95% of websites have easily detectable and preventable issues on their homepage. So if you can fix every accessibility problem that an automated scanning tool identifies, that website will be effectively in the top 5% of websites on the web in terms of accessibility.

Welcome to the Agency Hour Podcast, where we help web design and digital agency owners create abundance for themselves, their teams, and their communities. This week we're joined by Chris Hines. Chris is part owner of Equalize Digital and has been involved in accessibility projects for a wide range of organizations from small businesses to NASA. Yes, that NASA. And in this episode, we dive deep into digital accessibility and why it should be at the top of your priority list. It's a real opportunity here. It's not just about being compliant. So if you're looking for some additional revenue drivers and want to stay ahead of the game and also want to help your clients increase their capacity to reach new people, this episode is for you. I'm Troy Dean. Stay with us. Ladies and gentlemen, it's a great pleasure of mine to introduce Chris Hines from Equalize Digital onto the Agency Our Podcast. Hey Chris, how are you? Hey Troy. It's great to be here. I'm doing great today. Excellent. Thanks for being here. I appreciate you. Uh and just want to give people a little bit of context. We've known each other for a of a long time now. Do you remember the first time we met? Not in person, but the first time you and actually you and I actually connected online.

So it's it's been it's been a minute. Um, I believe I originally came across you and your work through um WP elevation back in the day. And this would have been in like the mid-2010s. So like 2014, 2015. I was in a different career at that point uh entirely. I used to be in food. Um and Amber and I were trying to get an agency going um because I have a business degree in addition to a food degree. And uh at night, after I got done with work, we would sit down on our couch and we would watch WP elevation videos and implement things from that original course that you had back in the day. Um, and you know, we've since stayed connected over the years. We were in Mavericks Club for a year, which was super valuable and helped catapult us to where we are now, where we have a digital product. Uh, Yoast SEO, the founders of Yoast SEO, have invested in our accessibility scanning solution. Um our tools and services are being used on nasa.gov with the new nasa.gov launch onto WordPress. Um, so we're, you know, uh from my formative years, you've been a mentor and a coach, and it's an absolute pleasure to be here and to be talking with you about accessibility.

That's awesome. I had no idea that SEO that Yoast had invested in you guys, and I didn't know that you were on NASA. One of our Mavericks members, I think JJ Toothman is was involved in the NASA build. Um I remember you and I first connected on a Skype call back in the day, before Zoom, I had a late night, it was late night for you, early morning for me, and we jumped on Skype with you and Amber and I you know answered some questions and hopefully added some value. And then you and I actually met in real life at WordCamp USA in Philadelphia, I want to say. Is that right?

Yeah, it was the inaugural WordCamp, and I was uh I was a speaker uh and talking about my transition out of the food industry. And yeah, we met at um at a museum, I think it was, or something. I remember I got to meet you in person. That was the first in-person meeting, but there had been like a couple of years of taking your courses and coaching before we'd ever met.

Yeah. I I'm saying this not to not for any reason other than to celebrate what a great time it is to be alive, that we can capture what we know, we can document what we know, we can share it on the internet, and you end up connecting with people all over the world and forming these relationships and these friendships. And it's just a I mean, it's an incredible thing. I tell Oscar, my six-year-old, stories of when I was a kid at night. I tell him uh I read a chapter book and then he says, Oh, Dad, tell me a story about when you grew up. And I have to explain to him what it was like before mobile phones and before text messages and before the internet. Like he, it's like the dark ages. Anyway, it's a great time to be alive. You're here on the Agents Tower, and we're talking about uh accessibility. For those that don't know, let's first, and I can hear people, some people listening to this going, oh, accessibility, it's this thing that we have to do to be compliant. This episode, we are going to make the case as to why accessibility should be on the top of your priority list. We're also going to help you understand the business case, the economics behind it, how it can actually help you grow your agency and make more revenue. And it's not just a compliance thing. And this is a journey that I've been on. I've had to educate myself over the years, and Chris and Amber have been a big part of that. So before we dive into that, just tell people what is accessibility and how did you get into this into the accessibility space?

