The Relevance of Web Accessibility Today

Greetings everybody, welcome to the Wednesday, May 22nd, 2019 episode of Free Webinar Wednesdays. This is Eric Cook with WSI Digital Marketing, and I'm joining you from Memphis, Tennessee. You might hear some background noise. I had a flight here for the Barrett School of— Barrett Graduate School of Banking. Make sure I get that correct. I'm teaching there tomorrow. And my flight was a little delayed and I was not able to get to the hotel, so I found the closest outlet that I could and we're going live from the airport. So if you hear background noise or announcements, I apologize right now, but I just wanted to let you know that's where I am located and looking forward to my class tomorrow. Going to talk to a bunch of bankers on digital marketing and social media. I've got the whole morning with them and we're going to go through some The digital dozen. We're going to talk about personas. We're going to talk about personal branding. So all sorts of cool stuff. So pretty excited, but that's where I am. And again, apologize in advance for the background noise, but that's one of the joys of doing a live show, and that's just what we're going to have to deal with today. So with that out of the way, I would like to thank those of you that are joining me live for today's show. If you have questions, comments, thoughts, please feel free to use the chat. Let me know. And if you're listening to this live, well, you can't really do that, but you can still let me know what you think by shooting me an email at eric@poweredbywsi.com. Today's show is being recorded, and when I have a free moment in spare time, I'll get that and other shows posted up to freewebinarwednesdays.com for you to be able to check out. What I thought I'd talk about today is a few of the things that have come across my desk recently in conversations with, I'd say customers, but I'd also say prospects and folks that we're having initial conversations with that have explored the possibility of working with us. And some of the articles that I've caught and things that I've read and just kind of put some things on your radar screen for the rest of the week to think about. So first item that I've got up here, you'll see, is an article from Search Engine Journal. And this is one of the feeds that I get pulled into my Flipboard as well as my Google News reader, because I've got SEO as being a, uh, an item that I like to keep on top of. It certainly changes on a pretty regular basis. So Search Engine Journal is a great little website that talks a lot about, no surprise, search engine strategies and trends as it relates to SEO and paid search. But I caught an article that came along with regards to ADA and website accessibility. It's been a while since I've talked about that. And those of you that maybe have influence or oversight over your organization's website, this is certainly something that you want to make sure is on your radar screen. Because while there's no formal law on the books yet, there has been precedent set in the courts, and businesses have been successfully sued and settled for thousands of dollars. in the courts of law here in the United States as it relates to web accessibility issues under what's referred to as WCAG 2.0 Level AA standards, which is Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. So a little backstory on the reason that this kind of cropped up. I mean, first off, I saw the article, so it got me thinking about it, but then it was pretty ironic that one of the companies that we partner up with— and there's There's an announcement coming over the, uh, the news here, so I'm gonna give it a quick second to let that wrap up. Let me put you on mute and I will be right back. Okay. All right, sorry about that announcement. Anyway, what I was saying is when this article came in, it piqued my interest for a couple of reasons. One is one of the partner companies that we do some work with sent me a note and said one of their clients actually is being sued. And as I found out when we had further conversation, for the second time. for web accessibility violations, and I'm not going to disclose or divulge who that is, but suffice to say, this was something that they weren't really excited about. They thought they had it fixed, and apparently they didn't because another law firm found some problems and sent them another demand letter, and they've settled. And what we found out as we explored kind of the terms of their settlement is they settled under the current guidelines— well, I guess current as of maybe June of last year, I referred to WCAG 2.0 or Level 2.0 status. In June of last year, Web Content Accessibility Guidelines were updated to 2.1, which basically gave the standards a refresh because the original 2.0 were created 10 years prior in 2008. So when we dove in, and the hope was that, you know, we're not going to get sued again because we've settled for this 2.0. It was under 2.0 guidelines, and 2.1 introduced a variety of new elements, particularly in the area of interactive design and mobile, which really weren't around, or if they were, they weren't nearly as powerful as they are today. And so now the risk exists for that organization to potentially