Ep.132/ SEAMONSTER STUDIOS
Web compliance and accessibility (WCAG & ADA) for ecommerce brands with SeaMonster Studios
Mariah Parsons, Host of Retention Chronicles and Head of Marketing at Malomo, is joined by SeaMonster Studios’ Wes Buckwalter, Creative Director and CEO, and Deneb Pulsipher, Web Developer and Accessibility Specialist. Wes shares the company's origins and evolution into a full-service agency offering branding, graphic design, and compliance. Deneb, previously a high school English teacher, transitioned into web development, focusing on accessibility for ecommerce brands. They discuss the importance of WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) and ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act) compliance, emphasizing the need for accessible websites to retain customers and avoid lawsuits. They highlight common issues like alternative text for images and text in images, and the benefits of compliance for SEO and user experience.
Episode Timestamps:
4:57 SeaMonster Studios background and evolution into web compliance and accessibility experts
25:33 Sea Monster Studios' Expertise and Offerings With Branding and Web Compliance
25:58 Challenges and Benefits of Accessibility
31:31 Practical Considerations for Accessibility
43:52 Common Accessibility Issues and Solutions For Ecommerce Brands
Ep.132
WES BUCKWALTER
DENEB PULSIPHER
TRANSCRIPT
This transcript was completed by an automated system, please forgive any grammatical errors.
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
company, people, accessibility, compliance, platform, business, data, shopify, wes, compliant, brand, build, great, systems, felt, give, capabilities, put, accessible, e commerce
SPEAKERS
Mariah Parsons, Wes Buckwalter, Deneb Pulsipher
Mariah Parsons 00:05
Greetings and welcome to retention. Chronicles, the podcast with learnings from expert e commerce brands and partners. I'm your host. Mariah Parsons, if you're here, you're either on a quest for E commerce enlightenment or you accidentally click the wrong link. Either way, I am thrilled you stumbled into our corner of the internet, and I hope you'll stick around. We've got pearls of wisdom for everyone, whether you're running a multi million dollar business or simply just starting out on your entrepreneurial journey. Before we unleash the brilliance of today's guests, let's give a shout out to our podcast sponsor, malomo. Malomo is so much more than just another Shopify app, their post purchase wizards, making beautiful and branded order tracking smoother than a jazz solo. So our amazing founders, like our guests, can keep their customers happy and up to date while they track their orders. So hit that subscribe button like it'll increase your LTV overnight and go listen to our other episodes@gomolomo.com that's G O M, a, l o m, o.com Get ready for insights, chuckles and perhaps a profound realization or two with This newest episode of retention Chronicles. Hello everyone, and welcome back to retention Chronicles. I'm psyched for our episode here today. It's usually one guest that we have on, but today we have two, so we have double the fun. Wes and Dana. Thank you so much for joining us. I'm going to ask you both to say hello to our listeners and give a quick personal background of what you all have been up to and what's led you to this point in your career so far? So Wes, let's start with you. Kick us off. Tell our listeners who you are.
Wes Buckwalter 01:48
Nice to see everybody. I'm Wes, I'm the Creative Director and CEO at sea monster studios. Most of the time I'm involved in all of our projects from a direction standpoint, but oftentimes, as a business owner of a small business goes, I'm involved in just about everything so common character in this role here.
Mariah Parsons 02:05
Love it, love it. And now, Dana, please say hi to our listeners and give a quick intro.
Deneb Pulsipher 02:09
Yeah. So I'm Dani. I actually was a high school English teacher for about 10 years. Transitioned into web development about five years ago, Wes started having me do some accessibility work to make sure that our websites that we were developing for clients were accessible. And I just found my love. I love making sure that everybody can use the site, even if they have no arms, even if they have no eyes. You know, whatever it is that that they need accommodation with the site should still work for them. And I just found it really interesting how we can code it so that it works that way.
Mariah Parsons 02:50
So, yeah, yeah, okay, so we're gonna have to pause here for a minute. Why the switch? Was there, like a pivotal moment, or was it just something you were always interested in both, you know, studying English and then also compliance, or Yeah, was there a pivotal moment where you're like, you know what? I think I'm ready to make this jump. Well,
Deneb Pulsipher 03:10
I really did not want to change from being a teacher to web development, but I felt like that was kind of what I probably needed to do. But I really loved teaching, and I didn't like the idea of having to sit kind of confined in a cubicle someplace coding, but I just felt like it was what I needed to do for my family, because you can't raise a family on a teacher's salary. I'm afraid,
Mariah Parsons 03:39
yes, I think a lot of people would like to.
Deneb Pulsipher 03:43
So the the coding I found interesting, and it was, it was okay, it was fun, and I had a lot of learning to do, and so Wes certainly helped me with a lot of that. But when I, when I figured out, oh, accessibility is something that actually Wes doesn't know about he's asking me to figure it out. And I just found it fascinating. And so really just got interested in it.
