Making Your Website Accessible | David Gibson
Today’s guest is David Gibson, of PropellerMediaWorks.com.
David leads a team of A-level professionals who deliver creative ADA compliant websites that entice, engage, and convert.
They are proactive partners who steer clients away from danger when it comes to website design. Yesterday it was mobile and responsive design. Today it is website accessibility to provide Sect. 508 and ADA compliance. Under the brand Accessibility.Works they have a dedicated team of accessibility specialists - each with over 18 years in digital accessibility - to provide best-practice WCAG audits, remediation guidance, training, and policy consulting.
David and I had a deep conversation about making your site accessible. We talked about some of the pitfalls in the shark infested waters of accessibility.
My own interest in the topic is personal. I have a few friends who use screen readers to navigate their online work.
One friend lost his entire business when the tools he was using overnight removed support for any screen readers. He was devastated and it took years for him to recover his business.
David shared a blog post called “Why Accessibility Overlay Solutions Fail to Protect or Serve”.
https://www.accessibility.works/blog/avoid-accessibility-overlay-tools-toolbar-plugins/
About a half-hour into our conversation, we discussed Schema markup, and whether screen readers can read this data to help users. I was amazed at the complexity of the answer, and learned about ARIA (Accessible Rich Internet Applications).
In the time that’s passed since this recording it’s possible that Schema markup can be used in accessibility measures. So please make sure you’re using all available tools,so you can support people who use your site.
Learn about the web accessibility IRS tax credit for accessibility work on your site. (This is not financial or tax advice. Check with your tax advisor to learn if this tax credit will work for you.)
You can always find more at https://amybiddle.me, including training, blog posts, and all of the podcast episodes (go to the website for full podcast transcripts) as they're released. Make sure to opt-in for emails when you're at the site so you get the exclusive content as it's released.
For additional help with your ecommerce business, here is a book I wrote called, "Retailer's Email Playbook: The 67-Point Master Plan You Can Start Using Right Now to Add 30% or More to Your Bottom Line". Available now in paperback and Kindle versions here: https://amzn.to/3lY2U97
Let me help you with your ecommerce business. Get free ad techniques… discussions on what’s working now… starting and scaling… and more.
Join the free Facebook group, the eCommerce Traffic Handler Facebook Group here: https://bit.ly/3amChIf
Full transcript of the episode:
This may be the beginning of the path
that either goes in the direction of a
legitimate lawsuit or a satisfied customer.
Welcome to the Traffic Handler podcast.
We're about getting new customers, making more
sales, and growing your ecommerce retail business.
I'm your host, Amy Biddle.
Today's guest is David Gibson of Propeller Media Works.
David leads a team of A-level
professionals who deliver creative ADA compliant websites
that entice, engage and convert.
They're proactive partners who steer clients away from
danger when it comes to website design.
Yesterday was mobile and responsive design,
but today it's website accessibility to
provide Section 508 and ADA compliance.
David and his team provide best practice WCAG
audits, remediation, guidance, training, and policy consulting.
This is a conversation from the vault only previously
released to my private Traffic Handler clients, but it's
finally time to release it to the public.
My own interest in the topic is personal.
I have a few friends who use screen readers
to navigate their online work because they're visually impaired.
One friend lost his business entirely when
the tools he was using overnight removed
support for any screen readers.
He was devastated, and it took
him years to recover his business.
Please take this conversation to heart and
apply Dave's information to your business.
We're going to talk today about accessibility and websites,
and David is a longtime specialist in this work
and knows all the ins and outs.
So we're covering interesting things like the
Americans with Disabilities Act, which is, I
think, 30 years old now.
So that's a long time in place thing, but following
it up and we're going to hear a lot about
this today is the website content accessibility guidelines.
So, David, how would you
like to start this conversation?
Because there's a lot to dig into.
Yeah, there are a lot of topics.
I mean, there's topics regarding... there's the
legal side, there's the practical side in
terms of the auditing piece.
There are approaches for the
remediation, there's best practices.
There are some bad actors out there.
It's a little bit of the Wild
West right now in the provider space.
