In this episode, we talk about the case of a “sue and settle” Kansas City attorney who was found to own multiple inaccessible websites themselves, according to findings from an ABC investigative journalist’s report.
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Links Mentioned
- Naked Life Non-Alcoholic Negroni Spritz
- Attorney involved in dozens of ‘sue-and-settle’ lawsuits around KC may have web accessibility issues on his own sites
- Kevin Puckett Attorney at Law
- ADA Legal Team
Transcript
Chris: Welcome to the Accessibility Craft Podcast, where we explore the art of creating accessible websites while trying out interesting craft beverages. This podcast is brought to you by the team at Equalize Digital, a WordPress accessibility company, and the proud creators of the Accessibility Checker plugin. And now onto the show.
Amber: Hey everybody, it’s Amber and I’m here today with Chris.
Chris: Hey everybody.
Amber: And Steve.
Steve: Hello everyone.
Amber: And this is episode 136 of Accessibility Craft. So if you want to find show notes and a full transcript, you can do that if you go to AccessibilityCraft.com/136.
Today’s Beverage
Amber: We always start every show with beverage. What are we drinking today, Chris?
Chris: So we are trying a non-alcoholic Negroni Spritz in a can. So this is by Naked Life. And they have a lot of different ones, but I chose Negroni Spritz just because I ended up having a few of these and was reminded that I like them a lot, when we were over in Basel about a month and a half ago.
So we’re testing these out today. They recommend having it over ice with an orange peel or just on its own. So we, I actually have some ice and an orange peel, and I’m gonna do half the can that way and try it without it too and see what the difference is.
Amber: All right. Help me out here because I don’t think I drank these in Basel.
What is a real Negroni Spritz?
Chris: So what I know about it is it always has orange and it always has bitters in it. And then it’s usually like bright red. I don’t know what the other alcohol component is because I’m not a mixologist, but it’s it’s usually like bitter and a little sweet and it has the orange flavor and it’s just nice.
It’s an easy to drink cocktail that is not super fruit, you know, sweet forward little bit more of …
Amber: So, okay. AI tells me it is equal parts gin, sweet vermouth, and Campari with orange peel. So we think this drink is going to be trying to taste a little bit like gin?
Chris: Maybe. And again, Campari, which is like bitter. And then it should have a little bit of orange flavor, so it won’t, it shouldn’t be very sweet. It should be like bitter, orangy maybe a little bit herbaceous if they replicated the gin. Or maybe we’ll just end up with a furniture polish situation like we’ve had with other fake alcohols that try to imitate gin. We’ll see.
Amber: It is interesting, it’s been a while since we’ve done like a non-alcoholic cocktail, and I saw an article, that was talking about like non-alcoholic cocktails and like beers and stuff. And I think they’re saying the market for this in the US is like over $800 million a year.
So a lot of people drink these. I’ve had a hard time finding one that I like. Sometimes I feel like they taste weird, but if you look at the ingredients of this, now that I know it’s supposed to have gin in it, it has a what? How do I never know how to say this? Quinine, Quin, quinine. I don’t even know.
Which is what they put in gin and also helps protect you from malaria.
Steve: Oh.
Amber: So handy beverage, if you’re gonna be hanging out around mosquitoes, I guess.
Steve: So why is it called Naked Life?
Chris: Couldn’t tell you.
Steve: I mean, I looked on their website.
Amber: Yeah. What’s their website say?
Steve: I mean, it doesn’t say anything.
It doesn’t, I haven’t found why it’s called Naked Life, so…
Amber: Maybe it’s, well, it’s got, it’s only got five calories and it’s zero grams of sugar. So it’s using artificial sugars for people. Fruit and vegetable juice for color, stevia, erythritol. Maybe they’re trying to say healthier way of drinking. Oh, it’s pretty…
Steve: Well, or maybe people that live the naked life want to not gain a lot of weight.
Chris: Yeah.
Amber: I mean, yeah. If I was visiting those topless beaches, I probably would wanna make sure.
These are cute little cans though. So it’s like a peachy color and it’s got almost like a grape, like a ruby red grapefruit color illustration of, I guess an orange.
Chris: It smells like what I think it should smell like. I haven’t tasted yet, but it smells like a Negroni Spritz should smell.
