Digital Accessibility Is Not Optional: How Inclusive Websites Unlock B2B Growth (with Mike Barton)

Linda: Welcome to the B2B Brand 180 Podcast where we don't just talk about growth, we challenge the assumptions behind it. I'm Linda Fanaras and I'm the CEO of Millennium Agency and your host. Today I'm joined by Mike Barton and Mike works with AudioEye. They're a company at the forefront of digital accessibility, helping companies really ensure that everyone, including people with disabilities, can actually use their websites and have great digital experiences. He brings a marketer's lens to a topic most companies barely think about or even talk about. So Mike, it's great to have you here today. Mike: Yeah, I'm excited to be here. Thank you for having me. Linda: Yeah, so let's call this out. Let's get started. So most B2B websites today, they're unintentionally shutting the door on a massive segment of their audience. Especially - it's not that they don't care, it's not that they don't want to invest in digital because they're not really building for accessibility, even though I think roughly maybe 25% of the US population and 16% of the global population has some form of disability. So if your website isn't accessible, you're not just leaving revenue on the table, you're making it impossible for people to do business with you. Your work sits right there at the center of all of this, and I'd really like to dive in and talk a little bit about what you do and also how you help companies fix these digital accessibility gaps. Mike: Before AudioEye, I never worked in the accessibility space, and like you said, as a marketer for those 15 plus years working at Adobe and other companies creating you name the type of content, digital content, video, written, interactive pages, landing pages, et cetera. I sadly not once during any of those times and any of those companies did I say, I wonder if this experience will work for somebody who's using a screen reader who's blind or somebody with a mobility issue who can't use a mouse and has to tab with a keyboard, can they get through our conversion funnel? Again, not because I didn't care or lacked empathy, it just wasn't something that I had thought about or talked about. So that's partly why I love coming on podcasts like yours is to just raise awareness and talk about it. At the end of the day, it is exactly what you said in your intro, which is opening the digital doors so that people can access your site. And so many companies today are focused on the customer experience, right? They're focused on how do we differentiate ourselves through that digital experience, through not just our products and services, which in many ways can kind of be commoditized, it's that experience that can differentiate you, and yet despite that focus, they're still not including in that cohort people with disabilities, which can be a significant portion of traffic that's already coming to their sites. Linda: So what actually woke you up to this problem? I guess it's kind of a critical moment, especially for businesses to pay attention to this topic. So I'm just curious what sort of said, okay, yeah, it's time to really do something about this. Mike: Actually, it was almost accidental. I was at a soccer game with my daughter, came across somebody who I had used to work with at another tech company who had just started working at AudioEye. And so he was telling me about it and similar story for him, right? He's like, totally illuminating, I hadn't thought about this. And immediately it was just like, yes, this makes sense. And that was the same light bulb that really went off for me realizing, hey, this is not only a purpose driven company and something that's good for the world, but something that actually in making your site accessible for people with disabilities, you are impacting the customer experience. You are making your site more SEO friendly and today's LLM AI world, making your site also more accessible for the LLMs who are now sending agents or having users query various questions about companies and industries and things like that. So we're also lifting all these other marketing channels and making them more efficient and more effective. Linda: And I think to your point, it's not just checking off a compliance box, it's actually a customer experience. So it's a revenue issue and in some cases it could be even, I would think a legal risk issue as well. So if users with a disability can't navigate your site, they can't use your forms, can't understand your content, then they definitely will not become leads or customers or they may not even, they may have the grounds to I'm assuming sue under ADA, would you say that could be the case? Mike: Yeah, a hundred percent. And we've seen that in the last couple of years, lawsuits have doubled, they’re increasing at the state level, even more and more from people who are not able to go online and do something. And again, take a step back and think about everything that you did yesterday online, right? You're probably checking the news, you're communicating with friends and family, you're working, you're maybe checking your finances, maybe you went to a doctor and they uploaded your test results into a patient portal. All those things that we all try to do on a daily basis. People with disabilities encounter issue and issue and barrier and barrier that either triple, quadruple the amount of time it takes them to do something or in a lot of cases they just can't because their assistive technology that they're trying to use can't understand the way the page is built or coded, not using accessibility best practice. So yeah, because they have been going at it for so long and have not been able to get companies to think about it and prioritize it, unfortunately, suing is their, here's my method of getting somebody to listen and pay attention. And so we have found in the past, a lot of companies come to us because they got a demand letter, they got sued. But we are seeing that transition more and more where people are starting to say proactively not only do I want to avoid the lawsuit, not only do I want to be compliant, but also I am seeing the benefits. So it's not just like something our legal or a compliance team is pushing, but the marketing team is starting to say, Hey, this should be part of our tech stack, this should be the way that we make it maybe is part 5% of the overall marketing tech stack, but it makes the other 95% that much more efficient. Linda: That makes sense. We primarily work in the B2B sectors, tech firms, pharma, manufacturing, and to these leaders, what does digital accessibility actually mean to them? And