Episode #107: Navigating the European Accessibility Act with Vially.io

Speaker A: Welcome to the Milk Bottle E Commerce show, brought to you by Milk Bottle Labs, one of the world's top rated accredited Shopify experts. The Irish based Milk Bottle Labs team Upgrade, migrate, manage and advise some of the highest performing Shopify stores worldwide. Founder Keith Matthews interviews merchants, developers, fellow agency owners and Shopify folk to share as many Shopify tips and tricks as possible. If you're planning on upgrading to Shopify 2.0 or migrating over to Shopify, reach out. Milk Bottle will help. Now over to Keith.

Speaker B: Hey folks, welcome back to the Milk Bottle E Commerce show for episode 107. Today we are talking about something that's going to affect every digital business in Europe. On June 28, the European Accessibility act kicks in. And from that date, digital providers must have official accessibility statements and certification. And it's not just about ticking boxes. It's also about making sure that everybody that is running a website or a digital product has the ability to give everybody access to that product. So what is digital accessibility and what do we need to do before or after June 28th? I'm joined today by Andrew Power from Faiali IO, who helps businesses create accessible digital experiences. And Andrew has been working with companies in this space for very many years. So, Andrew, welcome. How are you?

Speaker C: Good, Great. It's lovely to be here and thanks for having me. Good.

Speaker B: Is it correct or incorrect for me to compare this kind of thing to GDPR back in April 2018? Is it the same scale or is it even larger? What do you think?

Speaker C: I think the scale is similar, yes. And I think it's been compared to gdpr, the GDPR of accessibility. It's the first time that the EU has implemented into the private sector the kind of, you know, rigorous requirements around digital accessibility and inclusion that have already existed for the public sector and, you know, just the scope of the number of individuals that it will impact in a positive way. If we can get it to work properly and companies and organizations come along and start to do the right things around building accessibility into their apps and their websites and so on, then definitely we'll have that scale of impact of GDPR just on the sheer number of people whose lives it will impact, hopefully in a positive way, in the same way that GDPR did. It gave us more control over our privacy. This hopefully will give people, uh, living with disabilities more freedom and control over their own lives, be it working, you know, going and looking at bank statements and financial services, to purchasing insurance products, to, you know, purchasing physical products, uh, through E commerce websites. As I know, a lot of milk Bottles listeners here would be interested in that. So it's a pretty broad act and it covers a lot of different industries and currently it is very consumer focused. So. So it is about the individual at the end point, I think. So similar to GDPR in that way. Yes.

Speaker B: So when we talk about, obviously this podcast is focused on E commerce, but there's plenty of e commerce owners will, you know, run an app and run other digital products. So separate to e commerce, what's the, or what are the digital products that people should be aware of that come in under this app?

Speaker C: So apps are the main one and I mean I think they've largely in a lot of cases replaced websites over a number of years. I mean I can't remember the last time I logged into my banking on my laptop. You know what I mean? It's just on my phone and I think most people like that and the younger generations are only moving more towards that kind of mobile side of it. So apps are hugely important from a usability perspective, but it covers a wide, wide range of stuff. So the European Accessibility act is not solely focused on digital accessibility. It also, the act itself covers physical accessibility. But if we think about it in the sphere of the digital element, kind of meeting the physical or the built environment, things that also are being considered or looked at are things like ATMs, point of sale terminals, those infernal self service checkouts that are exist in every retail environment. Um, so you know, if you put, particularly if you're an E commerce organization and you, you operate an app and a website, you know, they're both covered by the act, but there are similar guidelines, uh, that can help you make both of those more accessible and hopefully without a huge amount of effort. You can see a lot of uptick there. And apps are an interesting one as well. Mobile phones particularly iPhones are very favored by people. Take sitegloss for example because of the built in accessibility that's on them. So from, you know, from an E commerce perspective, your apps, your websites. But yes, it will also touch on things in other realms like kiosks and ticketing machines and self service check ins and airports and that sort of thing as well.

Speaker B: Okay, so it kicks off on June 28th. So if I run a busy e commerce store for me to operate within the legislation after 28 June, my understanding is, is that the first kind of action is, is to chat to an accredited professional, uh, who can assess the E commerce store. So is that what Vialli do, Andrew?

