You’re Ignoring 25% of Your Audience - And Ops Owns It with Mike Barton

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Hello everyone. Welcome to another episode of OpsCast brought to you by marketingops.com, powered by all the MO Pros out there. I am your host, Michael Hartman, flying solo again today. Today, we're going to be talking about something interesting. Most teams think about accessibility as a compliance issue, something that legal owns, is in charge of, something that we'll deal with later, something that slows you down. But what if that's Completely backwards. So joining me today to talk about that in this episode is Mike Barton, who leads corporate communications and content marketing at AudioEye. And we're going to be talking about why accessibility is not just a risk to manage, but a lever for better customer experience, stronger performance, and ultimately growth. So the reason this is important is because 1 in 4 people experience some form of disability, and it's not just edge case thinking. It's actually mainstream, and the implications for ops are bigger than most people realize. I certainly didn't realize it. So Mike, welcome. Thanks for joining us.

Yeah, my pleasure to be here.

All right. Well, why don't we start simple? So when we talk about digital accessibility, what is that? Like, what are we actually talking about? What, you know, and why do you think most teams and most people probably in the ops space, including me, underestimate it?

Yeah, so digital accessibility, I'd say, at its simplest and at its core is ensuring that any person, regardless of ability or how they access the internet, is able to do so, right? Sounds super basic, but it's something that you kind of hinted at. A lot of us just don't think about it. It's one of those biases where you, and this is a little bit of like kind of ableist language, but like you see the world through your own lens.

And so, Right.

I see the world as somebody who has vision, who has hearing, who has full mobility in his hands and body. And so I access the internet in a different way than somebody who's blind, and they access it differently than somebody who's deaf or who has a mobility impairment. And so I think that's, you know, getting at the kind of crux of the question of like, why don't we think about it? Or why in ops or marketing or digital marketing in general, Why isn't it something that's more top of mind? And I think it's because we're just not surrounded by it in a lot of our normal or everyday lives. And so that's partly why I like coming on shows like this because I think it's largely an awareness, just getting people to kind of think about it, think outside their lives and their purview. But it's one of those things that once you start to think about it and once you have that little kind of seed of awareness, Very quickly you start to realize, oh yeah, I've got this friend who has this cognitive disability and any content that's written with jargon or overly complex, she has a real hard time with, right? Or I've got this other friend, it starts to cascade really quickly, so.

Yeah, and I mean, I'm probably the— I think it was interesting when we first talked that I hadn't really given it much thought. Probably actually thought like, oh, this is not a big deal, right? Or yes, I know I should do it, but right, I come up with a list of excuses. Yeah. And it's interesting. So I was just thinking as you were describing it, and we haven't talked about this, but I, so I think about like privacy compliance is it kind of falls into a similar, maybe a similar one. I think more people are astutely aware of it because it's much, it doesn't have all the other sort of like biases maybe that we have. But I know that even I think about it as, not a one-size-fits-all thing. I think about it like, oh, well, if I'm in the US, I'm pretty flexible. Like, as long as we're not, you know, ignoring people's pleas not to be followed or to unsubscribe, that kind of thing, that, you know, we're good. And I'm okay with working with sales teams or whatever to be a little more aggressive. And on the other hand, in other parts of the world where it's more restrictive, like, but this one, Like, I, in some ways I think of it as a similar thing. Like, oh, it's a nice, it feels like, oh, well, yeah, we should comply, but maybe, yeah, for yada yada. So, um, it, it, I know the conversation here.

Yeah, that's, I mean, very common. I think that's one of the, um, kind of misconceptions that I hear all the time as well, which is like, I know I should do it. Um, it's important. You know, it's a next year priority, we'll get to it, and it's the right thing to do. But a lot of people don't realize that in addition to being the right thing to do, under the Americans with Disabilities Act, which was, you know, founded 35+ years ago when the internet didn't exist. So at that time, it was very much about having spaces for people with disabilities, having automatic doors, ways for them to enter your physical premises, essentially making it so the physical world was accessible by everybody. Well, along comes the internet and people start to wonder, hey, does this apply to the digital space as well? And courts very quickly started to say, yes, it does. If you have a digital footprint, you need to have your digital doors be available to anyone. So from like a compliance perspective, A user who tries to come to your site and tries to navigate and tries to make a purchase and can't, they've got a legal right to sue that company. And we see that happening more and more, that because companies are putting off accessibility or putting off thinking about it, people with disabilities are left with no option but like, all right, I have to sue. But that leads us to this conversation also, which is— In addition to a risk management approach so that you're just not sued, people often find that, hey, I'm making my site better, I'm making it more usable, I'm making it actually easier for all the other people who are coming to the site as well. So not only am I now taking advantage of a population who couldn't utilize my site before, but now also it reads better, it's again more usable. So the rising boat that Providing tide that lifts all boats really applies with digital accessibility here.