Amber: Steve, how, what does it smell like to you? How would you describe that?
He took a drink.
Steve: It’s better. It’s, I mean, I don’t know.
Chris: This is shockingly accurate. Like to what a Negroni spritz should taste like if it had alcohol, just without alcohol burn. Like it has that gin character. It’s bitter. It’s got the orange. It’s definitely not like a fruity, you know, thing. You have to like bitter stuff to like this, you know, which you might not.
Amber: And it’s not sweet at all. I don’t get any sugar or sweetness off of it.
Chris: I think the Stevia leaf extract is just there to offset like the bitter a little bit, so it’s not all bitter. I bet this would be gross if it didn’t have the stevia in it.
Steve: I mean, it, it hits hard with the bitter and then I can taste a little bit of the sugary on the finish of it, like…
Chris: Oh yeah, it definitely, I can see why they recommend serving it over eyes with orange peel because that definitely does something for it. Like the fresh citrus does something.
Amber: I feel like it’s like all of these always to me, either have just a weird off kind of flavor, which I guess is them trying to make it taste like alcohol or they just don’t have much flavor. And to me, I don’t get a lot of depth or, I don’t know, like the strength of the flavor feels weak to me on this.
I don’t get if it’s supposed to have an orange flavor or like when I think of gin, it’s very juniper-y. I don’t really get either of those in strong amounts on this.
Chris: I don’t know. It definitely to me, is very reminiscent to my palate of what a Negroni Spritz tastes like, but I do agree that it, it feels like it’s missing something, probably the alcohol.
Amber: I don’t think it’s the alcohol though, to me. If this were an alcoholic beverage, what I would think is that they put too much of the, like water mixer in and not enough of the things that have flavor. Like to me it’s watered down or like thin.
Steve: Yeah it’s just really bitter to me. Like I feel like I’m chewing on the roots of like weeds or something like, it’s…
Amber: Or like orange peel. Does it seem like you’re like eating pith?
Chris: Yeah.
Steve: What? What’d you say? What was that word?
Amber: Is that what it’s called? The white part?
Steve: Pith? Yeah. Yeah.
Amber: I could have invented that word. I don’t know.
Steve: I mean, it sounds like you said it takes something else, but…
Chris: No, that’s light, that’s light beers.
Steve: Yeah, that’s the light beers.
Amber: Oh, man.
Steve: Yeah, it’s just bitter. It’s just really bitter to me for some reason. I don’t know.
Amber: Yeah. All right, so, so let’s say it then, with our so technical ratings. Would you buy it again? Thumbs up, thumbs in middle, thumbs down.
Chris: I’d rather just have a normal Negroni Spritz.
Amber: Yeah…
Steve: I’m gonna go thumbs down. And I’m gonna say, I’m gonna say that when I got it out, I handed one to my wife and she opens it and she goes, oh, it’s not that bad. I’m like, okay, that’s weird. Because normally, so she likes something about it that I’m not tasting, so I’ll say that.
Amber: Yeah. I’m also a thumbs down. My thought on it is most days I don’t have any alcohol. But I don’t ever feel like I have to have alcohol if I go somewhere. So I don’t feel like I also need a mocktail. And I would honestly be happier probably with just like seltzer and lime because I feel like that would have a stronger flavor.
Steve: Yeah, and I mean, I hate to say it, but if I have a mocktail, I don’t mind them being like super sweet tasting like Kool-Aid or something.
Amber: Or fruity.
Steve: Yeah. Fruity. Yeah. Yeah.
Amber: The news article that I saw, it was on the AP and they were talking about one of the problems with mocktails in general is that they have really high sugar content and then they were saying, you know , all the doctors associations are like, you shouldn’t have that much sugar. But what’s, I mean, no one can win ever.
Steve: Yeah. Yeah, just drink water.
Chris: That’s what I was gonna say. It’s pretty much what they’re saying is drink water. And don’t enjoy your life.
Steve: Yeah. When you’re young, you think the the adult drink is alcohol. And then when you become an adult, you realize that the adult drink is water.
Chris: That’s the real adult drink. That’s an astute observation, sir.
