ADA and Website Accessibility - What You Need to Know

Greetings everybody, welcome to the Wednesday, June 28th, 2017 episode of Free Webinar Wednesdays. This is Eric Cook, and I'm with WSI Digital Marketing, where we work with businesses and organizations on helping them better understand and leverage the power of the internet as a strategic business tool. You can learn more about me and WSI online at poweredbywsi.com. With me this week is my good friend and Free Webinar Wednesday partner, Mr. Jeff Simpkins. Jeff.

Hey Eric.

Say hello to everybody out there in Free Webinar Wednesday world.

Hello everybody, this is Jeff Simpkins. I'm with Community Bank Consulting Inc., and you can learn more about me and the services we provide at Community Bank Consulting Inc. online at www.communitybankconsulting.com.

Excellent. So we had last week off. I was at a conference, um, tons of really good information. We had one presenter shared some really good information about the whole concept of cybersecurity, and it's kind of timely given the fact that another round of ransomware has hit the news. A lot of businesses are experiencing little messages when they try to log into their computer network indicating that the bad guys are requesting $300 worth of Bitcoin be submitted to them through that cryptocurrency service and all sorts of other stuff. So as a public service announcement to get things kicked off, just want to remind everybody of the importance of employee training, because one of the things that jumped out to me in the webinar— in the presentation that I wanted to share in the webinar was the fact that a vast majority of these, these malware, ransomware, any of these incidences that impact the business and result in financial loss, 90% of the time results from somebody, some human involvement clicking something that they shouldn't have clicked on. So you can have the absolute best security technology in place But if you don't spend the time to talk to your staff and train them on things that they should or shouldn't be clicking on, you need to you need to spend some time to do that. So Dr. Kevin Streff, who's on faculty with me at the Graduate School of Banking out in Madison, Wisconsin, was the presenter, and he heads up a company called SBS Cybersecurity, and you can learn more about them at sbscyber.com. But it's starting to trickle outside of the world of banking, which is the world that you and I live in, Jeff, into many many other areas. Areas as well. So not that I wanted to start the presentation off on a downer, but given all of the news that's starting to come around with this ransomware issue, I figured we would kind of mention that. And I think we're going to have a session in the future specifically dedicated to that. So keep your eyes peeled because cybersecurity and the importance of protecting your data and your customers' data is becoming a pretty hot topic. So, I don't know if you have any other comments. I suspect this probably trickled through on your NPR feeds, and you probably heard something about this as well.

Yeah, I can't remember if it was New York Times today or NPR. Certainly, it was mentioned on both. One went into more detail, and a big issue, and of course, This is out of the control of most users in a corporate environment, but one of the big issues that has allowed this to propagate is not keeping current with the releases from Microsoft on the operating system. Yep.