So let's start with what accessibility is. Um, at its most fundamental level, if we're talking about digital accessibility, it's the idea that any piece of digital content, and for our conversation today, this being the agency hour, we're going to focus on websites, um, although there are other aspects. It needs to be usable by everyone. And so there's a couple different layers to this. First, is it needs to be usable by everyone regardless of their abilities or their disabilities. So um they need to be able to access the content, navigate through it, use the interface, et cetera, um, regardless of how they need to interact or what their ability levels are. Uh, there are some different considerations here. You know, what we most often think of with sexability are people that maybe are blind or visually impaired, or maybe they're deaf or hard of hearing, and so they need captions on their videos, right? On the blindness side or low vision side, they might have to zoom their browser into 400% in order to access the website, or they might be using a screen reader to actually read the website's content to them kind of like it's a book almost. Um, so those are some common examples, but there are less common ones too. So one that often gets um, you know, we're both guys here, and actually a good percentage of guys have colorblindness to some degree. Um so colorblindness is not a readily apparent disability, but it is one nonetheless. And so if you're trying to um denote or share information with someone using color alone, say, you know, like we a lot of us like to do this, right? Green, good, red bad, right? If you're not using text or iconography or things like that to also convey the information, um, things could completely slip past people. Um, and then there's the idea of temporary disabilities or abilities. So the idea that um, you know, maybe I typically use my mouse, but I've broken my arm and I can't use a mouse or my trackpad for six, eight weeks sometimes. Or even extending beyond that, you know, that in this day and age, uh, a lot of us maybe are tired or overworked or stressed at times, and maybe our cognitive abilities are just a little bit low. Maybe it's late at night and something just slips right by us or goes over our head because the, you know, the reading level is too high or the information wasn't presented in a clear way. And so accessibility really considers all of those things. Um, but even taking and extending it beyond that and uh into the idea of uh different access points and different devices. So whether we're on you know, gigabit fiber or on a rural 3G connection on a potato Nokia phone, we should be able to access the interface and be able to do what we need to do. And um across that, too, is you know, different technologies. So tablets, mobile phones, whether we're using a screen reader or a keyboard board to navigate, there's just all of these different layers of um configurations and abilities of disability that we have to consider um when we're considering accessibility. And I know that's very complicated, but we're we're human beings. We are complicated. And our technology is complicated with how we interact with the web. In terms of how I got into accessibility, I'll share a very quick story. Um and it was um maybe a year, year and a half after I got into the agency world. So this would have been about 2016 or so, we started doing a lot of work with Colorado State University. And in that work, um, we became rapidly exposed to the accessibility world because you can imagine at an institution of higher learning in the United States, accessibility is a big deal from a regulatory standpoint for these organizations that are receiving government funding. And that's kind of the baseline of where accessibility gets mentioned a lot, is in these in this sort of context, right, where it's a government entity. And so um, as part of that delivery process, uh we started bringing in testers, we started testing with screen readers and keyboards and these things, and we built up this internal knowledge. Um, and for me, kind of the light switch moment was later on when we were building a website for a uh workforce center that we had won in an RFP. Uh, we actually brought in students from the Texas School from the Blind to our physical office because we had physical offices in those days, um, unlike today, right? Um, but uh they came in and these were these were individuals who happened to be blind and they were using their screen readers to access this website and test all of our team's hard work right in front of me. And we had put so much thought and so much care into this because we were like, there, these kids are coming up to test this. It has to be the best possible experience, right? We really wanted to wow them. Um, and I remember sitting down to lunch with this kid, uh, his name is Devin. He's blind, he's a musician now, he puts out amazing music, um, and has since you know years ago graduated this, this, their high school program at the Texas School for the Blind. But he was um just telling me over lunch that if every website was like the website we had done, which this made me so proud, he wouldn't have to, you know, call a cousin or an aunt or an uncle or his parents into his room every five freaking minutes just to do basic shit on the internet. Um, sorry, I don't know if we're allowed to curse on this podcast. Uh you can bleep me if you need to. Um, but uh, you know, just basic stuff. And um without, you know, having to ask an adult for help. Um, it's stuff that you and I would take for granted, right? Just filling out a web form or buying a book or um renting a movie, whatever it is, that those kinds of fundamental things are um, you know, just the light bulb flip for me. It's like the there's there's an entire world out there that I have not seen, right? That is completely or partially cut off from things that are essential to my everyday life and that they need too, because we're in an increasingly digital world. So that's the background, that's the light switch moment.

Got it. Thanks, thank you for sharing that. Uh, I'm gonna play devil's advocate here, and I'm gonna be the conduit for the audience listening to this, and I'm gonna say, this sounds like a lot of work, Chris. It sounds like it's something I should do. It's feel good, yes. You know, it makes me feel better about, but man, it sounds like a lot of work. Like, I've built this website, I'm on a budget, I'm dealing with small to medium business owners. Like, this is just gonna take more work, and that's gonna cost me my profit, right?

Well, here's the rub, right? Um, there's this fun statistic that I like to share with people um that is uh, well, it's just interesting. So I don't know if you've heard of the WebAim million, but they go out every single year and they test the top million websites for accessibility using a very simple front-end scanner and some basic tests. And they came back in 2023 and they found that over 95% of websites have easily detectable accessibility issues just on their homepage. So these are uh this is really simple stuff, right? So it's it's things like headings being the proper order or alternative text on images, um stuff that can be easily detected through automated means. Uh and when you have something like this where 95% of the websites aren't even following the most basic fundamental level best practices that for many professionals in the space are at least somewhat second nature to do, um uh the the thing for me is like, yes, there's work that needs to be done, but uh the way things currently sit, and this is completely true, there are literally not enough accessibility specialists in the world to deal with the amount of accessibility gap that we have on the internet today. And if you look at the legal landscape of accessibility and the overall business landscape of accessibility, um there there are some clear indicators that this is this is coming and it's going to become increasingly a priority uh among businesses of all sizes. It's not just government anymore that's gonna care about this stuff. And I think that, you know, really what I'm advocating for is to just ask freelancers and web agencies for for help, to start to try to find strategic ways to introduce accessibility into existing processes and service offerings, but charge accordingly. Um and increasingly as awareness for this builds, I believe firmly that people are going to step up and they're going to pay for this if the right value proposition is made. Um and Troy, just to give a few ideas here, um this idea of like an accessibility as a service model, right, rolling that into existing offerings. Uh, this could take shape as something like a quarterly accessibility status report that an agency can deliver on the home page header and footer of their customers' websites. And this could be done with an automated scanning tool and about, you know, maybe 30 minutes of keyboard and screen reader testing to just generate a basic report, right? That gives them some ideas, some action items. Or maybe we're adding automated accessibility scanning to maintenance plans. So we talk a lot about care plans as a growth model for agencies to build recurring revenue. Why not add automated accessibility scanning enabled with a third-party tool that you can just layer in, install, and go into a maintenance plan so that you're reporting on this and so that you're giving your customer something to ask you to do, right? So it can be a revenue driver, like we talk about the idea of turning red things green, right? Um the idea of creating progress, showing growth and showing progress on improving a website. Um, and then we have ongoing accessibility monitoring. So, like you can have offer, you know, retesting a website for accessibility at routine intervals to make sure that it's still compliant if you've already engaged in an audit or remediation with them. So there's there's numerous opportunities within things that agencies are already doing to turn this into a revenue driver and to show their customers that they're you know creating a new result in a new area. And by the way, like backtracking just a little bit to this legal landscape, because I did reference that, um, one pin that your audience is going to want to put into their calendars is uh summer of 2025, which is when the European Accessibility Act goes into effect. And at that point, the overwhelming majority of businesses and organizations that do business in or are physically located in the EU are going to have to have accessible websites by law. So this is this is coming. Um, and it's it's now, you know, what the EU does, many other countries are going to follow. Um, and I think that um that agencies would be well served to start paying attention to this for numerous reasons. I think there are economic drivers, there are legal drivers, and there's just a huge opportunity here to build solutions in for businesses um and for your customers before they bring it up. You know, be ready, um, be proactive.