The Investigative Report that Led to Today’s Discussion
Amber: Oh man. So, August 14th, a KMBC news, which is in an ABC affiliate out of Kansas City, so television news here in the US. They did a whole expose on an attorney who has been involved in dozens of “sue and settle” lawsuits around the Kansas City area, who also may have web accessibility issues on his own sites. And so that made me think that this would be such an interesting thing to discuss. Hence, today’s topic, throwing stones from glass houses. Can we start just by summarizing the news story, Chris, you maybe wanna talk about what this little news story says?
Chris: Sure. So basically this attorney has, sued dozens of small businesses in Missouri. I think the count was up to 90 plus. And it seems that they are all coming from the same plaintiff, so he’s representing the same person. And all of the small business websites that he is suing he’s targeting cash settlements for.
So it’s all from the same plaintiff. It’s all targeting cash settlements. This fits a pattern that we’ve discussed previously, both in WordPress Accessibility Meetup and even on this podcast with an attorney. Kind of talking through, you know, these sue and settle type things, targeting small businesses who have accessibility issues on their sites.
And so this fits that pattern. But I think what makes this particularly interesting, at least for me as I was reading through this article, is two things.
Number one, just the fact that this got picked up by a news outlet and is being reported on like in local news. I think that’s super interesting.
Amber: TV news even.
Chris: Yeah, TV news. And number two, they actually did some investigative work on this. So they went to this, someone in their newsroom knows what WAVE is. The browser extension, for anyone listening who isn’t familiar that can help scan for accessibility issues. They installed WAVE on a computer in their newsroom and they went and found this attorney’s various websites.
They scanned it, they scanned them, and they found issues in WAVE. Errors, warnings, et cetera. And so they were pointing out, you know, Hey, this attorney’s suing everyone and seems to be making some similar mistakes. And they even found that some of the issues on this attorney’s website were similar in nature to issues that , this attorney was suing people for.
So some parity between the issues on the attorney sites and what the attorney is suing for. And then on top of that… The most fascinating piece of investigative journalism from this particular article and video is that they went and looked into the serial plaintiff who was on all these lawsuits, and the serial plaintiff is someone who has macular degeneration. But the thing that was particularly interesting to me is that serial plaintiff is living on the land of this attorney’s family in what looks like maybe some sort of mobile home or something like that.
And has resided there for quite some time. So I think that’s a really interesting piece of information that I’m still kind of chewing on. I just saw that and I was like, wow, that’s really interesting. So, but I think I want to…
Amber: Yeah, I was just gonna say it is interesting and it might seem illicit, maybe, I don’t know, but it’s possible that the attorney’s family was already his landlord and he was just complaining to them about his real life experience on websites, and that’s how they got connected.
So I don’t know. I was like sitting here being like, is this really bad?
Steve: There’s objects and, the reason why the lawyer can’t just go out and sue all these places is ’cause you have to have a plaintiff that has standing, right?
Somebody that actually has had trouble accessing these websites. One thing I thought was interesting, just a data point here, was that it says out of the 101 lawsuits, about half the businesses have settled for the amounts ranging from 5,000 to 40,000. So, that’s individually right, like 5,000 to 40,000 individually.
So we’re talking we’re talking major money here. So the optics are definitely not good when they live on the same property and there’s a lot of money to be made here. And I think when companies do get these lawsuits they are inclined to settle.
Because it could cost them even more to fight. And so, yeah, it kind of feels a little bit like the classic ambulance chaser format.
Chris: It does have that feeling for sure. And we can neither confirm or deny any of this. It’s all speculation based on what we can see from this news story from KNBC.
Did the “Settle and Sue” Attorney’s Websites Have Verifiable Issues?
Chris: But the interesting thing to dig into a little bit, and the thing that I think is really what we’re trying to talk about today, with the idea of throwing stones from glass houses, is the fact that this investigative journalist claims to have found accessibility issues on these attorney’s websites. And I, we’ve done a little bit of looking into this, so what issues did we find when we looked, and is this real or are they not really major problems?
Steve: Sure. So there’s two websites that are in question here, and I did just my own quick little scan of the page and I did use WAVE. And so there are two websites I think he has like his normal, traditional attorney website where he does, you know, family law and things like that. And then he’s got a niche website that is specific to his accessibility legal practice. So both of these sites are using Divi and they use a Divi child theme.