So it's a digital world, just like any other really big city. There's certain areas that you probably don't want to spend a whole lot of time in without being very, very cautious, and it's quickly becoming that case on the internet. So Anyway, stay tuned, but I think that'll be another show topic that I think will be a good public service for folks, whether you're in banking or outside of the world of financial services. So, and not that today's topic is any more necessarily good news, although I think there are certainly some positives around web accessibility that I think we want to make sure Sure, we talk about, but we're going to chat a little bit about web accessibility, some of the things that have gone on specifically in the world of banking, and how the winds of change are blowing into other areas as well. So any business that really operates a website or has any sort of a digital presence needs to start paying attention to these things. So before we officially kick into the discussion on web accessibility, just want to remind everybody that today's show and all shows are recorded, made available at freewebinarwednesdays.com. So after today's show, if you're interested in sharing this with anybody within your organization or anyone else for that matter, you can certainly hop onto the webinar and watch it in archive mode. And if you have questions or clarification or anything like that, please feel free to use the chat function within the GoToWebinar system, your control panel on the right-hand side of your screen. This is a confusing topic. This is one that has a good deal of ambiguity with it. I'm not professing to be a legal expert, but I've been really educating myself on this since last August and making sure that we're making good recommendations to our clients on ways to mitigate this whole topic of web accessibility. So please feel free to type up any questions that you may have that have come across your plate. But the— I guess to provide some background on this, In case you've not heard of this issue before, as with building a physical location, you have disability requirements when you do a remodeling project or you put an addition on your office of certain things that I think we're all pretty familiar with. Doorways have to be a certain width. Ramps can only be a certain slope so that a wheelchair can easily get up it. The doors themselves have to have no more than X number of pounds as pull strength in order to allow people, or you have to have a button that allows the door to open automatically. Drinking fountains, et cetera, et cetera. So there's a lot of things that I think from a physical world we're familiar with when we start thinking about individuals with disabilities and how they're able to access our physical offices, our physical locations. The challenge that a lot of businesses run into is when the ADA, Americans with Disabilities Act, trickles into the digital world. And there has not really been a formal law in place. They've pushed it back a number of times. We actually did a webinar back in January of this year where we had a representative from the, from the Department of Justice. join us and kind of talk about accessibility in Title III and what it really meant as it relates to public accommodation for individuals with disabilities. And so a lot of, a lot of people have seen, like, fall of 2018 being the bogey that now has been the updated desired goalpost for when the Disabilities Act is going to get updated, make things mandatory. There were a couple of law firms late last year that actually jumped the gun on this. And in the banking industry, we're pretty familiar with these issues because several years ago— and Jeff, I'm sure you've got clients that were also hit with these as well— that some of these law firms were sending out letters demanding settlement and claiming disability discrimination because banks, credit unions, even if you're a convenience store offering an ATM, Those did not have keys that had Braille or audio jacks. And so an individual with a disability was not able to use those in order to get cash out of an ATM. And so these law firms are going around sending these letters, and it involved lawsuits and settlements to the thousands of dollars, plus replacement, updating, enhancement of ATMs. Some of these older ATMs couldn't support newer technology. So budgets and timelines had to be created. So the last time accessibility really impacted, at least in the world of banking from an electronic perspective, was this ATM. And now everybody pretty much has gone through and replaced their ATM machines. There's even little audio jacks that you can plug in and, you know, the ATM— excuse me— can read back or talk to you if you're hearing or visually impaired. And can tell you what to do on the ATM in order to use it to get cash. Now, though, the websites are the next target. And so many of these same law firms— and say what you will about them— are going through their list of banks that they reached out and sued as a result of ATM discrimination, and they're going after them from a website perspective. And so we've had a number of our clients that have received these letters claiming disability discrimination and have had to kind of educate ourselves on really what the process was, what really the options were. So one of the first things, and in the write-up on today's show, we've got a couple of links here for you to learn more. So what's really driving all of the accessibility and what's being used as the ruler or the benchmark for accessibility is what's referred to as Web Content Accessibility 2.0 or WCAG 2.0. And unlike the traditional world of, you know, building and construction, the challenge that you run into when you start thinking of digital properties is by their very nature, they change over time. And so the fluidity of a website is one that you can't just say, well, we just remodeled our office and we made sure the drinking fountain and the doors and the ramps were all good to go and then not have to worry about it again. The issue related to web content is it's an evolving entity. So if you're doing it correctly, you're doing blog posts, you're adding news releases, you're promoting different products and services. So those are all things that you want to make sure that you are able to ensure not only are compliant from the initial review or updating, but how do you make sure that they're compliant on an ongoing basis? And so the first link that's in the article really talks about web content accessibility. And this gives you the 4 main areas of WCAG 2.0: perceivable, operable, understandable, and robust. And each one of these is described in additional information kind of behind the scenes. So I don't want to spend a ton of time going over this. If you're interested in the webinar that we did with the Department of Justice, as well as the individual with a representative, a blind individual that does a lot of blogging and is kind of an advocate for the disability community, You know, we can go ahead and we'll post that link up into the comments and you can check that out and you can listen to that webinar if you're interested. But this is a good thing for you to at least kind of take a look at and understand all the different layers that are involved in what it takes to make a website accessible. And so when we got approached by our very first client, we started doing research and one of the things that I initially found was there's a lot of companies out there, and I think the last time I looked, web content under the W3C, which is the World Wide Web Consortium, they have a list of accessibility vendors or partners or service providers. I think that is close to 100 different service providers now. When I started last year, roughly in August, I think there were probably 60 or 70. So that list continues to grow. But when we started doing our research for our clients, one of the things that we found was there's a lot of companies that will come in and they'll do an analysis or a report for you. And as you think about, well, how do we fix this? First off, you need to determine, does your website really have vulnerabilities, or does it really have inaccessible content for individuals that are browsing using assistive technology? If I'm blind, I may be using a service like JAWS, or I might have enabled assisted browsing capability within Safari or Firefox. So when I'm doing that as a disabled visitor to your site, how do I make sure that the content that you have is able to be consumed by me, or does it just, you know, not give enough information for me to know what's going on? So the first part is really assessing your risk and figuring out where that actually stands. The next part in that is determining a plan of action to say what needs to be fixed and And how long or how costly is it going to be to do that remediation and ensuring that you've got a plan in place for that. And so while the initial reports, as we were looking around at different vendors, typically range anywhere between $4,500 to $7,000 or more, the, the report that comes back and says, here's where your problems are. Was able to be some sort of a finite cost. The variable item in the area where a lot of our clients were frustrated is it was difficult to produce any sort of an estimated budget or a timeline because you really don't know what that is until the report's done. So you've got to invest $5,000 or $6,000 in a report before you can even develop a plan to determine what needs to be fixed how long it's going to take to be fixed, and if it's something that's going to require any sort of modification to your website because you might be using color combinations that impact a certain area of the community that have visual, you know, challenges with the color combinations that you've selected. So there's a lot of unknown variables that made it very difficult for businesses to be able to budget for this. And so As we continued to look around, one of the services that kept coming up, and I mentioned in the actual— in the write-up that we're going to do a demo of AudioEye, which is the tool that we've actually built a partnership with as our preferred way of handling web accessibility, is they've solved or addressed this solution with a technology that sits on top of a website using JavaScript. And it looks for the violations, if you will, and fixes those either with a technology fix or as part of their annual subscription service. They bring web accessible consultants and experts to the table that go in and actually fix things in that JavaScript overlay is what it's called, so that your site maintains its compliance on an ongoing basis. So I'm going to I'm going to hit pause there because I've thrown a lot of jargon, and Jeff, I'm going to rely on you to be kind of my interpreter if there's anything that I've talked about that I understand, because I've been in this up to my eyeballs over the last several months, that you might think would be beneficial for us to kind of review back and clarify.

