Why 35% of accessibility lawsuits target sites with overlay plugins already installed.
"These tools rely on automation that only catches 30% of issues. And for blind users with screen readers? The overlays often conflict with their assistive tech—making the site harder to use."
Bet Hannon runs AccessiCart, an agency that fixes accessibility problems for e-commerce stores—usually right after they've been sued. We talked about why "quick fix" overlay plugins are making the problem worse, the four accessibility issues you can fix right now, and what the European Accessibility Act's €100K fines mean for US-based stores.
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The Unofficial Shopify Podcast is hosted by Kurt Elster and explores the stories behind successful Shopify stores. Get actionable insights, practical strategies, and proven tactics from entrepreneurs who've built thriving ecommerce businesses.
Kurt Elster
This episode is sponsored in part by Swim. Okay, here's a depressing stat. 70% of shoppers who want your products never actually buy them. They browse, they consider, then they forget. That's revenue walking out the door. Swim Wishless Plus turns browsers into buyers. Customers save products they want, get notified when prices drop, or items restock. You can also engage them in personalized fashion through your marketing or sales outreach. It's like having a personal shopper reminding them to come back and buy from you instead of your competitors. And 45,000 stores already use it, and it only takes five minutes to install. You could try it free today for 14 days. Go to get swim. com slash curt. That's swimwithay. com slash curt. Turn those maybe later into sales today. Get swim. com. My friends, today on the unofficial Shopify Podcast, we are discussing accessibility. Accessibility is a you know uh another one of those those checklists that you're supposed to pass with your website, right? Like an SEO checklist, a performance checklist, a conversion rate checklist. Now we're at accessibility, actually, this one's quite important. Because of doing this for many years, I have, well, completely lost track of the number of times a Shopify store owner has told me, hey, We got hit with an accessibility lawsuit. Ooh, okay, so that's the stick here. But with accessibility, there is a carrot too. There is a genuine positive outcome. to engaging in accessibility best practices, to passing these accessibility tests. And so I need an expert. I've got some at this point I've got experience here. uh in you know addressing some of these issues, but we need you know someone better than me, smarter than me, who can talk us through accessibility and the finer points of it. Our guest today is is Bet Hannon. Uh Bet, tell me what you do. Why are you our accessibility expert?
Bet Hannon
I lead an agency called AccessiCart where we focus on accessibility and e-commerce. And so we uh we're a services agency, so we're not providing a tool, we're helping people figure out how to use the tools, because sometimes that gets a little complicated, and then uh helping them uh with documentation and things like that reporting. And so people come to us when they get sued often.
Kurt Elster
So I'm gonna say what's the these relationships I bet start with a phone call. I'm betting the most common phone call you get is help, I just got sued.
Bet Hannon
Yep. Yep. Um we do you know, I try to reach out and encourage people to, you know, try to start working more slowly at things uh uh at first, but Often it is the lawsuit that brings people to think about accessibility.
Kurt Elster
You know, though it they'll get a letter or an email. What does it actually say? Typically.
Bet Hannon
Yeah, yeah. So um if they get they don't always get a letter, but uh they can get what's called a demand letter. And this is coming from an uh attorney And what we uh call a serial plaintiff. So this is typically a very infrequently a deaf person, but almost uh like I would say 95% of the time it's a person who's blind. who has um is t saying, I can't use your website, I can't check out, can't buy product, whatever that is. Um sometimes they will not be very specific. Sometimes they will be You know, more specific, we found that you have images that are missing alt text, right? They'll tell you where, because you know, they're not really doing, they're not actually going there. And so the uh this one plaintiff and attorney pair will sue dozens and dozens of websites. So they're sending you a letter that says, we intend to sue you. And that's all it says. But the implication is you should come, you should uh reach out to us and for a settlement so that we don't go to court. And if you if the brand does get one of those letters, it is in their best interest to, well, first, you should contact an attorney and you should know that I'm not an attorney. But I usually as my attorney wants me to say that at the beginning of this.
Kurt Elster
We are not lawyers. This is not legal advice.
