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Access Granted: Kim Casey Transcript. Tune in wherever you listen to podcasts
Mike: Welcome to Access Granted, Ablr’s wonderful podcast on the importance of accessibility and inclusion. On today’s episode, I have our very own director of accessibility, Kim Casey. We are here to talk about lots of great stuff, things like misnomers, things like, why are we in this business, things like why it matters, and things like how are we gonna come together as a unified front to ensure that all people have access to all digital content, and why it’s so important that we all join forces and make changes every single day to improve the lives of others.
I have the one and only Kim Casey in the live studio at Burt Studios in North Carolina. So Kim, welcome. Kim is our director of accessibility at Ablr. But she plays a million other roles, way more than that. And from day one, Kim, you’ve just been incredible, helping the business get off the ground, executing for our clients, running our operations, our administration, our testing team. The list goes on and on. But I really am excited to have you here today because, I always look at you as the voice of reason, the credible voice of reason.
And I want to give you a couple minutes to give a quick introduction. But when you do that, throw a little bit in there about like how you got in this, because this isn’t like you just started doing this. You’ve been doing this for 20 years, or 20 plus years. So, tell the crew about yourself and then give a little background on what really got you into accessibility testing.
Kim: Alright. Well, I’m the, like Mike said, the Director of Accessibility at Ablr. I’ve been doing this for over 20 years now. I didn’t really choose this profession or this career. I started off in college, just kind of looking for a job, ended up in a mail room for a company that was developing maps for people who are blind.
Mike: Mail room. I did not know the mail room part.
Kim: I had no idea what I was, yeah, I was like bottom of the line. My boss needed someone to read his mail for him. He was blind. He is blind. And so I did that. I had no idea what I was getting into. And so, it was kind of, every day it was throwing me into something new.
So it was, here, learn the product. Go teach the product. Here, go walk with this person. Teach them. So, these maps were incredible. They would teach people, directions. How long are the blocks? That sort of thing. And so we were opening up the world for these people. Before they were never brave enough. I mean, this was back before maps were on everyone’s cell phones.
Mike: This is 2000?
Kim: We were going from paper maps to actual electronic maps. And yeah. And before that, of course, there’s no map access for people who are blind. And so now that it’s electronic, everyone’s able to, what block am I on? What point of interest? What restaurants am I passing?
Mike: Now, this is Mike, right? Mike May?
Kim: Mike May. That’s right. Yeah.
Mike: Talk a little bit about Mike and your relationship there.
Kim: So, like I said, I started out, he just needed someone to read his mail. And then we realized, okay, well we need to make this business official. Then we need to take this business on the road, kind of thing, and get education out there. So at the time, a lot of the orientation mobility specialists said, not them, but, some of the agencies would say, what do blind people need to know where they’re going for? It was that whole education thing that we still have today.
Why do they need to know? And it was like, because they need that independent information. Like we can’t be filtering. Like, who doesn’t want full information about where they’re going. So it was really an amazing job and really grabbed me.
So I was actually at the time, studying to be an economist or a CPA or whatever, boring thing. And I realized I can’t not do this. And it just really grabbed me, and I’ve been learning every day since.
Mike: Wow. Wow. Economist?
Kim: Yeah, you know, who knows?
Mike: Well, now I understand why you love the numbers piece.
Kim: My family laughs at me for it, right?
Mike: Yeah, you’re like, “I’ll do the numbers.” Okay!
Kim: I still prefer accessibility. I’ll tell you that much.
Mike: So tell me why. Tell me why you prefer accessibility. I mean, obviously there’s some obvious reasons.
Kim: So yeah, in the mapping, of course, it was like hearing the stories. I went to the grocery store by myself today. I can do this with my daughter. Like that kind of life changing thing. And then it’s the lifelong learning. So accessibility, it’s never a static thing. There’s always stuff changing. Technology is improving. We went from, the maps were on a laptop with an external keyboard, with a speaker, people were carrying around five pounds or ten, five to ten pounds worth of equipment just to be able to know what street they were on. So now we carry around our phones, it’s like a totally different.
Mike: Like the old school bag phones, man.
Kim: Exactly, it’s a totally different phone game.
Mike: He remembers those, yeah.
Yeah, that’s great. And I mean, we talk about the mission and everything, so you kind of found yourself attracted to the mission. Attractive helping. Attractive doing. Because, sometimes you get into life and working and producing. And, you and I have always talked about this. It’s like you’re in front and back end and it’s like you’re just rolling all the day, but sometimes you kind of forget. So how do you keep yourself grounded with the mission? Cause I’ll be the first to tell you, sometimes I don’t get to see the whole outcome through the backside. And that’s a hard thing not to see it all the time. How do you stay grounded with the mission?
Kim: Well now, going from being, talking to end users, I’m actually talking to people that are creating the electronic resources. So the websites, the internal HR systems, that sort of thing. And so I get to work with developers who never knew. They’re always, ” I had no idea I was blocking so many people.” And I think you and I have talked about that on many occasions, where you’ve created something that you think is absolutely fabulous, and then you see it in the hands of somebody who’s using assistive technology and you’re embarrassed and like ashamed and what did I do. So many people will just, apologize to our testers. I see that every day.
“I’m so sorry. I did this to you. I watched the video of your user experience and I’m so sorry. I had no idea.”
Mike: Yeah, those videos were great. So define accessibility for me from your perspective.
Kim: From my perspective, there’s the checkbox that we’ve talked about where you’re checking the boxes.
We have the web content accessibility guidelines. That’s technical accessibility, but when you really get into the good part is when what you’re doing is usable and it’s enjoyable. It’s a similar experience for every user. We’re not excluding someone and you know it doesn’t take this person over here two minutes to do it and this person over here 30 minutes to do it.
We want to make it as usable as possible for everyone.
Mike: So you talk about the checkboxes, and that’s always a hard thing in what we do because you’re trying to, sadly, sometimes you’re trying to convince people like this actually matters, right? We’re using an automated tool or this one automated tool says I scored an 85.
