Season 01 | Episode 08: Accessibility and Web Agencies

David: Welcome to Practical Accessibility Insights, the podcast that brings you tips and tricks about making your communications more accessible to people with various types of human limitations. And helping you to expand your market. I’m David Best, and with me is my co-host Sandi Gauder. Hi Sandi.

Sandi: Hi David. How are you today?

David: I’m good. And I’m looking forward to this podcast because we have a guest today that we both have had contact with and interactions with, and I think most of our listeners will probably be able to relate to what his accessibility experiences have been. So Sandi, why don’t you go ahead and introduce our guests and get things rolling.

Sandi: Happy to do that. So today on our show we have Jason Pomerleau. He is with a company called Elev8 Web Studio, and as David has said, we’ve been corresponding with Jason over the years, but finally getting to have a real live conversation with the man. So welcome, Jason.

Jason: Thank you. Great to be here.

Sandi: So why don’t we start by having you tell us a bit more about who you are, your elevator pitch.

Jason: Sure, yeah. My name is Jason Pomerleau. I’ve been developing websites for quite a long time. I got my start in the late nineties, and I’m from a company called Elev8 Web Studio. We help small and mid-size companies deliver great web experiences with a particular focus on the WordPress platform. We’re a WordPress focused web agency.

Sandi: Now, one of the reasons we brought you on the show was because David and I both are aware that you have been progressing down your journey in the space of digital accessibility. So I’m curious to know how did that all start? How did you get introduced to digital accessibility and why did you decide that this is something, you and your company needed to do more about?

Jason: Yeah, it’s a, it’s a little bit of sort of ancient history and a little bit of serendipity. So, you know, I, geez, many years ago, I, I think I would say probably the early two thousands, uh, maybe a few years after the first WCAG spec, you know, came out as a web developer you know, it was, it was something to be aware of.

I had always tried to sort of be aware of the uh, big moving pieces in, in my, the craft that I was learning and, and accessibility was a topic even back then. So it was sort of something I was aware of, but for me it was sort of mostly a tangential consideration. Like, you know, I certainly tried to be aware of this stuff I should know, and I, and I applied it to my projects, but there was never really any sort of real world testing done or, or validation done.

I just, you know, did what I thought was necessary. You know, fast forward, you know, many, many moons later, the serendipitous part, this is becoming more and more of a topic. And of course with, you know, legislation, you know, coming out in, in the last, you know, number of years around accessibility and, and how that applies to customers, you know, are the websites that we build for our customers.

We started to look at it more seriously. And then a few years ago, I had a chance encounter with David and we got to, you know, having a conversation, and, uh, David, you know, sort of explained to me that’s, uh, you know, it’s, it’s much more involved than just sort of like, you know, meeting the line items and the spec.

And that’s sort of one thing led to another. And now, you know, we work with David quite closely on all of our initiatives.

Sandi: So there wasn’t one particular project that kind of flipped the switch for you? It was just more of a one thing layered on top of another kind of a thing?

Jason: Yeah, I guess it was a bit of a process. You know, it was, it was something I felt. If you would’ve sort of interviewed me 15 years ago, I would say that I build accessible website and, uh, you know, that, that I was aware of WCAG and the various, you know, moving parts along it. But, uh, yeah, it was, it was kind of an evolution even, and David could tell you, even working with David was something that started, that took place over about a year.

We started to talk, we got him involved in a couple of small things. Looking at things for us. But over a period of about a year, we started to, to number one budget for, for accessibility, a dedicated accessibility budget in our projects, which we’d never had before. And that took a little bit of time to get through because of course, you, you know, you, you quote projects and sometimes you win them, you know, six or eight months later.

Once we started to realize that this was going to be a journey and not really a destination, we started to just incorporate that budget into our projects, you know, every time. And so now David’s involved in pretty much all of the work that goes through our, our door at, at, uh, various points.

