Selling accessibility to your maintenance clients and stakeholders can generate regular recurring income as well as it can make their websites more accessible and compliant with legal responsibilities. This can also help them avoid unexpected costs later on, such as legal fees and the cost of fixing the issues that cause them.
- Determine which of your maintenance clients are good candidates for selling accessibility by looking at their marketing budget.
- Sell accessibility to clients during trigger opportunities such as new maintenance clients, annual reviews, and big news items.
- When discussing accessibility with clients, focus on user experience and tell stories to make it more relatable.
- Phrase discussions in a people-focused way, such as “Can people find help if they experience problems with your site?”
- Present a solution to clients, such as a one-day theme change or a fix-in-place strategy, to improve web accessibility.
Transcript
Welcome back to the Easy A11y Guide channel. I’m Gen Herres, and in this video, I’ll be covering how to sell accessibility to your maintenance clients.
Determine which of your maintenance clients to sell to
The first part is determining which of your maintenance clients are good candidates for selling accessibility to. For this, you need to look at their marketing budget. If a client has very little marketing budget, less than a few hundred a month, they just aren’t a good candidate to sell accessibility to. If they do have a decent marketing budget, then it’s time to move forward and see how you can sell it.
Determine when to sell to clients with trigger opportunities
Now, we’re going to talk about when to sell. We look for trigger opportunities. These are moments in time that occur via external factors. The first one is when you receive a new maintenance client. During your initial onboarding audit, this is a great time to bring up accessibility, or as I usually call it, usability of a website while you’re going ahead and talking about all the other different aspects of the site that you’re checking as you onboard them.
The next opportunity is during their annual review. If you have a client with a decent-size marketing budget, you are probably doing an annual review to talk about what’s happened over the last year and where you can go forward from this point. This is a great time to tie accessibility in with everything else.
Finally, when you have a big news item. For example, the Department of Justice just released information about Title 2 of the ADA and that those websites will now be required to comply with WCAG 2.1 Level AA. This applies to state and local governments. If you have any websites that fall under this group or are funded by state and local government money, then you’ll definitely want to bring up this news item with them and talk about how it impacts makes them.
When you’re talking to your customers and clients about an onboarding audit or an annual review, you want to make it a little bit of a competition. Talk about some of the other websites that are in a similar space or direct competitors to your client. This is a great way to build some competition and make them want to outdo their competitor.
Here you can talk about different aspects of their website. Legal responsibilities, like making sure that they are complying with privacy policies. SEO, how are they doing in search engine rankings? Security, is their website secure? Speed, is their website fast? Does it load well on mobile devices?
Usability. This is how I usually phrase accessibility with maintenance clients, is I talk about usability. Can people actually use their website out in the real world under non-ideal circumstances? Now that we have the discussion started with our clients, we want to talk about how to phrase the discussion.
First, we want to see if that client has any legal obligations. If they do, we definitely want to focus on that because legal obligations tend to be a lot more clear-cut. But for many clients, we don’t have clear-cut legal rules. In that case, we want to focus on people. We want to talk about user experience and we want to tell stories.
Tell stories when talking about user experience on the client’s website
So one story that I sometimes tell is how I was talking with a friend, and I wanted to grab an article to answer a question for them. So I was on my phone, I was outside. It was bright and sunny, so I grabbed my phone and I went to my web browser and I opened up the search engine. On the search engine, the text was nice and clear. There was plenty of contrast. The font was large enough, I could read it.
I put my search query in, and the first website that comes up in the search engine, I click on. Well, guess what happened? The font was super light. So it’s bright and sunny out and the page was completely washed out. It’s basically illegible, and I have 20/20 vision. So back from that page I went.
The next one I opened up, but it was tiny. There was plenty of contrast, but the font was just super tiny and was all smushed together. It was really unpleasant. So back to the search engine I went. Number three. Third time was the charm. This website was easy to read. The font was larger, The font was more spaced out. It was a pleasant experience.
That’s the one that I shared with my friend. That’s the one that I then went on to post on social media. I talked about and I shared the articles and I stayed on the page because I could actually read it. This is what real people do in the real world. If you give them a poor experience, they leave. I tend to make my discussions with clients people-focused.
Make your discussions with clients people-focused
Instead of saying, “Does your website have an accessibility statement?” I say, “Can people find help if they experience problems with your site?” It gets to the same solution, but it phrases it in a people-focused way. Instead of talking about keyboard accessibility, I will say, “Can people with dexterity issues or low vision use your website?” Again, we talk about people, and people who encounter barriers leave and go to competitors.
Then when I want to talk about color contrast, I go right back to that phone example. Well, guess what? Poor color contrast, I can’t read on my phone outside in bright sunlight. It’s completely washed out and illegible. I talk about, “Can people use your website on a phone in the real world?”