Beauty is the eye of the beholder, right? Ultimately the end of the day, what kind of tool is it? What’s the credibility of the tool? How’s it work? And one of the things you always talked about was the contextual nature of a violation. And so oftentimes you’ll go through and we’ll pull report and it might be thousands and thousands of violations but the contextual nature of the usability components.
You can have a compliant site or compliant content that’s not accessible. And then you could also have an accessible site that’s not usable.
So when we talk about the technical aspects of accessibility, where does the contextual nature come versus the technical side?
Kim: I have so many developers who have access to those free AI tools. I can just run this scan and know that I’m doing fabulous.
The hardest discussion with those developers is, yeah. It’s not great. Here’s the real experience. You may have a hundred percent, everyone’s searching for that hundred percent. And I would say in accessibility, that hundred percent is very difficult.
Mike: Especially when you’re looking at an automated tool.
Kim: On the other side of that, when we do our tests, we typically find triple digit number of issues. And the developers are, they don’t want to flood their, JIRA tickets. They don’t want to have to figure out, oh gosh, now how are we going to fit that into our regular things?
So a lot of my job and the team’s job is to say, okay, these are the things that are blocking people from using this.
Mike: The priority aspects are, yep. And that’s kind of, I call it the roadmap remediation report.
Kim: I like that name, but I’m not as good at naming as you.
Mike: Yeah, you call it, I think you call it the accessibility report, right?
Kim: It’s so much more to type, that’s why I call it the accessibility report.
Mike: And that’s funny because it’s the same report. It is the same report.
Kim: It you what the issue is, where the issue is. And how to fix the issue. And so my goal for all of those reports is let’s give you the tools. Let’s tell you what’s going on. A lot of times we’ll let the teams go back, decide what they want to do with the report and what they think they can fit in with their resources. And then they come back to us and say, “Hey, how are we doing? Are we doing a great job?” And that’s really where the magic starts.
Mike: Because there are all different kinds of organizations that, oh, we have to do it or we want to do something or, but then there’s organizations that actually just have this innate desire to actually create really usable experiences.
And yes, for folks with disabilities for sure, but also it benefits everybody. We always try to align with organizations that have that sort of mojo, right? That sort of end game. We want to make sure that everyone has the same experience. Whether you’re using a straw to navigate, whether you have a magnifier. What’s the difference from a perspective of operations?
So working with someone, it’s just like just checking the box versus people. I mean, you’re seeing a lot of people, especially our clients that are like, they’re in it. They’re loving it. They’re training people.
Kim: They get the report. Sometimes they waiver. But we work with them, we work through that, because, sometimes they bite off more than they can chew.
Yeah, they’re like, wow, I had no idea we had such a problem. Or our design company said that we were great. They told us they had it handled. And they’re disappointed in that sense.
Mike: Boy, don’t we hear that a lot.
Kim: It’s a hard discussion to have.
Mike: I’d say 50 percent plus of the time we hear that. Well, our website company’s doing ADA. That’s what I love.
Kim: They have those automated tools and that’s, they think that’s checking the box scanners making it work. And then they get this report back and they see, one of our testers, their experience and it’s like, it’s not working. You need to do something.
Mike: So do you think, and this kind of leads me to my next question is sort of about what really makes, in your opinion, Ablr uniquely different? There’s a lot of organizations big and small and publicly traded and for profit and just pumping money into it and flipping the companies and all over the world.
And we seem to have been dealing with that from day one. We’ve got agencies that are trying to do it. And then we always find these incredible companies that kind of see through the clarity of like reality. I think that’s really awesome because we get to work with incredible people.
From that perspective, what do you think, and you’re a big part of this, makes us uniquely different in the marketplace?
Kim: That’s a good question. I think we’re in it for the long run, and I think, we’re committed to the end product. And so we’re not just like you say, a lot of times we don’t just drop the report on your doorstep and run.
We don’t just collect the paycheck and say, “Thanks. Have a great day.” And our team’s awesome too. So we have people who are using assistive technology. We have a database of hundreds of people who are happy to give their opinions on newly released things. We have other clients where we do usability testing.
They say, we’re thinking of adding this to our product. Can you get us 20 people that can tell me what the experience is like from somebody who’s visually impaired perspective or somebody who can’t use a mouse? So having those actual people behind it, I think that’s the big thing is a lot of people forget that it’s for the people. It’s not just to check a box.
Mike: Yeah, that’s a hard thing too with all the rules and regulations and, obviously we talk about WCAG, and WCAG is sort of the global standard, but then you still have the ADA, you still have Section 508, and it’s all these things, and I often hear, “we’re doing ADA.”
What does that mean exactly? Because we think about ADA, as amazing as it is, but from a digital perspective, it’s 32 years old, I believe, right? And now there’s new updates to that. And those updates, we talk about Title II. And what does that look like?
And so in a lot of ways, there’s a huge need out there. So now for consulting and support, because, traditionally it’s like I have an issue. I have either I got sued or I’m going public and I need to make sure my company passes or I need a VPAT for an RFP and it’s very like intentional in terms of what it’s in it for. Transactional. And a lot of times I explain compliance that way. When I hear the word, and I just don’t like the word compliance, I just think it’s the absolute wrong word. Because to me, compliance is I’m doing the bare minimum to protect myself.
Kim: Yeah, just what we were talking about yesterday, people see the compliance officer come in and they dread and they don’t want to hear what you have to say. I’m never welcome in the room. Nobody wants to me here.
Mike: But it’s, it kind of is like a challenge.
Kim: Yeah.
Mike: Because people are like I’m just doing the bare minimum and you have to find people that are willing to go above and beyond and organizations. And it oftentimes comes from the top down, like organizations say, you know what, we want to do more.
We want to do better. And oftentimes we think about it because there’s, you have to throw the statistics out. There’s one in four people globally have a disability. So you’re talking to 25 percent of potential prospective client or student or purchaser or whatever or anybody.
