AccessiCart CEO Bet Hannon on Ecommerce Marketing with the Pitbulls

[Presenters: Andy Janaitis and Lindsey Kugler, with guest speaker, Bet Hannon]

Andy: Hi, I’m Andy

Lindsey: and I’m Lindsey. Welcome to e-commerce marketing with the pitbulls, where we try to cut through the noise and simplify digital marketing for authentic brands, looking to make more sales online.

Andy: Great. I’m really excited for today’s conversation. We are joined by Bette Hannon, who is the CEO and founder of Accessicart. Um, so Bet, why don’t you introduce yourself, give us a little bit of background about, uh, what Accessicart does,

Bet: right? So we focus on e-commerce and, uh, accessibility for people with disabilities. And when I, e-commerce, But more broadly, things that have anything that has a high user engagement. So, uh, e-commerce, of course, people have to fill out forms.

There’s a checkout, all of those kinds of things. Um, and so all of those are places, uh, are typically places where you might find some problems with accessibility on a website. So they, uh, tend to get sued a little bit more often and, uh, uh, or, you know, want to regain those customers for sure.

Andy: That’s awesome.

Yeah, I know we spend a lot of time thinking about friction in the checkout process, and I think this is just kind of one more, one more area of that that probably gets, gets overlooked pretty frequently.

Bet: Yeah, I try to tell people really when to the, a good way to think about accessibility is to think about it as optimizing user experience for a little bit wider group of people.

Andy: Awesome. Yeah. All right. And you mentioned, uh, before we kind of dive into accessibility in and out, just kind of teeing up, you know, the importance of it, you mentioned being sued there. Can you dive into that a little bit?

Bet: Sure. So, um, if you are in the U S. Well, if you have customers in the U. S. So like privacy law, um, laws around web accessibility deal with where the, where the user lives.

So, or the customer lives. And so if you have customers in the U. S., um, then your site has to comply with, uh, Americans with Disabilities Act, or ADA. A lot of people have heard about ADA, and they, they Think about it primarily in terms of physical spaces like brick and mortar stores, but, uh, increasingly, uh, over the last 15 years or so, there have been more lawsuits around ADA and, um, websites.

And just last year, the justice department said, yes, websites do need to do fall under ADA. There’s a little bit of ambiguity about how do you meet that compliance? You know, it’s not like when you have a, you know, you have to have these kind of. parking spaces or these kinds of, you know, doorways. But, um, so it’s a little bit different, but we’re moving toward that and getting more and more of that.

But in the meantime, in the U. S., what we’re left with is, um, people suing you because your site is not accessible. In other countries, um, they also have accessibility laws. So if you have customers in Canada or the E. U. or Australia, They also have, um, rights, uh, around, uh, things being accessible. And, uh, typically in those other countries, there’s not the lawsuits.

They, people file a complaint and it’s the government that enforces that and you get a fine. And so, um, it just a little bit different processes, but it all boils down to, if you’re making money off your website, it’s, you know, pretty much a slam dunk that you need to be paying attention to accessibility.

Andy: Definitely. Yeah, it seems like it would be really important. One, just obviously, uh, you know, making sure that you are accessible and that you’re, uh, as many people as possible can get to the site and, and engage with your brand, but to that, that, uh, legal ramifications, uh, just add that extra bit of urgency to it all.

Bet: It is, it is a kind of thing that I think. motivates people to start thinking about accessibility. That’s often a really common thing, right? People are, have heard about somebody getting sued or they’ve gotten sued themselves. And so, uh, you know, I think it’s a, it is a really common thing to start from that place, but then kind of growing beyond that to say, well, I want to, you know, um, it’s the right thing to do.

I mean, there’s certainly a moral argument for not excluding anybody. Um, but also kind of moving into. Um, thinking about all the business positive ways, and we could talk about that. I should say just in terms of U.S. Um, you know, uh, folks with us customers, the, the first step, usually, if you’re going to get sued is that you would get what’s called a demand letter.