Mariah Parsons 04:08
Okay. Well, I
Wes Buckwalter 04:10
love that. Danny is underselling his capabilities here as well, but he holds some pretty serious certifications in WCAG compliance, knowledge and capabilities. And I think more than most people. He's put in a massive amount of effort to become sort of provably certified at what he does, and sort of the expert in the room, I guess you would say. And so now, as a team, he guides the ship. His actual job. Role in that position is called Captain accessible, which is pretty awesome, I think. And we take his lead now, rather than, you know, sort of doing what we think is right now. We know what's right. I
Mariah Parsons 04:44
love that. Can I just call you captain accessible for the rest of this podcast?
Deneb Pulsipher 04:47
So when I, when I first started getting into accessibility, I asked the whole team. I said, oh, so what should my actual job title be, you know? And so everybody put forth a bunch of, oh, you ought to be. You know, Chief Accessibility author, you know, whatever, um, but Wes was like, No, you gotta be captain accessible, perfect. Let's do it.
Mariah Parsons 05:10
I love that. Yeah, that's great. Um, I feel like with it can be very daunting, like sitting from someone who does not know much about coding I've done a couple of courses, can be pretty daunting to see the laundry list of what you all accomplished for the clients you work with. So I'm excited to get into it. And obviously our listeners, they're probably putting two and two together to know that we're going to dive into a lot of compliance and a lot of different aspects from what we normally talk about. And I think that'll be very exciting. And they obviously all come back to customer retention strategies anyways, but that's a little easter egg for everyone. So we've done the personal intros. Can we now do a company intro? Tell us about sea monster studios. Wes. We'll start with you, and then Dana, if there's things that you want to pepper in there, please feel free to
Wes Buckwalter 06:04
Sure. So started the company as sort of a weekend warrior, I guess while I had a day job as a younger lad working in the coffee industry. And one of the things that attracted me to this line of work was it was what I was doing in that industry, and back in the good old days when there wasn't Shopify or there wasn't e commerce platforms per se. You had to build your own e commerce system or whatever. And one of the things that we figured out along the way was, you know, we sell a habitual product that people want to receive on a regular basis. And we figured out a way to sort of build what I would call the rudiments of a subscription program when things didn't really exist, and we were sort of a younger, decent sized company, but smaller in comparison to the Starbucks and Dunkin Donuts of the world. And one of the things that set us apart was that you could actually buy our products online and subscribe to them and do all these really novel things back when we didn't even have responsive websites, and we were just looking at things on a laptop or a desktop and so figured I was young enough and bold enough to take a risk and start a company, and if it all fell apart, I could always go back to working in the coffee industry or whatever, and 18 years later, we're still sitting here. So that makes us sort of old in the industry, I guess. But what I think that it means is that we've run a good business and treated our people, right? And built neat things. And, you know, hopefully our clients think so as well. It seems to be that way. Anyway, yeah,
Mariah Parsons 07:28
no, I think, like old and wise, I think are those are, you know, usually what I think about when someone's been in the space for a while, and the technical understanding of having to build out platforms on your own or with your own team, I think has a very useful background, because I know I appreciate that I could not do that as of today, if you sat, you know, if you told me that, so,
Wes Buckwalter 07:56
you know, they say, like, neces the mother of invention, I suppose, right? And I think these days, there's so many inventors, there's always an app for some solution or there's a tool that's been made. And, you know, back in the good old days, as a younger developer, it was like none of this existed. And so you either have to dream it and build it and hope for the best, and, you know, sort of sort out the edge cases. But these days, I think the systems and the players in the field is so much broader that in a lot of cases, you don't necessarily have to be the innovator that you did back in the day. But I think there's still plenty of room for that, understanding how systems work together, or what pieces play nice together, or even just building the one thing that's missing from the puzzle is an important aspect of being a good developer or a good solution Maker of all kinds. Yeah,
Mariah Parsons 08:41
yeah. I love it. So this is a little bit of a tangent and just a more fun question before we dive into the technical part of this podcast. But C monster studios, the logo and the name, how did you come up with it? I'm always so is there a fun story behind there?
