345 - Accessibility for eCommerce Websites with Bet Hannon

And so you'll want to make sure that you're going through and checking the entire kind of user journey , whether that's a customer journey buying something or someone signing up on your website or going through your LMS system . You know the courses going through there and you're just kind of checking .

Primarily you know all of those base things , but then especially keyboard navigation . So it's not uncommon at all to find places in e-commerce sites where the cart and checkout process has keyboard navigation issues or other kinds of issues around screen readers not reading out text .

We've had some conversations , which I'll make sure we link to in the show notes for this episode , about accessibility , but one thing we have not talked about specifically is accessibility for e-commerce , which come to find out and not shockingly is a and can be a very , very complex thing .

So that's what we're going to take a deep dive into and this one I'm real excited to bring on accessibility expert Beth Hannon , who is the CEO of accessicartcom , and there's a lot of really cool things in this one . We really this whole conversation .

It starts off simple and basic in the world of accessibility , which I'm kind of glad because we do get into that you could do one-off and pretty quickly . You can also do these things ongoing and roll this into a growth plan or a support plan , but a lot of things you could just have as common practice for your websites .

We really get into the weeds , though , on e-commerce accessibility traps what to avoid ? The number one culprit for restaurant sites in the way of accessibility . Can you guess what that is ? Well , you'll learn that here in this conversation .

And we also talk about how to just build your websites from the ground up with accessibility in mind , whether they're simple portfolio sites , simple , or whether they are e-commerce sites . Bette is really someone who knows her stuff and it's very evident from that one on this one .

Now , I am not an accessibility expert , which is why I rely on folks like bet to really stay at the forefront of what's going on here . And I say that to say , if you feel overwhelmed with accessibility , you are not alone , because I'm right there with you .

But I think it's so important to constantly be reminded of the basics of accessibility and know what to cover . Moving forward , and while we do get into some of the lawsuits and penalties that have been circulating around and accessibility , I also do not want you to feel intimidated or scaled scared by this for web design as a whole .

It's kind of a disclaimer here , because you could very quickly be like all right , I'm done , I don't even want to worry about this stuff , so maybe I need to find a new profession . But the reality is those things are rare but they can happen . But what happens is .

What I've found is typically lawsuits and penalties and stuff like that are the things that make headlines . So just remember , while it is a possibility , it is very rare . It reminds me of privacy and security . It's rare that these events will happen . But in any case , the goal of accessibility is not as much to by . As much as accessibility feels overwhelming .

The goal is for somebody like my daughter , who has vision impairments and has some things she's working against as a special needs kiddo to make the internet accessible for her too . So keep that in mind Anytime you're feeling overwhelmed or scared about this . The goal of accessibility is to make it for everyone .

So with that in mind , here's Beth , and let's take a deep dive into accessibility , specifically accessibility in e-commerce sites . Bette , welcome to the show , so excited to chat with you Before I hit record . We were talking about how I think in web design , this is really common for educators like myself , but also agencies .

It's like there's just so many components to websites , especially now with accessibility , with privacy , with optimization and conversion and design and copy and messaging and all these different areas .

I do think the cool thing is if you have a focus and an emphasis and you can partner up with people who know their stuff , you can learn a lot and it could be a mean group . So all that to say , accessibility not my strong suit . I'm so excited to have you on .

You know , the core issue is just making it easier for people to use your sites , right .

So you want to think about how can you make sure that your site works for people who are blind , people who are low vision , people who are colorblind , people who can't use a mouse or they're not steady enough with a mouse or their finger to hit small targets , small buttons or clicks , and so all kinds of things like reading disabilities .

We I mean it can begin to be quite a list of things that can impact user experience . And you know , it's just , it all starts with beginning to think about not everybody uses a website exactly like you do .

Are they going to pay me for this ? Like all that to say , I think the accessibility movement , while awesome and I totally understand how important it is , I do think it's overwhelmed A lot of web designers and agency owners to where we're like almost paralyzed in like a to do list now . So where is , like , the best place to start ?

So there are all those pieces that come together to be making content , to be to make sites not less , more or less accessible , and so a great place to start is by looking at some of those content related things and some of the design things .