So you do have to have a heads
up in that area and then really how
you maintain your accessibility going forward.
So I think that's the rough outline, right? Sure.
That makes a ton of sense.
And then as far as the audits go, you
and I were talking about this in our days
leading up to our conversation today.
And audits are one of the
services that your company provides.
So we'll probably dig into that a little bit later on.
As far as what levels of audit people watching
this are going to be everywhere from side hustle
startups, one person side hustle startups to multiplayer teams
with a million or more in revenue.
I think what I promised to offer is really
a pragmatic, as I say to so many clients
in the beginning of this conversation, is that's the
approach you take really depends on where you lie
on the spectrum of budget and risk.
And it's a pretty broad spectrum.
But there are some ways to avoid being caught
up as low hanging fruit from the standpoint of
the trolling plaintiff law firms that are out there.
And that's what many are looking for.
Others are also, of course, looking to make
sure that this is a DEI issue.
This is diversity, equity and inclusion.
And digital inclusion for people with disabilities
is ever more important, especially this year.
Makes a ton of sense.
Now that ecommerce specifically, that's
the front line of retail now.
It really is.
And it's the ecommerce providers that are really
taking the brunt of the hit from the
legal standpoint, they are number one.
Financial services are right on there.
Well, there's actually a pretty good gap.
Ecommerce in retail in general is the
number one target for these companies, regardless of
the pandemic and the strains that have been
put on these small businesses. Okay. All right.
So how can a small ecommerce player small being under
$5 million in revenue, how can they protect themselves?
And what are these bad actors looking for?
So the trolling law firms, plaintiffs and
such, they're looking to cash in.
They're looking for very quick
settlements, really easy money.
That usually takes the form of a demand letter.
And we don't really have any idea
the volume of these demand letters.
We know it's very large, just anecdotally
it's a massive amount because they're so
quick, cheap and easy to produce.
They simply need to go to your website.
They run an automated test on the site.
They'll get hundreds, if not thousands
of, quote, violations of the WCAG.
I think we should dive into that next
a little bit to define that in the
legal ADA versus Section 508 situation.
There's a lot of room there in terms
of that situation there with these law firms.
They're just really trolling.
They're using their automated tool.
They're dropping it... your URL into it.
It's producing all those... that folds right into a
form demand letter that gets emailed straight out.
And they probably put in less than 30 minutes per
and they're getting back minimum of $4,000, $5,000 per.
So they're really printing money and
they're strongly incentivized to do this.
Well, yeah, no kidding.
I mean, if they can go to an
ecommerce store and basically, it's like ransomware.
Yeah.
The word extortion is used a lot. Yeah.
It really kind of is because all you need
is like a bot to go reading through things.
And that pays for itself with your first letter.
Oh, yeah. It's crazy.
The tools they're using are generally free as well.
Oh, man. Wow.
That's the end, man.
All right, so you mentioned WCAG a couple of
times, the Website Content Accessibility Guidelines, Section 508.
And I understand that there are certain
levels of compliance that we're looking for.
Let me back up and take that one level,
because what we're dealing with in the US, we
have two laws that govern digital accessibility, and one
is really on the .gov side.
So entities that take federal dollars, they
fall under section 508, the Rehabilitation Act.
Then you have the American Disabilities Act, the ADA,
and that is focused more on commercial enterprise.
Both of them refer well, 508 does explicitly now
as of I think about two, if not three
years ago, explicitly establishes the WCAG as the standard.
The ADA has yet to have its rules revised.
The Department of Justice has dragged its heels
for well over a decade now in rulemaking
and under the previous administration stalled out 100%.
So it's really been the courts that have
shouldered the responsibility of kind of establishing through
case law what the standards are.
And that's pretty universal.
There are some deviant cases, but most of them refer
to the WCAG version 2.0, although we are in version
2.1 right now, which only adds 17 additional criteria.
It's really a very small step.
It doesn't really... you don't
really think twice about it.
And then there's three levels.
There's A, AA and AAA. A are the very low
hanging fruit, your missing alt tags, things like that, AAA,
and then AAA is really just best practice.
