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Chris Hinds doesn’t just know accessibility, he knows how to sell it.

In our second Kinsta Talks session with Chris, VP of Products at Equalize Digital, we dive into how agencies can build accessibility into client projects, and their own revenue models.

Fox vs. Ostrich: Two Approaches, Two Outcomes

Chris walks us through a case study featuring a fictional small business, Hearth & Harvest Café. Two fictional agencies submit proposals for the website:

• The Ostrich Agency: Fast, cheap, and focused on checking boxes. They use no-code tools, slap on an accessibility overlay, and finish the project quickly.
• The Fox Agency: Strategic, long-term thinkers. They plan for accessibility from the start, build with reusable components, and test thoroughly.

Spoiler: One agency ends up with a lawsuit. The other nets a five-year ROI of over $1.2 million.

The Real Costs of Skipping Accessibility

Accessibility overlays may sound like a shortcut, but as Chris explains, they’re risky business:

• They only catch ~10% of real issues
• They often conflict with screen readers and user settings
• They’ve been involved in lawsuits and FTC actions
• They bleed revenue from agencies who could be capturing that spend themselves

“If overlays worked, they’d be selling to disabled users—not to businesses,” Chris says.

The ROI of Doing It Right

Accessibility improvements don’t just help a few people. Chris explains how they:

• Increase conversions (from 0.5% to 2% in one case)
• Improve session time and page depth (30–40% gains)
• Boost SEO (Google measures accessibility signals too)
• Create happier, more loyal users

Or as Chris puts it:

Accessibility is a performance multiplier.

Tools to Help You Start

Chris recommends starting with automated testing using tools like Accessibility Checker for WordPress. Then gradually build expertise or partner with pros for audits, remediation, and user testing.

“Every week I talk to agency leaders who want to do this better,” he says.

You don’t have to do it alone.

🔧 Want to Get Started?

Check out Equalize Digital’s Accessibility Checker — it’s free to try and built specifically for agencies and WordPress users.

Full Transcript

Roger Williams (00:00)
You said that improving accessibility from terrible compliance to full compliance,

is a 10 to 20 percent increase in traffic. How much of that is traffic from people who first of all could not access the site before because they have some sort of disability and now they can access it? how much of that is search engine traffic because now the site is semantically accurate and presents well to the bots? how much of it is something else that I’m just not even aware of?

Chris Hinds (00:29)
My unhelpful answer is all of the above and more.

there’s this ripple effect of considering all of these things and putting real thought and effort behind the usability of your systems for literally everyone and not just people like you that it just has this ripple effect that that really extends to 100 % of your audience, not.

20 % and certainly not 2%.

the biggest extreme. I’ve seen it like double or triple, but more average is like a 30 to 40 % jump, they’re spending more time on your content. They are consuming more and they’re going deeper into whatever the user journeys are that you’ve set up.

those metrics all directly in a feedback loop go back to SEO, right?

Roger Williams (01:13)
this is an accessibility series that Chris from Equalize Digital has been very generous to give us some time and kind of go over your insights and expertise that you’ve gained over the years of doing all of this stuff. And I really enjoyed our first session. You you hit.

we’re really hitting specifically agencies on how to sell accessibility. And so the first session was great. It was a great overview for how agencies can go ahead and start like proposing these ideas. And then in this session, we’re really diving, we’re kind of deep diving further into some actual examples.

And with all that said, Chris, can you go ahead and get us started?

Chris Hinds (01:55)
Yeah, yeah, let’s get into this quickly. in this is part two of a series, like you said, Roger, but I don’t want anyone to tune out and go find part one right now. There’s plenty that you can get from this and then circle back to part one to get a little bit more of the context of what we’re going to be going into and some of the details. But we’ll be going in.

to an example of a real world small business website project that’s based on kind of an amalgamation of multiple real projects into one to kind of create this.

very realistic case study of what doing accessibility versus not doing accessibility looks like. So we’re going to be digging into two very different approaches to that same project, including budgets. And then we’re going to project out with real numbers ROI for each approach based on what we’ve seen and kind of comparing those results. In part one, just a very quick recap, we covered how treating accessibility as a single isolated touch point in a project is less efficient. We also talked through the accessibility

essential and what they cost in terms of time or money to name a few that’s like automated testing tools evaluations remediation and then multimedia accessibility dock accessibility all of those things all of that’s in part one and you can go find that later and then we talked about the cost of ignoring accessibility and the idea that that creates debt that gets repaid later in the form of lost time lost revenue increased risk and let’s let’s dive into this so very similar to people

who attended part one, have two archetypal agencies here. The first time it was tortoise and hare and they were a little bit more basic, but these agencies that I’m going to be talking about today are a little bit less one dimensional than the tortoise and the hare agency. Both are based on what I’d call very stereotypical types of real world agencies that I’ve seen that I’ve worked with. And we’re going to dig into the website project first that each agency is going to tackle.