So actually , the four top accessibility issues , just by sheer numbers , would be color contrast making sure you have a good color contrast between background and fonts . Alt text on your images , your heading structures are properly nested .

You know you shouldn't ever skip from an H2 to an H4 , right , you should always have an H3 in between and then link text that's not ambiguous . You know you shouldn't ever skip from an H2 to an H4 , right , you should always have an H3 in between and then link text that's not ambiguous .

So if you took care of all like you never want to have , just click here , right , the links should stand . People who are blind often have the screen reader just read out all the link text on the page , and so if all they hear is click here , click here , click here . That does nothing for them .

It says click here for the report on blah blah , blah , blah , blah .

You know , starting place for accessibility , and there are some great tools to help people get started that are pretty much free out there on the web . So the wavewebameorg , so w-a-v-e . Wavewebameorg is a tool that you can put the URL in and you can .

There's actually a browser extension for it too , and you can start to get things like the color contrast and the heading structure and I don't think it'll do ambiguous link text , but some other tools may . And then you know the semantic piece is there and you can start to begin to work on those issues .

When you start to do that , it's important to know that it's going to flag some things as false positives . So , for instance , it's an automated tool right to check , and automated tools can only find about 30% of issues . So when you start to do that , find about 30% of issues . So when you start to do that when it's automated like that .

Sometimes if you have an image background with font on top of it , that tool can't see the image . So it'll tell you , oh , you have white font on white background or black font on black background . Or it'll sort of say , but that's not a real issue , that's , that's a false positive . So you got to sort of sort out , um , the those issues .

But you know that's a great place to start . If you're in wordpress , there is a , a free plugin in the wordpress plugin directory called accessibility checker . It's from equalized digital and , uh , you put it in there and you the free level .

You just have to open every post or post or page editor and it'll kind of like the Yoast SEO tools or the Olli SEO tools at the bottom of the page , right . It shows you the problems that are there and what might need to be there . The paid version of that does some really cool things . If you have a really big site , that could be helpful .

But again , all these automated tools are only able to deal with about 30% of issues . So I would say , start there , though . That's a great place to start .

So if you've ever done like Control-S or Control-V or Control-X , right , that's keyboard , you're navigating with the keyboard and so you're controlling the computer with that keyboard . And there are thousands and thousands of those different little shortcuts .

People who are blind or low vision , but also people who have mobility impairments and they can't use a mouse , will use pretty much the tab and the enter key and maybe the space bar or the arrow keys to get through your entire website , if it's accessible , right , and so , beginning to test that , you can start to test that .

It doesn't take super special skills . You just start pressing the tab key and see where you're going and can you get through the menu ? Do you have what's called you get through the menu ? Can you ? Do you have a what's called skip links at the top ?

You should have like something that appears in the upper left corner that says skip to the content , so you don't have to go through the menu again after you've been through it once . All of those kinds of you know start to deal with that keyboard .

But at a certain point you're going to want to bring in other professionals , especially if you have an e-commerce site . So e-commerce is about 80% of the lawsuits in the US for ADA , for websites a little more than 80% .

There are special requirements in other places in the world with e-commerce accessibility and so you'll want to bring in someone else to kind of begin to help you know , help you sort through those problems . And I'm so glad you mentioned the e-commerce side of things .

I did want to touch on real quick , before we dive into accessibility with e-commerce , a couple of things I think are going to be important that lead into that .

One is you had talked about Hans from Termageddon , who's a good friend of mine , on the podcast a lot and I always viewed privacy and accessibility and them being not at war with each other but conflicting , especially when it comes to having cookie consents and privacy things with pop ups and that some of those things we know can affect load times and speed and

accessibility . Do you , I guess , what is the difference between the two ? I mean you mentioned , I think , before we hit record . They're kind of all under the compliance end of website . Can you just kind of share your insight on accessibility and privacy and how they can work well together ?

I know Hans and Donata have really worked hard at trying to make sure that you can test for keyboard navigation and that the site goes down into that privacy policy right , so that a blind user would be able to know that that policy is there .

They're supposed to click it Just because if it's broken they'll just keep tabbing but they won't be able to get anywhere , right . So you want to make sure that it's not broken for those users . But yeah , they're not antithetical at all and it's really about protecting individuals , right .

