Breaking Barriers: Josh Basile’s Mission for Disability Rights & Accessibility

Welcome to the Biz to Biz Podcast, your number one source for all business news. Hey everybody, welcome to today's episode of B2B Vault, the Biz to Biz Podcast sponsored by Nationwide Payment System and our new product NPS One. And I guess Josh, our special guest Josh Basil, he must have got the note that everybody was supposed to wear a blue shirt today.

Blue is a beautiful color. So it looks good. It's great to be here.

And, uh, so today our special guest is Josh Basil from AccessiBe, and we're going to talk about website accessibility. And it's a really interesting subject matter because recently I've been exposed to a bunch of different companies talking to me about this, and Josh agreed to come on the podcast. And we're going to dive in and talk about websites and how accessibility is important. And obviously it's important to all businesses, but there's definitely some sectors of business where it's being, you know, businesses are being targeted and we'll get into all that in a minute. So Josh, introduce yourself to the audience.

Absolutely. And again, it's great to be here and My journey within the disability world really was flipped upside down as a teenager. So a little over 20 years ago, I was on a family vacation at the beach. I was 18 at the time, and a wave picked me up, threw me over my boogie board, and slammed me headfirst against the ocean floor. And that day I heard a loud crack, and it ended up being my 5th cervical vertebrae, and it burst, and I immediately became paralyzed. Below my shoulders. And, uh, was, you know, my friends pulled me to the shore, went through different hospital systems, and, um, ended up being diagnosed a C4-5 quadriplegic. And basically for the last 20 years I've been paralyzed below my shoulders, a power wheelchair user, and ended up returning to college and finished my undergrad at University of Maryland, then graduated magna cum laude from law school. So for the last decade, I've been a practicing attorney and also doing a ton of work around accessibility and breaking down barriers. So, and then for the last 4 years, I've been the community relations manager at AccessiBe, and I'm excited to talk more about AccessiBe and the journey of accessibility.

Okay, so, so, you know, so how did you end up um, working with this company? What was the, the driving force behind that?

It was really about the pandemic. So we were all forced indoors, and for so much when I thought of accessibility from a day-to-day standpoint, it was in the physical world. And then we were all trapped, and it just, it just really opened my eyes to how much the internet and the public accommodations around the internet, how important it is to make sure that the world and people with disabilities have access just like everyone else, or just to be able to experience websites just like everyone else. And it was clear to me that the, the deeper I dove into it— at that time, I think less than 2% of the internet met accessibility guidelines, and that was just a huge number that I wanted to do something about and to change. And As an advocate for life, I ended up wheeling full steam ahead and I've been at this and bringing community together, having the important healthy conversations because at the end of the day, we don't know what we don't know. Having these conversations is healthy and it also actually provides a lot of protections to do better businesses, to be a better business, to be better to your customers, to have your customers have better experiences. And to avoid a lot of the headaches that can come down the road with litigation and other things that can happen by not being accessible.

Yeah, there's definitely like a lot of litigation surrounding accessibility because I used to be in the restaurant business and I'll never forget, like, I was with one of my friends— my dog is behaving badly right now— but one of my friends owned a owned the building, and they bought— somebody built the building next to his building, and all of a sudden the whole thing started with some attorney about the ramp and where the ramp was and where there wasn't a ramp.

The ADA, you know, since the 1990s that the ADA came about, yeah, it's— it was a landmark piece of legislation that said, you know what, people with disabilities deserve to be a part of the world, both in the physical And at the time, the digital world wasn't anywhere it is today, but the ADA does provide— it's a different life because of that legislation. And the unfortunate part, there's always going to be good lawyers and bad lawyers, um, and the ones I don't like is the drive-by attorneys that are just trying to do a quick shakedown. But there's also a lot of good attorneys that do bring about certain type of cases so that companies, especially larger companies and other ones, people can be part of their journey and not have like the barrier. Like, within my digital experiences, I use voice dictation software to be able to type. I use on-screen keyboard to jump around a page. I use screen readers to be able to help read pages to me as well. And if accessibility is not properly done, I can get stuck on the homepage and not be able to access a dropdown to get to the next page. Or I might be at checkout trying to put my credit card information and personal information and I'm blocked from doing that. Or I'm not able to get my screen reader to be able to read what's fully on the site. Like, it's— so it's like there's, there's unfortunately the bad stories that come with a lot of the ADA things that, you know, are brought not for the right reason, but the ones that are brought for the right reason, it is It is an important protection in place. And at the same time, if we can get ahead of the game and bring accessibility, the best accessibility practices for businesses, you're, you're going to be a better business, but you're also going to protect yourself, which is an important conversation to have.