Okay. Are you able to hear me?

Yep, we got you.

Okay, I was on mute. Um, so I'm gonna just sort of dummy this down. Basically what you've said is you're about to demo a solution for us that takes your existing website and will make it, uh, will make it accessible from a compliance standpoint. And the only thing I'm— I want you to clarify is, am I using accessible from a compliance standpoint correctly? Is that an accurate statement, or have I overstated it?

No, I think that's, that's exactly what I'm about ready to do. So, um, yes, absolutely. And the only other thing that I want to cover before we jump into that, because I mentioned earlier and it was even talked about in the webinar that we did back in January, is the lack of an official law or requirement as it relates to accessibility, ADA Title III, has caused some businesses, some service providers that even provide services to the banks that we we work with to put in their kind of response that this is not a mandatory requirement, so we're not going to worry about this, or we're not going to have a plan in place, or we're not going to address this until 2018 when law becomes in effect. And there have been several organizations that have actually been successfully sued because of accessibility infractions, the largest of which has been the Americans with Disabilities— or the American Federation for the Blind versus the Target Corporation. And this was several years ago to the tune of, I think it was either $6 or $9 million. And you can just do a Google search for Target web accessibility lawsuit. I'll even do that here real quick. So if you do a search for Target web accessibility lawsuit, so yeah, $6.3 million. You can see on the World Wide Web Consortium as well as in Wikipedia. So this was back in 2006, 2007. And originally, ultimately got settled in 2008, 2009. Excuse me. I'm battling a little bit of a cold and all this talking is precipitating my cough. So this has been out there for a while. It hasn't really been on many business owner website owners' radar screens, especially in the banking sector, until some of these law firms started thinking that they had an opportunity to drum up some legal business by getting a plaintiff. In Ohio, it's a gentleman that resides in Cleveland or Columbus. In Indiana, somebody that's in the Indianapolis area. And the Michigan lawsuits are references somebody out of the Kalamazoo area. So they find an individual that has a disability, they put that individual's name on the lawsuit, and then they just blanket the market with letters stating that so-and-so was not able to use your website. And that's kind of what starts the process. So the argument that there's no formal law on the books has some merit, but it's going to be an expensive one for you to defend if you do indeed get sued by somebody and they take you to court and you have to settle. There's going to be costs, even if it's just getting your law firm to defend that. A couple of months ago, Domino's Pizza out in California successfully, quote unquote, I'm doing air quotes with my fingers, defended their position in that somebody filed a lawsuit against Domino's Pizza stating that their website was not accessible. Domino's took them to court, defended themselves. And in California, they were found that Domino's in that instance didn't have to make their site as accessible as what the plaintiff was requesting because there was a lack of precedent in other areas related to this. Just recently, and this is the lawsuit that has kind of rocked the accessibility community, and I've got a link to this in the Free Webinar Wednesdays write-up as well, is Lainey Feingold is an attorney out of California and she's kind of the godmother. Actually tried to get her to be a guest on that accessibility webinar that we did back in January, but she was just too busy. But Lainey Feingold is kind of the end-all to be-all as it relates to accessibility lawsuits in the accessibility community. She's got a write-up of the accessibility finding in Florida that really has made history and has kind of set precedent that others will look to in a consumer or a resident against the Winn-Dixie grocery store. And so this is one that you can kind of get the actual write-up. There's a 13-page court order that talks about what Winn-Dixie needs to do, talks about the fact that it doesn't matter that it is not formal law under the ADA, that now the digital world is what it is and should be treated as such. And so you can kind of get a list, a breakdown of everything that's included in that. So as this becomes more and more of an issue, businesses are going to have to figure out how they're going to address accessibility on their end. The larger your business, the bigger the target that you are, the more you're going to have to probably pay attention to this. Some of you that are listening either live or on recording may not need to go all the way to a solution like AudioEye, which is what I'm about ready to demo. You may be able to implement some minor changes and do some tweaks that will make your site accessible, and you can produce a statement on the site that just indicates, you know, what you're doing and how you're planning on being available to individuals with disabilities. But if you've got a lot at stake and you're doing a lot of business online, and that's kind of a big strategic priority of yours, the AudioEye solution, from what we found, seems to be one of the, the best long-term strategies because it remains actively engaged on top of your site and provides certification of compliance. And there's a lot of organizations that have actually gone to AudioEye as a result of getting one of these letters that has used their service to help with making their sites compliant and defending themselves in court. So one of the banks that I'm just going to pull up here is a bank that we work with down in Berne, Indiana. And when you visit a website that is using the AudioEye solution, and you can go to audioeye.com and that will give you, you know, access to their website and kind of learn a little bit more about them. But when you go to a website that's being protected by the AudioEye solution, You will notice that there is a little accessibility icon. This is kind of the symbol that is being adopted for online accessibility, much like the wheelchair is the accessibility symbol for handicap parking, etc. You will find that this icon is kind of what is being used in the accessibility community. This means that the website is being remediated by the AudioEye service. You can click on this. Now, you don't have to have this in order to make a website accessible. In fact, If somebody's visiting your website and they're blind, they're not going to see this anyway. So