Speaker C: Broadly speaking, yeah. So you know, from the 28th of June, the act comes into force. The act itself is the, is the regulatory or legislative piece of it. Within that there are standards and guidelines and a framework that can help people who run a website or an app in a kind of more technical way or you know, operational way of changing how the website is constructed, changing how people interact with us. Different. I can touch on a few different kind of elements of that. But the main set of guidelines that are being used are something called the web content accessibility guidelines. And that is how you will assess your website or app digital product and how you can ensure that it's being, you know, that uh, it's built in an inclusive way that you make changes to make it more inclusive, to make it digitally accessible so that anyone can use it, anyone can access your website and anybody can buy the products or services that you have on that website. Which crucially is I suppose the whole point of running an E commerce business, isn't it that you want people to be able to come along and buy. And the last census in Ireland indicated that about 20% of people in Ireland have some sort of disability. So that's a fairly significant customer cohort there. And there is also clear evidence that you know, cart abandonment rates are lower and time on a web spent on a website is higher for websites that are digitally accessible because it just generally improves user experience. The first port of call if you don't know what to do is to get a website audit. And that is yeah, uh, Vialli will provide combination of things. We have an automated platform that you can use to automatically scan websites and give you feedback on that. We augment that with manual auditing where individuals either with disabilities or without, but who are trained in accessibility. We'll work through that website and deliver a report for you that can be shared with your developer. If you do it in house. We then support the kind of the work to think about how do you remediate the website. And we also provide you know, kind of in depth consultancy training. We literally just today launched our uh, our self directed learning, uh, accessibility training platform as well, which is great. So you know there's multiple things we do but, but really for the first protocol for somebody I suppose is find out where you are. Ah as is and then you know the starting point and you can start to address the challenges.

Speaker B: I suppose I'd state the obvious like for, for the average E commerce store, like there's over 4 million stores on Shopify right now. Okay. So a lot of the listeners here will be Shopify users. So for the average E commerce store, are we talking about things like pop ups getting in the way? Are we talking about font sizes? Are we talking about colors? In the old days there was actually some, some websites actually had a separate link to larger font and to different colors to allow the store to be accessible to everybody. Most people now are operating off a single portal or multiple portals with the same design. So are we talking about simple little things like that or is it more complex?

Speaker C: It can get more complex. Those are absolutely things to consider. Color contrast ratio. So if you have low vision, it's a person with low vision or somebody who's colorblind, there are specific ratios that conform, um, to the WCAG guidelines that will help you be compliant with the eaa. Simple things like alternative text on an image. So if you think about an E commerce website, and Perhaps you're selling TVs, right? And every television should, you know, there's an image of the television for a fully sighted person. You can just look at that, make an assessment of what that television looks like. For somebody with sight loss, they may be using an assistive technology like a screen reader, and if they're using that screen reader, it can catch that alternative text and it should be a good description of what that image is. Not overly complicated, but at least give them a sense of what that device does. Right. Or what it, you know, what it looks like, what it feels like.

Speaker B: So you're referring, Andrew, there to the alt text over the images, which is a setting within. So for Shopify, you can very quickly add alternative text over the image. So what you're saying is that somebody with possibly a, uh, visual disability is going to use the mouse to roll over the image if they can't see the image properly to read the alt text. So it's more important than ever now.

Speaker C: Exactly, Absolutely, yeah. Uh, and again it just that that will help you to achieve compliance and it'll give a better user experience for individuals with eyegloss. And then it does get, you know, it can get quite complex. And I suppose Shopify is one thing, assuming there are sort of templated designs there. But if the DOM order of a website isn't set up effectively, if you take somebody who may have mobility issues and can't use a mouse and they have to use a keyboard, uh, to tab through a website, the DOM or the tabbing order isn't set up correctly, it'll just fly around all over the place or skip about. A very good example of that might be if you're trying to fill in A form, you know, say you're getting your shipping information filled in and it skips from first name to first line of address and back up to air code or something like that. Incredibly frustrating and difficult experience for somebody then to try and fill that out. They might just give up and walk away. So I think, you know, again it's those kind of more in depth things as well. And there are 88 success criteria in the WCAG guidelines that can help you understand what makes a website accessible. What elements should you be considering? But there's really simple stuff that you can capture quickly and then there is stuff that gets more complex and you know, that could be, you know, stuff that requires code changes to the website or it could be something that could be managed by a content or you know, ah, a front end marketing team or something like that.