Can we talk about because if 95% of the top 1 million websites on the planet are not accessible, if they don't care about it enough to make it happen, how do I get Jim, who, you know, owns an accounting practice in the suburbs here and is going to invest $12,000 or $15,000 in a website, how do I get Jim to care about accessibility, other than saying, well, you know, one, you need to do this for legal reasons so you don't get sued. Two, you know, because I I don't I I you know I hear the conversation already. It's like, okay, sure. There's, you know, there's G there's GDPR, there's the Californian Privacy Act. Uh, there are, you know, a gazillion websites on the planet. It's impossible for the authorities to police and fine everyone. So I'm just going to slip under the radar. I'm a small business. We're turning over a couple of million dollars a year, no one cares, it's not going to affect us. Uh, so legally, I'm not worried about it. It might be the right thing to do from a social conscience point of view, but hey, none of my clients are disabled, so I don't care. How do I get Jim, the accountant, to care about this enough? Because even if I care about it as an agency, I'm not gonna, I'm not prepared to invest an extra 30 hours into a build to make it accessible just so that I know I'm doing the right thing. Someone's got to pay for this, right? So what I'm curious about is what are the statistics around how do I how do I show Jim if we do this, the potential upside is X?

Yeah. And I think that goes back to um this idea of what percentage of the population actually experiences it with a disability and kind of what the ripple effect of of making these accessibility improvements actually is, right? So um there's uh a report out from the World Health Organization from a couple years ago that says that about one billion people or about 15% of the world's population has some form of a disability. Now, let's play devil's advocate and let's say that, okay, let's say that maybe um three quarters to half of those people have some form of a disability that doesn't actually impact their ability to use the internet at all, um, which I don't know if that is a reasonable assumption or not. But let's just play devil's advocate and let's say that it's maybe, maybe it's 7.5%, maybe it's five percent actually have a disability that meaningfully impacts their ability to use the online world. Um, in that case, I think that the the main question that I would ask small businesses, and the the answer may be different depending on their their volume of customer, right? But imagine you had this brick and mortar business, and imagine you put an obstacle course in front of your front door that ensured, guaranteed, that you excluded and made it impossible for anywhere between five and fifteen percent of your customers to walk through it. What business in their right mind would make that decision consciously? I think the issue that we have here with this 95% statistic, it's not that they don't that people don't care. I think it's actually fundamentally that people just don't know. And if you look at the context of the web and how it's evolved, right, and our our CTO, Steve, can probably put this better than I can, but you know, you you basically you started from a point of HTML, right? And there wasn't much else going on. And it's very easy to make semantic HTML accessible if that's all you're coding. But once you start to load, load, layer on, you know, CSS, SaaS, JavaScript, animated elements, video, all of these other things, as the web has gotten more complex and more layered, it has become increasingly difficult to keep it accessible because the the um the pace at which the web is changing is outstripping the capability for people who understand the best practices to keep up. That is fundamentally the problem. And then layer on top of that, the fact that since you know around 85% of the population doesn't have a disability, the majority of us, um, this is kind of an invisible problem that we don't really think about unless we are educated on it. So I think the idea that um, you know, educating customers, helping them understand that no, these are these are real barriers that real people are experiencing that are preventing them from, you know, buying something off of your store or booking an appointment with you or whatever it is, right? Um, that is that is a very real thing. I think that the other thing that's often overlooked is metrics around SEO and search performance. So if you have a website that is inherently more usable, more understandable, it has uh you know the best possible color contrast, the most clear interface based on all of the standard and web content accessibility guidelines, you are virtually guaranteed, and everything that I have seen when we do pre and post-analysis on websites that we build or that we remediate, um, you are guaranteed to see uh increased time on page, more and deeper browsing of your website, longer consumption of your content. And the great algorithm that governs over us all is going to take notice of people engaging with your website more frequently and for longer because it is inherently more usable. So even, and I don't mean to assume anything about you, Troy, but guys like me, you and I, who are typically abled, right? Um, we don't necessarily notice why. We just know that, hey, I like the experience on this website, right? This is it's it's good, it's clean, it's timeless, I can use it. The information is clearly laid out, I don't get confused, I don't get lost, right? Um, so there are there are these ripple effects, these side benefits to implementing accessibility that can enhance a website's overall performance quite substantially. And then uh, you know, if you have customers that are bringing up these other things, right? So um whether it's SEO or um getting more conversions, right? Because conversion optimization is a big deal. And if your website is accessible, you're going to get more conversions. There's not even a question. It's not a maybe, it's a win. Um, and uh like the idea of just uh observing core quality and best practices in general, I think resonates with more people than necessarily you or I would think, right? So I've I've spoken to plenty of business owners over the years that wouldn't have typically considered an accessible website as a priority. But when we start to talk about quality of the code, quality of the interface, the idea of maximizing the utility of this thing you're building for them, I think if you can speak to accessibility in terms that don't make it sound like it's just, and I don't mean this in a minimizing way, but not just for disabled people, um, I think that that really helps drive the conversation forward.