Bet Hannon
Uh 99. 9% of these things get settled, either before or after they go to court. And so if you have a choice, you want to settle before you go to court, because if you go to court, then there are public record documents that you've been sued for accessibility and you settled. Which then makes you just a big target. And you just get repeated, repeated losses. And so there's this law letter that may come. It may they look junky. They look like Junk mail, they are very unprofessional often. I mean these are I don't know, you know, I I try to be nice to my attorney friends, but these are kind of like bottom feeder sort of chasers? Ambulance chasers, yeah. Um and what what it may be surprising to a lot of people to know is that the the uh the disabled plaintiff actually doesn't get a lot of money in these and they can't get a lot of money without jeopardizing their any disability benefits if they get disability benefits. So um so that it's actually the attorneys that are making a lot of money. And they have a lot of vested interest in s you know stretching this out and making it more complex because it's the defendant, the site owner that pays both their legal fees and the plaintiff's legal fees at the end. So the it's it's really you know it was set up that way in the law so that people with disabilities could you know, it get the accommodations they needed without having to come upfront with a lot of money, right? The ADA. The ADA. Right. Yeah, exactly.
Kurt Elster
Yeah. And so the the Disabilities Act, Americans with Disabilities Act. But it predates websites.
Bet Hannon
It does. And so there's not anything about websites in there. So we've had these court cases that are there's a a you know, some mix of how the courts are coming out about this. There are some you know, federal district jurisdictions where they say you must have a brick and mortar store to uh For the ADA to apply to your website, others of them say no, you know, websites stand on their own. And so then the plaintiffs are filing these in the jurisdictions that make the most sense, right? If you have customers in New York, uh certain districts in New York or Florida or California, then uh, you know, those were that's where we see a lot of these cases being filed. And you know, it's not just ADA. There are some other there's some state laws, and so uh we're actually seeing more over the last year more state uh court filings. And so in California you have the UNRU Act. And that's uh unlike ADA, the the plaintiff can get damages there And so we see a lot of uh you know cases that are filed there in Minnes uh Minnesota, Wisconsin, some other New York, of course, but some other places too. So so yeah, the the the way that these all kind of work is really kind of um You know, uh it at one level it's unfortunate, and at another level, you know cases like that, legitimate cases like that, were how people with disabilities got the accommodations they have today. And so we, you know, we always have to kind of balance out, you know, there's the ambulance chasers, but it is the law. And and how do we begin to, you know, be responsible with with um making sure everybody can use our
Kurt Elster
So it typically a serial plaintiff and a law firm that specializes in just doing this uh are the ones behind it. Yep. From my understanding is they're going to use an accessibility tool to bulk you know, like wave tool to bulk scan a bunch of sites that they know are uh e-commerce sites because the thinking is like, well, this applies specifically to an online store because it should have those accommodations were it to have a physical counter part.
Bet Hannon
Yeah, so about 80% of the cases the there uh the ADA lawsuits that are out there are now e-commerce, seventy-five to eighty percent over the last three or four years. And that's partly because e-commerce sites, if you think about it, people come to a site, they have a specific intention when they go, they're gonna buy try to buy a product. Um, there is a lot of user interaction that has to happen. You know, you have to go, you have to search for a product, you have to filter things, you get into the product, you have to then Sometimes select a variation, then you have to get in, you have to put in all your billings. There's a lot of surface area for problems to be there, right? And so um it makes sense that it's A lot more uh with uh e-commerce. You know, before there was a period of time in which there was hospitality stuff, we're seeing much more kind of direct-to-consumer um e-commerce over the last three or four years.
Kurt Elster
So define it for me. Like when we say, oh, this website is accessible or is not, what are we actually saying?