So you get a letter from an attorney on behalf of the plaintiff who has a disability. That they intend to sue you. And sometimes these can really look like junk mail. And sometimes they are, you know, you would think a letter from attorney might look professional, but a lot of times they’re not. And so some of them can be these predatory lawsuits where one attorney, one plaintiff are suing.

Many, many people. That doesn’t mean that they aren’t real and that you shouldn’t take them seriously. And so if you get a letter like that, it’s important to contact your attorney or an attorney that deals with these sorts of matters. Take it seriously. A lot of times you can, um, you know, it can be less costly if you settle that up front rather than um, going to court over it.

But if you, if you just toss it and don’t pay any attention to it, the next thing that comes to you is a summons to appear in court. And so that starts to get really costly.

Andy: Definitely, I can imagine.

Lindsey: And now that we’ve sufficiently gained everyone’s attention by sharing them a bit. I think it would be great.

So now that we’ve got that, what would you say from just like a business owner coming to you saying like, what is accessibility when it comes to my website? What are the pieces that they have to be thinking about around this?

Bet: Yeah, so one piece is that, um, the, the CDC in the U. S. and the U. N. more globally says that about 25 percent of all adults everywhere have some disability that requires an accommodation.

That’s, uh, so that includes everybody from people who are blind to people who have, you know, have a mobility impairment, they can’t use a mouse to people who are colorblind. I mean, we begin to talk about. Dealing with a whole spectrum of things, including, um, you know, ADHD and reading disabilities, other kinds of, um, things.

Um, uh, even, you know, we work with, as we’re working with e-commerce books, we even begin to think about anxiety and depression that cause people to give up too quick, right? If your checkout process is convoluted and takes a long time and seems never ending, people will bounce because they’re just giving up.

And, uh, so beginning to think about how, How can you make changes to your site so that all of those different types of people can use it? So it begins to look practically, um, like this. So, um, people, and you know, as I talk, go around talking, uh, To people about these kinds of things, a lot of times people have just never really given any thought to how people with disabilities would use the web.

And so there’s a kind of a curiosity on the one hand. And, uh, so people who are blind or who have a severe visual impairment use what’s called a screen reader and it’s a bit of software that lives on their machine and, uh, it will read out loud to them. Um, the website. not just the text content on the page, but it’ll read out, um, if there are descriptions on the images, which there should be, it will, um, read out, um, the link text.

So they can look at link text. They can tell the screen reader to only read out the H2 headings on the page. Um, so, um, there are ways that a screen reader reads out loud to them things. Um, if a person can’t use a mouse, Um, they often have what’s some kind of an adaptive device. So like Stephen Hawking had a little as he became more and more paralyzed, had a little sensor on his, uh, he wore on his glasses for his cheek, right?

He could move a cheek muscle. And really, um, there are All of those devices are very, um, individualized to the person’s limitations and abilities, but they all come down to keyboard navigation. So testing, you don’t have to like accommodate a thousand different devices, you just have to make sure your site is keyboard navigatable, and that’s true for people who are blind and screen reader users too, they’re using keyboard navigation to move around in your website.

So you can just go to your, um, site and you can start pressing tab and enter and see how far you can navigate through your site, right? Um, because those are the keys that’ll, you may not have known that, right? The tab key would just move you through things on your website. Um, and then, um, you know, we begin to look at things like, Um, you know, people who have reading disabilities, if you full justify text so that it’s even on both margins, it creates what are called rivers of white through, through the text, because the person with the reading disability may see the, See the white and not the words, right?

And so you would, you don’t want a full job. It’s simple things like that sometimes, right? Just don’t full justify something. Um, but making sure that you’re using colors properly, right? You want to have, um, you know, you don’t want to make your link text just be a color indicator. Because the person who is colorblind might not ever see that, right?

