Nathan Porter Speaks About the Importance of Website Accessibility

Our transcript of the discussion between Nathan Porter and Jameson Files host Carrie Webber has been lightly edited for flow. To enjoy the audio conversation, you can watch on YouTube or listen to our podcast on iTunes, Google Play, or Spotify.

Jameson Files Episode 144

Carrie:

Welcome to the Jamon Files. I’m your host, Carrie Webber, and we’re thrilled to have you joining us for another episode. Today, we are going to focus on the realm of marketing. It’s always fun to learn about marketing. What’s the new trend? What are things that can help us be found more successfully or to bring in more new patients or to refresh our brand? All of those are always fun, but what we don’t think about as business owners is what we are doing to make sure that we are being compliant and that we are protected in how our website is present online and is performing. 

The ADA (Americans with Disabilities Acts) and Website Accessibility

You may or may not know that there are pieces to your website that must be compliant according to the Americans with Disabilities Acts. And so I am so thrilled to have our Chief Marketing Officer, Nate Porter, with me today for this episode to talk about not only what you need to be doing to make sure you are protected and being represented correctly according to those ADA standards on your website, and how to evaluate to see if perhaps you need to do some updates, but also we’re going to talk a little bit about your website in general. We often set it and forget it. Some of you may be a little more active and intentional in your marketing efforts, and you may be doing a lot of things well. Some of you may have some changes or some updates that you need to be considering. We’re going to talk about those today. 

Nate, thank you so much for being with me.

Nate:

Thanks for having me.

Carrie:

So, to start things off, let’s really just give everybody a scare, shall we? Let’s talk about websites from the side of being compliant according to the Americans with Disabilities Act. What does that even mean?  Why are we even talking about this? Can you give a little bit of an update, maybe a news report, on what we’re talking about today?

Nate:

So about 15% of the population has some sort of disability that would impair them from interacting with your website in the way that you and I would. It can be anything from someone who’s colorblind to someone who is fully blind or deaf. And so, the web platforms have been a little bit of a gray area for some time. The ADA has not been very forthcoming with their regulations and definitions for that. There’s certainly been some talk about it since 2015 or 2016, but the legislation hasn’t been there. So what’s driven this though for business owners and people who operate websites, whether it’s e-commerce or whatever, is legal actions.

Domino’s Loses Lawsuit Concerning Website Accessibility

In 2016, there was a landmark case against Domino’s where someone was trying to order a pizza allegedly, and they were not able to complete the process because they were blind and they couldn’t navigate to make that work. And so, people use assistive technologies like screen readers and things like that to help them in that process. Domino’s lost that lawsuit. They appealed it all the way up to the Supreme Court, and in 2019, the Supreme Court declined to overrule that decision. In a way that established the standard for what was acceptable when it comes to accessibility. Now here we are a few years later, and we’re seeing that the volume of lawsuits against people has really increased in this area.

Carrie:

So what you’re saying is since these lawsuits have started to take place, doctors’ practices may be thinking, well, Domino’s Pizza is a little bit bigger than us. But what you’re saying is, at this point in time, because of how the rulings have gone through in that kind of initial lawsuit, that puts every business owner that has a website online at risk for groups that are going out to see if you are indeed compliant based upon the ADA. We’re not talking about the American Dental Association here, people, we’re talking about the Americans with Disabilities Act. So what can practices do? What did they need to do to make sure they’re being compliant and not putting themselves at risk for a fine?

The Importance of Website Accessibility is Not Limited to Big Businesses

Nate:

So the thing to understand about this is that it’s not the same as other compliance in your practice. Other compliance in your practice would be like HIPPA, OSHA compliance, those kinds of things, which are obviously very important. And you may receive scrutiny for that or someone may report something in those cases. This is a little different because your website is considered a public space, and so it comes under different levels of regulation. Also what we’re seeing is that the people who are taking legal actions against website owners are not your patients, your local community, your customers. It’s legal firms who are using bots to scan the internet and find websites that are not compliant. Then they filter that by industry to see which industries have the highest likelihood to be able to pay a lawsuit or legal action. Then they pursue legal action against those businesses. In the last three years, half of the top 500 websites have been named in a lawsuit regarding accessibility. It’s very prevalent for small businesses and big businesses alike. And they’re winning these lawsuits. Essentially what they’re doing is when they find a website that is not compliant with accessibility, they work with a plaintiff on their side to bring the suit. Then they take legal action, so it can be very costly.

