Web Accessibility and ADA Compliance - Some Things You Need to Know

Greetings everybody. Welcome to the Wednesday, January 18th, 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 www.poweredbywsi.com. With me back this week, I flew solo last week and talked all about Mighty Pixel and Daydream and virtual reality and Facebook video, etc. But Jeff Simpkins with Community Bank Consulting, my good friend and Free Webinar Wednesday partner, is back in the saddle and with me today. Jeff, say hello to everybody out there in Free Webinar Wednesday's world.

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

So where were you galavanting off to last week, Jeffrey? We missed you.

I had some North Carolina-based stuff going on that I had to deal with last week.

Gotcha. Well, I know you do not have a Pixel phone. You have an iPhone. And I know a few other people that have iPhones who I have shared my little Daydream viewer virtual reality. And everybody that has seen it so far has been scurrying around trying to figure out how they can get something just as cool for their iPhone.

I saw an end cap that the Pixel was promoted at inside Best Buy. Yeah. Yep.

So we actually— I mentioned this last week, but we've got a museum that we work with, and I've been kind of going around taking a look at some different ways to do virtual tours. And there's a couple of software providers out there that have got some pretty hardcore cameras that will take interior renderings and then create a virtual 3D model of your office, of your home, of your museum, or wherever you want. And they are— they call them Cardboard because that's the predecessor to the Daydream, but they're Cardboard and VR compatible. So if you've got one, you can go ahead and put it on and jump into any of these places and immerse yourself in wherever you want to go. You can just do it on your phone and use your finger and drag things around.

I think it was the New York Times that a year or two ago added some sort of virtual reality experience for their subscribers. They sent out the The little cardboard viewer things that were the original virtual reality tools. Yep.