And yet it seems to be so crazy to me that we just are so nonchalant about ensuring digital content is accessible for all people. And sometimes I struggle with that.
Kim: Yeah, well, you were talking about our consulting and really what’s great about our consulting services is that we figure out who you are as an organization, what’s important to you, what your needs are.
And you’re really good about pitching the customized plan. Nobody’s going to fit into a box. Everyone’s going to get their own plan that makes sense to them. The more we can get to know who we’re working with and what they’re working with, a lot of companies will come to say, well, I have this new HR system. We have this new seat booking system because of the whole, rotating office situation. Is this going to be accessible? Can they schedule a desk? That sort of thing. Making sure that everyone can access everything that they need to do their job successfully.
Mike: Well, and mobile applications and learning management systems and physical employee journey mapping and all those things. And that’s the thing about the Title II, and I think in our industry right now, at least there’s a shift from just executional, do the work, versus, “Hey, I don’t really know exactly what I need to do.”
And so Ablr provides education, training, consulting. This is where I love the roadmap point, the whole planning aspect of it. Because now with Title II It’s not just about a website. It’s about every single thing that an organization and the public entities are doing.
So that is a huge undertaking. So organizations really need to work with experts to help determine like what are the number of assets they have, how do they work, how do the stakeholders evaluate and reviews, how do you build out a plan to actually execute the testing, how do you validate those processes, what about process and procedure and documentation and all these things, so accessibility is really so much more than just we’re just going to run a scan and get an 85 on my score and say we’re okay. So, tell me the importance of the manual side. Because we talk about that a lot.
Kim: There’s so much. So you’re just opening up this whole can of worms. Let me just start. So the training, we have clients that come to us first for our training, for our disability inclusion training.
It has everything from, what do I do if I have a blind employee? How do I talk to my blind coworker? What do I do if somebody’s in a wheelchair? That sort of like basic thing. We have a lot of etiquette. We have the business case for, “Hey, I’m a champion at my organization. I want to bring accessibility here. How do I do it?”
How do you introduce it in? What are some of the assistive technologies that people are using? So there’s that great general information there that usually brings people in the door. We love that course. What we found after a few years is that they’re like, yeah, I know I want to do accessibility.
How? And so we’re starting to build these things. How do you do accessible presentations? How do you do accessible documents?
Mike: And social media, email marketing and all that stuff.
Kim: Like plain content creation because there’s a lot of areas and accessibility that overlap. If you know the basics, you can bring it to everything, just writing your own emails.
And if it’s digital, all of the same principles apply. And so we have this comprehensive training,
Mike: Which is called what again?
Kim: The Ablr Plus library.
Mike: Lovely.
Kim: I didn’t name it. I was not allowed to name it, I’ll tell you that much.
Mike: I love Ablr Plus library. Yeah. I love, and I’ll just, I just love that.
Kim: And a lot of times you say, we’re not just going to talk at you. We’re not just going to keep giving you reports. We want you to be able to do this on your own. We want you to get smarter. We want you to avoid these issues in the future because we can’t be everything for everyone. And we want all of the knowledge to ripple out.
Mike: And you just made a great point because I always say, give a man a fish, teach a man a fish.
A lot of times in a conversation, like we’re going to, we’re going to give you the fish. But then we’re going to teach you to fish because organizations don’t want to be dependent. They got enough retainers to pay, they got enough bills coming in from everybody else out there. And I say this all the time, but 80 percent of our clients stay with us.
So we come in look we don’t want you to be dependent. We want you to come in. We want to help you identify what the problems are. We want to help you remediate those issues. We want to help validate those issues, provide documentation, consulting, train the team, get you going on your own direction, which is our mission. Because again it’s about doing it affordably, efficiently.
Kim: It takes the entire organization. Can’t just be one person. So I always feel for that one person who comes to me and says, “We want to do it, but nobody’s on board with me.” Because they have a huge walk up. So when you get everyone on, and I know it, I can feel it when we’re doing, we’re working with a client. There’s kind of like that uphill battle where everyone’s kind of resisting, and then we get to the top and we can see the whole view and everyone’s let’s, we’re all in, let’s do this.
And then they all start helping each other and I’ll get questions that build on what I’ve taught them. And that’s when I know we’ve been successful.
Mike: Yeah. And talk about, and I want to get into a few misnomers in a little bit, but people just assume, and I get it I mean you know my story, I was in advertising most of my life and had an experience with John and it felt, I felt terrible.
I was like, I create all this content for these great brands and never even thought of it. And it’s sort of a transformational thing for me to move into this kind of industry. But I think people often forget there’s a so much value that comes along other than just providing access. And the other thing is, we’re not taking a website that you have today that you spent time and money on, it’s super pretty, and we’re not destroying it and turning it into a front page asset from 1998.
That’s not what it is. A lot of this work is behind the scenes with code. A lot of it’s fixing the, it’s usability a lot of times.
Kim: And a lot of it’s take a step back, how can you present your information better?
Mike: Yeah, and it’s, that’s the improvements. And the improvements are things like increased conversion rates, right?
Again, one, you’re adding 25 percent potential people not including friends and families and other brand reputational pieces that drive more traffic, but you’re improving your organic SEO and organic search because you’re actually putting titles, all tags in where they need to be that are valid and reputational driven.
Then you have increased conversion rates because you’re getting more people in, but they’re converting better because you’ve improved that. So there’s so many other benefits to it. So when you think about backlog and I got to get to this, got to get to this, got to get to this, it all builds.
Kim: It’s beautiful. Yeah.
Mike: Yeah. So talk just a little bit why it is beautiful in your opinion.
Kim: I just, I seeing that it’s like the same thing as that person who had never traveled, when I was doing the maps when they never traveled alone before. I see people, they’ll come to me and say I can never look at a website the same, like I never see it the same or we were able to cut completion time by three minutes, that sort of thing, like if it’s an online form.
Mike: And it’s not just about folks with disabilities, it’s improving it for everybody.