Yeah. One of the things that I learned about accessibility when it comes to websites, it's definitely, you know, not that lawyers are out targeting people, but definitely it's on, you know, shopping sites where there's e-commerce going on, obviously restaurants because everybody needs to order food, hotels, and that's, you know, the whole hospitality, you know, industry from that standpoint, you know, definitely needs to take notice on accessibility because from their standpoint, you know, that's probably the one of the biggest industries that needs to be— that where there needs to be improvement in that.

Yeah. And it's, it's again, most businesses don't wake up saying, I want to exclude this group of people. Like, it's just not like that. Every, every business wants to bring in as many customers as possible and invite them in on their journey. But at the same time, because accessibility can sometimes be scary for some businesses, I mean, like, they don't know where to start. It's just having conversations like, all right, one of the biggest and easiest, easiest things that actually businesses can do is with Accessibility. We have accessibility.com/accessscan. You go to that web page, you can actually put your URL of your website in, and it scans the site and it tells you where you're doing great and where you're falling behind. And it gives you kind of the report of what it means and how this impacts, you know, it gives you a really good report to let you kind of, kind of do an audit to say like, all right, this is where it's at. But then being able to team up with, you know, Accessibee, and I don't want to be too much of like an infomercial of it, but then it's like, all right, what do you do next after you know what the problems are? What are your options? And I'm a huge fan of technology, especially, especially from a scalability standpoint. So leveraging AI today to be able to do scans of your entire site and find out where the holes are and make the fixes, um, that's a product called AccessWidget. And then there's one called AccessFlow, which is for developers to use to then make the, the manual remediation fixes on the backend if you want to do it that way, or you can do them both. But we could talk more like kind of how, how you can approach accessibility.

So I remember when we were talking, you were telling me like your product works with, uh, you're working with Shopify now, and I know that you have WordPress plugin. And, you know, between Shopify and WordPress, that's probably a pretty good chunk of the internet.

Yeah, no, there's hundreds of thousands of customers using, uh, the Access widget, which is our AI kind of, uh, widget that goes on a website and scans your site every 24 hours. And then once it's activated, um, it also creates all these profiles. So a lot of people might see like the accessibility icons on different parts of websites. In one of the corners. And not everyone is as good as the next, but with AccessiBe, they're, they're very good at what they do. But it creates profiles. So like, let's say you are— you have epilepsy and there's like blinking lights on a website. You can click a button and it, it makes all those lights go away and tones it down. There's, there's profiles for if you have a motor disability. If you're blind or low vision, if you have a cognitive disability, and then lots of other fun ways to customize it for however you want to experience the website.

Oh, that's interesting. So the users also have some control over what's going on on the website. That's really interesting.

And that's the— that's one of the cool parts about— I think all customers love having options, right? Like, we want to be able to experience it how we want to experience it, and One particular site, I want to experience it a certain way. Another site, I want to experience it another way because I want to read more. Or the other one, I want to shop on that site. On the other one, I want to fill out forms. So being able to have kind of those options, you can really customize it on how you want to— we call it usability in the accessibility world. And it's kind of accessibility and usability kind of go hand in hand, but they're also a little bit different.

Yeah, it's, you know, it's important, you know, like the part, you know, the thing about the podcast is that we, you know, we're here. The, the podcast I started it, you know, it's like educational for education for merchants, right? So, you know, if you're a merchant, you're listening to, you know, the podcast today, this is something you should check out when we'll get— we'll post the link in the podcast and you can go scan your site. So Like, what kind of regulations, you know, do the ADA have, like, that retailers and restaurants and hotels and e-commerce merchants— what should they know about? From what are, like, important things that they should know about?