Nobody is held against AAA standards.
Okay, that's good to know.
And we've been talking about alt tags
in the eCommerce Traffic Handler program in
our group since about February.
I had a friend years ago who lost his
entire business, all of his living because Jaws would
no longer work on the software he was using.
And he was a contractor for that company also.
This was well before WCAG.
He was out of the country.
Anyway, it's all a bad thing.
We've been talking a lot about alt tags, just as a
starting idea for how to tackle some of these problems.
Today's episode is sponsored by Schema app
for Shopify. Connect with customers at the
beginning of their buying journey.
Adding structured data to your Shopify store
helps search engines better understand your website.
This increases the chance of customers finding
and purchasing products and services like yours.
Get started today at schemaapp.com.
We were talking before we hit record today
about what some of the tools are.
They can be used just as a very start.
How do website owners, how do store
owners, ecommerce business people get started with
a fix for these things, right?
Well, of course, before there's the fix,
you need to understand what's wrong.
What's wrong?
That requires an audit.
That's the core of what
we do at Propeller Accessibility.Works.
Accessibility.Works is our
web accessibility consultancy.
And everybody, I'll just plug it really quickly.
Everybody on that team is north
of 17 years in digital accessibility.
We don't have any interns.
There's no juniors.
You have established professionals doing the work.
I describe this as a boutique, even though we work with
very large brands, many of which I can't name but Ben
and Jerry's, I think it is clear and well, there's just
many others and I won't get into that.
But in terms of process here and best practices, again,
it does go back together where you are in that
line of what you can afford from a practical standpoint
and the things you need to look out for.
But the best practice is to do
what we describe as a three factor
audit that would begin with automated testing.
The very important thing to realize and understand
about automated testing, even the best which we
have at our disposal, they're only going to
detect roughly 30% of WCAG issues at best. Okay.
The WCAG is fairly nuanced.
It's interpreted at points.
And just machines are just not good at testing certain
things like not using your mouse and just using the
keyboard, your tab and enter key to navigate the site.
Automated tools are not good at that.
So to make up the difference, you
do manual and then assistive technology testing.
Those are the two additional factors.
You don't do that on the entire site.
That would be crazy expensive.
Your website is built on templates.
And within those templates, the application of those
templates, you have components embedded in the page.
So what you want to do is come up with
a list of pages that captures every template and each
of the instances of the components within your pages.
That can turn out to be a surprising number.
Most ecommerce sites are usually over 20 unique pages.
I want to get into some cost
ranges, too, to set some expectations.
Let me establish that here.
This is by our methods.
What we're going to do is we're going to come
in and do that three factor with testing, automated manual
testing, and then assistive technology testing, where we blindfold ourselves
and use Jaws or NVDA and others on the desktop
and or mobile, we're going to come up with a
really complete audit, at least.
What we do is we're intent on not just showing
you where the issue is and what it is.
We want to show you how to fix each issue.
So we're speaking directly to the designer,
the developer, or the content team.
Many of the issues can be addressed through the
CMS, like those image alt tags you're talking about.
In most cases, all of those can be addressed through
the CMS or whatever your back end is, your database
for images, tables, table, headers, things like that.
So there are those kind of nuances there.
And those things you really need to
look out for, taking the shortcut.
Let me step down from that.
So when we come back and we say, okay,
it's going to be 20 to 25 unique pages.
As a rough number, just put $1,000 per on that.
So you're looking at $20- to $25,000.
Some e commerce, some Shopify owners may have
spent that amount on the initial website.
So it's a tough pill to swallow. At that point.
So from a pragmatic standpoint, I say,
okay, let's see what we can do.
What is your budget?
Let's say your budget is $10,000.
And we say, okay, let's do
ten templates, ten unique pages.
We go into your Google Analytics, we look at which ones
are the most popular, and we also look at it from
a Pragmatic user flow from the homepage to the checkout.
And that linear path there to make sure we are
covering the core use cases for the website and at
least making sure that pathway is as clean as possible.
That makes a ton of sense. Right.
And I want to interject here for a second,
because what you're describing is a human first model.
