Boost Profits & Avoid Liability with Accessibility featuring Bet Hannon of AccessiCart

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Introducing our guest, Bet Hannon, CEO of AccessiCart

Meet Bet Hannon, the CEO and founder of AccessiCart, an expert in web accessibility. She shares her insights on the importance of accessibility for e-commerce sites and common mistakes to avoid.

Accessibility: A Must for Profitable Websites

If your website generates revenue, accessibility should be a top priority. Approximately 26% of all adults have some form of disability, making it crucial to ensure your e-commerce site is accessible to all users.

Key Components of Web Accessibility

Keyboard navigation and proper heading structure are essential for an inclusive website. Additionally, color contrast checkers can help make your text more readable for everyone.

Addressing Common Accessibility Issues

By focusing on three main issues (keyboard navigation, proper heading structure, and color contrast), you can fix up to 80% of web accessibility issues. Emphasizing accessibility can lead to SEO improvements and benefit all users.

Understanding Accessibility Audits

AccessiCart provides audits for e-commerce platforms that want to improve their accessibility. An accessibility audit identifies potential issues on your site and provides recommendations for improvement. Tools and resources are available to help you make the necessary changes.

The Truth About Overlay Accessibility Apps & Plugins

While they may seem like a quick fix, overlay fact sheets and plugins can cause more problems than they solve. Familiarize yourself with the limitations of these tools and explore better alternatives.

Navigating Lawsuits and Financial Support

If you've been sued for accessibility issues, it's essential to take action promptly. US-based businesses can benefit from non-refundable tax credits to offset some of the costs associated with making their websites more accessible.

Investing in Accessibility for Long-Term Success

Making your website more accessible is an ongoing process and a valuable investment. Inclusivity should not be overlooked, as people with disabilities are vocal about their needs and experiences.

Evaluating Shopify Themes for Accessibility

While some Shopify themes may not be fully accessible, it's important to be aware of potential issues and address them proactively. Ensuring your shopping cart is accessible is particularly crucial for a seamless user experience.

By prioritizing accessibility, e-commerce business owners can boost profits, avoid liability, and create an inclusive online shopping experience for all. Utilize an auditing and consulting resource like Bet Hannon and learn more about making your website accessible and compliant with laws.

Looking for a transcript? We've got you:

Interview Transcript

Andy Janaitis
Hi, I'm Andy.

Lindsey Kugler
And I'm Lindsey. Welcome to e commerce marketing with the pitfalls where we try to cut through the noise and simplify digital marketing for authentic brands looking to make more sales online.

Andy Janaitis
Great, I'm really excited for today's conversation, we are joined by Bet Hannon, who is the CEO and founder of Accessicart. So Ben, why don't you introduce yourself, give us a little bit of background about what excessive cart does.

Bet Hannon
Right? So we focus on E commerce and accessibility for people with disabilities and when ecommerce but more broadly, things that have anything that has a high user engagement. So what e commerce, of course, people have to fill out forms, there's a checkout, all of those kinds of things. And so all of those are places are typically places where you might find some problems with accessibility on a website. So they tend to get sued a little bit more often and, or, you know, want to gain those customers for sure.

Andy Janaitis
That's awesome. Yeah, I know, we spent a lot of time thinking about friction in the checkout process. And I think this is just kind of one more, one more area that that probably gets gets overlooked pretty frequently.

Bet Hannon
Yeah, I try to tell people really, when to the good way to think about accessibility is to think about it as optimizing user experience for a little bit wider group of people. Awesome.

Andy Janaitis
Yeah. All right. And you mentioned before we kind of dive into accessibility in and out just kind of teeing up, you know, the importance of it. You mentioned being sued there. Can you dive into that a little bit?