be sued again when 2.1 standards become the accepted norm. So they were really interested in what could be done to insulate them from being sued. Now, there's nothing that you can do to prevent somebody from suing you. It's a litigious society in which we live. We don't have any way of preventing that, but you can certainly increase the odds in your favor that if you do get sued, you're going to have a defendable position to be able to fight back and say that web accessibility is indeed something that you are concerned about and working to mitigate. But in this article from Search Engine Journal, it kind of walks through some of the elements of a good old-fashioned, um, how do you, how do you fix things at the code level. It talks about things like color and contrast and ARIA labels and alternate text over images. And while those are certainly an important element In the development process, one of the challenges that any organization has, if you're building a website or you have a website built for you, and that website is being changed or updated or modified on a continual basis through a content strategy, which could be supporting a formal SEO effort. But ultimately, any website in today's day and age really needs to be one that's being updated on a frequent basis to show not just customers, but certainly the Google bots and other search engines that the website is one that's becoming, you know, a good trusted resource. So as you introduce new content, there certainly is an opportunity for new content to be introduced and is not accessibly compliant, and that creates problems. So as we talked, and I've mentioned it here before, but for those of you that haven't been part of my ADA accessibility ramblings and soapboxing, one of the companies that we've chosen to partner with, with our customers primarily in the financial services space, although I will tell you the company that we spoke with yesterday is not in the banking space, outside of the world of banking, and they're still getting sued for ADA and accessibility. So this is something that doesn't just involve the banking world in which I live primarily, is a company called AudioEye. And if you were to Hop over to our website there at poweredbywsi.com/ada. We have an actual page with some information related to web accessibility, some downloadable tools from some platforms that we've looked at. But more importantly, there is a 23-minute and 6-second video overview of how the AudioEye tool works using the FCC's Consumer Complaint Center as an example. Now one of the things that's interesting is this video has been around for a while. Since the video was actually created and I did the tutorial, the FCC entirely, the entire Federal Communications Commission, has decided to embrace the AudioEye technology to make its entire website, not just the Consumer Complaints Division, ADA accessible under WCAG 2.0 Level AA standards. And so if you were to go out and visit the FCC.gov website, you will see the AudioEye tool there. I'm not going to go through a full-blown demonstration, but the thing that I want to draw to your attention— and it all is going to depend because AudioEye is based off of an annual subscription. It's not exactly an inexpensive solution, but compared to a lawsuit, it's definitely better than getting sued and suffering not only the financial but the reputational damages that come along with a lawsuit. But for a business that feels that this is something that is worth it, The AudioEye solution basically mitigates accessibility issues using JavaScript technology and an overlay that sits on top of your website. And over about a 100-day period, it learns what's going on on your website— the menus, the structure, the colors, the content, the navigation— and it creates a version of your website that is presented to visitors that are using assistive technology. That have some form of a disability that gives them a version of your website that meets those WCAG guidelines. And because it's set up as an annual subscription model, that platform remains active on your website on an ongoing basis, making sure that any new content that you add is automatically taken care of. Now, you can certainly do that with some internal training. You can develop staff skills. You can work with a web development company that's familiar with those manual elements, and if they're the ones that are doing the updates or you're doing it, you can certainly take that responsibility on yourself. But this is a tool that we've used, and a vast majority of our clients are using this to help them not only make sure that their website is initially compliant, but they have ongoing compliance as well. So it's a, it's a pretty important element that you need to start thinking about. I would encourage you to go out and check out the Search Engine Journal article here and kind of read through that and then just do some just good old-fashioned Google searching on ADA, web accessibility, web accessibility lawsuits, web accessibility technology, because it is an important thing not only from a, hey, we don't want to get sued perspective, but from just a customer service perspective. Almost 20% of the population here in the United States has some form of