Bet Hannon
Yeah. Well, the important thing to know is that no site is ever 100% accessible. When you stop to think about what that if you were gonna say this site is 100% accessible, it means that any person with any level of disability with any combination of disabilities would have no problems whatsoever on the site. Now I mean that I I think it's just really l logically impossible. to do that. Now, can you make sure that a w a w a good portion of people can get there? Absolutely. Right. And so that's where we end up with these kinds of uh you know the lawsuits are tr are sometimes trying to be picky, but actually right now they're they're really just doing the kind of surface level scans you're talking about. And they're trying to make it uh by that makes it super easy for them to identify sites. Um they're using tools, uh, you know, uh Wave is one that you mentioned, wave. webam. org. That's a free tool and I encourage folks to use that to test their own site, right? They can look look at that, but you can test with WAVE. Most of the time uh these plaintiffs are not using a not using WAVE, they're using a paid tool. You know, there are paid tools out there that you can use. Um the important thing to know is that those tools are only going to find automated testing will only find about 30% of issues. Whether that's the p you know these a lawyer, you know, these uh, you know, uh serial plaintiffs, or whether that's you as the site owner, you're only gonna find about 30% of issues when you're using an automated tool. So the rest of it comes down to some manual testing and looking at things. So for instance People who are blind and people who are mobility impaired may depend on uh keyboard navigation. So if I'm totally paralyzed, I have an adaptive device. And those are really customized for people's disabilities, but they all come back to keyboard navigation. So you don't have to worry about accommodating a you know a bajillion different devices. You just have to make sure the key things work for keyboard. But you know, it's not uncommon to find things like, uh, you know, we audited a site um uh earlier in the year where um the keyboard navigation was broken for getting into a variation. So you could you could get into the product to see the shirts, but you could never keyboard navigate to pick a red or a green or a blue one. So you could never put it in the cart. Right? So any product on that site that had variations that you had to choose before you could put it in the cart, you couldn't purchase. Right. And so, you know, it's it's important to know, well, on the one hand, that's blocky, that's a barrier for people with disabilities. That's a a legal problem. But on the other hand, that site's losing sales, right? When people run into that problem. Or we audited a site where people who needed keyboard navigation Uh they're mate mostly using tab and enter, right? They couldn't tab out of that last field to click submit. So think about how frustrating that would be. So what does it mean to be accessible? Well it means that The the guidelines that are there are the website content accessibility guidelines. You can Google that. We say WCAG sometimes with W-C-A-G, WCAG.
Kurt Elster
Oh, I would say WCAG.
Bet Hannon
The current version that we're on is 2. 2 double A. So there's single A, which is very minimal, A, triple A. Almost nobody does triple A. It's just huge It's a lot to get to AAA. Uh single A is very minimal. All of these court cases that have come out, uh the new laws in the European Union, everybody is really looking at A guidelines So you you want to make sure that you go through and you're w looking at trying to make your site meet these guidelines. But But really when folks are just starting out, if this is a totally new thing for you and you've never really thought about this before or done anything, there are about four things that you can start to do without even anybody like me helping you that could really begin. to to make your site more accessible. And I would say the majority of uh the cases that we see that start out are start out with a complaint about what's called alt text. And that is the the i the description that's on an image. So persons who have visual disabilities often are using a tool called a screen reader. It's reading out loud to them. not only just the text on the page, but all a lot of information about what something is, menu item or an image or something. And then it reads out, if it's an image, it reads out the description that you've put in for that image.
Kurt Elster
What I want to know is like, okay, typical, you know, top three to five issues we see in a store. Stay with alt text a moment, because this is like one of the easier ones to address. that, you know, really anybody could do, but is also the one that I often see most overlooked. Shopify, you've got your product media, you upload a photo, you can add alt text to it to describe it. This is good for accessible accessibility or necessary for accessibility, also good for SEO. Because it it is additional relevant text on the page and it helps to describe an image that a a bot may not necessarily be looking at the image because there's a lot of additional processing power. The alt text has to be for a person first. You know, describe the image with context as though you're describing it over the phone. And what I ended up doing, you have a store with a thousand products, ten thousand products. It almost impossible to do this. And so I wrote uh with you know with the assistance of AI, vibe coded, uh a Python script that connects to ShopFi via the API, checks, you know, hey, uh like let's go find our active product listings, find the photos, do they have alt text? Yes, ignore it. Let's just assume someone did it already. No, then send the image to ChatGPT Vision with context and a clear description of like these are best practices for writing old text. And then it returns pretty consistently good alt text. Now you still should review this. You do enough of them. There'll be something weird in there.
Bet Hannon
But you're right. When you have like thousands of images that you've got to do getting that kind of leg up by having some AI generation is is really a smart idea, I think. But going through them review, I would say um I my little critique of your thing is You put in there if it already has alt text to ignore it. I think my next pass would be to go back because you would be surprised how many times people have put in uh image56749 dot jpg or a dp. Or just a product title? They product title title. And they've got you know images on the page, you know, five images of the product, but they all have the product title as they alt text.
Kurt Elster
Or they used it for some kind of grouping system, so it's just like hashtag red.
Bet Hannon
I would go back and redo those and uh, you know, as is your second pass. Right, absolutely.
Kurt Elster
That only addressed product photos. There's still, you know, all the other photos the thing uses. And so like that's a pain too. In Shopify you could go like settings. content files and get it all.
