or organizations and we need to get in compliance.” That’s what I’ve been seeing. I don’t know, Scott or Ron, have you seen anything different on the marketing versus compliance?

>> SCOTT: It’s the same for us too [Inaudible 00:27:48] [crosstalk]. It’s all about not getting caught, so let’s get compliance so we don’t have an issue, but it’s 100% for us been that way.

>> RON: I’d say it’s more compliance rather than market opportunity from an education perspective too. I think most business owners that we talk with haven’t even heard of web accessibility, and so they don’t understand that there’s a market opportunity to grow their client base by making their site accessible. I think there’s a lot of work to be done there to just educate business owners and website owners in general.

>> AMBER: Yes. I’m going to skip around through some of our questions. Sorry, guys, but I feel like I’m feeling a theme here, because I’m kind of curious when we’re talking about that and you’re saying that there are a lot who haven’t heard of it and maybe they had to get introduced, or Scott, you’re saying, “Oh, they see it as a line item and now I have to explain it to them.” Do we think there are certain client types that are more receptive to investing in accessibility? If so, who are they?

I’m asking this question especially from the angle of there are probably some people who are attending right now who are thinking, “I want to grow my accessibility business now, but I’ve been trying to sell it and I can’t, and everybody’s like, ‘No, I’m not going to pay for that.'” Is there either a certain role or a certain size of business or a certain industry where we feel like if they were going to go out and try to market that more, because that’s a side of their business they’re interested in growing, that they might have more success? Gen, do you want to go first?

>> GEN: Yes, so the group that I’ve found are the e-commerce people, the ones who are frustrated. They are having frustrations with their e-commerce website. That’s usually why they have come to me in the past for WordPress issues, is because they’re just frustrated with their WordPress site. They’re having all sorts of different, various issues. They have customers calling and saying there are problems with the site, and they want the frustrations to go away. That’s their end goal.

I’ve found that they are open to a lot of options for how do I make that frustration go away, because they have a big, ugly problem that’s right in front of them. They are like, “You’re going to give me a path to fix this problem? Okay, I’m on board. I will throw money at this. This has to go away.”

>> SCOTT: Yes, and I would say from my side, anything healthcare-related, they’re going to go down this path. It’s almost like it’s not an option. If you’re going to have a healthcare-related site, you have to go down this path. I mean, obviously, you don’t have to, but they are going to go down that path. It’s not a hard sell in that niche.

>> RON: For our client base, the government entities are very receptive, but including those, we have been contacted by agencies that never heard of accessibility until we explained it to them. Then, they realize, “Oh, we better do this.” That’s [crosstalk]–

>> AMBER: Are those more like the city, local, smaller agencies where they’ve never heard of it?

>> RON: This was a state agency, but in a different state. Outside of government though, I would say for us, not so much specific client types, but personality types. For example, it seems to me like of our clients who are commercial websites, not government websites, it’s decision makers who want to be seen as leaders who do the right thing and who are actually trying to make the world a better place. They are more receptive, and they’ll say yes fairly quickly.

>> SCOTT: I think also there’s the little market. Let’s say you’re a mom-and-pop and you have one tire store, you’re not going to do this. Now you’re a mom-and-pop that’s grown to 30 tire stores, you’re going to do this. It’s the right thing to do. You realize it’s the right thing to do. You’ve got 30 locations. It needs to happen now. These little mom-and-pops, it’s not really worth spinning your gears in that market when you’ve really got to go after somebody that’s– It’s a concern. I don’t think it’s really a concern or in their radar when they’re that small of a business.

>> AMBER: Except for maybe in very specific instances where their friend from the Chamber of Commerce got sued. [laughs]

>> SCOTT: Or for us, we [crosstalk]–

>> AMBER: Then, suddenly they get– but I think you’re right. I do think there’s definitely a revenue threshold here where any business that makes under $100,000 a year I could almost guarantee will probably not invest in accessibility, and many of them will have very, very small website budgets to the effect that they might not. Gen, I know you serve the smaller business, and so I’d love for you to talk a little bit about that.

>> GEN: I work with a lot of businesses that are under $100,000 a yea, and the reality is they will take the small package. If you can offer them the small one-time package, they will take the small one-time package, and the reality is their website is not going to change very much. They really don’t update their content very often. I’ve been able to do one-day builds with them, and we just get the website done and it’s over with, and quite frankly, it’s going to work pretty well. That’s [crosstalk]–

>> AMBER: I think those are the kind of customers who probably don’t even have a blog and they don’t have any sort of ongoing marketing strategy would be my guess. They have a four-page brochure website, in which case you can definitely do [crosstalk]–

>> GEN: They have social media. That’s where they spend all their time. They spend all their time on social media, and then their website is primarily to give people the link of, “Here’s my services, here’s what I do. I am in fact real.” They found that their website is really important for being legitimate, to be viewed by other people as legitimate, but they spend almost all of their time on social media. If people don’t have a website to click off to and see stuff, they aren’t viewed as legitimate. That’s what their website is for. They want it, but they really don’t make changes to it very often, maybe once a year.

If you can just get it done in that one day, then they are really happy because it’s over with, it’s done with, and they can move on with their life. Then, they’re like, okay, great. Now, frequently what happens is they stop getting complaints about their website.