So the client is, this is not a real, or if, if you see anything real based on this, it’s purely a coincidence because I, I used a, language model to help me generate like the profile and the facts about this business based on some inputs. but it, it’s a kind of, like I said, a mixture of, different, real world customers that we’ve seen over the years. So hearth and harvest cafe is a specialty cafe, artisanal bakery. This fictitious place is, or.

Victitious Business is located in Fremont, California, and they’re this cozy local cafe. They do sustainable sourcing. They serve, you know, individuals, families, students, professionals in their local area. They generate about $700K in annual revenue, and they have a small but dedicated team of nine employees who handle their day-to-day operations. They’re looking for a new website project.

or a new website. The reason that they are looking for a new website stems from multiple facets. So first, they want a modern mobile friendly design. The current website they have was built by like a family member or a relative of the owner as a side project when the business was way smaller and had less money. It’s since grown, they need to have an online presence that fits kind of the mold of the type of business they are now. They need an online ordering and reservation system. They don’t currently have one and might basically

they’re relying on foot traffic and people finding their number on various public listings to call and make those reservations. And they want just generally for customers to engage better with the website online. They also want to showcase catering and local partnerships in an effort to drum up bigger sales from higher value customers who maybe want to have them cater events at their offices or at local farmers markets and things like that. And then they want better performance in local search like many small businesses do for obvious reasons.

in their specific case, there’s a construction project going on in their area that has reduced foot traffic because it’s blocked a lot of parking. So they need more of an online presence to

Roger Williams (05:36)
Hmm.

Chris Hinds (05:40)
continue to see the same growth that they’ve been seeing. then accessibility is bit of concern. They’ve had some business colleagues and friends who maybe have been sued themselves or have gotten complaints. And there’s some regulations going on in California that have them a little bit concerned about accessibility overall. So they have directly mentioned this to these agencies in terms of technical specifications. These are going to look really similar to what we talked about at the end of the last presentation. So they want, they want a custom design. They want

four design pages and layouts, a contact form and integration with an off the shelf. That’s what that OTS is online ordering a reservation system. And then the content includes 25 web pages. have 10 PDF files, 30 pages total across those PDF files. And that’s like event catering menus and sample menus and things like that. And then they have a five minute video that they shot with a production company that showcases their local partnerships with growers. The website gets about 20,000 hits per month on average and their best guess based on

on

just customer surveys at the front of the restaurant is that maybe 0.15 % of customers like saw the website and that’s what prompted them to come in. So let’s talk about our two agencies.

So the first agency is the Ostrich Agency. So they’re all about execution.

They’re less about strategy. And what I mean by that is they’re about get it done, whatever the customer wants, get it done quickly. And they’re kind of dialed into that process versus doing a lot of deep thinking and long-term thinking about execution. They want short-term quick wins. They are business results focused and they use accessibility overlays and toolbars when accessibility comes up on projects. The kind of closing statement for the ostrich and the sales presentation is that

They say, we’re gonna get the same results as the Fox agency in less time for less money. Let us help you check this off your list so that you can get to the next priority. So you can kind of get a vibe for who this agency is. They’re trying to get things done quickly.

In terms of their approach, the ostrich agency is going to utilize popular no code page builders to generate custom layouts for the client quickly. They’re going to do those designs in browser and they’re going to account for mobile screen sizes as well. Their main criteria for that off the shelf ordering and reservation system that the customer wants is going to is that it needs to integrate easily with the ostriches existing tech stack.

This is going to keep the budget lower. So that is their primary criteria and nothing else. So whatever works best with what they’re doing is what they’re going to recommend. The page builders built in form solution is used so they’re not using any other kind of form solution. The content is migrated as is from various docs and kind of.

adapted and shoehorned into the approved layouts that were designed with placeholder content in the browser. And then the promotional video, the PDFs, all those multimedia files we mentioned in the scope, those are just getting stuck into the website as is and no additional efforts are made to make them accessible or have alternative media formats for any of them. The the checks.

that they’re going to do for accessibility beyond just putting the overlay tool on the website are primarily going to be related to color contrast and alt text of images. And they’re going to focus really on those things. And they are, like I said, going to recommend a popular accessibility toolbar to handle the rest. essentially.

that boils down to a specific budget. So the ostriches budget.

is going to be a total of $10,500 that breaks down into about $8,000 for the base design and dev. going to spend about, they charge $100 an hour, same as the Fox agency, but they’re going to spend about four hours or $400 on remediation. And that’s that, you know, the image alt text, correcting or tweaking some color contrast. And then the overlay, and this is based on real overlay pricing based on this website’s traffic is going to be about $1,500 per year.