Bet Hannon
You know, you want to test because you're talking about like you you can upload the image into Shopify and you put the alt text on there and you assume you're good. But not every template, uh like sometimes there are things that are pulling like we see this all the time on homepage. There's a thing that's pulling like the popular products or the things are on sale or whatever it is, but that little widget things uh on the homepage that's pulled those is not pulling is not including the alt text.
Kurt Elster
The apps, the damn apps. Here's some customer service emails you don't want to wake up to. I was drunk. This was a gift, but we broke up. Wrong color, wrong size, wrong me. Sound familiar? With Cleverific, you don't have to deal with these anymore. Cleverific gives your customers a self-service portal to edit their own orders. No emails, no back and forth, just simple fixes. Fewer support tickets, faster fulfillment, and happier customers. Peter Manning, New York slashed their order support request by 99%. you can too. Get 50% off the Cleverific Pro Plan, just $49 a month, exclusively for the unofficial Shopify podcast listeners. Go to Cleverific. com slash unofficial and use promo code Kurt50. Fix the problem before it's a problem. That's cleverific. So typically it's like a, you know, someone gets hit with the lawsuit. And then they hire a, you know, accessibility professional. And then there'll be some fixes that we have to make in the theme, you know, as a as a theme developer. And often the one, you know, like missing all text, you know, but often like the troublemakers are apps. And sometimes that means, you know, we always reach out to app support. And then they'll be like, no, you can't do it, or like, here's just a you know, an onerous amount of work to fix it. So I just go find an app that is willing to be accessible. And I'll I'll tell them as much.
Bet Hannon
And that's the thing for shop owners to know is that you are responsible for the stuff you put on your site. So if you pick an app or an add-on or a feature, you know, um a wish list or whatever it is, right, that that you've put on your site, you are responsible for the accessibility of that. And so that's exactly the way to do it. Reach out because they need to know um you know those that that can get expensive right you get an ADA lawsuit or you get a you know a European accessibility act complaint all of those kinds of things right that that um you know you you need to reach out And get them to do it. If they become if they make it so painful that you can't do it or whatever, just find another one that will be. And I think that that pressure is uh a lot of times you will find add-on devs that will be If they're savvy about this, they will be grateful that you have reported it to them. Because what it has done is now save them a whole load of money that they might have had to pay out to get this thing tested. So now they're getting real world data back that their thing is not accessible and they didn't have to go out and pay to have it tested. So if they if they're thinking they're smart about it and they welcome it and they do the fix. If they're not and they just don't care and they don't think it's important, they don't understand how big this really is in terms of, you know, I think a lot of times when I talk to people, they They minimize the importance of accessibility or it's further down on their list because they don't think it affects very many people, right? So it's important to remember that First of all, a lot of people have invisible disabilities that you just don't know about, right? So your strobing video may uh induce epileptic seizures, but you don't know that about looking at someone. Or a lot of times is Your video that has a lot of motion in it can induce people, can give people nausea. Like people who get car sick, the video on your site can they just have to leave because they can't They can't deal with that. Uh I have somebody on my team that has that problem, right? It's like, oh we can't look at that.
Kurt Elster
Yeah, motion sickness, for sure.
Bet Hannon
You know, it's about 25% of all adults across most developed nations in the world, about 25% of all adults have some disability that requires an accommodation. Now, we're kind of in the it's what's interesting is, you know, you talked about ADA was best in 1990, and we think about how the web has been sort of growing, how the pandemic include made lots of people who really didn't shop online, start to shop online. You know, my 85-year-old dad buys stuff online all the time, but he didn't really do that so much before COVID. And so we're really seeing this generational thing. And as the general population of a nation incre uh the average age increases you get higher numbers of people with disabilities because of course the older you get, the more chance you are you have a disability, an accident or an illness or develop a disability, right? But you're talking about people that have reading disabilities, people who are, you know, have people had the mobility issues, motor disabilities. And that's not just that they can't use a mouse. That's some people, right? They're paralyzed. They can't use a mouse. But it's also people who may um as they get older may not have enough steadiness to tap a really small target on your app or on your mobile site, right? So you want to make sure that the the t sizes of buttons and targets are big enough to rate uh account for that. So yeah, all kinds of uh scenarios that we begin to think about in terms of making people, you know, making sure people can use your site.
