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The Agile Brand with Greg Kihlström®: Expert Mode Marketing Technology, AI, & CX
#711: Making accessibility a priority with Make Paciello, AudioEye
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Mike Paciello
The Agile Brand.
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Greg Kilstrom
Welcome to Season seven of the Agile Brand where we discuss the trends and topics marketing leaders need to know. Stay curious, stay agile and join the top enterprise brands and martech platforms as we explore marketing, technology, AI, e commerce, and whatever's next for the omnichannel customer experience. Together we'll discover what it takes to create an agile brand built for today and tomorrow and built for customers, employees and continued business growth. I'm your host Greg Kilstrom, advising Fortune 1000 brands on martech, AI and marketing operations. The Agile Brand podcast is brought to you by Tech Systems, an industry leader in full stack technology services, talent services and real world application. For more information, go to teksystems.com to make sure you always get the latest episodes, please hit subscribe on the app you listen to podcasts on and leave us a rating so others can find us as well. And now onto the show.
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Host
Most Companies obsess over SEO, performance and.
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Greg Kilstrom
Conversion rates, but overlook 25% of their audience entirely.
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Host
Why do so many businesses miss the opportunity to serve users with disabilities? And what are they leaving on the table? Today I'm joined by Mike Paciello, Chief accessibility officer at AudioEye. Mike is a pioneer in digital accessibility and a longtime advocate for creating inclusive online experiences. While many business professionals focus on growth and efficiency, Mike makes a compelling case that accessibility is not just about compliance.
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Greg Kilstrom
It'S a powerful business opportunity.
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Host
He's here to help us understand how accessibility can improve everything from reach to reputation to revenue. Mike, welcome to the show.
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Mike Paciello
Hey Greg, thanks very much. I really appreciate having me on the Agile brand. It's cool.
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Host
Yeah, yeah. Looking forward to this conversation and definitely love this topic. Before we dive in though, why don't you start by giving us a little bit of your background and your role at AudioEye?
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Mike Paciello
Yeah, sure. So I've been in the business now since the mid-80s, so 40 years of just accessibility and usability for people with disabilities and completely absorbed in technology field. So I started off at the time a very large software company, Digital Equipment Corporation found a little niche dealing with the blind in electronic documents, working on the accessibility of them. That led to a number of different things. I eventually worked at MIT as a volunteer and that led to the growth of the Web Accessibility Initiative and the founding of that through MIT at the W3C left that started a couple of companies, sold those and now I'm off over here working at AudioEye as their chief Accessibility Officer. My role here pretty much is to kind of guide and navigate the company. The corporation along lines of what we do and what we're promoting in terms of usability and accessibility, people with disabilities and the products in the space that we sell.
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Host
That's great. That's great. Yeah, definitely. Great background there. I remember the early days of the, the W3, you know, WAI and all that stuff. So I, I wasn't a member, but I followed, I followed along. So, yeah, definitely been, yeah, looking forward to talking about this with somebody that's. That's been. Been Seen some. Seen some stuff. Right.
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Mike Paciello
So longer than I want to admit.
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Host
Haven't we all? But, yeah, so let's, let's start with the business case for accessibility. And you know, as I mentioned at the top of the show, one in four U.S. adults lives with a disability. Can you paint a picture of how people with disabilities access and interact with digital content? And what are some of the most common accessibility barriers on things like websites and that impact the user experience?