They’re also going to put the customer in a $50 a month basic maintenance plan just to make sure the website stays up, stays secure, and some basics are being observed.

So let’s assume the ostrich agency wins. If we extrapolate that out, that’s $10,000 in year one in direct costs and then years two through five, it’s $2,100 between the maintenance plan and the overlay for a total of $18,900. And

If we look at the ROI of this and we’re going to dig into these numbers a bit more, I’m just basing this on law of averages and things I’ve seen from agencies that we’ve spoken with on like average results from their rebuilds and what they present in their case studies. So this modern redesign that the ostrich agency did does triple the conversion rate up to about point five percent on the website. It was point one five with the amateur build. And there’s a short term drop in traffic in year one. And we’ve seen this numerous times with rebuilds that don’t consider

accessibility or maybe don’t do a perfect job of considering SEO. But in years two through five, it kind of rebounds and it ends up with a modest net increase of around 5 % over that five year period as it drops and then creeps back up. The new booking and catering options along with that increased overall traffic over that five year period generate $91,000 and additional annual revenues. And unfortunately,

between using the overlay and not considering accessibility and knowing that there’s around 5,000 accessibility lawsuits per year in the US and about 20 % of those lawsuits target a website that’s using an overlay tool. This business, H &H Cafe, in year three does get slapped with an accessibility lawsuit. They have to settle that for $15,000 plus $5,000 in attorney fees. And as part of that settlement, they have to pay $21,000 to remediate their website. There’s reasons behind those numbers that we can

get into later. The project finishes three months sooner though compared to the Fox agency. So that adds twenty two thousand dollars back to their base ROI because it was done faster. The base five year ROI doing all the math and I have a spreadsheet for this that I’ve put together is three hundred and seventy four thousand dollars. So not bad like they got ROI. They got the job done quickly. But let’s talk about the Fox agency and kind of look at what that approach is. So

Roger Williams (11:44)
Okay.

Chris Hinds (11:53)
The Fox agency, their MO is they start with a good plan. They focus on creating long-term value rather than business goal focused. are user centric focused. So they’re focusing on the end user of the website and maximizing the end user’s utility. And they account for accessibility throughout their projects and their closing statement in this hypothetical scenario where they win is that smart planning today saves headaches tomorrow. It will take longer and cost more, but that’s what it takes to do the job right.

And so that’s what allows the Fox agency to close the deal. As far as the Fox’s approach goes, they collect content first before design and it’s reviewed to ensure that the structure and any calls to action are super clear. Then multiple options for the ordering and reservation system are carefully evaluated by the Fox’s team and the option that can be used by the broadest audience possible is ultimately selected.

for those off the shelf integrated pieces. Then after that, they design and build from a set of boilerplate components that can be modified to fit the customer’s spec and accessibility is considered at both the design and the code level. This obviously takes longer. The agency uses their standard form building solution.

which they know has accessible outputs when configured correctly and the promotional video receives captioning and transcripts unlike with the with the ostrich agency and the PDFs part of them are converted into web pages to improve their discoverability and ranking and search and then a few sample menus are still retained and they are actually remediated to make sure that the doc form of those menus can be used by everyone and in addition to the early stage tests late stage in the project and expert is brought in to validate and confirm

that the website’s meeting WCAG 2.2 AA and after launch an automated scanning and monitoring plan is put in place. This obviously increases the cost of the ongoing maintenance of the website. In terms of the Fox’s budget, the base design dev is $12,000. So it’s about, I would say 30 % to 40 % more than what the…

the ostrich agency proposed. And then on top of that, they are adding about $150 a year for a scanning solution. And this is based on our products pricing accessibility checker. They’re adding 18 hours or $1,800 because remember same hourly rate and evaluation. And this is based on what we covered in the last presentation where the average time to review for accessibility throughout a project is about one hour per design, two hours per unique page, and then a flat four hours for the header and footer.

And then the remediation time is 12 hours. That’s about 10 % on top of the base design dev budget, which again, law of averages, if your team is experienced with accessibility, that’s about how much additional time you would be spending to correct any lingering issues that get discovered. If you’re less experienced, it might be 20 or even 25 % longer.

