Selling web accessibility is something you should do with all new website builds. If you aren’t selling accessibility, you are doing your clients and their customers a disservice. Accessibility is about allowing all customers to be able to use your client’s website.
- Sell accessibility to all new clients, regardless of budget.
- Determine the client’s target audience and their accessibility needs.
- Include accessibility in the design phase and revisit it throughout the project.
- Meet customer expectations by using familiar interactions and clear language.
- Offer tiers of pricing to accommodate different budgets.
- Use WCAG standards for web accessibility.
Transcript
Welcome back to the Easy A11y Guide channel. I’m Gen Herres, and in this video, I’m going to talk about selling accessibility with new website builds. In the previous video, I talked about selling accessibility to maintenance clients. If you’re looking for that, take a look at that video.
Who should you sell to?
Who to sell to. You want to be selling accessibility to all of your new builds, all of your clients. The trick is to have different price points for people at different budgets. For example, I have full builds that I do with clients, and that’s a comprehensive design and build process.
Whereas I also have a one-day build, which is for a discounted price and happens in just one day. That I include a lower level of accessibility with, but I still do include accessibility.
Find out who the client’s customers are
Before you decide what level of accessibility you want to sell to a given client, you need to determine if the client has a specific set of criteria or standards that they need to meet. Be sure to ask your client where they are and where their customers are. Also, make sure to ask them important questions like, where do they get their funding from?
For example, many nonprofits may be subject to government regulations. Be sure to follow the money when it comes to how an organization is funded. For example, if a nonprofit receives funding from state or local governments in the United States, then they fall under ADA Title II. If they receive funding from the federal government, they normally fall under Section 508. If they receive both, you’ll need to go with the higher standard.
In many European countries, there’s also a number of standards, and in Canada, there’s a number of standards. Be sure to find out who their customers are where those customers are. Then find out if there are any country or region-related accessibility laws that they need to comply with.
When to sell to your clients
When to sell to your clients. Always start as early in the process as possible. You need to include accessibility at the very beginning of the discussion because you need to take a look at any existing branding that they have and make any adjustments needed to ensure that that branding will comply with accessibility standards going forward into the design phase. You also want to revisit it in the design phase and make sure that your designs are in fact, accessible before you show them to your clients.
If you don’t have the ability to do this in-house, then you’ll need to bring on an accessibility consultant to do something like a design review, which I do regularly at the Easy A11y Guide. You always want to keep accessibility in mind at all phases of your project project because rework is very, very costly.
There was a study on accessibility. It found that an error discovered at the very beginning became 100 times more costly if that error wasn’t found until after the site went live. That is a massive amount of difference to your clients. Phrase the discussion with your clients.
Meet customer expectations
You want to let them know that you are excited about building a website that real people people can use in the real world. You want to talk to them about meeting customer expectations and user patterns that they are already familiar with. People like things that they are familiar with.
I like to use an analogy. When I’m driving a car here in the US, the turn signal is on the left-hand side. I push up to turn right, down to turn left. If someone were to make a car where the turn signal was on the right, I would be so incredibly confused and basically unable to use that turn signal. You don’t want to do that with your websites. You want to do things that people are already familiar with and that people already know how to interact with.
Meeting expectations. You want to ask your client about a time when a website didn’t work as they expected. If they don’t have an answer, you want to make sure to have some examples ready.
For example, I was recently trying to look up how to clear the cache for the Facebook developer. I couldn’t quite remember the words to type into the search engine, but I did find an article. At the end of the article was what’s called a naked link, which is the https:// slash right there on the page.
I thought I was going to have to select and copy the whole link and then paste it into a new browser window. But when I put my mouse on it, I actually discovered it was a link. This wasn’t obvious to me. I thought I’d have to do more work, and then when I’d accepted that I had to do more work, it then didn’t interact the way I expected it to. This caused me to be frustrated, and I left that site with a poor feeling about the site.
Next, you want to ask your client about positive experiences. The goal here is you want to have positive thoughts in their head before you get to the next step. Always have a few positive examples ready. For example, large shopping websites, large news organization websites. Talk about how those meet expectations.
Get your customer to say yes three times
Now we want to get the customer to say yes. Our goal is to get them to say yes three times in a row. And later, if they try to push back on something, we will bring it back to one of those yeses that they already agreed to. If the client doesn’t say yes three times in a row to these three questions, that is a giant red flag, and you probably don’t want to work with this client.
These three examples are things that I use, but you can change up the questions if you can find a better set of questions to suit the client’s agenda. The first yes that I go for is a really easy one. Do you want people to be able to use your website on their phones? By agreeing yes to this, they are agreeing to good color contrast because people use their phones outside in the sunshine where all the text is washed out. They’re agreeing to legible font sizes, again, outside in the sunlight.
They’re agreeing to clear links. Phones don’t have a hover state. They’re also agreeing that nothing is hidden behind a hover state because, again, phones don’t have one. The second yes.
Here you want to talk about imperfect people because we are all imperfect. I like to say we all have challenging days. Do you want a website that people can navigate even when they have a headache or a cold? They should say yes. What they’re agreeing to is plain, simple language.
No fancy fonts. When you have a headache, you cannot deal with fancy fonts. Easy navigation. Make everything easy to find. And no autoplay or big movements. If you already have the stomach flu, you do not need a website with a whole bunch of motion or parallax that’s basically going to make you vomit. That is not a memory people want associated with their website.
The third yes. Do you want a website that both people and search engines can understand by answering yes to this, they are agreeing to proper heading structures, good alt text on images, proper use of link text, and remember, search engines are screen readers, which means if your website isn’t friendly to screen readers, it’s not friendly to search engines.
Now, I like to introduce WCAG, now that they’re already on board and saying yes a lot. I bring up that there are already a lot of standards for HTML and CSS, and we want to follow the standards when building your website so that it renders well across browsers. Well, there’s also a set of standards for making a website usable by people. It’s called accessibility. There are standards, and those are called WCAG or Web Content Accessibility Guidelines.
Offer tiers of prices
Next, I want to make sure to offer tiers of prices. I always start with anchoring at a higher level price and then moving on to lower priced options. This means that if the high level is a shock to them, then the lower levels are going to seem a whole lot more reasonable and much easier to say yes to.
Also, if the existing website has a lot of content, and that content is going to need quite a bit of work to make accessible, what you’ll want to do is break it down into an initial build and then offer an ongoing remediation plan for the other content. For ongoing remediation plans, take a look at my previous video, which is Accessibility for Maintenance Clients, and that talks about selling remediation plans.
To recap, you want to sell accessibility to all of your clients. You want to check at the beginning if there is a specific standard that they need to meet. Then you want to sell it and make sure to include it in all of your phases. It is much, much less expensive to fix accessibility problems early than to wait until the end of development.
You want to focus on people and the impact that websites have on people and how well they can use them and ultimately convert and become customers. And you want to offer tiers. People like choices. They don’t like being forced into only one option. So you offer tiers. I normally offer three, a highest-priced one first, and then two lower-priced ones.
Thanks for watching. I’m Gen Herres from the Easy A11y Guide, where we try to make accessibility easier to implement through done-for-you services, tools, and processes. If you enjoyed this video, please give it a thumbs up. It really helps our channel.
You can subscribe to our channel for more accessibility tips and to be notified when new videos are released. For more information on web accessibility, including services, tutorials, and more, please visit easya11yguide.com. Thank you so much again for watching, and I look forward to seeing you in the next video.