Digital Accessibility with Expert James Warnken - Part 2

The digital accessibility expert, James Warnken, is back for this week's episode of the Brand Shorthand Podcast to continue the discussion on all things web accessibility. Join Mark and James to hear the reasons why businesses should care about digital accessibility, and the principles that can help guide you through making your digital content accessible. 

 Join Mark and James for 30-ish as they discuss all things marketing, advertising, and of course … positioning!

Transcript

Mark Vandegrift 
Welcome to the Brand Shorthand podcast. I'm your host Mark Vandegrift and today we will have part 2 of our interview with James Warnken as we talk all things website accessibility. So, enjoy and we look forward to seeing you on another episode of the Band Shorthand podcast.

Very good. You always touch on something which really we could have started this whole podcast with, and that's the reason to care about digital accessibility as a business, not just as a human. I think the human aspect of it, certainly there's people that just don't care, and I don't know that you'll convince them to care. But if you truly care about other people, you would care about this, but from a business aspect, right? There's two paths you could take. You could say, well, I can't afford it or I can't, I don't have the time or I don't understand it. So you can go out and you can buy a plugin, let's say, or I don't know, I call it the band-aid approach, right? The other option is you just do it right. There are ways to properly code a site, properly write content. Properly tag things within your website that, by the way, are beneficial not only for accessibility, but SEO. Describe your images, et cetera, et cetera. So compare and contrast those two ideas. This lets throw a Band-Aid on it and forget about it. And no, I really care about it. Let's do this right. Give us a sense for what the market is bearing that way. What the challenges are with the Band-Aid approach, and then we can expand further on that discussion here in a second.

James Warnken
Yeah. So I'll start for anybody that is interested on that business bottom line aspect of this whole conversation. There are Accenture reports out there that show benefits, increases in revenue, increases in customer and employee retention when you include accessibility as a part of your process. So you're not just doing the right thing, right? You're not just avoiding another lawsuit. You're increasing your revenue. You're increasing your audience segment size by 25 % if not more. So there are a ton of benefits that come with doing accessibility right and just making it a standard part of your business and your organization, not just with your website, but in everything you do from HR to marketing to PR to leadership and development recruiting, accessibility has a seat at all of those tables. And when you integrate it into your process versus a band-aid type of approach, you're really engaging in that ideology that everybody deserves the same opportunities and experiences. And that's really kind of where I come from, that Band-Aid sort of approach is most likely still the people that we say are living in the if mindset. And what that means is as accessibility gains traction, as it gains its seat at the table, as laws and regulations emerge, there has been this sort of mindset of if somebody files a complaint, if somebody says something is wrong, if somebody sues me, and we've seen consistent growth in claims, in lawsuits, the legal side over the last five years, whether they be real or false or somewhere in between, we've seen increases. And so a lot of industry leaders, former Department of Justice attorneys, nonprofit leaders, for-profit leaders, that are owning accessibility are now saying it's not a matter of if that happens, it's a matter of when. Because when we look at the industry as a whole, your large organizations, your Fortune 500s, they've already been sued once or twice or three times or if not more. They have legal teams in place. They have responses ready to go now. They can implement change at the flip of a switch. Essentially, they've gone through that process. So who's next? On the target list, the medium sized businesses, the small businesses, and we're seeing more and more of those small businesses being targeted. And so it's not that if it's more when somebody comes knocking on your door, do you want to be prepared or do you want to be caught off guard? And if you put a bandaid on it, we've seen just earlier this year, one of those plugins that claims to make your website accessible, we've seen small businesses that have those still be a target, still be sued, still go through all of that time and energy and money and resources to fight that and settle that and do whatever they need to do when they could have spent half the money just to make it accessible from the front, from the very beginning When we talk about accessibility, a band-aid might be a cheap way to cover it up and out of sight, out of mind accessibility. But at some point, accessibility is going to come knocking on your door. And if you're not doing anything about it, it's going to be significantly more expensive at that point than if you were implementing accessibility along the way. You don't need to wait until something launches to make it accessible. You could start with accessibility all the way at the beginning when you're picking what platform are we building this for? Who is the audience for this? What design and branding are we going to use for this? You could start accessibility and carry it all the way through your development lifecycle and do it affordably rather than viewing accessibility as we need to band-aid this and cover it up or this is a whole separate project from what we're doing. If it's a part of your process, you're not looking at it as a separate expense, a separate pool of resources and time and talent. You're viewing it as a requirement for your larger project. If you're building an $80,000 website that's accessible, it's $80,000. But if you're building an $80,000 website and then making it accessible, you could be looking at another 20, 30, $40,000 to make it accessible at that point.