And then multimedia accessibility, add 150 bucks, that’s just for those PDFs, the video captioning. It’s a very small cost in the context of the overall budget. Maintenance is twice as big. It’s $1,200 per year for the maintenance because it includes some manual monitoring for accessibility, checking in on things beyond just baseline updates. So the total cost is $16,500 in year one, and then the ongoing annual cost is $1,350. Now, if we contrast that back to the ostrich agency,

ostrich agency was over $2,000 per year in costs because primarily of that overlay solution, which is utilization or traffic-based pricing. And based on the traffic of this customer, they were paying about $1,500 a year just for that thing, which didn’t even ultimately do its job, which was make the website usable and prevent them from experiencing litigation.

In terms of ROI on the Fox agency side, and this is again, based on real world numbers, both on website projects that we’ve done as well as case studies of projects where we took something that was inaccessible and the only thing we fixed was accessibility and kind of the net change or the Delta and things like conversion rate and traffic just from doing accessibility only. So the Fox agency, their accessible redesign got conversions up to 2 % instead of 0.5%. Their year over

year traffic produced a near immediate net gain of 15 % post launch. Massive traffic conversion rate changes and increases ultimately generated $269,000 in additional annual revenues. And this is based on this this restaurants check averages per individual customer as well as the check average of a catering deal and a conversion rate differential between those two. So there is math behind this.

And then in year three, H &H Cafes automated accessibility scans and the monitoring that they engaged with this agency on did find issues. But this wasn’t a lawsuit, they did. did. They found issues and they proactively invested $15,000 to correct course, which was considerably less. If you remember what the figure was for the lawsuit, plus the attorney’s plus still having to go back and do what should have been done in the first place. But basically at the end of the day with these numbers.

Roger Williams (16:32)
Yeah.

Chris Hinds (17:00)
The base five year ROI is $1.26 million. So we can discuss some results here. We can talk about why they’re different, how we arrived at those numbers. I’m happy to answer questions.

Roger Williams (17:04)
Woo.

Wow.

Yeah, let’s take a…

first of all, let’s just take a deep breath, because Chris, wow, my mind is blown. You’re like, clearly I knew you were an expert, but holy, like you really do understand the agency approach to.

building websites and doing online marketing. And I really hope that the people listening to this rewind and go back through what you were talking about there. The ostrich has its problems, it like compared to how I was running my agency.

Like this is legitimate stuff and you’re really, if you’re talking to your clients this way, you’re really gonna help unlock their brains into thinking about what their website can be doing for them. I still know so many businesses that have a Facebook page, right? And so regardless, whether they’re going ostrich or fox here, they’re definitely improving their business.

But, and I also love the names of the companies that you’ve come up with here. It’s subtle, but obviously the metaphors are strong. Kind of going back and unpacking a little. Hey.

Chris Hinds (18:12)
And no shade at the ostriches. Like, I know y’all are scared. I know you’re worried.

There is a better way, and I hope you add some gradual change over time.

Roger Williams (18:22)
No, 100%. And I think a big thing to think about here, right? And I know when I was starting my agency is it was just like, hey, I got a client. Yes. Yes to everything, right? Like, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. Give me the money and get started. And you’ve got to get started some way. And I get that urge to just take it and make promises to things that you haven’t thought through. Yeah, sure. An overlay.

But then over time, you should be thinking more like a fox and you should be seeing, you should be having these difficult conversations with the clients. And I think maybe that’s where a lot of benefit out of this conversation, Chris, is for me and for the listeners is how do you talk a customer into spending more money and taking longer?

Chris Hinds (19:07)
Mm-hmm.

Roger Williams (19:09)
But eventually I’m going to give you 5x the revenue and give you a lot less headaches. How do you have those conversations?

Chris Hinds (19:18)
I think it requires good sales discovery in a nutshell. Like you have to, you have to get them.

to tell you and this can be something that’s as a reaction right to an objection like maybe you weren’t expecting pushback on the price and so you didn’t ask them these granular questions about and these would be the type of questions so it’d be like okay you know how much traffic is your website getting do you know what your conversion rate is if you had to guess what would it be what would you say you know if it’s a restaurant what would you say your check average is right or if it’s a product company what would you say your average cart value is all of those isolated right are innocuous

questions and unless the customer is super savvy or has had a million of these conversations, they aren’t going to know that you can work backwards to get to their revenue. Right. And that’s really the point. Right. So you just need to know a few pieces of information, which is like, what is the average purchase? How many people are seeing their offer in general? And do they know what percentage of the total people that are seeing their offer are buying?

And if you can get those three things, you can very quickly extrapolate revenue. And then if you know what levers you can pull to impact any one of those three variables, whether it’s just more people, just more conversions, increasing their check value or their average purchase value, like, or all three.