Yeah, it's pretty amazing. And CNN, Wall Street Journal, Fox, a lot of the different news channels are creating virtual reality experiences for people to consume their news. So instead of just seeing a picture in a news story, you're actually right in the middle of it. And I even stumbled upon a video series that's Sponsored by Lexus, which has got probably 15-minute little vignettes, almost like a little mini soap opera with some sci-fi focus to it. But you are in the actual scene. So my wife kind of was making fun of me the other day because I was sitting in the chair and she was watching regular television and I was sitting in the chair. And when somebody comes on camera, normally when you're watching it on a television, they just, you know, everything happens right in front of you. But in a 360-degree environment, there's people that are engaging behind behind you, off to the side. They're walking from right to left. And so, in order to really be part of or to see the entire film or movie or whatever show that's going on, you've got to swivel. And if you're not careful, you can hurt your neck. So, but yeah, so that was a fun show last week, and I've really been enjoying the whole VR. My wife and I are now on the hunt for a 360-degree virtual reality camera. Unfortunately, I can't get the Samsung because I don't have a Samsung phone, but we're hopefully going to find some cool ones out there. So maybe we need to invite Greg McPherson back on the show and have him do a little gadget guru with us. Well, let's go ahead and we will officially kind of kick things off. I know we did not get a chance to post what the show is about today, so those of you that have shown up live, you're kind of rolling the dice here, but we've got some stuff that we want to talk about as a follow-up to a webinar that WSI Corporate did last week on a pretty important topic related to ADA and accessibility. We'll walk through some of those things, kind of a recap of the webinar, because I'm seeing some names on Free Webinar Wednesdays that might not have been in the webinar, so it's good to kind of spread the word on this. So those of you that are joining live, thank you for coming and showing up. A couple of housekeeping items, as you may suspect, Seeing the Free Webinar Wednesday site, all of our shows are recorded and made available for playback. So if you'd like to go back and check a show out, or if you didn't happen to catch all my chitchat regarding Pixel and Daydream and Facebook Live video, you can watch last week's show. And then if you are attending live and have a comment, question, thought, would like to share something, we love it when the live audience participates as well. So please feel free to go ahead and use the chat function and let us know. We would love to hear from our live audience. If you are listening to this as a recording, you are not going to have that option. Join us live next time. With that, let's go ahead and kick off what I wanted to talk about today. That is the whole concept of ADA disability accessibility, web content accessibility, WCAG, If you go on the internet and you do WCAG 2.0, you do a search for that. The existing standard, and if you are not familiar with web content accessibility and ADA as it relates to digital properties, think about the ADA and the Americans with Disabilities Act as it relates to physical properties. Most of you are probably part of a business, maybe manage a business. Maybe have overseen some sort of remodeling or construction or build project, and when that happens in the physical world, I think everybody has a pretty clear understanding and appreciation that there are certain requirements that one has to meet in order to ensure that people with disabilities are going to be easily accommodated. You've got doorway widths that have to meet a certain inch measurement so that it accommodates wheelchairs, assisted bars in restrooms, ramps that. are only a certain slope so that wheeled devices can get up them with minimal effort. And so all of those things that are going on in the physical world certainly make a tremendous amount of sense to us, and they're tangible. We can see them. We can touch them. The banking industry, which obviously Jeff and I do a lot of work in, got hit probably 2, 3, maybe 4 years ago by a round of law firms claiming disability discrimination because ATM machines and other electronic banking options didn't have Braille keypads or headjacks for audio devices. And these very similar— very same law firms are now going through those lists of banks that they sent letters to and tried to sue, now claiming disability discrimination for websites. And so this web content accessibility ADA for individuals with disabilities is becoming a pretty hot button. And unlike ATM machines, where unless you owned a convenience store and had an ATM machine that you were using to provide quick cash for your customers, you probably as a business weren't really impacted by the last round of lawsuits and letters. But everybody, I would say these days, every business has a website, and it's education, it's nonprofit, it's government, it's small business, it's ecommerce, it's financial. I mean, you name it, a website really is not insulated from this. And so because we work with a lot of community banks, this kind of drove me into the learning process much faster than others because we started getting some of our banking clients receiving these letters demanding settlement from law firms claiming representation of the disabled. Plaintiff that was claiming that they couldn't use the bank's website. So I took it upon myself to really try to get an education. So if you go through and you take a look at web content accessibility, just do WCAG 2.0. The World Wide Web Consortium is kind of a governing organization that kind of oversees web standards, if you will. At this point in time, the Department of Justice— we actually had a representative from the Department of Justice as well as somebody, an individual who is blind. His name is Chris Hofstetter, and he has written a handful of blog posts being somewhat caustic against these ADA troll lawyers going after businesses trying to seek monetary damages and not necessarily in it to provide a way to get to accessible, but looking at it more as a way to go and actually try to extort— is what a lot of people have called it— money from these businesses and financial institutions. So without formal guidance by the Department of Justice and the ADA as it relates to digital, everything's kind of falling back to the W3C and their Web Content Accessibility Overview. So if you like to probably learn more than you ever want to learn about web content accessibility, you can go through here. This Web Content Accessibility at a Glance is a helpful little guide where it talks about the 4 main areas that a website has to make sure that it's perceivable, operable, understandable, and robust. And so all of the elements that are required under WCAG 2.0 are really kind of in these 4 main categories. And so businesses are kind of struggling with, you know, how to go about actually maintaining compliance and understanding what they need to do, what they should do, what they should plan for. And so I'm going to just kind of flip over to our website here because I've created a page. As I've come across helpful information and resources out there, I've come across Lots of good downloadable documents, some toolkits. I've got a link to that Web 2.0 or the WCAG 2.0 at a glance in the body of the helpful documents area. And so you can use this as a resource if you want to kind of get some more information. I've also got a demonstration of a technology that can provide assistance on not only making your website compliant but also being involved on a regular basis or an ongoing basis to help ensure compliance so that any new content that you add actually is compliant, even if you as a business owner, your marketing company, your web firm, whoever is maintaining your website and adding content. That's one of the biggest challenges around all of this is in the physical world when you build a building or remodel or put on an addition and you make sure the doorways are a certain width and everything else that meets ADA requirements, That building or that addition or that physical property is not going to change. You're not going to see that information. You know, it's not information that's being updated and modified like a website. But because society is so digitized these days and there's so much information that people are now getting on the web, I mean, for us, they just think of how much Christmas shopping we did this year using Amazon and other online retailers. As opposed to going out into the physical world and visiting the mall and going to stores. You know, I think