← Coffee N° 5 with Lara Schmoisman
Coffee N° 5 with Lara Schmoisman
Accessibility, Compliance, and Conversions: Why Digital Inclusion Is a Business Imperative with Bet Hannon
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Foreign.
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B
This is Coffee Number Five. I'm your host, Lara Schmoisman. Hi everyone. Welcome back to Coffee Number Five. And today maybe we're gonna talk about something that it doesn't sound as sexy, but it's important. It's really, really important. So if you know me, you know that I talk about this a lot. If you had a mini audit with me or you interview us as an agenda, as an agency, you know that I talk to you guys about this all the time, which is accessibility. And as unsexy as it sound, it's super important because there is something that it bothers me as much as a job not well done in the digital world is the people not having the knowledge and service providers not involved to inform their clients of what needs to be done. And as a formal educator and as a professional, I feel like I always need to own my knowledge, but I'm always looking for more knowledge, how can I help my clients? And unfortunately, there are a lot of consumer lawyers out there today trying to make some extra, extra money on the side for this little issue that it's called accessibility. So I want to bring it today to an expert.
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A
Welcome.
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B
Bet. I'm so happy to have you here today.
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A
It's good to be here. Thank you for having me.
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B
And so how did you get roped in, into accessibility?
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A
That's a really good question. We. So I, I had a first career in nonprofit management doing communications pieces. And then in the first financial crisis, 2008, I got downsized and kind of stumbled into freelancing and building websites for people. And one of our clients, around 2015, an agency of the state of California let us know that they needed to make sure their website was accessible. And when we dived in to learn more about what that really involved, it just captured our entire team. All of us realized that we had family members and friends and people that we knew that accessibility impacted. And, and it just became this sort of purpose driven piece for us to involve, to start doing more with accessibility. And so we've been shifting for 10 years.
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B
Let's start from the beginning. What's accessibility?
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A
Yeah. So if you on a website, people with disabilities, different types of disabilities may have encounter barriers. So people don't always use websites the same way when we, when we build them. Right. Even people without disabilities might use them differently than we maybe think they are going to. People who have a mobility impairment, for example, they're paralyzed and they can't use a mouse. So think about how you might use a website without a mouse. Typically you have some kind of adaptive device. So people that are totally paralyzed, for instance, from the, from the neck down or can't use their hands for a mouse, might use an adaptive device that comes back to keyboard navigation. So there are as many different devices almost as there are people. Right. Because they're customized for a specific person's disability. But it comes back to you using keyboard navigation. Pressing tab and enter. To navigate through the website, people who are blind use a tool called a screen reader that reads out loud to them not just the text on the page or the descriptions of the images that are put on them, but also the context for what's there, what's a heading and whether it's a button. So there are many different ways that we begin to think about making sites usable for people with all kinds of disabilities, from, you know, being hearing impaired, for needing captions to even things like reading disabilities and how we put text on a page can begin to impact how people can use things. One of the big ones is motion sensitivity. We have people on our team that have this. Right. If you have like lots of motion things that are happening on a site, it can make people car sick essentially. Right. So. So all kinds of ways that. Or induce seizures. So all kinds of ways that we begin to think about making sure that everybody that comes to your site, including people with disabilities, can use the site.
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B
Yeah. And I mean for me it's part of the user experience and it's something that drives me a little crazy. I have checked this, that I see a lot of websites that they look very pretty and there were done by a design designer and there is no user experience is all only about to make it pretty.
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A
Right.
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B
When we're talking about the user experience is to understand the customer journey, but also to know that there are people that they are not using the website in the same ways that most of the people are using it.
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A
Right. And you know, you may have, I mean you can think about. Accessibility is really a form of user experience optimization. That's considering that you might have customers with disabilities that are a part of that journey. So just like you might have a Persona, user Persona when you're doing user UX optimizations. Persona that is, you know, a 20 something female, middle income. Right. You know, or, or a certain educational levels or you might have different Personas. Having Personas with people that include people with disabilities is just as important.
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B
Yeah, absolutely. So because there are all these plugins now to address accessibility. And I always say it's great because let's be honest, the Accessibility law has a lot of gray areas. And as technology is involving, evolving constantly, it's really hard to change the law all the time.