That’s how you can show ROI super easily in a sales conversation. And then from there, it’s just down to experience and confidence and knowing the actual real world impact of what you’re doing and measuring that. After every project, trying to measure it, going back and checking. That’s how I have these numbers. On average, just fixing accessibility will increase traffic 10 to 15 % over year on year.

near instantaneously from something that was really not accessible to something that’s accessible, right? If it’s like mostly accessible and you’re fixing alt text on five images, you’re probably not going to see that 15 % gain. But if you’re going from super not accessible to really accessible, you’re going to get that, right? Same with conversion rate, you know, jumping from those sub 1 % numbers, which is super common even for agency projects to one, two, sometimes even 3%.

Again, we’ve seen it happen multiple times over. And so at this point, it’s not just a anecdote. It’s a trend that we see when we are being hired to go in on these websites and correct or remediate accessibility issues. Or we partner with an agency where we just find the issues and the agency goes and fixes them. We try to go back and we’re like, hey, how did things change? Right. And sometimes we get some tidbits of information that we can add as a data point to our overall knowledge. But it’s

If you can do the numbers of accessibility, that’s great. There’s another side to this, right? Which is if you have case studies, if you have these average numbers in mind, you can kind of go with the what if question, right? So if you have an objection trying to like around, it’s too expensive or it takes too much time or whatever, pivoting that objection to it’s like, hear you and what if…

XYZ, right? If it’s the accessibility, adding the accessibility piece into the project or, or whatever it is, what if XYZ even increased your conversion rate by 0.5 % as opposed to one or two, which is what we typically see, right? So you can, you can, you can slip that in there. And by the way, I know based on what you shared with me already, that if we were to increase your conversions by 0.5 % based on this, this traffic, this ticket average,

know, this, this would, and if you can make the business case, this would probably pay for itself four times over, even if we achieve on the low end of what we see. Right. And suddenly you’ve pivoted the knee jerk, like, it’s too expensive. it’s too much time into them thinking about, but I can serve my customers better and I can make more money while serving my customers better. Because at the end of the day, it’s about people.

right, and making people’s experience better.

Roger Williams (23:22)
For sure, for sure. So, you know, I love the Business 101 Masterclass stuff here. I think that this is stuff we need to be talking about more often, right? We take it for granted.

that we know this, I think a lot of people come into web design and they’re like, hey, I like creating things. I like to build things. And I know that was my entry point, but we really need to be making the business case for these things so that the client really understands what they’re getting. So kind of pivoting now, let’s get down to the accessibility side of things. You said that improving accessibility from terrible compliance to full compliance,

is a 10 to 20 percent increase in traffic. Break that down for me. How much of that is traffic from people who first of all could not access the site before because they have some sort of disability and now they can access it? And then how much of that is social search engine traffic because now the site is semantically accurate and presents well to the bots? And then how much of it is something else that I’m just not even aware of?

Chris Hinds (24:27)
My unhelpful answer is all of the above and more. there’s two angles to this, right? So the first angle is accessibility itself exists on this spectrum.

And none of us are ever on a fixed point on this spectrum for our whole lives, right? We can have car accidents, we can break limbs, we can have a stroke. Like there’s so many things that can, not to get too existential, but that can happen to us, right? Over our lifetimes and where you are today is not necessarily where you will be in 5, 10, 25, 50 years. And it’s the same for literally every other one of the billions of us on this planet.

And so when you think about it in that context, right? And that, you know, there’s not just like even just let’s let’s take like blind and low vision, for example, there’s not just can’t see, can see there’s this entire spectrum, right? Same with color blindness. There’s multiple types and different sensitivities or extremities to that.

or particular colors that you can or can’t see. And there’s numerous others examples of this. And so what you’re really talking about is, yes, there is some percentage of your audience that will just bounce off like it’s a brick wall. Because if your website’s inaccessible to them for their particular needs, they literally can’t even start at step one.