a disability that would or could preclude them from browsing the internet or using digital technology the way that we normally assume that it can be used if we're fortunate to have all of our faculties. And so blind, deaf, ambulatory, cognitively disabled— those are the 4 main categories. You know, several, close to 50 million people in the United States have some sort of a disability. So not only is it a good thing to do to keep you from being sued, but it could potentially open your organization up to some opportunities with some clients that maybe couldn't do business with you previously or choosing not to do business with someone that they're doing business with now and looking for a new solution, and that could be you. So check those out, hop over and check out the video if you'd like to take a look at that. If you'd like to talk specifically, have us run maybe a couple of analysis tools against your site just to give you a ballpark idea of that would be awesome and we'd be happy to do that. Next on the list, and I've got 2 things, 2 more things I want to talk about. One is dual login authentication and personal branding. We are working with a couple of banks now and helping to develop personal Facebook pages for their lenders so that they can have a page that represents the loan officer on Facebook, which gives the organization a little bit more control some access. You can do some auditing, you can run advertising against them. And what's going to happen is they're going to make the lenders, as well as the marketing and compliance people, administrators of these pages so that they can go in and add content and post information. And then, um, you know, everybody will be managing these lender pages as as company pages, but really with a focus on building up the identity or the branding for that individual lender. So before you go ahead and start doing this in your own organization, or if you've got administrative access to any social media site, or even your own personal ones, which I would strongly recommend because I've had a number of conversations with people who've had their social media profiles taken over because of an email password compromise. I would strongly encourage you, and we're putting it into the policy that's going to be part of these banks' programs, that anybody that has administrative access to these pages has to turn on 2-step or 2-factor authentication for logging in. So I'm just going to show you the 2 ways of doing it within Facebook and LinkedIn, because those are the 2 primary platforms that we're going to use for brand building. But all of the networks that are out there today, even Snapchat and Instagram and Pinterest, they all have 2-factor authentication capabilities. So if you visit your Facebook page, or I guess your profile as an individual user, you click on the little dropdown arrow which gets you to your settings. You can go down here and click on settings. This is going to bring you into general and you simply go to security and login and you can see where you have 2-factor authentication. You're going to leverage your mobile device. Or you can also use the Facebook mobile app as an authenticator, and it can generate a secondary password. If your phone sends you a login request code and you have not recently logged into Facebook, that means somebody has your email address and your password, and they are in the process of trying to get into your Facebook account. And if your Facebook account has administrative access to your organization's page, or maybe your church or a nonprofit, Once they get control of your Facebook, they have access to your friends, they have access to your pages, they have access to some personal data. You definitely want to keep the bad guys out. So if you're not doing this, and again, we're keeping Free Webinar Wednesdays closer to the half an hour range, you've got some time before you go back to the real world and dig back into your desk. Go into your Facebook settings and make sure that you register your mobile device, turn on 2-factor authentication, get that set up so that you make sure nobody is going to be able to get in there without a significant fight. The LinkedIn area, very similar. You're going to go to a little dropdown area. You're going to go down to your settings and privacy. That's going to come up. You're going to flip over to your account, and then you're going to scroll down in your account area. Actually, you're not going to do that. You're going to just go right to login and security. I just blew right by it, and those of you that are probably watching the screen probably said, hey, wait a minute, Eric, you're blowing right by it. You're going to go into your settings and privacy. You're going to go to the account, and you can see 2-step verification here is turned on for me as well. It's also a good idea just to go back in and take a look at all of your settings, where you're sharing stuff, who's got access to it. When you make a change to your information, are you posting the updates and sending it all out to the rest of the network? Or is it being kept private? It's not a bad idea to just spend some time every couple of months and make sure that the network didn't reset anything, flip