Yeah, one of the biggest ones is that the Department of Justice is putting out guidelines, and they've done it multiple times over the years, and they reaffirmed it again last summer in a big memo, but that the ADA and websites fall under places of public accommodation. So websites need to meet accessibility standards, and WCAG is kind of an international 2.1 AA kind of standard that websites and business owners must follow to make their websites accessible. Basically being able to team up with an accessibility company or service or type widget or however you want to say it, to be able to meet those standards and bring your website into compliance is key. Unfortunately, a lot of businesses are like, "I just want to flip a switch and make this accessible." Unfortunately, accessibility is a journey. It's not something that you can just be one and done. Uh, it could be if you never updated your website ever again, but we're constantly updating our websites and putting new content, new information. So we have to make it a journey, um, because with that new content, the new pages, each time it needs to kind of also do it right on that end. So being able to think of it that way and understanding that accessibility is just as important as security So like even like decades ago when, you know, people were like, they prior to it did not have a lot of security on the back end of their site. But as time went on, they're like, all right, no, this is a must-have within our business journey in order to do this right and to protect ourselves. Same thing goes with accessibility. To do it right, you need to have an accessible website and to avoid the headache of litigation and other things that might come your way, especially unhappy customers as well. There's statistics, I think it's over 70% of websites that are inaccessible when a person with disability goes on and they reach a barrier, they immediately get off that site and they don't come back. That's a loss right there. I've been on sites where I want to put my credit card information in that I mentioned earlier. It's like, take my money, please. But I couldn't do it because it wasn't accessible and I had to wait for my family member to come home. To even try it again. And not everybody is going to be patient enough to wait, right?

No, that's true. It's, it's definitely, you know, it's, it, it's definitely a journey. I remember I— you asked me if I scanned my website. I don't think if the score was too low, but there was definitely like a lot of different things, headers on, you know, F1 headers and different little things that it made a lot of different suggestions I mean, that's definitely, it's definitely some kind of project that you would have to have somebody go in and, and do. I have no idea what that time would be on it, but it's definitely something.

And that, that's the beauty of kind of being able to team up with like a trusted company that does this every single day. It's like AccessBay being able to scan it, but then being able to provide like a full suite of services. To be able to do it, whether you're a small business, medium business, or a large business, being able to have different packages and options to be able to do it and to be able to then trust them to like have your back along the journey. But also, you know, we constantly doing like teaching moments and conversations to, to make this a journey, but baking it in within the business mindset is a, is, is, is huge. But The fact that your listeners are listening to this right now, like, they deserve a pat on the back because this is a conversation that at least they're, they're doing something. They're being— they're hearing it. They're, they're— and then it's up to them to do what they do next, which is a very powerful moment to like really jump all over it and do it right.

Yeah, it's definitely— you have to, um, you know, scan the, you know, scan your site, which you can go to AccessiBe .com and scan your site, and then you can see what your health score is from that standpoint.

And then you have 100% free to do, right?

And then you have to figure out from there, like, how you're gonna fix the problem, you know, which you don't— you know, that's the, that's the biggest— that's like the bigger issue is how to, how to do that. If you're starting off, if you're going to start a brand new website Then it's super important to make sure from the beginning to put all those rules into place so that you're compliant starting out from day one, you know, not catching up because people have websites that are 5, 10, 20 years old, right? They're constantly updating and then, you know, you have to, you know, go in and fix a site that has hundreds or thousands of pages on it. Of content, that could take a lot of work.

And that's, that's the beauty of AI as well for those type of sites that have already been built out. Like, I always like to say, if you're gonna do it right, do it from the beginning, right? But the fact is, you've gotta meet businesses where they're at in their journey. And those that already have thousands of pages or even, even 100 pages or 10 pages, being able to leverage AI technology to be able to scan it, remediate it, and make important fixes right then and there, which is, can be, you know, is exactly what a certain business might need with where they're at. Or if they have the time and bandwidth to be able to do the manual remediation, that can cost a lot of money to do kind of manual remediation with a lot of these companies, but it can get the job done. And then I know I mentioned AccessFlow, but that's a really cool developer tool that AccessiBe put together that actually helps developers from the back end make the fixes and know what options they are to make the fixes. It's, it's a really cool developer tool.

Yeah, there's a lot of AI products that are out there to do SEO, that do all kinds of things on your website, and definitely AI can help you get a job done a lot faster. So one of the questions that you put down is what, you know, we talked about what everybody should do, check their website, get a free scan. But what do you do when you have to, you know, you get an unscrupulous attorney? And I've dealt with that before and a whole bunch of different things across being in business for like over 30 years. You know, I was telling you about the sidewalk. Um, you know, when I first got into ATMs and ADA started, you know, there was— there's also, you know, you know, they outlawed a whole bunch of ATMs because they were too high, and one whole line of ATMs had to be like completely ripped out of everywhere, and people had to buy new ATM machines. And, you know, we've had all kinds of different changes over the years of on the credit card machines, even how they work and things, and things like that. So, you know, it's super important to be sensitive to, to these types of things in your business and then be prepared to, you know, if you're a new business, be prepared from the get-go. If you're an existing business, then you got to figure out, you know, okay, well, here's the plan to to, to deal with that, you know, going forward.