that's a trend in society, which is why this is becoming, you know, much more of a hot issue, because people are using the web and digital much, much more, and there's really no signs of that actually slowing down. So there's some resources here, and I'll maybe take some time if we do have some time, I'll pull up kind of a demonstration, but you can watch this video kind of after the fact, or you can certainly rewatch this webinar. But if you go right to the ADA page on our website, you'll be able to check that out. The other thing that I wanted to draw attention to is the webinar that we did on Friday. I have a brief little write-up about it here, and this actually talks about the speakers that we had. And if you're interested in getting a copy, the webinar is over, But if you're interested in getting a link to the webinar recording, or we also made an offer that you could get a complimentary assessment of your website, I'll show you how you can actually find that. But we had our co-founder and CEO, Mark Dobson, actually kick things off. And WSI, being a global collection of digital marketing agencies, has been in the space for 21 years. We've been involved in the European area and in Canada where the ADA equivalent of compliance has been around for a while. And so Mark was able to provide some perspective on the fact that, you know, we've not, you know, been surprised by this. We've been down this road before, and we certainly got some expertise in those areas. And now understanding what relates to the ADA here in the States is just kind of another way of applying that. WSI actually formed a web accessibility subcommittee, and I raised my hand, or maybe I didn't step back fast enough, but I was appointed the chair of that. And I think with the experience that I've been able to amass through my banking work and clients, that kind of puts me, I guess, in a good spot to be able to kind of lead the charge. But we've certainly got a great committee involved in that process. We even have One of our consultants, he is a disabled individual and has provided a really unique perspective because one of the things that I think might get lost in this is doing this just for the sake of saving yourself from being sued kind of takes the humanistic element out of it. And when we started doing some research just in the United States alone, Roughly 53 million people suffer from some form of a disability, maybe 20% of the population. And so that isn't a small number to shake a stick at. And if you can make your website more accessible, that could potentially open your business up to more customers, better revenue opportunities. Not only does it reduce the likelihood that you'll get sued, but there's also some nice even some SEO advantages to taking a look at your accessibility because it reinforces things like descriptions over images and other sorts of stuff that will help educate people when they visit your website. We were able to get somebody directly from the Department of Justice. Amanda Mazels was with us, who is the Deputy Chief in the Disability Rights Section. She actually kicked things off and provided an excellent overview of the Americans with Disabilities Act Title I, II, and III and kind of painted the picture around where we're at today, what is law, what is recommended. And despite the fact that there's no formal, formal law in place, there are several organizations that have been taken to court, and I think Target is the largest one out there, over $9 million judged against them in a case against the American Federation for the Blind. It's not one that you can— if you get a letter, you can just kind of toss it in the wastebasket and not worry about it. There needs to be some sort of reaction on your part, and the best way to prevent one of those from showing up is to embrace more of a proactive approach, to take a look and see what your website currently stands at from a compliance perspective. I'll show you a free tool that we've used as well that's just a nice kind of high-level overview. And then Chris Hofstetter, who again I mentioned is an advocate for the blind and others with disabilities, he's written a couple of pretty interesting articles referring back to Carlson Lynch, the law firm that's kind of getting most of the press out of the Pittsburgh area that's going after a lot of the community banks. But there are other firms that he's also found out of Miami and Some in the Texas area that are going after businesses. I think he mentioned on the webinar one of the cases with this law firm down in the Miami area was actually settled out of court, I believe he said, but it was a local pizza shop that had a website and they got sued and they had to settle. So it's not just the banks and the big boys that are getting these letters. It's all different types of organizations. So this is a post that just kind of sets the stage and talks a little bit about the info. If you visit our website, and I don't have a public link on this, it was sent out automatically to folks that were able to register, but if you go to our website and you just type the word recap and you do a search on our site for the word recap, you will get A search result that will come back and it will give you the link to the WSI ADA Accessibility Webinar Recap page. So that will take you to the page where you can go in and that will give you access to the video recording of the webinar we did last Friday, as well as the ability to download the complete slide deck. So we had some slides, WSI, to kick things off. Amanda had a nice slide deck that she presented from the Department of Justice, and then Chris also had some talking points that we went through as well. So you can get that information, and one of the things that was recommended kind of as a wrap-up is if this is something that is brand new to you, starting to amass information about this issue, links to webinars, document notes that you've had conversations, you've learned about it, you've visited, you've done some reading, you've got some slides, start collecting that information because a couple months down the road if you do happen to be an unfortunate receiver of one of these demand letters, you can at least use that as evidence that you were in the process of amassing some information, developing a plan, doing your research. It may not necessarily totally insulate you from being sued, but it's better than not having anything in place and having your word against the attorney and saying, well, you didn't know anything about this, you were taking no steps whatsoever, where you can actually have documentation that list of the different things that you've done to try to move your website towards an accessible and friendly format. Feel free to take a look at those sorts of things if you would like. I will also mention, up until February 13th, if you are interested, and it is mentioned in the actual recording as well, but if you are interested in getting a complimentary report from our partnership with the folks at AudioEye, you can go to wsiworld.com, if I spell it right, ADA test. So if you go to that page, the fine folks at AudioEye have graciously allowed us to provide a copy of their report that will provide you with some pretty detailed information. The tool that I'm going to show you here in a little bit called WAVE from a company called WebAIM It does a pretty good job on just a page-by-page basis, but what the AudioEye assessment will do for you is it gives you kind of a bigger site picture where it looks at all of your pages and comes back with kind of a, here's all of the issues that we found, and then with some suggested remediation efforts, some links to learn a little bit more about what a particular— why does a form label matter? What's alternate text? What's descriptive information? Those sorts of things. So you can visit this page and then just provide us with your information. This will go into a little reporting process that kicks back to me as the accessibility chairperson, and then we'll coordinate that directly with the folks at AudioEye, and we'll get you a report on your website so that at least you can take that as a first step. And then you can take that back and you can have a conversation with whoever does your website. If you are a WSI customer, you can have a conversation with your consultant. Or if you don't know where to go or what to do, you can certainly, you know, get back in touch and we'll be more than happy to have a conversation and do what we can do to help you along the way. So I'm going to hit pause just because I've been talking for a super long time, and that'll give Jeff an opportunity to take his phone off of mute if he knows that I'm going to say, hey Jeff, do you have any thoughts or comments or observations about what we've talked about thus far?