And the main website actually in the accessibility statement claims that they are using UserWay as a widget overlay and as a scanner. And I was actually unable to get the widget to come up. I don’t know if there’s something special you have to do to get it to come up or if I’m blocking those scripts in my browser. And then it did come up with, you know, a handful of WAVE issues.
And I will preface this, that I don’t think that these issues are like monumental. These are kind of, you know, typical issues that you see on a lot of websites that haven’t really thought a lot about accessibility. And I will say that the family practice one does seem like there’s been less effort put into the accessibility than the accessibility website. It seems like there’s been more effort.
So I mean, on the main family law website, there’s missing form labels, and empty buttons and you know, select missing a form label. There’s some field sets. So not all these things are errors. And when I tab through on this website, I’m missing a lot of visual focus outlines for a visual user. Those are really nice to have if you’re using a keyboard. And it’s lacking in a lot of those. And there’s lots of icons that get read out by the screen reader when you go through. These are not major issues, they’re just kind of annoyances. There’s, you know, there’s some social icons that are not labeled and things like that. And then there’s some heading order problems on that one as well.
And then on, on the accessibility focused website there’s less issues. There’s just a few maybe contrast issues and things that were reported by WAVE and, the accessibility website, they’re actually utilizing the WP Accessibility plugin and which the WP Accessibility plugin will tell me what it’s doing in the console log, which is kind of interesting.
So, I can see that plugin is actually adding a skip link to the page. It just has a skip to content link, whereas his family practice website didn’t appear to have a skip link. And you know, it’s doing a few things by explicitly labeling search fields and removing title attributes from images and setting a max viewport scale. So, so good focus outlines there. The heading order actually does come back as legit on that site, but as I was doing you know, we’re probably talk about this a little more.
Like these automated tests can only go so far, to tell you what the accessibility is and you know, I don’t know if it’s 20 80, or 30 70. You know, it depends on the tool you’re using to evaluate the website. But on, on that website, the heading orders do come out in a check fine in the right order, but on a manual inspection there’s spans that are actually presenting visually as headings and that aren’t actually headings.
And they, you know, the website kind of does the back and forth, you know, where you have the heading on the left side in this section and the text on the right, and then it flips back and forth and the order gets off with those spans. So, I would say that the accessibility website has much better accessibility than the main website, but I don’t think that either it’s like, it’s completely blocking accessibility issues that I noticed just at a glance.
Amber: Yeah. Yeah, I feel like both of these have some pretty obvious failures that might stop someone from being able to use the website, particularly on the main one. That’s not just about we sue people for ADA violations. And it’s interesting he is got an accessibility statement and trying to do that, but then it’s well, I mean people with disabilities get divorced too, or need help with child custody or whatever. So if you think that one should be accessible, why wouldn’t the other one be, you know?
Steve: Yeah. And on the main website, if it was using the UserWay scanner, I mean, I haven’t really used UserWay all that much, but I would assume that UserWay can pick out some of these low hanging fruit issues that we can easily identify on that main website.
Amber: Yeah, I tried, so I know I have Accessi-ByeBye in my main browser, which blocks all of those.
But I tried it incognito and I tried it not in brave ’cause sometimes brave also blocks the scripts. I couldn’t find UserWay on any of these. So what my guess is maybe at one point in time he was paying for UserWay and decided he didn’t wanna pay for it. And so it got removed, but he didn’t update the statement.
So he is not keeping his accessibility statement up to date. So I think like high level, what it sounds like is as far as what we can tell, what the news reported that he has websites that are not accessible is true. That…
Steve: Yeah.
Amber: We can support what the news has shown.
Steve: Yeah. Yeah. I mean I think the WAVE evaluation seem to be correct and I think that the issues that WAVE is finding, WAVE does an adequate job of identifying those.
Amber: Yeah. And then as long as you were to also do that manual testing like you were talking about ’cause there is some stuff WAVE won’t find. I mean, and the only other thing that I noted was on the main website, there’s a lot of animations. They don’t have pause buttons, which is a WCAG failure and could be disruptive if they’re making an announcement.
Steve: Yeah. And both sites don’t respect prefers reduced motion. I tested that.