Mark Vandegrift 
Yeah, that reminds me of the days when SEO were new, which you were too young to remember those days. But I go back to the late 90s and the early 2000s when SEO was a new word and people build a website and then they said, we need to SEO it. Well, today you wouldn't build a website without it being baked in. I think we're not at that point yet with accessibility, but you mentioned lawsuits, right? Wasn't one or two of the primary plugins actually had multiple class action suits against it for the very reason of not being accessible enough?

James Warnken
Yep, one of those was earlier this year. Most of them have been under fire. They take a lot of heat, some for good reason, some for not completely good reason. When it comes to overlays and widgets and plugins, I think, going back to your point, we're not quite there yet. I think that technology is not quite there yet, right? And so when it comes to how those tools are marketed and promoted and sold, it could be a little bit misleading, partially because of their choice, but also partially because the general public just isn't educated. They're not aware of what accessibility actually is. And so when they think about it, they're not being educated on that whole industry, that whole conversation. They're being educated on somebody could come along and sue you, it could cost you tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars for 99 bucks a month we'll protect you. So that sounds like icing on the cake, a cherry on top, but when you actually start to get into it understand it, those tools are really somewhere in that like 30 to 50 % of doing the whole job. And we're in 2025, technology and the growth and development curve is not slowing down. Sure, those tools are going to get better over time, but they're not there yet. They might get to a point where they're 70 80 85 percent complete in what they can do But again going back to the beginning of our conversation Accessibility impacts people you can't prove and validate that things are or are not accessible truly without people And so when you put a plug-in in a single line of JavaScript on the back end of your website and think that it's fully accessible That's just not the case and I don't think it will ever be totally the case, but sure, over time, we're probably going to see advances and developments and increases in what those tools can do to protect you maybe a little bit more, but never completely.

Mark Vandegrift 
Good. Now, I promised to get technical here. So, when we talk, and for any of the listeners that don't like the technical side, you can beg out now. But I think it's intriguing because I mentioned you've worked with folks from the Department of Justice before. I think a good friend of yours maybe even works there..

James Warnken
He was a defense attorney.

Mark Vandegrift 
Oh, okay. So there's a standard Right? You don't randomly check these sites. You're checking them against a standard. But yet that standard is an ideal framework, guardrail, whatever you want to call it. There's not an officially published Department of Justice list that says if you don't meet these standards, you're breaking the law. So give us a sense at, you know, just make it as basic or generic as you can describe this. What is the standard? What's it called? And also how does that, I guess, morph over time? Who's in charge of making that list and updating it? And what standard do we typically go to at any given time?