Kim: Here’s your screen reader experience, but here’s your everybody experience, and it’s gonna take everybody a half an hour to fill out that form. How do you think when University A has a 10 minute form and you have a 30 minute form? How many people are you going to get?
Mike: And that really right there kind of sums up the usability side. And it’s not just about compliance. We’re actually helping organizations improve their usability and their experiences.
Kim: And that’s the other thing. A lot of people they’ll come and they have an existing process and they realize it’s not efficient.
They need to do something. So we need to streamline all of our images. You were talking about all tags for SEO purposes. What can we do? How can we make that uniform so that everybody who’s putting content into this database is going to do it correctly? And is going to do it intentionally.
Mike: And that’s the training component, that is such an important piece, because again, you can, if you have one person or two people in there, and then they do all this work, and then no one trains them on how to upload new content, at least from an accessibility perspective, all of a sudden you’re using a content management system, you’re putting in images, you’re putting in H1s incorrectly, H2s, and all of a sudden the whole site that you spent all this time creating, can find itself in not so great six months.
And so the training component is such an important piece. And that’s why we added that as the fifth stage of the 360, because, we don’t want to do all this work for you. And then you have to come back in three to six and we’ve had it happen quite a bit with quite a few organizations that had to go back and do it again and again, instead of saying, “Hey, we’re going to invest in this, in our organization. So all people understand the importance of accessible content, usable content in every capacity of our business, whether it’s the product team, whether it’s the it team, whether it’s the marketing team.” So talk a little bit about that because Manscaped and I’ll just throw it out there, they’re an organization that’s like doing it in so many, I mean, Excelsior, I mean, we have so many kinds, Lenovo, there’s so many companies out there that are doing it in great ways, they’re embracing that. And so, Manscaped, you’re, we’re meeting, what, talk a little bit about the departments we’re meeting with now with some of these organizations, it’s not just my web master.
Kim: That’s right, yeah, we gave them that big report.
Mike: What was that called again?
Kim: Remediation Roadmap Report. They came back. They decided they wanted to, they had to regroup. It was a lot to take in. It took a while. So then I started meeting with them on a regular basis.
And then I got the ears of the developers on a regular basis. And it was amazing. And then they brought in the design folks because they’re like, well, we’re getting these files from design. There’s no way I can do this accessibly. We need to talk to them. And it was kind of like, I get to be the bad guy.
And that’s fine with me. I’m happy doing that.
Mike: Yeah, you’re good at that.
Kim: I am good at that. Yes. I’m not capable of lying here. So I do, I tell him, I say, and this is the truth. Sometimes you have to give it to him the way it is, because they have to prepare, they have to be able to plan for it, they have to make sure they have the resources for it.
Mike: Well, it’s authenticity, it’s credibility, it’s direct honesty.
Kim: It’s in, yeah, it’s because I want to make them better.
Mike: Exactly, and that’s a big difference because, again, a lot of organizations out there might have thousands of salespeople, and they might just be pumping calls, pumping calls, pumping calls.
But this goes back to, in my opinion, the unique difference of what Ablr and other organizations like us do. And it is about the caring aspect. It’s about finishing it. It’s about completing it. It’s about supporting it. It’s not just about, I think you said not about the paycheck. So we’re not just helping the content we’re helping the people which is infusing a whole new directional shift, transformational shift, and how an organization is actually functioning, which is a huge difference because that’s not things that you measure all the time. We can’t measure that. But when the whole company is thinking about usability in a way that’s going to impact every human being, it transforms you. And so these companies that we work with are changing. It’s not just we’re doing an asset.
Kim: What we’re seeing now is our companies are saying, okay, this is great. Now we’re accessible. How do we employ somebody with a disability? How do we tap into that job market that’s been underemployed for so many years?
Mike: Yeah. Talk about that. I mean, we’ve got our workforce development program.
Kim: It’s really amazing. A lot of the people that I’ve been working with, I can confidently say, yes, go to that company. They care. They’re going to do a good job. They are going to provide the support that our trainees need.
Mike: And that’s kind of the beauty of having these great companies that we bring on with accessibility. And they’re sort of open minded to this whole new world of, well, let me get trained. Right? What about my processes and my procedures? What about my physical side? Can people get in, into my office space? Do they have the right operational systems to do their job every day?
And so all of a sudden it’s like this whole, and that’s where this scary word called inclusion, which is ridiculous because it’s a word that actually matters. And this is why people feel included. And they belong because people are opening their eyes to a new potential that never even existed before.
So it’s not just get my site accessible. It’s transforming your entire business. And now you’re bringing in people that have once been kind of pushed away on the sidelines for so long, now they’ve got this training and education from our workforce program.
And now they can walk into an industry right now, into a business and say not only provide accessibility services, provide that ongoing commitment, that loyalty, that completely different perspective.
Kim: You gave me a job, you changed my life, I’ve been unemployed for 10 years. That kind of story. I mean, we hear those every day. It’s amazing.
Mike: The loyalty aspects alone are worth every dime, because you, and again, you’re comparing to what their competition is. These are adults who have been excluded and now have tools and they just want to be part of it. And then you start thinking about efficiency and productivity. And that whole thing, and that whole game, that’s a whole game changer for the, for any organization.
Kim: Getting inside the organization and being able to streamline their processes, and it’s just amazing. It’s so fun because there’s so many times with accessibility where you feel like you hit a brick wall. And you really don’t. You just have to take a step back or even just look, at the doorway on the side.
There’s always a way around. I was just working recently on like an antiquated database company I was working with. They haven’t upgraded in forever. The people they have working are using screen readers, what happens is it reads through the table, it’s missing entire columns of data.
So, they can’t finish their job, and it’s well we can’t ask for support, the thing’s 25 years old, well maybe not 25 years old, but it was old.
Mike: They’re listening, Kim, they’re listening.
Kim: Yeah, we have this, yes, I’m not naming any names.
But we have this problem and how do we get around it? We’re not just going to say, okay, we can’t do it. I think we have to lay this person off. And that’s where we know we’ve succeeded because we can find that way around. And actually I was talking with one of the employees there and they said, you know what?