they're going to use a third-party tool to read the website and to have the content regurgitated back to them in a format, whether it's through a Braille reader or they've got some sort of an audio feedback service that they're using, but they're not going to really use this. This is an additional functionality that is available to anybody that visits the website. That may have a minor form of disability. Maybe they have a certain bit of colorblindness, they need font sizes to be increased, they might be cognitively challenged, maybe they've got dyslexia or a learning disability. And so the AudioEye tool sits on top of the site and allows a more convenient experience for somebody that maybe isn't using one of these third-party tools. But in either instance, when the AudioEye service is enabled, it actually supports both of those scenarios. So if we click on this accessibility icon, one of the things that I like about the AudioEye tool is everything kind of is integrated with the service. So when you first visit, whether it's First Bank of Bern, the Federal Communications Commission, AudioEye's website itself, Mutual of Omaha, Omaha is also protected, so big insurance companies. So there's a lot of sites out there that are starting to use the AudioEye tool. It provides you with some help screens that walk you through, and so you can play around with this on your own after the webinar is over just to kind of see how it works. But this explains how the actual tool works. It kind of explains what these little icons mean, gives you some description of You know, how can you navigate the site? What sort of page elements are there? You've got some custom settings that you can set. So there's a help desk area that you can go to that gives you the accessibility options. You can see that there's certification down here. So this is the— what you ultimately want to have, not only for your site visitors, but if you've been approached by a law firm claiming disability discrimination, This is a nice statement that you can go back that just says, you know, the site's been certified accessible. It's received automated as well as manual testing. So part of the AudioEye service involves manual testing where individuals with disabilities will visit the site and browse it to make sure that the technology that is in place is actually doing what it's supposed to do. So you get that validation process. Again, the alternative is to have a report run, work with your web development firm, fix the things manually in the HTML code, and then hire a company that has individuals with disabilities to browse the site to test it for you, provide feedback. That feedback then is taken back to your web development company, fixes are made, testing is done again. So it can be a rather convoluted and time-consuming process. And time is money, obviously, both from an expense perspective is you have to pay people to do all of this. But the longer your site remains non-compliant, the more exposure that you have and the more risk that you have to lawsuits and other sorts of financial damages. The other important thing that I think is worth noting is, is when we were doing our webinar back in January, statistically speaking, 20% of the American population which is about 50-53 million people, have some form of a disability that presents a challenge to them using electronic, digital, website, whatever you want to call it. And so there's a business advantage here as well, whereas if you make your site more accessible and you are able to accommodate visitors that may have some sort of a disability, you could potentially be opening up your service to to an additional market area that previously was not able to buy through you, learn about your service. So there are some economic reasons why. And one of the things that the folks at AudioEye say is if you look 30 years down the road as to will accessibility be baked into everything, I don't think that there's a question that at some point accessibility is going to have to be there, whether it's mandated by the law now is something that comes along in 2018 or it takes another couple of years. At some point, I don't think anybody can really argue the fact that the web really needs to be an accessible experience for everybody. And when we had the individual on our webinar and he was talking about how he browses the web and uses his iPhone to read back information. He even made the comment that he does not bank with a US-based financial institution because he's not found one that has an online banking service that supports an accessible experience. He actually banks with a bank out of the Netherlands because that's the only institution that he's found that's been able to give him an environment where he's comfortable if he goes in and pays a bill or does a balance transfer that it's not going to mess up. and send $2,500 instead of $250 to somebody. So my eyes certainly have been opened to this issue as I've learned more about it. With the original, hey, I just want to defend my clients and make sure that they can provide necessary information to refute a lawsuit, to there's really a market out there that experiences some challenges with the web. And Jeff, You know, you and I probably take that for granted. We hop on our phones, we hop on the browser on the computer, and we just get what we want, look at what we want. But videos, audio, images, that's all a foreign concept to folks that have disabilities. So this is kind of the lay of the land here, so you can walk through the different little elements that the AudioEye tool provides. One of the services that I found early on when I was testing and doing some kind of just ballpark, okay, what does a website actually have as exposure, is a tool called WebAIM. And this is pretty popular. Many of you that are on the webinar listening to the recording may have actually heard of these folks. WebAIM is a company that I've actually talked to the folks out of Utah. They've got a comprehensive certification program that you can go out and you can actually go to the their training sessions for 3 days. And so this is where if you really want to bake it into the original, like from the ground up, they can help provide some training in that area. But they've got a really cool little tool on their WebAIM site called their WAVE, Website Accessibility Evaluation Tool. So if you visit webaim.org, if you go down here and you just plug in any sort of a website address, and I'm going to show you a different way that I do it as well using a Chrome plugin. But if I go down here and I take First Bank of Berne, for example, and I have WebAIM do an evaluation of the site, what they're doing is they're loading the site up before the AudioEye JavaScript is able to fix any of