Bet Hannon
Sure. So if you are in the US, well, if you have customers in the US, so like privacy law, laws around web accessibility deal with where the where the user lives, so or the customer lives. And so if you have customers in the US, then your site has to comply with Americans with Disabilities Act, or ADA, a lot of people have heard about ADA, and they think about it primarily in terms of physical spaces, like brick and mortar stores. But increasingly, over the last 15 years or so there have been more lawsuits around Ada and websites. And just last year, the Justice Department said, Yes, websites do need to do fall under ADA, there's a little bit of ambiguity about how do you meet that compliance, you know, it's not like when you have, you know, you have to have these kind of parking spaces or these kinds of, you know, doorways. But so it's a little bit different. But we're moving toward that and getting more and more of that, but in the meantime, in the US, what we're left with is people suing you, because your site is not accessible. In other countries. They also have accessibility laws. So if you have customers in Canada, or the EU, or Australia, they also have rights around things being accessible. And, uh, typically in those other countries, there's not the lawsuits, they people file a complaint. And it's the government that enforces that and you get a fine. And so it just a little bit different processes. But it all boils down to if you're making money off your website, it's, you know, pretty much a slam dunk that you need to be paying attention to accessibility.

Andy Janaitis
Definitely, yeah, it seems like it'd be really important one, just obviously, making sure that you are accessible, that you're, as many people as possible can get to the site and engage with your brand. But to that, that legal ramifications, just add that extra bit of urgency to it all

Bet Hannon
it is it is a kind of thing that I think motivates people to start thinking about accessibility, that's often a really common thing, right? People have heard about somebody getting sued, or they've gotten sued themselves. And so, you know, I think it's a, it is a really common thing to start from that place. But then kind of growing beyond that to say, well, I want to, you know, it's the right thing to do. I mean, there's certainly a moral argument for not excluding anybody, but also kind of moving into thinking about all the business positive ways, and we could talk about that, I should say, just in terms of us, you know, folks with US customers, the the first step, usually, if you're going to get sued as that you would get what's called a demand letter. So you get a letter from an attorney on behalf of the plaintiff who has a disability, that they intend to sue you. And sometimes these can really look like junk mail, and sometimes they are, you know, you would think a letter from attorney might look professional, but a lot of times they're not and so some of them can be these predatory lawsuits where one attorney one plaintiff are suing many, many people. That doesn't mean that they aren't really he'll and that you shouldn't take them seriously. And so if you get a letter like that, it's important to contact your attorney or an attorney that deals with these sorts of matters. Take it seriously, a lot of times, you can, you know, it can be less costly if you settle that upfront, rather than don't go into court over it. But if you if you just toss it and don't pay any attention to it, the next thing that comes to you is a summons to appear in court. And so that starts to get really costly.

Andy Janaitis
Definitely, I can imagine.

Lindsey Kugler
And now that we've sufficiently gained everyone's attention, I think everybody now that we've got that, what would you say from just like a business owner coming to you saying, like, what is accessibility? When it comes to my website? What are the pieces that they have to be thinking about around this?

Bet Hannon
Yeah, so one piece is that the the CDC in the US and the UN more globally says that about 25% of all adults everywhere, have some disability that requires an accommodation. That's, so that includes everybody from people who are blind to people who have you know, or have a mobility impairment, they can't use a mouse to people who are colorblind. I mean, we begin to talk about dealing with a whole spectrum of things, including, you know, ADHD, and reading disabilities, other kinds of things. Even, you know, we work with as we're working with E commerce books, we even begin to think about anxiety and depression, that cause people to give up too quick, right? If your checkout process is convoluted, and takes a long time, and seems never ending, people feel balanced, because they're just giving up. And so beginning to think about how can you make changes to your site, so that all of those different types of people can use it. So it begins to look practically like this. So people, and, you know, as I talk go around talking to people about these kinds of things, a lot of times people just never really given any thought to how people with disabilities would use the web. And so there's a kind of a curiosity on the one and, and so people who are blind or who have a severe visual impairment, use what's called a screen reader. And it's a bit of software that lives on their machine. And it will read out loud to them. The website, not just the text content on the page, but it'll read out. If there are descriptions on the images, which there should be, it will read out the link text, and it can look at link text, they can tell the screen reader to only read out the h2 headings on the page. So there are ways that a screen reader reads out loud to them things. If a person can't use a mouse, they often have what's some kind of an adaptive device. So like Stephen Hawking had a little as he became more and more paralyzed, had a little sensor on his glove, they weren't his glasses for his cheek, and he can move a cheek muscle. And really, there are, all of those devices are very individualized to the person's limitations and abilities. But they all come down to keyboard navigation. So testing, you don't have to like accommodate 1000 different devices, you just have to make sure your site is keyboard navigatable. And that's true for people who are blind and screenreader users too. They're using keyboard navigation to move around in your website. So you can just go to your site, and you can start pressing tab and enter and see how far you can navigate through your site. Right? Because those are the keys that you may not have known that right or the Tab key would just move you through things on your website. And then, you know, we begin to look at things like you know, people who have reading disabilities, if you fool justify text so that it's even on both margins, it creates what are called rivers of white through through the tax because the person with the reading disability may see the see the white and not the words, right. And so you would you don't want to fool it's simple things like that sometimes, right? Just don't feel justify something. But making sure that you're using colors properly, right you want to have you know, you don't want to make your link text just be a color indicator. Because the person who was colorblind might not ever see that, right? You want to underline it or, or make it bold, as well as given a color, right. So things like that are what you would the sorts of things that you would want to do to try and make your site more friendly for people with disabilities. The place that you can go to begin to learn all of those sorts of guidelines for things is called the Website Content Accessibility Guidelines. WCAG. And there are it's, you know, pretty technical, but if you Have a developer team or you work with folks that are helping you, that's a great place resource for them. There are three, let we're on to level 2.0. Now. And there are three levels of that single, a double, a triple A double A is generally where everyone is focusing their efforts on all of that. And so, you know, in some ways, it doesn't really change your website and to obviously, for people who are sighted, or who have no disabilities, but you know, it can really make a difference to those, those customers that have some disabilities.