For closed captions and transcripts, instead of listing out WCAG criteria, I say, “Can people use it in a coffee shop? Loud noisy environment where it’s not okay for you to be blasting audio out of your speakers.” Instead of saying, “Can a screen reader go through this website?” I say, “Can people who have reading difficulties, like dyslexia, use it?” Dyslexia is actually very common, and many people know someone who has it.
Instead of saying, “Does your form have proper labels?” I say, “Is your form easy for people to use? What if they get interrupted and need to come back later? Can they still use it?” Once I’ve got the client engaged in a discussion and feeling like they are actually starting to drive forward, yes, we want to focus on people and their experiences.
This is when I normally bring up WCAG or the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. I talk about how there are standards for HTML and CSS. The same international authority that creates these standards has also made a set of standards for determining whether a website is usable or not. They call these WCAG or Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, and frequently Currently, we’ll just refer to this as accessibility.
Present a solution to your clients
Now that the client is engaged, it’s time to present the solution to them. This will look like either a large project, a one-day theme change, and/or a fix-and-place strategy. Let’s talk about each of these three items.
The first is a large project. This is if you want to do a complete overhaul to the website, take it to staging, and take weeks to months to work on overhauling handling everything. This is an option for some clients, but it may not work for all of your clients.
Which brings us to the second two. If the website has a lot of issues that tie back to the theme, then I start with a one-day theme change. In one day, we can take their website over to staging, don’t make any changes on the live website, and change out their theme and frequently tick off a lot of different WCAG criteria in one go in one day. This gives us a big boost in web accessibility.
Then we’ll move on to a fix-in-place strategy. In this, we will work on their existing content in place. So focusing on either replacing one plugin, for example, if they had an issue with their existing form plugin, I would replace the forms one at a time with a new form plugin. If the issue was with a specific element on the website, like their accordion was inaccessible, I’d go through and replace all the accordions within the website with a new and accessible accordion.
And then fix various content issues and just generally clean things up as we go. I will normally structure this as a monthly package. This is great for a few different reasons. For me, it provides regular recurring revenue, and for the client, it allows them to space this out in monthly payments instead of trying to come up with a lump sum all at once.
Offer estimated price points
For the clients that I do white label for, which is several different agencies, I handle this as a $500 to $1,000 a month package. It’s all wrapped up with a neat little bow on it, and they can resell it to their clients with a markup, and they’ll frequently bundle it in with SEO services, which many of these agencies are charging a few thousand a month for their various ongoing SEO and advertising and social media services.
Now we get to the estimate. How much is this going to cost cost overall. I normally break this down into tiers. We have a high-level tier, which is normally what I present first. This gives the client an anchor price. If they get a little scared by this price, we have two more prices that are lower, and by the time we get to the lowest price, it seems a whole lot less scary because we anchored at a high point.
Typically, the highest level will be to get to full WCAG level AA compliance. That isn’t always achievable for all businesses. In that case, I move down to a mid-level. In this level, I’ll address everything that the automated checkers can find and the common barriers for people.
This includes screen reader testing the websites, keyboard testing the websites, and doing several other manual checks over the website in addition to the automated testing. Automated testing can only find a small amount of WCAG criteria, so we need to augment that with real manual testing so that we can get proper coverage and really help people use the website.
Finally, I offer the lowest level, and that is just the items that I identify in my quick audit. The quick audit is focused on the most common issues that are barriers for people, as well as the most common issues that show up in lawsuits. And guess what? The most common issues for people and the most common issues in lawsuits have a huge amount of overlap because, quite frankly, most lawsuits are suing you because it can’t be used by a person.
After I’ve talked about how long it’s going to take and the different estimated price points, then we’ll talk about what to do once we get done with our fixes. Here we’ll have two options. Either we move to a monitoring in minor fixes, which is a lower monthly fee, or we move to just doing an annual review once a year. Both of these options appeal to different audiences.
Recap of how to sell to your maintenance clients
To recap everything that we’ve covered in how to sell to your maintenance clients. Number one, you want to make sure that your client has a marketing budget. If there’s no If you’re on a budget, you’re not going to make the sale.
Number two, we use a trigger point. When we onboard, when we get to an annual review, or when we get a big news item, use this as the trigger for why you are bringing it up now. Then we want to focus on people and their stories. We want to talk about how a problem on a website impacts a real person out in the real world.
Then we’ll determine our strategy. Does the website need a new theme or does it just need some content fixed in place? And we move forward based on that strategy. And then we sell it as a package with different price points. We anchor high, and then we give two lower options to make those a lot more affordable and budget-friendly.
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.
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Thank you so much again for watching, and I look forward to seeing you in the next video.