the problems as part of the service. So when WebAIM pulls up, and you'll notice that AudioEye has not been enabled here because the little accessibility toolbar is not part of the site. You can see on the left-hand side, the WAVE tool actually detects that there's 6 errors on the site. And as you kind of browse through the site, you can go in— excuse me— you can go in and you can take a look at the flags and you can see what the problems specifically are. This gives you a nice little peek behind the scenes where you can go in and take a look at some of the code-level issues that are having problems. And so, depending on how geeky you want to get, this can be a service that you can kind of use at a very high level. It doesn't catch everything. It is a free tool, so you kind of have to understand that. But if you're looking to get kind of a big picture of how your organization's website is positioned related to Web Content 2.0 accessibility, this is a good way to at least start the process. And so, some of these things— now, the downside it looks at one page at a time, it doesn't give you everything. You take a look at, you know, small text, redundant title text, other sorts of things that are part of all this. You know, there are issues here that the service has found. If we run that same tool, and I'm going to go ahead and close the Ally toolbar here, but if we run that same tool, you'll see that I have a little plugin on my Chrome that says it's the WAVE tool, and this is going to check first bank of burn after AudioEye has done its thing. So if an organization hires AudioEye, it takes about 100 days for their team to make the necessary updates and modifications to the JavaScript that sits on top of the website to make sure that the site is compliant. And so if we go in now that AudioEye has done its job and we take a look at the exact same website and it's a important to know is the web developer behind the scenes, we didn't go into the website and make any changes to the code itself, which is what this report— this is a report looking at the actual HTML code on the site. So you can see that there are still infractions and we didn't go through, but what we've done is we're using a technology that helps us maintain compliance. So if we run the WAVE tool against the site, with AudioEye enabled, you can see that there's, there's 3 error messages that show up here. And some of these may be related, and I've got a couple little plugins that I've installed within my browser that are kind of causing some false positives here. But we've dropped it down to significantly fewer error messages than what were on the report itself when you ran it through The actual tool, and you see 6 versus 3, and then some of these are just kind of some walkthroughs. And I think that actually has a— let me go ahead and just do a refresh here because I think that's related to the AudioEye service itself. So let me just do a refresh on the page. So we're going to refresh that page, disable the AudioEye, which might have been conflicting, and when this gets reloaded, We'll do the wave assessment again. So now we go through. So now you can see that the site has zero errors. It was caching some of the AudioEye services that I had activated before. So nothing like a live show to kind of throw you a little bit of a curveball, because when I was doing my testing before, it came up as zero and The 3 kind of threw me for a loop, but you can see now that there are no error messages. We do have a few areas here where we talk about some elements that relate to different sorts of navigational items, some other alternatives to being able to browse, but that's where when we start taking a look at the actual AudioEye tool itself, really come to play. So let's say somebody has a hard time telling the difference between blue and white, and that would kind of be a problem for First Bank of Bern because that's kind of their brand. So within the AudioEye tool now, we can go in, and I'm going to walk through a couple of these little tools that provide some additional levels of functionality for the visitor. So you can see the first time I used any of the tools, the AudioEye system is going to provide kind of some instructions to say, hey, you've turned on the reader. Would you like to learn a little bit more about the reader and what it does? So it's going to share with you some information. So this draws attention to the text element down on the bottom, which you can see is marked by number 1 there. You can see number 2, you've got the ability to change the font style. Number 3, you have the ability to change the color and the contrast. So it kind of gives you all that information. So if we scroll through this and we decide, you know what, I want to view this a little differently, I want to make the font a little bit larger, maybe I'm an older customer, I have a hard time reading, it's all the same information. The URL has not changed. So from a Google perspective, when you start thinking about things like search engine optimization, we're not redirecting the visitor to a different kind of disability equals yes version of the website. Everything is being done in real time. We can go through and we can change the font style. So you can go from the default serif to a sans serif. You can also go to this font, which is actually a font designed for individuals that have dyslexia. You'll notice that the font is a little bit heavier on the bottom. So you can change a little bit more about this OpenDyslexic font. And then lastly is we have the ability to give somebody the ability to change the entire look and feel of the website where they can pick their particular colors, which are all selected based off of kind of the analysis and what people prefer to read. So this is a better way for you to read because you may be sensitive to bright lights and maybe bright lights triggers migraines or possibly a seizure. You can go in and you can actually tone down the website and you can read the information with white text on a darker background. And that gives you the ability to consume that in a little bit better way that might not be as, you know, I don't want to say offensive, but it might not be as problematic as looking at the site with big white background colors. A couple of the other services that are part of this that I'm not going to Joe on the webinar because sometimes that doesn't come through real well. But as you kind of look at any of these pages, you have the ability to click the play button, and this essentially turns your web content into its own little mini podcast, sometimes I like to say. So if somebody either they, they can't see the information and they want to just have it read back to them, or somebody that may have a cognitive