Wes Buckwalter 08:57
It's kind of a fun story, I guess. So we're based in Seattle, and when I was trying to think of the name for the company, it was an exercise I'd done before in the industry that I previously worked in from a branding perspective. And you know, I didn't want it to be like West company or Seattle web design or something like that. And so it was trying to find things that sort of lent themselves to being in Seattle, sounded cool, felt memorable, or whatever. And then there's sort of the semantic side of, well, what's on the USPTO and what trade names aren't taken and what domain names are available? You know, 20 years ago or whatever, there was a lot more domain names available than there were today. So,
Mariah Parsons 09:34
like, everyone has a domain, yeah, now what's, uh,
Wes Buckwalter 09:37
what's just available to buy. And so I had a bunch of different names that I thought were cool, and then found that this one was available. There was no trademarks, and it sounded like the best winner to me anyway, and so that that was the genesis of the name. So sort of a creative thing, but also, like it was all open and usable kind of thing. And then from the logo perspective, this is actually our, I think. Third logo in total over the years, but our project manager was actually our first employee who was employed as a designer back in the day, and as a result, he helped design the first version of this logo, which looked very similar, but different graphic technique and stuff from so many years ago. It looked very different, and then we've just iterated upon it since then, and this is where we've landed. Okay,
Mariah Parsons 10:24
amazing. So now let's cover let's go one step deeper. I mentioned this a little bit earlier in this episode, but there's so many things that you all cover, and your expansive knowledge is very helpful for those are in the Shopify space, looking to looking to check off certain things or improve certain things about their e commerce Store. So can you give us a synopsis of, first, what are those areas of expertise that you all are, you know, experts in and offering to merchants with your services? And then was it a compilation of just having to build, you mentioned those specific platforms because there wasn't so many innovators or so many SaaS solutions in the space. Is that kind of the reason, if you had to put, you know, if you had to put money on why you all are so expansive in in your offerings, is that the reason that you can cover so many different areas of servicing an E commerce brand,
Wes Buckwalter 11:25
sure, so we describe ourselves as a full service agency. So we deal with branding of all kinds, whether that's naming a company to designing a logo, or evolving a logo or a brand presence into something else, to the strategy that goes into that. Why is your company named the way it is, and what's the vision that you have for your company, and what languages and visual elements are we using to describe your company to an audience that isn't you, you know? And so we help business owners or entrepreneurs sort of step outside of themselves, to help their audience understand who their company is and make sure that the audience thinks of it the same way that they do. And the natural evolution in branding is things like graphic design and product packaging. If you're selling a widget of some sort, you've got to have a neat box to put it in and a store shelf to pick it on. And so over the years, as we've sort of done those projects, we've learned a lot about where do you get things printed, or how do you get it on a store shelf, and what does the sales negotiation look like to get it there. And then, of course, that naturally evolves into an omni channel presence like E commerce, you know. And as Shopify came along, early in the days, we found it to be an awesome platform. It was very easy to use. And in comparison to some of the other tools that existed way back in the day, it felt like the right platform for us. And so as we've sort of evolved along with Shopify, we've become experts and partners and so forth, and sort of learned the ins and outs of the of the system. And I think as a result of that, you run into the SaaS platforms that come along with it, whether it's subscriptions or tracking pages or, you know, upsells and retention programs and things like that. We've sort of sorted out what we think are the most usable or the best in class, and have chosen to partner with those those platforms. But generally, I sort of pitch ourselves from a web design and development standpoint, as we can design anything you want and build anything that you want, and there's really very little limits to our capabilities there. And I think to some end or another, most agencies do that, and then, you know, figure it out in the back end. Probably is sort of how it works, right? But I think generally, we can take a customer from having no business name and a sort of idea for a product to a shelvable product or a shippable product, all the way through their presence online and offline, and then deal with the strategy that comes around after you've gone live. And so figuring out, how do we retain our customers longer? What other marketing or other strategies should we employ? And in this case, we sort of draw the line at some of the more mystical things. I guess advertising, maybe the more technical aspects of marketing to folks beyond you know what your website and your brand does for you, so things like Shopify email marketing campaigning or shipping SMS campaigning or communications, we tend to partner with agencies that we think focus specifically on those things and do a much better job. But outside of that, we play very well with other agencies, and we often are brought in in projects where we're one of the many, many pieces of a puzzle type agency solution. We also have a data scientist on the team that helps us do things like data migrations, whether you're coming from a platform to another, or turning subscribers from one subscription platform into another. And I think that's played very nicely into our skill set of you know, if we need to bring you from one place to another, if we can't move your data, then it's a really big struggle for a business to have systems that aren't congruent with each other, or, you