David: That’s interesting, Jason, that you make that comment because that’s one of the topics that always comes up when I’m talking to small business owners is accessibility is a journey. It’s not a one stop event.

And a lot of small companies tell me that their website developer tells them that they can make their website accessible and then they just forget it and put it in the background. But as you said, it’s a journey. You have to keep the accessibility up to date and you have to keep learning as to how people actually communicate with your website or social media.

Sandi: What do your clients say when you, you know, in your proposal you’ve got this section about accessibility. Are most of them aware of what you’re talking about in those proposals, or do you have to actually explain why it’s important, why there’s value in it? Does it distinguish your agency, from other agencies?

Jason: Yeah, I, you know, it, uh, interestingly enough it’s not a line item in our proposal, it’s just part of the product, you know, that we build. Almost like when you build a website these days, people expect a mobile friendly, responsive design. They expect it to, to change based on, you know, tablets or you know, phones or desktop computers.

So for us, we don’t actually, internally we have, you know, the accessibility budget, but I think for us, adding it as a line item to the proposal and calling it out as a specific budget kind of invites the implication that it could be removed. Because sometimes customers will take, you know, they wanna bring the cost down, so they’ll, they’ll say, well, what if we could remove this and this?

I don’t even wanna have that conversation because it’s not coming out. It’s part of our product. We’re not gonna do a website project without accessibility in mind. From that perspective, we actually tend not to talk about it very much. We actually talk about when we, when we sell a website, you know, we, we, we say, okay, well hey, it’s gonna, we’re gonna meet all the best practices and it’s gonna be this and it’s gonna be that.

And there’s deliverables in our proposal that say it’s going to be accessible, but that’s about it. And then of course, as part of onboarding and training, we then teach them. What they need to know from a content management perspective, you know what, what needs to happen. So that’s kind of what it looks like for us.

Sandi: I love that answer.

Jason: Well, you know, a lot of people are asking for it. We’re seeing in the public sector and in the nonprofit sector, it’s part of the RFP must be AODA compliant, you know, et cetera, et cetera. And so we kind of see that as like table stakes. You know, it’s, that’s a baseline requirement now for the product.

David: So one of the big challenge though is cost. That, that’s something that always comes up when you’re talking about building a website for somebody. What is the biggest obstacle you have in building the accessibility into someone’s website when it comes to cost, because there are certain tools and as you know, different widgets that can be put into a website that can create challenges for you. So what, what’s one of the biggest problems you have and when a cost comes up?

Jason: Well, the good news is, is that by not including it as a line item in our proposal, that the, the cost conversation often never comes up. Now where it does come up is where, you know, we will often take on a new customer and we would, we, we would, you know, say take over a website that’s been built by someone else. I can think of a few examples, you know, in my head where, like, say a nonprofit, you know, website was being managed by someone else.

You know, we take it over, you know, we identify, you know, that there’s accessibility issues with it and we, we bring that up and that definitely the cost equation you know, can become challenging at that point because it’s like, okay, well now we have this thing that we’ve built and we’ve paid someone to build in that build, and now we’re finding out that okay, it’s not actually compliant, it’s not accessible. And of course, David, as you know, remediating, uh, accessibility issues is a lot more expensive than doing it right to begin with and building it in right from the outset.

And so that can be a bit of a shocking experience for, for customers. And, and sometimes what will happen is that we make it funded to fix some of the issues, but not all of ’em. In rare cases, I don’t think we’ve ever had anyone say, well, we’re not gonna do any of this work. But in some cases it’s been like, okay, well we, we can’t really afford to make all these remediations. What was gonna make the biggest impact, you know, now?

So from a cost perspective, of course it adds to the cost of building the product, but so does SEO optimization and structural optimization, and so does responsive design. So, so we just see accessibility as one more of the sort of key foundational pillars in a website build project.