Steps to Take to Ensure Your Website is Accessible

Carrie:

So what are some of the initial steps that practices can do to make sure that they indeed have their i’s dotted and t’s crossed in this respect?

Nate:

So the usability factor is fairly easy to understand. Implementation is a little bit more difficult. 

What you have to look at, for people who are colorblind, for instance, you can’t have things where you’re using only color to indicate something. So if a field on a form is required and that’s indicated by red text, somebody who’s colorblind can’t tell that. So it’s something as simple as that. 

For someone who’s blind, there are assistive tags or texts that go along with images and that go along with the fields on a form that tell it what it is. It’s in the code. It’s not visible on the front end, but as someone’s using a screen reader, it tells them what that is. The same for video. For video, you are required to have closed captioning so that it can read what’s happening throughout the video. And also text that tells what the video is about.

Then there’s also contrast. For people who are vision impaired but not blind, if you have text over an image, that may not be very visible to them. Or if you have two colors that are too similar in tone, those might be visible to you and I, but it would be hard for someone who’s vision impaired to read. There are a lot of different things like that. 

We go through a process of auditing websites to identify how many things are wrong with them. It can also be something as simple as tab order. For example, if you’re tabbing through a page, maybe it’s jumping around instead of going in the order you would expect. So it really does require somebody to do an audit of your site to see what’s wrong with it. Our team is certified in accessibility. Each person has gone through 10 or 20 hours of training to identify all of this. Our developers are used to that, but it’s quite a bit of work to change that kind of mindset.

Website and Marketing Needs are Constantly Evolving

Carrie:

So, if this just seems overwhelming and you don’t even know where to start, because obviously this is something that we now know that five years ago wasn’t even a thing. This is just another example of the evolution of websites and marketing and why it’s important to stay up to date with your website. And so for those of you who need help with determining what your needs are for your current website, you can reach out to us at Jameson. We would be happy to have a conversation with you and work with you to audit your site to determine if you are all good, or if there are areas that need to be improved or changed to make sure that you’re representing yourself correctly according to these standards. This just makes me think about when I talk to people in lectures about marketing. I’m always telling them that if your website is three years old and you haven’t done anything to change it, it’s completely out of date. So if they haven’t done anything to their website since 2020, there’s probably an overhaul that needs to be done. 

Nate:

Right. So it’s easy to remember back to 2020; that was the pandemic.

Carrie:

Unfortunately, no one can forget.

Nate:

If you haven’t done it since the pandemic, it’s definitely time to take a look.

Carrie:

While we’re on the topic of websites, can we go a little deeper for a little bit? Something that I find interesting is that even though I feel like websites and the need for that has really been given its due justice at this point– we’re not necessarily fighting as much to help practices understand the need for that online presence. Most practices have a website. It doesn’t mean that it’s any good or even remotely current, but they have something online with their name on it. But that just doesn’t do the trick, especially if you’re paying a company to keep that going for you. What’s the point of investing in that when it is really not doing anything for you and your online presence and ability to be found? Would you like to join me on my soapbox about this?

Nate:

Yeah, so a website standalone is not a traffic driving tool. If you just put up a website and stick it out there, it’s kind of like taking a brochure and sticking it somewhere and hoping that people are going to find it. Maybe right after you launch it, you might get a traffic boost out of it because you are putting new information out there that’s getting indexed. It might give you a little boost. But if you’re wanting to actually drive traffic, especially if you’re in an area that’s somewhat competitive, it needs to be fresh. You need to be proactively putting new content out there constantly. It lets people know that you’re in business, you’re active. 