That depends on how your website is built, like what particular web content accessibility guideline criteria you’re failing versus not failing, et cetera. But there’s some percentage of users that is going to bounce off, right? There will be another subset of users that are majorly inconvenienced, but can kind of wade through it until they hit a blocker or they have to stop. And so your website’s going to be annoying them.

probably pretty consistently. They’re going to be rolling their eyes. They’re going to have a generally negative experience to an extremely negative experience, but they’re going to get through it. And those are the people that you’re very likely to see complaints from, or they’re just never going to patronize your business again. And they’re going to tell all their friends not to either. And then there’s another subset that is maybe mildly inconvenienced to just everyday people being like, wow, everything I need is where I need it.

when I need it, how I need it. This website is brilliantly designed. I’m never confused. I’m never lost. If I’m on a mobile device, if I’m on a tablet, if I zoom in, if I zoom out, if I’m in dark mode, light mode, like it doesn’t matter. It works. Right. And that’s the rest of us, right. The other 75 % of us, we don’t, it’s,

Like the rest of that stuff, around like screen reader compatibility, keyboard compatibility, invisible probably to 75 % of the population until the point in time that they need it. But there’s this ripple effect of considering all of these things and putting real thought and effort behind the usability of your systems for literally everyone and not just people like you that it just has this ripple effect that that really extends to 100 % of your audience, not.

20 % and certainly not 2%. And so that’s the audience side. The other side of this that I want to talk about is yes, on the metrics side. So what we very frequently see when we are considering accessibility or just making accessibility improvements only is that average time on page or average session duration typically skyrockets. I’ve seen it double.

Roger Williams (27:52)
Okay.

Chris Hinds (27:53)
More at more, but that’s like the biggest extreme. I’ve seen it like double or triple, but more average is like a 30 to 40 % jump, which is still huge. And then like average number of like average depth that they will browse. So the number of different pages they visit average page visited, usually goes up. So they’re spending more time on your content. They are consuming more and they’re going deeper into whatever the user journeys are that you’ve set up. And, it’s.

Roger Williams (28:03)
Yeah.

Chris Hinds (28:23)
It’s interesting because those metrics all directly in a feedback feedback loop go back to SEO, right? And what Google measures and what others measure and the I I’m not like I’m not an SEO guy. Like I understand what all the metrics mean, what they are, how they fit into, you know, what it is an indicator of in a user experience. But I don’t know how the Google algorithm weighs all those things. But what I do know is

If all of the metrics that Google has to measure that measure how useful your website is, how much utility it has. So time on site, how many pages they look at, are they a first time or a frequent user, all of those things. If those are all going this way, your rank is going to go this way too, because Google does not measure shit for no reason. Pardon my French, but they don’t, right? Like, and even in Lighthouse, like Lighthouse has a whole accessibility tab now.

Roger Williams (29:13)
No. Yeah.

Chris Hinds (29:20)
Again, Google doesn’t measure stuff for no reason. So yeah, I mean, think that this is like, if we’re talking about websites and accessibility, there’s like so, so many reasons between SEO and conversions and all of these things to do it. Yeah.

Roger Williams (29:22)
And they don’t, more importantly…

Yeah. Well,

and think you make a great point there is that Google doesn’t just give us these data points because they like giving us data points. And then the other thing to keep in mind is they don’t show us everything that they’re looking at. this is like the tip of the iceberg. And I think you hit it on the head there. And one of the things that I keep trying to drive home to people about accessibility is, yes, there’s this compliance issue.

There is, you need to be aware of that. Like that is real money. But that’s not why you should be doing accessibility. You should be doing accessibility because people matter and you want to, you started a business because you wanted to help people. So help people, make your site accessible and all this other stuff follows. I hadn’t even thought about the data points. I was only thinking semantic markup, nice and easy for the bots to crawl, but you’re,

Chris Hinds (30:23)
Yep. Well, that’s one too.

And I didn’t even mention it, but like that, that is, that is one, that is another one. Like your, your website is inherently more understandable by machines because if a screen reader is able to understand it and a screen reader is a machine that interprets the web for, for blind individuals or low vision individuals, obviously a search engine crawler is going to be able to interpret it better too. So yeah, I mean, it’s all part of the same holistic.

Roger Williams (30:25)
Ha ha ha ha.

Chris Hinds (30:49)
system. And that’s really, that’s the other point that I’m kind of leading myself into that wasn’t even originally going to be a part of this conversation, but I think it, makes sense to bring this up, which is what accessibility really is to me at a fundamental level from an agency mindset. So this is not like a human to human mindset. This is an agency B2B mindset is it is a performance multiplier.

So it’s something you can slot into your holistic solution that makes literally everything in it better and bigger and do more. And it touches so much that it’s one of the highest impact ones and often one of the more overlooked ones.

Roger Williams (31:31)
This is very poignant stuff. I’m loving this every time we talk I learned so much Chris We’re at 38 minutes. I want to keep these not too long, but before we go I Would be remiss in us not talking about these screen overlay add-ons and All of the news going on around them. We don’t need to name names if you google accessibility overlays, you’re gonna see some

crazy news stories, lawsuits, ⁓ I mean, and they’re not just finding the provider of the add-on, they’re finding the company’s websites that are hosting these. Can you talk a little bit about overlays and what people need, they just need to open their eyes about when they’re going into potentially using one of these?