Sandi: So when you have take on these projects with clients and they ask for things that maybe aren’t accessible or very difficult to make accessible, they want some sort of feature, you know, uh, I’m just thinking something like a carousel that can be just such a challenge to make accessible for all sorts of people with disabilities, different types of disabilities. How do you have the conversation with the client around, are you sure this is what you really want because it’s not necessarily gonna be accessible, or if it is, it may not look the way you want it to look, or, you know, those kinds of things.

How do you broach those conversations with your customers?

Jason: Yeah, that’s, uh, that is something that, that sort of fits under the umbrella of what I call managing expectations. And so, you know, you really have to sort of get in front of conversations and be proactive. We, we can’t just expect our customers to know what’s accessible.

Uh, and so, you know, in those scenarios, typically I, uh, my policy is always call it out early. You know, when they’re asking for something that’s not accessible, you know, we will basically say, okay, well, you know, unfortunately we can’t really do that exact thing because there’s actually an accessibility issue with carousels, you know, for example.

Normally what we would recommend, and actually there’s other usability issues with carousels outside of accessibility, you know, that, that, that are sort of a whole different UX conversation. But our goal really is to take a leadership role with our customers and, and to, to give them choices and to give them good choices as to where they want to go.

So, you know, getting back to my earlier point, if you give a customer a choice of doing accessibility or not doing it, then lots of them are gonna pick no if, if that’s, you know, that’s the choice. A key element for us is to offer alternatives, right? And to say, okay, well that’s going to be an accessibility issue, but normally what we would recommend is a set of tiles instead.

And that’s actually gonna improve the UX for reasons A, B, and C. So, you know, just, just guiding them and taking the leadership role and also critically, not actually. You’ll notice that, that, that I didn’t actually give them that choice. Right? We’re not doing a carousel. Uh, you know, this is, this is, these are the options in front of us.

What I often do with a customer say, Hey, this is really what we should do. This is our recommendation, but if you insist, we will, you know , we will give you what you’re asking for, but recommend against it. But that’s pretty rare on the accessibility side of things for like, because that’s usually a hard no. For other things, you know, other functional things where they’re asking for something maybe a little bit crazy or unrealistic, you know, we’ll, we’ll try to, to sort of scale it back or maybe suggest an alternative. That’s kind of how it goes for us.

David: Accessibility education is a critical criteria for your staff, I assume. So, what resources have you found available to help yourself along this journey of digital accessibility and helping your clients to, to understand the, the important points of it over and above legislation. What kind of journey have you had in the education process?

Jason: So I really see that as two pronged. You know, the first one would be our own internal, you know, education process was just something I have more control over, you know, than our customer’s education process. But I’ll, I’ll, I’ll maybe start with the team you know, remembering that this was a bit of a journey for us.

We, as part of onboarding new staff, we have a whole training. It’s a calendar that’s laid out for them and there’s WordPress training and there’s, you know, and so what we would historically have done and and still do, is we actually send them, Google has, uh, uh, an online course that provides some training, and then we supplement with resources, like things like WebAIM, you know, and, and stuff like that.

And then we also have an internal KB, an internal knowledge base, and some supporting documents like checklists and what have you that that we utilize, you know, internally. So everyone kind of goes through that training. What we do is we send them for the Google training, and then we supplement it with an internal, I would call it a course, but it’s more of a webinar with me, we’re, we’re a small team, uh, where we go over some of, you know, those details. And then of course, David, as you know, we, we bring you in to QA, you know, our work and, and to essentially sort of check everything that we do.

But, then with our customers, that education happens in two ways. The first is part of the onboarding of a new website. So, you know, Hey, here’s your new shiny new website. You know, here’s how the content management system works. You know, here’s the things you need to be thinking about as a content author. And we spend about an hour going through the core stuff. Things like heading structure and alternative text and how to handle video and that, that sort of stuff.

