E174. Why 30% of Your Potential Customers Can't Use Your Website

Hi and welcome to a brand new episode of Tech Your Business. Today we'll talk about a topic that we've mentioned if I remember about twice in the podcast, which is accessibility. Accessibility is something a lot of us when we are building our businesses, building our web platforms and things like that. It's something we don't really pay attention to, but it's very important, especially for ranking, especially for giving access to more people.

to more people to use your platforms, your business premises and things like that. So today to talk about that topic with us and other things in that field, we'll be Warren Wilansky all the way from Montreal in Canada. So welcome, Warren. Thank you.

Thank you, Peter. I'm happy to be here. Thank you so much. So before we go into the gist for the day, can you just tell us your journey from founding Plank and all you've been doing up to this point?

For sure. I mean, it's been a long time, so I don't know how much I can get into it. But I started Plank in 1998, and we focus almost exclusively on building websites, arts and cultural organizations mainly, but we have, we've over the years had many different kinds of clients. Okay.

So now we, I was looking at the, doing some research, so that you talk about accessibility and ethical web design so what drew you to focus on those things accessibility ethical web design against um chasing other trends like other agencies well the interesting thing is you know we still take real pride in producing really large well-designed websites from a ui and ux perspective but my feeling is that's not enough in other words it's almost like if we're doing that that's great but what we want to be doing is that much more we want to be taking into account things like accessibility privacy security making sure that we're developing web web projects and and websites that really exceed people's expectations and really include as many people as possible okay so now i think i've mentioned the term accessibility and i'm probably assuming that people understand it but for those who don't really understand what accessibility is or might be unfamiliar.

What do, when we see accessibility, web accessibility, what exactly do we mean by that and who benefits from it? Well, if we take a step back, let's say if we think of accessibility and you think about it from a building perspective, let's say you know you want to walk into a building, it's easy if you have both your feet and you can get up and walk through a door yourself, but there are other people who might be in a wheelchair or might have trouble walking you want to make sure that you create a situation where they can easily get into a building um when it comes to a website it's the same kind of principle in other words the average person who has a great computer good internet connection sitting in front of them um and you know has full vision can see um they can experience the web in the way that let's say you know if a traditional website is built but if let's say somebody's visually impaired um they can't see a website in a traditional way um so they might have to have it read to them so we want to make sure that we build websites so that um somebody who let's say with a screen reader can have a great experience with the website itself we want to take into account things that people might have issues with you know with you know sensitivity to motion so we want to make sure that we create websites so that if there is any kind of animation or motion that people can turn that off we want to make sure that that we create web experiences that include as many people as possible so more people can can get the information that a client of ours or an organization we're working with can offer to the general public okay so now when you look at um websites especially the general most business websites we have out there what are the I know you mentioned that most, especially for people who can't see, they need screen readers to read what's on the website.

So for most of the websites out there, what are the common barriers to accessibility, the most common ones that you see on these business websites generally? I mean, the most common barriers is people not taking into account somebody's experience. So for example, very basic one, color contrast. In other words, if somebody has, let's say, if not full, let's say have just some visual impairments and the text contrast is not high, they might not be able to experience the website in a proper way.

Somebody could even be colorblind. And being colorblind, if there's not a high contrast, they might, you know, they might lose the visual experience itself to the website. So things like that, it's just, you know, the subtlety of taking that into account. and the key thing is also website accessibility shouldn't be an afterthought in other words when you finish designing a site you stop and go oh maybe now i'll consider accessibility if you're doing that then it becomes a difficult thing to do versus if you're considering it from the moment that you start considering designing building developing a website it then becomes part of the process so then it becomes not something tacked on at the end okay so now i think one one thing a a lot of business owners think about is when building their websites, they feel that the amount of users who need these accessibility accommodations on their websites are not as much us.

So can you maybe give us an idea of the market size of users who actually benefit from these accessibility tweaks on websites? You know, it's funny, I don't have the number in front of me, but I remember we did a presentation a few months ago. And if you take into account all different aspects of accessibility, in other words, there's a range of different people's different issues. I think the number was something of 20 to 30% of all website users.

So it isn't 1% or 2%. It's more like 20 to 30% of people have some issue. I mean, if I take myself, for example, I'm in my fifties and as a result, my eyesight is not what it was when I was in my twenties. So when I was in my twenties, I used to design websites, not thinking about people like myself now that had 9.

