AS:040 Website Accessibility with AccessiBe

Welcome to the Accessibility Solutions Podcast, hosted by Linda Hunt, an award winning accessibility consultant, speaker, and author. With over 30 years experience in senior management rules and indeed passion for creating inclusive environments, Linda brings us unmatched expertise and credibility to our discussions. Join us as we explore the transformative power of accessibility and inclusion in today's world. Through captivating conversations, Linda shares her wealth of knowledge, provides practical solutions, and sheds light on the latest trends and investments in the field. Whether you're a business owner or disability advocate, or simply curious about the world of accessibility, this podcast is your go to resource. Get ready to unlock new perspectives, breakdown barriers, and embark on a journey of empowerment. Are you ready to create a more inclusive world? Let's begin! Welcome to the Accessibility Solutions Podcast!

Hi there and welcome to the Accessibility Solutions podcast. This episode, I'm pleased to have my friend Michael Hingson joining us today. Michael has been blind since birth and has had eight guide dogs in his 10 years. He has had a guide dog since he was 14 years old. Michael went to college, receiving a bachelor and a master's degree in physics, along with a secondary teaching credential from the University of California at Irvine. Michael then enjoyed a nearly 30 year career working for high tech companies, spending most of his time in management roles.

Michael's life changed dramatically on September 11th, 2001, when he and his guide dog Roselle, escaped from the 78th floor of Tower One in the World Trade Center moments before it collapsed. Michael is the best selling author of No.1 best selling New York Times best selling author of Thunder Dog, True Story of a Blind Man, a Guide Dog, and The Triumph of trust, selling over 2.5 million copies. In 2021, Mike joined AccessiBe as its Chief Vision Officer to help advance the company goal of making the entire internet fully inclusive by 2025. AccessiBe provides an artificial intelligence based product that makes websites accessible to all persons with disability. So welcome Michael. And web accessibility is one of those areas that I'd like to say is not my area of expertise as a sighted person, but I certainly spend a lot of time working with companies that consider accessibility as physical barriers to perhaps their storefront locations. But don't you know, don't think in terms of web accessibility and it's important for them to have an accessible presence on the websites that are on the internet. So, you know, from your standpoint at AccessiBe and it's chief vision officer, first of all, kind of tell me what AccessiBe does and then why. That's, you know, why web accessibility from the standpoint, but of a blind person that's on the internet looking for information or trying to do anything that people do on the internet. Why? That's why it's so important