>> AMBER: Yes, so it definitely depends a little bit on how you structure your packages, I think, but it doesn’t mean that those people necessarily won’t buy if you have the right package for them. It sounds like that’s what you’re saying, right?

>> GEN: Yes, they have to have the– If you want to go after the small clients, you have to have the small package.

>> AMBER: James said something interesting in the chat. James says, “I work with nonprofits, and they understand the ramifications if they decline on the option with accessibility. Unfortunately, they also don’t have the budget. Design and functionality gets set aside so that they are compliant. They may not get grants from the government if they don’t abide by the rules.” That led me a little bit to think about the opposite of who is receptive to like, okay, now we have some people who are not as receptive, and during sales conversations, there might be objectives that come up.

I’m curious if you could each share some thoughts about how you handle client objections like that it’s not in our budget. We’re a very smal– we’re a nonprofit or we’re have very low margins or whatever. How do you handle that? Ron, do you want to go first?

>> RON: Sure. On the budget side of things, that’s not uncommon for people to say that it’s not on their budget. We can ask some questions about, well, how about planning ahead for it? Would it be possible for them to budget it in next year? Then, if they do say yes to that, then maybe there’s something we can do this year to make a step in the right direction and then budget for the bigger piece later. I think that’s one option. I’ll pass the baton to whoever else would like to answer next.

>> SCOTT: I think, for us, it happens when you’re already an existing site, we’re not doing a brand new build, and they’re looking to cut some costs. I’ll basically explain, “This is not a have to, but we strongly recommend you do this.” If they don’t and they still pass on it, we figure out a way to work it into their marketing plan, because we reissue marketing plans every six months to make sure we’re still on task with what Google wants to see, et cetera, et cetera. We’ll figure out a way to work it in down the road because we feel so strongly about it.

Then, we explain when it happens, “We’ve built the cost of doing this for you into your next marketing plan,” and we get it done.

>> AMBER: That I think is a really great transition to I wanted to talk about recurring accessibility services, because up until now, we’ve mostly been talking about a new build. I imagine each of you have some sort of recurring accessibility remediation or monitoring that you do. Could you talk a little bit about what those packages are like and how they’re set up? Gen, do you want to go first?

>> GEN: We have a couple different packages. We have some small scope monitoring, which we keep in the sub 100 range because it’s literally very simple monitoring of a small subset of your pages with automation. This is not robust, it’s simple. Then, we have for a lot of places like, let’s say your local library is a good one for this example, they probably walked in saying, “We don’t even have a budget,” and they’re like, “We don’t know, we have to show our board something.” Usually what they have is they need to show their board progress.

Normally for that, it’s going to be a monthly retainer, something in the 300 to $1,000 a month range is something that they can fit into their budget, and with that, you can show a little progress each month. You can show a little bit happened depending upon where they fall. Even an hour a month like, “Okay, this month we fixed their main menu. Their main menu now works well. It’s now easy to use main menu. This month we fix their footer. We can now use their footer with the keyboard. Next month we did some theme fixes and we got some stuff in.”

You just chip away at it slowly, but they’re able to show their board something is happening. A lot of times when they don’t have a budget, what they need is they mean we can pay small amounts monthly but we don’t have a chunk to give you.

>> RON: I can speak to that. Yes, we offer monthly accessibility plans, as we call them MAPs, M-A-P, MAPs. These are really a great fit for WordPress websites that are not accessible. We spend a specific amount of time each month doing both auditing and remediation. We did base these plans off of Amber’s company. Equalize Digital has these types of plans, and it just seemed brilliant to me, and she gave us permission to do something similar, so we did.

The plan here is [crosstalk]–

>> AMBER: I’ll–

>> RON: Yes, go ahead. Go for it.

>> AMBER: I’ll just chime in. Maybe Paula can find the link. I gave a whole meetup presentation about how we run these, because I would love more people to do it. You are allowed to copy me. You can go look at what the pricing tiers are. Because people can buy them off our website. Obviously, you need to set it up as it works for your business, but just saying that. Ron asked, anybody can do it. It’s not special. [laughs] Go on, Ron.

>> RON: Thanks, thanks. No, that’s great. I mean, I appreciate what you’re doing with it, because that’s the whole goal, right, is to have more agencies offering more opportunities to make more sites accessible. I think this is a really key piece. The idea with a MAP is each month, some time is spent on auditing and some on remediation. We have different levels of plans. The only difference is the amount of time each month.

At the beginning, we’re going to focus on the lowest hanging fruit for the biggest impact, so main navigation, header and footer, those things are present on every page of the site. Those might be the first month or two or three of the effort, and then after that, we’ve identified of course many other issues, and we’ll just keep working our way through them in a prioritized fashion. You can make a lot of progress quickly, like Gen was saying, even with just a little bit of effort, you can make a lot of progress quickly, and then over time, make the site more and more accessible.

That’s a great fit for clients who aren’t ready to redesign this year or maybe even in the next several years, but they want to make their site more accessible. This is a great approach to that.