5, 8.5, which is fine if your eyesight's fantastic, but if it isn't, then you have to, you know, you would have to then actively go in and change the font size so that the website becomes more usable. So that's not a disability. That basically just accessing making the sites more thoughtful about anybody that could be coming to use it Okay So now one reason why a lot of business owners have accessibility included on their websites especially in the United States, is because of legal requirements like the Americans with Disabilities Act, ADA, and things like that.

But apart from those legal requirements, and what other things do you think should motivate business owners to really care about having their websites accessible let's say they are not covered by this ada or something i mean it's so it's an interesting challenge because let's say hypothetically if we're building a website for an organization here in canada or north america we're mainly thinking about serving a north american audience so as a result you know we want to take into account local laws but let's say hypothetically you're a museum and a museum might serve a worldwide experience in other words somebody might not come to your museum physically here but somebody let's say where you are might visit it and we want to make sure that everybody can can can have a similar experience so given we're talking number of 20 or 30 percent we're not doing it just because we legally are obliged we're doing it because it serves more people and if we want to have an experience where we want to increase let's say if it's a museum we want to increase the image of the museum worldwide so it becomes more well known and have a greater reputation then it's to our benefit to make sure that people from anywhere in the world can come and experience it in a in a proper way um and i'm not even sure so i'm not sure like where you are in other parts of the world what are the accessibility expectations okay so now for um clients who you've built websites for including these accessibility requirements and co-in the websites.

Have you seen, do you have any story of anyone who has seen maybe business improvements or maybe surprising stories because they had those features on their websites? I mean, I would say, you know, it could be direct or indirect but we've we've had clients who've come to us and and and shown us that let's say their donations have gone up on a redesign by 100 or 200 now is that directly as a result of accessibility no but what we're doing is we're creating a platform that it's it's more open to more people and as a result it's having business impacts um for an forum for a performing arts organization i think also it ends up being really much more in line with the expectations in other words working with an arts organization they want to have an accessible experience in person and online so it goes with the values of their organization itself in other words if an organization you know we work with a theater here locally and they just recently put in a ramp so that people can now more easily get into their theater that an accessible website is is in line with their values okay so now i think going with the conversation so far a lot of business owners might say, okay, we have building a website, then we have building a website with accessibility features.

And a lot of them will feel, okay, having a website with those features included might be some magnitude of costs higher than just building a website. So can you maybe address that for us? Is it something far more expensive or just slightly more or the same? About the same or slightly more, but not in, not a, not a recognizable amount of money.

In other words, like I mentioned before, if we're considering accessibility from the moment we start on a website, it's not a service that's tacked on afterwards. In other words, if my design team is designing from, from the get go with the intention of a high, let's say contrast between the text and imagery behind it, then that's built into the process when we're actually developing the site versus if we went ahead did it then did accessibility tests and then said oh no now we have to go back to the drawing board because we didn't think of accessibility from the get-go that's where things can get more expensive but i mean if we take into account that we take into account even let's say bandwidth in other words if somebody has is in let's say a rural part of the world where their bandwidth is let's say a satellite connection.

We need to also take into account making sure that the website is well optimized so that then it can be delivered on a lower speed connection as well. So that's another level of accessibility, which is making sure that a website is accessible from that perspective by being low bandwidth and more available to people throughout the world. Okay. So I think from what you say, if you consider accessibility from the planning stage before writing a line of code or drawing anything, then it's cost about the same thing or maybe just a bit slightly more than when you don't consider it.

And then you end up having a lot more benefits than you would have had if you didn't do that. Yeah, that sounds about right. I mean, that's my perspective on it. And that's really the reality, which is if you're taking into account something like that, think of it again, I come back to the idea of like always wanting to think of a website almost as like a building or a bit of like a construction project, which is if, let's say you consider when building, let's say, a house that the person who's moving into the house is in a wheelchair and you build the ramp into the house when you're building it, it substantially doesn't affect the cost of actually building the house as if you had to then retrofit it and add in that feature afterwards.

Okay. So I think that's actually a good illustration that makes it much clearer for everyone. Yes, so you created something that's called the Ethical Web Collective Framework. So, can you tell us what this is about and what led you to develop this approach?

So, I'll take you back to the beginning of it. A couple of years ago, I was thinking about the kind of things that we do and we've been doing with websites we've built for years. And we've taken into account all the different elements that are already a part of this collective that I mentioned, that I've mentioned on our website and you reference. And we started calling it our ethical web framework.