So accessibility, I was building a landing page the other day, and um we had a look at the traffic coming from a campaign that we were running, and 85% of it was from mobiles, Facebook ads, Facebook lead ads that we're driving, and they end up on a landing page, and 85% of it's coming from Facebook, mobile. And uh so I had to rebuild this landing page, and I so I built it mobile first. That's kind of the I mean, I know this I'm probably a bit of a dinosaur here, but this is the first time I actually went into a page builder and shrunk it down to mobile and said, right, I'm just gonna, I'm I don't care what it looks like on desktop, I'm gonna build this mobile first, and then I'm going to embellish it for the desktop experience, right? It changed the way I built the page, it changed the performance of the page, it made the page better on desktop because what I did is I built it just with text. Even the even the logo at the top, I had a text placeholder there to begin with, right? Which became the alt text for the image. And the video that was gonna be on the page, I actually included uh the transcript in an accordion before I loaded the video onto the page. So I built I built it for a super fast mobile experience, and then I embellished it for desktop. I'm the what I'm hearing is that if we follow best practices and if we build a great user experience and we build it accessible first, and then we add the multimedia elements to provide an augmented embellished experience for those who can enjoy it, right? That we are going to have a better performing page on all devices. Uh, so instead of building a website for people like you and I and then attaching accessibility on as an afterthought, we should really be building accessible websites and then making them augmenting the experience for people who can enjoy multimedia. Am I in the ballpark here?

Yeah, you you are. And I and I was uh I think um from an operational standpoint, you're spot on, right? The the earlier and and the more often that we can consider accessibility in a process, the better the outcome is going to be. And in the accessibility world's vernacular, we call this shifting left with accessibility. So earlier in a waterfall process, um, considering accessibility and discovery, content design, et cetera. Um, and I think that uh agencies certainly can can and should do that. And they, and at least for now, when arguably most agencies and freelancers aren't really paying all that much attention to accessibility, being able to speak to that intelligently is going to allow you to close larger deals for organizations that maybe wouldn't otherwise consider you, right? So uh just case in point, um, right now we are in a high dollar RFP process with a large organization on the East Coast, large nonprofit that serves individuals with disabilities, um, about $80,000 to $150,000 price range on the website project. Um, so pretty sizable. And there are, I want to say, um, 10 respondents to the RFP, of which we are one. Uh, seven of the 10 on the accessibility requirement eliminate or uh recommended overlays, which caused them to immediately be disqualified from the RF RFP process. So 70% of my competition for these um eliminated itself by recommending an automated solution versus actually uh speaking to the best practices and observing these best practices that we're talking about. And so I think um I think what would be good for agencies to start to consider is to uh figure out ways to actually adopt these best practices into their processes. And the the point being that you can sell more bigger projects to organizations with higher standards for themselves versus kind of being stuck in um you know small business land. Um not that that's a bad place to be if you have really dialed-in processes. I'm not saying that.

But yeah, but it but again, if you if you if you optimize your workflow to build you know mobile first, accessible first websites and then augment the content with with you know um with an experience that people can enjoy, you know, for for you know, for example, video uh or audio or uh infographics or um animation. But if you build the website to best practices for accessibility and mobile experience first, then uh augment it. It's just a matter of getting that workflow dialed in once, right? Rather than because the problem is, you know, I I mean I made a video recently about how, and we know this to be true, how sign up forms generally work better inside a pop-up because of micro commitment and what's called behavioral congruence. In other words, if I see something on a website and I say, yes, I'm interested in that, and I click the button and then the opt-in form appears in a pop-up, I'm way more likely to complete that form rather than if the form is just on the page. However, I'm now I'm thinking about this, and just because you and I are having this conversation going, I bet you there is an accessibility issue with pop-ups. Am I right?

Uh yeah, there there definitely is. Uh, you can have pop-ups and have them be accessible, but um, there's just like there's a checklist of things you need to do.

And I don't know what that checklist is, and I I didn't think about it. And I'm I'm like, what, you know, so my so my question is, where is the checklist? Is there is there somewhere I can go that says, right, build it, build these are the best practices to follow, then attach the embellishments, if you like, on top. Once we've built it to these best practices, what is the best practice skeleton? Where is the checklist? And I'm sure you can share some resources with me. We'll stick them in the show notes.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think um at a fundamental level, everyone should bookmark the web content accessibility guidelines by W3C um and try to internalize those. Uh, I'll be frank, they're very dry reading. Um, but we also have a shift left with accessibility checklist that I can share a link in the uh in your show notes here um that we share with anybody who wants it. But this is literally our checklist that we use internally for every project phase. You were alluding to the fact that you know you can dial in these processes once and then they're it's there, right? Um and it's become second nature over time. And what I was going to share was um we actually did kind of this this study internally. And and you and some of your coaches at Mavericks know that at Equalized Digital, we clock our time religiously. Um, so we've done that going back years. And so what's interesting is uh we looked at our clocked time on website projects before and after we started to just do accessibility on every single one of them. And for the project as a whole, what we've observed is uh maybe a between 10 and 20% difference in time fundamentally.