Let's broaden the scope a little bit. Actually it isn't just people who happen to be blind or have low vision. You are in a wheelchair. You're using a power chair, but I gather you can use your hands, but there are quadriplegics who can't. They use something like a puff and sip stick to be able to interact with their computer, which essentially, if you mix what they're doing at work, Something like a keyboard. What if a website has only the ability to deal with a mouse and you have, you hover your mouse over something and it opens up a menu or whatever. That doesn't work if you're using a keyboard. What if you have epilepsy and you go to a website with blinking elements on the site? They can throw a person into a seizure. And there should be a way that you can disable those and have other ways of getting the same attraction to whatever it is that the website owner wanted you to see rather than just using a blinking element. So that's an issue. What if you are a person who deals with ADHD and you need ways to get yourself to be able to focus on websites? The reality is it's not just blind people, it is all sorts of people. What about people with dyslexia who aren't necessarily able to read things as well as they would like, but they can hear that information. So they may need a screen reader. But the reality is that all of those are examples of different things that may prove to be barriers for people to be able to fully use your website, whoever you are. And in reality, today, only about 3% of all websites have any kind of meaningful work done on them to make them accessible. If you will, AccessiBe is defined by the World Wide Web Consortium with Webcon, with what's called the Webcon Accessibility Guidelines, which is now up to, I believe, version 2.2. So the guidelines are specific definitions that describe what accessibility means for different kinds of things. Whether it be graphics, scribing graphics, whether it be dealing with menus on websites or any number of different kinds of things, whether it be labeling links so that people can hear them as opposed to just seeing them. Like Facebook has a particular icon that you can look at it and know that it's a Facebook link, but unless it's labeled appropriately, I won't hear anything or I'll hear it just say link and I won't know what that is. And there's no reason for that today because the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines in reality provide definitions to deal with all of that. Well, so how do we make all that work in terms of making a website accessible? The traditional way and a way that works as far as it goes is that when you create the website or after the website is created by a programmer, that same programmer or someone else has to come in and code in all the accessibility stuff, labeling the links, defining a menu. So a blind person with a screen reader can actually know that it's a menu and open the menu with a keyboard or even just interact with a keyboard or using a website. In terms of, again, working with a puff and sip stick or working with being able to disable blinking elements and so on, all of that has to be done. There are things that accessibility and other, a lot of most other web content creators and accessibility creators don't necessarily do. And that is what about videos on your website. You got this nice video and it has lovely music, but when I go to it, all I hear is the music. There's nothing to describe what is being said or shown in the video. That's the audio description. And that, right now is outside the preview of what we're gonna talk about, but it is still part of what accessibility is all about and what needs to be done to make your website inclusive. And so before going further, why should you do that? According to the CDC, the Center for Disease Controls here in the United States, and I'm sure it's true in Canada and it's true in other parts of the world, the reality is that 20 to 25% of all people traditionally will have what is called a traditional disability. In an, the podcast where we chatted earlier, I pointed out that everyone has a disability. For most people, it's life dependent. But you don't need to have your website modified to deal with light dependents as long as you have a monitor. But for the rest of us who are not light dependent or actually light independent or have other kinds of conditions or characteristics that our disabilities manifest, we need to have special things done to make the websites usable. And again, why is that relevant? Well, the CDC says that between 20 and 25% of all persons in this country have some sort of disability. Do you really want your website to leave out 20 to 25% of all people or would you rather get that business potentially into your website? And that's kind of what it's really all about is the real reason to make your website accessible is you include so many more people and organizations like the Nielsen Company that does the ratings and so on have done surveys and demonstrated categorically that websites that do pay attention to these marginalized or, or subgroups of people tend to have great brand loyalty from those people because they were included in what was done with the website as opposed to website owners that don't do that. So website owners that do pay attention to accessibility are gonna get a lot more business and have a 20 to 25% broader range of business potential from people with disabilities than other websites will. Now, yeah, some websites may accidentally have some of their stuff done, but the bottom line is that as I said, somewhere around 90, 97% of all websites don't tend to be accessible. So again, now going back to how do we deal with that? Well typically a programmer, a coder comes in, encodes all the things into the website that makes it accessible. That is to say, they put in the appropriate labels for links, they define menus, they define something so that if you have a drop down on your page that opens a menu or whatever, that will be appropriately set. So a person with a screen reader or others are able to access it with their keyboard as opposed to just doing it with a mouse and so on. The problem with that solution is that every website has to be manually coded. It's not scalable. So you have to do them one website at a time and you have to have enough programmers to make that work. Well, we don't have enough coders to make it work. Hence, 97% of all websites tend not to be accessible. So what's the solution to that? Well, one solution that has evolved came about because three people in Israel had a company that they created that websites for people and they would go in and they would make a website and then they would go on and make the next website. Well, in 2017, as I understand it, Israel said all websites in Israel must be accessible. And suddenly these three people, these three gentlemen were confronted with a pretty serious situation. How do we make our websites customers? They had a bunch, they were very successful at it. They hit on a way using artificial intelligence and some other things to create a system that could go in and analyze a website based on the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. And they could create, if you will, an image or what some people call an overlay of that site. And that overlay sits up in the cloud somewhere. And then if that image were created, it was because when they did all this, they created a company called AccessiBe A C C E S S I B E capital B, by the way. And they offered this to their customers. It was very inexpensive because once you got the widget created that does all that, it knows how to analyze websites. So when you subscribe and it's like under $500 a year if you have a website that has less than 1,000 pages and some other things like that. But the bottom line is that if you subscribe inexpensively, the widget will look at your website and it will say, okay, here's how we fix this accessibility issue, here's how we fix that accessibility issue. And today it also says, I don't know how to fix everything. It will try, for example, on my website. One of the things that it tries to do is to analyze some pictures on my website. And when I listen to the AccessiBe, when it's activated on my website and I get to a particular picture, it says man with dog sitting on park bench with his eyes, with eyes closed. Technically, that's correct, but it's not in reality correct because it doesn't say who the man is. It doesn't say what the dog is. It doesn't give me the information that I really wanna know, which is Mike Hingson hugging Roselle on a park bench. But the bottom line is it makes an effort at it. But bottom line, but the other bottom part of the bottom line is it's not really what I want. So it doesn't do everything, but it does a lot. And some pictures are described really well, but the reality is what AccessiBe today can do is with the widget look at a website and say, I can fix this, I can fix that, I can fix the other thing, but I can't fix this. I can try to do that, but I really don't know how to do that. And there's a new product that AccessiBe created called Access Flow, which can look at websites using the widget. And not only will it say, yeah, we can't do that, but we can tell you the website designer how to code and what to code to make that totally usable. And so even AI, which is always gonna need human beings, needs support to make itself work, but accessible today can use the artificial intelligent widget that sits up in the cloud. And it can use the additional resources of Access Flow to go in and truly make websites fully inclusive and accessible. Now having said that, I'm sure that there will be things that will come along that will cause all of this to hiccup.