Lindsey Kugler
Yeah, and I Oh, go ahead, Andy.

Andy Janaitis
I was just going to say when when you're getting started, so you've got new, especially ecommerce client comes to you what are like some of the you mentioned some of the areas but what are the like the, you know, give us the top couple mistakes that you see on on a lot of ecommerce sites.

Bet Hannon
Yeah, so the big three are having alt text on your images, and, and when we say helpful alt text. And so remember, the screen reader is reading that out loud. So you don't want to jam pack that super long, necessarily. But you're wanting to be thoughtful about giving enough pieces, we have a post on our blog about writing all text for products, because that's a, a product images are kind of a special case. So you might want to think about that. So all text using the heading structure on the page properly. So a lot of times people are using the headings, to style text and make it different sizes are different. And really the headings that's really about giving the meaning. So you want to think about those headings as almost like the outline you used to do in high school English, right? You're like the Roman numeral one, and then you indent the letter A and then you have small Roman numeral and then a lowercase. So all of that kind of nesting. That's what headings are supposed to do. So you have one and only one h1. And generally, that's the title or the title product. And then then you'd have h2, and then you would never skip from an h2 to an h four or five, right? So you want to make sure, so in reality, the text of that heading can be styled any way you want. But the H factor, whether it's a two or three or four is telling the screen reader but also Google what the cause where that content is in terms of its meaning on the page. And it's kind of important because like a screen reader user will have their screen reader, you know, read me all the H tos and so they just surfing through just like sighted people do, we're skimming through right to look at what's most relevant to us, right? That's how they're skimming to is read me all the h2. Now read me all the h3 is under that h2 so that they can narrow down quickly on what they're looking for. So I'll text using heading and other semantic things properly, right, if you put a data table in, it needs to have the HTML for data table, tags in it, that kind of stuff. Don't, don't use a hyphen for making a bullet right use a proper bulleted list those kinds of things. So it alt text, semantic HTML headings, and then making sure you're getting your color contrast, right, like just looking at color contrast, if you deal with those, this is this has to do with the color of the font on the you know, with the button behind or the color of the font and its background. And there are some color contrast checkers, you can look at the the amount of the contrast varies on the size of the font. So you want to make sure that you know you can look at that and kind of get a sense for you know, if it's small font, it's got to be really high contrast, if it's a bigger font, maybe it doesn't have to be as bad as much contrast. But getting that color contrast, right? If you do all of those three, that's about 80% of all web accessibility issues. And most of those really don't need a developer to work with really, a lot of that can be, you know, the site owner or if they're not a developer working on those. But, you know, if you've got a store with 10,000 products, and you never put any old tags, you know, text into your images, that's a lot of work to go back for. And so I would say the most important thing in that kind of a case is really educate yourself and start creating accessible content so that you're not, you know, at least you, you you're not creating more work for your future self.