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A
Yeah, you know, well, ADA is what, in the United States, what most of the lawsuits come back to. That was passed, that law was passed in 1990 before we really had commercial lawsuits or commercial websites like we have today. Right. So it's all applying that retroactively and we don't, it's not written into the law. So in the United States, what has happened is we've had these lawsuits brought by consumers that have over time established. I mean there are some gray areas. You know, there's one U.S. district Court Circuit that says that you only have to make your E commerce site accessible if you also have a brick and mortar store. Right. So sometimes it can get really kind of narrow. But the thing to remember is that you have to look at the bigger picture because, because in the US anybody can file their case any, in any district they want. And so there are some more, some districts and some courts, some states that are more seen as more favorable to people bringing these lawsuits. And those would be like California, New York, Florida, although we are seeing an uptick in places like, you know, Wisconsin of all places. Right. So it's, it's an interesting kind of piece. It is the law and that's been kind of pretty clearly established that it is the law that you need to make your site workable for people. You can't exclude them.
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B
How these plugins work, how do what plugins for accessibility work?
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A
Oh yeah, so there are plugins and add ons for accessibility. You might see them as kind of like just install this bit of code and everything will be okay. Well, those plugins are using automated tools. So automated tools and automated testing in general can only find about 30% of issues. So these plugins and overlays are purporting to find and fix, you know, as many things as they can via automation. That's about 30% of the issues on generally on a website. So they're not fixing everything. And those tools also will automatically often conflict or create code conflicts for people that have already have adaptive devices on their computer. So for example, they often conflict with screen readers leading neither tool to work. So I can't tell you how many blind people have told me that they just block those, they try to block those tools at the root. And now what we see is that those predatory kind of serial plaintiff lawsuits that are targeting people, about 25% of those every year are now, now sites that are already running an overlay or a plugin. And it's becoming more and more clear that those lawsuits are targeting those tools in the tech stack because they know it's easy to prove that you knew you should do something about accessibility. You put this accessibility plugin on, but it doesn't fix everything. And it's really more of a target anymore than anything.
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One of the things that I realized that a lot of people are not understanding of the art that in accessibility there is a big thing that is, that is the color construct contract.
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Yes. Color contrast, right?
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Yes. That's a big thing in accessibility. So when you designing your logo, your brand, whatever you design, you need to keep this in mind. And today we have amazing tools already. If you use Figma and use there is accessibility measurements, they are so don't get in love with the color palette that won't pass accessibility because that's what you really have.
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Think two or three times about picking orange as your main color. Right. Orange is really hard to match for accessibility. But yeah, so there are some great tools that are out there, but you have to begin to think about it not just in terms of your basic design, your logo and your basic color scheme, but also you need to start building a color contrast check into your regular design and development process. Right. So one of the reasons that E commerce websites are 80% of these ADA lawsuits is is that they change all the time. Right. You were putting up a new hero every few weeks or we're putting up new landing pages, we're building new products, putting them all out. But you need to start building color contrast checks as well as other kinds of accessibility checks just in that workflow every single time, right?
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Absolutely. Something else also that I notice a lot is because now you have when you send email marketing, email marketing works with blocks of information that comes from your website directly and which is a lot of people start changing those images in the website. So in their emails it looks pretty necessarily. And yeah, as we keep changing and changing, you're affecting the website and the, the image descriptions and a lot of things.
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Yeah, well actually what I see more often in terms of E email marketing, but also social media marketing has to do with people putting up an image that has text on it, right? It has a lot. It's. It's an image, but there's not really a font in there. And so it's just an image. And so a, you know, the algorithms can't read that text in the image yet so easily. But also it's not available to a screen reader. So you need to, if you're going to do that, then you have to make all of that content available somehow for people that need screen readers. Or it's also terrible when people who may not necessarily be, you know, 100% blind, but have a visual, you know, difficulty and they need to magnify things.
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So that's a lot of problems that I see it and I deal with this with a lot of clients and I did in the past and I know that I will do in the future that when I create content and beautiful content, they need to be. First of all, you need to make it responsive too because it's not going to work on one device and you need to be thinking about the magnifying. So and then you want to use a font that is Google font, so it works in every device. But at the same time you need to think about these situations. So you want to make sure that the text is in the native platform and you don't put so much text in images because it will shrink with the image.