Speaker B: But Andy, your comment there about the tabs, the doms, the setup, is that browser based? Like is that good, is that Chrome that's doing that or is it the website that's controlling that?

Speaker C: It's the website that controls that. So you know, you can also, if it's set up effectively to work with zoom text and stuff like that. You mentioned that it could, could go over to a different site. Particularly in the last couple of years there were things called overlays that came in and it's something that your listeners should be very careful of. There's a lot of companies that come along and say put our little widget on your website, you flick a switch and it makes it accessible. Unfortunately the reality is that it doesn't. The European Commission have come out and said that overlays are not effective in uh, delivering accessibility or inclusion for people and they won't help you conform to the EAA European Accessibility Act. And there are actually a couple of cases where there's a class action lawsuits against these guys in the US for false advertising. You know, because uh, people have been, you know, they claim that they big claims about making it accessible. Unfortunately there isn't really an easy fix. You know there are things that you can do to help by using, you know, automation, scale it a little bit. But it is about getting the size of the app really usable, really functional and once you've got it there it's easier to keep it there as well. So it's, and then you're kind of building that understanding within development, you know, within your devs or in your UX or UI or your agency, just getting them to understand, you know, what makes an accessible app or website and then they learn and uh, it just gets better all the time.

Speaker B: Yeah. So ultimately agencies will build the regulation into their development process and they're kind of their build process. When GDPR went live back in 2018, there was big fines being waved around and a lot of people were actually quite frightened of the potential consequences. And as it turned out, they just didn't have the resources, I suppose to go after the, you know, the small guy. I'm not suggesting that that's going to happen this time. I won't comment on the plans of the legislators. But there is fines associated with this legislation, isn't there?

Speaker C: Yeah. So in Ireland the fine is up to 60,000 Euro. There's mention of jail time. I think there would have to a staggering amount of negligence at play before anything like that happens. But I think they put that into the legislation as well. I think the biggest thing that's being called out and we've, you know, obviously we've done a lot of work on this understanding it legislatively. Our head of accessibility sits on a standards committee at EU level. Um, and so we've had those interactions with the, with the regulators and the legislators. It's, it's the ability for an individual to take litigation against company in Europe now through the mechanisms. The EAA that I think is called out as the biggest, uh, challenge. You know, if we're talking about kind of the big financial institutions that we work with, that's the thing that they see as the most concerning outside of reputational risk. I think they want to do the right thing and they look at it that way. But you know, a person can now come along and take you through, you know, civil court if you're inaccessible and you failed to provide alternatives to support them that way. So I think the fines are part of it. But I think that is a more concerning piece. And you know, there's probably quite a few disgruntled individuals out there who's uh, struggled with services over the years that, you know, may take advantage of this. So I think that's probably the thing to watch out for.

Speaker B: Isn't that what's happening in the, in the states, in the state of California, isn't it where individuals are scanning sites, finding the ones that are not within the legislation over there and they're sending random letters to random E commerce business owners?

Speaker C: Yeah, yeah. And look, I think the US are a litigious bunch by nature in a way that perhaps Europeans aren't, but yes, absolutely. I mean there's something like 17,000 lawsuits over the last decade in the US against different organizations. Some of them are huge. Delta Airlines just got done $55 million fine. Domino's Pizza, uh, got raked over the coals for millions. Beyonce was sued over in the US as well by individuals for inaccessible ticket sales website. So I think that is the concern less about the regulatory piece. But I think it's interesting because the regulation now previously in Ireland particularly had all fallen to the National Disability Authority who you know, were regulating the public sector organizations like charities, for example, things like that. And yes, limited resources, but we're looking at that being broken out across comrade, the Irish Aviation Authority, the Central bank of England, you know, the consumer protection. So the resources are now going to be spread across a lot of different, you know, different regulators who will have a probably a more limited set of organizations that they need to deal with. So it's potentially more people will see them knocking on their door than they had previously. You know.

Speaker B: So is there a stamp of approval? So let's say shopify user listen to this podcast in, you know, in any anywhere in Europe would go to a registered practitioner like yourselves that are qualified to do the audit and to come back with the report. So when the accessibility statement and certification audit, when that goes through and then they could come to somebody like Milk Pocket Labs, we would make the changes and then it will be stamped for approval. A certificate would be uh, approved. Is there a stamp on the bottom on the footer of the website? Like how does anybody let anybody know with accessibility issues that this site is actually compliant within the law?