And at first, the word ethics seems like a very, very heavy word to be imposing on a project But I comfortable with it because what we saying then is we have our ethics that matter to us And everybody ethics could be different but we wanted to identify the things that matter to us on top of building a beautiful website And those are things like accessibility, best practices, security, privacy, and making sure that we take into account the environmental impact of the websites that we create.

And all of those things together are what we call our framework. Now, the word collective is the layer in which we put on top of this framework because as a collective, we want other people joining in our collective. We would love for other people to kind of reach out to us and try to live up to the same standards and work together on developing and advancing those standards. So at this point, the majority of people that are part of our collective is, I would describe ourselves and our clients, but we really want to make it into a wider movement.

Okay, so now I think researching on the framework, I saw it has different parts such as accessibility and inclusion, like you mentioned, privacy and security, responsible development and environmental impact. So we'll just go through them one by one. I think we've gone through accessibility and inclusion already. So let's go to the second one, which is privacy and security.

So how does this connect to accessibility and what changes or improvements can businesses make to implement this on their business websites? So, you know, again, we could come at this from the legal perspective of, let's say, in Europe, the GDPR, where there are certain expected standards of how an organization or company manages the data they collect. So with that, it is collect only the data that you need, give any individual whose data is collected the ability to delete that data, and have a clear privacy policy explaining to people exactly how you're using that data.

So that for us is important, but there's the legal requirement of it. But more importantly than the legal requirement for us, it's a matter of being clear and creating a trustful relationship between the company and their customers and users. In other words, if I am going to offer my information in exchange for something, if it's a product that I buy from a company, or if it's to join their mailing list, or if it's through the use of Google Analytics, so somebody can understand my behavior on their website, that's a kind of relationship that's being created and if a company is just hoovering up data and then using it in some malicious way or not or storing it and not doing anything with it other than just to keep it for you know for their own reasons then that's almost going to create a relationship not built on trust so we believe and we believe that we want to create a relationship so that our clients our clients customers feel like they have a trustful relationship with them.

Okay so I think the next point the next 10 parts of the framework is responsible development so concerning that what practices should businesses look out for from their web developers or their agencies they work with under this part of responsible development? Yeah by taking into account modern expectations for coding and basically doing the highest quality secure development that we can we're ensuring that you know we can we can deliver experiences that are modern for a modern web browser but more importantly that we can we can help ensure now of course no website is without all bugs or no website is fully secure but we try to develop websites that are as secure as possible so that a client can then feel confident that they're not going to get hacked because of the website that the website is going to is going to be developed in a way so that it is secure so that when the information shared with the client with a customer with the owner of the website that they can be confident that that website data is not going to be stolen by somebody else so by doing that keeping a website up to date keeping security patches look similar to a computer if you have your own computer it's to your benefit to continuously patch it and make sure that all the most recent updates are in place so that you don't get a virus so that you don't get access and there is no malware on your site or computer yeah so there's something you mentioned them environmental impacts which i was actually surprised to see in the framework because it's one thing we don't really associate when we talk about um websites um environmental impact environmental concerns.

So what should businesses know about this environmental impact as part of this framework? Yeah, some people don't think about it because you know you imagine that what is the environmental impact? Well, I have my computer on, I'm just looking at the screen, I'm loading a website, what's the environmental impact of that? I mean there is, somebody would understand that you're using a certain amount of electricity, so you are using that.

But what people don't take into account is the electricity being used to deliver that website. that website is sitting on a computer somewhere in the world and you are then asking your web browser to connect to that computer and transfer data so you might figure that a few images and a few bits of text don't have an environmental impact but if let's say you're an organization that is high trafficked and let's say there are now hundreds of thousands of people or millions of people accessing your website you suddenly multiply each of those images delivered by a million and suddenly you are now sending out and having an environmental impact substantially higher than you can imagine.

Now, if you take into account AI, I think the statistic is for every general Google search you do, if you do a same request with an AI, it has five times the environmental impact and energy usage as a traditional web search. So we're all getting to rely more and more on AI tools. And as a result, we're having an even bigger impact. I think I saw a research recently.

I can't remember the exact same about, I think you see an AI prompt or something using nine liters of water to cool the data centers. And that's, I think that relates here to these two. So for business owners listening to this episode and they maybe have their website already and they want to improve on it this week, tomorrow. So what are three easy and low cost changes that they can implement immediately to improve it Well the easiest one for our clients which I know might not seem like a big deal but can have a big impact.