Yeah, I think that was the thing from our conversation that I didn't expect. I mean, I think a lot of it, like we already talked about, right? A lot of this is compliance, risk management, but you, when we talked, you framed it more as like a business issue and where there's a real opportunity to capture more revenue if you address this and you're not ignoring the accessibility issue. Like, how do you How do you think about that?

Yeah, so there's a few areas. One is, I'd say, discoverability. So we recently, or in the past, it was all about SEO. I think this actually starts to be even more applicable in an AI-driven world of search with AEO and GEO. And the reality is when you build and code your page, With accessible best practices, meaning links are clear and descriptive. Image descriptions, alt text. Again, not complex things. They sound very basic to a degree, but when you're coding quickly and fast, it very easily those are the things that get forgotten. So like all your links on the page might say click here, right? To learn more, as opposed to click here to download our best practice guide on da da da da da. And as you have more and more of that descriptive text throughout your entire site, the engines actually pick that up and gives you more credibility and it starts to impact your findability. And we're finding more and more that LLMs are scanning the accessibility tree there and using that as a way to understand what's on the site. So an accessible site in the, you know—

Oh, cool.

Will be seen more than a site that's non-accessible. So that to me is one of the biggest, Especially as AI is just becoming more and more prevalent. That's the biggest new advantage, I think, of building a site accessible. And then of course, there's also just the conversion factor that again, if you have an e-commerce site and again, the stat that you shared at the top was 1 in 4 people have a disability. Obviously, there's a whole range there, but if there's a subset of people who are trying to come to your site, Blind people use something called a screen reader, which literally reads the code kind of in the background to them so they know what's happening with the copy, what those links are. If they find a site that is accessible and that makes it easy for them to purchase, they are a super loyal group of people.

Right.

Because I finally found a site that makes it easy for me to shop or consume the news, what have you.

I would assume that they are also becoming advocates with other people who have similar disabilities or challenges.

Yeah, that's exactly what I was going to say is not only are they loyal, but they then become great advocates and their friends and family, not only the ones like you said who have disabilities, but their friends and family who don't have disabilities are like, hey, such and such website makes it really easy for, you know, this person who I really care for or respect. So now I'm going to shop there as well, even though I don't have a disability. So that spending power of people with disabilities and their friends and family is $18 trillion with a T. So not a small market there. So I like to talk about that because—

Sorry, global, US?

Global, yes.

Global, okay. Still a lot, big number.

Exactly. But it just shows that like, I like this idea of the digital door, which I kind of mentioned a little bit earlier. These are people who are often already coming to your site, they're already trying to engage, so you don't have to spend more money on paid channels, right? You don't have to spend more to get them. You're essentially just, when they come to your site, making it so that door opens and they can actually work with you. So it's a bit of an efficiency play as well.

That's so interesting because I was just thinking to myself like how frustrated I get when I try to get on my phone onto a website and it's not working for the mobile. Like it's just out of— and how annoying that is. And I can't even imagine right now if you come in there and you like, that's not even an option, right?

Yeah. You know, we talk to people with disabilities all the time and one of their frustrations is that, you know, they've grown accustomed to, all right, what might take Michael Hartman 10 minutes to do on this e-commerce site. I just know it's going to take me 45 minutes to click around, get where I need to go, figure out a workaround to eventually be able to purchase. And they're like, my life shouldn't be a compromise where I just know that it's going to take me 2, 3, 4, 10 times longer to accomplish something.

Sure.

So yeah, anytime I get mildly frustrated with a website not working, I'm like, wow, I'm getting frustrated at this for the first time this week, somebody that I just talked to who has disability probably dealt with that 5 times already today.