You gave us a great suggestion and then I took that home and I thought, well, why don’t I just do an export? That’s a much more accessible format than the database than anything else. It’s faster because it doesn’t have to be online. So now I’ve got the employees thinking about how can I make this more efficient?
Mike: Yeah, that again, I just go back to that’s one of the things that makes us different because we’re actually we have a senior level person who is driving major decision making in organizations and you’re actually putting in extra effort to help the company get better. Again, it’s not just a checkbox, like again, not just a training checkbox, but I have a website, I have templates, I have workflows, I have got my VPAT. We’re going to work with you to figure out ways to get to where you want to get to because it matters. And our team, again, I remember just being in the agency days, it was always this thing. We would go out and we would talk to companies and they were like, “Oh, this is great pitch and great all these things. And it’s well, who does the work?”
And there’s nothing worse when you actually hire somebody to do something because they come out and they bring you in and all of a sudden you say, “Sure, let’s do it.” And then a whole other crew comes out. You never met them before. You have no idea who they are and they’re not skilled.
I’ve always said this and I believe this very much so, that you get the leadership, the support, the consulting up front, the authenticity, the story, the mission, all those things up front and we deliver better on the backside. It’s always, “Wow, we had no idea what we didn’t know. We learned so much. The testing team, Kim, went above and beyond. They’re helping transform our business.” That is real stuff. That’s what people say.
Kim: Right.
Mike: That’s what everybody says.
Kim: No, I love it. And I love it too because, you know, I’ve got a lot of experience, but then I also bring in all my team members. If I have, somebody who’s working on a low vision system, I bring in another team member, somebody who needs screen reader. I’ve got people who are using this technology every day, all day.
And they know how to optimize it, and it’s really amazing some of the things that they think of just to make their job easier on them. How can I shorten this? What do I have to memorize? That sort of thing. It’s not the same experience. I’m always telling everyone, you may be used to seeing things this way, but I tell people if you want to learn a screen reader, do it.
That whole empathy thing that we, that, John talks about a lot.
Mike: Proximity builds empathy.
Kim: Knowing, okay, well, why don’t you figure out this document with a screen reader? How do you feel about that? I mean, there’s that whole I don’t know how to use a screen reader thing, so it’s really awkward at the beginning. Once they figure out how to use it, then it’s still challenging.
Mike: It’s incredibly challenging.
So that goes back to this sort of importance of manual testing, right? So you have all this in a world full of AI, which is, again, I’m, I think the companies that are doing AI, it’s amazing and it’s great.
And they do some really cool stuff.
Kim: I have a lot of clients that say, I’m a roadblock. I can’t think. I’ve got to do alt text for a thousand images and I’m like, after 20, my brain goes dead. I don’t know what to do. We’ll plug it into AI and then fix it.
Mike: Those are good tools.
Kim: Then fix it. It’s the important thing.
Mike: Yes, but then it’s also this dependency on a product that is an overlay that says, “Hey, I’m going to go ahead and just fix all your problems for a flat fee for the rest of your life.”
Kim: That’s the thing is you’re paying that flat fee months on end, but you’re not advancing. You’re staying at the same spot. Most, let’s say mid-priced one, maybe $800 a month.
Mike: Yeah, mid price. Do that for five years.
Kim: Well, yeah, and the navigation menu, let’s say the navigation menu doesn’t expand and the user can’t get into it.
Mike: So you just pay that much money.
Kim: The AI doesn’t fix that. So you’re paying 800, maybe it does, but you know, take two months, you’ve already paid a developer to fix it.
And then you may even realize, hey, that menu is really obnoxious. It had extra links we didn’t need. Let’s clear them out. Let’s get people to click the links we want them to go to. So, there’s all of that, too.
Mike: There’s a ton of that. And that’s one of the challenges, because, again, it’s hard to tell an organization not to think that way, right?
Because that’s what agencies do. A lot of agencies. I don’t mean to umbrella everybody in, but it’s, well, we have to do this. The company wants us to do ADA, so let’s just do a bolt on. And it’s $1,000 a month, or $800 a month, and we can charge them $1,500 a month. We can make $700 a month on top of it. And then at the end of the day, it doesn’t work, they still get sued and the customer comes and they’re not happy.
Often times, and I was saying in the very beginning of this I, it’s gotta be 50 percent plus that we’ve talked to. That have worked with an agency, that were told they were gonna do it right. And I still struggle with it because we have some incredible agency partners that are actually doing it the right way with us and we and they’re part of our allyship program and they, we help train them and educate them and we do partnership programs with them and co-marketing.
It’s wonderful. We attend trade shows together and there are great companies that are doing it, but, and I understand the challenges. You don’t want to let revenue out the door. I get that. I get that. But at the same time. I’ve always, the agency guy that I was, I always believe you put your client first, period.
And it’s not, you don’t put your agency first. You put the client first. And if you put the agency first, it’s just like an education. If you put the education institution first versus the student, you lose. So, in an agency, you have to put your client first and you can’t just offer solutions that you have no idea what you’re doing or plugins that you don’t know you’re doing and telling your client, “Guess what, you’re going to be fine.”
Kim: And there are things, like I said before, that don’t, just can’t, aren’t in the scope of those AI bots, you’re still liable.
Mike: Which, and you’ve paid.
Kim: And there’s no guarantee, they may tell you there is, but there’s no guarantee.
Mike: I agree, there can’t be, but what I love about it though is, and I do think AI has a component, and automated tools have a component.
Kim: That’s the thing, they’re not all bad.
Mike: No, they’re not all bad. And there’s some.
Kim: I always say they’re a good start.
Mike: They’re a good start, but I also think they could potentially be a better supporter in the backside. Work with a manual testing company, get into the actual violations, resolve the issues, validate the resolutions. And then if you need to bolt on something on the back end, after the site has been fixed and corrected and is usable and compliant and functional and accessible then, but to depend on it to create usable experiences.
