Hey everyone Scott Austin here. And this week we're going to be talking a little bit more about Ada compliance. We've talked to an attorney recently about that.

And now we're going to bring in somebody from the agency side who helps brands

make their stores Ada compliant. And that is

Jordan Brannon from coalition. Welcome. Jordan.

Yeah it is certainly the bane of many brands existence. And it seems like it's only going to get worse before it gets better. So that's what I want to dig into a little bit here. Can you explain for our audience a little bit about what Ada compliance is and means for online stores?

Yeah. And one thing I just got to drop in here, completely tangential, is because this podcast actually gets listened to, equally by Americans and

other English speaking countries.

So we're actually big in Australia, Canada and UK.

And for you people who aren't Americans, you have no idea how the American culture is all about suing one another. We sue everybody for everything all the time.

And it's much less in your markets than it is in our. So here in America,

it's become a nightmare where brands are getting sued for not being Ada compliant. And like you just said, there are no rules for what that means. And

we all just have to figure

it out. So our legislation hasn't told us what the structure of those rules are.

So the lawyers are you know, we're suing. You're like, oh, it's this, this and this and, you know, blah, blah, blah. And nobody knows the answer. So it's everybody's just trudging around trying to figure it out, while paying money to lawyers, which is never cheap.

So what have you seen from the litigious state of things? You know who's getting you know, you mentioned the more you make and all that kind of stuff,

what can stores do to prevent or reduce their risk of getting sued

I'm just going to call them ambulance chasing, you

scum sucking shark lawyers.

Right?

when we talk about, you know, make sure you're compliant, what sort of things make a website accessible and what sort of tools can check for those things that make a website accessible.

I'm here for the book, but yeah.

I, I

You know.

Check

it.

It's.

Cheap for me.

Me me me me. For.

20

Okay. Okay. Okay. Keeping.

It. Keep. Stop. Okay. Thank you. We. It's.

Because your wrist goes up from the shark suing you.

Yeah.

Yeah.

But I'm finding as time goes on, that that threshold of how much money I've been making is getting smaller and smaller, and they're

going out and they're going to have the little

people. Now, amazingly. So

if I set up a Shopify store, throw in, you know, one of the themes from the theme store, how compliant would my store be out of the box, let's call it, versus how much work do I have to do to make it compliant from whatever I get from Shopify and my theme.

Yeah. So just so people understand as you're talking about contrast, what you're talking about is,

text over a background color. And if they're too close together, whether they're both light or both dark, that people with vision capabilities are like they got to squint and try to understand it. You know, there's actually metrics. There's the math. You can put behind it to see what the contrast ratio

is,

and you have to be above a certain number to be Ada compliant.

I've got a, you know, a store that I built, got a theme. It was fairly compliant. Let's say I added a bunch of customization. Some apps is no longer as compliant.

I run it through the tools that you had mentioned, get a list of things to do.

Can I just add one of those nice Ada compliant apps that I see in the App Store and then, you know, do a victory lap?

I'm done. Or do those help at all. And if they do help, great. You know, it's when that a little bit if they don't help, what else do I need to do.

Do you have an app in mind when you say that?

I've got this list from the ordered app. I'm you've now convinced me that all those great little free apps or low cost apps in the App Store aren't going to help me fix my problems.

What sort of things are going to be on that list that need to be fixed? And

what sort of steps we have to take to fix those things?

Yep.

And that's like alt text for the field

basically, right? Yeah. Yeah.

Yep.

Now, one of the things I didn't hear you mention is a is a common issue. So I'm wondering if it is still a common issue. I,

you know, is tab orders and the, you

know, having to tab

infinitely through things. Is that still an issue or

does the structure of

most sites out of the box now cover that for us?

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I've got this list of items and the stuff you mentioned don't sound that hard. You know, the the and what I love and shop for in the past year is now they have AI built right into

your content section, and it'll give you

the alt text half the time or so. It looks like it gives it to you.

So you don't have to think if you hit that button kind of stuff. And we actually go through our online stores and just go through their entire content list and click,

click, click, click, click, it's a lot of clicks. You can do it in bulk, but it's way easier

than than having to create that content yourself.

That's a big part of the work.

And the other stuff sounds like a lot of CSS or some just design choices that you make, like

to just

the color palette. Let's get, you know, thicker fonts. Let's go over here and adjust the CSS for padding on these things. They don't sound that hard. They sound like a pain in the ass, but they don't sound that hard.

are there hard things that do pop up that you haven't brought up yet

that are, you know, going to require some serious heavy lifting?

Go.

Yeah. And for those that don't know, sidekick is Shopify is I assume

every store owner by now has used it. But if you haven't,

it's amazing. And it's showing up everywhere.

And it's it's inside a theme customization. You can have it do things inside of your store admin. You can have it do things.

So it's just oh, it's why it's a great name.

Sidekick. It's always just sitting there. It's that little icon of the guy, the mask on or something like that up in the upper right. Usually click on it and ask it questions and see how it helps you, because it ties directly into all of the Shopify documentation

and uses that instead of, you know, like ChatGPT making stuff up.

It's very focused using on data that shopper has created to give you the right answer for what you're

looking for.

you're definitely recommending that people go in and, you know, get their hands dirty and understand this stuff, run the regular checks. What if my store is so large and complex? I've got so many apps that our in-house staff can't handle this.

How do we find a company

like yours?

That helps brands with this kind of stuff?

And what should we be looking at in those companies? What questions you should be asking them?

Yeah,

Yup.

And

I think you said it early on, but it wasn't in your summer list. It sounds to me like some of these agencies will also be there for you. During the litigious part of this conversation.

Too.

I just banging my head against the desk, listening to all the things we have to do. It's all great for, you know, people with disabilities. I love it for that reason.

But the fact we're

focused on this because of the lawyers just being

the.

Yeah.

Yep.

Yep.

Yep.

Now you were talking earlier on about having an accessibility statement where you explain to anybody, especially the lawyers,

what it is you're doing. Do you in that put in the software you're doing for testing the agency you're using to help you be compliant? Do you get to that level of detail? And does that scare away the attorneys because they're like, oh, these guys are legit.

They've got it buttoned up and we're going to leave them alone.

That makes sense.

is there anything about this topic that we haven't talked about that our audience should, should know about.

Yeah.

So I heard you say two things. One is it could get better when we have standards come through legislation and two, it's getting worse until that happens.

if a brand is is listening to this and they want to reach out to you guys and, you know, get your help, how do they find you and what sort of,

customer profile are you looking at for for your customer?

Excellent. Excellent. Thanks for your time today. I really appreciate you sharing all this information with us.