>> SCOTT: For us, we build it into the marketing plan. These are the five things we’re doing even in our most basic marketing plan, and the ongoing compliance is one of them. The way that I explain it to people is, “We can make your site compliant as of today, but next month, you’re going to add a blog, you might add a new procedure page, you’re doing something, and those new additions have to become compliant. That’s why we’re doing these monthly scans every month.” People understand. It’s this living thing that it’s always changing, and we’ve got to make sure that we’re changing with it.

>> RON: Yes, and I’m glad you brought that up, Scott, because that’s a really important part, is once a site is made accessible, right, keeping an eye on it and helping maintain that accessibility, as we all know, it’s an ongoing process. We do the same, once we’ve built a new website to be accessible, then same thing, we offer an unpublished version of the MAP, if you will. That’s a lower cost because it takes less effort, and we do some auditing and remediation either monthly or quarterly to help our client keep the website accessible.

>> SCOTT: Yes, I mean, it kind of goes along the lines of– we do monthly speed and security updates, WordPress plugins are getting updated, software’s getting updated. The slightest little thing can break the site, so we need to go in on a monthly basis and make sure everything’s working well.

>> AMBER: Something that we always talk about with this is the challenge that we have sometimes, at least initially, of communicating during the sales process about how long it will take. I’ll say right now, I’m not the person who does our sales, my partner Chris does all of our sales, so he has all these conversations, but I know one of the things that he’s been talking about is like, well, there’s going to be a minimum upfront investment, but we very frequently will say, this is always just an estimate. Once we actually get in and we’re auditing your website, it could change.

The biggest thing is we will always communicate that to you.

That’s something that’s really important, because fixing their nav menu could be simple. It could also be, no, we’re going to recode your entire nav menu because you use a custom theme, or it was built with some plugin that was really bad, like mega menu plugin that doesn’t support anything. It’s just like, eh, it’s easier to start over. At the same time, depending upon what tier they’re on, because we do ours based on a number of hours, well, okay, now there might not be enough time in one month to do that because that fix ended up being so big.

I don’t know if any of you have any thoughts about how you communicate that kind of stuff during the sales process to clients about these recurring plans that, we can give you a picture, but it’s possible once we get in, just like the plumber, right, if he opens the wall and finds a whole bunch of mold, well, surprise. Do you have anything like that that helps you with communicating during sales about expectations?

>> SCOTT: We have a set idea of how long it’s going to take. There’s a range in there. We build that into the initial price, but obviously, if the site is three times the size of your average site you’re working on, it’s going to take more time. There’s times that we’ve gone back and said, “Look, you’ve got a gigantic site, it’s going to cost more.” There’s been times where it unexpectedly took more time and we just ate the time because it’s the right thing to do.

Ultimately for us, it’s getting our client onto this ongoing marketing plan and that monthly nut that’s coming in, and that’s what we want. If we have to eat a little bit to make it right, we’ll do that, because it’s more important that we get the site compliant, get them on the marketing plan, and then we can continue to do things. Again, like you guys have both mentioned, sometimes you’ll only do a little bit this month, and you’re going to finish it up the next month when you’ve got more time [unintelligible 00:45:53].

There’s been more than one time where we did an estimate and we ran into an issue midway and we just ate it to get it done.

>> AMBER: I think we’ve probably all been there

[laughter]

>> AMBER: Gen, you were starting to say something.

>> [INAUDIBLE 00:46:09] [crosstalk]

>> GEN: Yes, so I normally just give them, okay, it’s this much a month, and we estimate that it’s going to take between whatever, four and seven months to get you to the point that you want to be at. When we hit the four-month point, we’re going to do a check-in and say, okay, here’s where we’re at, here’s what we’ve done, and we’re going to give you a more specific estimate of what we think is left.

Then, usually I give them a couple of options, because people love options. You have some people who are like, “I want it done completely,” and you have some people who are like, “I want the less expensive one, even if it’s not complete.” I usually will say we’ve got these issues left and I will try to rate and prioritize them, because some issues are– it’s mildly annoying, but people can still get past it, and other issues are, “No, I literally cannot check out.” There’s different types of issues.

I usually give them the two choices, and they get to choose which one. It makes them feel like they’re still in control. Then, of course, I always bring up the story of remodeling my kitchen when the contractor pulled up the flooring and yes, yes, there was mold. Then, they ripped out that layer, and then they found a whole laminate floor layer, which had some issues, so they ripped that out. Then, they found the linoleum underneath that, and they ripped that out. Then, we finally got down to clean, decent plywood. I just shared my own personal struggle.

>> AMBER: We can all thank HGTV for creating analogies that everyone will understand.

[laughter]

>> GEN: Right.

>> AMBER: Ron, how about you? How do you handle those expectations?

>> RON: Yes. Well, I think managing expectations right is one of our most important jobs in the business that we are all in. Gen, you just described that so well, that you just don’t know sometimes, so just managing those expectations as well as you can upfront and then updating them regularly is just by far the most important thing to keeping that client knowing what’s going on. For us, we have found that those monthly accessibility plans are very successful, and that like, Gen, as you said, people love options.

Part of that is, right, that gives them some agency, some control over the process, which often there isn’t maybe in web design and development as much. In this case, there is because they see the progress each month. They’re getting a report, and we’re talking with them each month, and then they can stop. They don’t have to go all the way to conformance. They can stop early. I think that flexibility and them having that ability to turn it off when they’re ready is also very helpful in this particular approach.