Kim: Those automated are great once you know what you’re doing, just to make sure you’re still doing it right.
Mike: I agree. So let’s lead into the importance of education now based on that because that is one of the areas that is the hardest thing to educate. Because a lot of times you’re looking at accessibility as either a last minute add on or something that I have to do. So make it cheap. Make it quick. Just make it go away. So education is a major part of what we do, and I do a lot of it upfront too, but talk about how important it’s in this industry because it’s, this is a growing industry.
We just got outta this incredible event at LCI and the statistics on vision loss are increasing rapidly, and yes, there’s incredible stuff out there with cataract surgery and all these wonderful things, but when you look at glaucoma and you look at diabetic retinopathy, you look at macular degeneration.
Kim: Aging in general.
Mike: They’re going up 10, 12, 15 percent year over year, and then you factor in these little cute little phones that they trap us on every day, and our eyes are suffering significantly, so this accessibility stuff is here to stay.
And it matters. So talk about the importance of this educational piece because that’s, we take a lot of time with that.
Kim: Yeah. Well, it’s because it’s taken me a lot of time to learn what I know. I know it’s not just I can read a book in a weekend and figure it all out. It’s a learning process.
And as you go through, you realize your needs change. And so you may need to learn, new skills. There’s always something new to learn. And new technologies, so that’s the other thing is it’s kind of a moving target as we go through. You have to always be thinking always on your toes.
Always looking out for anything that, you may need to improve.
Mike: Looking back at our very humble beginnings it’s always been about mission. And it was always about integrating what we do into other organizations so they can take over.
Do you feel like we’re making an impact there?
Kim: Absolutely. I just, yeah, I have so much fun with all of our clients.
Mike: Yeah, we have a great group of clients.
Kim: We do.
Mike: And a lot of them have been sitting in this seat too, which has been fun.
Kim: Yeah.
Mike: So, that, I mean, because that matters in mission. You know, it matters.
Kim: Right. And the fact that they’ll come here just to spread the word.
Mike: That is true.
Kim: You know, and the fact that we, it’s not just us talking about it, it’s them talking about it as well. This, I was in your seat. I was scared. I was on the other side where I had no idea what I was getting into. Go for it. You’ll like it.
That kind of thing.
Mike: Yeah, I want to ask you just a tricky question around the legality aspects of it. Because, when we started the business, it was very important for us not to be that company. That threatens or gets scared about and sells. We’re not a sales company. We don’t sell, sell, sell.
We try to align with organizations that are like minded that actually care about doing this stuff. But with Title II, it’s a new change. But also lawsuits are still jumping. And I think I remember it was about 700 in 2020 and I feel like I’ve seen 11,000 and I’ve seen 7,000 and I’m seeing even more and more.
Kim: It’s because they don’t separate out the type of accessibility lawsuit.
Mike: Okay, that’s probably what it is.
Kim: Yeah, but it is, it’s consistently growing as you’re seeing.
Mike: And when you think about the investment aspects, because again, what we do is manual. It’s manual labor. So we charge based on an hourly rate. And really, I always say before, what we do with our profit is we hire people with disabilities. It goes right back into the business and that’s what we do. But it’s an effort. It’s not something that’s just so, we just run a scan and it should be this.
So we put time into it. There’s manual testing. There’s usability testing. There’s video content that gets created. There’s visuals. There’s roadmaps that are created for reporting. There’s all kinds of stuff. When you think about the cost of not doing it correctly. And I know we’ve had some examples of little things, like someone had to pay $25,000 over a small kitchen product.
That’s just in a settlement. That’s not even the legal fees that are $500 an hour from a hotshot lawyer in New York, which could also go to $20,000.
Kim: There’s no limit.
Mike: It’s crazy the amount of money that can be spent in a lawsuit. But yet, it’s typically half. Well, it can be half if you do it the right way, the first way.
Kim: Yeah, my favorite from one of our clients, they said, “I want to get to the point where we’re proactive rather than reactive.” Because nobody wants to be in that seat. Somebody’s in the hot seat. When they get that demand letter from lawyers, I have to deal with this.
This is my job and my job until I get this fixed. And it’s not something that, like you said, with the lawyers going into court, processing paperwork, it’s not something you’re going to easily get done. Plus they have their regular job.
Mike: Yeah. Well, and then it’s a quick settlement. And then what do you do after that?
Do you do the work then? Because that goes away. And then someone else can knock on the door tomorrow.
So it never goes away unless you fix the issues.
Kim: I’m a superstitious person and I think they keep people on lists and they revisit it and they’ll check you again. I hope that’s not the case.
Mike: It is the case because I know there’s a lot of organizations that go through this multiple times. Again, I don’t love to talk the legal thing, but sometimes I feel like it has to be addressed because all too often it’s like we take the easy way out.
Organizations that are manually testing. It’s just like building a website. There’s a usability component of it. You’re using experts that are certified to test all your content, your code, your design, your integrations, your plug ins to create universal experiences that all people can use. It’s an effort.
It’s an investment in time. And it’s not a huge investment financially, but it’s an investment. It’s not like a little widget or a plug and I put on my site for $800 a month and I’m good. I got to put a little bit more into it, but the education that comes out of it, the learning that comes out of it, the protection that comes out of it, the reputation that comes out of it, there’s so many benefits.
Why is it so hard for everyone to understand that?
Kim: I think it’s a lot of factors. Maybe they don’t have the executive support. Maybe there’s one person, screaming in the void, listen to me, we need to do accessibility. Maybe they just don’t have the resources. Maybe they don’t know how to structure it.
There’s so many things that stop an organization from starting an accessibility plan. And, that’s something that we help people through. I even have a training course on putting accessibility into practice. Yeah, we all want to do it. Why not? Sounds great. I love inclusion. How? And then they stop.
And that’s what we’re here. We want to push them past that line and make sure they get to the point where they feel empowered and they can do something. Make little changes. I always say, celebrate the small victories. It may feel like you’re doing nothing, but if you’re just doing research, if you’re getting smarter, you’re doing something.