You want to underline it or, or make it bold, uh, in, as well as give it a color, right? So things like that are what you would, uh, the sorts of things that you would want to do to try and make your site more, um, friendly for people with disabilities. Um, the place that you can go to begin to learn all of those sort of guidelines for things is called the website Content Accessibility Guidelines, WCAG, and, um, there are, it’s, you know, pretty technical, but if you have a developer team or you work with folks that are helping you, that’s a great place, resource for them.

There are three, we’re on, uh, two, level 2. 0 now. Um, And there are three levels of that single A, double A, triple A, double A is generally where everyone is focusing their efforts on all of that. And so, you know, in some ways, it doesn’t really change your website too obviously for people who are sighted, or who have no disabilities, but, you know, it can really make a difference to those, those customers that have some disabilities.

Andy: So.

Lindsey: Oh, go ahead, Andy.

Andy: I was just going to say when, when you’re getting started. So you’ve got, you know, new, especially e-commerce, uh, client comes to you. What are like some of the, you, you mentioned some of the, the areas, but what are like the, you know, give us the top couple of mistakes that you, you see on, on a lot of e-commerce sites.

Bet: Yeah. So, um, the, the big three are having alt text on your images and, and when we say helpful alt text. And so remember the screen reader is reading that out loud so you don’t want to jam pack that super long necessarily. But you’re wanting to be thoughtful about giving enough pieces we have a post on our blog about writing alt texts for products because that’s a, that’s a, uh, uhm.

Product images are kind of a special case. So you might want to think about that. Um, so all text using the heading structure on the page properly. So a lot of times people are using the headings to, um, style texts and make it different sizes or different. And really the headings, that’s, really about giving the meaning.

And so you want to think about those headings as, um, almost like the outline you used to do in high school English, right? And you know, like the, the, the, the Roman numeral one, and then you indent the letter a, and then you have a small Roman numeral lowercase. So all of that kind of nesting, that’s what headings are supposed to do.

So you have one and only one H1. And generally that’s the title or the title of the product. Um, and then. Then you have H2, and then you would never skip from an H2 to an H4 or 5, right, so you want to make sure. So in reality, the text of that heading can be styled any way you want, but the H factor, whether it’s a 2, 3 or a 4, is telling the screen reader, But also Google what the, where that content is in terms of its meaning on the page.

And it’s kind of important because like a screen reader user will have their screen reader, you know, read me all the H2s. And so they just surfing through, just like sighted people do, we’re skimming through, right? To look at what’s most relevant to us, right? That’s how they’re skimming too, is read me all the H2s.

Now read me all the H3s under that H2. so that they can narrow down quickly on what they’re looking for. So alt text using heading and other semantic things properly, right? If you put a data table in, it needs to have the HTML for data table tags in it, that kind of stuff. Don’t, don’t use a hyphen for making a bullet, right?

Use a proper bulleted list, those kinds of things. Um, so it, alt text, semantic HTML headings, and then, um, making sure you’re getting your color contrast right, like just looking at color contrast. If you deal with those, uh, this is, this has to do with the color of the font on the, you know, with the button behind or the, the color of the font and its background, and there are some color contrast checkers you can look at.

Um, the, the amount of the contrast varies. On the size of the font. So you want to make sure that you know, you can look at that and kind of get a sense for, um, you know, if it’s small font, it’s got to be really high contrast. If it’s a bigger font, maybe it doesn’t have to be as bad as much contrast. But getting that color contrast, right?

If you do all those three, that’s about 80 percent of all. web accessibility issues. And most of those really don’t need a developer to work with. Really, a lot of that can be, you know, the site owner or, uh, if they’re not a developer working on those. But, you know, if you’ve got a store with 10, 000 products and you never put any alt tags, you know, text into your images, that’s a lot of work to go back for.

And so, um, I would say the most important thing in that kind of a case is really educate yourself and, you know, Start creating accessible content so that you’re not, you know, at least you, you, you’re not creating more work for your future self.