And I am off mute. So any—

I know we've talked a little bit about this on past shows, but I don't know if you've heard any more about this. I just saw an article the other day about a big school system that got hit with a lawsuit from a parent who— I believe the parent was blind, and they were trying to do something on the school district's website for one of their children and they couldn't. So they sued and I don't know, hundreds of thousands of dollars was the settlement and the school district had to go and put together a plan and completely redo all of its website information. And I'm just starting to see more of this. Maybe it's because I'm paying attention to it, but I'm seeing more of this in the news. I don't know if it's just me, but are you? Catching any of this, Jeff?

I have not noticed articles specifically on this. You know, it's like you say, when you become aware of something, you tend to notice them more. I use— often use as the example when my house needed a new roof, I'd spent my whole life not noticing roofs on other people's houses, and suddenly they started jumping out at me, and I was keenly aware of other people's roofs. I think that's what's happening with you on this issue.

Yeah.

It makes sense. You know, I'm sadly Many things become involved in litigation. My preference is always to take the information that you're sharing and for businesses to do the right thing in terms of making their sites friendly to people that have issues that they're dealing with, sight, etc.

Yep.

I think what you're sharing is great information and it's a good idea to approach it like we want to make our site friendly to everybody that could want to do business with us. Hopefully, that will prevent you from getting the letters that you've referred to a couple times.