The quicker you can address accessibility, the less headaches you're going to have down the road, and you're just going to start doing it right. And it's, it's, um, like, it's, it's, it's not hard to do it. You just have to start somewhere, got to know where you're at, and then you got to find out what your options of how you want to tackle it. And luckily there are lots of options. Out there with different price points, time commitments, things of that nature. But there, there's the ability to do it, and, and to not have to do it alone is, is a, is a key message, right?

So what other things should businesses know about when it comes to this?

Um, I, I would say being able to start somewhere. You just got to start somewhere, and and be proactive about it. If you're thinking about it, just go ahead and start doing something. Otherwise, it's going to— whatever project you might have going on or past projects you've seen, if you don't take action steps towards addressing it, it just gets pushed or the can gets kicked down the way. And kicking the can on accessibility, I believe, creates future headaches in a big way. And it creates customers that face barriers. So let's address that right away. And then also being able to, like, I don't know, keep— I always try to ask everybody that ends up being on their accessibility journey to tell their friends and tell the other businesses and to promote that they're doing something about it. Like, it's— you deserve a pat on the back by being a part of welcoming all abilities within your business. And there's multiple days throughout the year, especially within social media, that you can just share that you're doing it right. And I think, you know, I know the disability community is the most brand-loyal community because unfortunately we don't have as many options as others. So when we're treated well, we come back again and again. Repeat customers, and we tell our friends, we tell our family members that we had a good experience, and we also tell when we had bad experiences. So it's like being able to do it right, it's like you, you're, you're not only inviting in the people with disabilities, but you're inviting in all, all the people that they surround themselves with.

So what, what, what, what should a business do if they get one of these ambulance chaser guys, or you call them the drive-by guys? Not actually driving by your website, but what do you do when something like that happens?

Yeah, it's important to be able to then make the necessary remediations to get your website to be compliant. If you're already compliant, it should be thrown out immediately. But if you're not compliant, being able to bring accessibility to your website, bringing in different options— AccessiBe has great litigation packages built in. To their different services that they— that you have, especially with the Access widget, which is a powerful kind of, we've got your back during the good days and the bad days or whatever might come your way. But you usually have to lawyer up at that point to avoid kind of that shakedown. And I know businesses make business decisions, but If you get shaken down and you don't make your website accessible, there's going to be the next person that tries to do a shakedown, unfortunately. And I don't like those lawyers. I very much like a lot of attorneys, but the drive-by ones that don't do it to actually bring websites to accessibility, they're doing nothing good other than messing with businesses.

Yeah, no businesses, you know, don't deserve to do that. Worked hard enough to start a business and own a business, and then when new rules come along, you know, obviously new expenses come up, and then you have to, you know, raise prices or whatever in order to pay for things to be done. So it's, you know, it's— I feel for business owners all the time, no matter what. When regulations change, it's, it's always you know, super hard to deal with, you know.

It's just the, the interesting part about the ADA and, and everything around website accessibility, it's been around for a long time. So it's like, it's like if you haven't done it yet, you should be thanking and counting your luck at this point. But as time goes on, that luck's going to run out. And if you do it right now, you could start doing it right moving forward. And it's like, it becomes a language that you understand, that you can speak, and it's, it doesn't feel like you're forcing it into your business. It's, it's just a best practice. It's a security, it's accessibility. It's making sure your customers can go from the start of your website to the end of your website without having to stop in between. Like, it's, it just makes a lot of sense and it's, It's the right thing to do. Let's just be real as well. Like, I think I started off saying no, no business wakes up saying, oh, I want to exclude 25% of the population. And there's a lot of people with disabilities in the US and beyond.

Yeah, nobody wants— nobody's intentionally trying to do that.

So no, they're not. But they don't know what they don't know. And that's, that's the beauty. And I can't thank you enough for like having this conversation?