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Yeah, exactly.
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Being adapting. And I know that many companies are all about the looks, but we need to think about.
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Well, you know, there are, I mean, as long as you're offering some alternatives. Right. So it's, it's. You can you. I think you're right. There are bigger problems because you got all these different devices and making things mobile responsive is a problem for all of that. But if you provide that text that you've put in there also in the email. Right. So you've got, you know, some kind of text in the, on this image. But as long as you're repeating it or making it available somehow to people or you're, you know, you're finding a way to put it into the alt text or you know, as long as you're finding ways to also make it available. But the problem is that people don't do that or they do it for a few times and then they start forgetting. Right. And so it's not a part of their regular process.
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Yeah. So let's talk about accessibility and we talk about websites. There is any. In the digital world, do we have any other accessibility laws that we need to be aware of? Like in email marketing, SMS marketing, social media?
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Yeah, we haven't seen that those kinds of cases here in the US in terms of social media, there are some cases that are very around ADA and emails, but they tend to be more around transactional things. Like when people are, when it's like a, a service provider that's sending an email like A utility or a bank. Right. Making sure that, that when you're sending an email to the customer that they have a, to access it. But the other piece that we do see that comes up is as of June 2025, so just a few months ago, if you sell product or services to EU customers, there's a relatively new law. The European Accessibility act is the overarching law and in the EU then every country has an implementation, most of those. And that means that if you're selling services or products to EU customers, that site has to be accessible. There are some exemptions for very small businesses. But, but, but also your social media also has to be accessible.
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But also you need to be compliant with all the cookies and all those integrations.
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And yeah, it's just like G, Yeah, it's just like gdpr. This accessibility law is like that. Right. It, it's, you can be a US company but if you're selling to EU customers now you have this compliance requirement.
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Yeah, absolutely the same with email marketing. It's very different how we do email marketing in the US than internationally. Absolutely the same with SMS in now the SMS laws are a little crazy that even every state is a little different.
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Yep, yep, for sure. So there, there are those laws that are coming. But you know, I, I, there are so many benefits. I mean there's, it's a compliance piece and, and I would say, you know, so it is the law, you should do it. But, and it can be expensive to be non compliant. Often you know, one of the expense, it's not only that, it's, there's legal costs or a settlement or all of that, but also that, you know, often you are then required to make your site accessible on a very short time window which increases the cost. Right. Because you have to do it in a compressed time frame.
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Yeah. So let's stop for a second. For example, the company starting their brand new website. I don't want to, to give an example of fixing a website because sometimes it's a lot harder. Let's start. So someone who's starting their website and they want to go thrifty, maybe they don't want to work with an agency, they want to work with a designer. What are the things that they need to be looking at in order to make sure that they are compliant?
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Yeah. So you know, there are, there are things related to accessibility that are design related. Things like color contrast we talked about. There are things that are content related. So things like.
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Let's explain about this. We have structures in websites that you have to have H1S, H2 description. So you need to make sure that even if you're an H1, it needs to be tag as an H1 so people can know this is a title, this is a heading, this is a body.
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Yeah. This is the. You know, a lot of times people who are not. Haven't learned yet think of those headings as a way to style text, to make text bigger and smaller. Right. And actually the, the H2 can be any size font you want it to be. Right. The H3 can be. It doesn't have to be nested that way.
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We do it that H1, H2, H3 head, all these.
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Right.
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And those are for someone else.
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Exactly. And so there we want to see one and only one H1. That's the title of the page or the product or the title of that particular web page.
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I mean, it can be a module also. When you have multiple modules.
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Yeah, one and only H1 on the page.
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Okay.
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All right. And then H2s to structure all the way down the page after that. And then you're nesting things just like you were writing a high school, you know, essay outline, right. You're, you're doing the Roman numerals, you're nesting them. So H2, H3. And the reason for this is that I think when people understand how those get used, it can kind of help them understand why to do it. So people who are blind would use their screen reader and say to the. As a way of surfing the content. Right. As a way of sort of trying to find what they're looking for on a page. They would say, read me out loud all the H2s. And so the, the screen reader would start reading all the H2s on the page. When they find the one that they're interested in, then they say, okay, now read me all the H3s under that. Right. And so they're trying to narrow their way to finding the specific content they want. But if you've jumped your headings around and you haven't properly nested everything, that's going to be really hard. Now the other thing to know is when you properly nest things like that is much better for your traditional SEO. Right. That's what, that's how Google.