Andy Janaitis
I'm curious as we talk about this, I think you kind of sounded like or maybe you alluded to a little bit, but I'm curious how this ties into like SEO even so we're talking about obviously how human can read through everything. But as we're going through especially some of that like hierarchical HTML, I'm curious, like what effects and what improvements I can give you from a from an SEO perspective,

Bet Hannon
you you almost always improve your SEO when you you're improving accessibility, because of that structured piece, right, and you're getting that semantic structure in there, the alt text as well as a port for SEO, you want to make sure you're not just sort of keyword stuffing in the alt text, but it's genuine, because because the Google algorithms are now looking is that genuinely helpful information about your image, right? And so, you know, making sure you're doing that you're almost always improving your SEO. And actually, the same is true for user experience, right? Anytime you improve accessibility for people with disabilities, you improve the user experience for everybody. Because, you know, if a lot of times people are just have situational, you know, impairment, in a sense, right? I have a wiggly baby on my hip, and I'm trying to navigate your website, this is important for you, Andy, right, because you're going to have another wiggly got babies that you're juggling, and you're trying to navigate or you're out in the sunlight on your, on your phone, right. And so the contrast needs to be high, you almost always improve the user experience for everybody, when you make your site accessible. And actually, it's, it's kind of true. You know, a lot of things technology improvements that improve were originally intended to improve life for people with disabilities be become things that make life better for all of us. So we often talk about use the example of Curb cuts, right curb cuts, or for people with wheelchairs, or scooters or that kind of thing. But you know, if you're pushing your baby stroller or you're dragging your luggage, right, we all love those curb cuts. Same for, for, you know, like aI assistants like Alexa and Google Voice and all of those, right, all of that technology originally developed to help people with disabilities. And so we all get to benefit from Alabama.

Andy Janaitis
Yeah, love the example before we we hopped on here, you were telling us about the having captions on the video. And you know, obviously, there's a big accessibility tied to that. But, you know, I forget the percentage you had thrown out there, but a very high percentage of people are watching videos with sound off as well. So it really helps everybody.

Bet Hannon
It does, really does. Yeah.

Lindsey Kugler
So if I'm a business, and I'm thinking about this, now, I kind of makes me think how interesting this is that likely, a lot of business owners don't interact with any of these kind of accessibility issues in their daily life. So they're not going to be thinking about it for their website, or their business in general, until they are gonna get sued. Or if they have a brick and mortar store, they're thinking about the ADEA. So if there's someone who doesn't have those kinds of accessibility thoughts in their daily life, who can they go to? What are some resources that business owners can utilize to make their website more success? more accessible?

Bet Hannon
Right, right. And so I can't remember whether we mentioned it yet or not. But you know, CDC says about 25% of all adults have some issue. So just because you don't know someone, or you don't think about that, it doesn't mean that it's not out there. And that there's a large, I mean, you can widen your audience, right. So as as a part of becoming more accessible. So, so that's important. And, you know, in reality, all of us are just one accident or illness away from some kind of disability. So there are some resources out there there are, there are agencies like ours, that will can help you with what's called an audit. So we have people on, like our team, and not just us, I mean, there are other places out there too, that will help you do some testing on your site to to help you find the accessibility issues. So you may be able to do some of that testing yourself kind of DIY at the beginning. And definitely, you know, you probably know whether you need to add alt text to your images already. Right? If you haven't been doing that. You you may want to, you can do some of that self testing, although what we find is there are and there are some online tools to do that. One of them is called wave wav.webaim.org, I think is their campus.com a.org. But wave the WAVE tool, what we find is that while you get those AI generated testers, so there's some automation testing that can happen. But what happens is that AI both gives you false positives and false negatives. So sometimes it will tell you you have a color contrast issue when you have an image background, but because the AI can't see the image background, it it it doesn't. You know, it's it's telling you you have a color contrast issue when you really don't. Conversely, there are just some things that AI can't test for. So it can't tell you that you have that your menu is not navigatable with the keyboard, right. There's no way for AI to test for that. And so, it can also let you know, it's just really hard, I think for site owners to look at those tools and know how to make Have them and to know what to do next. And that's where agencies like ours can help is that we can help you do that testing. And then we can help you prepare a plan and say, Look, this issue impacts a lot of people, or, you know, folks like me that say, Look, you know, 95, or more percent of all of the lawsuits that come are from for with, for e commerce sites and 77% of all of those all ADA website, lawsuits are e commerce, right. So huge percentage. And, and of those 95% of them are people who are blind, right. So if you're worried about your legal liability, then you probably want to, like deal with those issues. First, not, don't stop there. Because other people still can like you, you want to include other people too, but but that's the place to start, right? So people can help you prioritize those pieces. So when you get an audit done, typically, you are not getting your whole site audited. Usually, unless you have a very small site that is cost prohibitive to do that. So you're usually getting what's called a sample audit. So we would work with a client. And the way we do it is that we would help the client pick a representative number of URLs or work or views, right, sometimes the view on the page changes, even though the URL doesn't change as in like a checkout form or something, but a URL review, and we would we package those at 1020, and 30. And so you would get, we would identify what those are, we would do the testing, then you get a report. And the testing, is using some of those automated tools, but you want to make sure if you're gonna get an audit and pay for it, that you are having some human testing done. It's just you know, as we talked about some there are just some things that the tools can't test for. And a lot of accessibility has contextual pieces to it right, you would want to do this in this particular kind of situation. And in a different sort of context, you would do it this different way. Right. And so, some of that human testing is super important. So you get a report, and then we tend to do an offer as well then an hour of consulting. So then, often the client will bring their regular development team or the agency that they typically work with to that meeting, we can answer some technical questions and be, you know, do more consultation worked on a more technical basis with them, where sometimes it's just meeting with the site owner and helping them learn what they need to do, you know, self serve, or DIY. Love that.