And I've been talking about that for years.
The websites have to be human first.
The search engines will catch up, as evidenced
by we used to just have metadata.
Now we've got schema and there's just a whole bunch
of additional nifty tools that websites are now readable.
But it was human care that had to come first.
So it makes a ton of sense that what you're
describing is an audit done by a professional that handles
all of this nuanced issues and that only a certain
portion of them can be handled in an automated fashion.
That makes a ton of sense. Right.
The best is when you combine the two. Right.
Because the automated is excellent at being
able to spider the entire website.
We can even get through the back doors
and get into the back end account for
the user and get through the checkout process.
They're pretty sophisticated in some cases,
so you can get through.
But just as I said, they're limited.
That's why that human component is so important. Yeah.
But even still, let's say you're just getting started.
Your website, you just published like last year,
and you're like, oh, no, you're kidding me.
What is this?
So at the very low hanging fruit approach, you have
$3,000 or $5,000 to go with automated try to get
the best automated tools you can get for your money.
Many of these tools are really mature.
They've been around some of them for 15 to 20 years.
So they have really deep libraries behind them.
The library would be where it identifies
the issues, and then it has canned
remediation guidance that flows into the reporting.
Depending on the tool that you're using, that can be
fairly robust and at least get you think about it
this way, if the trolls are using automated tools and
they're not using manual, they're going to use manual.
Perhaps if they really want to dig in on a
large brand and they really want to dig deep.
But for the most part, they're using automated tools.
So I just say use better automated tools.
Yeah, that sounds good.
Now, before we get started today, one of
the things you're talking about is overlays.
Can you address that problem?
Because it sounds like a bandaid that leaks.
That's exactly how to describe it.
That is precise.
This is where, as I mentioned, there are some actors out
there, and this is a little bit of the Wild West.
There are people making outrageous claims that with this
little widget, place this little widget on your website
and poof, your website is magically ADA compliant.
And that just is false.
As we said, automated tools at best
can only detect 30% of issues.
These overlays are automated tools, so making
any such claim is really something else.
What that's doing, too, and what's important to
understand about overlays, and you can identify them.
You'll come upon websites that have a little icon in the
bottom left or right hand side of the page, and you
click them, and up comes a widget that gives you options
to change the contrast or increase the font size.
Some of them have baked in
screen readers in them and such.
And the problem with this is that
they don't fix the underlying code.
It's a surface level bandaid that leaks,
as you perfectly said, a little graphic.
And unless you're fixing the underlying code, because
in some cases, that overlay isn't even triggered
until the user hits that button.
So by default, your underlying code could be exposed.
There's that issue from kind
of a legal liability extent.
But I think more importantly is the
effect it has on people with disabilities.
What these tend to do more often than not is
get in the way of the user's native assistive technologies,
which I'll just refer as at we're talking about.
You mentioned Jaws before.
That's a screen reader.
NVDA is another one, and that has just
recently surpassed Jaws as the industry leader.
It is free, of note, too.
And I welcome anyone to download one
and just put themselves in those shoes.
It's something to experience.
There are plenty of videos also
out there demonstrating these tools.
There are some videos also showing
how users actually, there's one on.
Maybe I can include you with a blog post
that outlays this overlay issue because I also have
a video embedded, or I can just send you
the video directly of a person being interviewed who
is blind and he walks through these barriers.
That the overlays.
Yeah.
So from the standpoint of making your
website more accessible to people with unique
abilities and from a legal standpoint, these
overlays are something certainly to avoid.
Amazing.
I mean, we've got the bad actors in
the legal offices who are what you describe
as serial plaintiffs going around looking for small
businesses to hit with a demand letter.
And then you've got these other bad
actors who are putting out overlays and
plugins saying you'll be compliant. Yeah.
It's a little tough right now everywhere. Yeah.
Especially given the audience and
who we're talking about.
These are our most vulnerable members
of society, and they're especially hurt
during this pandemic on one side.
And then you have the small business people.
I've spoken with restaurant owners recently
that are just beside themselves.