Mike: Chris Ruden was sitting in your chair, he said the same thing. Small wins. And sometimes my brain doesn’t, my brain gets stuck. And I’m like, can’t.
Kim: And so many people do. They see that roadmash, roadmap remediation report, see that’s fun.
Mike: Roadmash.
Kim: We’ll better be short. We’re going to roadmash.
Mike: So lets talk about roadmap too because, one of the things now that we’re doing with this Title II shift and our organization’s evolving and it’s evolve or die kind of scenario. We’ve got all these services and products that we can support you in.
We’ve got the Ablr 360, which is the five step program, we’re not going to dive into that today, but there’s five step program starts with the audit goes validation consulting, the VPAT, the training. Then we have assurance, which helps organizations figure out where they want to go.
They don’t know exactly where they want to go. They just build on what we want to do. And that came from companies that were doing the 360 and then after having such great experience with our team and you was like, well, we want to do more. And we’re like, okay. An assurance was birthed out of that.
And then you have the advantage program, which I love because you get the best of both worlds. Let’s get the audit done. Let’s get the roadmap report done. Let’s get the accessibility statements and documentation. Let’s get you protected to mitigate risk. And then. We’ll start rolling into all these other things and helping you go out.
And that’s where a lot of our companies are, about 80%. But now this consulting piece is such an important piece.
And so we’re rolling out some new products now, and support products to help organizations not necessarily feel like they have to dive all in on something tomorrow. But they can take baby steps with having expert guidance, expert support, and we can help refine and define what they ultimately need to do and why they need to do that.
Kim: And we talk about accessibility maturity. You come in and you don’t know what you want, you don’t know what you’re looking for, you want something. And so we guide people through that. Where are you right now? Let’s ask some of your stakeholders. Let’s ask some of your employees how they feel.
Do they feel supported? Do they know what to do if they had an accessibility issue? Those kind of simple questions. And then we give you a score. It doesn’t matter what your first number is. It’s what you do after that. You get that first measurement.
So for the accessibility maturity model, we’re going to measure you where you are today, and then we’re going to have that discussion.
Where do you want to be? What’s important to you? What are your first goals?
Let’s build a policy so you can make this thing repeatable. Nobody even has to think about it. They know what they’re supposed to do. When you have a policy, it’s like we’ll just follow the guidebook.
Just do it. It’s part of the policy. Part of your training.
Mike: We can help write policy. We can help create documentation. We can help do physical accessibility evaluations. We can help consult work with stakeholders and all different kinds of organizations to determine what their needs are. And then we can collect a collection of assets because that’s again, it’s not just one thing.
It’s all things. It’s external client facing and it’s internal employee facing because the first step might be the website, but then all of a sudden you got to look inward, all the systems internally. Having a consultancy and help you define that and build out a roadmap of how do we deliver. And it’s a strategic roadmap. It’s not just, “Hey, we need to do all these things.”
It’s okay. Let’s figure out how we’re going to get there together on your time frame. Also, you learn a lot. You get educated, everyone’s learning about the awareness aspects of it, and it’s fun, because I think that’s one of the things we try to do, is have fun.
Kim: We do. Yeah.
Mike: So, how much fun do you have?
Kim: I have a lot of fun. Yeah.
Mike: You having fun now?
Kim: And that’s really, yeah, absolutely. That’s really what kept me here, is that it changes every day. I don’t think I’d be able to do the same job every day, and I think our clients see that. It’s not just one size fits all, we’re going to make sure that, like you said, with your timeline, whatever works for you, how are we going to make this work?
And a lot of people come in strong and they think, I’m going to do it all today. I’m going to get my hundred percent by three months from now. And then, those are the ones who go quiet. They go quiet, and then they feel guilty. They’re like, oh, I can’t talk to Kim anymore because I didn’t do my homework.
I don’t care if you did your homework, just keep talking to me. Let’s keep this discussion going. You know?
Mike: I love that. Alright, so I want to ask you, in your opinion, what is the current state of accessibility? Cause it’s gone through a lot.
And I’m just interested because, years ago it was literally trying to talk people into the importance of this. And we spent years getting people to finally listen. And then we started, we kind of ramped up. People were like, yeah, we got to do this. You know, e-commerce companies and pharmaceutical and healthcare and associations and foundations and state run organizations and colleges and for profit institutions and the list goes on and on.
And now there’s some climate changes, and to me, I think accessibility is more important than ever, especially with the evolution of AI, especially with the evolution of digital content. And we’re producing more content that we can keep up with, because you remember when we started, the statistic was like 90 percent of all, or 93 percent of all content.
It still is! And we have 250 brands that we work with, and we’re one company. There are companies that are doing this all the time, and we’re still not beating that number down. As a director of accessibility who knows this, who’s lived it, and yes, you’re always learning and growing, and you’ve got this incredible team, but how do you see today what is the current state of accessibility, and then I want you to give me a sense of sort of what your vision is for the future state of accessibility.
Kim: Oh boy. We’re talking future here.
I’ve been in this industry long enough. I’ve seen it. The slow starts. I’ve seen technology evolve, and I think that’s the most exciting piece of it because we’re all starting to work together.
So now there’s technology companies like Lenovo out there saying, “What can we do at the start of a project to make this more accessible?”
So, we have things being built in, I always like to say accessibility should be opt out rather than opt in, shouldn’t be something like you say, bolted on.
It’s not something that you can just afterthought throw it in there. Regardless of whatever’s going on in the outside world, there’s this constant, we need to make sure that people can access information. That’s not going to go anywhere.
Mike: I would say we’re aging into it. We’re a second away from a disability.
Kim: Absolutely. Situational.
Mike: Walk outside. Boom.
Kim: I would even say, not a disability. You’ve got a glare on your phone. You can’t see the screen. If you’ve got a low contrast interface, you can’t see your screen.