>> AMBER: I want to jump over to some of our questions that are in the Q&A panel. Dylan said, “I sometimes have potential clients who say their website is ‘accessible’, but they have only installed an accessibility overlay plugin. What is your take on these overlay plugins?” Dylan says, “It takes time to convince clients to understand why they need to spend money to build the website properly for accessibility.”

>> GEN: I guess I can tackle that one. If they’re over in Europe, I always bring up the European Union statement where they just come right out and they say overlays do not make your website accessible and they do not meet European laws. I love to bring out that one. Even when they’re not in Europe, I still love to bring out that one because the European Union isn’t exactly a small place. When you have something really big as an entity that says that, it’s really helpful.

Of course, you can bring up the recent FTC thing with accessiBe where the FTC just said that accessiBe, I don’t remember the exact terminology they used, but basically they said they had been using false claims regarding being able to make any website WCAG compliant. Something similar to that.

>> AMBER: They fined them a million dollars.

>> GEN: Yes, but there are I think recurring fines if they continue to make false claims. That’s what they do in a lot of their setups, is they add on fines if you keep violating it.

>> RON: We’ll explain some detail about the work involved in making a website accessible if we’re doing it from the foundation up. I don’t know that we use semantic HTML on a regular basis with a prospect or a client, but we do talk about that the coding structure is really important in doing semantic HTML. It’s one of the crucial things that allows the assistive technologies to interact with your website and understand it and make it work the way it needs to work, and that an overlay, it’s kind of a band-aid to fix some of those things, but it still never fixes the core issues. That’s helpful.

Then, there is that overlayfactsheet.com, I believe it is. Amber, is that the right URL?

>> AMBER: Yes.

>> RON: There’s a lot of good information there. Then, there was another WordPress Accessibility Meetup with the attorney from North Texas. I forget his name. That was a very good meetup. Do you recall his name, Amber?

>> AMBER: Yes, we can get the link for that meetup. He also was on our podcast because he defends– It’s interesting because we’ve had attorneys before that are on the side of– like Lainey Feingold advocates for accessibility and I think sues entities, but Richard Hunt is on the other side where he defends businesses, but he still was like, you need to make your website accessible if you don’t want to get sued. That’s what he said. It’s really interesting to hear his take from that other side.

>> RON: Yes, it is, because he pointed out some percentage of lawsuits against websites for them not being accessible. Some portion of those was because they were using an overlay, which made the website less accessible, so there’s more info [Inaudible 00:52:53] [crosstalk] meetup.

>> AMBER: Yes, I think last year it was about 30% of websites have that. I think there are law firms that are targeting websites with accessibility overlays on them. There are reports like UsableNet has a good report on accessibility lawsuits that you can share with your customers that might help them. I’ll say we’ve had a couple come to us that already had overlays and they had gotten sued, but one of the questions that they ask is, well, should we just leave the overlay on while you are fixing things or until you get it to a certain point?

Usually what I’ll do is we’ll copy their site to staging and we’ll turn off the overlay on staging, and then we’ll compare and do a manual audit of the live website with the overlay and a manual audit of the live website without the overlay. Then, usually we can be like, “Well, see, all these same problems exist anyway,” and then they’re like, “Oh, okay.” And I’m like, “You can save yourself at a baseline $49 a month,” but some of these organizations are paying thousands of dollars a year to the overlay because it’s based on page views.

Usually, that’s how we can convince them that– I’m like, “You’ve been sued, and it still has these problems. You’re wasting your money.” Have you experienced this, Scott, the overlay question? Not really?

>> SCOTT: No, [Inaudible 00:54:24] [crosstalk], and our clients that come to us have no idea what that would even be. As I said, we build it into the plan. We don’t really talk about it. It’s on there, but they’re not looking at that. We build it into the plan and then explain if they ask. It’s an easy sell for us because of the niche that we work in. It’s an easy sell. It’s not really happened where somebody wants to fight us on it.

>> AMBER: What you’re saying is we all just need to get into medical marketing.

[laughter]

>> SCOTT: No, I wouldn’t recommend that either. [laughs]

>> AMBER: Yes, you have to worry about HIPAA. The rest of us are like [crosstalk]–

>> SCOTT: I know. Don’t get me started on that one.

[laughter]

>> RON: There’s one other angle on the overlay thing that I wanted to mention, because I got surprised by a prospect one time, and so I thought hard about how to explain this better the next time. When people need to use a screen reader software, they use that screen reader software for all the functions of their computer, not just visiting websites. They’re going to open other documents. They’re going to open other applications. They’re also going to browse websites. They’re going to do email all with the screen reader software. They need to be able to navigate every website on the internet with that software.

If you think you’re special and you put your one little overlay on your one website and that overlay has one-tenth of 1% market share globally, do you really expect someone who needs assistance to learn your one tool for your one website when they’re already using a tool that they know so well? That’s what you want to build to.

>> AMBER: Yes, I like that.

>> GEN: It’s very common that on these overlays, they don’t work almost uniformly, very reliable on carousels. A lot of them have an animated carousel that’s going through, and if you open the widget and find the spot to turn off the animations, which is always a challenge. I literally have a prospect try and open up the overlay, figure out how to turn off animations, and they’re like, “It took me an entire minute to do that,” and then try and use the carousel now. The carousel’s broken, and literally you can’t page through it anymore.