Yeah. I love this sort of, I don't know if you want to call it empathy, sympathy, but I went like in the real world, I did some consulting work years ago for a Texas-based grocery store in their bulk fulfillment pharmacy. And one of the things we did was we went out Because you're going back and forth. Not only were they doing bulk directly to consumers, but also to the pharmacies in local markets. And we went to a few of them just to kind of observe and see what they did. And I remember walking away from that going, I am never going to be an asshole to a pharmacist ever again, because it is a really hard, high-pressure job. And you get people when they're at their worst. And it's kind of like, I think there's something about having, thinking, If I encourage people who are listening or watching now to think about like when you get frustrated to go with your, like what you just did, right? Just imagine what it's like for somebody else. And I think that would be, that may be the biggest benefit we could have out of this conversation maybe even, but maybe not.

No, I completely agree. Like I have only been in the accessibility space for a couple years. I, and often when I talk to people, I'm like, I wish I could go back and talk to, The Mike of 10, 15 years ago who worked at, you know, big companies creating all types of content. And not once did that Mike ever ask, is this accessible to a blind person? Is this super cool interactive experience, could a screen reader actually describe that and make all of it come to life for somebody else? And yeah, I just didn't have the opportunity, unfortunately, where I— Kind of quickly developed that empathy and that understanding of, uh, this is how other people experience it. And probably I've had the same misconception that a lot of people had, uh, or, and still have, which is, oh, it's actually probably a small population, right? There's not a lot of people, uh, or blind people wouldn't want to experience this interactive experience I made anyway. So it's fine that it's not accessible. I actually hear that quite a bit. Or, you know, People with disabilities don't buy X product of mine. The reality is they might want to, and if they do or could, maybe you've now got a new customer segment that you didn't even know existed that again is trying to get that product from you. So it really is, I think, a good reminder, not only with accessibility, you know, there's other topics as well where if you just kind of widen your lens and your view of the world, you start to see other marketing and business opportunities and product opportunities.

Yeah. You know, you mentioned it earlier, this idea that focusing on this improves the experience for everyone. And maybe talk about that a little more. I mean, I'm assuming, this is one that I harp on a lot. I think a lot of, especially B2B websites, their content is full of words that don't have a, don't really, like, it's hard to understand what they mean, right? And so like, I'm a big advocate for like clear, simple language. And so this idea, like, I get why people want to be seen as thought leaders in quotes, right? But at the same time, right, it's not easy to understand. Are you talking about things like that, like changing the actual language and words you use and the way you talk about your products and services, or is it something more than that?

No, yes and no. There is much more to it, but that's one great example. And I love that one also because yes, people with various cognitive disabilities are going to have a hard time reading jargon-filled or even long complex sentences, right? Where you're often, you're just trying to maybe sound intelligent or sound Yeah, this is the voice of a leader who just knows their stuff. Yeah, look up their resume, right? Yeah, yes, exactly, totally. And so you'll lose people who have different types of cognitive disabilities. And we found not only does it just logically make sense, but we've done some tests also at AudioEye where we said, hey, let's simplify a page, a product page for a person with a disability and In the past, I used the phrase like, okay, let's dumb down the language, but that's actually not what it is at all. I think if you can say something concisely and intelligently in fewer words and in more simple words, you're actually doing it in a more intelligent manner, and it's actually harder to do.

You're making me think of— I think it's at least in my mind attributed to Mark Twain is the quote like, I would've written a shorter letter if I only had more time.

If I had more time, right?

Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah, I was literally about to say that. So that's funny that we're thinking of the same quote. But yeah, so we saw that test, it was a winner. And again, as we kind of brought that to the other product pages and did other sorts of qualitative interviews, the feedback was the same across all personas, all individuals, people with disabilities, people with no disabilities. That said, yes, I want this page. I understand this page. I know what you're offering much more clearly when it's said simply. And so I think that's a great example where in doing it for a specific audience, everybody else benefits from it. And it helps you as a business also have to think a little bit more about your product and your offering and what are the values, what are the simple you know, things that I'm providing to a prospect? What are the needs that they have and how do I talk about that? So yeah, I think that's a fantastic example.