know, understanding the flow of data into your order tracking or the reports that your CEO needs, or otherwise, I think, are a really important aspect of doing a successful online or offline business. Or likewise, the connectivity of systems, making sure that everything's communicating with. Actively with itself, and then over time, as Dena mentioned, we evolved into dealing with compliance, and that, I think, covers everything from branding to development to design of all kinds. You know that it touches a little bit of every part of this thing that I just described, and it was something that I found to be incredibly daunting from a technical standpoint or a knowledge standpoint. I mean, if you look at the rules, they're robust and extensive, and so finding somebody who's willing to be an expert in it and find the passion in making the internet sort of accessible to everybody was an important factor of doing good business. I guess. You know, why would we sacrifice a chunk of our audience for, you know, lack of capabilities. If we can just enhance our capabilities, we we can also make things more available to a much broader audience at the very sort of businessy side of things. But more importantly, you know, we bring equity to the table in an environment where that's not always part of the conversation. I think, you know, a lot of people build neat websites and that's it. And we build neat websites for people, I guess. And so hopefully it's all people, not just some people. Yeah,
Mariah Parsons 16:05
I love it. That was a very comprehensive journey in describing what you all do. Thank you. S um, couple of notes as well, and a couple of rabbit holes I want to go down. So I think the first one that I would want to go down is you mentioned. You know, obviously you're one of the great aspects of Shopify is that you're able to plug and play with different SaaS providers. Obviously, that's where my background is, and then different agencies where your background is. And so I want to get your opinions on looking at the different when you're evaluating, like, the tech that you're bringing into the merchants that you all are working with, are you looking at, you know, how are, how is their platform built out? How is it compliant? How is it, you know, kind of, how is it a good partnership for us? Like, from a business standpoint of, yes, we can, like, there's multiple platforms that can solve this one specific issue that a merchant is facing. But when you're looking at, okay, this is the platform that maybe stands the best with what we all do, is that part of the conversation, or is it really just like, when you're in the platforms, of, like, ease of use and stuff like that,
Wes Buckwalter 17:19
I think it starts with a review of the platform, right? So we're lucky enough sometimes to have the platform come to us and say, Hey, we like what you're doing. We want to show you our thing. Other times, it's something we find ourselves and stumble into in some way because the client maybe already had it, or thought that it sounded cool and wants us to check it out and maybe vet it a little bit. So it sort of starts from all angles. I think for me, the thing that makes me use platforms, whether it's my CRM or my sales tools or my accounting software, it has to sort of look good and work well, so it has to be highly usable from an administrative standpoint. You know. I mean, there's always room for the really ugly tool that does a great job of things. But I think I'm always more inspired to use it, if it, if it feels good to me from a use standpoint. So a lot of times we're looking at the administrative functionalities of, does it make sense? Does it does it look beautiful? Is it easy to use? You know, can our clients use it? Most importantly, since we're sort of setting it up and handing them the keys, are they willing to use it as well? And I think a lot of times when I'm talking to clients about platforms, it's a question of, is this inspiring for you to continuously run the show with meaning. If you can't administrate your subscriptions, then you sort of let them lag, and then they become less important to you as a company, and that's not what we want. Or you can't send emails because you can't rapidly iterate upon them, you should think about using a different platform, because it's more inspiring to get the job done and make more money, which is what we're all sort of here to do, I guess then, to sort of suffer through a platform that you don't like. I think on top of that, whatever happens for the consumer, it's really important to see that it that it works well as well. I think usability for the consumer is ultimately more important than usability for the administrator. They both kind of have to be good. But I think if, the consumer experience is 100% and the administrators only 75% I mean, I think that's pretty tolerable. And so, you know, users always come first. I think the people part, you know, and then I think maybe the other side of it a little bit that we focus on is the technical side. Do search engines pick something up, or is it, does it play nicely with technology of other kinds and so forth. And then I think a lot of our analysis comes into the way that Shopify has connectivity amongst systems. So who integrates with what? Who shares data? I think having disparate data systems and having to sort of collate and curate that data into something that's unifiable is really difficult to manage. I think even for data scientists or people who do it all day long. It's a job that doesn't necessarily need human interactivity, if you can skirt around it a little bit, and if you think about the cost of labor or the cost of mental space, when you could be making a new pitch or inventing a new product, rather than, say, manipulating a spreadsheet to get you the data you need just to understand your product, I think it's all the more important under. Stand what does it connect to, and how do your tech stack talk to itself? And what does it produce from an analytics or reporting or informational standpoint? Because I think without great data, you can't make great decisions. And so if you can make a data driven decision more than a gut feeling decision, oftentimes it serves your needs as the business owner much better, or as the business administrator, or otherwise?