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Mike Paciello
Yeah, very good questions. So there are a number of things to take into consideration right out of the box. First of all, most of us tend to be familiar with people with disabilities who are blind, deaf, maybe in wheelchairs, they have mobility disabilities. In fact, they don't even make up the largest population and demographic of people with disabilities. The largest population are individuals with some version of cognitive disability, maybe visual. We tend to think that dyslexia, for example, is a visual, but it's not. Actually not. It's a cognitive disability. So right off the bat, when you're talking about a digital society which we live in, and everything is online, it's, how do I design, develop that in a way that they can render it so that they can understand it? And that is really where the, you know, the rubber meets the road, so to speak, because it's difficult. We don't always know. Even, you know, those in the medical field or professional field who work with people with disabilities with cognitive disabilities, for example, they don't know the, the wide variance. It's so wide, it's hard to get everything just right. So it's important to understand right off the bat in terms of the business value proposition that companies are doing, the fact that companies make a commitment to progress in making their sites accessible and usable according to the guidelines that are out there right now. Those guidelines pretty much are international and they're driven through the World Wide Web Consortium, through the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. That's WCAG and their acronym. If you follow those, by and large, that's where you're going to get the biggest bang for your buck. You'll be able to get those profound disabilities, but you're also going to start to reach in and touch the larger populations of people with disabilities, especially cognition. The challenge to that is, well, how do I know? Because privacy laws protect people with disabilities. Right. So you don't really know if I own Amazon or if I'm in Google or from your local bank or what, or government services, organization. These are all the types of vertical market spaces, education that have to deal with the complexities of good user interface design for people with disabilities. But they don't know how many of them are actually using it. So they use percentages. Like you said, a quarter. I think it's somewhere between 16 and 17%, to be honest with you, of the US population are marked by disabilities in the world. It's pretty close to that same number. So you're looking at somewhere roughly between a billion or so individuals with disabilities all over. So you look at those numbers and they say, wow, that's big. That's huge. Why would anyone not want to go after that market? And the reason why is because, or what makes it difficult is because it's hard to capture who's really what. People with disabilities are really using my services, you know, SAS or otherwise, or my products or procuring them. So we're hoping, and I do use the word hope because that's really what this business is driven by. Compliance is out there. But most organizations, most companies don't like the notion of being forced because that's the way they feel that or they interpret those standards as being some sort of enforcement. They don't like that. They want to be able to do things innovative, creative, serve their customers for the people who are going to buy their products or their services as they are. So that's the business value proposition. Sell what you've got, but just to a broader audience and keep them in mind. So if you're building things up from the ground up, then you can be assured that you'll reach those individuals with disabilities regardless of what they are.
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Host
Yeah, yeah, well. And, you know, I have to say I've had a few episodes dedicated to, you know, greater accessibility. I have not heard someone focus on, you know, the, the cognitive disabilities and things like that because. Well, I don't, I don't know why, but I won't, I won't speculate, but I think that's a, it's a really interesting thing to, to keep in mind. Again, it might be that it's, it's straightforward to do like color contrast checking or Some of the other things that, that might be associated with, with visual impairment or other things like that. But I guess there's a lot of focus on some of the. Some of the disabilities, but not others.
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Mike Paciello
They're easier, frankly. They're easy to design and develop for, right? So if you know a person's using a screen reader, so that's an assistive technology that vocalizes what's on the screen to a person who's blind, visually impaired, there are other disabilities that use it, but primarily those that are blind. And so you can now design your website to ensure that things, for example, that we would do with a person that has the ability to navigate using a mouse, for example, that those things are done through the keyboard. Most assistive technologies, not all, but most assistive technologies are bound to keyboard operation. So that's a big thing to keep in mind. You mentioned color contrast. That's also important, but I can tell you most AT is designed to interact using a keyboard interaction model. So if you're doing that, you're probably going to be able to capture a good portion of the disabilities market space just by doing a few simple things. Color contrast, keyboard accessibility, making sure that your images and your images have alternative text, so there's a text rendering of that image. Your videos have, have captioning for the deaf, right? Your forms are accessible to screen readers and ats as well. Those tend to be the big ticket items. The other thing that I always recommend, because I often talk about the engineering life cycle, an engineering life cycle includes a workflow, right? So generally speaking, you're developing requirements as a software company or people who are building your, your, your web environment for you. Those requirements usually work by Persona development. So who your customers are, where they, where you want to go, where you want to drive them to, and what parts of your web environment you want them to use, and then workflow. So can they log in right? Can they make a purchase? Can they see that they're making that purchase? Is there a successful conclusion from A to Z, so to speak, at that level? Those things are actually the type of enhancements or design requirements that are good for every individual. They just have sometimes a little bit more of a stricter focus for people with disabilities to do them right so they can accomplish them.