And, and that's fine because the value of doing what AccessiBe does is it doesn't have to be done one website at a time. The widget that creates all this information sits up in a cloud and anytime anybody subscribes to AccessiBe Widget, the widget goes down and looks at the website and makes the changes that it can in its overlay if you will. And it will also know what it can't do because of Access Flow. And then I, as the user of the website, have the ability to activate this overlay process. And what it then does is it transmits the codes down to my website. So rather than permanently changing the website coding like a programmer has to do the overlay, if you will, transmit the codes down to the website to make the website more inclusive. My web browser and my screen reader, the software I use to verbalize a website doesn't care where the information comes from as long as it sees the codes. So I am able to make websites even with just the widget a lot more inclusive than they otherwise would be because of the fact that the widget does know how to analyze. Again, I'm not gonna say that it's perfect. AI isn't perfect and probably never will be totally perfect, but it makes a big difference and it's scalable. So anyone who subscribes to AccessiBe has the access to that widget and all that it can do for their website. And if they find that there's something that's not working on the website, they can report it to AccessiBe and AccessiBe can look at it and go, yeah, it's not working. Let's fix it and fix it. And then when they do and upload that into the widget system up in the cloud, anyone who has that same condition on their website suddenly gets the fix. It's scalable. And that's what you don't get with individual programmers. So AccessiBe makes it a much more scalable system. And hence the result of that is that it's able to affect in a very positive way many more websites than an individual programmer can do. My belief is that every programmer in the world ought to be using AccessiBe Why? Because it will do a lot of the work that they have to do, so they don't have to then do it and they can focus on the stuff that the which it can't do. In the 1980s, I worked for a company that laid me off in June of 1984 because Xerox bought the company and got rid of the entire sales staff. And when I went looking for a job, I couldn't find one as much as I tried because the unemployment rate among employable blind people was around 70%. And it wasn't because people who were blind couldn't work, it was because people thought that blind people couldn't work. So there were so many barriers.

Eventually, I started my own company selling PC based CAD systems to architects and engineers. And I had a lot of people who said, yeah, we like your system, it works really well.

But if we use your system, we can't charge what we did when we were just charging our customers normally, because we have to take all this time to create drawings and go through different sets until we get something that we wanna show the customer. Then we can show it to the customer and make changes and all that, and all that takes time and that's what we charge on the basis of when I said, you're looking at it all wrong. You get a cad system like what we're providing. You charge exactly what you charged before, but now you're charging for your expertise. So instead of taking months to do drawings, you do it in a week or two weeks or whatever you bring the customer in, you show them your full design of the building on your computer. You can even do three dimensional walkthroughs and flythroughs and so on and so on, even walking somebody into a building in a simulation way. They can look out a window and see what people would see if they looked out that window in the real building. They can do all of that and they can tell you what they want changed to give them the vision and the building that they want. You can then easily over a week or two make those changes and you suddenly have a job that the customer likes. You're charging for your expertise, not your time. You don't change your price, you just are changing what you're charging for. And it's the same thing here. I think that manual programmers ought to use accessibility to do all that it can, and then they can do the rest and use tools like access flow to help them figure out what to do the rest really means. But the system does work. It has worked. It's improved a lot. And we do have people who say it doesn't work. It doesn't, artificial intelligence can never do it. That's just not what we're seeing. And for the most part, when people identify something that they say doesn't work, if we can replicate it, it'll get fixed. If we can't replicate it, then we'll tell them or we'll try to figure out what they're seeing that we're not. But the reality is it does work, and it works very effectively.