Kurt Elster
Yeah. So okay, there is a s there's a supposedly easy one-click just install it solution in the form of any number of accessibility overlays. You know, not naming names. So tell me about accessibility overlays as a category.
Bet Hannon
Remember we talked about how that automated testing only finds about 30% of issues? Well, these tools, these tools rely on that testing, on that kind of automation, right? They can find things like color contrast for you or images without alt text. But they're not going to be able to tell you about keyboard navigation. They're not going to be able to tell you about anything that is depending on JavaScript on your site, right? So lots of things fall outside of what they're able to see. and then what they're able to try and fix. Then you need to know that you know they're they're you providing these additional little widgety tools. Well If you're a person with a disability and you require something like a screen reader or a mag you know magnification, you know, you have low vision and so you need things magnified or you uh need uh some other special tools to change the sizes of the font. You almost always have those already installed on your computer for the other 99. 9% of websites out there that you're going to try and encounter that don't have these little widgets on them. So you already have a tool and the two f two tools, especially for screen readers, often conflict. So people who are blind come to your site and they try to use their screen reader, but the screen reader that's sitting there supposedly ready for them is making their screen reader not work. And I can't tell you how many people who are blind have told me if they're tech heavy enough to do it, that they block the IP addresses of these overlay companies at the router level so that they just don't have to deal with it. And they they try to block your tools. So so they cause more problems for people with disabilities. When you when a person uh clicks into one of those widgets and uses one of the tools, we are seeing anecdotal evidence that now that tool already shows that clicked when they visit another site with that same overlay and so there's a big concern that somehow they are storing private uh personal healthcare information without getting any user consent and uh uh in the so yeah it's a little kind of uh there's not a way to Test that. And more importantly, maybe for folks, is that over the last two years, the number of ADA cases that seem to be targeting sites with these overlays on them. is skyrocket. Yes. So last year it was 25%. Uh the information from last month showed it 35% of the cases last month were had an overlay already on them. And so I think it's it's understandable to me that people would really, you know, it seems like an easy button. You know the easy button they used to have in the uh office supply stores like the easy button like just do this one simple thing and then it's all done and I don't have to think about it anymore. And we all wish that were true, but it just doesn't really work that way. And um and they're likely to get you sued. And so uh it's there I think the the only use case I see for those is If you are really under the gun for getting your site remediated, you need some time to think about to fix bigger issues. And you use it for a month or two or three while you're getting other stuff done. And then you're like, but it's in your plan to get rid of it as soon as you can because it's a target on your back.
Kurt Elster
Absolutely. Okay.
Bet Hannon
Let's go back. We didn't do our four issues. So okay, so we talked about alt text. That's one. Um color contrast is another. So the wave WebAim tool will help you find color contrast, and that is when you have like a color, um, like a font uh color over a button color, and people have a hard time reading it. Right? So this is a problem for people with low vision. This is a people for c a problem for people who are colorblind. That's 9% of white men have a colorblindness problem. So my brother included. Um, so having good color contrast is there. Um, and you can use all kinds, there's all kinds of free tools and color checkers. Um often the problem comes uh that's a thing that is more global on your site. So a lot of times, you know, you've picked the color. of the button and the color of the font because that's a part of the brand color palette, right?
Kurt Elster
Um so my favorite is of course it's like, oh you know what we should do? Dark gray text on a light gray background. And you know what? We want it to be real sophisticated, so a small, thin, fiddly font should do it. You're like, great! This website's really tough to read for people with normal vision, you know, let alone someone who's vision impaired. So when I do conversion rate audits, one of the first things we do is just like, hey, can you make this site easier to read? Yeah. Let's let's let's try black text on white and see how that goes for us.
Bet Hannon
So it's what's interesting to me is that I think color contrast is the best example of how making access when you make your site more accessible. You make it easier for everybody to use. Yes. You you improve the user experience for everybody, not just people with disabilities, but everybody. And we see uh uh, you know, depending on the, I and I think color contrast is a great example of that, right? Because as people age, we have start to have more trouble with color contrast. Another one is link text. People who use screen readers will often go to a site and they will say to a page and remember just like Everybody else, they have a purpose for going to first they're searching for something, right? And so they may go to a page, it may load the page, and then they may tell the screen reader, read out loud to me all the links on this page. And what it does is it will use the link text, so not the HTTP, not the URL, but the link text that you've made into the link. And it'll just start at the top and it'll just read every link on the page. But if all they hear is click here, click here, click here, click here, it tells them nothing. So the the link text, you need I mean the great test is for you to just read the link text aloud. You don't know anything else about the context of all the other text around it or the images next to it or the button that's above it. You gotta just read that link text as if it's all on its own. Click here for our uh, you know, fall um, you know. Collection, right? So they need to they need to know where it's going to take them. So that's discernible link text. So you want to avoid any kind of ambiguity about your link text. And then finally the last one is kind of similar, and that's the headings on the page. So people who uh have put together things, uh, you know, you using H1. And you have one and only one H1 on the page. That's the page title.