Okay, that's great. Now, so maybe let's shift gears a little bit and think about our audience, which is primarily ops people. So yeah, in my experience, like thinking about compliance really has not necessarily fallen on me, even though I've run web stuff, where I think about more so, where would you suggest that this idea of accessibility and compliance and addressing that audience that is sometimes overlooked, like where should it be thinking about? Should that be in the ops team? Should it be somewhere else in marketing? Should it be like, where do you think it should be and how would it look?

Yeah, it's a good question. And this will be a little bit of a cop-out, But I think it depends on the company and kind of the organization, because what we found is you need somebody who is a champion and who is going to kind of push it. Because when push comes to shove, and we see this in so many of our customers, you'll have initial calls where like, yes, we want to do it. We actually want to own it in-house, right? We want to do it all. But then other priorities come along and the economy starts to go down. So it's like, dollars become even more important and efficiency becomes even more important. And so accessibility can and does get deprioritized for some of these other things. And so having a champion who can continually reinforce that with the various teams is super helpful. I mean, this is a bit of a shameless plug, but AudioEye, the way we have our product is so that it The teams can think about it as little as possible, right? Like they think about how do we implement it? How do we get it on our pages? How do we— how often do we do audits so that people with disabilities are looking and going through our site's experience? But you do have to start thinking about all your digital properties. So it's the website, it's your apps. If you have like a chatbot or something like that, like is that accessible? Your emails, any of your communication, social media. Does your social media person, are they thinking about the right best practices with images and carousels and things like that? So it very quickly, I think, begins to, like you said earlier, be illuminating of like, oh, I was just thinking it was maybe my website, but now I'm realizing any really customer-facing or prospect-facing initiative and said technology sitting underneath it that delivers it needs to have some of those capabilities.

Yeah, it's interesting that you said it's easy to deprioritize, and my head went right to, like, it feels like the same conversation we have about data quality. Like, everybody knows that data quality is important, but it gets deprioritized because, in my view, the reason it gets deprioritized is because it's not obvious what, like, you spend money and effort to go clean up data. Like, there's not a, oh, an immediate like, well, we launched this email. Like, so if you go like, oh, we need to do, get more in the marketplace, you see more emails, more ads, more landing pages. Like it's seen and data is the engine behind it, right? Or at least fuel, maybe it's the fuel behind that. And, you know, there's often this sort of hidden cost of dealing with getting around poor quality data that is not obvious because At the end of the day, like people do heroic things and it feels like this kind of falls in the same thing where it's like the immediate benefit of it is not always seen. Does that sound familiar to you?

Yes, 100%. Because it happens in the background. Not only is the benefit not, you know, kind of seen up except for that end user who finally does, quote unquote, see the site through their technology.

Right.

But yeah, it's— the problem also is not seen, which is why a lot of us didn't think about it until someone brought it to our attention because it lives in the code. So for those of us who visually see the page, it looks fine, it looks accessible. In fact, that's another thing that people are surprised about when I talk to them is they say, oh, Our team is pretty locked in. I'm guessing it's not accessible, but we're probably pretty accessible. And then I say, all right, here's a scanner. ioi has a free one. You can go scan your site. It'll give you a detailed breakdown. There's lots of them out there. Go run it and come back to me. And almost every time they come back, what? This can't be right. This is hundreds of issues on one page, not across the site, on one page. And I'm like, yeah. And that's just what the automation found, like I said, there's a lot that finds about 50% of the issues. There's usually higher impact, more like the types of issues that are the ones that will get you sued, that people with disabilities find when they're actually auditing and going through your site. So whatever tool you scan your site with and get your number, it's actually probably, you know, exponentially more than that.

It's underreporting. Right.

Yes, it's underreported, exactly. And so that's the big surprise, even a really well-built site where the team is putting their love and attention into that process, it's just going to have, by the nature of humans, mistakes. And especially when the majority of developers don't go through school or through their self-taught experience and think, All right, let me learn the web content accessibility guidelines so that I can build an accessible site. Let me stay up to date on what those are every year. They just don't have the time or the awareness to do so, and so they're not building accessible sites naturally.

Yeah, so when you think about things beyond websites, and I love the idea of having a tool that can help identify where you could get better, but what about things like email and You mentioned social, like how, for people who are listening, like, are there a couple of things they should be thinking about in those different kinds of channels? Yeah.