Yeah, and so you've hit on, well, a couple of things that I, as an accessibility consultant, work with businesses on. And right, 22% of the population has some form of a disability. And, you know, I do entire webinars talking to businesses all the time on the fact that accessibility is good for business, because otherwise you're not including that portion of the population. And in Canada, we even quote that it's up to 40% of the population over the age of 65 aging. And with an aging population, that number is just continuing to grow. So you're right, persons with disabilities and whether it be, whether your restaurant was accessible or your website was accessible, they're very loyal. So not only are they loyal, what I call their spirit influence is also very loyal as well. So, it gives them a competitive advantage to be accessible, not just from the standpoint of the built environment, but also to be accessible online. And, you know, I truly believe that it sends the message that we need to do a better job of getting through to businesses. So in Ontario, Canada where we are, we have the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities, what we call the AODA, and it has a mandate that all websites will be accessible by 2025. And it's now 2024. And so with 97% of websites not being accessible, I think we've got a long way to go, which is why technology such as excessively are tools that give the business the ability to enhance accessibility on their website. And as you said, for a fairly reasonable subscription fee per year, they're opening themselves up to that market that they have previously not been able to capture if their website was not accessible. Right? So in your, you know, in your experience dealing with websites as a blind person, when you go to somebody's website that's not accessible, then you're not able to learn the information. You're not able to do all of its comparison shopping, for example. And so that business is now just off your list

If the website isn't accessible. And again, you know, sometimes people have accidentally done enough that I can use the website, but you're right, a fully inclusive website is always gonna get my loyalty over something that's not.

Yeah, exactly. And that's, you know, a great point to make sure that people understand that it's not just accessible. Accessible business is not just do you have a ramp or do you have an automatic door opener. It's, you know, all of the facets of your business are accessible. You know, I do a lot of work with the physical accessibility of businesses and the fact that they need to be compliant with legislation. But yeah, we touch on all of the assets of the business that need to be accessible, including their website. Not only from the standpoint it needs to be accessible so that they're in compliance with current legislation, but also so that they're open and inclusive to, as you said, that 22% of the population that has a disability and requires web accessibility in order to be able to access the good services and information that's online. So I think we, you know, we've talked about the importance of web accessibility. Any other thoughts that you've got on AccessiBe and accessible websites?

AccessiBe started, I think, in 2018 and it's a growing company and it's an evolving company and it has made a significant amount of advances in contributing to making websites more inclusive and more usable. And it will continue to do that. And you know that you're becoming an affiliate and you're going to be using accessibility to help and what you do, which is really cool. I think that, as I said, there are some people who are our naysayers in terms of all of this. They're using the same arguments in the same information that they used three years ago when I joined, but it doesn't really work. And reality is it does really work. It doesn't necessarily solve the whole problem. But I can tell you that I have seen websites created by manual programmers, manual coders that don't work, that supposedly had the expertise of accessibility, didn't define menus, didn't do other kinds of things that they should have done. And the customers spent hundreds of thousands of dollars and still didn't get what needed to be done. And AccessiBe actually came in and remedied some of it. I don't know what it did at all. But the reality is that anyone who really is thinking seriously about being involved in this whole world of web inclusion and accessibility should use all the tools that they have available. And don't say one works, the other one doesn't because there is so much evidence that the kinds of things that AccessiBe does actually work and it knows AccessiBe and the developers know what it can do and can't do. They have a vision for how it will improve over time, and that's great. But we know what it does and what it doesn't do. But the reality is it does a lot more than most everyone thinks it can. And even the stuff that doesn't work well, it tries, but it can identify that so that you can fix it. And that's really what, again, Access Flow is all about. AccessiBe is a company that wants to make websites inclusive and is working to do that. Does it do everything for everyone? No, AccessiBe doesn't, for example, create audio descriptions for videos on websites. That's a technology that no one has totally figured out yet other than doing it manually. Some people are working on AI ways to do it and that will be something that comes along. There are other issues regarding videos and other kinds of things that need to be done. But the reality is don't knock what is being done to try to make the website and the web world more inclusive than it otherwise would be. And that's what accessibility really brings to the party.