Amber: So it sounds like we all agree these websites have problems. I wanna talk about, what does this mean? Because obviously the news thought that was important. But before we do that, we’re gonna take a quick commercial break.
Brought to You by Accessibility Checker
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Does This Actually Matter?
Amber: So we’re back, and this is what I wanna talk about. If an attorney or a web agency, someone who is out there promoting accessibility or doing things to motivate other people to have accessible websites, which arguably we’re suing to help motivate that and not just to get money, right? But your own website is not accessible.
Is this hypocrisy or does that not even matter and is not totally irrelevant to him suing people or helping his clients sue people?
Steve: Yeah, that’s the initial knee jerk, right? Is oh wait, hold on. You really practice what you preach, right? You know, do on the others that you would do to yourself. It’s like all these like things come up. But then I kind of, I had a second thought was like, well, okay, website takes say, government funding, right?
Then they have a certain level of compliance that they have to get to, does that lawyer that would sue that company have to meet the same legal compliance that, that the company they’re suing? May, maybe not, right?
Amber: Oh, and this is an interesting question because is a law firm covered by the ADA. It might not be considered a typical place of public accommodation, and therefore it might not have the same standards that say a restaurant has. I don’t know, and we’re not attorneys, so we’re not gonna guess. But that is like an interesting thought here, right?
Steve: Yeah. So you dive into the legal, right?
So are they on the correct legal footing? I don’t know. Not a lawyer. I can’t tell you, but like I do question, you know, the requirements for the law for maybe different than the legal requirements for the person that they’re suing.
Chris: Yeah, totally. I think that’s a really interesting thing to consider, right?
The other side of that, you know, on the glass houses thing I think, Steve, you had brought up optics earlier, right? And I think there’s this optics thing with these small businesses and the general public who is looking at this story and…
My knee-jerk reaction when I looked at this story, and this is just me personally, right? I was like, Ooh, you know, this doesn’t, this looks like, not saying that’s the case, but it looks like someone trying to make a quick buck by taking advantage of the situation. It’s what it looks like. And that’s the optics.
And I’m sure I’m not the only person who looked at that and thought this. And so my high level concern with this approach and kind of what the ripple effect of it is, it’s gonna put a bad taste in people’s mouth on what accessibility is supposed to be about and what it’s really supposed to mean from a standpoint of ethics, morals, like public good, right?
When we see things like this where people are kind of being attacked, you know, or would have that feeling right of being unjustifiably attacked when it’s, you know, one, plaintiff 90 cases settling half of ’em from between five and fourty thousand.
Steve: And I will underscore a little bit too, what, you know, you brought up, you know, we’re talking legal, ethical moral, right? Like, where does this fall? And and really we even questioned ourselves, what’s the difference between ethics and morals, right?
So, I mean, a lot of these are things that we have to identify and figure out within our own selves. And on both of the websites for this attorney looking at the accessibility statements, it, it’s stated in a disclaimer that it is our collective moral obligation to allow seamless accessible, and unhindered use also for those of us with disabilities.
So this attorney is stating in their own words that they believe this is a moral obligation. So that definitely would lean towards if it’s, if you find it within yourself, a moral obligation to do this, then maybe some more steps could be taken to make your own properties on the internet a little more accessible.
Amber: Yeah. I think the other thing that I thought was sort of interesting, and we haven’t mentioned this before now, but in the news story, they highlighted the fact that this attorney also owns like a marketing slash web shop, which is really interesting. I’ve never seen that before. That website was one that had accessibility problems, but it’s no longer available on the internet.
And I had to be like, wait, really? So I went and looked at it in the way back machine and indeed he’s like the principal of the thing. And so what’s extra interesting about this is I suspect he’s building his own websites, so it would be harder probably to argue, well, his developer told them they were accessible and he just didn’t know any better.
But it is really interesting if you’re putting out there that you believe this is a moral requirement, but then you’re not even doing it, it seems very hard for you to be telling other people they should do it. I don’t know. It’s hard though because I feel like, you know, on the one hand, none of us are perfect. We all make mistakes. We all overlook things or learn over time and realize that the way we did something when we first started building websites wasn’t good. That’s happened to us.
There’s a literal news story on the television news in his big city that he lives in, right? He is not even a small town attorney, about how bad his website is, and we’re looking at it 15 days later.