Well, you know, things that help business owners, that's what it's all about, you know, the podcast. And, you know, we put it out in a blog and we try to educate our merchants, you know, so, so that they know like what's going on in the world from all sorts of different, you know, whatever regulations are out there, because there's always regulation surrounding credit card processing from, you know, PCI compliance Accessibility regulations. You know, we have ATM machines and, you know, ATM machines, if they're mounted to the wall, have to be mounted at a certain height. We have to explain that to the customers. You know, everybody, you know, everybody has to play by the rules. We had a customer one time, we told them you can't put the ATM up so high. It's a wall-mounted ATM. The city came and, you know, Told them to move it. And, you know, the guy called me up and goes, I should have listened to you. And I was like, well, we tried to tell you, you don't want to listen, you know.

And one of the other big things is, you know, if you're doing international business, like the European Accessibility Act, EAA, just went into full force effect in June. And, you know, the legislation passed in 2019, they gave websites businesses that make, that sell products overseas, the opportunity to get themselves to reach accessibility standards. And now American businesses that do business overseas need to be able to— and luckily the WCAG standards that I mentioned before across the board, whether it's in the state or states or in Europe, they follow kind of the same guidelines. So doing it right in the states doing it right overseas. It's kind of hand in hand at the moment. And so it's just another protection to protect yourself from lawsuits from here and abroad.

And no one— that you don't want to deal with, getting sued from across the pond over there. So what— as we're finishing up the podcast, what would you— what would be good advice you would give to a business owner Besides, we tell them to go to the website, get your website scanned, and what other type of things should they know about?

Yeah, you said it. First, you got to know where you're at. So scanning, but then doing something about it after you scan, just doing something. You've now have this information and it's up to you to what you do with it. You can do nothing or you could do something and be proactive to like bring this into your business model. And, uh, that's— I— that's what I would ask businesses, because I truly believe it's going to help them in the long run to do it right and to start somewhere. And obviously yesterday was the best day to do it, today is the next best. So let's, let's make it happen together.

So once after somebody scans and they, let's say they buy your product and then it's being used on the website, is it— is there something that's automatically going in and fixing everything, or it's a manual process?

So you have two options. You have the ability to do it from the manual standpoint through Access Flow, which is a developer tool, which goes in your site and actually makes manual remediation code. Or you have the option to do the Access widget, which is our flagship kind of service, and it's kind of what we've been at for many years now, really, really refining it and investing tons of money and resources to making it better and better and better. But the Access widget with a snippet of code gets put into your website and then it then on the backend scans the site every 24 hours and makes remediation fixes when someone activates the icon on your website and utilizing the different profiles or customizations, but it brings accessibility through that really powerful artificial intelligence tool or you can use both. That's being able to do it manually through Access Flow, but then using Access Widget to create that usability. There's lots of different options to do it.

Oh, so the Access Widget, that's what gives the users like you a choice of what's going on on the website.

Exactly.

Oh, that's interesting. I'm gonna have to check all that out and see it in action.

All right, it's a, it's a, it really is not as painful as you think. Like, it's on, I have it on 3 of my websites and it took less than 15-20 minutes on each of the sites to get the Access widget loaded up and operational. So it's a, it's a pretty, pretty cool option to have.

Okay, that's interesting. No, everything, you know, listen, if you're running a shopping site you have a restaurant, you're doing online ordering, you have e-commerce. This is super, super important for your, for your business. I mean, that's, you know, I was talking to some other, some other people that are in— not, they're not offering the same kind of product that, uh, Josh has, but they were in the same, in the same realm of business. And that we were just talking about, like, how How does that all work and what people can do? And if you're on a Shopify site, it's built into Shopify. It's one of the things you can install on your site. So, and they have a WordPress plugin that works with WordPress. So it's really cool. I want to thank you, Josh, for coming on the show today.

Thank you, Allen.

You can follow B2B Vault on, we're on LinkedIn, YouTube, Spotify, Apple, wherever you listen to podcasts, that's where you'll find us.. And thanks for coming on the show today. Go to AccessiBe.com, scan your site, see your score, and then take some action. And thank you everybody for listening. And thanks again to Josh for coming on the show. Any last words?

Just a pleasure to be here and a pleasure to have these conversations. And thank you for being on this journey with me, buddy.

All right, well, peace out. And I always say, carpe diem, seize the day.

Thanks, Allen Kopelman. Hi, everyone.