In other words, let's say when we build websites, we usually will give our clients what's called a content management system. So what that is, is an administration system running behind the website so that they can update content, add images, make changes, add pages in a way so that they don't have to involve us on a day-to-day basis. Now with that, that means they have the power to make those changes. So a lot of times people don't think when they're uploading an image, they don't think to optimize that image before they upload it.

If let's say you upload a four meg humongous image that doesn't even need to be that big because it's displaying on a browser, you suddenly every time you are serving up a four 4 meg image. All you have to do is optimize it, bring it down to 500k, 100k, and then as a result, you are then improving your website performance substantially and having an environmental impact. That's one. Two is if your web development team takes into account proper, you know, responsible coding, you know, coding standards, then they will optimize the website so that it will load substantially quicker.

That's another key way to do that. And another one would be, you know, if we're taking into account proper principles for accessibility, then the website should be able to load substantially faster as well. So those are some initial ones, but I think a lot of it is just having a consideration so that we're not doing that. Another big one is also video.

On top of images, video is a big bandwidth suck. So the more or you can optimize those, or you have smaller clips so that people only load the videos they want. That's another way to kind of optimize the experience for environmental impact. Yes, so optimize your images, optimize your videos, optimize your code, so you are less hard on the environment and your websites will also load them faster, which is good for SEO, good for user experience and everything else.

So one thing business owners do when maintaining their website, they probably make a few updates, check for mistakes, check for different things. But we are talking about accessibility. And I realized that a lot of business owners don't test for accessibility when carrying out website maintenance. So how would you suggest that businesses integrates testing for accessibility regularly when Carina's website maintenance?

Now, of course, this is very self-serving because I run a digital website design agency. My first thought would be have a great partner to work with you. We have what we call retainers. In other words, let's say a website launches, we like to be there and available for our clients on a regular basis to be able to maintain and then be a partner in their website development.

So even if it's only a few hours a month, we can be there to basically almost act as a backup to make sure that we're constantly checking those things but for example if let's say you don't and you are trying to maintain a website yourself there's a service through google called lighthouse um and it's a it it's basically a way to to report on a lot of the things that we mentioned within our ethical web framework if you run a lighthouse report it will report for you the the the rating for each of those different things from accessibility, best practices, you know, responsiveness, all those things, it'll give you an actual percentage.

And if you if you're not meeting those things, it'll give you a list of things that you can actually fix and go in and do that yourself. You can type into Google, if you type in a search for Google and Lighthouse, Lighthouse, you will pull that up. But actually, if you're working in Chrome, you can right click on your website itself and you will see a little option for running a Lighthouse report and getting those accessibility standards. So either get a partner that can handle all this for you so you don't leave your business and start working on the website or check Google Lighthouse and get reports and find out what you have to fix concerning accessibility and things like that.

So for business owners who want to learn more about accessibility and the topics we've talked about, what tools, what resources would you recommend for them? Well, amazingly, Google Lighthouse is one of them. I mean, truthfully, we're at a point now that, you know, I would suggest that people just search online and search for the words accessibility, you know, optimization. How do I optimize my website?

What are the best practices? If you put in very, very simple Google searches like that, searches like that, you will find the resources you need to be able to educate yourself on it. There's also an organization called W3C and they put out the standards for accessibility. If you search for that or you go to their organization's website, they will explain out what accessibility is and what all the different guidelines for it are.

All right. So now for listeners who probably have listened to this conversation or watched this conversation so far and they want to continue the conversation or they want to connect with you, learn more from you or probably work with you in the accessibility space what's the best way they can reach you uh our website is the best place um and i encourage people to go there the website is plank p-l-a-n-k dot c-o just c-o not dot com um and reach out come to talk to us there i'm always willing to have a discussion about this topic i'm personally excited about it and always willing to to just have a conversation about it and give our best advice or take a look at a website and give people the tips of what are the five or ten things that they can do now to optimize their website.

All right, so plank, P-L-A-N-K.co, that will be in the show notes that will be on the screen once this episode goes live. So thank you so much, Warring, for coming on Take Your Business today. Thank you, Peter.

Good to chat with you. So, listeners, I hope you learned something about ethical web design, the environmental impact of your website, accessibility, and all we talked about today. So share this with anyone who this would help. Until next week when we're back to a brand new episode of this podcast, don't forget to keep taking your business.

Bye for now.