Andy: I’m curious, as we talk about this, I think you kind of sounded like, or maybe you alluded to a little bit, but I’m curious how this ties into like SEO, even so we’re talking about, obviously, how human can read through everything.

But. As we’re going through, especially some of that, like, um, hierarchical HTML, I’m curious, like what effects and what improvements I can give you from a, from an SEO perspective. Oh,

Bet: you, you almost always improve your SEO when you’re improving accessibility because of that structured piece, right? And you’re getting that semantic structure in there.

The alt text as well is important for SEO. Um, you want to make sure you’re not just sort of keyword stuffing in the alt text, but it’s genuine because the Google algorithms are now looking, is that genuinely helpful information about your image, right? And so, uh, you know, making sure you’re doing that, you’re almost always improving your SEO.

And actually, um, the, the same is true for user experience, right? Anytime you improve accessibility for people with disabilities, you improve the user experience for everyone. Everybody because, you know, if, uh, a lot of times people are just have situational, um, you know, uh, impairment, right? In a sense, right?

I have a wiggly baby on my hip and I’m trying to navigate your website. This is important for you, Andy, right? Because you’re going to have another wiggly got babies that you’re juggling and you’re trying to navigate where you’re out in the sunlight on your on your phone, right? And so the contrast needs to be high.

You almost always improve the user experience for everybody. When you make your site accessible and actually, it’s, it’s kind of true, uh, you know, a lot of thing, technology improvements that improve were originally intended to improve life for people with disabilities, become, things that make life better for all of us.

So, uh, we, we often talk about, use the example of curb cuts, right? Curb cuts are for people with wheelchairs or scooters or, uh, that kind of thing. But, you know, if you’re pushing your baby stroller or you’re dragging your luggage, right? We all love those curb cuts. Uh, same for, Or, you know, like, um, AI assistance, like Alexa and Google voice and all of those, right?

All of that technology originally developed to help people with disabilities. And so we all get to benefit from all of it.

Andy: Yeah, I love the example before we, we hopped on here, you were telling us about the, um, having captions on the video and, you know, obviously there’s a big accessibility tie to that, but you know, I forget the percentage you had thrown out there, but a very high percentage of people are watching videos with sound off as well.

So it really helps everybody.

Bet: It does. It really does. Yeah.

Lindsey: So if I’m a business and I’m thinking about this now, I, it kind of makes me think how interesting this is that likely a lot of business owners don’t interact with any of these kinds of accessibility issues in their daily life. So they’re not going to be thinking about it for their website or their business in general, until they’re going to get sued.

Or if they have a brick and mortar store, they’re thinking about the ADA. So if there’s someone who doesn’t have those kinds of accessibility thoughts, in their daily life? Who can they go to? What are some resources that business owners can utilize to make their website more successful, more accessible?

Bet: Right, right.

And so I, I can’t remember whether we mentioned it yet or not, but you know, CDC says about 25 percent of all adults have some issues. So just because you don’t know someone or you don’t, um, think about that, um, It doesn’t mean that it’s not out there and that there’s a large, I mean, you can widen your audience.

Right? So, uh, as, as a part of, uh, becoming more accessible. So, so that’s important. And, you know, in reality, all of us are just one accident or illness away from some kind of disability. Um, so there are some resources out there. There are, um, there are agencies like ours that do that. That will, um, can help you with what’s called an audit.

So we have people on like our team and, and not just us. I mean, there are other places out there too, that will help you do some testing on your site to, um, to, to help you find the accessibility issues. So you may be able to do some of that testing yourself, kind of DIY at the beginning. And definitely, you know, you probably know whether you need to add alt text to your images already, right?

If you haven’t been doing that. Um, you, you may. Um, want to you, you can do some of that self-testing, although what we find is there are, and there are some online tools to do that. Um, one of them is called Wave wave dot web aim dot uh, org, I think is there, uh, I can’t remember if it’s dot com or dot org, but wave the Wave Tool.