Exactly. Let me just kind of share my experience. It was kind of mid-August of last year when one of our clients forwarded me a letter that that they got claiming disability discrimination. And, you know, as the producer and creator of their website, you know, obviously I was, you know, concerned, offended, upset. I mean, all the different series of emotions ran through my head. Worried, my God, my customer is going to sue me if they're going to get sued. What do I do? So fortunately that wasn't the case, and the client that received the letter has been a longtime client of ours, and we're actually in the process of redoing their website again for them. For the third time, and there had been some discussion regarding ADA, and we were able to use that as part of our response back to Carlson Lynch indicating, hey, thanks for, thanks for sending us this letter and informing us that our site is not compliant, but we know that, and that's why we're in the process of building a new one, and here's the conversations that we've had around this. And that's why I said earlier it's good to start a list of things that you have done or will be doing moving forward to collect information on this. So if you do happen to get one, it was nice that we had a document that we circulated by email 2.5 months prior to receiving the letter where it was specifically mentioned that we were talking about ADA accessibility for the bank's new website. And so that will just help you build your case to defend yourself so that you don't come across as the insensitive deer in headlights that doesn't have any clue that this thing even exists. But when I started going through the process and looking for the different options, one of the things that I found— and I'll see if I can find it here real quick— is— I should have had this actually keyed up. But under the World Wide Web Consortium, they have a vendor list, and I can't find it right off the top of my head. But when I went and I visited it, the vendor list at the time had 72 vendors listed. Now I believe the last time I looked at it, it was up to 88, and I suspect it's probably even more now. And when I started talking with some of the vendors, it seemed like an awful lot of them had the approach of We'll come in, we'll run an assessment on your website, we'll tell you what's wrong, we'll provide human-based testing, we'll give you all sorts of things. We'll essentially give you the blueprint. We'll show you what's wrong, and then it's up to you as an organization or your web company to remediate those things. And not only was the process somewhat expensive, I found organizations that would quote anywhere between $3,000 for a complete a complete website assessment report, all the way up to $15,000, depending on how big your site is, how complex it is, and the level to the extent that they were relying on human-based technology. So blind people, deaf people actually going on and physically working with your site to determine where there are problems. Obviously, that takes a little bit more time, and it is going to be a little bit more expensive because you are involving human labor. So I didn't really see that there were a lot of consistent options. One of the other things that I noticed is the reports themselves, there was no real consistent standard of measurement because the Department of Justice and the law really hasn't come out with formal final guidelines for digital accessibility standards. That's why we're kind of going back to the W3C and web content accessibility. As a benchmark. In the banking industry, we had something similar to this prior to the Examinatory Council coming out with formal social media guidelines. Securities brokers and investment individuals had very clear social media rules, but a bank early on using Facebook or Twitter didn't really know the rules because they didn't exist. So we used those as a proxy, and sure enough, When the FFIEC came out with their final guidelines, it looked very similar to what the SEC had created. And that's what we're suspecting is going to be the case here with regards to web content accessibility. But we just don't know that for sure. So I talk, talk, talk. The company by the name of AudioEye came up more than once as I would We're a relatively new player in the industry, been around since 2005, but doing mostly stuff in the government arena, but really putting a hard focus over the last couple of years on leveraging technology to solve the problem a couple of different ways. So while there's certainly no harm, and maybe sometimes budget won't allow you to invest in a technology like AudioEye and going through and remediating a website, if it's a small one, you can fix those things probably pretty easily within a couple of days of focused effort. And then making sure that you have a plan in place so that any new content is going to be compliant and recurring testing. Particularly if you receive any sort of a letter or judgment, you're going to be mandated to do ongoing testing anyway. But what I found with the folks at AudioEye was their technology kind of inserts itself into the website and helps to protect you to, I'll say, guarantee, but certainly increase the likelihood or be a very integral part of your overall compliance efforts. And so one of the sites that they showed me very early on was with the Federal Communications Committee here with the Consumer Complaints Center. And so it's at the FCC's Consumer Complaints. And the video that I have on my ADA page is essentially a review of this, but I'll do an abbreviated version. One of the tools that I also looked at was a company by the name of WebAIM. I had a really good conversation with these folks. They really focus on education. They will provide comprehensive reports. They don't do any remediation themselves. They will work with you. They will consult. They will provide assistance to your web team or your technical team on getting your site compliant. But they don't necessarily do this themselves per se. They'll just provide some assistance. If you visit their website, they have a little accessibility checker down here in the bottom left-hand corner called WAVE, which is their Web Accessibility Evaluation Tool, which also is available as a Chrome extension that you can plug in. So what I want to show you is an example of the AudioEye solution is if we go over to the WebAIM tool and we just kind of knock out the consumer complaint and we have the WAVE tool do an assessment. What it does is it goes out and it reviews the site and comes back. Any site that you look at, it just does it on a page-by-page basis, but any site that you look at, it comes back with a summary report over here. Any of the things that show up in red, you are probably going to want to make sure that you identify those. I also want to caveat this by saying this is by no means an all-encompassing tool. Even the folks at WebAIM will tell you. This is a very high level. If you have one error that shows up here, you probably have a good dozen or so that will show if you do some human-based testing. If you have 15 errors, you probably have way more than that. But with this tool, just to give you kind of a high level, you can go and you can click on this little flag and it shows you the errors. And if you want to know what's actually showing up as a red error, you can click on this and it shows you You see that that actually kind of makes a little blink. And then you've got this little window down below that you can turn on, and it gives you a sneak peek at the HTML code that's behind your website. So you can view this. It draws it down, and you can see that, hey, there's a problem. And if you wonder, well, what's the problem? It says missing a form label. And you can click on the little information, which takes you down and says, well, this is what a form label does. This is why it's important. This is how you You fix it. You need to use a label tag in order to make sure that it is there. The reason that this is important is an individual with a disability visiting your website, whether it is blind or deaf, likely is going to be using assistive technology or assistive technology to consume that information. They will use some sort of program that visits your site And it gathers information and then regurgitates it back to the individual in a format that they can understand. It might push it out onto a Braille keypad. It might read it back to them through audio and talk to them and tell them what's on the site. But one way or another, the information that's on your website is going to go back to that individual through one of these assistive technologies. When that assistive technology gets to the search box, for example, it doesn't know what it is. It sees that there's a field there, but it