James Warnken
Yep. Fantastic question. One that we get all the time. I do not do legal advice and legal consulting. I leave that to the experts. But from an accessibility lens, if you're government of any kind or you're receiving any type of government funding or you work with or for the government you have accessibility requirements that aren't the most clear at this point, but they're definitely getting better over time. At the federal level, we see things like the Section 508 standards. At the state and local level, we see things related to the Americans with Disabilities Act under Title II. They just rolled out a final rule for Title II as of last year that the deadline is approaching, depending on the size of the population for those state and local governments, either this coming April or April of 2027. Now, the interesting thing, when we go outside of the government sector to our for-profits, to our not-for-profit organizations that aren't receiving funding like that, we often think that there's not anything that directly calls us out unless you're in specific industries like video communication, instant messaging and text messaging, air travel. There's industry specific laws that relate to those specific industries. But when we think about the general business, the general organization.There's an assumption that there's nothing that necessarily holds us to any type of legal requirement. However, if we look into the Americans with Disabilities Act, there's a section in there that talks about public accommodation. And within public accommodation, they identify different industries like exhibition and entertainment, food and drink service. There's all of these different areas of our society, of our communities, our states, our country, that they've identified are places of public accommodation. And there's a lot of debate right now around what that word actually means and who's included in public accommodation. Because if you're asking me, if I can pull up Google Chrome and go to your website, it's publicly available. If I can walk down the street and walk into your business and talk to the secretary at the front desk or shop around and check out without needing clearance or a secret password or anything like that, it's public, right? And so those organizations under the ADA have a requirement. And whether you're federal, state, or you're in that public accommodation part of the conversation, all of them tie back to the same guidelines and standards, which are the web content accessibility guidelines. Within the digital space, those are a set of four principles, 13 guidelines, and 70-something-odd success criteria that illustrate and help you and guide you through making your digital content accessible. It starts at the very top with perception. Can the user perceive the content. So in the very first criteria, and there is putting alt text and descriptions on visual content. So if I can see it, describe it back to me in text, alternative text. That's where that comes from and so as we go through the perceivable principle, we're looking at things like color contrast and information and relationships, non-text alternative, captions on audio. And we're getting advice based on what kind of content we're designing and developing. We move into principle two, operable. Can the user operate the content with a keyboard, with a touch device, with a mouse? That's where seizures and physical reactions comes in. The timing. Is there enough time for users who move a little bit slower or need a little bit of additional time to complete that? So operability within the content. Principle three is understandable. Can the user understand what they're doing and why they're doing it? That's where we see topics around forms and legal transactions and financial commitments, setting languages so that proper annunciation and pronounciation of words and phrases can be properly transferred and translated. And then lastly, principle four is robust. With our current technology and future technology, will this work today and will it continue to work tomorrow? Is it robust enough that I can view it on Edge and Chrome and Safari and Firefox, or do I have to use a single screen reader browser combination to consume this content? And so those are the guiding pillars and posts they get very very technical the first time I read through it I didn't understand probably more than five words on it, but I read through it and I read through it again and again and again and I practiced and I researched and I asked questions to other leaders that worked with the Department of Justice that worked at Microsoft and Verizon and GEA and some of these large companies that are leading the way in accessibility to fully understand it. And ultimately that's how I got to where I am with I don't want to be the gatekeeper for this because this is bigger than me. This is bigger than Clear Vision. This is something that everybody deserves to have access to, price shouldn't be an issue, timing shouldn't be an issue, resource, manpower should not be the limiting factor on how accessible you can be. And so as we've sort of moved through and figured things out, yes, we're looking at industry standards on pricing and labor and all of that, but really what we're looking at is impact. And impact and impact, it always comes back up in the conversation and helping businesses and organizations level up because unfortunately they're not teaching accessibility in the college classroom. They're not teaching it in high school. It doesn't matter whether you're a computer scientist, you're a marketer, a business analyst, whatever, accessibility might be a day or a week in your four years or your six years or your eight years depending on how long you go for. It doesn't have its own separate space yet which is one of the largest reasons why we're not there yet because it's just not the general public is not being educated on it. And so when we sort of take a step back and we look at the standards and the requirements, I personally believe everybody should have to be accessible from a digital standpoint to those WCAG standards. Whether you're an employee, a potential customer, a client, everybody should have the same opportunities and experiences regardless of where a closed door for-profit, we only work with three clients and that's it, or you're a big box store that has an in-person and an e-commerce aspect. I think everything deserves to have accessibility worked into it. ultimately organizations like Clear Vision, like Blind Institute of Technology, like Converge Accessibility, like Scallywag, like Accessibrand, there's so many good organizations trying to do good work. Unfortunately, the industry is starting to be a little watered down by profit driven entrepreneurs that are seeing we can build a an automated tool charge a hundred bucks a month on a subscription People will forget about it. Just like they do their Netflix subscription or their Hulu subscription or or they're saying people are charging and paying 300 400 dollars a page to have it tested by a blind person that we can pay 20 bucks an hour So the industry has its flaws. It has its issues organizations like the ones I just mentioned in many others are approaching it with that true human, I don't like the word empathetic and compassionate because it's more than that. It doesn't feel fair to use words like that when we talk about disabilities because it's one of those topics that myself or you or anybody listening, we could join that community today, tomorrow, and then it becomes very real.

Mark Vandegrift 
Yeah, one breath. Yep, we're one breath away from being disabled, right?

James Warnken
Yep. And in an instant you could join that community and now it's the most important thing on your priority list when five minutes ago it wasn't even on your priority list. So empathy and understanding and compassion and all of those words, yes, they're applicable, but I don't feel like they do a full job of explaining why this industry is more than just another part of doing business, but it needs to be like an underlying staple. One of your pillars or your columns or your values within every organization just because of the degree and the potential reach and impact that it brings with it.