They can't believe they have this demand letter
on their hands or even a federal suit
when they're struggling to stay in business.
There's no conscience with some of these people. No.
Today's episode is sponsored by Bold Apps.
Bold offers a full suite of proven apps for
Shopify and Shopify Plus to help you grow your
online store, all backed by industry leading support, including
bundles, upsells, subscriptions, and a whole lot more.
Find them at boldcommerce.com. So what are some of the fixes
that the small business owner can put in place
now and perhaps build into their growth structure so
that they get compliant and stay compliant? Yeah.
Well, the first step is the audit and to get as
complete of an audit as you can afford because it's power.
Knowledge is power.
And if you have that audit, what you can
then do is you have the audit costs and
then you're going to have the remediation cost.
So at least with our audits, what we want to do
to help our clients and we ourselves are our own clients.
We build websites. Right.
So when we get that report, sometimes
it's 120 some odd pages or more.
We need to prioritize that.
So that's actually one thing we realized early
on way back in the day, is that
the report is too much to consume.
We need to make this somehow
easier to manage and digest.
So we established a priority
report, which is a spreadsheet.
We take all those items from the primary
report, drop them into a spreadsheet, and for
every issue, we indicate the level of severity.
So that's how much does this issue affect a person
with a specific disability and then a priority number.
And the priority number is kind
of a business logic in there.
And so when you shift into remediation, a logical
approach is to hit all of those high priority
issues first and work your way down through and
perhaps break the project into pieces.
Obviously, segment out all the issues that
can be addressed through the CMS.
Give those to your niece, an intern, you know, somebody
that just can sit down and muscle through all of
those all of those issues that can be addressed through
the content management system and free up those resources to
your development team or perhaps even your design team if
you have to go back that far.
So that's my first recommendation
of kind of first steps.
Get a good audit, invest well, there
you're investing upstream in that case.
And the deeper and the better that remediation
guidance is that will save you plenty of
that will pay for itself when you go
into development side, because your development team doesn't
have the answers right in front of them.
They don't have to go shooting out over
the Internet looking for how to address XYZ.
The answers are right there.
It's much more efficient.
And then work your way based on
budget where you can afford that year.
On the remediation side, get all
those low hanging fruit items.
Get yourself really out of the path of an easy lawsuit.
Another recommendation I'd have would be to
add an accessibility statement in your footer
right next to your Privacy policy.
Make sure it's exposed.
You want in the photo of every site and on
that page you want to spell out not in every
certain detail, but you want to establish that.
You want to acknowledge that there is an issue or
that you are working on this, that you care very
much about web accessibility and people with unique abilities.
You want to establish that your goal is WCAG 2.1 A / AA.
If you are in the midst of hiring an
outside consultant, you may want to mention that there
showing that you're not just talking, but you're doing.
But most importantly, and to write this
with a great deal of empathy.
No legal speak here, because this is where
a person with a challenge might very likely.
This may be the beginning of the path
that either goes in the direction of a
legitimate lawsuit or a satisfied customer.
So you want to provide them
with a path to communication.
So you want to have an 800 number.
You want to have that number, preferably going
to somebody, not just the front line.
If you've got a larger ecommerce organization and
you have a customer service team, you'd want
to bump this up a level immediately.
You want the number to go straight to a manager
who has this on their radar to take such a
call very seriously and with a great deal of empathy.
Obviously, an email, a chat bot.
But the chat bot needs to be accessible, right?
Many of them aren't.
So you definitely want to look for that.
Maybe a form.
Again, the form needs to be labeled correctly and accessible,
but just the very least is that phone number.
That's their main tool.
And I think that also the accessibility statements at the
footer is also a flag to those trolls that says,
okay, this is a company that is on this.
This isn't the lowest hanging fruit, right?
It may not stop them at all.
They don't really care what your intent is.
They're looking for fast, easy cash.
So I'm not going to claim that it's going to stop that.
But I think in a legitimate
claim, you can help you there.
And most importantly, the person with a disability just
wants to learn a little bit more about a
certain product or whether or not something is still
in stock or so on and so forth.
Answer any questions about shipping.