Privacy is about not letting our data be sold and accessibility is really just about sort of helping all kinds of people , all kinds of users , be able to use your site .

You definitely use those automated tools for what you can get out of them , but just know that you know things like keyboard navigation . Can you navigate through your site ? Are there any problems with that ? That all has to be manual .

That has to be manually done , and so at least at this point , I mean you know , maybe at some point in the future but people I know talk about that being somewhere between five and 10 years in the future that we would be able to do that . The tests that we are able to do with some of that now have to be highly scripted and are website specific .

So if you , if you have you know , if you want to do this , I mean it just gets cost prohibitive at a certain point , right .

So you have to go in , you have to say take this product from my website , put it in the cart , then do this , change the quantity , now go to the checkout , and so you have to really give it specific instructions for checking out , and so it's not so easy to do that , and that typically happens on more enterprise e-commerce sites that they're looking for that

and they've already checked . They already know that the accessibility is there . It's really just them testing . Did I break something when I made this last change ? Right ?

And that's the piece is that a lot of people just want the easy button . They want something , one little automated solution that will do it all , and there are services and plugins out there that purport to do that .

Some of them are getting sued now and they're targeted in the lawsuits anymore because , like 25 , those are called overlay plugins , so they're running a little bit of JavaScript over the website , ostensibly to fix accessibility issues on the fly .

They usually put a little widget down in the , you know , in the bottom of the site , for with some tools those are highly problematic for a lot of reasons . They conflict with tools that user disabled users would already have on their machines so that they could make the other 99% of the websites on the web work , and neither tool works .

Then there's some privacy concerns , because they store information from session to session .

And there was just a case announced last week or the week before that a guy that was running a dermatology clinic in New York State and he had bought the AccessiBe plug-in . He got sued . He went to them because they promised some kind of support if there was litigation and they gave him none and so then he filed a class action suit against them .

And so what we see is actually the sites that are running those sorts of overlay plugins are being targeted for lawsuits . Twenty five percent of all the ADA cases last year were people running those plugins because those predatory or serial lawsuits .

They know that it those tools can only fix 30 of the issues and so they don't even look for what those other issues are .

He is completely blind in one eye and so he has a lot of vision issues , but he actually at the time was using AccessiBe . So I was like , oh cool , check it out . So I talked to him .

I had somebody from access to be on the podcast Great guy Like , but and he affirmed it opened the floodgates , though , to the division in the accessibility world which I was unaware or uh , unready for Um , but it it did . I mean he even said like it is not the end all , but it is . For some people it is , it does .

You know it's able to do certain things , but , as you pointed out , there's a lot of other concerns that back alongside of that . So I took an even further step and then talked with somebody who was very anti pop-up . This was a couple of years ago , and so I really got to be exposed to that world a little more . All that to say yes .

I think it's very widely known now that pop-ups are kind of like a bandaid to an actual problem that's under underlying , and there are privacy issues .

You know , really you shouldn't use these . I mean , there's a case to be made . If you have a lawsuit that you're you know you've got to get it , you've got it's like a stop gap measure until you can get everything fixed .

You know , there's a small case to be made for that , but in many cases you know you're going to be way better off just really fixing the underlying accessibility issue , because the moment you stop paying those folks , all of those issues are still there , right ? It's kind of a .

I don't want to paraphrase it , but it was really like especially for businesses who absolutely just do not have a budget for a developer to go in and do potentially thousands of dollars worth of accessibility work , it is kind of seems like a band-aid option to at least show that they're trying to add a little buffer room until they can support more .

I'm very aware there's this kind of you know division , but just try to educate , just read up on them . Read up on them . Understand why . I mean , there are a lot of blind people who block the IP addresses for those services so that they don't have to get take .

They prevent their browsers from ever going there to avoid having to deal with them because it represents such a stumbling block . If they have , if they have tools installed and configured on their machine to work for them everywhere else on the Web , then these overlays hijack that and make neither tool work , and that's problematic .

Just wish I had blocked some of the emails that came through . I was like , good lord people , I'm just learning here , give it a break . But I understand that there's a lot at stake here and it is in the name of helping folks who have a disability or are not able to use the internet like somebody without vision problems or physical disability .

Yeah , that's the name of the game .