disability or some sort of a learning disability that doesn't allow them to read very well, They can go through and they can play the information and the website will actually talk to them and tell them what's on the pages. You also have, and this is currently in beta right now, but you have voice navigation capability. So assuming that you're using a device that has a microphone input, you can go through and you can turn this on and you can kind of talk to it. It uses speech recognition technology very similar to Siri. Which, by the way, many of you probably are iPhone users and you utilize Siri, or if you're Android, you've got your Android Assistant. But many may not realize that when Siri was actually conceived by the folks at Apple, it wasn't originally designed as a tool that everybody in the world would use. They didn't realize that non-disabled individuals would actually like to have voice navigation capability. They developed Siri as an assistive technology for individuals with disabilities to help them use their iPhone or their iPad devices. And so what we think is being just kind of a cool little virtual assistant tool was actually created under the accessibility or the usability banner, and consumers just kind of adopted it and said, yeah, this is really cool. And in past episodes here at Free Webinar Wednesdays, we've talked about the power Of voice-driven devices. One of the last shows that we did was with Greg McPherson. Jeff and I actually talked about the Alexa app and how it actually is being able— I just said the A-word and she just lit up on my desk, so she'll probably stop paying attention to me and say she can't hear me now. But how the Amazon Echo device is being used from a voice navigation perspective. So all of these things have kind of their roots in the whole concept of accessibility and usability. So the voice navigation, I actually saw a demo of this when I was in San Antonio with the folks at AudioEye, and they had it installed on Netflix, and you were actually able to navigate through Netflix without any special app, you're on the Netflix website, you enable the voice nav, you could say, Netflix, go to romantic comedies, or Netflix, scroll down, or Netflix, play Orange is the New Black. And the AudioEye solution was taking your commands, feeding it directly into the website, and allowing the website to then react to you just as if you were navigating it with your mouse and your keyboard. And so the additional layers of functionality that are now possible with a JavaScript solution like AudioEye really are kind of mind-blowing. The next item that's on the list is the help desk. So one of the things that also came out as part of my research was if somebody goes to your website and they for whatever reason can't consume, read, listen to whatever your information, you need to provide some means of them contacting you. And while you can certainly use your contact us form and direct them there, what AudioEye does as part of their subscription process is they provide an accessibility help desk where if somebody has a specific accessibility issue, they can go directly to this form and fill it out. And they can say, I'm using JAWS reader, for example, I'm trying to get to a particular page or read a particular blog post and it's not working for me. So the AudioEye team gets that and as your accessibility department, if you will, goes in, analyzes the situation. It might be something that you recently just added to the site, but they go in and they actually fix the problem and make it accessible. And so the help desk is another great function that they provide as part of their service. Starting up at the top, you can kind of get an idea of the navigation. So you've got the main menu, you've got the utility menu, you've got footer menus. So it takes all the navigational elements that are part of the website. So if you are somebody that's interested in getting access to business information, you can click on that. It takes you to the business page, and then it remembers that you have the accessibility service turned on so that it automatically converts it and turns it on. So now you can see that here's the bank's information, all related to their business banking services. And if I'm interested in business loans, I can click on the Learn More. It goes to the Loans and Lines page and then turns it into an accessible solution. And so then you've got the accessibility to all that. I can click play. So, as you can see, it's— and at any point you can turn that off and it takes you to the normal looking page, or you can turn it on. Turn into reader mode, and it takes that back. Notice again the importance, because I've found tools out there that would provide alternate versions of the website, and that's been kind of deemed as not best practice because in an accessibility lawsuit, that opens the opportunity for somebody to claim that they're getting different content than somebody that does not have disability. So if I'm blind, why are you taking me to a special page that has information only for blind people? And does that information have the exact— does that page have the exact same information as the sighted page does? And you need to be able to prove that. In this instance, the AudioEye technology just basically takes that off the table. It's not an issue. There's different page elements. So this gives you the ability to go top of page, different elements you can skip right down to the main content. So that's another accessible item. Imagine if you are browsing a site and every page that you load— because what an accessible reader does is it starts at the top, reads its way down. And if, if I already know that this page has locations, financial calculators, contact us, site search, login, every time I load a page It has to read through all of that information. But really what I'm interested in is I want to know what sorts of information this bank or this business provides about business loans or whatever your, your business is. So I need to have an easy way to give an individual with a disability the option to skip to the main content. And so that's essentially what we're doing here is through that different elements, we can skip right down to the main content. get into the content information, content info. Other sorts of settings with regards to reader and player, so you can do voice training. And then there's always a help area here. So, Jeff, I'm gonna hit pause again because I know I just dropped a whole lot more information. If there's any of those functions that might require an additional little review or if you've got questions, and again, if you're listening live and you've got a question, Please feel free to go ahead and toss it into the chat area for us.