Mariah Parsons 20:20
Yeah, yeah. This is something obviously, I think a lot of marketers in this newer age of marketing with the internet bump up against, where we have so much more data and so being able to actually quantify and make decisions with data versus, just like a gut feeling, feel like a lot of that. There's still a lot of it, but we're, we're inching closer to, you know that not being a reality and like that not being acceptable anymore as well. And I'm happy we're back at the data piece, because when we were reviewing the different offerings that you all have, the different teammates, you have to have experts, I think it's so interesting that you also have someone who is able to help with migrations, because I think that's a lot of the from, if you're sitting in emergency, just from this podcast, even I've learned, like, once you have, you know, systems set up to migrate them to something else that is a headache. And so if you all are able to, you know, assess, assist in getting, you know, these different platforms to work together. Getting off of one platform and onto a new, entirely different platform is very, very interesting. I
Wes Buckwalter 21:31
think data scares people as well, you know, yeah, yeah, spread spreadsheets and numbers and what if I make a mistake? Does it ripple through, you know, those kind of things? And I think I don't know. I'm pretty nerdy, I guess, and I really like data, and so, you know, for me, it never felt super scary. It just felt something that it needs exacting, needs you know, or needs to be exact with. So if you're manipulating something, you have to be able to measure the outcome and understand what it's supposed to be, those kind of things. And I think that's where people tend to be really intimidated, you know. And I think at the end of the day, having somebody who has the expertise or has, like an I got you moment, you know, generally, makes people pretty comfortable. I think also it comes down to feeling stuck as a business owner. You may not be the technologist, and so, you know, you need to move for a cost of your ownership or tech stack reasons, or you need something that's more effective, but if you're sort of beholden to not being able to move because you can't pick up the box and move it from point A to point B, you know, I think that presents unique challenges for folks that maybe don't deal with data on a regular basis, and so I think it's important to always have a stranglehold on the ownership of your data and being able to manipulate it in a way that serves your needs best? Yeah,
Mariah Parsons 22:42
I'm also it's timely for me, because I just finished reading data driven marketing by Mark Jeffrey. I don't know if you've read it before, but it was all in the realm of what we're discussing. And so the third comment that I wanted to make, and then we're going to dive into a little bit more of your area of expertise, Dana, but the bring being able to bring equity to the internet, that's kind of how you like phrased right this arm of sea monster studios. And I love what you were saying about or something along the lines of, you know, you're, you're in the internet. You have, you have, you have to make sure that you're compliant, and like, bringing in all, like, 100% of people, that you're 100% of customers, right? You don't want to just not do something because you're not capable of doing it right. Like the onus is on you type of messaging that you were talking about. And I think it's interesting, because especially in the E commerce space, you have so many people who are just like, up and starting these new companies. And so I also look at it as people might be either investors or entrepreneurs, and not even know about this whole realm of how to be compliant. And so I think that's what this conversation is going to be, very interesting, because there's just people out there who might have, like, a great idea and just hop on Shopify and might not know, like, Okay, you need to design graphics in this specific way. You need to have your your brand kit match these regulations and these rules. And it can also be something like data that's intimidating to you know, have a complete and robust understanding of all these different things. So with that, I'll lead us into high level Dani. Can you tell us about and we can assume that there, assume that our listeners have not just because it's easier, are not super familiar with WCAG or ADA compliance. Can you give us, like an overall summary, I guess, of what it even means for you to be working in this, this area, this industry, day to day, sure.
Deneb Pulsipher 24:52
So when the internet was started, you know, it was just put out there. Kind of as is for whoever wanted to or was able to come, come see it. And actually, way back at the beginning, there weren't, there weren't a lot of things that could be inaccessible. You know, there wasn't a whole lot of multimedia. There were, weren't even very many images or that sort of thing. But as people continue to build more and more complex things, well, it started to get harder and harder for for some set of people to access and everybody started wanting to access it. And so if you were blind, for example, there was there was something called a screen reader that that you could then listen to the page be read to you. But the more complex pages got to be, the more things started being not read correctly, and so you you'd get a lesser view or understanding of the page from your screen reader. And that just got worse and worse, until finally, there were some standards that needed to be set, and they were called the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, which were standards that were put out by this, you know, kind of international organization called W 3c that that governs, kind of all the web but they put these standards together, saying, okay, in order to make sure that everybody can understand the pages that are on the on the internet and can interact with them, you need to follow these certain guidelines, these these content guidelines, web accessibility content guidelines. And if you do that, then people will be able to use their assistive devices, whatever they happen to be, whether it's screen readers or, like texted well, like come voice command systems or whatever, people will be able to get what they what they want, what everybody else can get from the web. And so these standards became very important, but since they are still, I mean, fairly recent in terms of they're updated every year, but we're only on version 2.2 of these standards, so they're still fairly young, and so lots of people don't know that they need to be obeying these standards. They need to follow these certain rules in order to make it so that, like as well, like I said before, that blind people can still get access to the content in the way that they need. That, you know, if people don't have access to a mouse, or they can't use a mouse, they don't they don't have that good motor control, they can still get around the site and and every other you know, neurodiverse people who just need something different in order to be able to understand what they're perceiving or seeing that they can be okay on there. You know, there are 1000 different capabilities that need to be taken into account. And so the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, WCAG is kind of what most people refer to it as, or WCAG. Those make it so that if you follow those, you can be fairly certain that most people can get what they need from your site. So talking about retention, I'm glad that this is a is a retention conversation, but even before people can be retained, they have to get what what they need from your site. But then if they had it, if they had difficulty getting it in the first place, they're probably not going to come back and get it again. So if they had trouble ordering the product in the first place, they won't come back to your site, so you won't retain that customer. And so that's kind of an overview of web accessibility and some of its importance, I guess. Yeah,
Mariah Parsons 29:03
that was great. Yeah. Do you Wes? Were you going to add something? Yeah?