Then occasionally we also have a webinar and it’s something we deliver as like a one and a half hour sort of accessibility essentials, you know, uh, webinar that we actually deliver to companies sort of on demand. So we’ve been hired specifically to, to kind of come in and deliver this training. And it’s introductory and it’s sort of, you know, but also recognizing that for the most of these organizations, it’s their first steps into web accessibility in the content publishing realm. It’s a journey for them too.

David: So education though, is an ongoing experience, right? And it’s really what you do. It’s not really what you read or what you know, but the more you actually engage in an activity, the more you learn about it. So your developers are learning about accessibility more and more every time they do a new project.

What’s the importance of having an advisor or an accessibility specialist attached to your team?

Jason: Obviously for us it’s been pretty critical because as we discovered, we thought we were doing a pretty good job with accessibility, and I think if you looked at the letter of the spec and the letter of the law, we were sort of hitting all the major notes, but of course, as we discovered when we started to see how our products were being used with assistive technology, we realized that we were not doing as good a job as we thought, and we course corrected.

And so from my perspective, the way I see it now is that for us it is very much an ongoing thing. That’s good news for you, David, because that means you’ll still be continually involved in evaluating our work because, you know, new things come out and new, you know, tools and techniques, the browsers, you know, themselves are constantly evolving.

Sandi: So have you been able to use AI to help you with any of your development, specifically around accessibility?

Jason: Not so much. Of course, we use AI extensively in our practice. I think it’s a tool for us, certainly, but I would say we, we haven’t really employed it in any direct ways as it relates to accessibility.

From my perspective, that’s what got us into trouble is in the first place was looking too much at the book, sort of, you know, what you’re supposed to do and not focusing enough on the actual experience and, and how it all plays out in real life.

Sandi: So aside from David doing testing with assistive technology with screen reader, what kind of testing do you do internally?

I’m assuming you use automated testing, but what else do you do when you’re working on a project for a client?

Jason: We do have some automated testing. We also have internal checklists that we utilize for us. My position on automated testing is, is they’re a bit of a blunt instrument. You know, they, they can identify problems that are actionable.

They’ll also flag problems that are not problems. You know, for example, the classic this image doesn’t have alternative text, meanwhile, it’s not supposed to. It’s a decorative image and, and we specifically don’t want it. So we’ll supplement with those, you know, with those automated tooling. We’ll use Google Lighthouse and then supplementing with an internal checklist.

Now, of course there’s a lot of emphasis on screen reading tech, but we actually go over all the different sort of major types of disabilities. You know, for example, motion, you know, concerns like things like tremors and how uh, you know, a UI component, like a dropdown is used by someone with tremors and how much difficulty those can cause.

We talk about color and, and how it’s important not to use color exclusively you know, to, to communicate things, you gotta pair it up with icons or some other thing that sort of communicates that and in place of, you know, the color. So for us, we, we try to really make people aware of all of those different things.

So we, we built a tool one time that that was this really neat interactive dynamic. We call it the bubble tool and it, and it was really neat and there was a lot of motion to it. And, and you know, we saw the motion as being pretty cool and it was, it was kind of exciting to interact with this thing.

And then we actually got an email from someone who was using that tool and said, you know, I have a risk of seizure. And uh, when I went to use this tool, you know, I was quite concerned because it could have, you know, triggered a seizure and so we took all the motion out of it and, and sort of, you know, refactored it basically to be, to be more accommodating.

Something else that we do too as well is we don’t rely entirely on David to, to be, you know, our accessibility QA. Our developers will actually spend a bit of time at the tail end of their dev cycle using a screen reader themselves for, for, you know, half an hour. I would say it’s not, not an extensive period of time, but essentially pre checking before we pass it over to David for sort of like a final QA.

Uh, of course, you know, keyboard navigability is a, is another large one that is part of our internal, you know, QA process. Not so much a mouse. It’s funny, we’re, we’re very big here on using the keyboard for more things. I mean, I have a bit of a dark humor joke that I share with new hires, and I sometimes will say the mouse is for losers.