Chris Hinds (32:02)
FTC fines, yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Sure. So an overlay is a tool that in the in the layers of a website is placed kind of at the very top and it inserts itself between the user and your website and and attempts through automation and JavaScript and all this stuff to basically hijack your website and and make it accessible. In reality, these tools at best can fix 10 or 15 percent of total

accessibility coverage under web content accessibility guidelines. So that’s, know, if you’re relying solely on those, that’s a 85 to 90 % gap you’re leaving yourself with. The tools, one of the reasons that they’re being sued and fined is because they promise 100 % coverage when they know damn well it couldn’t be further from the truth. And if you read their terms, and I would encourage you to go read their terms,

Roger Williams (33:08)
Mm.

Chris Hinds (33:11)
overly tools will say we don’t actually promise you anything. So, you know, it but with the interesting thing about it, I think from an agency perspective is is this tool is there. If if it is, if a user attempts to use it, it can interfere with their assistive technology that they already have in their OS in their browser, and it can hijack that or interfere with it. And so a lot of people who are blind, low vision or otherwise like

They have browser extensions that they install to make overlays not show up and to delete them. So it’s their tools that are built for business owners and not for the disabled because if overlays were such an amazing tool, why aren’t they selling to the disabled community? Right? Why are they selling themselves to businesses? If they’re such an amazing tool, why aren’t they a browser extension that anyone can install that can insert itself as a JavaScript layer over any website? And

everyday consumers can just pay a subscription. The answer is because they don’t work. But beyond that, the thing that I want to point out is the ostrich agency. If we go back to that scenario, where they had, and I’m going to go back in my slide so I can make sure I have the same numbers. They had a total investment of $18,900 over a five-year period.

Roger Williams (34:23)
Sure.

Chris Hinds (34:32)
$7,500 of that was the overlay, which is money not going to their agency. So out of that total amount, $18,900, around $7,500 of that is going to another company. That’s potential revenue for them, like 40 % of potential revenue on the project that they’ve lost. If you look at the total for the Fox agency and what they build over a five-year period, if we exclude

the audit remediation that they got hired for in year three, they still build $16,500. They kept almost 100 % of that money, except maybe the multimedia accessibility, which was 150 bucks. That’s usually a specialized service you hire out unless you’re a massive conglomerate. So they’ve given up a massive amount of potential revenue by not trying to adopt these best practices internally.

Roger Williams (35:17)
Sure.

Chris Hinds (35:26)
or find good partners that can fulfill like the one or two small pieces that they can’t do, like maybe hiring a company like ours to come in and do the evaluation, right? But then your team handles all the fixes, you get to bill for that. So they’re massively overlooking revenue that they could have in their pocket over that five year period.

Roger Williams (35:46)
It’s great point and again, this is what I’m really hoping that we’re reaching agencies with this is to really start thinking about how to run your business better, how to help your clients run their business better. Chris, this is wonderful and you teed me up perfectly for the closing question is how does Equalize Digital fit into this workspace for an agency and how can they engage you?

Chris Hinds (36:10)
So anyone that wants to reach out to me can and I’m happy to talk you through it. Our website’s equalizedigital.com. Basically where we come in and where we can help agencies is we have a WordPress plugin called Accessibility Checker that provides bulk scanning for accessibility issues and reports directly in the WordPress page and post editor. And we also have a number of different services that we offer. did I did I did I lose my connection?

you

Roger Williams (36:37)
You might have blipped out on me just a second. was hoping it would come back, but start over again from the beginning.

Chris Hinds (36:43)
Okay, sorry. So equalize digital. We really.

focus on partnering with agencies in two ways. So the first one is we have a WordPress plugin called Accessibility Checker. offers bulk scanning and reporting of accessibility issues directly inside WordPress CMS in the post and page editor, as well as a litany of different features and reports for everything from multi-sites to CSV exports. The list goes on. And that tool is really purpose-built to allow agencies to measure and manage accessibility over time on that list of

of automated issues. So things that can be checked for with an automated tool, which statistically is maybe.