Wes Buckwalter 29:07
I mean, I think something I found to be uniquely challenging, especially in conversations with merchants who maybe struggle in this area, is there isn't a law that says you have to be accessible, there's a recommendation, and then a bunch of lawsuits that happen as a result of not following the recommendation. And so, in a brick and mortar sense, we have the ADA that forces us, through building codes or through law to adhere to a specific, strict standard. And you must be accessible in this way in a public publicly accommodation, public accommodation sort of arena where, you know, for example, doors have to open in a specific way, and they have to be wide enough for a wheelchair to fit through, or a ramp has to exist, or those type of accommodations are required to be made, whereas in the web right now, it's still very gray area, and very much depends regionally, in some ways, on what gets applied and what doesn't. But what doesn't. Stop things from happening is if you're not compliant, the lawyers can come get you because you're not being accommodating. And so where I think it's really going to turn the tide for everybody is when law actually comes into play, whether the ADA governs it or a new organization is made to govern the online version of accessibility. If you're behind the curve or behind the eight ball, imagine having to knock down your brick and mortar store just to rebuild it to be make it more accessible. You know, it would be a huge cost for a business to have to redo everything. And so doing it right the first time is very important. And you know, I think it plays into a lot of advantages anyway, right? You're making your your website more accessible, just by the name of it, of the service, it becomes more available to everybody. And, you know, I think we run into a lot of folks who say, well, it's not the law, so I don't have to follow it. And it's like, well, you don't, but you're still going to get sued. And it's they're hunting you. I mean, denim probably has great statistics on how many of these lawsuits exist, but it's substantial and robust.
Deneb Pulsipher 31:03
Yeah, it comes out to, I think about one or one and a half a lawsuit every single business hour of the year. You know, it's, it's just so many lawsuits happen and, you know, and so I kind of view it in both ways, I think in some ways, I hate to see those lawyers who are just trying to stick it to the get some money, I guess, but at the same time, they are forcing some level of compliance, I think Eventually it will probably be more like it is. Well, several years ago in Europe, they they passed something called the European Accessibility Act, and what it said was, by, I think they gave you a four years so it's and it's coming up in just about another year, in June of next year. Um, every website that does business in in Europe, well, excluding England, I suppose, because it's not part of the European Union. But every business that does does those business in Europe has to have their website. Needs to follow the web accessibility, content guidelines, and each country needs to have an office that checks that. So they're going to go through, they're going to be rolling through everybody's websites that the governmental agency is going to be checking and issuing fines and forcing compliance. You know, here it's, it's kind of the Wild West. So if, if a lawyer spots you, you're going to get sued. And that's, that's kind of the the consequence, but it's nothing from the government. I think eventually it probably will be
Mariah Parsons 32:48
right, okay, I love, I love this, this summary of it, and I think it's very there's a lot of different things that we can dip into. So my first note is customers, when we're talking about making sure that you're obviously accessible to customers. There's, we hear this a lot with order tracking right where, if you have a bad experience, someone's not going to shop with you again if they could not, if they didn't enjoy the experience of waiting for their their you know, order to get to them. And that's more the malomo side of things. But I think the underlying current of consumer behavior and people caring about if, as a brand, you care about their experience, their customer experience, and then also what your brand stands for. So it's very prevalent in E commerce, at least, I believe in, I think a lot of people would agree that you can, because you are probably faster moving than like these, you know, dinosaurs of companies that have sold, you know, like logos in retail and in e com, the faster moving companies that have less red tape, they can stand out against those giants because they can have policies that really are, I guess, that really reflect the consumer and what they care about. So I think there's also, like that element that we're that, yes, like, from a from a business standpoint, it makes sense that you don't want to be sued. You don't want a lawyer to catch you and be able to be able to come after you. But also it's like the consumer experience and the consumer behavior that it's advantageous for a brand to make the adjustments now, rather than later, when maybe they're in some hot water with, say, lawyers. But a follow up question to the discussion we're having when we're looking at Europe rolling out the governmental compliance aspect, is there a worry, or is there any anticipation that for companies that have, like international arms or sell internationally, that they're probably, if they're, you know, if they have a US and a Europe. In channel that they're probably going to do a site refresh or become compliant, because the European, the European, I forgot what it was. It the EAA. EAA, that's what it was. Yeah, yeah. Accessibility Act. Do you think that there's going to be like a new wave that kind of revises the American sites? Or do you think you know people who are with their European websites and regulations are just going to be updating those? Do you have any like opinions there with with when we're looking at like the different markets and their
Deneb Pulsipher 35:39
regulations? So it's,
Mariah Parsons 35:43
it's hard to say, it's
Deneb Pulsipher 35:44
hard to tell what people are going to do. The EAA has, has very little, I guess, bite outside of of companies that are based in Europe. So, you know, for example, a check company the Czech government could levy a fine or something against. You know that company for being inaccessible. However, if, if you know, I'm a company that sells T shirts to whoever in the world wants them, right? Even though, yes, I serve that that market, the Czech government isn't going to be able to find me so but, but what I do think is going to happen is that this idea of, let's get more, you know, government regulation in this space, because it's been proven that companies on their own aren't going to do, you know, lots of them do do the right thing, but many of them don't, and without a little impetus from the government, it's not going to happen. I think this, this idea will spread, and I think it will be more like, like Wes said, like building codes. I think those things will come. And so I think any company that is looking into the horizon is gonna think, Oh, well, okay, it is, yeah, next time I do a web redesign, I better make sure that my company is is gonna make it accessible.