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Sponsor
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Host
And so you know, you brought up the regulatory component and you know a lot of companies treat accessibility as kind of the checkbox of like yes, you know, we kind of have to do it but for, for one reason or another it feels just like kind of a box to check and, and not really having a strong business case for it. How you know, what's the business case to be made for accessibility beyond? You know, simply risk mitigation or not that risk mitigation is simple but, but you know, what's the, what's the business case here?
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Mike Paciello
It's a, it's, it's a great question. I can't even tell you how, how great that question is because right now we're at a time, we in a time when compliance is in the assistive and accessibility world. As much as a driver as it's been is probably going to take a backseat to a lot of other things that are going on in the world right now. And so while lawsuit, I call them fear based incentives which I can't stand. I think it's just a bad way of doing business. But that frankly is the number one way by which companies are kind of forced to comply. I don't know any company and I've worked for many that says standards compliance, the law. Sure, let's go for it. I'm all in. Right? They don't unless they're pushing their own agenda which happens, you know, if you're in the standards business. So what's the business value proposition? A couple of months ago I would have said the numbers are out there. So the population supports that you should make sure that your website is or your digital property. I don't even like saying websites anymore. Digital properties that, that you have out there, your digital services, your SaaS services and things along those lines that they are usable and accessible to people with disabilities. If you do that and you follow the guidelines, not compliance but if you follow the guidelines that are out there, if you build that into your software life cycle development life cycle. So your requirement, your architects, your requirements people, your developers, your designers, your usability specialist and the accessibility staff you may or may not have on if they're all agreed to, following through to those, to those guidelines. Well, then you're going to build a good consumer foundation for people with disabilities. So consumers are still who we're aiming at, right? I mean, that is who we sell to, by and large. Unless you're doing strictly B2B or B2G, even then the end user is very likely the recipient of whatever it is that you're designing and developing. So the government was up until recently, I don't know what the numbers are like right now with all the layoffs that are going on, but was the largest employer of people with disabilities in the US Bar none. So anytime you sold to the US Government, the value proposition was to meet their guidelines that they had that were there. So that helped win contracts. You could do that. I'd like to believe that there are financial incentives and tax incentives that are out there. There are, there are some small ones, but they're nothing like we've seen in, say, for example, the automotive or the banking industry. You know, those, those triggers that were, that were put out there for them, those are, they're not there. So frankly, to answer your question right now, that business value proposition is something we're working on. I spent most of the day today, just came out of meetings and it came out of earlier meetings. We need to somehow change our message because compliance is no longer going to be the means of driving this industry to get companies to buy into it. The other big one has always said, well, it's the right thing to do. Right. And that's true. But when was the last CEO that you met who truly, when he sat down there with his board, his, you know, in his C suite team said, okay, folks, now everyone that wants to do good and drive our business, let's, let's, let's, let's own up to him, put our priorities.
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Host
Yeah, I mean, the way that works is when it's tied to the bottom line. I mean, you know, kind of to your point is, you know, it's not that it can't happen. It's admittedly rare, you know, when it does. But, but when it happens, it's because it's tied to the stock price or, you know, something very, very tangible and, and, and external. I, I mean, I do Wonder, you know, 16 to 17% of the audience being left on the table. Like, to me, that's, that's pretty compelling. You know, when, when everybody's fighting for market share, that, that alone could be, you know, could, could be a compelling point.
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Mike Paciello
Yeah, absolutely. And, and if you look at holistically like that, that is a big number. And again, the guidelines that are out there to help you make your digital properties usually accessible are there. So if you follow those, I mean, ideally, you know, it's the old notion of shift left, right? If you build it from the ground up and you're building to those, to those guidelines, you're golden. I mean, you're going to hit 80, 90% of that marketplace just as a natural outgrowth of your commitment to those guidelines. But again, I think when you get into demographics and you get into market studies, they tend to pick apart those, those demographics and they say, well, you know, the reality is, is that there's only 3% of the populate total population is blind. And how much of that market buys, you know, our products. We make surgical items, right? Tools and things like, you know, this is. So they will do things like that. And unfortunately, that's why usability, accessibility tend to get a bad name for themselves. And therefore, because accessibility has something that usability will probably never have, and that is a civil rights law, right? That becomes a motivator and a driver. You have to do this because ADA says you have to in this country and most other countries, Europe right now is ready to roll out the European Accessibility Act. Most other countries and continents have disability discrimination acts. So they're all patterned kind of after the ada. So that tends to be, be the motivator still out there, you know, that compliance.