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That's one of the, the, the, the keys of SEO to next, Right. And to use the elements. Right, right, exactly. All the AI world more than ever.
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Yeah. So here's the interesting thing, right? So the AI search stuff, the AI is, is ingesting pages, not looking through so much the code. So Like Google and all of that traditional search stuff was looking at the code, they're looking at those H tags. The AI is not so much doing that. It is looking for. It is basically taking screenshots of the page and using optical character recognition. So what that means is that you need to pay attention. For traditional SEO, you need to pay attention for your headings and alt text for sure. For AI search, you need to pay attention more to your color contrast. Because if the color con, if they can't read the text, if you have really bad text contrast, then they're not going to be able to get that text for understand for using OCR on it. So finding ways that you're using that for AI, very cool.
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So how do you see these, this ADA look as the world is changing right now and we are evolving in the digital world, how do you think all this will evolve?
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Well, one of the things that I'm starting to see is that, you know, let's back up and say, I think sometimes people who are marketing, marketers, marketing managers, think that people with disabilities is a really small number. And I can't tell you how many times people have said to me, people with disabilities don't buy our product. Right? And the statistics say that in most developed nations, 20 to 25% of all adults have some disability that requires an accommodation. The latest number in the US that we had was 28%. Now, if you think about it, this is also as the general population ages, the average age of the population ages, that disability number goes up. Right? Just you've lived longer, you have more chance of having an accident or an illness. You develop more disabilities as you age.
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B
I have a question for you because I saw the other day a plugin claiming that they can adjust for people with adhd.
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Let's get back to that. Where I was going was, I think what I see happening for folks is savvy marketing managers are figuring out that this is a huge demographic. It is a, you know, 20 to 25% in most developing nations. It is a huge, you know, 500 billion dol in disposable income in the US globally, that's $8 trillion. It's a, it's a market that you're, you know, you are able to, if you're making your site accessible, it makes it more easier for those people to spend money with you. So I think I'm seeing some of that starting to happen, that brands that are looking to increase their conversions and revenue are looking to accessibility for a.
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Demographic that they could tap that's amazing. And what about the ADHD that I just asked about?
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I think in general, the consensus is a little dubious about those because ADHD is a wide variety of, you know, symptoms. Right. A lot. A wide variety of ways that that can manifest itself. And so any one thing that claims that is probably not. Yeah, people are pretty skeptical about that.
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Yeah, I was too when I.
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There are. We have for more than a. More than a few and those are relatively new. What we have seen for a long time are fonts that are supposed to be better for people with adhd. And that's kind of like. Yeah, no, not so much now. There are fonts that are more difficult things that are fonts that are cursive, for example, are sometimes really hard. Hard for folks. You know, we don't teach cursive in school anymore. I know you're in the States. And so people are kind of making an assumption about everyone being able to read those. And that's not necessarily true.
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B
I know. And. And it's really hard. I can see people really struggling with the Corsair and also a lot of brands. I see that they get. They fall in love with fonts and they look pretty, but it's. They're really hard to remember.
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Yeah. And you know, the. At the end, what's your big goal? Is your big goal if you, if, if you have to choose, do you want to look pretty or still product?
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B
Exactly. I always say the same. That's a personal decision. I want interfere in that Vet. I have a last question for you.
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Absolutely.
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B
How do you drink your coffee?
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Oh, I am a dark roast black woman.
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Oh, okay. I can see that. Okay. Sugar or not sugar? Okay.
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Black. Black. No sugar.
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All right.
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Yep.
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Guys, you know, if you want to buy bet a coffee, you know what to get her. Thank you so much, Beth.
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Oh, you're welcome.
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Having you here. And to you guys. I will see you next week with more coffee number five. Talk soon. Bye. Find everything you need@larashmoisman.com or in the episode notes right below. Don't forget to subscribe. Was so good to have you here today. See you next time. Catch you on the flip side. Ciao. Ciao.