Reduction or or or increase?

Increase. So so it it does it does. I mean, it if you're actively testing for something you weren't testing for before, I don't want to sugarcoat it. It is going to take more time. But I think some people imagine in their head that it's going to take twice as long or three times as long or whatever it is. But um from a uh from a practical standpoint, um, once you have a dialed-in process, it is maybe 10 to 20% more time. Um, and so you can factor that into uh, you know, pricing, you can factor that into uh how you plan your projects out if you want to start introducing these best practices.

If you like the idea of dialing in accessibility for your clients, but you're currently overwhelmed with too much client work on your desk, then you might want to hit up our friends over at E2M Solutions. E2M Solutions are a large white label WordPress development agency based out of India. They are the exclusive sponsor of the agency our podcast. And Manish has built an incredible team of over 180 WordPress specialists, all operating out of their head office in India, and they specialize in doing white label WordPress development work for your clients, for you and your clients. And so if you are at capacity now and you need more bandwidth, uh just check out e2msolutions.com/slash agency dash mavericks. We'll put a link under this uh podcast episode in the show notes. You get a discount off your first month, and they will be able to take off your desk a lot of the work that you've currently got so that you can then think about how you're going to use accessibility to pitch clients, find better clients, find uh higher value clients, and dial in your accessibility process so that you can turn it into a revenue stream or maybe add it to your WordPress care plan workflow, which by the way, the guys at E2M can manage that for you so that you can focus on growing your business. So check out e2msolutions.com slash agency-mavericks. I want to talk about how to find clients who need this in your existing network or clients that you've worked with in the past. How do you identify those clients that, you know, are more, I want I don't want to say vulnerable, but um are more likely to benefit from this. But before we do that, what's the fastest way? Is there a tool? Is there a plug-in that I can go, hey, here's a website, run this scanner over it, and it shows me what's broken? Is there a way I can do that in a, you know, so that I can identify the low-hanging fruit and and what the gap is?

Yeah, so uh we actually built a tool for that. It's called Equalize Digital Accessibility Checker. And if you are using WordPress at all, or you're maintaining WordPress websites, of which I think most of your folks are, you can go to the WordPress.org plugin repository, search up accessibility checker will be right there. You can find the yellow emblem with the check mark, um, get that installed, and it will allow you to uh scan unlimited pages and posts for over 40 different automated accessibility checks. Uh, if you don't like the idea of having a plugin for that, I will also plug the WAVE browser extension, which is free, open source, available for anyone to use. Uh, and you can install that on um Edge, Fiberfox, et cetera. And that's just Wave W A-V-E. Um, and you can uh the nice thing about that is you don't have to install it on anything. So you can you know go check out competitor websites or scan someone's website with it before you uh reach out for a sales conversation and be able to speak intelligently to their accessibility.

That's interesting. So that's a browser extension uh called WAVE and uh the accessibility checker, the equalized digital accessibility checker plug-in. We will put sh links to both of those things in the show notes. There's a free is it a freemium model, uh, your your plugin? There's a free version and a paid version, I imagine. Yeah.

Mm-hmm. Yeah. And the the paid version um is definitely not necessary for smaller websites. So our idea is we really want to democratize accessibility for all, much like WordPress democratize publishing. Um, and there's definitely a social good component to that. But for larger organizations who need advanced features and advanced reporting, we do have a paid version. Got it.

Um now, how do we uh, you know, I I'm I I still a lot of and look, this I see the world through a very specific lens, right? Because most conversations I have with people are how do we get more clients? How do we get more high-value clients? How do we make more revenue? Because revenue pays for problems. Revenue solves problems and also creates them. But anyway, that's a whole other conversation. So how do we find, how do we, how do we prospect for the right type of clients? And then what's the how do we start the conversation rather than coming in and saying, well, if you're not, if you're not uh if you're not compliant, the European government are gonna throw you in jail, because we don't want to start the conversation like that. So how do we find the high-need clients and then how do we get them on the hook and convert them?