We're not talking about tiny little numbers of all US adults have some sort of disability that requires an accommodation . So it's not . We're not talking about tiny little numbers of people here . There's a lot of people . They represent about $490 billion in disposable income .

So why would you not be doing everything you can to close the places where people are leaking out because they can't navigate or complete a sale on your site ?

Before we take a little deeper dive into e-commerce , specifically because I have a lot of questions about that , I think we need to cover what's ahead . The european accessibility act can you kind of share ? This is fairly new news to me , so I'd love to hear yeah , tell us about it . What do we need to know ?

So they pass a directive that calls for um far reaching kind of accessibility around web and what's called ICT or inter um internet communication technology , and so um , all kinds of products and services , any product and service that has any kind of basically digital component to it is required to have certain level of accessibility , and not only the web .

So your website , the websites , have to have that . The product or service has to have be accessible . You have to have a statement and you have to . On that website , you have to be showing regular testing by a certified professional , which is going to we're not even to that point yet . We're sort of dealing with the beginning phases of that .

So the piece of that so it's requiring website accessibility at the standard of WCAG Website Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.1 , version 2.1 , aa , so that if that's a place where you get all the technical pieces of all all the things you need to implement to make sure you're meeting those guidelines .

So then each individual country after that is responsible for making their own set of laws under this umbrella directive . That sets the minimum standards and each country as we've been watching them come out a few of them are making their standards a little more strict . So they're wanting the WCAG , 2.2 , aa . Then they're also putting in their enforcement mechanisms .

So there's a kind of oversight authority , there's a process by which there's a complaint that can be filed , and all of them are a little bit different . Some of them are much more laid back and very , you know , like , oh , we'll meet the minimum .

Others of them are much more strict because you know , that's just the character of these different countries and their approaches .

In Germany , not only can individual consumers that are either disabled or on behalf of consumer groups can file complaints and and the oversight authority can go looking for people who are not complying , but your competitors can also file a complaint or or a lot of complain that you're not being compliant .

And the strategy there is they want to level the playing field . If I spent a lot of money or time and resources making my website , my services , compliant and my competitor didn't , they have an unfair advantage by being illegal by avoiding the requirement , and so I can report them so that it tries to level that playing field .

The fines most of them are monetary fines , so they're somewhere around 60,000 euros , per instance . A lot of them , some of them are 100,000 euros . Per instance , in Ireland you can get 18 months of jail time .

I mean , they're pretty serious about some of these uh sorts of pieces and so , um , the enforcement deadline is coming up in june , june 28 , 2025 , so about 11 months from the time of this recording anyway to getting that going . And here's the kicker that has to happen for a lot of US companies .

It's like GDPR it's based on where your customers live , not where your business is based . So if you have EU customers and they have an exemption , if you're a small business so if you're under 2 million euros about $2 million in annual revenue or under 10 employees you're exempted for now , but there's some expectation that those levels will come down eventually .

So you'll probably want to start paying attention to this , even if you're exempted now . But if you have EU customers , you're going to want to start getting that work done . It can take , you know , if you're pursuing remediation work at a moderate pace on a moderately sized website that can take six to nine months .

Right , because it just takes a while to get stuff done , and so 11 months is not very long . Right to be looking at that . 11 months is not very long right To be looking at that .

So , but the thing I'm glad you mentioned the revenue issue , because I do wonder , like for a for a mom and pop pizza shop who is , like , barely able to pay a thousand dollars for a website design , for example ?

The number one thing that restaurants do that's not accessible , that's going to get them sued sooner or later , can , I guess is , yes , menu , pdf , menus , exactly . Just just put it on the web page .

And they're like , no , we'll just send you the PDF . This was even before accessibility was talked about 10 years ago .

It's people that have mobility issues Cause you've got to like pull , you know , you've got to like pinch and scroll that thing way out , and then you then the mobility issues can't you can't scroll around in that PD .

Yeah , we talked about Hans .

You know , a lot of us were online a lot before COVID , but after COVID I think about , you know , my mom and dad , who were in their mid-80s , do so much more online all their banking , all their all this stuff that they never did before COVID online , right , and and so much stuff happens for us online now .

You know banking and registering to vote and you know following through on issues that we're interested in .