Speaker C: So there is a requirement within the EAA to have an accessibility statement on your website. And um, you know, that could be a pretty basic document that indicates, you know, look, here's what we're doing. Well, here's where we know there are challenges that we're addressing. And here is the contact information for somebody in our accessibility team or somebody that you can speak to if you're having issues and hopefully we can provide alternatives. Uh, Vialli will provide that for an organization. If we've done an audit for your website based on the information that we found and we give you a Vial seal to look out for things, I mean we're a member of W3C, the World Web. The web content accessibility guidelines were developed by W3C. For 25 years they've independently developed and verified those guidelines. We're also members of the iaap, International association of Accessibility Professionals. And Viale is deeply, uh, connected to Vision Ireland, which is the largest sight loss organization in Ireland as well. So we have the Authenticity and the credibility from the community, those organizations to say, look, yes, you're ticking the boxes from compliance, from a regulatory perspective, you're following the guidelines of the eaa, but we very, very much take that person centered, inclusive approach. Does it actually work at the end of the day? So if person who has sight loss or hearing loss, whatever it might be, goes to your website or your app, will it work for them? Does it function for them? And so yes, you can get that accessibility statement. Uh, there's a legal requirement to update it every three years, but it's a good thing to keep on top of and just, you know, start to build accessibly, start to consider accessibility every time you make a release or make a change. Think about it again from a procedural and programmatic perspective, embedded in how you design, develop and how you, how you build. And then, you know, you hopefully will maintain compliance and stay in a strong position all the way along and have, you know, a great website and a great user experience for everyone.

Speaker B: Thanks for the info. Um, it's really important and the number there, the 20% of people that in Ireland alone that have accessibility issues, that's a big chunk of a market. So they should be treated fairly and they should be treated equally. And you know, tech is easy to change. You can make people's lives very, very easy, I'm sure by some simple changes that um, that would obviously come up in the, in the audit. You know, when you look back at gdpr, it was the best thing that ever happened because what are we now, five so you know, seven years later? Actually it's exactly seven years. It was, it was just seven years a few weeks ago. E Commerce business owners are now confident and um, they can operate their businesses knowing well that their email databases are absolutely 100% legit. So, so I'm sure in a few years time everybody will look back at this. You know, their website is 100% accessible and maybe they can access 20%, 20% more of the market.

Speaker C: Yeah. And um, um, have those, you know, that 20% of the market be as happy with the customer experience as anyone else. And you know, you said, um, it must have a positive impact. And we see that every day. You know, we hear stories of people, you know, working with, you know, who are clients of our clients coming along and saying, oh, I can, I can actually just get my bank statement and read it myself now using my screen reader and I don't get my mother to do it anymore and my private information remains private. That's basic fundamental human right to have that privacy. And that's the kind of stuff you're talking about, the ability to go and buy a product or something like that. And maybe it's not something you want somebody else buying for you, you know, who knows? Uh, it's. And it's just freedom to be the same as anyone else. It's really important when you put it like that.

Speaker B: You know, it has a big impact on society, which I'm assuming is exactly why the powers that be brought it in.

Speaker C: Yeah, well, we would hope. I mean, it's taken a long time to get here, but I think it will. And look at, there's a long tail to it as well. I don't think 28 June is going to roll around and everybody will be, well, we're all, everything's perfect now. There's a big journey. But I do think that making that journey, or showing that you're making that journey by having accessibility statements. And even if your website or app isn't perfect, we know from our, uh, being deeply embedded with the community through Vision Ireland, constantly working with them. Look, lots of people who work for Vialley have different kind of life experiences and backgrounds and we leverage that as well. It matters hugely to them that they're able to kind of live their life the same way as anyone else.

Speaker B: Well, Andrew, thanks for the insights and you mentioned some organizations and links there in your conversation, so we'll put those in the show notes. And, uh, thank you very much for your time. It's really important. Although it's a legal change which will result in a tech change, it's really interesting to see that it is actually going to have a massive impact on society.

Speaker C: Fingers crossed.

Speaker B: Okay, listen, thanks for your time.

Speaker C: Thanks, Keith. It was a pleasure.

Speaker A: Thanks for listening. All of our episodes are available on Apple, Spotify, itunes and Google Podcasts. If you're an e commerce professional with an exciting story to tell, reach out to the team on. Hello, uh, milkbottle labs.com until the next time, take.