Yeah, so uh very broad question, but I I fortunately had a very good teacher in sales over the years. So for the uh podcast listening audiences benefit, uh Troy, you've taught me most of what I know about sales um from back in the day, and then I've I've uh expanded on that and kind of uh molded it, seasoned it to taste, as you would say, for the accessibility world. Um yeah, uh industries. So let's talk about that. What what sorts of clients are most interested in accessibility? Um I'm gonna start with the most obvious ones and then I'm gonna work my way down. Um so the first one, definitely government and higher education. Uh most of us probably knew this, so I'm not gonna spend a lot of time here. Um, but uh it's the lowest hanging fruit for sure. Uh, they also tend to have the largest budgets, so it tends to be more competitive. You have a lot of really experienced, very large agencies going after these. Accessibility will pretty much universally be a requirement. So by the time you're going after these, hopefully you have a fairly dialed-in process. You kind of know what you're doing. Otherwise, they'll they'll smell you out quick and you'll be eliminated from their competitive bid process. Um, and uh for these larger ones, I would just caution that to just be ready to deal with a lot of stakeholders. Uh and it's most likely going to be an RFP of some sort, and to try your best to just build some relationships there over the course of the RFP. Don't be afraid to call and speak to people. This is some of the ways that we have gotten in the door for larger bids, is just to try to have pre-existing relationships because fun secret of the RFP world, and there are a lot of them, but most RFP processes out there, I firmly believe, are entirely performative. They already know who they're going to hire. Um, so that that upfront relationship is absolutely key because most of it is just a dog and pony show to satisfy legal requirements. Yep. So uh on to less obvious ones. Uh e-commerce is the next big one. And there's uh this is right on government's heels, and this is by sales volume for us in what we have coming in in terms of work. And there's a the big a big reason for this. So uh there were uh I would say about 4,000, maybe mid-4,000 accessibility lawsuits uh in the US in 2023 alone. Uh and about 80% of those targeted e-commerce companies. What's fascinating about that figure, beyond just the idea of 4,000 lawsuits, 80% targeting e-commerce, is that that's the thing, those are the things that actually made it to the lawsuit stage. So you can imagine what the number of complaints was. Because obviously most things get resolved out of court before we ever get to a lawsuit. So I would I would argue it's a factor of three, five, maybe ten, um, in terms of the number of complaints coming in to e-commerce specifically. Um if you have e-commerce close, uh, you know, if you have e-commerce customers, um, I would be trying frantically to get some sort of initial offering together, even if it's just, hey, let's get a scanning tool on your care plan. Let's start to measure this, because what we aren't measuring, we aren't, you know, able to address at all, right? Um and you can close them on that pretty quickly. Um, the best chance of closing any sort of meaningful um accessibility offering in my experience is they generally need to have more than a million in annual revenue, which in the e-commerce world, there's plenty of them out there. Um that's a relatively low threshold. Um, and you can build smaller offers for lower revenue people, like the sub 1 million a year revenue. Um, you're generally going to be talking to the owner or a director level individual um when closing these deals, maybe a combination of both. Um and I think trying to identify those people, reaching out on LinkedIn, sharing information with them, giving value up front. Um, I think all of these things work, and they have worked for me. So um, like for us, equalize digital itself, we obviously put out a lot of resources that are targeted to WordPress in general and also e-commerce. We just did a big e-commerce accessibility study that we released out, and we've gotten inquiries and customers off of that. So being able to share meaningful resources, meaningful information around e-commerce and accessibility, or for any of these other things I mentioned will get people reaching out to you. Um, but if you can't do that, I think the next best thing is to try to find the places where people who run these types of companies will be physically and go and talk to them in person. Increasingly, because of generative AI, which is a whole other discussion, we are all getting bombarded with auto-generated robots trying to sell us crap we don't want. And everyone has big walls up now, including myself. And really, one of the last good ways to sell someone cold is to do it in person so that they know you're a real human being. Um, couple other options, uh, mid-cap and enterprise. So um, what I mean by that is any business in any industry with five million or more, um, you know, between five and twenty-five million in annual revenue, they're generally big enough at that point that they're going to start to worry more about risk mitigation and legal compliance specifically. So you might, you're like most often I'm talking to like a marketing director or a CMO who are making these kinds of decisions. And you may already be working with some of these people. Like if you're like some people in Mavericks, I know that they're their agencies, right? They are probably building websites for some of these mid-cap companies, um, particularly like um, I think like in the industrial space or the or the building space, the retail space, uh uh business consultancies, things of that nature. Um, you most of your people in Mavericks probably have a few of these companies sitting in their list, and maybe they just don't have the data to know that they're $5 million a year companies. Like I've gotten access to people who we're doing services for. Um, like they've shared like some of their numbers with me, and I'm like, wow, you make that much money? You make more money than me. You know, like it's it's shocking what's how big some of these companies are, even if they look small. Um, so I think mid cap and enterprise, just general small businesses, just try to find ones that look like they have a reasonably size, reasonable size footprint, not massive, just reasonable sized, and speak to speak to risk, speak to legal compliance, pay attention to geography, right? So are they in California, New York? Are they are they doing business in the EU and they don't know that this law is coming next year, right? Uh I think that that is those are the types of things that you can share if you have an offer to go with it that can get people to sit up, pay attention, and invest money in some sort of accessibility offering. And then uh large nonprofits are one of the last ones I wanted to mention. So uh we actually just launched a website from for one not too long ago where accessibility was the central focus, as you can imagine. Um, and this was a nonprofit that served individuals with disabilities across a regional area in the Pacific Northwest here in the US. Um, and what I've found with a lot of these large nonprofits is they are actually fairly starved for reliable expertise and recommendations around accessibility. And many of them were at one point or another sold a solution as accessible. And I don't think that this was out of malice, right? Probably the, you know, people don't know what they don't know. And so they went with something that said it was accessible, but it wasn't really, and they didn't really know how to validate it. So I think um they there are a lot of large nonprofits out there who are going to have respectable budgets. Um, like we're bidding on an $80,000 website right now for a large nonprofit. Like there are nonprofits out there who have respectable budgets, who needs uh accessibility expertise, or agencies that are just willing to deliver accessible solutions and willing to build the systems and put the work in. And they're going, if you're willing to do that, they're going to pick you over the other guy. And that that's maybe the point to drive home. Um so those are some of the industries in terms of how to actually close them or how to get them to sit up and pay attention. Um, I think this is where we all really need to just sit back, shut up, and put our listening caps on. Um and ask good questions, listen to what they tell you about what their pain points are. And I alluded to this a little bit earlier. You know, if they're if they have pain points around um, you know, some of them will outright say, I'm worried about getting sued, right? And they might specifically list accessibility. But if they don't say accessibility, listen for things like SEO, conversion optimization, quality and maintaining best practices, aligning with their DEI initiatives. So if they care about being inclusive and that's part of their organizational culture, selling them on accessibility should be very easy because they're they need to be living up to their own words, right? Through action. Um, listen to those sorts of things. Find ways to draw threads between what their needs are and accessibility. And You can, and I have done this, you can sell accessibility as a project component without really saying the word accessibility.