Steve: Yeah. And if he listens to this episode, you could install Accessibility Checker and we could add those focus states for you. And the same with Joe Dawson’s WP Accessibility plugin. He can do that as well, which he is using on his accessibility focused website.
You know, this news agency pulled up, WAVE and scanned the website and when easily found a handful of accessibility issues that can be remediated fairly quickly. That, that is very low hanging fruit. And if you’re, you know, if you’re kind of presenting yourself as an accessibility advocate or professional or somebody with a moral obligation to accessibility, that fixing those low hanging fruits are super easy to identify and super easy to remediate as well.
Now, if everything was copacetic in WAVE like and WAVE didn’t come back with any issues or any other accessibility scanner, and you resolve those. And then there’s like the kind of the edge cases in like more advanced components on your site, like tabs or you know, a slider, accordion, things like that.
A lot of times those are harder things to remediate, especially if you’re using a third party plugin or library to do those. And there can be some nuance to what is the exact right way to remediate those things. That’s a whole nother story. But when there’s really, like, when you’re not ignoring icons from outputting in the screen reader. I know on one of these sites it was like, it read out as a dollar sign or a number, just little annoying things like that. Or you know, naked links, or there’s even, like on his family practice, there’s click here, ambiguous links. Those can be edited in the editor, like it’s been 15 days.
You can just go into the editor, I’m sure it’s like a widget area, and you could just make that an actual link instead of, you know, an ambiguous link. So there’s a lot of really easy low hanging fruit that could be fixed quickly.
Chris: Yeah, and I think that’s where this really starts to feel hypocritical, is the fact that there’s easy fix stuff here. And, I mean, if you’re going out and you’re doing these sorts of things with, you know, serial plaintiff lawsuit, after lawsuit it really would feel a lot better, I think, if this attorney or any attorney who’s doing this, his own house is in order in terms of accessibility. It’s this little seed of inconsistency that anyone who’s observing this externally starts to think to themselves like, what do you really care? Or is this about something else?
Amber: Yeah. And I think the biggest downside on that is that it takes, it distracts from the more important argument, which is that all websites should work for people with disabilities and, but then when we start to see these kinds of lawsuits, it really just makes it, it just makes people hate accessibility, to be frank. And think this is horrible. This is all fake. This is just scammers who are trying to scam you. I’ve seen that a ton in like Reddit posts or conversations on various social media platforms.
When somebody says, I got sued for accessibility on my website, and I’m like, yeah, your website sucks. But a whole bunch of people will reply back and be like, it’s a scam. Like this whole thing is just a scam. But it’s ’cause they don’t understand. And then when you see things like this, I think it really does not reflect well on the industry.
Closing Thoughts for Agencies, Freelancers, and Other Web Professionals
Amber: And so I think as maybe some closing thoughts. Obviously we know that our audience typically is not attorneys listening to this, it’s web developers and web agencies. Are there any takeaways from somebody getting called out on the news about their lack of accessibility and not practicing what they preach.
Are there any takeaways from this for agencies and web developers who are trying to sell or promote accessibility to their customers?
Steve: Yeah, I mean, I think I can go first. What I would caution, you know, freelancers and agencies for with this is that there are people potentially out there, looking for issues. And this may not just be somebody with a disability that stumbles across an actual blocker on your website and they can’t actually utilize it. But , there probably are actors out there that are actually looking for accessibility issues to be able to push lawsuits like this and to maybe make profit off of your inaccessibility.
So I think it underscores the importance of it. You know, on top of all the other things we’ve talked about in all these other episodes we’ve had on why we do accessibility and why it’s important and who it benefits and how it benefits everybody really. But, you kind of wanna protect yourself against the, I wanna be careful with the words I’m saying, but you know, some people could construe this as predatory. And they’re coming at you with not the best intentions.
And I did kind of have a thought about kind of the last thing, you know, the 101 lawsuits. About half of them have settled for the amounts of $500 to $40,000. So we’re talking hundreds of thousands of dollars here probably. And the question is, can two things be right?
And can they be right about the accessibility and make the money right? And if all those dollars that came back through this litigation resulted in all of those websites being accessible, that may actually be a net positive. But I would probably argue that those settlements were made, but the accessibility may not have been part of the settlement.