You just want to make sure
that pathway is really open, right? Absolutely.
Now, I didn't even know about accessibility statements.
So this is a best practice standard that all
small businesses can, all businesses should be doing.
Like, right off the bat.
Yeah, we've had clients who have hesitated,
they've wanted to get farther down field
before they publish that statement.
Others say right off the bat, let's just
be forward with this and make sure we
have that communication path that's really open today.
In these instances, it's really a kind
of a risk management type of question.
You may want to bring in
counsel to answer these questions.
I think it's a good idea to have
counsel review this statement and understand that there's
a difference between a policy and a statement.
I wouldn't call this a web accessibility policy.
Such a policy would normally be internal to a company.
The statement is public facing and
it should avoid the legal speak.
That really would turn people off.
Yeah, it just makes a ton of sense.
You said something, David, a couple of minutes ago
about checking to see, just for an example, if
a product were in stock or not.
Now, schema is one of the ways that the search
engines can see on, for example, a product page.
If it's in stock, out of stock, what
the prices, sizes that are available, stuff like
that that's kind of baked into most not
all Shopify themes, WordPress stores and sites.
Woocommerce.
At the very least, we see a fairly
decent schema structured data on most of at
least the product pages, sometimes even collection pages.
So I'm wondering, does NVDA or
Jaws or any screen reader?
Can they read schema?
Can they read structured data?
That's a really good question.
I'm not sure what the answer to that is.
They're basically reading the DOM.
They're reading what you can see on the screen, plus
other labels and ARIA code that is in there.
ARIA is kind of a specific language set that is
designed to speak directly to the screen readers and provide
to help with describing things that are very difficult to
describe or to explain from a labeling standpoint.
Amazing.
I had no idea about ARIA.
That's a great question, though, and
I'm sorry, I can't answer it.
I can follow up with you about email.
That would be great.
Yeah, because I can put that in the comments in the
group, and I can also add it to the show notes
for sound or on YouTube in the additional information below.
Well, this is all amazing.
I mean, I've got two pages of notes here.
How can people either work with you or
at least get an introductory sort of help?
David, what do I do next?
Sure, just give me a call, shoot
me an email, go to Accessibility.Works.
You can also find me through
Propellermediaworks.com, get in, touch me there.
I always do a free initial consultation.
I'm not going to audit your site, but I'll
go through and just look at a few things.
We can have a conversation.
We can talk about just the pragmatic approach that will
work with you based on your budget and your goals.
And we can also provide remediation as well.
The Propeller Media Works side is set up well
to work on Shopify sites and other ecommerce WordPress
and such to execute the remediation itself.
But I'm not going to push that though, because
I think what's really important is if you have
a partner that's in place that you have a
good relationship with, we want to empower them.
They will learn a great deal from this.
Just going through one
remediation round it's exponential.
They will learn a ton through that,
then they're stronger for you moving forward.
And please don't blame them for this either, unless
they contracted specifically claiming they were going to deliver
WCAG two point whatever A / AA, unless that was explicitly
stated, even if it was explicitly stated, that was
at one point in time.
Once the website is launched and you're
using it, the content itself is what
also really impacts that accessibility.
So you add a new product without an alt tag, you
create a new page with a form that lacks labels.
Any other type of situations are really on
the team that's using the content management system.
So look at this as a learning process.
Look at this, unfortunately, as a new cost
of doing business and then moving ahead.
I want to mention this too,
once you're through the remediation process.
And by the way, when you're shopping for
someone like us, you're looking for a consultant.
You want to make sure too,
that whatever costs are quoting includes
the initial audit, some remediation consulting.
If their reporting is really good, you
shouldn't need much of that consulting.
We include by default 4 hours in every
one of our projects, and it's incredibly rare
that even a single hour is used.
And then once that remediation is complete, your team
has gone through like we've checked off everything.
They raised their hand, say, okay, come
on back and do a verification audit.
That verification audit isn't always included and
therefore a hidden cost, because you definitely
are going to want that.
Let me also mention too, about certifications.
Certifications are often asked for.
They really hold very little value.