Accessibility.

Yeah. And like we put it in scope. We say, this is how you do things. And if you care about X, Y, and Z, this is the way we're going to do it because it is going to get you that result. Um. And before your next question, I want to share one other little tidbit, right? And this is um this is for an organization that they're a they're a publisher for they target people who are in professional careers that are high paying. So like doctors, attorneys, etc., um, who have large amounts of student loans. And so they put a lot, they put out a lot of content about like consolidating debt, getting better interest rates, all of this. And they have like a consultancy now. But anyway, they they're they're they have this huge publishing arm, they're getting around 200,000, 300,000 hits a month on their website. And um, in my sales conversation with them, and this was a year ago before we built this, um, they were like, Oh, we don't care about accessibility, we don't need to talk about that. And I just I just flat out said, just imagine this. Imagine with your volume, right? You have 300,000 people coming to this website any every month, and X tiny percentage of those, you know, I asked him what his conversion rate was. He said it was one or two percent. Um, and I was like, okay, so let's do some quick back of the napkin math here. That's um, you know, at least a few thousand conversions every single month. What if you could increase that by five to ten percent with accessibility just overnight without having to change anything else? And suddenly accessibility was a no-brainer. Um and and I think that finding just finding ways to tie their goals to accessibility is probably the number one skill that salespeople need to cultivate, and it just requires you to listen and to understand the areas of a website that accessibility can meaningfully impact.

Got it. Yeah, um I think the gold nugget for this episode is uh you can sell accessibility without mentioning the word accessibility. Because for years I've been saying if you want to make more money as a web designer, stop selling websites, right? You're selling solutions, and a website is the vehicle that's gonna help us get to the goal. Um the other thing I think that I really like about this is uh most uh and you've proven this, 70% of your competitors have been eliminated in the current RFP process. Most people just aren't going to do this, right? So the opportunity is huge because if you can just spend a little bit of time understanding accessibility and reframing accessibility into benefits to the client, your competitors are not going to be having this conversation. And then what happens is this is one of the reasons I'm such a big advocate for paid discovery, right? If a client comes to me and says, you know, we had a client in Mavericks Club recently saying we're getting all these incoming leads for websites. They're a social media management agency and they're starting to build websites. Clients are saying, Can you give us a quote for a website? And they said to me, We don't know what to say when a client asks for a quote for a website, and I say, Here's the line. I'd love to give you an estimate. In fact, I'd love to give you an accurate rollout of how much your website's going to cost and how long it's going to take. Can you send me your digital strategy for the next 12 months so I can see how your website fits into what you're trying to do? At which point, 99.9% of clients say, we don't have a digital strategy. You say, okay, well, the first thing we need to do is work out the strategy. And by the way, if anyone else is giving you a proposal for your website based on the amount of information you've given me, then they're completely making it up and guessing. And I don't want to do that. I don't want to guess. I want to give you an accurate scope of work and cost structure and timeline for this project. I just need more information before we can do that. And I think the same is true for accessibility. It's a way for you to then subtly let your prospect know that the competition aren't serious because they're not talking about accessibility. They're not, they don't understand this because it's requires work. We've done the work to skill up. We now have this kind of tool in our toolbox, if you like, which has all these additional benefits, right? We've talked about search engine optimization, it's algorithm-friendly, it's going to get you better conversions, it's not going to ostracize five or 10% of the traffic coming to your website. So do the work, understand the benefits, and you instantly you're in the top 10% of agencies because most people just aren't going to do this work, right?

Right. And I think the other thing that I really want to drive home for people is you do not have to be an accessibility expert to sell accessibility. There are tools available on the market like Accessibility Checker or even WAVE, where you can run automated scans, you can figure out how to fix those very basic problems. And if you fix all of those problems, let's go back to the web a million, right? We've established that 95% of websites have easily detectable and preventable issues on their homepage. So if you can fix every accessibility problem that a automated scanning tool identifies, that website will be effectively in the top 5% of websites on the web in terms of accessibility. Which as an accessibility professional, that makes me quite sad. But um in terms of like the amount, just the sheer volume of work that has to be done here. And it's this universal problem that just needs more awareness and capable agencies and salespeople to go out and sell it. And I believe that businesses can be sold on it because there is a tangible, measurable benefit to doing this work. Um, that you know, I think that this is something that people are gonna need to start paying attention to.

Yeah. Um, I just ran the Waves uh extension over a landing page that I built, and I'm pleased to say there are no errors. However, there are four alerts, which I haven't was not aware of, and I can see immediately there's some alt text missing on images because I'm an idiot. And um, I I could fix all of this in half an hour, and it's a checklist of what I need to fix. And so this is dude, this is like this has enlightened me again. Uh, it has opened my eyes, and I'm not even looking at this from an accessibility point of view. I can see if I fix these things, it's actually going to make the page better, it's gonna make it a better experience. One thing I did is I used the underline element to stylize some text, right? What I could do is just use the italics emphasis or bold element to stylize the text because underline generally means it's a link, right? So if people are using this and you know what I mean? So things like that I just take for granted, it's a little CSS cheat that I was using. Well, now I'm gonna go back and revisit that and I'm gonna run this uh and I'll grab the equal, because this page is not on WordPress, so I couldn't use the equalized uh checker, for example, but I will use the equalized checker on the WordPress on our website, come up with a list and send it off to the team to fix. So this is awesome. Thank you so much for spending some time with us on the agency. What's the one question I should have asked that we haven't had time to?