All of those things , buying things off of all kinds of online stores All of those things are things we want people with disabilities to be able to participate in just as much as anybody else , without having to depend on a family member or a friend , right , you know ?

I did want to make sure we hit a few differences in accessibility , or maybe extra accessibility components to e-commerce , because I imagine everything that is the basic foundation of good accessibility with contrast , with copy , with tabbing , with hierarchy , with color management , all those things , alt text , all that stuff is going to be applied to a simple brochure

site . I quote , quote , quote , unquote , simple , along with an e-commerce site . But what are the extra areas of e-commerce when it comes to accessibility ?

Right , people are searching and filtering for products , people are getting things into their cart , they're going to their cart , they're changing quantities , they're checking out , they're putting in lots of info . All of that really high user interaction just creates a lot of surface area for these other issues to come up .

And so it's a couple things about e-commerce to know .

One is that a lot of times , the basic e-commerce platform that you're using and this so that same user interaction would apply to , like learning management systems right , there are just fewer of them , right , relative to number of e-commerce sites right , but learning management systems or membership sites or those kinds of things right , same kinds of interactions in a

way , you'll want to the base kind of platform or plugin that you're using for that , whether that's , you know , woocommerce or Shopify or LearnDash or something else right , a membership system , paid memberships , pro or whatever the base plugin or service can be fairly accessible . All of them have in the base , have some issues still and they're working on them .

But when you start adding extras on top of that whether you're adding another third party plugin to bring a different feature or you're having someone custom code something for you to do some special functionality that's when you're often introducing extra accessibility issues and so you'll want to make sure that you're going through and checking the entire kind of user

journey , whether that's a customer journey buying something or someone signing up on your website or going through your LMS system . You know the courses going through there and you're just kind of checking . Primarily you know all of those base cart and checkout process has keyboard navigation issues or other kinds of issues around screen readers not reading out text .

So , for instance , if you have a product and it's on sale and you have a strikeout through the regular price and the sale price is visually displayed , sometimes the screen reader doesn't pick up that . To read that out loud to the person who's blind , wouldn't that ?

sorry to interrupt , I just want to make sure yeah , I don't want to be careful about getting too too deep in the technical weeds , but , but you know , if it's simply a css thing that may be applied on top of something that may not get picked up by the screen reader , and there are all kinds of things like .

One of the really common things is that people will , um , will , they will create buttons instead of Ella , instead of radio buttons for choices .

So there are some really well-known , very popular , for example , swatch and gift card plugins and those kinds of things , things where you're picking a swatch and it looks like it's a radio button , it's styled like a radio button , but they're all in the in divs as button and the screen reader can't . A screen , a keyboard navigation user can't get to that item .

They can never select a swatch or a gift card face or whatever . And so you know you want to make really check that your , your your customer process through those kinds of interactions all the way through to checkout . Is there Things like making sure that you've turned ?

There are usually options for auto-complete , so people with disabilities will often have turned on browser settings that it says if you recognize this as a name field , put my name in there . If you recognize this as a phone number field , put my phone number in there .

That's a huge win , not just for people with disabilities , and that we could talk about that too . Right , this improves your user experience for everybody .

But , um , but right , that auto complete is turned on for your checkout process too , and so , yeah , all kinds of things , but just kind of uh , checking that people can do you the search and filter through products , right , sometimes they can't get into the results for search and filter products , or , okay , I want you know all kinds of yeah , I want to put

myself on the spot to do a little live .

I will do normally like 97 , but it's it's striked out or struck out , Is that right ? And then the price will be there . What the way I do it is in HTML .

set up , your theme controls how that all happens , right ? So sometimes your theme has done it correctly and sometimes they haven't , right . But you want to check those things Right and get through them .

But um again , you know , personally , when we work with eco and we do a lot of work , as our name implies , right , we do a lot of work with accessibility and e-commerce and what we do is we start at the end of that process .

We start with cart and checkout and then we start to work our way back because if , if somebody can't check out , fixing stuff at the beginning doesn't help I see we want to .

We want to start at the end of the funnel and kind of begin to work our way back , because then you can start fixing individual products if there are problems with individual products , and those can go through . And then we would typically strategically work with the client to pick their better selling products and make sure those are all fixed first .

So you're kind of working backwards through the end of the sales .

