Hey everyone. Scott Austin here. And in this podcast episode, we're once again going to be talking about Ada compliance because a lot of my clients and a lot of people in the industry are getting hit with these bogus lawsuits. So I'm doing multiple podcast episodes because every person has a different point of view, and you might learn something in one episode that wasn't available in another, or something might resonate more.

So today we have Amanda Porter from Interact one to talk to us. Welcome, Amanda. Can you give us a little bit of your, you know, street cred and why we should listen to you about Ada compliance?

Yeah, yeah. And it's one of those, when I talk to the attorney about this a couple episodes ago, you know, basically the answer was,

you can't get rid of this risk. You can just reduce or minimize it kind of thing.

I love what you just said there. Let's dive straight into it. What you guys are focused on is

evaluating compliance and then fixing issues.

So let's talk about how do you go about evaluating compliance in a store for your clients.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah. And thank you for, adjusting my tone of saying this Ada stuff is all bogus and B.S. there's actually a good side to these rules, and they're meant to help people,

you know, gain access to your brand, through your website.

my clients are getting inundated with the lawsuits, so I'm only focused on the negative side.

But you're absolutely right. They're there for a good reason,

 

Yep.

thank you for

for bringing that aspect,

to my, my

opening lines there.

So you're using this tool way, and you said it was a browser plug in other certain browsers. It works on.

Yep.

Yep. Yep.

It's amazing how sophisticated these scumbags of the internet are getting. Total

aside, I just.

All my clients get inundated in the past two days with emails from Scottrade, Puma at gmail.com soliciting

new services, which is obviously not me. Right. And just. And like, they're really

sophisticated. You know, it's it's crazy how scumbag people are.

But on this this wave

tool, do you like run it once and it scans your whole site.

Do you have to do it page by page? What's the execution process look like for you?

Yep, that makes sense. And what is the output. So you run it on a page and it's a Chrome

plugin. So is it given you a document? Is it listed on you know, what does it give you it. And when you said, you know, there's warnings and errors that sounded very search console to me were we always look at the errors and sometimes we look at the warnings kind of stuff.

And it's nice that the,

you know, hierarchy give a hierarchy to those those results.

Yeah.

Oh that's really nice. The

It's sort of like how Google Analytics used to have the layers on top. And it just points years the click rate on this part.

I didn't realize it was that good. Now in a Shopify

store because, you know, our audience is mostly Shopify.

When you mentioned BigCommerce, like people still use that, but that's,

I guess, legacy people.

But in Shopify stores, what sort of, you know, what are the top, you know, five or so errors that you're seeing that are typical in a Shopify store.

Good.

Well.

Yeah, I was really happy the day that Shopify rolled out AI suggestions for all text and made

that life a lot easier.

There's no bulk

edit in there,

but I'm sure there are apps that do that. They just have found them yet kind of thing.

the wave report that you get, you know, let's go back to the you know what?

What do you think are the top five, you know, types of errors? Obviously old tech sounds like one of them.

what other types of things can people see that are beyond the content stuff that is actually going to require a little code work or development work to fix?

Yeah.

Yeah.

So for you, attribution is, you know, flagging it as an h1, h2, h3 type of thing.

Because obviously can attribution is like giving credit to

the photographer or something. But that's my vernacular, right.

Yep. Thanks a lot of sense.

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Now when

you get to the the app side, which you said is the big offender, let me take a step back because you mentioned themes and you had said there's a lot of good themes. I assume what you were saying is when you're in the shop and when you're getting a theme for your store, go to the Shopify theme store, do not go anywhere else.

Right. Was always a good best practice for everything when it comes to buying themes. Always it from

the Shopify theme store.

And then in the world of themes, do you find that some are better or are they all kind of equal about that?

Yep,

With.

Do you get a score from with like a compatibility score?

Okay.

Nice.

So I could see where you could have, you know, two versions of your theme, the original untouched version offline.

And you measure that for a page and then go measure the current live one with, you know, the customizations you've done or the apps have done. And you can see the Delta and see, you know, what's more at fault?

Is it the content that you've added in or is it the theme itself?

And that might be a

good way to, to try to triangulate

where to go to fix things.

Which brings

up to the next question

that I have, which is a lot of times, you know, when I'm working with app developers and, you know, we make eight apps of our own here kind of thing.

Sometimes you get good responsiveness and they fix things and sometimes they don't get good responsiveness.

What is your experience and getting developers to do the work you need them to do, or do you guys have to take that work on yourself and and crack open their code?

I want to, you know, double down or double click on the contrast. Just so people understand because most most of the audience probably understands. But there may be a few people that don't. Right. And so contrast is, you know, if you have a background color and a foreground color like text on a background, the contrast is how much you can see the foreground color, the text given the background color.

For example, if you have light gray, you know, background in a dark gray. Foreground, there's less contrast than if the background is white and then the text is black. And so as

we start putting

in backgrounds and shading and textures, we lose contrast. And you know, another example would be, you know, a text over a banner image where there's, you know, lots of background colors and variations going on the banner.

