In this episode of Accessibility Craft, Amber and Chris sit down with Roger Rowles of Made Right Media to talk about what it really looks like for a digital agency to level up its accessibility practices. Roger shares how his team moved from early accessibility assumptions and overlay reliance toward a more thoughtful, proactive, and client-centered approach.
The conversation covers how agencies can introduce accessibility without making it feel like an upsell, how to position remediation and rebuilds with legacy clients, why accessibility is an ongoing practice rather than a one-time checkbox, and how better accessibility work can also support technical SEO. Along the way, the crew tastes Stereochemistry DIPA from Spindletap Brewery, a bold double IPA with a bright label, layered hops, and a surprising thumbs-up from our historically IPA-disliking hosts.
Episode Outline
- Introducing Roger Rowles of Made Right Media
- Tasting Stereochemistry DIPA from Spindletap Brewery
- How Made Right Media first approached accessibility
- Why public sector clients often need proactive accessibility guidance
- The risks of relying on accessibility overlays
- How Roger approached legacy clients after changing accessibility recommendations
- Why accessibility should be connected to audience needs
- Practical ways agencies can package accessibility work and not have it feel like a throwaway upsell
- How accessibility improvements can support SEO and content quality
- Why WCAG conformance should be treated as an ongoing process
- Roger’s other projects, including a new startup focusing on local, targeted AI implementations and VistaWP, a solution for real estate websites
Links & Resources Mentioned
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Accessibility Craft is hosted by Amber Hinds, Chris Hinds, and Steve Jones. They are experts in digital accessibility and creators of software, courses, and specialized services that have made millions of websites more accessible through their work.
To learn more about us, you can visit our website.
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Transcript
Chris Hinds: Welcome to Accessibility Craft, where we explore the complex challenges and emerging trends that are shaping digital accessibility, while sipping on unique craft beverages. This show is proudly produced by Equalize Digital, The most trusted name in WordPress accessibility. Join us every week as we break down accessibility news and share the expert strategies we’ve used to help make millions of websites more accessible.
Grab a drink, the show starts now!
Amber: Hey everyone, it’s Amber, and I’m here today with Chris.
Chris: Hey, everybody.
Amber: And we have a special guest, Roger, who is going to introduce himself here in just a moment. But if you are tuning in, this is episode number 170, which means you can find show notes and a full transcript if you go to accessibilitycraft.com/170. Roger, we are so excited to have you here. Do you want to introduce yourself for our guests?
Introducting Roger Rowles with Made Right Media and Bora.ai
Roger Rowles: Sure. My name is Roger Rowles. a digital agency owner and a customer of Equalize Digital, and we do a lot of website design and development and SEO and pretty much anything under the sun when it comes to a business’s presence on the web. We serve s- businesses, public sector nonprofits, and yeah, I’m excited to be here.
Chris: Wonderful. Wonderful. Well, we’re excited to have you, and for, for those listening or watching or reading this transcript afterwards, roger’s agency name is Made Right Media. They’re based out of Idaho in the US, and feel free to check them out, and we’re gonna throw a back link in the show notes for you to look at them if you’re interested in getting connected with Roger.
Today’s Beverage
Amber: Yep. we start every episode with a beverage. I will say I’m super excited because it’s purple. What are we drinking today, Chris?
Chris: So yeah, we’re trying a Spindletap Brewery beer called Stereochemistry, and they just have an acronym DIPA, which I believe stands for double IPA. So Roger likes IPAs, and so we picked this one, and this says Volume 11, which is kind of cute. So, and they say it’s music for your mouth.
8.8% ABV, and it’s a full pint can with a really cool, like, cassette tape illustration on the side of it. I’m excited to taste this.
Amber: It’s purple and pink. It passes that Amber likes the label design.
Roger Rowles: Yeah. I always like when you get one that has, like, just the plain can and then the sticker label on it, ’cause that means you know it’s, like, legit independent.
Not paying for the fully colored can, right?
Chris: Yeah. Yeah.
Amber: This is from a brewery that is down in Houston, Texas, so not too far from us, but a few hours away from where we are. And they actually have a pretty big like three acre brewery that you can go to where food trucks come and they have food and coffee and ice cream, and they’re like, “It’s family friendly.”
So it’s like a cool place to hang out if you’re down in Houston, I guess.