So I would say as you, whether it's email or even a website, a lot of times some of the most common issues to fix are the most basic. And I think I hinted at this a little bit earlier, but every email Likely it's going to have at least a header image, maybe some images throughout if you want to kind of break up a newsletter that you might have. Do you have the right alt text built into that so that again, somebody who has a screen reader and is reading the code, the HTML is able to understand what that email is? When you've got a few links in your newsletter, are those links descriptive so that I, as somebody who can't see, knows what I'm clicking through and clicking to. And it's really the same principles on social media. So building it with that in mind is probably the most helpful part. And that involves working it into whatever processes you have internally to have that accessibility check essentially. Often on our side, it lies with the content and the design teams as we're building those emails, writing them as our design team is creating the great assets. Part of what they do is create a really descriptive set of alt text that we can build into those emails. So again, that one, super simple, but it makes it readable. And then if those same principles flow into the website where there's often hundreds and thousands of site images and links, small, but all those thousands of images and links together compound to either a really useful site or a really broken site.

Yeah. So I'm curious, you've been in kind of marketing roles in other places and now you're in this one here and how has this changed maybe how you, maybe you hinted at it here a minute ago, but like how has this changed how you work with your ops teams when you're building out content or programs or whatever? Yeah.

So I'd say the biggest thing is that we're thinking about it and we're talking about it. So like that's step one is, right, just, which I kind of alluded to with having a champion, is ensuring that somebody on the marketing side and the ops side, that there's agreement, that there's SLAs in place on the importance of accessibility and keeping it so that it's always one of those priorities that it might get down a little, but it's still not below the we're going to work on it line. And then I think, The other thing that we've tried to do really is put those processes in place, like I mentioned before, where when we're creating stuff and handing it off to those teams, we're handing off accessible experiences so that it's not on them to go back and create a lot of that accessibility content. They really just have it in their process to check the boxes like, okay, this is done. If not, hey, Mike, your team missed something, right? Let's get this fixed.

Yeah, I was going to ask you, are they able to kind of go like, hey, yeah, you missed something? It sounds like that's a part of it too. So it's like a leveling up of everybody, right? To help kind of not only the awareness, but knowing what to look for. That makes sense.

It's like you said with other programs, right? It's like you just have to kind of build in new processes and new checks and balances. So that it goes out the door in a way that it should. And initially it's always a little bit rough as you're figuring it out, but you get to a point where it's just the norm and that norm is now making it so that you, in theory, get to 25% more of your audience. Right.

On balance, do you think it has slowed things down for your team to execute or You know, you're now in a state where you're back, kind of back where you would've been before you'd been considering this. Like, how does that impact everything like that?

You know, by taking the time, we'll use the images and the link descriptions as examples. Does it take a few more seconds, 30 seconds maybe, to write a descriptive one compared to a— so does that add up? Yeah, it adds up. But does that increase in time outweigh the impact it will have to the end user? No, it's much more like this, right? So it does take a little bit more time. The other thing that we're starting to find again, going back to AI, is AI can help speed that up. There's now a lot easier ways to have AI preview like, hey, here's how I think all these link descriptions and all these image descriptions should be based on what I'm seeing. And then we're just going in and Oh yeah, that's right. Or, oh no, missed this, or it could be more simple. And then you kind of reteach it. So I think AI will actually further speed up and simplify the accessibility process as well as you're working with options.

Yeah, that's interesting. I was like, just yesterday I had gotten a set of screenshots. It was a list of users of a system because the person couldn't export it. And so I was able to, with OCR, like pull this blob of text out, put it in a document, and then run it through an AI thing to like go like, uh, give me, generate a list that I could put into a spreadsheet, which is what I needed. But is it because I noticed that some of the text had been clipped off, I also told it like, give me a score about how confident you are in that you got the right stuff. And it's like, that's the kind of thing, like if you could do that, right? Give a score on each thing and—

Yeah.

Yeah. Sort of a compliance score. I love that idea.