What we find is that while you get those AI generated tests, so there’s some automation testing that can happen. But what happens is that AI both gives you false positives and false negatives. So sometimes it will tell you, you have a color contrast issue when you have an image background, but because the AI can’t see the image background, it, it, it doesn’t, You know, it’s, it’s telling you, you have a color contrast issue when you really don’t.

Conversely, there are just some things that AI can’t test for. So it, it, it can’t tell you that you have, um, that your menu is not navigatable with the keyboard, right? There’s no way for AI to test for that. And so, um, it can also, um, It’s just really hard, I think, for site owners to look at those tools and know how to make sense of them and to know what to do next.

And that’s where agencies like ours can help, is that we can help you do that testing, and then we can help you prepare a plan and say, look, this issue impacts a lot of people. Or, you know, folks like me that say, um, look, you know, 95 or more percent of all of the lawsuits that come are from. For with, uh, for e-commerce sites and 77 percent of all of those of all ADA website.

lawsuits are e-commerce, right? So huge percentage. Um, and, and of those, 95 percent of them are people who are blind, right? So if you’re worried about your legal liability, then you probably want to like deal with those issues first. Not don’t stop there because other people still can like you you want to include other people too, but but that’s the place to start right so people can help you prioritize those pieces.

So when you get an audit done. Typically, you are not getting your whole site audited. Usually, unless you have a very small site that is cost prohibitive. To do that. So you’re usually getting what’s called a sample audit. So we would work with a client and, um, the way we do it is that we would help the client pick a representative number of URLs or, or, or views, right.

Sometimes the, the view on the page changes, even though the URL doesn’t change in like a checkout form or something. But, um, a URL review and we would. We packaged those at 10, 20 or 30. Uh, and so you would get you we would identify what those are, we would do the testing, then you get a report. And the testing is using some of those automated tools, but you want to make sure if you’re going to get an audit and pay for it, that you are having some human testing done.

It’s just, you know, as we talked about some there are just some things that the it. tools can’t test for and a lot of accessibility has contextual pieces to it, right? You would want to do this in this particular kind of situation and in a different sort of context, you would do it this different way, right?

And so, um, some of that human testing is super important. Um, so you get a report and, uh, then we, tend to do, uh, offer as well than an hour of consulting. So then, uh, often the client will bring their regular development team or the agency that they typically work with to that meeting. We can answer some technical questions and, uh, be, you know, do more consultation, work on a more technical basis with them, or sometimes it’s just meeting with the site owner and helping them learn what they need to do, you know, self serve or DIY.

Andy: Love that. Yeah. What about some of these like tools or I, I’ve seen like apps that you can install that supposedly just will, you know, give you better accessibility out of the gate. Do any of those work or what, what, what, what should we know about those?

Bet: Yeah, so, um, well the first thing to know is that they are flush with venture capital.

So their ads are everywhere, and so, uh, if you, if, if, uh. If the Google overlords know that you have an e-commerce store, you’re surely seeing them. Um, and so they might be, um, uh, these are called overlay plugins. Some names that you might’ve seen are AccessiBee or UserWay or AudioEye. Um, and, and what they are is that you put a little bit of code in your site.

Uh, in a Shopify site, it might be in theme, in a WordPress site, it might be in, in a plug in and, um, what it does is it sort of pulls in a script from their AI service and tries to fix or overlay the problem with a more accessible solution. as the site visitor is there and chooses the tools. So there’s actually a number of problems with those pieces.

The best place to go for all the information, all the things is called overlayfactsheet.com, overlayfactsheet.com. But among the problems are if, if a person has a disability and they need a particular tool, usually they already have it installed on their machine because they need it for the other 99 percent of the websites on the web.