Wes Buckwalter 37:20
Well, I think that for companies that do have a nexus in Europe and also in the United States or Canada or otherwise, you know, I think one of the advantages that Shopify brings to the table is the idea of having, say, a site that changes its language so it's multilingual, or it changes its presence for a currency conversion or otherwise, and it's sort of a unified website that maybe just changes its underlying factors. And so if you're thinking about, well, I should become compliant, because I'm this check company that's going to be regulated against it would be foolish not to also make the American aspects of your website just as compliant, because you might as well be efficient and unify your design or your capabilities in both places. And I think there's never a bad place to be way ahead of the curve, right from a business standpoint, if you can cover everything now because you're required to here, and it's now free because you were required to over here, or you're not required to over here, you know there's only, there's only a financial advantage to doing such a thing right and also staying untouchable and one less thing to worry about. I mean, as an average business, you've got your payroll to worry about, and you've got all the laws that you have to obey to worry about, and, you know, keeping your employees happy, like, why would you want to worry about this one thing that could be easily corrected by good technology or the right tools for the job? And so, you know, I think for those businesses that have an international presence that is both physical and digital. You wouldn't want to just fix one thing and not fix the other just because it's a corner you can shave off. It's way more efficient to fix everything all at once, and whether that's in a redesign or just chipping away at problems, you know, I think, I think both are reasonable tactics until the law forces your hand to chip away at all problems at once. But you know, the opportunity to sort of solve for small problems now is always available to any website. And there's probably a point when we're reviewing a website together that denim comes to a conclusion, potentially, of, well, this whole thing is so bad, it would be better to redesign or rebuild than it is to try to try to put tape over the over the problems, right? I mean, there is a point where in any technology circumstance, whether it's compliance or tools or otherwise, that sometimes it's easier to wipe the slate and sort of reinvent the slate, even if it sort of visually looks the same. There might be modern coding techniques or otherwise that are that are better. And I think the toughest thing for any brand to encounter in this conversation, though, is your brand presence, your physical presence, colors, fonts, etc. The way that you relate your brand from a visual standpoint, is inaccessible, and thus you must change your brand color in this way. And that's always the most sensitive and emotional aspect of compliance. I think it's you can't use this blue anymore. You have to do something. Else. And you know, this is the business that maybe has been doing the same thing for 20 years, and we can't just change our colors or, you know, make things different just for this purpose. And it's like, well, at some point you're not going to have a choice. And there's techniques we can use as good branders to nudge it along the way, to help you get there and still look visually faithful to your original brand. And like denim said at the same time, if you can't provide accessibility to everybody, or you can't open the doors to your entire audience, it's the idea that when somebody has a great experience, they tell one friend. When somebody has a bad experience, they tell 20 friends. And so, you know, really, what it comes down to is, as a business, you want to make a decision to be discriminatory, accidentally or otherwise, and is that financially a smart choice for you as a company? And if you can reverse course on that, and it inevitably makes for better SEO, a better experience for your entire audience, makes you more money. Like, what are the downsides to this, other than the initial, front loaded costs of becoming compliant and then maintaining that compliance over time. And I think it's definitely worth Deb talking a little bit about what maintaining compliance looks like, because I think that's the other unique challenges. You've built a beautiful, compliant, fun website to use, and then now what? And I think the now what is often not considered in this equation, and it's a lot of times what I see gets people into the most trouble as well. Yeah, as
Mariah Parsons 41:22
well. Yeah, let's dive into it.