It's hard to read the words, which is why, you know, sometimes you bring in a background color under the text to, you know, help with that contrast issue. But yeah, that's when you're seeing contrast and what the audience understand. That's what we're talking about. You know, my favorite thing is why can't we just make our text 000 black, right?

Instead of the 666

or the 333. Like, let's just make it black. And a lot of brands don't like that for, you know, very good reasons. But it really does help from the usability and readability of the site. Like, I have a site I'm working on right now.

And the client, you know,

we went with 000 black, but they've also got a textured background which isn't dark.

It's it's light, but it affects the contrast. Right. And they're telling

me, oh, this isn't readable. Let's

make it bold. Let's make the text bigger. I'm like,

how about we just get rid of the background,

And you lose that branding

element, but you increase the readability of it

and

that's a trade off you're talking about, which is very real

Yeah. There's two two

goals you have that are not aligned. I want to have strong branding. And I want to have, you know, good readability and contrast for everybody.

Ada especially, but everybody. And they're competing. And that just becomes like you're saying

one of those business decisions that becomes a really hard conversation to have

because different stakeholders have different goals.

And, you know, it's hard it's hard for any stakeholder to sacrifice their goal for the greater good.

Yeah. Yeah, I like that. You bring in the we have to think about the stage, like maybe you have more branding at the top of the funnel and less branding

at

the bottom of the funnel, kind of stuff like that.

Now, you were saying that what your agency does is a quarterly review, but do you also document that for the the store?

Like, here's the question I really want to ask you. If I'm a store and I'm doing this myself, what sort of documentation should I do to have a defense when needed? During one of these legal battles that happened?

We are not lawyers here.

We are not lawyers. Yep, totally.

Yep.

Well, what?

All.

Yep.

Now

my understanding,

most brands you have are all brands is my understanding. So one if this is a best practice you guys are using an accessibility statement

know is there is

there boilerplate for that or people just you know

just documenting. Here's our process. Here's what we're trying to do to help,

you know, make our site more approachable for everybody.

You know, what are some best practices behind accessibility statements?

And now

the other thing I have as a question for, you know, the front end of the website is, you know, in the App Store, there's plenty of apps that are going to tell you that you're Ada compliant if you install this app and pay a fee every month.

Do those help? Do you guys use those or is that a bandaid that really isn't appropriate or as useful as we want them to be?

Oh, that was a front end website.

I thought there was like a back end measuring tool you were using before. This is one of those you you put on the. Yeah. No, I'm wondering about those. You know, those websites with a little less accessibility tab where they increase your your text or change your contrast? Do you guys use those tools in in your Shopify stores to help the customer on the front end?

Yeah.

Yep.

called that as because because I'm seeing that same trend in everybody that I talk to is,

stoners are hearing they either are getting sued or hearing about their friends that are getting sued, like, oh, I need to protect myself from this. So they go to the App Store, they find the Ada compliant and it says, oh, we're wcaG or whatever, that that acronym is 3.3 and all that kind of stuff.

So they add the app in and they think they're covered.

And in the end

it didn't help them at

all. And it maybe actually

drew more attention to them kind of thing.

once again, we're not lawyers. We're not experts in this stuff. But, that is what I've been hearing also is the apps aren't aren't helpful.

And you got to do the hard work that you're going through, right? You've got to make sure your site is structured, you have the right attribution, you have alt tags, and you're fixing your code where it's being identified. Code needs to be fixed. It's not just like you can add in the silver bullet solution and and rest easy.

Yep.

another way I'd see what you're saying. I like what you're saying. There is. You need to make Ada compliance part of your DNA.

It's not

an afterthought.

It's part of when you build your site

and you integrate things. And Ada is one of those boxes you have to be thinking about and considering. When you're making those decisions.

Shopify store owners, every time you go to the dentist, you should have done

two

Ada compliance checks on your

website.

and and

I, I like that way of thinking about it like it's it's

a hygiene thing. You just make it part of

your process.

Even though we're all too busy. This is one of those there's enough pain if you don't do that process that it actually makes it worth doing that hygiene process you're talking about.

Yeah, it makes a lot of sense.

This is all great information, I appreciate it. Is there anything

about Ada for Shopify stories that we haven't covered that you want to mention?

You

know.

Yeah. And I would also add to that, I have not seen any brand get out of this for less than $5,000

and most

ignored 10,000 plus

kind of thing. So

not only is there the, you know, reducing the hassle, there's a real cost to these bogus lawsuits kind of thing.

But, you know,

hopefully we've

given them enough reasons, good, good reasons, positive feedback and negative feedback loops.

They understand, you know, how actually important it is to do,

I appreciate your time today. Is someone else to get Ahold of you or interact? One how can how can they reach out?

in.

Excellent. Thanks for your time today, Amanda.

Awesome. Thank you so much. Thank you for having me on. This is great.