Because you can move much quicker on a, on a computer with a keyboard if you know all of the different combinations. So we teach those actually as part of our onboarding. And we’ve actually had staff depart the organization who have later come back and said, those keyboard shortcuts have been the, uh, you know, all those, those productivity, you know, things that, that I learned have really helped me in my subsequent, you know, employment.

Sandi: So after you hand over the keys to your clients, you’ve delivered an accessible website, whether they know it or not, you’ve given them some training around how to manage the content. What do you do once you turn over the keys?

Are they kinda left to their own devices to undo all the work that you did, or what’s your process there?

Jason: Yeah. You know, we are on an accessibility journey ourselves. I feel like, you know, there’s, there’s more that we still need to be doing. When we typically do our initial training and we do the onboarding, we cover all these topics.

We emphasize the importance of internal process for maintaining this, and we talk about the risks of if you just, just leave this training and you don’t have a, a solid internal process for maintaining this, you’re going to fall off the accessibility wagon and you will end up with compliance issue. And so we, we try to leave them with a stark warning.

And as you can imagine, we, we have, you know, several hundred customers and you have many different types of what I would call corporate personalities. Some of them take it to heart and, and internalize it and incorporate things into their practice, and others fall off the wagon immediately. Sadly.

David: As a screen reader, user myself, if I go to a website and I’m having problems in navigating it or something, and I go down and look for an accessibility page so I can get feedback or get support and I don’t find anything, I simply leave that site and I’ll never go back. So I think if you wanna build any kind of relationship with your customers, whether you call it accessibility statement or something else, you should have some sort of a mechanism for your users to contact you and get help when they need it properly.

Jason: You know, David, you bring up a really interesting point. But this, this is similar to when we talk about website traffic with our customers, is that you can get a hundred thousand visitors a day to your website. None of that matters unless it’s the right a hundred thousand people.

And so having that accessibility statement might only be of concern for, for a very small group of people, but the impact of that, for that group of people is, is quite, quite significant.

Sandi: So I know, I know you and I, Jason have had, uh, had a brief email exchange with around a mutual client that had an overlay installed and thankfully the client recognizes that it wasn’t a good idea and, and that overlay will be leaving the website. Do you get clients coming to you asking about that, asking to add them?

Jason: We do, and it’s actually something we deal with a few times a year. We will get a customer that says, Hey, and sometimes the worst, the worst is when we get it after they’ve already been sold. So they’ve already bought it and we get this email saying, Hey, we need you to add this JavaScript, you know, snippet, you know, to our website.

This happens with enough frequency that I have a templated email, uh, that I have put together, that I, that I send to folks, and it just, someday it’ll turn into a blog post. For any of our managed websites that we build or we manage the site, we won’t actually allow those things to be deployed. I actually have an interesting story about this.

I was sort of introduced to someone who manages a, a group home for folks with various types of disabilities. So this is assisted living facility, and this executive director happened to notice that there was no overlay solution on another website in town. And, and then actually informed that organization that their website was not accessible and, and is like, mentioned this to me and I said, well, well hold on like it is.

You know, like, we built that website, it should be pretty good. Like, what, what did you find? And she said, you know, I didn’t see the sort of like the font resizing tools, or I didn’t see the, the accessibility button that would, that would do all this stuff. And so that was another opportunity for education to basically say, you know, these, these tools shouldn’t be necessary if you’re doing, you know, accessibility right.

So once again, coming back to the fact that, that we try to be leaders and guide our customers away from you know, bad decisions, we’ll steer them away from those things. It’s kind of unfortunate. I think one of them had to pay a million dollar fine because they, they, they literally were not allowed to say that they, they made websites accessible, which really tells you something.

Sandi: They have really good salespeople is what it tells you.

Jason: Yeah. They get a slick and they, they call up a public sector organization saying, the law, the law, the law. Right. This, this, this thing will just check the box for you. And guess what, guess what they want? They wanna check the box, right? It it as easily and as cheaply as possible.