Right. And what happens is that The tool that you have sitting there potentially conflicts with their tool and renders neither tool working. So now they can’t use their preferred tool either, and so a lot of times there are people with disabilities will install a browser extension to block your tool.

So that’s one. It’s not helping the people you think it’s going to help. Um, two, um, it, it actually can only deal with things that AI can, can help, right? It can’t make your menu navigatable by keyboard because it can’t detect that you have a problem. And that’s not something that can be, um, overridden, right?

In the same way, and so there are things that they don’t fix. There are in Incre, uh, increasingly some, uh, we’re seeing anecdotally, but it’s increasing that because people can, you know, look at the tech stack you’re using, they can actually target you for using these things that the predatory lawsuits are beginning to target.

People using these overlays. Mm-hmm . ’cause it’s pretty easy to say, well, they knew they should have been doing something about accessibility, but they didn’t fix this thing. Right. Um. And, uh, also how they work is there’s a little widget on your site and when the person clicks it, then they have to click what, what helpful tool they would like to use.

Well, if they say they want, for instance, screen magnification. Um, we are seeing evidence that the service. So like the, the company that you’re working with. Takes that information and stores it with that user’s IP address ostensibly so that the next time that user goes to another site with that tool, they can already have it enabled for them.

But that’s taking HIPAA protected information about their health care status and nobody is being notified that it’s being stored and you don’t have a way to remove it and the site. Yeah, it’s putting the site owner at risk in terms of some country. Privacy law and so a kind of a whole plethora of and they don’t stand with you when you’re sued, right?

A lot of people see the ads or interpret the ads as, oh, I just have to do this. And then I’m scot free. And then when you get sued the that company. Points you to the user, you know, the license agreement that where you signed off that you understood that they were not going to stand with you and defend you in court.

So, um, so problematic. I’m not best practice. The best case, the best, I think the best use case for them would be if you have been sued, you’re having to make your site accessible, you know, like on a dime as a part of a court settlement or a court case, and you’re working on it, but it’s just taking a while to get that done.

It’s not gonna, it’s not going to satisfy the, the court thing, but it would, might get you a little bit of, um, you know, time to get, get some things made accessible.

Andy: That makes sense. Yeah, it’s really interesting with all this stuff. There’s like the, you know, all the reasons why you should do it anyway, but then on top of that, just you could get sued too.

Lindsey: Yeah. Thanks for bringing that up, Andy, because I was wondering the exact same thing and I’ve seen these plugins everywhere. Um, I wanted to ask, I know that you mentioned that sometimes these costs can be prohibitive for businesses to dive in and start working on this. Are there any breaks that they can get, or are there any, is there any help out there in terms of costs?

Bet: Yeah, so, um, one of them is that there is a tax, um, uh, a non refundable tax credit that U. S. based businesses to get, can get. So if you live in the, if your business is based in the U. S., um, to qualify, you have to have, um, Less than 30 employees or less than a million in revenue. So not everybody qualifies, but certainly that’s going to help a lot of small business.

And it’s one or the other, right? So you can have 5 million in revenue. If you have less than 30 employees, you still qualify. And, um, what you, this qualifies anything that you do to make your website more accessible. So that can range from getting an audit done, having, uh, we say remediation is the word we use, fixing the accessibility issues, um, having a new, a completely new site redesigned with the accessibility as one of the, um, the factors for that, um, everything, um, up to, um, the tax credit is for up to $10, 000 in expenses.

You can get 50 percent of that. Back as a credit. Now you don’t get money back, but that reduces the amount that you owe on other things. You have to pay it all up front and then get the credit on the next year’s taxes. So it’s a it’s a it’s a great thing, right? That’s that’s that’s pretty amazing kind of break.

Oh, and then, you know, depending on how, how folks want to work on things, there are, in terms of spreading, there are ways to spread out some of the cost for doing that. We are not the only agency that does this, but there are agencies where you can, um, purchase sort of, uh, instead of, instead of outlaying, uh, A chunk of money on a on an audit that’s going to find a bunch of things and then sort of paying your developers to, you know, paying a developer to fix it, which, you know, that’s two big costs right there.