Andy Janaitis
What about some of these like tools, or I've seen like apps that you can install that supposedly just will give you better accessibility out of the gate? Do any of those work? Or what should we know about those?

Bet Hannon
Yeah, so Well, the first thing to know is that they are flush with venture capital, so their ads are everywhere. So if you if, if the Google overlords know that you have an e commerce Store, you're surely seeing them. And so they might be. You, these are called overlay plugins, some names that you might have seen on our accessibility or userway, or AudioEye. And, and what they are, is that you put a little bit of code in your site, and a Shopify site, it might be in theme in a WordPress site, it might be in, in a plugin. And what it does is it sort of pulls in a script from their AI service, and tries to fix or overlay the problem with a more accessible solution from the, as the site visitor is there and chooses the tools. So there's actually a number of problems with those pieces, the best place to go for all the information, all the things is called overlay fact sheet.com overlay fact sheet.com. But among the problems are if if a person has a disability, and they need a particular tool, usually they already have it installed on their machine because they need it for the other 99% of the websites on the web, right? And what happens is that the tool that you have sitting there potentially conflicts with their tool and renders neither tool working. So now they can't use their preferred tool either. And so a lot of times there are people with disabilities will install a browser extension to block your tool. So that's why and it's not helping the people you think it's going to help to you it actually can only deal with things that AI can can help right it can't make your menu navigatable by keyboard because it can't detect that you have a problem. And that's not something that can He overwritten right, in the same way. And so there are things that they don't fix. There are increasing increasingly some, we're seeing anecdotally. But it's increasing that because people can, you know, look at the tech stack you're using, they can actually target you for using these things, that the predatory lawsuits are beginning to target people using these overlays. Because it's pretty easy to say, well, they knew they should have been doing something about accessibility, but they didn't fix this thing, right. And also, how they work is there's a little widget on your site, and when the person clicks it, then they have to click what, what helpful tool they would like to use? Well, if they say they want, for instance, screen magnification, we are seeing evidence that the service, so like the company that you're working with, takes that information and stores it with that user's IP address, ostensibly so that the next time that user goes to another site with that tool, they can already have it enabled for them. But that's taking HIPAA protected information about their health care status. And nobody has been notified that it's being stored, and you don't have a way to remove it. And the site, oh, yeah, it's putting the site owner at risk in terms of some country privacy laws. And so a kind of a whole plethora of proud and they don't stand with you, when you're sued, right? A lot of people see the ads or interpret the ads as Oh, I just have to do this, and then I'm scot free. And then when you get sued, the that company points you to the user, you know, the license agreement that were you signed off that you understood that they were not going to stand with you and defend you in court. So, so problematic, not best practice, the best case the best. And I think the best use case for them would be if you have been sued, you're having to make your site accessible, you know, like on a dime as a part of a court settlement or a court case, and you are working on it. But it's just taking a while to get that done. And it's not going to it's not going to satisfy the court thing. But it would might get you a little bit of time to get get some things made accessible. That makes sense

Andy Janaitis
yet really interested with all this stuff. There's like the, you know, all the reasons why you should do it anyway. But then on top of that just you could get sued to

Lindsey Kugler
thanks for bringing that up, Andy, because I was wondering the exact same thing. And I've seen these plugins everywhere. I want to ask, I know that you mentioned that sometimes these costs can be prohibitive for businesses to dive in and start working on this. Are there any breaks that they can get? Or are there any is there any help out there in terms of cost?