I found that happens on quite a few websites. The other thing is I have a couple of websites that I know are using a specific overlay, and I know that it breaks their main menu completely with the keyboard. I’ll have someone try and use it on their machine, and then I have the AccessiByeBye browser extension installed. It’s a great browser extension, the AccessiByeBye, but it blocks most of the overlays. Tou can turn the AccessiByeBye on and then show that the main menu actually works without the overlay. That’s usually a big sale. They’re like, “Oh. Oh wow. Okay.”

>> AMBER: Let’s see. I’m going to try to get through a few of these quickly. MJ said, “I’m a new hire WordPress developer for a nonprofit. My company is very complex. WordPress site is not accessible at all. Images don’t even have alt text. They’re interested in being accessible, but don’t want to spend money. Do you have any suggestions for free or low-cost tools I can use to help audit the site?” Do you each want to talk about some of the low-cost or free tools that you use? Scott, do you want to go first?

>> SCOTT: We don’t. We don’t present it as an option. This is what we’re doing for you and this is why we’re doing it. For me, and it’s taken a long time for me to get here, and you guys can probably all relate, but eventually you get to this point where sometimes clients aren’t a good fit for you, and that’s just a hard truth that you have to come by. In the beginning, you want to grow your business. Every client, I want every client I can get. “I can only pay $100,” I’ll take it, but then you get to this point where it’s like, “You know what, I don’t think we’re right for you.”

If a client comes and is fighting us on everything that we know is the right thing to do, it’s not a good fit for Sector45. We might not be a good fit for them. We have this really interesting thing, and we’ve gotten a lot of compliments on it, but we have on our website, it’s called our breakup promise. It basically says if you or us decide that we’re not a good fit, here are all the ways that we’re going to work with you to make sure that you have a seamless transition to your next vendor. People appreciate it so much, but it comes back to the bottom line is, sometimes we’re not a good fit. When somebody doesn’t have the money to do something, well, that’s not how we work.

>> AMBER: What tools are you using?

>> SCOTT: What tools are we using for?

>> AMBER: For finding accessibility problems on websites.

>> SCOTT: Yours.

>> AMBER: [laughs] Yes, Accessibility Checker. Do you use any browser extensions?

>> SCOTT: The team’s got some stuff they use. I can’t offhand remember what it is they’re using, but they do. Your tool is our Bible.

>> AMBER: Well, thank you. We do have a free version. Ron, do you want to go?

>> RON: Yes. Yes. For WordPress sites, the free version of Accessibility Checker is great for a free tool. Definitely recommend that. If it’s not WordPress, then Wave works on every website, and that’s free. Then, for keyboard testing, anybody can do that. There’s links to the WebAIM keyboard testing guide, which is not that complex. Anyone can really train themselves to do that. Then, on the screen reader side, more complex to learn, but NVDA is free on the PC. Then Macs come with VoiceOver built in, and Android phones come with TalkBack built in. Those are all learnable. Equalize Digital has now some wonderful brand new courses on learning how to use VoiceOver available now, and NVDA coming very shortly.

>> AMBER: Thank you, Ron. Gen, what tools do you use for checking websites?

>> GEN: Usually, my first chat with a client is, I do two scores. The first score is going to be the risk score, and the second score is going to be the lightning audit, because those are both– it takes me about two minutes to do both of them. That just gives me a good, bad, ugly kind of situation.

>> AMBER: These are your own tools that you’ve developed? They’re not–

>> GEN: Yes. I can toss the links to them in the chat if you’d like, because they’re very quick and easy. Most people can learn them in just a few minutes. They’re good to just rank things, and it also gives you a good place to start. Like, okay, clearly this issue came up at the very beginning, so let’s focus on it and work on getting it to actually pass. Then, the quick audit presentation I did with the meetup.

>> AMBER: Maybe Paula can find that link. I think that takes us to Hannah had asked if anyone offers an accessibility audit at the beginning of the relationship to get new clients. I’m kind of wondering if that’s asking, like, as a pre-sale, has anybody gone out and been like, “Hey, I found these problems on your website. I can help you fix it.” Have any of you done that?

>> SCOTT: No.

>> GEN: I do the profile with new clients, and it’s what I teach when I work with agencies. I teach them to do this with their existing clients and also with their new clients, just so that they can get something that even a VA can do pretty quickly, and just profile them.

>> AMBER: It sounded like you both said no. I’ll say, I know for a while, a long time ago, Chris tried sometimes doing some of that cold outreach, and it never was very good. Generally, as part of our sales process, he does– it’s not a comprehensive audit by an accessibility professional, but he’ll do some of the things you’re talking about, Gen or Ron, that you mentioned, like, can he tab through to get a picture as part of the sales process. In conversation with the client, he’ll say, “Hey, I noticed these things don’t work.” That kind of thing.

>> SCOTT: It’s a tough sell to do it that way. It’s like, I have a web agency and I build websites for a living, you know how many emails I get telling me my website’s broken and only this company can fix it? Did you even look at my site and what I do? People are so inundated with these kind of, “It’s broken and you need to hire me,” and they just ignore or delete.