Mark Vandegrift
Well, you said on your website right at the top, one in four individuals is considered disabled. And yet if you go to the national statistics, it's around 13%, I think. Can you clarify why there's such a gap there in terms of really the true classification of disabled and why it really is closer to 25 % or more?

James Warnken
It's probably closer to like 30 or 40 percent in all reality. The reason there's such large discrepancy between 13%, 25%, 26%, 28%, 30%, 40 % is primarily data collection and data reporting. When you send out surveys and census data, you're leaving it up to that person to identify as it should be. You're letting them make the decision, do I check the boxes as I have a disability? For most people, if you have a hard time seeing, a hard time hearing, a hard time getting up and down the stairs, we don't as a society recognize those as disabilities when technically they are. And so there's a large discrepancy in the, what  we know from data collection and that 13 % and what is actually the true number, there's no way to get that. And like I said, that's the way it should be when the Americans with disabilities act was published in the 1990s, that created a ton of programs and services for people with disabilities. What they realized over the course of 15, 18 years was that people with disabilities weren't disabled enough. They were being denied services because they weren't disabled enough. They couldn't get a doctor's note. They couldn't qualify for those services. So in 2008, we saw an amendment to that act that brought in the definition of disability, making it easier to qualify. If you could self-identify without intense questioning. They did a lot to sort of try to loosen that up. And in doing so, it made it harder to track and trend the true number of people with disabilities within your community, within your country. I think globally, it's estimated like 1.3 billion people around the world live with a disability at any time. So we're not talking about a very small community, but we're also playing on that concern side with those numbers in all reality because we don't know who's identifying and who's not. 

Mark Vandegrift
Yeah. Well, and it's, I think if most people were to observe society, so I love to people watch wherever I am. If I'm at a park or an airport or anywhere, I like to people watch. And over the last few years, it's become very evident that disabilities are actually increasing. I would say multiple fold, not just, you know, 10 % or 1 % every year. I mean, it feels like just through observation that those who have some level of disability is significantly growing. So to your point, this is all about human interest, caring about people. As a corporation, let's say I'm a, I don't know, I'm a middle level manager at an organization and I'm tasked with trying to figure out this whole disability, digital accessibility space. What's a good first step, other than calling you, what's a good first step to learn a little bit about this before presenting to the organization and saying, folks, we have to get better at what we're doing in this regard?

James Warnken
I think the best first thing to do is to look locally. Look at your community, look at what's happening next door in your backyard. Mark, you and I are on the board of a nonprofit that focuses on accessibility here in Canton, in Stark County. And one of the things that surprised us was even in our own community, there's more than 100 providers providing services and programs and products and support to our local disability community, whether that's blindness, that's developmental disabilities, that's putting ramps in people's homes to modify their homes so that to make them more accessible. There's so much happening locally that we are just not aware of. And so I think talking to those local organizations, if you pick it up a phone and called any of those providers and said, hey, I'm a local business. I want to make sure that I'm considering everybody when I design my new menu or my new website, is there any way that somebody from your team could help me understand what things I need to be considered? I guarantee if you find one that doesn't get excited to hear that question, I would be surprised. I think those organizations would be overly excited and ecstatic to hear that local businesses are considering them and they want to include them. And so I think that's the easiest first step to make before you even call me or any other accessibility company is look and see what you have available right next door. As you learn, as you start to get more comfortable talking about accessibility and disability, then you call someone like me or another local organization that's certified and specialized in that experience side and designing and testing and remediating to actually help you implement it. Because it's one thing to understand it, it's a whole other world to actually implement, verify and validate it to make sure that you didn't include one group without excluding another. There's a lot of consideration that goes into that. I definitely encourage you to find somebody that you can trust and that sounds like they know what they're doing at the very least when you are actually ready to make a move. The one thing I will say coming out of the technical side of the conversation, if you're listening to this conversation and you're saying, I'm not a developer, accessibility only applies to developers, that's an assumption and we've learned over the last couple of years that more than 70 % of accessibility issues arise during the design and the creation phase. If you're the one writing the blog post, you're designing the prototypes and the Figma files, if you're creating the social media content and recording the videos, you have a role to play. It's not just a developer problem. For a lot of people, that's a hard pill to swallow because it's easy to put the blame on somebody else. I'm here to take the blame off of the developer's shoulders a little bit and say, you know the rest of your team that's providing you that content also has a part in this conversation.