something to the defaults. We've seen that happen before when Facebook's made an update. And after Facebook's F8 conference a few weeks ago, I've not seen anything roll out yet as it relates specifically to privacy, but Wouldn't surprise me if they started making some changes and putting in some new controls, and you may or may not like just the default settings that they add when they add anything new into the platform. So spend some time making sure that you're going to be secure. If you're an active person on Twitter, you're going to want to make sure you take care of that. If you use Instagram, take care of that. But those are a couple of the site examples here just to make sure that you are protected and the bad guys stay out. The last area that I want to talk about as it relates to personal branding, and I've already mentioned Flipboard, I'm not going to go into that today. And if you're not familiar with Flipboard, just go to flipboard.com and pick around content-wise. They're one of the best places that I go when I get articles and inspiration for stuff that I want to share, or if I'm interested in getting just articles for inspiration for a blog post. For example, the Search Engine Journal article that I talked about at the beginning, we're in the process of actually creating a blog blog post sharing some of our perspectives on web accessibility, drawing attention to the AudioEye tool as a potential solution. So they can give you some good inspiration for writing up some articles as well. So as you're thinking about your personal branding efforts, whether it's for you individually or maybe you want to up your game as it relates to your business or your organization, a couple of the Conferences that I've been to recently, and we've got an announcement going on again in the background, so I'm using a noise-canceling headphone. You'll have to let me know whether that really is canceling noise or if it's doing a poor job. But a couple of the conferences that I've been to recently have talked about the importance of video in your social media activities, whether it's native video, whether it's, you know, first person holding your camera in front of you and talking, or it's creating video that you can post out as advertising. There's 3 platforms that I just want to draw your attention to that I think are worth checking out. I believe all of them have a trial that you can use just to kick the tires and see how it works. Promo.com, Wave.video, and either Annie or Annie or Anna, but Animoto. Those are probably 3 of the leading video creation platforms out there. They all work pretty similarly in the sense that they provide you with a backend dashboard that you can select video snippets, you can put text over the top, you can upload your own audio, or you can select audio tracks from within the, within the platform. And it gives you a way of creating something that if it's going to be going into a Facebook newsfeed or you're going to be advertising, video is going to catch an eye and cause people to stop and maybe pay attention to it more so than just traditional images or certainly text. And so if you're not looking at ways to leverage video, these are a couple of the platforms that I would recommend taking a look at. We are likely going to be moving forward here within our office with the Wave.video platform. That seems to be one that is resonating more for us than the other 2, but I've talked to people that have used all 3 of these, and those that have embraced their chosen platform really just seem to love it. So Give those a shot if you're interested in kind of messing around playing with some video. If you create some video and you want to brag or maybe get some feedback, by all means send me a link. I'd love to check it out and give you some thoughts. But PromoWave and Animoto are 3 video platforms that you might want to invest a little bit of time kind of playing around with if you're not the one that really manages the promotional efforts for your organization. I would suggest maybe having some conversations with either the folks that do the marketing, your marketing people within office, your agency, or maybe you're doing some video now and that's great. But these are 3 tools that certainly would encourage you to pass along and have them check out. The last little bonus item, I'm a Buffer user. Buffer is a tool and I've mentioned it in conjunction a lot of times with Flipboard, but Buffer has In case you're not familiar, Buffer gives you the ability to post articles into its platform, and then you can control when those articles actually show up on various social media accounts. So you can set things into Buffer to go to a Facebook page or to a LinkedIn profile or to a Twitter account. Unfortunately, Facebook has cut off the connectivity to third-party apps like Buffer and Hootsuite and others. For personal profiles. So you can't really do that on Facebook to a personal profile, but if you've got pages or LinkedIn or Twitter, it works pretty well. But Buffer has a kind of a, I'll say, a secondary or a sister service called Pablo. And this is a cool little platform that you can use. It doesn't do video, but if you wanted to create some interesting images And I like their