>> AMBER: You’re probably going to waste a lot of your time if you try to put marketing effort into that kind of cold outreach.

>> SCOTT: I think that if you have a niche, like we have a niche, and we decided that this was important, and we talked to all of our clients because our clients trust us. When we say we recommend to do this, it’s not a hard sell for us because we already have that trust factor, but to do it as a cold outreach, that’s tough.

>> AMBER: For sure. Someone asked, “How do you handle clients who do not see the value in accessibility?” I know we sort of talked about this a little bit, but do you have anything else? I know we talked about budget, but are there any other objections or ways that you can communicate value?

>> SCOTT: I basically say, “You don’t have to do this. We strongly recommend, and here’s why.” I use the examples like the big boxes getting sued. Nobody wants to have a lawsuit, and then I drop it, and we circle back. We always circle back if they say no. I’m only talking about 1% to 2% say no, but if they do, we always circle back. I make sure I leave it with, “We don’t have to do this, but we really strongly recommend and here’s why,” and then drop it.

>> RON: We’ll talk about the things you do for accessibility help everybody, not just people who are currently using assistive technologies. It also impacts metrics on the backend as well. If the website’s easier to use, you’re generally going to attract more traffic. You can have a higher conversion rate. That’s not uncommon, and it helps SEO as well. There are many side benefits, if you will, to it that might be appealing to a regular business, even if they are, for whatever reason, not into accessibility. It’s still going to help them gain more customers and a better conversion rate.

>> AMBER: Let’s see. I think we have a couple of questions, maybe related to packaging. Hannah said, “We have a website maintenance package that all of their websites are part of. We’re trying to decide if we should wrap a regular accessibility audits into the maintenance package or have a separate program.” It sounds like Gen offers it separately, but Scott wraps it in. Are there any pros and cons to those two different approaches?

>> GEN: The biggest con to wrapping them together is just the fact that that tends to increase the cost of it quite a bit. I found, generally, people respond better when I give them tiers of pricing versus saying this is the package. Some people want the budget, some people want the platinum, that’s just how it is. It really depends on how budget-sensitive your customers are.

>> SCOTT: I think on the flip side for her is that when it’s a separate line item and you have a separate line item for this and hosting and this, it’s easy to say yes, yes, no, no. Wrapping it in together is kind of easy. There are some things in our plan that might not take as long as the others. We can use that time with the accessibility. This kind of package, we don’t have to necessarily explain, “Well, this takes us exactly this much time. This takes us exactly this much time.” We’re just going to do all of these things for you for this cost, and it works well for us.

>> RON: I thought Gen and Scott answered that great. I don’t have anything more to add.

>> AMBER: Okay. Ron, I actually think the next question is for you. It says, “When you offer maps, how do you build scoping into the monthly plan? My reason for asking is that it is difficult to recommend a plan tier without doing scoping.”

>> RON: Yes, excellent question. Typically, we will talk to our prospective client about how fast they want to improve the accessibility of the site. Is there a deadline that they are trying to reach, either for their own reason or some legal reason? Then they might want a larger package to go faster, and we’ll do more auditing in that first month. In fact, usually the first month is mostly auditing on those kinds of things to get a sense of, that’s giving us then the scope of what’s needed.

It’s okay. We can have someone change the package level if we discover that there’s more issues than we thought or fewer issues than we thought. We can be flexible with that. I don’t know if you have more to add, Amber, since you have the same kind of plans.

>> AMBER: I think usually it is deadline-based. As I said, I’m at a slight disadvantage because I don’t do all of our sales conversations. Sometimes Chris will have myself or Steve take a look at a website before they close on a specific plan tier. Because depending upon how it’s built can dramatically impact things. If we know it’s built with a certain page builder or something like that. Also, because sometimes they come to us with questions of like, can we remediate it or should we just rebuild it? Which is a whole ‘nother topic we could talk about for an hour, and Steve and I just presented on that. I would say if you’re interested in that, you should go watch that talk.

We have minimum months on each plan tier because we say, one, it helps us plan out to be able to forecast, and know for a certain amount of time, and we’re going to have it, but also, it’s a greater number of months at the smaller level. Because we’re like, “If you’re buying this, you want to get accessible, it’s going to take longer at a smaller tier.”

That said, we are flexible, and we’ve had someone come in recently at a 48-hour a month, and they just realized that they wanted to have a lot more oversight on everything. They’re hosted on Pantheon with a multi-dev. They’re really worried about pushing live to production. They wanted to check everything, but then they realized, “Oh, but also my day-to-day job is not just checking developer work.” [chuckles] They were like, the speed at which we were working didn’t match the speed at which they were available. So we were like, “Okay, well, we’ll be flexible and we’ll drop you to a lower tier and we’ll just do things slower because that’s what you need.”

We’ve also had people come in where they had a deadline with the Department of Education or with a state funding entity. They had to be by a certain time. Initially, we looked at it and we’re like, it’s going to be, let’s say, six months at 24 hours. We get in and we do one or two months of that, and we’re like, “Okay, you need to be accessible in X number of months. We can tell now this is definitely not going to happen. You have to go up. This is your choice.” You meet your deadline or not, because this is the reality of what we’ve discovered once we got in.