Kurt Elster
This is one we see this creates a lot of problems for us, is headings. May I love semantic HTML, but then you know like an apple change it or you know, hey, we just put a theme block here, but oh well it you know it didn't know and so the heading is wrong.
Bet Hannon
Or we gave it uh that we gave that theme block a heading. But now it appears on this page in a different context as that page. And so now, yeah. But understanding how people use their screen reader to understands why it's important for people with disabilities. So again, it's a it's a it's a strategy for reading through the content. You know, the person will say, read me all the H2s on this page. And then when they get through the H they find the H two that might be what they're looking for, then they say, Read all the H threes. And then y you can go on down. Well, if you've m skipped levels or you've m messed stuff up or it's not there, then uh you know you're you're just they can't figure out what where to go, right? So that's the like understanding how they're using that helps you kind of properly nest it. It's kind of like a, you know, it's supposed to be sort of like those uh high school essays that we used to write with the Roman numerals and then the capital letters and then the lower Roman numerals and yeah kind of all of that sort of cascading down um through there. And so it's hard to uh yeah. the th this is a problem for a lot of folks. The heading orders is a thing. That can be o that can be automated. You can check that by automation, right?
Kurt Elster
Yes. And that often ends up being it's like that, the alt text and the link text. Those are the three that make trouble.
Bet Hannon
And color contrast. And color contrast. Those are the four things, right?
Kurt Elster
You know, many of those that you'll get the error like the WAVE tool will report like, oh, you know, 500 errors. Well, it turns out it's like because the link text is wrong in the footer and it appears on every page. And so like getting, you know, sorting by like you have this error this number of times, oftentimes you find like, oh, well, I fix it once in one template.
Bet Hannon
That too. And then a piece of what makes it a little tricky sometimes with that automated testing is that sometimes you'll get a false positive. So remember, this is an automation and they're get they're gonna get better, but for right now, it's like you go to You do a wave test on a page and it says you have like 23 color contrast violations. And then you start going through and looking at them, and when when you have uh say white or black text. on a a block that has a an image background, it's not seeing the image in the background. So it'll when you look at the contrast violation, it says you have white text on white background, and I like Okay, I just know that's not true. Right. And so it's just not seeing the image. Um, but you know, there are there are some and then sometimes when you have background images it it's b the image, the the font over the image is kind of spotty, right? There are places where it's easily visible and other places where it's not. And so then you know great we employ great strategy of, you know, you put a little kind of semi-transparent box where you're increasing the opacity a little bit to kind of uh make sure that you're getting enough of that contrast there. So there's some strategies for dealing with it. but false positives and just make it's hard. I mean it is hard getting I was thinking the other day I should write a blog post about how to use the wave results Right? How do you rule out your false positives? How do you do this? And the free wave tool, of course, only gives you one page at a time.
Kurt Elster
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Bet Hannon
You know, especially if your brand is about inclusivity and welcoming people, right? And you wanna or you wanna um we don't want to exclude anybody It's it can be a huge kind of brand asset. And conversely, if it becomes public that you've got accessibility issues, then that can be a kind of a branded nightmare, a PR nightmare for
Kurt Elster
You know, it it's not gonna help.
Bet Hannon
So you get that. Um you talked about SEO. Let's talk a little bit about um one of the things that's a little different. I'm actually going to another webinar later today about um using about AI and SEO. One of the things that's happening is that they're using a lot of screen rather than reading uh s for some things, not reading things programmatically in the code as much as taking screenshots and using like OCR optical character recognition to see things. Right. Well, that means your color you gotta pay attention to color contrast in a different way, right? If you've got that medium gray font on the light gray background and it can't really read all of that or make sense out of all that you've got you you start to have some problems there, right? So you want to pay attention to color contrast as a part of that.