quotes, but you can put pretty much anything that you want on an actual image. It doesn't have to be a quote, but if you go to pablo.buffer.com, the first time that you're there, you can just walk through a series of little how-to tips and it gives you some ideas. And this is an interesting way to kind of create just some visual content that you might be able to throw out there just to get people thinking. If you've ever heard me talk, you know that I'm a big fan of golden retrievers. We don't have human kids, we have 4-legged kinds, and 2 of them in the household now. So I just went here and searched for the images and found a golden retriever. You can see tons of golden retriever pictures here that you can pick from, but you could go cycling, fishing, outdoors, whatever it is that you're really looking for. There's a ton of photos in here that you can pick from. So, you just grab a picture, click on it, it uploads it over here so you can kind of see it. And then you have the ability to change the size. So, I'll tell you, I really don't use the Pinterest size, but I will use the square, which, you know, I can grab one of those and send it out. It's primarily for Instagram. And then you've also got kind of more of the landscape, which is good. For Facebook and Twitter. Either one of those you can test and see which one comes across better for LinkedIn if you want to share some of those. You've got some, some basic contrast capabilities here, so you can kind of give it some different tints if you want. And then you also have the ability to control— you can put a header on, you've got the body content, you can drop a caption in there if you want. And then you can scroll through some quotes. So you can find an inspirational quote if you would like to, and maybe, you know, kind of on a Monday morning, kind of flip through these— excuse me— and see maybe if any of these might start your week off on a good note and share it with the audience. Obviously not a lot of salesy schmancy activity going on here, but really more of just a feel-good, set-the-mood type of a post. And then you can also drop in a logo or a graphic if you would like to do so. Clicking on the, the text gives you the ability to select different font styles. You can also make it bold, italics, you can make them larger, you can change the orientation and even the color. So It's a really, really basic image editor, so I like it because it's not super sophisticated. There's not a ton of things that you need to do in order to kick something out that looks pretty cool, but it is kind of an interesting thing that you can use and just kind of gives you a cool way of creating some maybe thought-provoking images. And when you're done, you can simply click here with share and download. Now, if you do have a Buffer account and you want to just share it right through Buffer, you can certainly do that, or you can just click on the share and download. And guess what? You can go ahead and just download the image directly to your computer, and then you've gone ahead and just, you know, grabbed the picture and you can do whatever you want with it at that point. So cool little tool. Again, totally free to use. And this is just kind of an interesting way of giving you some cool images that you can use in setting your brand. You've seen over here, I didn't mention it specifically, but if there's a specific image that you want to use, let's say you had an event over the weekend or, you know, caught a picture that you thought was kind of cool, or maybe I wanted, maybe I wanted my own dogs as opposed to some, some stock photography of golden retrievers. I could go in and I could actually click on upload image and I could put my own images in here as well, and I could use those as part of my posts. So kind of a cool little platform to use. So, and yes, there was a comment that came through the chat that said, surprise, you're using a golden retriever. So yep, not gonna, not gonna hide the fact that I'm a golden retriever lover. So But those are the things that really I just wanted to share with you today. Hopefully they've been helpful. Again, take a peek at web accessibility. It's an important issue, not just from a risk-based perspective, but also from a customer service, making sure that you're serving as broad an audience as you possibly can. If you would like to get a report against your website, or maybe you would like to get a report against your competitor's website too, to see how you stack up, Just get in touch and let me know. There's a form actually on that ADA page that you can fill out and let me know. Make sure to double-check your security settings, get those login authentications in place, play around with some video, and then maybe give Pablo a spin. And if you come up with anything cool or creative, I'd love to see it. Send it my way. Tag me on LinkedIn. Tag me on— Twitter. So with that, I'm gonna go ahead and wrap today's show. I appreciate everybody joining me for this week's webinar. We'll be back next week. Those of you here in the States, enjoy a wonderful 3-day Memorial Day weekend, and we will see you next Wednesday here at freewebinarwednesdays.com. Until then, make it a great week. Talk to you later. Bye. Thank you.