Yeah, yeah. And I think that's kind of the wave of future. I'm also a big proponent that there's always gotta be that human review, that even if, you know, it gives itself a score of 10 out of 10, there's gonna be some that it just misdiagnoses. The other interesting thing with AI and accessibility and disability is, AI is trained on arguably kind of the norm or what is just out there, and what's out there is largely inaccessible. It's largely in some ways ableist, meaning it's not built or talked about in a way that includes people with disabilities. And so AI, we found, really, you gotta train it a lot on how to think about it. We do similar scoring, and it took us a little bit of time to get AI that we were using to kind of realize, okay, this is the checklist, this is how I should score it, this is how I should approach it. So even the LLMs aren't quite up to snuff in terms of accessibility. They're in the same boat we are, I guess. So that's, we have a shared lack of understanding in some ways in terms of accessibility.

Yeah, yeah. Well, and I'm, in my experience, just in stuff like that I'm doing on a repeated basis, like prepping for these Right? I use AI to help with some of that. And I find it, if I'm not careful, right, it starts to veer off a little bit from what I was doing. See, my dog agrees. This is important. All right. So let me, so this can be overwhelming, right? I'm sitting here kind of like, I don't know, like there seems like this is a huge thing. So for the audience out there who's listening and going like, yeah, I'm convinced, need to be doing something with this, there's a business case for it, not just just a compliance one, like where should they start? Like how do, like where, like where would you recommend they start on that?

Yeah, I mean, I think the first, especially as you're trying to build a business case, if somebody's listening, right? And they're like, I get it, I need to get my boss on board, I need to get the, you know, procurement and budget on board. I think step one is doing a scan like I mentioned earlier and just putting your site in to see how many errors per page, how much at risk would you be? For a lawsuit. And that starts to really, I think, again, kind of be illuminating to people of like, oh, we actually have a significant number of issues there. And then from there, if you're like most companies who realize we should do something, but we're not going to hire more people, we're not going to expect our developers to all of a sudden become experts in accessibility or even over time be experts in it, I think a lot of companies need to find a partner like AudioEye or whoever makes sense for them, who will take the majority of that work off them, who has the expertise already, who has the understanding of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, and who has the understanding of, for a business in e-commerce or for a SaaS business, here are the types of workflows that you got to nail and make sure they're accessible. Because those are going to be the key to unlocking conversion, unlocking sales and things like that. And so I think if you find the right partner, like almost any other kind of SaaS product, right, where in a perfect world, yeah, you would build it on your own and you would run it, but Accessibly at the end of the day is probably not one of those. And so finding a partner who will work with you, help you understand the space, understand the best practices for your company and your space. I think that's the unlock, is really just finding the right partner to help you from both an automated perspective and again, that human layer of performing audits on those really important workflows.

Maybe this is a pretty tactical question, but the scanning for websites, Sounds easy. Is there similar tools for things like email and digital, that kind of display ads like that? There are.

They're typically different from website offerings. So we have found, as an example, like at AudioEye, we have our automation obviously running on our website, our audits then pick up issues, and then we write custom fixes that then deploy through the automation. So even the issues found through humans, the fixes to those issues can be deployed. So the large majority of those issues get fixed there, but it is important for our social team, our email team, our content team to know some of those same best practices so that as we push out the content that's pushing to the website, it is accessible. So I think that's where the learning is important is for that last person or the first person, I guess, arguably on the content and design and dev team for some of those areas to understand some of those best practices.

All right. I know you said it depends on this, but I want to see if we can narrow it down. So I'm going to assume that there's some common patterns, right? Low-hanging fruit or things where people, I hate to say it, lazy, but You know, lazy practices that some teams have that affect accessibility. Like, what are some of the most common things you're seeing where people could start to have an impact tomorrow, even? Yeah.

So I've talked about images and links too much, so I won't go there again, but WebAIM is a nonprofit that does a yearly scan of the top million websites, and they've been doing it for a number of years.

Wow.

They're finding that of those top million websites, 95% are inaccessible. Next year it's like 94.8%. So it's kind of alarming that in today's modern age, less than 5% of the sites, the homepages are completely accessible. And so that's because of images, links. The other thing that's a huge unlock in my opinion, Um, is form fields. So you think about a form field, right?

Okay.