Kurt Elster
So for sure like color contrast is one of the easy ones, I think. It's also like one of the most common ones. The image alt text, okay, you know, ideally we can automate our way out of that. Link text is a tougher one in Shopify anyway. Like just it's often not in the theme, but Something you should be able to do. I'm just like thinking through like I bet you could do it with Liquid. You know, the the apps are the the troublemakers.
Bet Hannon
Yeah, so some things are just in the content. You can't automate the fixes of like the link text in many ways, right? You're gonna have to go in, you're gonna have to see what that is, you're gonna have to write the new alt text. are the new link text. So uh we haven't really talked about, you know, there are different like accessibility touches like the whole team responsible for the site. So there's I think a lot of times people think about accessibility as just the developers. That's the only people that really need to deal with accessibility. But you have developers, you have designers, there's the people that are dealing with the color contrasts and the font sizes and the spaces, and then you have the content people that are putting things in and what they remember and what they forget can create problems, right? You know, it it's really all of those pieces together. And so that's it's sometimes it's hard for teams, I think, to find a home for accessibility. Who's responsible for accessibility? Well It's kind of a little bit of everybody. And how do you get people trained? And how do you get people, you know, as t team members turn over? How do you make sure that The new person is putting alt text on on the images, right, and they're doing it correctly. And uh how do you remember to uh make sure when we're looking at a new add-on that we remember to include. It would be good if we kind of like put that in our QA of looking at like we're gonna get a new uh app to do this or that. Well we should probably check the accessibility.
Kurt Elster
What's the takeaway? What's the next step? Like, how much of this should we do because we want a better website? How much of this is just driven by fear of lawsuits?
Bet Hannon
I think people put it off for a variety of reasons. Maybe they'll think twice about that after we talked about some of the other benefits today. But people do tend to put it off until they get sued. Uh the f you know, sometimes not until they get sued for the second or third time and realize that, oh, it's an ongoing thing and they just are gonna have to buckle down and do it. And so I I think if you can start uh with those, you know, those four items that we named, alt text, heading text link text and color and you can just start building those into some processes. I think you need to think about accessibility as a kind of continuous improvement. It's never gonna be a once check it off and done kind of thing because your website is never that, right? You're always adding new products and you're changing things and you're adding a new add-on or app or fe you know, feature to the site over time. And so it's always going to be some level of continuous improvement that you have to think about accessibility. That was kind of why, you know, we Um uh and and uh realizing that and that really that some level of being able to show that you are making a good faith effort at that continuous improvement over time that you're regularly testing and fixing things. Um, that's it doesn't prevent you from being sued, but it gives you the leverage for the negotiation in the settlement. That's what can come, right? If your lawyer can go and say, hey, we have 18 months of these uh monthly reports where we've been working on things showing that we're fixing things. Thanks for pointing out that one issue that you have lifted up. Um, but let we'll expedite that for you.
Kurt Elster
Smart. I like that. I like that a lot.
Bet Hannon
And so and so that's where I came back to develop kind of more of a monthly kind of turnkey. plan where we're doing a little bit of testing. We're provide you know we're providing, we're prioritizing, because a lot of times people don't understand what are the bigger barriers versus the smaller areas where are you Where are the bigger area uh barriers for people with disabilities, but also what are the things most likely to get you sued? And like surfacing those to the top? as opposed to uh smaller things that you that uh you know absolutely should also be done, but you know, are uh maybe a little bit lower priority, but kind of working them through and then uh Uh but but kind of spreading that out through the year so that you're you know you're working on five or three or one issue per month and you're getting but you're getting that generated documentation that you're You know, you're you're making a good thing.
Kurt Elster
Actively working through it. Smart. That's really smart.