So, that was an excellent overview. One thing I'm going to ask you to address is you mentioned there's a 100-day implementation period. Talk a little bit about when there are site updates made and how the tool accommodates those. Sure.

So one of the things that— and I'll give you an example of a bank right now that is in the process of getting its site completely certified. So depending on when you watch this review, it may already be in Phase 3, but Level One Bank has the AudioEye service enabled, and if you go and you take a look at their accessibility icon, you'll notice it doesn't have a little check mark. It's got the little kind of the edgy ribbon around it, but we don't have a little check mark. And if you click on that, you'll see— and for anybody that's using the accessibility tool from AudioEye, it can either be just the AudioEye accessible guy, it could be with the edge, or it can have a little check mark. And it's either in Phase 1, Phase 2, as in the case of the Level 1 bank, or Phase 3. So I mentioned it takes about 100 days. When the AudioEye JavaScript is on the website itself, one of the things that it does is it also monitors for site changes and updates. So whether it's Level 1 or First Bank of Bern or the FCC or anybody, when a page update gets done, let's say somebody goes in and they do a blog post or they post a new news release, that signifies to the AudioEye system that new content has been added to the site, and that triggers a review by one of the AudioEye people, and they can take a look at it. They can see whether the technology actually fixes it or if they're going to have to get in and do a manual remediation of the image, of a link, of the page structure, whatever the case is, so that again, they're not getting access to your website, which is an important compliance concern, particularly in the banking space. One of the things that we wanted to make sure AudioEye could not do is actually get on the website and make changes to the HTML, because then that opens up an opportunity for changes to login code or other sorts of information, which we really, you know, we fully trust and support AudioEye, and we knew that that wouldn't be an issue, but that's just one more compliance issue that we would have to address. So they're not actually getting on the site and making changes to the HTML, but they're getting on the site through the JavaScript overlay and making sure that what ultimately is presented to the visitor has the appropriate information. So it may not happen instantaneously. So if you post a new blog and you forget to put the information, you know, correctly, and you, you add an image that doesn't have an alternate text description to it, it may take a day or so for the AudioEye team to catch that, investigate it, remediate it, and update it. But over time, the tool itself ensures that any new content through this JavaScript overlay is identified, analyzed, and then updated so that it maintains that compliance. And that's one of the reasons why when you're in Phase 3, they can come back and say this site is certified web content accessibility compliant as it relates to kind of the WCAG 2.0 AA standard. Okay?