There are ways to, um, get a package where you buy a certain number of hours for auditing and remediation every month for a certain number, you know, for at least usually like ours have a certain minimum number of months for them. And people often go beyond that when they need to kind of keep doing the work but that’s a way to kind of spread out the cost for for some of the remediation work.

Andy: Yeah, I like that. I like, I like your suggestion earlier too. Like, Hey, even if you can’t get everything done all together, like at least start now, like make sure any new content you’re putting or new product pages you’re putting out are correct. So that that’s one less thing you have to go back and fix later.

Bet: Yeah. And, and I should say with. With those either with those kind of a plan package or any of those other things that we talked about in terms of the tax credit that tax credit is not one time you can you can kind of now I assume at some level there is a, uh, you know, there’s, there’s probably a limit somewhere, but, you know, it’s my understanding that you can claim it more than once as long as it’s legitimately things that you’re doing to work at making the website more accessible.

Andy: That’s awesome. So it’s been really helpful. I think we touched on a lot of different accessibility items. Is there anything we missed or any questions that you wish we had asked? That’s

Bet: Thats a really good, you know, I think, uh, in many ways, making your website more accessible can be a really great investment in your brand.

Um, you know, I, I do think I don’t want it to seem political, but I do think people do respect the values of companies that try to be inclusive and inclusive around people with disabilities. And so, I would say, if you work at making your website accessible, you want to figure out some ways to make that a part of your brand.

And one of the ways that we advise clients to do that is to put an accessibility statement in the, uh, and we just usually put it right down on the footer with the privacy policy kind of link down there. And a statement typically says three things. One it says we want, you know, we, it’s a value statement at one level, right?

We want everybody to be able to use this website. We want to include everybody to some statement about we particularly want to include people with disabilities and we’re striving to meet, you know, you don’t have to be specific but you know we’re striving to meet these guidelines or we just want to include people with disabilities.

And then, um, an acknowledgement, the third, that, that website accessibility is, well, it’s never one and done, right? If there’s a, there’s a level of maintenance to it. Anytime you make a change to the website, anytime you put a new product in, anytime you, um, you know, update the site, uh, you know, potentially it can go out of compliance, right?

So it’s, there’s a kind of a, an acknowledgement that we’ve, we’ve worked at this, but you might still find something that’s not accessible. If so, let us know. And then of course, you have to. Like be responsive to that, but, but, but I think that can go a long way toward creating this sense of, yeah, we want to, we’re not, we don’t want to exclude anybody. Right. And I think that can be a great investment in the brand. So

Andy: I love that. Yeah. And every, we, we really try to focus on working with what we call craft brands, but oftentimes it’s, you know, purpose driven brands and there’s a mission behind it, and I think that really probably aligns with the values of, of everybody that we’re, we’re typically working with that, you know, inclusivity is, uh, You know, not something to be overlooked, obviously.

Bet: Yeah, actually. And to be, you know, to be honest, I think, uh, like some other, um, you know, communities at the margins when they, uh, when the people with disabilities discover like an e-commerce shop that is inclusive, they are pretty vocal about sharing that around, right. You will find, and it’s not then just your, uh, you know, people with disabilities, but you, you know, you, you get that.

Reach for their friends and family members and the other people that care about them because it is You know, inclusive of them. And conversely, I mean, that can work the other way too, right? You know, if, uh, if you’re excluding my, if I have some choices and maybe I don’t, if I’m paying attention to that, I want to do, I want to support the brands that are going to help my friends with disabilities live, you know, full independent, lives are full of human dignity. So yeah,

Andy: love it.

Lindsey: That’s a great point. I love that with, especially who would have thought to create brand evangelists in this way. I’m sure that there are so many brands out there when they find out, Oh, you actually make my life easier and I can use your website and I can buy things when I want to. It’s just so much better.