Chris: Well, I’m gonna crack this open, and I got a glass that I’m gonna pour mine in.
Roger Rowles: So we’re an hour earlier here, so it’s a little early.
Amber: It’s 11:30.
Chris: Yeah.
Amber: Sorry about that, Roger.
Roger Rowles: That’s okay. Normally I’m into it, but we’re also going to a watch party for the USA- Australia game in the World Cup, and this is a double IPA with 8.8% alcohol. It’s also a tall boy. So I’m not gonna drink the whole thing.
I’m gonna pour it into a mason jar and…
Chris: Yeah, your…
Roger Rowles: … (cross-talk) save…
Chris: Your comment about it being before noon reminds me of the one time we did one of these recordings with someone over in Europe, and I think we did it at, like, 8:00 in the morning. And we were all tasting something. We’ve done a couple of those, actually. I, I think we did one with Joost, too, where we, like, were putting a liqueur into some coffee, so it felt, like, a little bit okay.
Roger Rowles: Yeah. Well, I mean, anytime you can have a beer before 12:00 is not necessarily a bad day.
Chris: No, no, not necessarily a bad thing. Not necessarily.
Amber: So it’s got a good nose…
Chris: Yeah.
Amber: I like…
Chris: Mmhmm.
Amber: Kind of… We’re not a huge fan of IPAs on this podcast.
Roger Rowles: Oh, sorry.
Chris: No, it’s okay.
Amber: No, that’s okay. I’m always interested to try new stuff. I haven’t tried this one before. And, but I like the nose. It’s a little bit fruity almost with the hop mixed in.
Roger Rowles: It’s got a nice kinda tang to it, and it’s pretty light for being a Double IPA. I feel like it’s pretty it’s just really light and kinda fizzy. nice.
Chris: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Honestly, what I’m getting on the nose is, like, pine needles or cedar. Like, it’s, it’s very it’s got that kind of smell to me for some reason. I’m gonna give it a taste.
Amber: All right, how would you describe that flavor?
Chris: Not as bitter as I was expecting. Really intense, like intensely flavored, very forward. I feel like structurally it’s, it’s backing up the, the hop. Like there’s decent … I talk about acidity a lot for people who have listened to this a few times in beverages. It’s like if I’m drinking something and after I swallow if I feel like I’m salivating a little, like that’s the acidity coming forward.
And it, I don’t know, it has backbone. It’s standing up to those hops. Sometimes it’s just like a hop punch and then, I don’t know, just bitter and unpleasant. But this one, it’s also, the hops aren’t one note. Like there’s, there’s different, there’s different layers to it, and I’m wondering if that’s what these other random, seemingly random words are on the front of this can.
It says Mosaic, Crush, and Nelson Sauvin. S-A-U-V-I-N. I don’t know if I’m pronouncing that right, but I’m wondering if those are like hop varietals or if that’s, or if those are bands I’ve never heard of since it’s got a music . I don’t know.
Amber: I’m guessing those are hop varieties.
Roger Rowles: I think so, yeah.
Amber: Yeah. So I had to look this up ’cause I had no idea what a double IPA meant because I’d never a beer that said it was that before. So double IPAs are IPAs that feature extra hops and malt. Said the added layering of hops promotes more bitterness while the extra malt provides a more distinct toasted or caramel flavor. And I’m…
Chris: Hmm.
Amber: As much of a toasted, but it’s interesting. I don’t think this is as bitter as some of the other IPAs I’ve had.
Roger Rowles: Definitely not. Yeah, like I would say it’s a pretty easy drinking IPA, especially for a double.
Amber: I’m curious, Roger. I don’t know if you know our backstory of we used to have an RV and travel all around, and one of my favorite places that we ever went was we went to where was it? Wilder, which is down in, like, the bottom part of the state, and we stayed next to a river. could be making this up, but I th- in my head it’s, like, the Snake River or something like that.
Is that a river in Idaho?
Roger Rowles: Yeah, it is.
Amber: But there were tons of hop…
Chris: The hop fields, I remember this.
Roger Rowles: Yeah.
Amber: Which was really interesting. So do you know, like, do they make a lot of beer in Idaho, or were we in just, like, one weird little pocket?