Deneb Pulsipher 41:26
So so your site could be completely compliant to begin with, and then through because it's most sites are continually changing. You know, you have a blog post, you you change something on the on the front page. You know, you you add more information here or there, you add a video or whatever there. There are 1000 ways that uncompliant Things can leak in to your site. So what we recommend at sea monster Studios is that the the content creators, the people who are putting those blog posts on and who are creating the new content that's going on, that they be given a pretty clear set of guidelines or or procedures that they should follow to make sure that that had they have all those things right. And so when, we do a, particularly when we're doing an accessibility adjustment, you know, an audit and then fixing things. I always give them Okay. So next time when you when you do this, here's you gotta, you gotta check this. Check that, you know, I give them a checklist of things that they need to make sure, as they're putting that blog post in, that they do this or that, and they're not always great at doing it. So, so that's why we have found that it's it's really valuable to to put a service in that actually monitors for accessibility. So we use this accessibility monitoring service that kind of scans through all the pages, or the pages that we said, and check to make sure, oh, are there new things that popped up every month, you know, or every, yeah, probably every month that'll scan through. And so it'll, it'll say, oh, you know this, this has three new problems. And so then I can, I can go to that company and say, Hey, let's, let's fix these real quick. Or remember, you gotta do this and that to to make sure that that's compliant. And so it is a continual process that needs to be done. It's once you understand the few things that you need to do. It's not, it's not really that overwhelming. I don't think because the uncompliant or inaccessible content will come in kind of predictable ways for the most part.
Mariah Parsons 43:48
Yeah, yeah, that totally makes sense. So are there a lot? And I know we're approaching our time, but this is just so interesting. Are there a lot of like? Is there like, one repeat offender of like I see this time and time again for most of the people that you're working with, or is it just really across the board, like, I know colors, like brand colors, that's what we already mentioned. But are there any like, you can almost expect that if someone is not compliant, or if someone is not focusing on this intentionally, that like you're probably going to see when you're doing those audits.
Deneb Pulsipher 44:20
Yeah. Yeah. So the big one, kind of the biggest one, I think that's it's kind of tricky too, and we don't have a ton of time to discuss it. But alternative text. So if you put an image in there, it needs to have something called alternative text that can be read by a computer program to the blind person or the person who just doesn't see very well. That says what that image is. And so this should be, it should be a really, a fairly concise description of the image, saying in, you know, like, basically, you have the about, about the amount of space. You would have in a text message to describe the image or or Less. Less is better, because the screen reader is reading the whole page to the person. It just takes a long time. If you do a really detailed description, that's not great, but you need to give the essence of of the image. Many people just don't even know that they need to do that, and so they don't do it, but it is very important, and I'd say that's probably one of the bigger offenders. Okay, that's what
Wes Buckwalter 45:30
makes it a great incentive to do it as well, is it's awesome for SEO. It helps with image search. It helps with, you know, amplifying your brand presence in search. And so if you have a picture of a product, and it's alternative text is called product photo that means nothing to both a search engine and a human. If it's picturing of amazing jump rope in blue, the user knows what the system is trying to relate, and search engines pick that up as well. So you're sort of double whammying with SEO tactics and accessibility. And the more you do it, the better you get in both arenas. And so there's a benefit to that. I think the other one that I see often, that I find is sort of, if I can pick on like the marketing C suite of businesses, tends to be building text into images because we like the way it looks. So meaning, you've got a banner image on your homepage and you want to put a message in it, that's the call to action for that image, a search engine and a screen reader tool and everything else has no idea of that, what that text is. And so if you think about a blind person being read to, you have a picture here, and that's all that describes to them. It's completely ineffective for that purpose. And so trying to find the balance between delivering a design and a visual experience that you want on top of a thing, like a banner image, and not building text in with Photoshop to that photography is a really important step to take and a really hard pill to swallow for folks who've been doing it for years, because you can always make it look like whatever you want when you get to do things in Photoshop, or you get to do things in Illustrator or otherwise. But once you have to use code to deliver it and you want to change it, maybe a Dev has to get involved. It gets more expensive. I have to learn new things, but by not learning those new things, or by not following those tactics, you're sacrificing a whole chunk of audience and SEO and other things that I think is really important to remember, and I see it every day. I mean, one out of three websites has this problem, and it's an easy thing to fix, if you just focus on fixing it. Yeah,
Mariah Parsons 47:30
I love those call outs. I also have, just from my own personal experience, been seeing a lot more social platforms, specifically LinkedIn and Instagram, I believe, of just like having that alternative text option, and I think at some point it was like a pop up and so that just more subjective experience in that. I think this was going to be a very helpful episode, and I want to keep going, but I'm going to wrap this up because we're already two minutes over, but Wes and Dana, thank you so much for joining me today. It has been a fascinating conversation, and I know this is going to be very, very helpful for people, whether or not they know about just like the technical background of compliance, or if it's brand new, maybe it's a reminder that they should be focusing in on different areas of their aspects and checking in. So thank you so much for making the time today. It's been a joy.
Wes Buckwalter 48:24
Thanks very much for having us.