So I think um the one question that we didn't get to or uh was the idea of like how do you approach building an accessibility offer? Do you feel like we have enough time that I can go into that for a couple minutes? Sure, let's do it. All right, sounds good. Um so the way that we approach this, and I'm going back to when we were kind of in the formative years of equalized digital, kind of discussing, okay, how could we turn our in-house knowledge as an agency into accessibility offerings for all sorts of organizations? And where we always began with is what's in it for the person I'm trying to sell this to, right? So we always started from the standpoint of what's the result that we are ultimately selling? What does this person care about, right? And the result will depend on who they are. So understanding industry responsibility, size of company, audience they serve, all of these things will kind of factor into what that result is. After you've established what the result is of this offer, right? What pain points is that result fixing? So that's the next step. And that's what helps you build out your sales copy, your outreach process, everything, right? And then continuing to work backwards, we start to talk about okay, how do we fulfill this? What is the process? Who's doing it? How do we measure success both internally and with the customer? And then finally, after all of that, with everything that we know, we decide what we need to get out of it in order for it to be worth it. So profit first is big for us. So we decide what profit needs to be, and then we work backwards through all of our cost centers to arrive at what the price has to be in order to get our ideal profit off of an offer. And based on that ideal price, we then finally, very last step, we make a lot, we see if we can uh, you know, do the rubber ducky test basically and talk through all of this and see if we can still make a logical case for ROI based on what we need to charge. Does the customer still get a return on their investment? If the answer to that is no or we can't prove it, then we kind of have to go back to the drawing board and go through a few permutations, which we have had to do. Um, and um the important thing to note too is that sometimes ROI isn't dollars, although often it is, but sometimes it's just peace of mind, right? Or understanding that um, because some people are uh achievement driven, right? It's understanding I have the best website that money can buy, right? And some people that's all they care about, right? So there are a lot of results that aren't dollars for a lot of different reasons. Um but I think that that's kind of how we go about building an offer and in working backwards from that. And I think using that process from uh to create an accessibility offer is the most ideal place to start. And if you aren't sure what result you want to sell, I would say the first stop is to start talking to your customers and asking them questions about accessibility, right? Particularly in these key industries. So if there's a customer who you can uh, you know, you have them on speed dial, you can call them up and be like, hey, have you heard about this accessibility thing? I'm starting to pay attention to it. Like, is it keeping you up at night? Oh, it is? Okay, what specific things? You know, what you know, start to drill down, start to ask questions. Um, and I think that you can you can very quickly get to a very sexy offer for a um, you know, a particular person working at a particular type of company, and then you're after the races.

Uh I'm reminded of a campaign I worked on for a company called Febfast once years ago. We I proudly will say we were the agency that got them to their first seven-figure year campaign. FebFast is an organization that encourages you to give up alcohol for the month of February and you get your friends to sponsor you. The form back in the day, I uh we we had no control, we had control over the the landing page and the sign-up form for people to sign up to register for FebFAS, but we had no control over the form they sent their friends to sponsor them. Now, for example, if I sign up and and uh agree to not drink alcohol for the month of February and I get and I send this form off to my friends, and some of my friends are visually impaired or can't use a mouse or whatever, and that form, which is hosted by a third-party platform, isn't accessible. All of a sudden, FebFAST is losing out because of a third-party tool that the the participants are using to get sponsorship, right? So accessibility, now this this isn't necessarily just about dollars or funds raised either, because what happens is people who if if you sponsor me to give up alcohol for the month of February and I raise five grand, and then I'm talking to you and I'm like, oh, thanks for sponsoring, man, and I feel great, I haven't had a drink for 30 days and I'm sleeping better, my energy levels are higher, you might agree to do it next year. However, if you haven't been able to sign up and sponsor me because you can't use a mouse, then FebFAS don't have the ability to promote the cause to you next year because you're not in their database as a as a sponsor, right? So it's so the ripple effect of accessibility, once you start thinking about how this plays out, the benefits for an organization, it is like a ripple effect. And I think you're right. You you just need to understand what your client actually wants and the outcomes they're looking for, and then understand how you can tie their pain points to these accessibility features. And you might just sell accessibility without using the word accessibility. I love it.

I love it. Works more often than you'd expect.

Yeah, this has been a great conversation. I really appreciate uh your time here. Um, I, you know, it's been great to be part of your journey over the last 10 years or however long it's been. I'm looking forward to hanging out again sometime when we're out in the States. I think we're coming out in October again, so maybe we can connect then. Uh, where can people get in touch and continue this conversation? What's the best way for people to reach out, Chris?

So if you're an agency or a freelancer and you want to talk about this more, I spend most of my time talking to agencies and freelancers about accessibility and how they can do more with it. Um, you can send me an email, Chris at equalize digital.com. Give me a shout out at Twitter. I'm Mr. underscore Chris Hines on Twitter. Um, happy to connect with anyone and everyone who uh needs help.

Awesome. Well, thank you for spending some time with us on the Agency Hour and sharing your knowledge. And you've certainly lit a fire within me, and I know you will have uh for a bunch of our listeners as well. So all the best. Say hi to Amber and the kids for us, and uh yeah, look forward to keeping the conversation going. All right, sounds good. Thanks for listening to the Agency Hour podcast, and a huge thanks to Chris for joining us. Okay, folks, remember to subscribe and please share this with anyone you think may need to hear it. I'm Troy Dean, and remember the King of Hearts is the only king in a deck of cards without a mustache.