But if you put the button HTML on it , that's wrong right If it takes you somewhere , right ? If it's just essentially a link . So you need to , like , think about the semantics of the HTML , right . Use your use unordered and ordered lists correctly . Don't just use hyphens , right ? So use semantics .

Use HTML , but use it semantically to make sure you're doing what's supposed to be , what you're supposed to convey with the HTML .

The sign up thing something that pops up a modal to sign up is doing something , as opposed to a link that just takes you off somewhere .

so it looks like a button , but it's actually just a title . Designed in like a pill shape , so it looks like a button but it's actually just a title . And that kind of thing I think just stylistically I recommend not doing . But even now it makes sense that if something is misleading , that's probably technically accessibility issues .

If it looks like a button , but it's not a button .

But we also want to think about people who may have some level of cognitive disability , some ADHD or focus pieces and some of what you're talking about there . That kind of misleading design might , would be a factor for those sorts of folks .

But , like , we've really got pretty advanced and pretty into the weeds on accessibility here . So , um , some of it is e-commerce . That totally makes sense with the complexities of the entire journey , because it's not just a page , it's the usability and the user journey .

Let me just talk a little bit about when you contact or start working with an accessibility professional . There's several ways that that can be structured and I think that can be helpful for people to think about too structured , and I think that can be helpful for people to think about too . Traditionally , what folks have done is get an audit done .

So you hire someone like our team to come in and test all the things right and to give you this giant report at the end . Part of the problem is typically that's a snapshot in time and it's really expensive . It can be really expensive People do we typically do . When we were doing audits , we would do what was called a sampling audit .

So you kind of pick strategically 10 or 20 or 30 URLs on the site and then you're only doing that . You're going to extrapolate from there .

But the problem with those reports is that sometimes we included a little bit of consulting , but not very much an hour , and then there's not a plan for what you're going to do with it after and how you're going to do it and how you're going to get things retested , how you're going to know how that's all going to work .

So I watch clients get frustrated with that . You can pull in a kind of accessibility team to come alongside your existing team , whether that's an in-house team at a big , you know more enterprise or larger company or the agency , even the freelancer . You can have accessibility professionals come alongside to do the testing and consulting and retesting for you .

We do a lot of that testing and consulting and retesting for you . We do a lot of that we do , and we do that both with kind of remediation as well as new site builds where we're consulting . As somebody like you said you were just going to have a site redesign .

We were like you could , somebody who wanted to worry about accessibility or work on accessibility might might bring in a team to do that alongside . So it's really the . The implementation is still happening by the freelancer or the agency or the in-house team , but there's consulting . That's a piece of that .

Then you can move into kind of done-for-you work , so this also can get kind of expensive , often because you're hiring the accessibility team to identify and to fix everything , and it's typically when you have a really short timeline . So sometimes out of these lawsuits there might be a really short window .

If you've had a good attorney , you've gotten maybe 24 months , but sometimes you don't get that . You get a really short window and then you have to be compliant and so that might be a situation where you would want to hire someone to kind of just come in and get it done .

And then finally we offer what we call accessibility maintenance plans and so we're identifying , we're testing the site , but we're identifying five , three or one issue per month , giving you that in a report , all the consulting you need around that particular issue , testing it to evaluate that it's fixed , and then giving you a report at the end of the month .

Those reports as a legal defense over time , because it shows that they have a long-term , regular program of testing and remediation . And that's what the courts love to see is that you've got that . You are taking this seriously , you do want to do the right thing . You're not avoiding working on this .

But this particular lawsuit they found an issue you hadn't fixed yet . So all of those pieces can go there Anytime . You have accessibility professionals working alongside your team . The side benefit whether it's you know , for a bigger consulting project or it's our little plans the side benefit is that your team grows in their understanding of accessibility .

We've seen it time and time again we come alongside to do some consulting for you know , a development or a fixed project and we say , oh no , that plug , that plug in , has a lot of problems for accessibility and it's hard to remediate , it's hard to fix them .

And then we look and we find a different one and then that whole team never uses that other problematic plug in again .

They know now that they should use something else in their tech stack and so all of those kinds of ways that you learn and grow about over time , because you're right , it is a lot and it's complex , but most agencies and freelancers that I know do pretty much a similar thing on each site .