That's how you contact a company if you want to talk to a person, book a demo. That's how you sign up for an account. E-commerce, obviously, that's your checkout flow. There's almost no CTA in an industry that doesn't involve a form of some sort, even a simple one. And if I'm using a very complex form, And I have an error, I can see that, oh, I switched my first name and last name, or I put— I started to put my shipping information in the credit card box. Forms are one of the top 3 issues most common across any industry, any site that are built wrong. And so a screen reader going through that form might come, you know, I added the My yellow t-shirt's a cart. I had such visual descriptions. I know what it is. I'm actually excited about this. I get to the form and the first form says on my screen reader, input 1, and I tab forward, input 2, instead of saying, right, a descriptive first name, last name. Another common form is that it has them labeled correctly, but then For some reason there's an error that happens and that error box is not appropriately accessible. And so I know there's an error, I just don't know how to fix it or what it is. And so sometimes I guess around and maybe I'll get it fixed again to your frustration point. How long am I going to be frustrated before I bounce and go to somebody else? So that to me, if you're looking at like, if I do one, if I focus in one area, what's my big unlock? It's Make sure your forms are accessible and that will unlock, I think, a lot for a company in any industry.

Well, and I would think that ties directly to the, what we talked about early on, which is the business, part of the business case for this is you make yourself open to people who otherwise might not be able to do business with you because they can't get through the gate, right? Or the stupid door as you used before. That's interesting. Yeah, it's funny, I was laughing because, not because of the story you were telling, because I was thinking like, I was just working with a team who had hidden fields on a form, and they were custom question 1, custom answer 1, right? And then that, they were hidden, right? They were meant not to be seen, but at the same time, I can imagine with the way you're talking about, like, as it's going through the code, that may come up. Right. So then probably a way to describe like, this is something you don't need to worry about. Yeah, for sure. So curious. So I'm just curious on 2 fronts here. Like when I think about this, so customer-facing stuff, what about like employee-facing stuff? So like we were just talking before this, right? Adobe Summit just happened. So we've got a lot of people who'll be listening who are Marketo or HubSpot or whatever. Like, are you seeing And then there's obviously all kinds of like internal tools for HR and, you know, operations and finance, et cetera. Like, are, like, is this a kind of thing that also is applying to those kinds of tools that are used for employees? Like, is employee, it's like supporting employees with disabilities a part of this that we should be thinking about too?

100%, because a good company will also have employees who have disabilities represented as part of their workforce. We talked earlier about, I don't see the world through my— I tend to see the world through my lens. Well, if you have other people on your team who have different lenses, who might have various disabilities, that makes it much easier for your team to think about the world more equally. And so we're actually seeing more and more, especially in SaaS, that companies who are getting to like the end of the procurement process, let's say there's 2 companies who are pretty equal on price, pretty equal on capabilities, but one of them has an accessible product. That company is going to choose the one that's accessible because they've got employees who need to use it, or just for various government regulations, and even more so in the EU, it's required Especially if you have government funding or work with government entities as well, that those products need to be accessible. So one of our big customers is an HR SaaS provider, and we started working with them, and we have a number of people with disabilities, and they quickly found like, hey, this doesn't work, this doesn't work. And it was great to work with them because they were like, we want to make this accessible. And so we worked with them, and now they have a very accessible compliant product. And I think more and more companies are going to start to see that if their products themselves are not accessible and usable by people with various disabilities, they're going to start to lose deals more and more in the future.

Are you seeing and hearing company, like procurement teams who are including this as part of their evaluation process too?

Yes. Yep. Yeah, we've seen a number of deals that, and heard about a number that, like I said, either crash or end up closing because the final deciding factor was, okay, this is accessible and will allow me to hire people with disabilities to use the product, or the people who are currently on my team who have disabilities will be able to use it.

That's, yeah, it's fascinating. I hadn't even really thought about that a whole lot. So we touched on a couple of different channels. I just, maybe you talked about social a little bit. We haven't really talked about video. I'm kind of curious about video in particular, like how, 'cause both in terms of like, I guess it could be animated GIFs or actual video kinds of things. Like, how is it— how is that? Um, because I know like lots of sites have things that have movement or, uh, have video that plays, uh, sometimes without being prompted, right? How does— yeah, is that, is that a good thing, bad thing? Like, what are the— are there things that companies can do to make that better?

Yeah, so I mentioned the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines earlier. There's a number of video-specific Guidelines there, and some of them address what you just said, auto-starting. Like, that's not a— like, that's considered not a good thing because a person with disability—

I don't like it anyway.