Bet Hannon
Yeah, so one of them is that there is a tax, a non refundable tax credit that US based businesses to get can get. So if you live in the if your business is based in the US to qualify, you have to have less than 30 employees or less than a million in revenue. So not everybody qualifies. But certainly that's going to help a lot of small biz, and it's one or the other, right. So you can have 5 million in revenue. If you have less than 30 employees, you still qualify and what you this qualifies anything that you do to make your website more accessible. So that can range from getting an audit done having we say remediation is the word we use fixing the accessibility issues, having a new completely new site redesigned with the accessibility as one of the factors for that everything up to the tax credit is for up to $10,000 in expenses, you can get 50% of that back as a credit and you don't get money back. But that reduces the amount that you owe on other things, you have to pay it all upfront, and then get the credit on the next year's taxes. So it's a great thing. Right? That's, that's, that's pretty amazing kind of break. So. Yeah, definitely. And then, you know, depending on how folks want to work on things there, in terms of spreading, there are ways to spread out some of the cost for doing that. We are not the only agency that does this. But there are agencies where you can purchase sort of, instead of instead of outlaying a chunk of money on a on an audit that's going to find a bunch of things and then sort of paying your developers to you know, paying a developer to fix it, which you know, that's too big cause right there. There are ways to get a package where you buy a certain number of hours for auditing and remediation every month for a certain number I know for at least, usually like ours have a certain amount minimum number of months for them. And people often go beyond that when they need to kind of keep doing the work. But that's a way to kind of spread out the costs for for some of the remediation work. And

Andy Janaitis
yeah, like that. I like your suggestion earlier to like, hey, even if you can't get everything done all together, like, at least start now, like, make sure any new content you're putting or new product pages you're putting out are correct. So that's one less thing you have to go back and fix later.

Bet Hannon
Yeah. And and I should say, with with those, either with Lowe's kind of a plan package, or any of those other things that we talked about in terms of the tax credit, that tax credit is not one time, you can you can kind of now I assume at some level, there is a you know, there's probably a limit somewhere. But you know, it's my understanding that you can claim it more than once, as long as it's legitimately things that you're doing to work at making the website more accessible. That's awesome. Yeah.

Andy Janaitis
So it's been really helpful. I think we touched on a lot of different accessibility items. Is there anything we missed, or any questions that you wish we had asked?

Bet Hannon
Ah, that's a really good. You know, I think, in many ways, making your website more accessible can be a really great investment in your brand. You know, I do think I don't want to I don't want it to seem political. But I do think people do respect the values of companies that try to be inclusive and inclusive around people with disabilities. And so I would say, if you work at making your website accessible, you want to figure out some ways to make that a part of your brand. And one of the ways that we advise clients to do that is to put an accessibility statement in, and we just usually put it right, like down on the footer with the privacy policy kind of link down there. And the statement typically says three things. One, it says we want, you know, we it's a value statement at one level, right? We want everybody to be able to use this website. Right? We want to include everybody to some statement about we particularly want to include people with disabilities and we're striving to meet, you know, you don't have to be specific, but you know, we're striving to meet these guidelines are we just want to include people with disabilities, and then an acknowledgement of the third that that website accessibility is? Well, it's never one and done. Right? If there's a there's a level of maintenance to it, anytime you make a change to the website, anytime you put a new product in anytime you you know, update the site, you know, potentially it can go out of compliance. Right. So it's there's a kind of an acknowledgment that we've we've worked at this, but you might still find something that's not accessible? If so let us know. And then of course, you have to, like be responsive to that. But But I think that can go a long way toward creating this sense of, yeah, we want to we're not we don't want to exclude anybody. Right. And I think that can be a great investment in the brand. So

Andy Janaitis
I love that. Yeah, never, we really tried to focus on working with what we call craft brands, but oftentimes, it's your purpose driven brands, and there's a mission behind it. And I think that really probably aligns with the values of of everybody that we're typically working with that, you know, inclusivity is not something to be overlooked, obviously.