Generally, in those scenarios, usually, it’s odd, like they can’t always find a lot of money for new websites or whatever, but they can find money when they’re about to be in really big trouble with the Department of Education.

[laughter]

>> AMBER: Usually those ones are almost– it sounds bad to say like a blank check, but they’re almost like if you go to them and say, “No, this is a reality, and if you want to be it, then they usually will go up.”

>> RON: You bring up a good point, Amber. We were just talking, all four of us, about how to do some quick testing on websites to analyze them. We do what you’re talking about, Amber, which is figuring out what theme they’re using, because that’s a big factor. Then we can do some keyboard testing. Google Lighthouse is another free, not very comprehensive way, but it is an automated way to get an answer in a few seconds of, where’s the general accessibility level? Is it in the close to 100% or is it down in the 20% level? You can get some quick sense of things up front of, is this really a train wreck, or is this not too bad and just needs a tune-up?

>> AMBER: Let’s see. Marsha had an interesting question, which says, “I recently was doing an audit for a nonprofit and they had built their site with a GUI tool,” G-U-I. “There’s no way to make it accessible without buying a more expensive version of that builder product. I’m in the position to have to log bugs with the vendor who created the tool. Have you ever had to go down this path? What has been your experience?”

>> SCOTT: I think for us, it’s been more, it’s not just accessibility related. It’s been the entire site as a train wreck once you get in there and see it. You say, “Look, we have to rebuild this,” or it might be some other situation where they were switching vendors and the vendor is keeping their code or something messy like that. It’s never really been a situation about accessibility for us. Really, it’s the entire, once you get in, you’re like, “Oh my God, what did they do?” [chuckles] You basically have to tell them, “You’ve got to rebuild your site,” but it looks fine on the outside. Well, on the outside it does, but not on the inside.

>> AMBER: I’ll add on that. We do a lot of times when we have people come in on our lowest tier, or even 12 hours a month or less, it can sometimes be really hard to fix major things. A big part of our strategy on that is that when we identify problems that exist in the theme or the plugins, we first report them to the theme or the plugin developer instead of us trying to fix them on that website. One, because it puts the burden on the theme or the plugin developer and takes away from time we have to spend, which then makes it less expensive for our client.

There’s three reasons why you do this. There’s that, the budget piece. Two, it means that if they fix it, they fix it for everyone using their plugin or theme. That is the biggest impact on the world that is great. Then three, if they fix it, it is not a guarantee, but much closer to a guaranteed long-term fix because you patch something with JavaScript or a PHP filter or something like that, and then they release an update and they change a [chuckles] class name or anything like that.

Now your fix won’t work and so to some degree, if you’re patching stuff and creating almost like your own overlay, which is sometimes what you’re doing, then you get in a land of every time a update for that plugin is released, you’ve got to check first before you can release it on their live site to make sure your fix still works. It’s a lot of ongoing overhead.

I would say, no matter what, I would try to report stuff to that vendor. That said, in our experience, some are better than others. Sometimes what happens is we report it, and it sits too long, and it doesn’t match the timeline. Then there’s a decision point of either we do go ahead and patch it, or we remove it, and we go with a different solution.

>> SCOTT: I think that’s super smart.

>> AMBER: Let’s see. I want to see. Oh, this is an interesting question. Someone said, “When a client declines accessibility for their website, do you have them sign off that they’re declining accessibility?” The second part of this question is, “Does a sign-off protect you from a lawsuit?” We’re not going to answer that because none of us are attorneys, so we can’t tell you whether that would protect you [chuckles] from a lawsuit. Does anybody have this in their practice where you have an accessibility waiver? Like, “I told you about this and you declined?”

>> SCOTT: No.

>> GEN: I do have an accessibility waiver where they can sign. It’s pretty darn terrifying, actually.

>> RON: We do the same. If we’re a little nervous about that client, then we do have a clause they can sign that they have declined to do the accessibility work.

>> AMBER: The thing that we have done, and I’ll be fully transparent, we don’t build new websites anymore. Last year, we stopped building new websites just because we like the auditing stuff better. When we were doing that, a big thing that we would sometimes do is a change of scope because we were writing in our contracts that certain components would be fully WCAG conformant. Never the entire website, but like the header, the footer, the sidebars, a page we built, whatever.

It was in our statement of work that we had to deliver that. If they would say, this happened, “I really want this one color in this one section to match my failing contrast logo because it looks just like my logo, the way the designer styled it with a box around it, and it’s light blue background and white text, and I’m like, ‘It’s going to fail contrast.’ No, I really want it just in this one spot.” We’re like, “Okay, you’re going to sign a change of scope that you agree that the header of the homepage is no longer going to be 100% WCAG conformant.”

It’s a scope change [chuckles] because otherwise they could come back and be like, “Well, you didn’t deliver on what you said.” We would do that. It wasn’t necessarily like a we waive you from being liable kind of thing, but it was more like, we have in writing now that they very clearly said they’re releasing us from that obligation to deliver that piece for that section of the website.