And we’ve seen that in a lot of these lawsuits where at the end of the day, the lawyers walk away with a lot of money and the person left holding nothing is the person with a disability that needs to access these websites. So unfortunately, my personal opinion is that I think a lot of this is about money, and I think if you want to protect yourself as an agency or a freelancer or an individual solo person make sure you’re making your stuff accessible.
Make for the right reasons. Do it for the right reasons, but also do it for legal protection as well.
Chris: Just to kind of tag onto what you said, I think a lot of small businesses, agencies, developers, accessibility professionals, a not statistically insignificant group of us, don’t really like that this kind of thing is going on.
If that wasn’t already obvious to the people watching and listening to this. And if we as a collective want to see the lawsuit mill go away, the best way that we can go about doing that is making sure that what we’re building from a continuous improvement mindset, like that everything we’re doing going forward is accessible.
And that it’s at least passing automated tests, preferably also being manually checked too. Because if we can do that and we can get the WebAIM Million from 94% to 90, to 85 to 70 to 60 to 50, right over the next few years, as people get better and more and more aware. That is shrinking the pool of people that law firms can target with these kinds of what appear to be from an external observer, predatory suits. So if we wanna see this industry go away, prioritize accessibility early and often.
Amber: You know, so I have a slightly different takeaway on this for agencies and, web developers. It’s that people you don’t even expect to know about WAVE, I don’t know, this random news reporter know about WAVE. I guess a lot of people do that can easily find tools like that and check your stuff. And we occasionally, we don’t always run Hotjar on our website, but we sometimes run Hotjar on our website.
And I have watched session recordings in Hotjar where I can see people running WAVE or Axe or similar on our website. Like checking us to be like, do they actually know what they’re talking about? And I don’t think that’s necessarily unique to accessibility. It could be that, maybe they go check your website in Google Page feed to see if you actually know what you’re talking about when you say you build performant websites.
But I think if you are somebody who is selling websites to any organization, or person, you should expect that they might be judging you and what you say on how your website looks. Because that’s literally what happened. Like the news is well, what does his website look like if he’s talking about accessibility being important?
And then they went and they’re like, no, he doesn’t. And it became news. And maybe we’re not all gonna end up on, you know, the 10 o’clock news. I hope not. But at the same time, like I think that is something that you have to consider and you need to make sure that what you are doing on your website is in line with what you are selling to your customers.
Accessibility, security, performance speed, SEO, whatever that is. We can’t ignore that for our own stuff and just turn around and tell other people, hey, you need this on your website. Because if we start doing that, then we’re going to get called out and it can be really embarrassing.
Steve: Yeah.
Amber: I don’t know if I feel super bad for this attorney. But I also probably do because I am 99% sure the day after this new story aired, it was horrible in that workplace. So I would say, you know, it’s hard to make time for working on your own stuff, but you have to make time for working on your own stuff. You can’t just be like, I’m gonna sell this to my clients and never do it for myself.
Steve: Totally.
Chris: I got nothing to add to that.
Amber: All right, well, that’s the end of this episode. So, we will probably not be finishing our Negroni Spritz?
Chris: What I will say though is Naked Life has five other flavors and maybe one of them is good. So sorry we didn’t like this one, Naked Life. ‘Cause I’m sure you’re watching. Our beverage opinions are widely distributed and everyone hangs on our every word for that, obviously. But…
Steve: Send us a case. Send us a case, and we’ll try ’em all out.
Amber: Yeah. And then we’ll let you know .
Chris: You’re still waiting on that Coca-Cola sponsorship.
Steve: There you go. I know. Diet Coke owes me some money. It’s for real. Like…
Amber: All right, well, we will see y’all back here in two weeks for another conversation.
Steve: All righty. See ya.
Chris: Thanks for listening to Accessibility Craft. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe in your podcast app to get notified when future episodes release. You can find Accessibility Craft on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and more. And if building accessibility awareness is important to you, please consider rating Accessibility Craft five stars on Apple Podcasts.
Accessibility Craft is produced by Equalize Digital and hosted by Amber Hinds, Chris Hinds and Steve Jones. Steve Jones composed our theme music. Learn how we help make thousands of WordPress websites more accessible at EqualizeDigital.Com.