Google especially has a really hard job when it comes to local businesses because there are thousands of local businesses. Google needs to try to figure out which ones are open, which ones are relevant, which ones are engaged and popular. If it looks like nothing’s happened for a year, Google wonders, “Are they still open?” Now, if you’re in a rural area and you have zero competition, really it is just a brochure. So if someone types in your name, they know what you’re about. Maybe it’s not as big a deal, but there’s fewer and fewer situations like that.

Your Website is a Reflection of Your Business

Carrie:

So to me, the takeaways from this brief conversation are that when you think about your website, it’s much more than just that you have one up. You need to make sure that it’s compliant and that it’s really checking the boxes of what’s expected of a functioning website for any level of business at this point. There is an expectation because of that public domain piece. It has to be accessible to people. If you don’t know, then it’s time to do some due diligence. If you need help with that, beyond some of the advice that Nate gave today, reach out to us or the professional that you trust the most, and let us help you make sure that you are compliant and help you to get compliant if you aren’t right now. In addition, remember that your website represents you in a lot of ways, not only in your ability to be found by your communities or the right patients for you, but it is also a reflection to others of who you are as a practice.

By choosing not to keep it up to date, you’re losing relevance every year because websites adapt based upon how the user functions online. You want to make sure that your website reflects that you are up to date, that you’re relevant, that you’re open, and that you are reflecting the quality of dentistry that you want people to perceive  that they’re going to receive from you. So not only do you need to make sure that you are compliant with ADA– Americans with Disabilities Act–  standards for your own protection, but it also may be time to do an overhaul and a look through of your website. When was the last time it was updated? Are you being found in searches at the level that you want to be? Are you attracting the right amount of new patients and the right types of new patients because of your online presence? If the answer is no to any of those, it may be time to look for new support, or it may be time to do a refresh of your website so that you can start getting the results that you want and need through your online presence. 

So Nate, how can everybody find us? What would be some next steps in terms of both looking at their compliance standards at this point, but also if they need some ideas or some help with their websites? What can they do?

The Ineffectiveness of Accessibility Plugins

Nate:

So one quick note I wanted to mention about accessibility. There is a common misconception that you can buy a little accessibility widget, throw it on your website for 50 bucks a month, and that’s going to fix your problem. And it is tempting because it’s affordable, and it’s seems like a bandaid solution, but about 30% of lawsuits are including the websites who have the little accessibility feature.

Carrie:

Oh, wow!

Nate:

And so it doesn’t protect you because while it can offer some tools, it can block screen readers. So people can get lost and not know how to navigate just because that thing pops up. It also can’t add information that’s not there. So it can’t identify what a picture is about and add alt text to the picture. It can’t add explicit text on buttons. So it doesn’t protect you.

Carrie:

There’s no easy button.

Nate:

That’s a Band-aid solution that doesn’t work.

Carrie:

Band-Aid solutions in anything typically don’t work. So if it can be called a Band-Aid solution, it’s probably not a solution.

Jameson Marketing’s Solution to Website Accessibility

Nate:

But in terms of finding us, we’ve moved to a web platform model because of all the tools and HIPAA compliance and forms and all that. We’ve moved to an ongoing subscription model that keeps you from having to worry about this every two or three years. We implement these changes as they come along. There’s no more asking, “Am I out of date? Am I up to date?” It’s just automatic. You can go to jmsn.com. You can request a consultation with us and we can specifically just look at accessibility with you and do an evaluation of that for free, just so you have peace of mind to know whether you’re protected or not, or what the issues are that are on your current website. Then we can provide you with a recommendation from there.

Carrie:

So really there is an easy button. It’s not necessarily easy for us, but it makes it easy for you because you can reach out to us and we can evaluate your needs with you, complimentary, and let you know where your focus needs to go and how we could help you. 

Well, Nate, thank you so much for being with me today. And thanks to all of you. Remember your practice is multifaceted. There’s a lot that you have to be keeping an eye on and making sure is on the right track. Your marketing and your website is just one of them. So reach out to us @jmsn.com if we can ever be of help to you. 

Carrie Webber:

Thank you for joining us on this episode of the Jameson Files. Visit us online. You can subscribe to this podcast on iTunes, Google Play, or Spotify. See you next time.