Let’s see. There’s a couple of questions related to accessibility and Divi, which I know Paula also put a link in the chat about that. I know we only have a few minutes, so I don’t know if we can go too far down on this. I am curious for you all to maybe say what you build with. Ron, I know you said you use a custom theme. Scott, Gen, are you using all custom stuff? Do you have a builder of choice?

>> SCOTT: We’re 100% WordPress. Up until recently, most of our stuff’s been with WPBakery, which we’ve been pretty happy with. Lately, we’ve been testing out using Oxygen, which has been much quicker build times and been pretty nice so far. It’s got a little bit of a learning curve if you haven’t poked around in it. Once you do, it works out pretty well. That’s basically what we build with.

>> GEN: I use my custom theme, which is Kaya, which is available on GitHub. It’s specifically designed for accessibility. I get it tested, kind of a nice little arrangement with the Blind Golf Canada. They make sure we just do some regular testing in exchange for a little bit of dev work from me. That’s great because they have– their entire membership is blind. We get a lot of good testing from them. That’s how I make sure that stays accessible.

Then, for the builder, I either use a very simple block pack and specific elements from it and only those elements, or I use Elementor and again, specific elements and only those elements, and only with certain configurations. It’s very restricted as to what gets used.

>> RON: For us on the block side of things, so for content, we’re developing blocks, but we use the Cadence system. We just use the accessible blocks of theirs. Then we do use the native Gutenberg blocks that are accessible for paragraphs and headings, and things. If those don’t completely meet the need, then we’ll build a custom block that’s accessible to meet the need. You can get very far with Cadence and the Accessible Gutenberg blocks.

>> AMBER: I want to wrap up with our last question. I’d like to ask each of you if you have any advice for agency owners or freelancers who want to start doing accessibility work, but aren’t sure how to incorporate it or get started. Your elevator pitch of advice.

[laughter]

>> AMBER: Ron’s going to volunteer to go first. [chuckles]

>> RON: I gave some thought to this. I would say one of the things I’ve learned that I recommend is write simple scopes of work so they’re just very easy to understand and just clearly point out what is included and what is not included. Amber, you gave a great example of how you were delivering certain components that were WCAG compliant, but that was what you were committed to. That’s a great way to do it. We have found that goes a long way for the client to understand things.

>> SCOTT: I think that both Gen and Ron, you guys gave really good examples of how you make the client think about it. Well, what kind of phone do you use? What kind of browser are you on? You’re walking through this path, and you’re telling this story. When you start telling that story, it’s very easy for us to say, “Well, I don’t have these problems and this is the way I think so everyone must think this way.” Well, what if somebody can’t hear or can’t see or whatever that problem is, and people don’t stop to think about it, and they don’t understand the percentages. When you start talking and use the data and tell a story, that’s really how you’re going to sell it.

>> GEN: At Easy A11y Guide, we have the Accessibility Partner Program, which you can sign up for free. We have some templates to help get you started to help you sell it to your clients, with, of course, the idea that you then white label the work through us. It helps a lot of agencies put their toe in the water by handling more of the sales part of the process and then not doing all the fulfillment. Then they can kind of start to slowly bring some of the fulfillment in-house and start to get their people trained on things over time, without having to dive into the deep end all the way.

You can grab the kickboard and the armbands, and whatnot to go in the pool.

>> AMBER: Go ahead, Ron.

>> RON: Yes, and my last piece was, work out effective ways to explain things and practice those explanations because you’ll get the same tricky questions from clients over and over, and it’s worth spending some time to sort that out. Like explaining why you can’t guarantee a conformant website will stay that way past the moment that you allow them access to the backend. Being able to explain that easily is very valuable, and many other things as well.

>> AMBER: Sometimes, just having confidence in your sales conversations is key because that helps build the trust. Because they’re like, “Okay, they know–” If you sound kind of nervous, then they’re going to be like, “Does he actually know what he’s talking about?” I’d say my thought on this is I do think it’s definitely worth investing in just spending some time working on your starter, whatever that is, and testing that, because that will allow you to start from a more accessible place.

Then I just increase your price a tiny bit. [chuckles] We’re always afraid to do that, I think sometimes, but try it as an experiment. What happens if I charge $1,000 extra, or $2,000, or $5,000, whatever that increment that makes sense for you. You might be surprised that they’ll just sign right off on it, and then you’re like, “Oh, okay.” Maybe that would give you that space to do a little bit more accessibility work on that project, and then you do it again on the next project, and kind of build it in.

I’d love to give each of you a chance to just say where people can follow up with you if they want to learn more about your businesses or have additional questions. Maybe you could give your web address and your top social media, whatever that might be. Maybe we could go in the same order that we introduced, which I think was Ron, Gen, and Scott.

>> RON: Sure, our website is codegeek.net, and the best social platform is LinkedIn for us. I’ll put my personal LinkedIn profile and I’ll post our company page too.

>> AMBER: Great.

>> GEN: For me, Gen Herres, the website is easya11yguide.com. LinkedIn is also a good place to find me, or the accessibility group on Facebook.

>> SCOTT: For me, the best way is on our website, sector45.com. You can reach out via the contact form, that comes straight to me.

>> AMBER: Okay. Well, thank you all so much. I really enjoyed having you here. You all shared such great information. Thank you, and thank you, everybody, for your wonderful questions.

>> [01:25:58] [END OF AUDIO]