Mike: It’s incredible to me, right? I’m going through some challenges with my eyes right now. And we were sitting in front of a hundred foot board today. And we were in the front row, and I couldn’t see anything. And I had to use my phone multiple times to zoom in on the PowerPoint because I forgot my glasses, so I could see what it was.
Kim: I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve done trainings. I do trainings and people are like, I had no idea that was an accessibility enhancement. Because people are using it without even knowing.
People magnify the stuff on their phone, they use magnification. That wouldn’t have been there if there was no accessibility.
So we’d all be sitting there with reading glasses trying to read our phones, but it’s built in.
Mike: Yeah. And that was usually the intent with agencies was to help us help you build it in. Yeah. If it’s built in, you don’t have to go backwards.
Kim: People notice that it’s missing, but if it’s there, it’s just a great experience.
Mike: Hmm. That’s a good point. I want to kind of wrap this up here in a few, but tell me three things that you would say to an organization that is on the fence or having difficulty getting buy in from someone else. It’s not a priority. We’ve got to put it on hold. Disability community isn’t part of our target.
It’s behind a million other things. You know, you hear them all.
Kim: Yeah. Well, I’m actually lucky. I get to everybody after you.
Mike: Maybe I should be answering that question.
Kim: Yeah, exactly. You have the great perspective. You’re right. You’re right. It almost just doesn’t compute with me.
Mike: But your perspective is important because you’re the expert who lives it and breathes it behind the scenes every day.
I talk about it because I’m passionate about it and I care about it and it’s a mission and it matters and our team, it matters. It’s frustrating when we need to focus on Q4 or we need to invest in new furniture or whatever we have to make cuts in marketing.
It’s just it’s not prioritized and it’s something it’s like saying, Oh, by the way, your experience doesn’t matter.
Kim: Exactly. And that’s the thing. You just have to show them that it does matter.
Mike: Okay.
Kim: You know what I mean? That’s one. It’s one. That is definitely one. It does matter.
Yeah, no, I don’t have two, Mike.
Mike: Come on. I want to see it.
Kim: Actually get me thinking.
Mike: Yeah, I want to see you think of it. But, I mean, not from my perspective, from your perspective. You live in it and breathe it every day.
Kim: Yeah, I see the end product.
Mike: You see people that suffer and struggle because they can’t use it.
Kim: And it’s painful. You go through the user experience and they can’t see that there. How can they ever get to the point where they can use that and not have to ask, you don’t have to ask a friend. So many times, if you’re booking an air flight, you know I have to go ask my friend to help me with my credit card information. Who wants to do that? Everybody wants to be independent.
I always go back. Yeah, I go back to the user. It’s the user experience. So everybody wants to be independent. Everybody wants to be able to control what they get to see and what they don’t get to see. One time I had a client say, “Why do I have to do this?”
Because, I don’t think we have anyone on our website that’s visually impaired. How do you know that?
Mike: I mean, you can go from low vision to, again, retinitis pigmentosa, macular degeneration, diabetic retinopathy I mean, there’s a cataract disease, there’s and you have different types of vision loss, it might be a cone you might not be able to see in front of you, you might be able to see the peripherals, you might be seeing lights, or darkness, or fireworks, or really low vision, or color blindness. Again, that goes back to the education piece, right?
But you just make this assumption that, well, I don’t have people that can’t see. You’re talking about millions of people that have struggle with vision is better than I can’t see. They struggle with vision. And that is how we function. Our vision is so critically important.
Kim: Well, what we find is if they get a block, they run into a roadblock, they’re less likely to reach out to you and say, “Hey, I can’t fill this form out.”
They’re just more likely to just abandon.
Mike: Abort and roll.
Kim: Yep.
Mike: And then people go, well, that’s only just one person, the community is so small, but when you start looking at it all adds up, it’s trillions of dollars in the buying power.
Kim: My husband went to your website, tried to fill out a form, couldn’t do it. I’m not going to order from you either. There’s that loyalty aspect to friends and family.
Mike: So the reputational thing I think is absolutely critical. Reputation is often underlooked in this. I think obviously doing the right thing, although that seems to be hard today to convince people to do the right thing, but it matters.
It really does matter. You’re excluding people.
Kim: I think at the end of the day, everybody cares. They just need to see it.
Mike: They need to see it. And okay, so the reputational components are massive. The increased conversion rate components and increased usability and all those things are super important. Again, the technical aspects of SEO and all those things are important.
The fact that you’re actually improving conversion rates and user experience, which I might have just said. The other component is, why would you ever want to, as a business, why would you ever want to not sell to someone?
Kim: How could you ever say that 25% is not valuable?
Mike: And then you factor on the people that they’re family and friends with, and then you think about social media and the spread. I mean, every time there’s a lawsuit for a big company, you see it. Boom. Everywhere. So, be proactive.
Talk to an organization like Ablr, or people specifically that are manually testing, that are certified, because that matters too.
Certified users matter. Testers matter. It’s not just, I’m just going to put a blindfold on and use a screen reader. It has nothing to do with understanding, with earning your CPACC, or getting your trusted tester. These are complex usability things, and you need experts to do them.
Kim: And there’s no one expert to do it, I try to do as much as I can with a screen reader, but that’s why I have my teammates who use screen readers every day. There’s no replacement for actual end users.
Mike: Done. Thank you, Kim Casey, our Director of Accessibility. It’s great to help get some real insight into what the real challenges are. Because, again, it’s easy for some people to hear from me saying it, but from someone who’s living and breathing it every day and leads an incredible team of people at this incredible company that do this work, your insights are incredibly appreciated. So thank you for coming on here. Thank you for being here.
Thank you for fighting the camera bashfulness to step up and say the things that needed to be said. And I know everyone on this team appreciates you. So thank you.
Thanks for tuning into this episode of Access Granted, featuring the brilliant Kim Casey. If something she said sparked a new perspective, that’s exactly what we’re here for. At Ablr, we’re proud to have a team full of experts like Kim, all driven by the same mission to make accessibility, the norm, not the exception.
We’re here to open doors, challenge the status quo, and build a future where everyone’s included.