doesn't know if this is a login field, if this is for a password, if this is for search, or if this is a subscription. Button, or put your email address in here and subscribe for their newsletter. There is no real clear definition. And what we found, even working with some of our sites, we use Google's enterprise site search as an example for doing site search, and we use their embed code. Google has not updated its embed code to allow us to be able to put labels around it. You use the code as it is provided. And so when you do one of these reports, it'll come back and it'll say, hey, Google Site Search doesn't have a label around it. So this will give you kind of an example of what may be wrong with your website, and you can pull up all sorts of other things. You'll also notice that there are alerts and other elements that you're going to want to take a look at as well that also are things to consider. Trying to fix that might be beyond just technology, but they might be related to the color, might be related to the spacing around the text, or things need to be larger. But if we hop back over to the native site, one of the things, if you visit this yourself, you'll probably hear a little clicking noise. This is the AudioEye Ally toolbar, which shows up on sites, and I'm seeing it on more and more bank websites because there's a couple of other bank technology companies that have thrown their weight behind AudioEye as well, which further reinforced why, at least with our office, this isn't a formal WSI corporate endorsement, but our office here in Michigan has endorsed and struck a partnership with AudioEye. I'm talking with other consultants as well about how it works. When you visit the site, what happens is a little snippet of code has been inserted across all of the Consumer Complaint Center pages that sits in between— if you think about where the HTML code is on the web server. I don't want to get too geeky here, but the HTML code that exists and what you see when you visit on a browser, because sometimes that's not exactly what's on the website. What AudioEye's code does is it sits in between and it says, okay, what's on the server? It sees images. It sees form fields. It sees text. It sees hyperlinks. And then it analyzes all of that to see whether it's accessible. Is that something that somebody visiting this website with assistive technology is going to be able to easily understand and use? And so when you actually use the browser extension for WAVE, because it's given the site an opportunity to load with the assistive JavaScript enabled, is when I turn this on, you'll notice that instead of showing one error message, now it's at zero. And you'll notice that where there was no label before, we now have a label that the AudioEye solution has inserted because it knows that it's missing on behalf of the Consumer Complaint Center for the FCC so that an assistive technology knows that this is site search. It's not an email subscription box. It's not a password box. This is where you go to enter your site search. And so if any of these other elements were missing information, that JavaScript would allow AudioEye to insert that. And this is one of the only technologies that I've seen that has the ability to do that in an unobtrusive way where you're not, you know, kind of changing URLs and providing a secondary site that, you know, hey, if you're disabled, go here. But if you are fully able, you stay on this site because that is a no-no. You don't want to be treating them differently than the general public. When we load the page back up, the other cool piece that I really like about the AudioEye solution is this Ally toolbar. When we talk about the assistive technology that somebody might be using, for example, JAWS, J-A-W-S, by the company Freedom Scientific. Produces. They will sell that software to an individual. You'll install it on your computer, and then it gives you the ability to consume the information in a friendly way. But if you've got a website, and whether it's a customer that might be older that doesn't have that technology, they're just looking for an easier way to navigate, with this Ally toolbar now in place, this gives your website the ability on desktop and tablet and mobile The ability to provide that JAWS-like experience for anybody else that shows up. So I think the example that I gave in my demo is one of the, one of the classes that you need to make sure that you're protecting against is the kind of visually impaired or low vision or visually challenged individuals. And there's a phenomenon out there called red-green colorblindness. And if you are a website that is focused on Christmas, You have a lot of red and a lot of green, but if you are somebody that suffers from red-green colorblind, you can't tell the difference between those 2 colors. It may be very difficult to navigate and use a website. The code itself may be easily consumable, but if you've got that colorblindness, now the business owner, the website owner has to kind of make the decision, do we change the color scheme, the layout? What do we need to do in order to make our site easier for somebody to browse? So when this tool is turned on, individuals that visit your website have the ability to go through and now have total control over the experience. So you can have customers, visitors increase or decrease the size of the font if they want to see things a little bit larger. They can change the font style if they choose to do so. This font, for example, is proven to be a little bit easier for individuals with dyslexia to read. And they can even change the contrast. So if I'm sensitive to light and white, a lot of white hurts my eyes or it might trigger a migraine or something along those lines, I can go in and I can actually change the contrast and I can go with maybe a light gray or even a black. And that might make it easier for me to go ahead and kind of, you know, consume and read information. So if we go in and maybe take a look at some of the pages that are on the site. We can go in here, for example, and what happens after I file my complaint. You can now navigate the site. It still pulls the normal website up. The URL is still the same. So from a Google perspective, it's really nice because you don't have the possibility of multiple URLs being indexed and spidered and what's going on. But you'll see after the page loads The page then says, oh, but you had the accessible toolbar turned on, so I'm just going to take you right back to where it was before, and now you can continue to view this information in a way that's going to be easier for you to view the info. It also gives people on your site the ability to have the information read back to them. You can navigate by voice, and then there's some other really cool things that if you watch the demo over at our ADA page, you'll kind of get a chance to see all that. This, from our perspective, I guess from my perspective and our client's perspective, not only does it go to the extent where we've taken the issue, and you can see I've turned it off and now I'm back here, it goes back to fixing the actual quote-unquote HTML so that you can kind of see this, but it now adds that extra layer of usability that maybe your competitors aren't offering. Now you've got another opportunity to provide an easier experience, a better way for your visitors. There's lots of other tools out there that will do a little audio bar across the top that will read pages back to you and some others. By no means is AudioEye the only solution out there that can give an alternate view, but When I've done my research, this is one of the ones that does it the cleanest, in my opinion, and makes it a super easy, super simple, but super friendly way of engaging and getting content. So that's kind of what I wanted to continue. I'm beating the drum on this pretty hard, particularly we had over half a dozen of our clients sign up with the AudioEye solution at the end of last year and suspect that we'll have way more than that for 2017. Because they're starting to realize that accessibility, whether they've gotten a letter or they just want to protect themselves from getting a letter in the future, this is giving them an opportunity to take a proactive stance to be more accessible to these 53 million people in the United States that have some form of a disability. So that essentially in a nutshell is what I really wanted to chat about today, Jeff. And I don't know if anybody in the audience has got a question or— No, I think that was great. I'll see if I can come back here and find the vendor list here real quick. And so maybe W3C vendors. Come on, Google, don't let me down. Yeah. I'll see if I can find that later. I'll post that. So anyway, so Jeff, thoughts? I think you're on mute.