Bet Hannon
Now again, remember it doesn't prevent you from being sued because anybody can sue anybody for anything in this country or so And anybody that promises you that you will not get sued for an accessibility lawsuit for your website is a fraud. That's just not the way it works. So anyway, hey, we have not talked yet about the uh uh European Accessibility Act. I know you you and I are both based in the US. So, but um the European Accessibility Act went into, and we have had five years to get ready, it went into enforcement. this summer. They are still in some ways scrambling to get their enforcement pieces going, but like GDPR, if you sell products to European citizens, you and you uh meet the threshold of two million euros in revenue, so about about two million dollars. uh then you are have a requirement under the European Accessibility Act. And there are some different requirements there than here in terms of that. The good news is But it really comes down to WCEG 2. 1 double A for now and 2. 2 soon to come in another year or so. Uh you really are working with the same standards. That's the good news. Um, there are some differences. You must have an accessibility statement. You're not really required to have an accessibility statement in the US. Um it's advised to do so, but I think but But also, you know, there are different countries have some differing regulations about that. So, but the accessibility statement has to provide the user with a process. for what they can do if they find a barrier on the site. Email you or phone you or whatever that process is. And then different countries have different um kind of um timelines. So like in Germany the brand has thirty days to get back to you. In s uh Italy it's seven days, right? And so uh there's some kind of like you have some legal obligations in terms of your response. You have to get things back. And then in every country, if you don't satisfy the consumer that that the issue's been resolved, they can escalate the complaint to an oversight body in that country. And so uh you must provide them with that information too, who they should contact if they uh are unhappy. And so uh those things are just getting going. Uh we had uh there was a big complaint that was public. Uh so it's not just consumers that can make the complaints. It can be advocacy groups on behalf of consumers. Um, and in Germany it can also be your competitors. Uh they've Yeah, I know, isn't that wild? Um, they view that as a way of leveling the playing field. If I invest in accessibility and make my site accessible to follow the law. But you don't. Why should you have the benefit of that of not having to lay out that money uh o over me, right? Uh you didn't you weren't required to do it, uh but so now I can report you that you didn't do it and you'll you'll be at a level that the playing field, right? Now here's the thing, right? To get to get the big fines, to get the jail time, you pretty much have to refuse to comply Right, you just have to be screw this or you know, like uh you know, so so it's kinda like they're out there and they're big things And and the the process is supposed to be, you don't get the fine right away. I mean you're gonna get a chance to make it accessible. But here's the thing, right? If you wait. Until a complaint is filed. And then um and then the the oversight body says, you have 30 days to make this site conform to WCAG is like that's a very short window of time. Even if they give you 60 or 90 days, for a lot of sites, that's just think about when you talked about 10,000 images without all text on it. Right. Right, you know Even with some assist, this is going to be a lot of work for some sites if you've been ignoring it. And so it's the short time frame means that your cost just for doing that. is going to be way higher than if you'd been working on this over time. And uh, you know, but you you're not gonna get the fine unless you fail to comply with those with that order, right? You've You you get this time period to make your site accessible. And if you haven't been thinking about it, you don't have people in your team that need to be trained, and you don't have an uh, you know, you don't have a Accessibility expert you know to call on and all you know, it can take time to get all that put together.
Kurt Elster
So it I wanna know where we could go to learn more about you.
Bet Hannon
Well, I'm on LinkedIn. You can find me on LinkedIn, uh Bet Hannon. And uh you can go to AccessiCard. com and learn more about our services, what we can offer folks, and we would love to chat with folks. And you know, I I really try to I love coming on these podcasts because I love educating people about Accessicard. Because it's a great uh you know, I get up every morning and I get to know that the work that I do makes a really positive difference in the world.
Kurt Elster
It helps.
Bet Hannon
It helps. It helps. It helps you know it's it's good work. It helps people with disabilities. It helps the site owners. make more money, right? And uh, you know, uh, we get to have a living doing, you know, things that are great good for the world. So yeah, I love that.
Kurt Elster
Wonderful. I mean on that note, we'll end it there. Bet Hannon, Accessicart, thank you so much. Thanks, Kurt. Good to be with you. Crowdfunding campaigns are great. You can add social proof and urgency to your product pre-orders while reducing risk of failure. But with traditional crowdfunding platforms. You're paying high fees and giving away control all while your campaign is lost in a sea of similar offers. It can be frustrating. That's why we built Crowdfunder. The Shopify app that turns your Shopify product pages into your own independent crowdfunding campaigns. We originally created Crowdfunder for our private clients. And it was so successful, we turned it into an app that anyone can use. Today, merchants using Crowdfunder have raised millions collectively. And With Crowdfunder, you'll enjoy real-time tracking, full campaign control, and direct customer engagement. And it's part of the Built for Shopify program, so you know it's easy to use. So say goodbye to high fees and hello to successful store-based crowdfunding. Start your free trial and transform your Shopify store into a pre-order powerhouse today. Search Crowdfunder in the Shopify App Store to get started.