I guess how should companies really be thinking about it? Mike: So I think breaking it down at the most basic level, when I got into the space, I had no idea how a person who is blind would use the internet. That’s, I think, a misconception, people just assume, well, they can't, so they don't, and that is completely not the case. And so they use something called a screen reader, and that screen reader literally reads the code on the page out loud to them. So it will read the navigation, it will read the alt text of the images, it will read the link description. This is, I think especially important for B2B companies. It's reading the form and helping them understand whether it's fill out a demo or contact us for more information or download these best practices. Hopefully the download itself is also accessible. We do an annual accessibility index where we go out and we crawl thousands and thousands of business sites, and every year there's three common issues that occur from homepage to your deepest page, which is that the images don't have sufficient alt text descriptions. Linda: Okay. Mike: So again, that screen reader that's trying to tell that person who's blind and describe it isn't able to, it might be super vague, it might not even be there. You get the same thing with link descriptions. If you have that best practice guide and you just say read more, why am I reading more? So being descriptive. But I think the biggest thing for B2B marketers is understanding that if your forms aren't built correctly and someone's trying to go in there, again, they're at the last stage of that funnel, they want to engage with you. They're trying to give you their information, but if it's not labelled correctly, it might just say input field one, input field two, input field three. Even if it does have some of that specificity, great. They make a mistake and then the error pops up and the error isn't built correctly. So they don't know what the mistake is and they just have to abandon ship. So what we really find is that a lot of the issues happen at the moment of conversion, and that's where that impact really starts to add up that you have a percentage, again, of a population who's already coming to you. You're not spending more to try to attract them. They're there. And again, going back to what you said at the beginning, you've just shut the digital door on them and said to them, go to a competitor. Linda: Yeah, I mean, marketers are worried about leads, turning them into customers, eventually turning them into revenue, but if somebody's using a screen reader and they can't understand your links, their forms are too difficult to complete, that doesn't matter how strong your campaign is or how much money you're actually spending on at the door is basically closed. So I think what's broken on most sites, you've seen a wide range of sites and diagnostics. What would you say is fundamentally broken across a lot of these websites today? Mike: The first thing I would say is just the number of issues is always a surprise to people in general. So we have an accessibility scanner that on our site where you can go and put in your website and it'll scan and give you a quick readout. We find that the average webpage has between 60 and 200 accessibility issues. That's not website, that's webpage. So every page has that number of issues, which is typically I think a lot more than people assume they have. We have a great development team, we've got great processes in place, but most of those teams aren't thinking about just that next step of accessibility, best practices. And so the volume is high. But then as we start to look at some of those high impact, it’s the things I said before, which is images without the alt text description, again, think about how many images are on any typical homepage or product page or even content page. Then the link descriptions, which is another big one, the forms, those are the top three that just constantly, especially with how fast teams are updating sites and changing content, those are kind of the little things that can slip through. And if we don't spend that extra little bit of time making this descriptive, then it won't hurt anything. But the reality is for people with disabilities, those turn into barriers that, again, they just hit it and they'll try because they've been trained to do their whole lives is try to get around your lack of accessibility. And when they just hit that wall, they go elsewhere. And the interesting thing that we haven't talked about is people with disabilities. We talked about the number of them in the US in the world, but they have an $18 trillion spending power. So it's also a significant portion, and they're super loyal. They have such trouble finding sites that work and companies that are prioritizing their needs that when they finally do find one that's accessible and makes it easy for them, again, customer experience, they're going to go back, they're going to be loyal, and they're telling their friends, they're telling their family, and those friends and family want to support those companies that make it easy for their friends with disabilities. Linda: So alt tags, things like that. Are there other small structural changes that can actually make a really big impact for usability and conversion? I know there's probably a lot of different things to look at, especially when it comes to images and text and all that. Mike: The web content accessibility guidelines, and there's 86 of them I think at the latest. And they go through a whole plethora of, with navigation, heading structure, page layout. There's all these essentially rules that are very binary. You're either doing it or you're not, that help people understand if the way they're building it is accessible. It's a lot. It's overwhelming. I think a lot of developers see that and they're like, whoa. That's partially actually probably why a lot of companies initially are like, yes, let's do it. But then it feels overwhelming. Companies like AudioEye come in and use technology, a combination of technology and audits with experts to take some of that burden off developer teams. There is a lot to know, but really it's foundationally around building it so it is accessible and usable by a screen reader and other assistive technology that they might be using. Linda: No, that's great. I would envision with uplifting the website with tags and so on. And so you're helping SEO, so can you speak a little bit about that? Can you walk us through any how maybe some accessible or descriptive links can benefit users in search performance? Mike: Yeah, yeah. In fact, I'll talk a little bit about AI