There we go. Again, just really good information. Lots to consider. I think this is one of those things that it is also valuable to— if you are taking on a project of updating websites with the idea of becoming ADA compliant, that using someone that's done it before is a really good idea. I think it's something that doing on your own probably is more challenging than you might think at the onset. What's your experience been with that?

Yeah, and I would agree with that. And we, you know, we'll oftentimes partner with marketing agencies. Because maybe the client has a relationship with an agency that is doing their advertisements, and they are doing their brochures, and they are doing their branding. But the agency has realized they have gotten to the point where with everything that is going on on the web or social media, maybe that is out of our wheelhouse. And luckily we get an opportunity to come in. But even some of these agencies that will do smaller websites, When I've had initial conversations, a lot of them would say, "I've not really heard about that," or you know even participating in an RFP. We'll put it in as part of our response, and that will not be part of you know the local web company's response, and that'll trigger because there's obviously some expense here. And when you're looking at dollars to dollars, and you want to do as best a job of comparing apples to apples, and if we're going to be X. And they're going to be Y, and X is way more than Y, they're going to want to know, well, why is that the case? And so being able to clearly explain it. The challenge, I think, as you scratch the surface and start digging into this, is from our perspective as consultants, it's not a, you know, 5-minute conversation because people don't understand it. They don't They haven't heard things about it. They— we heard some people refer to the letters as spam or bogus or phishing and just throw them away, which you probably don't want to do because ignoring it's probably not the best decision either. And so really just trying to figure out what the right way to navigate is. In most of the conversations that I've had either with fellow consultants or clients that are interested in learning more, have gone probably right around 40-45 minutes because understanding the backstory, the option of doing manual remediation, you compare that to the technology that's available to help kind of do that for you and be more from a partnership perspective. There's pros and cons there that boil down to timing and budget and resources, and sometimes it even takes a couple of conversations. Because, you know, you get 20 minutes into this conversation and you can see across the table the eyeballs start to glaze over. You know, it's a pretty heavy discussion. So, cool. So it looks like the chat area is clear. I was able to just kind of take a quick peek at my bookmarks and I found it. I was looking for vendors instead of evaluation tools. But this is a page you can check out. And I said it was up in the 80s. It's now, I think, 88 was the number. So it looks like it's remained pretty constant since the last time I was here. But this is a list of all the different tools that are out there that, you know, I started looking at and going through, and you are a couple of screen pages down before you even get out of the A's for that matter. So you can kind of scroll through here and take a look and see technology, approach, all sorts of other different things that kind of gives you some ideas about other vendors and approaches to accessibility in this space. So lots and lots of stuff to learn about. So, well, Jeff, that I believe kind of brings it to an end. I'm actually in Denver, Colorado this week and attending a developer conference. This is going to be one of the first non-banking conferences I've attended and Boy, I don't know how many years.