Perfect.

Cool. Good question. So there's a couple of questions in the chat area that I see related to cost. And, you know, it is an annual subscription. It is not You know, $1.99. But before I answer that question, what I want to make sure people understand is first having an understanding of what the alternative is. And I've talked already about, you know, having an organization come in and do a report for $4,000 or $5,000 or $6,000 and just tell you what's broke, and then going back to your web company and then figuring out a plan of attack. To get that taken care of. I've seen some vendors that have, you know, bragged about the fact that within 9 months we were able to make our site fully compliant because it took them that long versus 100 days. You also have to think about the potential risk or threat of lawsuit, legal costs, court costs. If you get found guilty or liable, you've got damages. So, so when you compare what the actual costs are to this, you just need to make sure that you're doing an apples-to-apples comparison. So I will tell you, with the financial institutions that we have worked with, they've all been in the $10,000 annual range. So for small businesses, that may seem like a huge nut to crack and may not be within budget. And I totally understand that. In those instances, having a strategy where you can work closely with your web development company, maybe a comprehensive report with some additional information, and then a plan of kind of addressing certain high-level things first and rolling it out. If you don't have the money or the resources, you at least need to have some sort of a risk-based approach to this. So that if you do get sued and you get drug into court, you can tell the judge, we've looked at this. We've paid a couple thousand bucks to have a report run. We've had meetings internally to talk about how we can address the big picture issues, and we've got a schedule to have those in place by the end of third quarter or the end of fourth quarter of 2017. What you don't want is for a lawsuit to show up on your door, and the first time that you're really talking about this, is when you're standing before the judge and saying, you know, well, we had no idea that this was going on, we didn't understand it, because then that's going to show negligence on your part and it's going to be harder to defend yourself as opposed to we've got a strategy, money doesn't grow on trees, we're not exactly sure how we're going to make all of these changes, but we've identified at least the big ones and we're going to, you know, quote unquote, eat the elephant one bite at a time and take the big bites first. I will tell you their service can range. We've got a partnership with AudioEye that allows us to offer some pretty competitive pricing, and for anybody that's a Free Webinar Wednesday subscriber, they'd be happy to extend that competitive pricing to you if you'd like to work through us, or if you reach out to the folks at AudioEye directly, if you'd like to mention WSI, and that can also So kind of get you into that group or that category. But they've done projects that have been tens of hundreds of thousands of dollars for sites that have multiple sites. And when you look at it as a risk-based approach, even paying that much money on an annual basis and the insulation and the guarantee that you have on an ongoing basis to eliminate that. Many of our clients just a few years ago didn't have cyber risk liability insurance or identity theft risk liability insurance, and they're now having to add those sorts of services to their, you know, repertoire of business contracts. So this, this may be one of those additional services that businesses are going to have to start thinking about and making budget for. So sometimes it can come in a little less than that. But not a tremendous amount more. So it's not an inexpensive solution, but it is probably one of the most comprehensive that we've found thus far. So any— if there's any other questions, go ahead and toss them into the chat. I know Jeff has a commitment right at the top of the hour, and he may have actually already departed. I know he had to leave right at 2 o'clock Eastern. So we will go ahead and kind of start wrapping this up. Jeff, is there anything else that you wanted to mention prior to close?

No, I think you have given us a good overview.

Yeah. So if you visit our website at WSI, if you go into the blog, there is a web accessibility blog post that we did back in January, and we have amended that With a link to the accessibility replay, so if you'd like to listen to that again, we did have somebody from the Department of Justice. You can see Chris Hofstetter is the individual that I mentioned earlier who's the blind blogger, and but it's. Particularly with the Winn-Dixie thing now being announced, I thought it was really important to spend a little more time talking about how this is kind of extending into other non-banking related areas and to really share a deep dive on the tool that we actually have come to really love for our clients, and that's through AudioEye. So cool. Well, Jeff, I think we'll wrap it. We'll get you out of here 4 minutes early. Thanks everybody for joining us. The webinar recording will be available at freewebinarwednesdays.com very shortly. So if you'd like to share this with anybody else within your organization, of course, if you'd like to talk a little bit more specifically about any of this, I mentioned our partnership with AudioEye, and I'm happy to extend that. So if you'd like to reach out to me directly, please feel free to do so, and I can answer any other specific questions that you may have. So until then, we'll We'll close for today, and we'll look forward to seeing you next Wednesday here at freewebinarwednesdays.com. Have a great week, everybody. Take care.

Thank you.