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Host
Yeah, well, and you said something earlier, you know, about the shift left kind of mentality. I want to, I want to get to that as well, which is building in accessibility from the start. You know, I know from other, from other approaches with like shift left, it's less expensive, it's easier when you do it from the start. So can you talk a little bit about that and your experience there of like, if we just, if we just start there, what can companies achieve?
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Mike Paciello
You know, there was a time in my life when every time my car broke down, I just went out and bought a new one, right? Was easier. It was built, it was new. Had everything in there, right? I just did. Or that's the notion of a lease, right? You get it every two years, you get a new car. You never have to worry about the maintenance. But the reality is that's not pragmatic, right? It's just not practical. We build things, we try to build them to last. And so if we don't build them right, you know, if you take a house, you build the foundation to the house and that foundation is shaky, then the rest of it doesn't matter how good it looks. The same approach has to be taken in terms of accessibility. If you don't build accessibility into the core of your, you know, your software environment, then somewhere along the line it'll catch up with you. You'll either employ people with disabilities, which is almost a guarantee. It's going to. Because the population is so large, because that percentage is spread around across all the vertical markets that you can think of. Right. You're going to end up finding, or someone's, someone with a disability is going to come to your storefront or your government service organization and realize they can't use it and a lawsuit is going to come out. So now what do you do? Well, first you spend money on lawyers to try to fight your way through what you have to do and have to. So there's a cost, right. Then you've got to hire people, probably specialists, because you probably don't have them in your organization to help you build this in, find all the errors, do a vulnerability assessment, do an audit and then build a strategy. All of this is very time consuming and cost. It's why for years, you know, having built at least two businesses around this in the professional services, we made money. We did. We were very, very profitable because we're specialists. I mean, we're the surgeons of the software industry because we're in a very specialized area. We, we could contract for very high hourly rates and get that because no one else could do the work that we could do. So that's the cost that people need to think about in terms of maintenance and added costs for not building something right in a shift left, in designing in a shift, from a shift left perspective.
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Host
Yeah, yeah.
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Mike Paciello
It's the maintenance cost. It's incredible.
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Host
Yeah, yeah. And I mean, and again, to go back to it would be great for people to do the right things for the right reasons and all that stuff. But you know, I think for whatever it's worth, like it's, it's always good to have these other, these other kind of levers to pull to say it's going to cost you more in the long run, it's going to get you more revenue. I mean, you know, for, for better or worse, like having these, these additional kind of arguments or backing to the case. It helps people do the right thing and have the financial justification.
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Mike Paciello
When we go into, when we go into clients. Look, we know that more often than not we're firefighters, right. We're putting out fires. But in that same discussion, we're already saying, look, don't let this be the only thing that kind of absorbs you around accessibility. There's a lot of opportunity here. There are, as you said, as you said, there are all kinds of marketplaces and market spaces that we could be in that we can enhance and start to drive and then talk about it. I think maybe one of the biggest and most valuable aspects of accessibility is the fact that people with disabilities, if they're using your products, you can advertise that, you can market that. Have you ever seen some of the commercials that Microsoft, Amazon, Walmart, McDonald's? I mean, I've seen these companies and it may seem like they're taking advantage of people with disabilities. The reality is they're saying that, that we care. You know, we've enhanced whatever it is that we're building so that users with disabilities can use them. Look what Apple's made a whole life on it. Their whole iPhone, you know, their whole I product line is all usable and accessible by and large for most people with disabilities. Amazon has done the same thing. Microsoft has done the same thing. So it shows you that, yeah, okay, we got a fire to do today. But look at the market and look at how we can tell everybody else the good things that we're doing. That's how you get, bring in loyalty and customers, more customers to come to you because people are people, right? We're empathic by nature.