Mark Vandegrift 
Well, we certainly learned that when we engaged the first time after your internship, when you started your business. And I think as a designer, you recoil because some of the things you learn about making a digital property or really the design pattern for accessibility feels like you're putting handcuffs on when in fact, after you go through it and you learn more about accessibility, you don't have to have those handcuffs. As you know, you were an intern here, we're all about design. And I would say that the only thing that learning about accessibility did for our designers was to expand their horizons. Like we're not in a box, their box is grown.

James Warnken
I was in a conversation last week with a state level organization that's looking to build a new website and they put out the RFPs to find a new development team to design and build this new website for them and when they asked that the two potential options they were looking at, if they could ensure that the website was going to be accessible, they said, yeah, but it's not going to look as good. And so they were actually giving them the option, do you want it to look good or do you want it to be accessible? Which is a very old way of thinking. Like you said, it's not putting handcuffs on it. It's actually expanding those horizons in the way that you approach design as a whole with things like color and resize and magnification, font selection, font style properties. All of those play into just a static, you could do just a static grayscale wireframe in Figma and incorporate accessibility and still have all of your design principles and UX and UI worked into it without really doing anything noticeable.

Mark Vandegrift 
Yep. Well, and it makes it better. We've had conversations. I'll bring up LeBron's latest adventure there. And we sent you a website that frankly, I don't have any visual limitations. I couldn't read it. It was so poorly designed that you couldn't read the font over top of images. It was horrible. I think great designers understand that the more they make their design accessible, the more eyes they get on it, right?

James Warnken
That's where the usability and accessibility overlap exists and when you're incorporating both, you're providing a seamless experience. I think with regard to overly complex designers that are stuck in their ways of, I don't underline links or I love using background images without an overlay on top of them. Those are the designers that probably shouldn't be designers, unfortunately.

Mark Vandegrift
They're stuck.

James Warnken
They're designing what they want, not what their customers want, not what their customers' customers need. So I've had a lot of discussions with designers over the last couple of years. The good designers are open to that criticism, to that feedback, to take the experience and incorporate more users, because that's what their goal is, is to make it usable to, like, that's UI, UX, that's like the core of that entire conversation. In regard to that website, I 100 % agree. The readability from just a general user perspective is a little bit rough.

Mark Vandegrift 
It was awful.

James Warnken
But it wouldn't be impossible to fix it. It wouldn't be that difficult to fix it either.

Mark Vandegrift 
Yeah. Yep. Well, I love the fact that, you know, you recently brought up in a conversation, we are talking about logos and they're even backing up clear to what I would call the first mark of a brand, you know, their logo mark, the font, the readability, all that type of thing is now going through an accessibility check. And I just love that because to me that says we're going back to the very basics to reconstruct what we believe to be inclusive design. And so that we're opening up our organizations to a much wider audience. And I think that's probably a good place to leave off. I've kept you much longer than we intended, but I appreciate your time. Let me give you one last point here for you to just share whatever is on your mind at this point for our listeners.

James Warnken
Just don't be afraid to jump in no matter where you start with my recommendation to look locally or you want to drop me a LinkedIn message or an email and just ask a curious question as a person who kind of walks the line between both communities I fully owned that I am somebody that that that is in that position and I don't ever want to gatekeep or create an additional barrier. So I am an open book. If you have a question that you are afraid to ask or you're intimidated by, I am proud to be somebody that can help answer those questions without any any form of judgment or or recourse or anything like that. So my inbox is open to anyone and everybody who's curious about accessibility, whether you're a fully non-disabled person or a person with a disability in any capacity. If I can't answer the question, I have a lot of people and a lot of friends now in the space that specialize in key areas of accessibility. I'm sure I can find you an answer or worst case scenario an answer doesn't exist but an opportunity to create an answer does.

Mark Vandegrift  
Awesome. Well, that's a great place to wrap up. I want to thank you, James, for joining us and thank you to our listeners for joining us. If you haven't liked or shared or subscribed, please do. And thank you for joining the Brand Shorthand Podcast today. Until next time, have an amazing day.