and LLMs, which I think is the other side of the coin essentially, because doing the same thing. But that's what we're seeing more and more is that when user goes to, we'll say Claude and asks, what's the best B2B software for X purpose? And it'll send out its agents, do the research and bring back the answers when your accessibility tree is built appropriately. So again, you've got the clear architecture, you've got the links, the forms, all that description in there, those agents are able to more quickly understand the business, the value there, the content there. And so the LLMS are using fewer tokens. It's easier on them, so they're going to prioritize those sites in what they bring back. And so we are seeing not only on our own site as we continue to make it accessible and see the impact on our rankings and LLMs, but we've seen the same thing with SEO, that those best practices of adding the content that answers the question quickly and cleanly describing, again, as few words as possible, but with as much specificity as possible, what's in those images, what's in those links. It just adds those keywords. It gives the right level of density and context from an SEO or AEO and GEO perspective is more and more becoming what those crawlers are looking at and rewarding. Linda: Great. No, I would think a lot of leaders look at this as risk mitigation versus I would think they had the opportunity to reframe accessibility as sort of a growth lever or customer experience strategy, not just like a compliance requirement. And that in itself can be valuable, at least to this, I would say to the team. So let's make this actionable. So if I'm a B2B marketing or digital leader listening and I'm like, okay, oh boy, we probably have some gaps. What are sort of the first two to three moves a company can make? Mike: Yeah, I'd say one, find a scanner like the one I mentioned earlier, AudioEye has one. There's many out there where you can just go put in your site and get that quick. Okay, how inaccessible am I? And again, I share this with lots of people and it's always interesting to me. They'll say, okay, I'll go do it. And then a day or two later, I'll get an email being like, holy cow. That was very shocking to me. And I'll also remind them with all those web content accessibility guidelines, automation actually can only detect about half of them because there are contextual, there's complex issues to look at that really require human judgement of is this accessible or not? So when you get an automated report that might tell you you've got an average of 75 issues per page, it's only capturing a portion of them. So that's like the floor of your problem, not the ceiling. So I say start there because again, it helps you see, okay, this is actually a problem. And then from there, I think it is looking at your internal organization and processes and understanding and really acknowledging, do we have the resources? Do we have the time and the effort for our developers to go out and learn best practices, to be able to build appropriately. While the intent is always there, the actual, when it comes to all the priorities that then flow down that usually we found with our customers ends up not being the case. And so I think from there it's understanding, okay, if we don't have the capability, where can we go to work with companies who can have experts, who can do audits on the other 50% that automation can't, who can help us understand what they can fix through JavaScript injection that helps update that page so it is readable by a screen reader. And then in many cases, like with AudioEye, we can fix about 95% of those issues. So we're handing the developers a much smaller and manageable list of things that really need to be handled at the source code. So again, I think it's start with awareness of where your site is at, and then kind of just look at how mature are we really going to be from an accessibility perspective. And with that maybe not optimistic view, but more pragmatic view, then determining how you're going to attack it with the right level of partner. Linda: Perfect. So that's great. Thanks Mike. So I'm going to ask you some rapid fire questions. Mike: Let's do it. Linda: All right. What's the biggest misconception about digital accessibility today? Mike: The biggest misconception is that a person who has a disability doesn't want your product or service. Linda: Right. And most overlooked accessibility issue on websites today? Mike: Those three: images, forms, and links. Linda: Okay, so one thing, every B2B website should fix this quarter, same thing or? Mike: Your conversion flow. And I think for most B2B, it's going to be that form is your critical. I'd say look at that plus one to two pages before, and if you're only going to do one audit or one thing, focus on that conversion, and that will have probably the biggest impact. Linda: Awesome. If you were to give me accessibility in one word, what would that be? Mike: Equality. Linda: Yeah. Okay. Awesome. Thanks Mike. So this is definitely a critical shift. I think companies need to really start thinking about making their site accessible for anyone who wants to be there. It just seems like it's a no-brainer. It's about redefining who gets to participate in the digital space. It should be available for anybody. So I would love for you to share a little bit about you, where people can get in touch with you, and we can take it from there. Mike: I'm on LinkedIn, Omni Barton comes from my early days of working at Omniture, which is web analytics at the time. Happy to connect with people as we've talked about at AudioEye . And again, if you have a choice between going and checking your accessibility scan or connecting with me online, I would go to that accessibility scan and just really use it as that first step towards, as we've said, doing something that will both benefit people with disabilities and the world at large. And also in the end, have a good impact on the work that you're doing and the audiences that you're trying to serve in your business. Linda: Yeah, great advice. Definitely great advice. I think it's definitely something that's overlooked. If you found this valuable today, don't just listen. Definitely apply it. Audit your website, fix the basics, open the digital door to more audience. And if you like what you heard today, please hit like, share, comment, or subscribe, and let's keep raising the marketing bar when it comes to digital experiences and for all users and drive actually real impact. If you're ready for your own brand 180, visit https://mill.agency/ or https://lindafanaras.com/ , we will see you in the next episode. Thank you.