And so I'm really excited about a potential and all the things that are coming along with it and people like you who are helping the process along and helping to make people aware of what this product really can do and what it does do by helping to make websites more available and inclusive than they have been in the past. And again, the real reason for doing it is because it's the right thing to do. You wanna really get the business and that's what it's all about exactly.

And so, yeah, you did hit the nail on the accessibility solutions. I mean, our business description is that we are a consulting firm that aids businesses and organizations to remedy barriers for people with disabilities. And so whatever that looks like, whatever that barrier looks like we're not, we're not webcoders, and so we wouldn't pretend that we could ourselves make a business website accessible, which is why we have become an affiliate of AccessiBe. So that's a solution, so that's a solution that we're able to provide to our clients in order to make their website accessible, which is again, good for business, but it also makes their website compliant with legislation that's in place that requires their website to be accessible.

So another thing that we're really concerned about doing is educating people, customers, that is, people who are putting up or who have put up or who wanna put up websites, they need to understand about all this and they really need to get a working knowledge of what accessibility is and why it's important. So one of the things that we're doing is to work to help educate people and teach them more about it. We understand that they may not be coders. They need to understand the philosophy, they need to understand the law, they need to understand the reasons behind it, and they need to understand the technology enough so they can make good choices on making sure that they make the websites that they have accessible

Exactly. And as you said, it doesn't matter whether it's web accessibility or someone that's trying to do some physical accessibility. Not always is it exactly perfect, but in most cases, the fact that they've done something certainly beats doing nothing at all. And on that note, I want to thank you for joining us. We are going to have to get in touch with Michael. His website is MichaelHingson.com. We'll have his contact information in the show notes. And if you are interested in finding out more about accessible websites and accessibility, then you can reach out to us here at Accessibility Solutions and we'll be able to hook you up with accessibility and, and improve accessibility on your website.

One of the things I would say is they reach out to you or even if they go visit the AccessiBe website, they can do a complete audit of their website. There is something on the website called Access Scan. If you go into it and give the system your website address, it will do an audit and you'll see exactly what is or is not accessible, which I think for most people will be a real eye opener. But it will also then give you the knowledge that you need to understand why it's important to make your website more usable and just can certainly help people with that as well.

Yeah. And I also know some of the other technologies that we've had people on the website are story on the podcast is people that do require accessible websites. If you're trying to deal with a business and their website is not accessible, we encourage you to reach out and let that business know that their website is not accessible. Because a lot of times they don't know what they don't know and they don't know the importance of the website being accessible and the fact that legally they are required to be, their websites need to meet accessibility compliant requirements.

So one, one of the things that has happened here in this country is the department of justice has now made it very clear that under the Americans with disabilities the internet is a place of business. And so websites do need to be accessible. And I would say, you know, that's a law, it's there but do it because it makes sense to do. Whether there's a law or not, you should do it.

Exactly. It's the right thing. And yeah, we find the same. I mean, we are lagging way behind in Canada with our Accessible Canada Act. I mean, the American Disabilities Act method has been around since 1992. We're just getting standards developed for the Accessible Canada Act which was just passed actually in 2019. I can tell you as a traveler when I go to the United States, you can tell that the legislation has been around for a lot longer in the States and has been in Canada. But regardless, as you said, it's accessible, accessibility is good for business and it is also the right thing to do and it gives you a competitive advantage. And, you know, that's kind of the, you know speaking from somebody that talks to businesses all the time, that's what we're trying to get across that it really can improve your bottom line. Yep, exactly. Okay, all right, Michael, well, thanks for joining us and this episode of the Accessibility Solutions podcast, and to our listeners until the next episode, thanks for tuning in and cheers!

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