30 to 40 % of the guidelines. Remember overlays were like 10. So it’s way, way more coverage if you’re relying purely on automated. The next layer is we do provide automated testing or excuse me, we do provide manual testing. So that’s accessibility audits that audit up to 100 % coverage of the standards. And that’s usually across a sample of different pages. And we can partner with agencies on those and then happy to hand that off and then

your team to do the work of actually fixing the problems. A lot of agencies will actually hire us to do those tests on like their base theme or their starter template, whatever they use as their boilerplate, so that they know that they’re starting from a good standpoint and then can use automated testing tools to make up the difference and some smart checks during design and content, right, to get better, to incrementally improve. And then the final thing that we can do is we can bring in people to do user testing and think of this like a

focus group with a particular individual or group of individuals who have some form of a disability, whether that’s, you know, being blind or low vision, maybe having a cognitive issue or anything, anything else. and we have numerous different partner organizations that we work with to bring in people to build those focus groups out. If you need that qualitative feedback about your user experience. so those are, those are three big ways that we collaborate. and honestly, I spend a good chunk of my week every single week talking to

⁓

leaders and owners of agencies and trying to help them like wrap their heads and their arms around this and get control of it so that they can give themselves and their customers better results. So I’m happy to talk to anybody anytime. Email is chris at equalizedigital.com if you want to reach out.

Roger Williams (39:00)
Excellent, excellent. I love the sales pitch, sort and sweet, covering all of the bases. Chris, if people are interested in learning more about accessibility, obviously, you know, don’t want to lose a whole bunch of business to people learning all this stuff, but I know you and I know you want people to learn all this stuff. What are like some of the fundamental websites and and and like standards that people have to just learn backwards and forwards?

Chris Hinds (39:25)
Yeah. Well, first and foremost, mission is to eventually hopefully put ourselves out of business by having everybody know and understand this stuff and really.

know it through and through because I think by then we will probably have made enough revenue that we won’t we won’t mind to begin with. But like I really like our objective with this is to make the Internet better and to make agencies organizations of all sizes of all types and all sectors self-sufficient with this stuff so they don’t need to be stuck in like this quick fix panic.

cycle every two or three years, like they know that they just haven’t handled. there’s, there’s literally

I don’t know, 100, 150 hours of free education on the equalized digital website on the WordPress accessibility meetup webpage. We have archived presentations going back multiple years for that meetup that we run. would also recommend checking out WP accessibility day, which is a 24 hour free conference that gets put on every single year. and then there’s numerous big names that come together to both sponsor and put that event forward. and there’s tons of free education there.

And

then I don’t mind mentioning this because I know we’re about to announce it in the next week, but we are about to introduce.

formal for purchase accessibility education and courses in the next two weeks. So it’s bit of a bombshell announcement, but we are we are rolling out or getting ready to roll out a for a full learning management system on the MyEqualize digital portal. We are going to be starting with a screen reader testing for voiceover and a screen reader testing for NVDA course, which should both be released if not right when the course launches within a few weeks.

And then I am also doing a more professionally geared, with more formal educational components, selling accessibility for agencies course as well. So those will be available through our website and through our portal for purchase by mid-May, by Global Accessibility Awareness Day, GAD, which is May 16th.

Roger Williams (41:27)
Very exciting news. Here we are. We’re breaking news on Kinsta Talks. You know, I’m not surprised in any way that you’re going to start offering this. In fact, I was wondering why you hadn’t already started it. So thank you for answering that question before I had to ask it.

Chris Hinds (41:29)
Yeah.

If you make courses that are of a sufficient level of quality, like the kind of quality we care about, it takes forever. But anyone who buys them is gonna understand immediately why it took so long because they are so detailed, exhaustively detailed and value packed. And accessible, yeah, of course, in true equalized digital fashion, the entire course platform is…

Roger Williams (41:50)
yeah.

and accessible, I’m gonna guess.

Chris Hinds (42:09)
built to be accessible.

Roger Williams (42:11)
Wonderful, wonderful. Chris, as always, my mind is blown, it’s melted. I need to go sit down and have a break. This has been wonderful and delightful as always. I appreciate your time and your expertise. You’ve said it before, but as a quick reminder, if people want to reach out with you and interact with you on the internet, where are some of the places that you’re doing that?

Chris Hinds (42:32)
We are at equalize digital in all the places. And then I’m at Mr. Underscore Chris Heinz on X. If you want to follow me there, I do try to add value to people’s feeds with.

know, relevant accessibility news and topics and equalizeddigital.com for everything else. So thank you, Roger. Thank you very much to Kinsta as well for having me again. Also, shout out to y’all for sponsoring WordPress Accessibility Meetup and prioritizing free education on accessibility in the WordPress ecosystem. Y’all are a great partner and I definitely encourage people to check out Kinsta as well.

Roger Williams (43:04)
man, thank you so much for that. And with that, I bid you adieu until next time.

Chris Hinds (43:09)
All right. Thank you, Roger.