Exactly. So that's one of those things that if it's built correctly for a person with disability, you're benefited because it doesn't play when you don't want it to, right? You're able to choose. So that's one. Having detailed transcriptions is associated with it. So again, if somebody with a screen reader can't read it, if there's no transcription or see it, there's no transcription, then they can't consume it. Obviously, they can often listen, but some people have both auditory and visual disabilities. Closed captioning, right, for people who just have an auditory. So some of the things you see actually, like government press conferences, I feel like are really good examples where they'll have somebody who's live signing in real time. They'll then include that as part of the download. And again, like having transcriptions and very clear kind of written content that goes with the video. And again, if you are a video-heavy site, that's not a small order to do a lot of that.

So— No.

It is very important, especially For sites where demos and other types of videos are important to moving somebody along in whatever your process is, that's definitely an area that has a big impact that not a lot of people, I think, initially kind of think about in terms of accessibility either.

Yeah, I mean, I think one of the things that I— is kind of going through the journey of becoming a podcast. We were starting a podcast is I didn't know anything about a lot of this kind of audio video stuff. And there's some incredible tools, some of which we use, some of which we don't, that are really good at doing things like transcription now. And I think they've just gotten better over even in the last year. It feels like you add in AI tools as well and they can kind of improve. We just had a guest on who actually talked about how he used AI to evaluate audio, the audio, not just the transcript, right? So for getting insights about customer calls and what language caused the pitch of their voice to change, things like that. And it seems like hopefully some of that kind of stuff in this realm could be beneficial, right? Where you could help with that.

So going back to AO and SEO and GEO that we talked about earlier, if you're including detailed descriptions and transcriptions on your page associated with the video, you've now got a lot more information that those tools can index and that will contribute to the page interest and the page content.

Yeah, I mean, that was a big, this big aha for me today was what you just talked about, how a lot of those, LLMs basically are using the code. I think I knew this for search, right? I kind of inherently knew, although it feels like it biased towards the visual content, like what's visible. Yeah, I hadn't thought about it from an AEO/Geo standpoint because it's like, I don't know, like, I mean, again, probably like, oh yeah, of course it does that because that's what it has access to. But Kind of combining that with what we just talked about is a really interesting one. You know, been fascinating, Mike. Thank you so much.

Hey, my pleasure. Anytime I can join another Michael and talk for some time, it's my pleasure.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, it was a lot of fun. And I know like both from our initial conversation before this and this one, like I've already, like I keep learning. And it's one that I think, I hope our audience out there really takes this to heart and thinks about how can they start to bring this back to their organization. Because I think your point about it, you know, yes, it's not trivial to do this. At the same time, there is a business case that can be made, which I'm a big fan of, right? Like, if you can do it, because I think otherwise the math for me is, a risk-reward kind of thing, right? So if the risk is relatively low and the cost of that is going to be relatively low, then am I going to invest the money? But if the reward is really big, that's a different model to think about, which is, I think that's really the, for me, the framing has changed from it's just a risk thing and I like, do I, am I willing to take the risk? And the consequences of that, or to now, like, is there a reward that I can get from this? Which it sounds like there is.

Yep, yep, it's the usability, it's the customer experience, it's the increased opportunity for conversion with a group of people who may already be, again, knocking on that digital door trying to get in, and now you're opening the doors and saying, come on in, welcome. And I think that's the business case that makes a lot of sense to people like yourself.

Yeah, I love it. Well, Mike, it's been a lot of fun. I hope this resonates with our audience. I think it's good for them to hear about this. If anyone wants to kind of follow up and learn more, keep up with what's going on with you and AudioEye, what's the best way for them to do that?

Yeah, I mean, I'm on LinkedIn, so I think I'm officially Michael Barton on LinkedIn with AudioEye. And yeah, go to audiowa.com. I've mentioned a scanner a few times. I think that's a great place to start to really just kind of have that first light bulb go off and realize how inaccessible your site might be.

Fantastic, Mike. It was again, pleasure, appreciate it. Thanks to everyone out there who's continued to support us and listen and watch now. We appreciate that. If you have ideas for topics or guests, or you want to be a guest like Mike, feel free to reach out to Naomi, Mike, Rizzo or me, and we'd be glad to get the ball rolling. Thanks everyone. Bye.