I mean , there's some variations , but you're using pretty much the same plugins all the time or the same theme families , and and so once you're learning how to do those better , you can do better .

Maybe the structure will will deviate slightly , but the core elements that you have in place , that could be your template for other sites and your tool stack will be similar to where you do have trusted plugins and you have a process for vetting out some , some new functionality .

We , there's new . And I think talking about how how to sell accessibility is like you know , this is a new thing that we didn't . You know we're , we're learning how important this is . We can go back now we can fix these things for you and you can kind of develop a package of what you could do to fix those things without any extra help .

So if you were to apply for a grant and say , listen , we are looking to help this client out with accessibility or our own accessibility efforts to avoid lawsuits , we're looking for grant funding to help us invest in accessibility efforts to help more people disabled , blind , whatever that is a good piece for getting grant funding too . If you show that .

And so the the client that was going to up to five , up to a ten thousand dollar spend . So the client I mean , this is the harder part , right ? The client has to spend that money up front and then next year , on their taxes , they get a credit .

They don't get money back , but it reduces the amount they owe by up to five thousand dollars , which is pretty significant chunk , right ? So if you were normally going to charge them you know $10,000 , you know $10,000 to do this you could charge them $1,500 to do that .

They can still get the $5,000 tax credit and you know that could cover the additional accessibility work on the project and and and go there , but you know the client has to be willing to finance it . I think in some ways right . So it's yeah , that makes sense .

I got to give you something now too , a little homework , which is to check out episode 301 of the Web Design Business Podcast , because we did talk about grants on that episode with Julia Taylor from Geek Pack , who is a WordPress community builder , and the reason I mentioned that is what she's found out .

She's someone who has literally secured hundreds of thousands of dollars in grants . It's kind of like a whole different side business she's got going .

What she discovered is these states , communities , counties , chamber of commerces , even countries as as a whole , are looking to empower businesses who are helping , especially people who are disabled , and just making things more humanitarian , like you have humanitarian rights which accessibility is , so I actually think there's a huge opportunity .

One is there is a Facebook group for WordPress accessibility and of course , you don't have to be in WordPress , but there's a ton of accessibility professionals there that are friendly and can answer one-off questions and people bring their questions there all the time . It's a great place . The other is there is on meetupcom .

There is an online meetup for WordPress accessibility . They meet twice . It's only online . They meet twice a month . They have amazing speakers and topics all the time and a huge library now of all these past presentations , so it's a great place to learn . If you want to learn about testing with screen readers or doing keyboard testing or all that , it's great .

Some great presentations there to learn more about accessibility .

So the wordpress foundation pays for meetupcom , for all the meetups , and that one says san francisco because that's where the foundation is got it and we don't really do anything in person , so yeah uh , any particular resource bet that we should go to .

Um is going to be um showing and it is 24 hours of accessibility presentations from all over the world , all different levels , from super technical to just getting started , and some great talks . I serve on that organizing team and I'm really excited .

You do a lot of accessibility on one site , your tool stack that will apply and filter down to all other projects for agencies and freelancers specifically so no site is ever 100 accessible .

A ton of resources was kind of like a mini masterclass here in accessibility for e-commerce sites . Be sure to check out Bette and her team's website at accessicartcom . That will be linked in the show notes , of course , at joshhallco slash 345 .

If you would like some ongoing help for your accessibility , help for your sites , especially if you're doing e-commerce and again I want to thank Bette for coming on and sharing her experience in this .

She's someone who knows a lot , so it was interesting to be able to pull out some of the most important things and the basics to the advanced when it comes to accessibility . I would love to hear how this one helped you out , especially if you are an e-commerce website designer .

Head over to joshhallco slash 345 to share a takeaway and again , you can connect with Bet and get all of the resources that we talked about available there at the show notes for this episode . Stay subscribed , friends , or subscribe if you haven't yet , because we've got a lot of good ones coming up . So I hope you're excited .

And if you haven't checked out our podcast playlists , make sure to go to joshhallco slash playlists and you can get podcast playlists on . They're kind of like listening paths for things like pricing , getting clients , even accessibility and some other areas that we're going to be adding moving forward .

So excited to help you on your web design journey and I hope this one helps you . I'll see you on the next episode . Good ones to come .