Bet Hannon
Yeah, actually. And to be, you know, to be honest, I think, like some other, you know, communities at the margins, when they, when people with disabilities discover, like an E commerce shop that is inclusive, they are pretty vocal about sharing that around, right, you will find and it's not then just your, you know, people with disabilities, but you you get that reach for their friends and family members and the other people that care about them, because it is, you know, inclusive of them. And conversely, me that could work the other way too, right? You know, if, if, if you're excluding my, if I have some choices, and maybe I don't, if I'm paying attention to that I want to do I want to support the brands that are going to help my friends with disabilities live, you know, full independent, lives with full human dignity. So

Lindsey Kugler
yeah, love it. That's a great point. I love that with especially who would have thought to create brand evangelists in this way. I'm sure that there are so many brands out there when they find out, Oh, you actually make my life easier. And I can use your website and I can buy things when I want to. It's just so much better. And well, like you said, sharing with friends and family to who will support as well. It's the number

Bet Hannon
of sites that they encounter on a daily basis that are not accessible. When they do encounter when it's accessible. It's really kind of a thing to be celebrated in their eyes. So that's great.

Andy Janaitis
Do you have are there any Shopify themes that are particularly good or particularly bad in from an accessibility standpoint,

Bet Hannon
I'm not so much particular that I'm a themes that I'm sure there are right. But the thing that we have noticed and paid attention to, and I know that the Shopify team tries, you know, it's difficult when you have a platform that large right to begin to try and deal with things. But there is a problem on the checkout option that is two columns on the page. So we're the left column asks them to start putting in their, you know, their name and address and some stuff, if you if you start tabbing through that page, and it's just going from field to field, and it goes down. But on the other side, you have the coupon code and the cart. If you keep tabbing, it goes down, it goes down the first column, and down into the footer and down to the next. No, the next go to shipping, I think is the next thing gonna show me and then down into the footer to the privacy policy. So the blind person says up, I've gone too far that I don't know where the coupon code is, let me go back, right. And so they can't find the coupon

Andy Janaitis
code. If they're really interesting, I hadn't thought about

Bet Hannon
that. All it takes to fix that is I mean, the platform can't fix it. But you can just switch to the one page checkout, right to where it just takes you a page, and you go to the next page. And, and that's the problem. Sometimes checkout for options that fly in, those are problematic. Or if somebody has embedded the kind of pop up widget in another website, where you popping it up and you're buying the projects. Often those are not super accessible. And in a lot of E commerce, there are things in the base platform, whether that's Shopify or WooCommerce, or big commerce that are mostly accessible out of the box. But then when you start adding additional things on whether it's themes or add ons, or plugins or other custom coding, right, sometimes the things that your developers do can make things less exciting when things get less accessible. So that's, but the shopping cart would be the typical a lot of where you would see a lot of accessibility issues. That's great thing

Andy Janaitis
to look out for definitely. Well, awesome, Ben, I think this has been super, super helpful. I feel like I've learned a lot. And definitely just a really interesting topic that we don't get to talk about. nearly enough, probably. So for all of our listeners out there, where can they find you and hear more about excessive car?

Bet Hannon
Yeah, so best place to find me is at accessit cars.com. So ACC e ss i Car t.com. And I'm still on Twitter, mostly at BET Hanon. But, you know, I see people leaving that platform all the time. So but we have a contact form addicts elsecar.com. And that's a good place to reach out as well. And happy to you know, I'm in a few groups, Shopify groups, and we're WordPress WooCommerce groups and all around Facebook and LinkedIn and

Andy Janaitis
awesome. Yeah, we're always on LinkedIn. Come on, come on out to LinkedIn. You can come on over from Twitter.

Lindsey Kugler
Awesome. Well, thank you so much for for sharing all of this incredible information. Like Andy said, I feel like I went to school and I'm hoping to pass the test next time it comes around. So thank you.

Bet Hannon
Being with you, thanks for inviting me. I really had a good time. So awesome.

Lindsey Kugler
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