It's not something you're going to be able to hide
behind as a legal document or something like that.
So just be aware of that.
It's also a snapshot in time because as I
described, once the site launches, you're using it.
It's out in the wild.
A website is a living beast.
So don't get hung up on these statements and such.
And anybody that's offering a guarantee and such
just be very that's actually a red flag.
They're claiming any sort of guarantees because it's
not something you can the provider can't guarantee
this because they're not doing the remediation.
And even if they were doing the remediation, it's
too much of a wild beast to tame.
So good.
I'm really glad we got to mention that,
too, because that comes up a lot in
the discussions I have with potential clients.
Yeah, absolutely.
Well, I've got a site of my own
that I need to bring to you.
So this will be an ongoing conversation.
But I do have one more quick question.
I understand that there's a tax credit because the government
is helping to subsidize some of this work, and I
think it's 50% between a certain range of costs.
Can you address that a little bit? Yes.
This is an IRS tax credit.
And once you get beyond $250, it covers up to
half of your expenses on Digital Accessibility up to $10,250.
And so it's a $5,000 tax credit.
And you can just look that up,
just Google "Web Accessibility tax credit".
You'll find everything that you're looking for.
It's only for businesses under a million
dollars and businesses under 30 employees.
So it sounds like that's a threshold that many
of your listeners may fall within, something that's really
worth paying for a good chunk of this. Exactly.
Now, my understanding with this, though, is that
there is some ongoing nature to this.
Like what happens in year one.
Let's say I spend $10,000 and then
I get that $5,000 tax credit.
So snapshot in time.
At that moment, I have compliance.
But then going forward, there are updates.
There are changes to.
Yeah, if I understand the tax credit, it
can be used year after year after year.
That's my understanding.
If you're taking a phase approach and depending on where you
are in your year, if you start this project in the
fall, you could do $5,000 up to January 1 and then
another $5,000 if you're breaking this into phases.
That's a perfect approach.
Yeah, there's definitely some good definitely check
with your tax advisor on this.
They'll fill you in on the details.
But you just mentioned ongoing, too.
And I'm realizing I wanted to mention too, about
what happens after you go through this process.
You've done your remediation and your audit up
to whatever point you are on that spectrum.
And then what do you need to be testing?
24/7.
There are plenty of monitoring tools that are going to
be automated based that will be really useful in keeping
you out of hot water on ongoing basis.
Catching that case where a blog post gets published
without those image all Tags or where your heading
Tags are out of whack and sending the screen
reader down here and up here and all around
the page, they can catch that.
And, of course, there are many different tools out there,
ranging from free to $50 a month, up to thousands
and thousands of dollars per year for licensing.
But there are many in that $50 a month range
that are strong, that will do what you need.
And then in terms of having to come back and
do a full audit that we've described, you only need
to do that once the user interface is really modified.
And let's say it's a small change.
Let's say you're just redoing the home page, plus
the global elements of the header and the footer.
You can bring somebody else like us back
in and just test those components right.
And you should be in good shape moving forward. Amazing.
David, I kind of get the feeling that you
and I could sit here all day and talk
about all the little elements of websites and accessibility.
I'm going to let you go, though.
I want to thank you so much for joining
me today and I'll put all the additional materials
in the comments and all that extra supplementary stuff.
I really appreciate and I really
appreciate you bringing this to light.
As I said, this is a group in our society
that doesn't get enough attention and who needs it?
They need our help right here.
And digital accessibility is if you're in
some of these situations, the internet is
their world and making that internet accessible
is a responsibility that we all have.
And I thank you all for considering this
and taking whatever steps you can afford. Awesome.
Thank you.
That's a great way to close. All right.
Thank you so much.
You've been listening to the Traffic Handler podcast.
We're about getting new customers, making more
sales and growing your ecommerce retail business.
I'm your host, Amy Biddle.
Get more at AmyBiddle.me.
Until next time, go sell more stuff.
===========================================
Podcast music by Dan Lebowitz.
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC38A5qHrlc_Zgua7vL4b96w
Post production by Melinda Fries.
Production Assistant Laurie Carnes.