And like you said, sharing with friends and family too, who will support as well.

Bet: The number of sites that they encounter on a daily basis that are not accessible, when they do encounter one that’s accessible, it’s really kind of a thing to be celebrated in their eyes, so that’s great.

Andy: Do you have, are there any, um, Shopify themes that are particularly good or particularly bad in, uh, from an accessibility standpoint?

Bet: Um, not so much particular, uh, that I’m a themes that I’m, I, I’m sure there are, right? Um, but the thing that we have noticed and paid attention to, and I know that the Shopify team. Tries, you know, it’s difficult when you have a platform that large right to begin to try and deal with things but there is a problem on the checkout option that is two columns on the page.

So we’re the left column. Asks them to start, uh, putting in their, you know, their, um, name and address and some stuff. If you, if you start tabbing through that page, um, and it’s just going from field to field and it goes down, but on the other side you have the coupon code and the cart. If, if you keep tabbing, it goes down, it goes down the first column.

And down into the footer and down to the next, you know, the next, uh, go to shipping. I think is the next thing. And then down into the footer to the privacy policy. So the blind person says up. I’ve got to fire that. I don’t know. I don’t know where the coupon code is. Let me go back. Right? And so they can’t find the coupon code.

Andy: Really interesting. I hadn’t thought about that.

Bet: All it takes to fix that is, I mean the platform can’t fix it, but you can just switch to the one page checkout, right, to where it just takes you a page, and you go to the next page and, and that’s a problem. Sometimes checkout for options that fly in those are problematic, or if somebody has embedded the kind of pop up widget in another website where you’re popping it up and you’re buying the products that often those are not.

Super accessible. And in a lot of e-commerce, um, there are things in the base platform, whether that’s Shopify or WooCommerce or BigCommerce that are, uh, mostly accessible out of the box, but then when you start adding additional things on, whether it’s themes or add ons or plugins or, um, other custom coding, right?

Sometimes the things that your developers do can make things less access then things get less accessible. So that’s, um, but the shopping cart would be the typical, a lot of, where you would see a lot of accessibility issues.

Andy: It’s a great thing to look out for, definitely. Well, awesome, Bet. I think this has been super, super helpful.

I feel like I’ve learned a lot, um, and definitely just a really interesting topic that we don’t get to talk about, um, nearly enough probably. So, um, for all of our listeners out there, where can they find you and, uh, hear more about Accessicart?

Bet: So, um, best place to find me is, uh, at accessicart.com. So “A-C-C-E-S-S-I-C-A-R-T dot com”. And, uh, I’m still on Twitter mostly at bethannan. Um, you know, I see people leaving that platform all the time. So, but, uh, we have a contact form at accessicart. com and that’s a good place to reach out as well. And happy to, um, You know, I’m in a few, um, groups, uh, Shopify groups and WordPress, uh, uh, WooCommerce groups and all around, um, Facebook and LinkedIn.

Andy: Awesome. Yeah, we’re always on LinkedIn. Come on, come on out to LinkedIn. You can come on over from Twitter. Awesome.

Lindsey: Well, thank you so much Bet for sharing all of this incredible information. Like Andy said, I feel like I went to school and I’m hoping to pass the test next time it comes around. So thank you. Great

Bet: Great being with you. Thanks for inviting me, I really had a good time.

Lindsey: Awesome. And if you liked what you heard today, go ahead and hit the subscribe button and get notified when new episodes come out.

And if you’re ready to take the next step in your digital marketing journey, go ahead and check it out. PPCpitbulls.com/assessment And you can take our digital marketing maturity assessment and reach out to us there and we’ll help you determine your next best step. So make sure you come back and get some more gems of wisdom.

Like we had today with that. We thank you so much, Bet we appreciate you and we’ll see you all next time.

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