I know.

I'm not going to have to wear a tie. A t-shirt and a pair of Vans is probably going to be overdressed for this. But I did see there is actually a session on— surprise, surprise— a session on Friday talking about web content accessibility and ADA compliance from a developer's perspective. As I'm eating my own dog food or drinking my own champagne or whatever you want to call it, it's more resource material that I'm adding to our resume of things that we're learning and trying to bring back for our clients. I'm going to get a little bit of education from more of a developer coding level perspective. To some of you listening to this, it might not seem like a very exciting thing to do, but I'm pretty excited about it.

So we didn't do a weather report at the beginning of our broadcast as we often do. What's the weather report from Denver?

Denver is about probably 45 degrees-ish, no snow, although I can see snow up on the mountains. Back in Michigan, we got rain and it's supposed to be close to the 50s. Hopefully our friends in northern Michigan get some cold weather because this kicks off a couple weeks of what's referred to as Tip-Up Town, where ice fishermen, snowmobilers, and pretty much anybody that loves the outdoors and snow, and I dare say maybe a little bit of beer drinking and having fun, head to the Houghton Lake area. Beyond what goes on up in the UP at Michigan Tech, I believe this is the second largest winter festival in the state of Michigan. So I'm sending all my love to my friends that are up there. Just please be safe and don't drive your snowmobile into any open holes in the ice. That's not a good thing, although that usually happens at least once or twice from what I hear from people at Tip-Up Town over the years. So it just happens. Yourself? How's the sun shining in North Carolina?

I am sitting at my desk in shorts and a t-shirt with the windows open and it is 75 degrees. Oh man.

Well, I probably should mention this now. We will have to cancel next week's Free Webinar Wednesdays unless of course, Jeff, you would like to fly solo, but I will be on a plane headed to a conference related to banking in Key West, and we'll be delivering a presentation to a group full of CEOs on the Digital Dozen and supporting our book. They bought a box of our books and are going to pop down there, so I will be in the air at 1 PM Eastern time next week. So if we had the webinar later in the day, I could say I'm wearing shorts and Enjoying the warm sunshine.

Hopefully enjoying the warm sunshine with a margarita or something in your hand.

Yeah, that might happen. That might happen. So, but anyway, yeah, so again, thank you for those of you that hopped on and were here live. I know we had a pretty good audience and we certainly appreciate that despite the lack of posting on my part. But we will be canceling for next week and resume, so we will get an update out there on the website. with the schedule. But until then, thanks everybody for joining us. Enjoy the remainder of your week. If we can be of assistance on any of the ADA stuff, feel free to get in touch and let us know. Happy to chat further. And I think that's it. So have an awesome week, and thanks again. See you, Jeff.

See ya.