Sandi: And I think that’s one of the challenges as far as I, I know in the, the digital accessibility space is that people don’t want to get called out. They don’t want the government to find them. In the states, they don’t wanna be getting sued so I can understand why site owners would see an overlay as a simple cost-effective solution to avoid getting into trouble.

And I think that, that the, these overlay companies probably prey on the lack of knowledge or understanding that some of these clients have around accessibility and what it actually means. And they’re able to, it’s almost like a con job. I can’t believe I said that out loud, but there it is.

Jason: Some of these are sales oriented organizations and, and it’s, yeah, you get the sort of high pressure, you know. And how do they really know any different? I had an interesting experience. I’ve been in the tech business for a long time, so I know all the lingo and, and we do our best to translate the technical lingo into business language that our customers understand.

And we’ve been complimented many times on, you know, thank you for helping me like actually see this and understand this in the way that I need to, you know, without being like, sort of overly technical, you know, with it. I had the experience of buying a product where I had no knowledge and felt very out of the loop and, and I was like, now I finally know what all that techno babble sounds like to people outside my industry.

I had that, you know, that lived experience of, of what all of my customers experience. So it, how do you know differently? Like even selecting a website vendor? They don’t know that, that, that this company is gonna do a better job with accessibility than that other one over there. And that actually is, is a, is a concern, right?

Because then how do you differentiate? For us, the differentiation is really in those relationships and the customer service aspect of it. We don’t try to compete on price. We are more expensive than other providers. We see ourselves, you know, to use a car analogy, we see ourselves as a Toyota. It’s gonna cost you more, but it’s well built and it’s going to, you know, it’s going to last.

David: Well, I wanna thank you, Jason, for joining us and sharing your experiences with us. I think it’s really enlightening to really understand what the experiences of, you know, the struggles of the small business owners. If people wanna reach out to you, how can they find you?

Jason: You can find us online at elev8webstudio.com, that’s ELEV eight, the number eight, web studio.com.

Sandi: And as we like to wrap up all of our podcasts, is there one simple thing our listeners can do today that would help remove barriers in the digital space?

Jason: My advice for anyone who’s involved in managing websites, whether that’s technical or whether that’s the content management side of it is to actually use some assistive tech yourself. Use a screen reader yourself for, for an hour. You know, Apple devices like, like iPhones and iPads and, and Macs have the voiceover software built in. On Windows, I believe you can get a free trial for Jaws, which is the screen reader I believe it’s a popular one for the Windows platform.

And just do it for an hour. You know, experience the web, you know, through the assistive technology. Experience your own website through assistive tech and see how those folks navigate and wind their way through all of the content. I think there’s nothing that’s quite like lived experience and so getting that experience is not that hard.

It’s just, you know, spending a little bit of time experiencing the world or rather the web in this case, you know, as someone else does.

Sandi: Exactly. That’s a great piece of advice. Thank you, Jason.

Jason: Thank you. It was my pleasure.

Sandi: And it has been great to have you on the show and finally get to have a real conversation with you, not email back and forth.

Jason: Yes.

Sandi: That, that’s been great.

Jason: Thank you, David. Thank you, Sandi.

David: The views, thoughts and opinions expressed on this podcast are the speakers own and do not necessarily represent those of the podcast team and partners. This podcast is for information and learning purposes only. The Practical Accessibility Insights podcast is hosted by CMS Web Solutions. The intent of this podcast is to raise awareness for practical advice and strategies for making digital and physical environments more accessible to everyone.

Thank you for joining us in this time of discovery and sharing for a more inclusive society. If you have questions or comments, you can email us at info, I N F O, at david dot best or Sandi, S A N D I, at CMS Web Solutions dot com. For more information and resources, go to www.CMSWebSolutions.com or www.BestAccessibility.consulting.