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Host
Yeah, yeah, definitely. So as we wrap up here, let's talk a little bit about the future. Certainly we talk about AI every episode. Certainly it's been top of mind for a lot of organizations for the last few years at the very least, if not last few decades for some. But what role is AI playing in improving digital accessibility? And where do you see that heading?
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Mike Paciello
Yeah, I just did a panel session out in California at a conference a couple weeks ago on AI and accessibility. There are a lot of products that are out there that have integrated products for the blind, like Be My Eyes, which is their own organization. They're working along with Microsoft and Meta now with the Meta glasses that have also been designed for people with disabilities. All have integrations or some aspects of AI built in, into it. We're using here at AudioEye, we're using AI as a basis for doing remediation. So, you know, customers come to us because we scale, because we have, we have automation and our costs, our value proposition from a cost perspective is much lower. Lower. There's a big value, cost savings value at that. But what we could do with AI and Automation is. We could scale and build it faster and fix things, enhance things faster. Now can we do it as well as software developers and engineers? No, but we could. We've provided a tool and a platform to get people booted and moving along faster and quicker than they ever could, especially if they didn't design it out of the, you know, out of the box, accessible. So that's where I think AI is going to play a big part, a big role. It already is in what we're doing in terms of scale and automation of digital properties to make them usable and accessible. Quicker, faster, better out of the box. Not absolute. We've got a long way to go, but we're definitely pushing the envelope in that direction using AI.
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Host
So there's still a role for humans somewhere in all this, right?
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Mike Paciello
There will always be. Because again, it's like I said before, we're surgeons, but the best people in this industry are literally surgeons for accessibility and they really know how to pinpoint something. So this is how it has to be done. Right now technology is, as much as I love software, it's still got a long ways to go. It sells a long ways to go. Yeah.
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Host
Yeah. Well, Mike, thanks so much for joining today. One last question before we wrap up here. What do you do to stay agile in your role and how do you find a way to do it consistently?
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Mike Paciello
Yeah, you know, keeping up with what's going on the industry is a big thing. AI is making a big, a big play. I follow a lot in terms of VR and augmented reality and activities at that. So there's an awful lot that's going on in our industry. I read a lot these days, you know, and this might be good for some of your users is too probably reports that they might want to look at to, you know, kind of get a better idea of what's wrong, what kind of things that need to be fixed on websites and what the perspective of the world is. So if you look up at the WebAIM million, WebAIM million report gives a total breakdown of our industry and web pages. And the fact of the matter is that 95% of the pages that they've looked at just homepages still have tens of errors that are on there. Another good one is what we've done here. Even at AudioEye, we have our digital accessibility index. Again, we've gone through vertical markets, I've gone literally gone through and done some full based audits using AI and our technology there to go through. And what we're finding is the same thing you've got 80 to 90% of the websites that are out there. So this is what I'm focused on right now. Reading them, understanding demographics, understanding the statistics so I can share them with audiences like yours.
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Host
Great. Great. Well, yeah, we'll have to put links to those in the show notes, so we'll do that. Yeah.
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Mike Paciello
Thank you. That'd be great.
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Host
Yeah. Well, again, I'd like to thank Mike Paciello from AudioEye for joining the show. You can learn more about Mike and AudioEye by following the links in the show notes.
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Greg Kilstrom
Thanks again for listening to the Agile Brand brought to you by Tech Systems. If you enjoyed the show, please take a minute to subscribe and leave us a rating so that others can find the show as well. You can access more episodes of the show@theagile brand.com that's theagile brand.com and contact me. If you're interested in consulting or advisory services or are looking for a speaker for your next event, go to www.gregkillstrom.com that's G R E G K I H L S t r o m.com the Agile brand is produced by Missing Link, a Latina owned, strategy driven, creatively fueled production co op. From ideation to creation, they craft human connections through intelligent, engaging and informative content. Until next time, stay curious and stay agile.
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Host
The Agile Brand.
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Sponsor
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Host
Are already aware of.
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Sponsor
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