Roger Rowles: No, we actually have… I think we’re actually one of the top hop producers in the country, if I’m not mistaken. And we actually have a pretty big wine scene too. There’s a ton of grapes, and that whole Snake River Valley has a ton of vineyards in it. Like some of the vintners in California are starting to buy property up here too, ’cause things are getting so hot in California.
We’re like a couple degrees cooler. So, like 20 minutes outside of Boise, you can go on these really cool wine tours and stuff like that.
Of course the craft beer scene here is huge. I mean, there’s so many restaurants and bars here in Boise, it’s like insane.
Amber: Yeah. Yeah. We, we went to Boise for a couple of days, like day trips, and…
Chris: One of the better restaurant experiences I had in our travels was at a place in Boise, kinda downtown. I have this vision in my head of, like, a, a really intricately painted, like, mural where it says Boise on it, but it’s like cityscape and landscape and buildings, like, and it was on the side of a, it was on the side of a building downtown.
And we were right on the main strip. I think we could even maybe see the capitol building. And there was a restaurant right on, right on that.
Roger Rowles: That mural is probably in the Basque district. So we have a huge Basque population. I don’t know if you know about the Basque people, but they’re from Northern Spain. And they have actually this really crazy language that’s not tied to any other language on the pl- planet. It’s like one of these languages that is not part of any other language family.
Chris: Mm-hmm.
Roger Rowles: And we have the biggest population of Basque people outside of Basque country. And they have a whole block downtown. They do a big festival every year. They have some great restaurants there. And the cool thing about Idaho, and I, maybe I shouldn’t be saying this actually is nobody knows about it. And so, like, everybody thinks Ohio or potatoes. And the main freeway runs through Southern Idaho, which is all super flat. But just north of Boise, you get into all these mountains and rivers and all this outdoor space that nobody knows about, and it’s amazing. So we actually have bumper stickers say, like, “Welcome to Ohio” and stuff to try and trick tourists to not come to Idaho, but to go to Ohio.
It’s, like, this kinda funny thing that we do.
Chris: And you heard it here first, everybody. Idaho does not wanna share.
Roger Rowles: No.
Chris: Very cool.
Amber: Yeah, we are very excited to have you here. Before we move on to talk a little bit about accessibility and actually accessibility in practice, we always like to give our beers a little bit of rating. It’s super not technical. You can use one thumb, you can use two, whatever your preference is. But it’s like thumbs up, thumbs in the middle, thumbs down. Would you buy it again?
Chris: Yeah.
Amber: Two thumbs up from Roger.
Roger Rowles: I love it.
Chris: Woo-hoo.
Amber: And for everyone who is listening and not watching, we got a really nice fireworks Mac animation on that one. I am a, a one thumbs up. I don’t normally give IPAs a thumbs up, but I think I’m liking this, and I think I’ll probably like it even more as I get towards the bottom of the very…
Chris: Mm-hmm.
Amber: … large can. I think I would have it again if I was gonna have an IPA
Chris: I am also a one thumbs up on this one. Don’t know if it’s, like, the, the bubbles in it or just the multiple layers of hops, but it kind of tickles your palate a little bit when you drink it, like Pop Rocks or something. I don’t know. I hate using the word, ’cause it’s kind of a weird word, but the mouth feel of it is really different and distinct compared to some of the other IPAs I’ve had. It’s unique.
Roger Rowles: It’s really good. Bravo, Spindletap.
Chris: Yes. Bravo to Spindletap.
The Before: How Made Right Media Used to Approach Accessibility
Chris: We didn’t necessarily come here to talk about how amazing Idaho is and IPAs all afternoon, as, as fun as that would be. So the reason we are having Roger on is because he is an agency owner who has had a bit of a transformation, and a before and an after for how he’s approaching accessibility vis-a-vis customer conversations, how it’s being positioned in projects, how maybe it’s being talked about in the context of website maintenance over time.
So that’s, that’s what we’re gonna get into today, and I think we wanna start with a bit of the, the before, and then I think the longer conversation will be the, the after or the post all of these changes.
Amber: Yeah, I think maybe along those lines, could you maybe share a little bit about how you and Made Right Media have been thinking about accessibility earlier on? And were you talking about it with customers at all?
Roger Rowles: That’s a great question. So I have to think back and so I started Made Right Media like 13 years ago now, which is crazy say out loud.
Amber: Wild?
Roger Rowles: Yeah. And when we started in WordPress, I mean, this was like way back where ev- I don’t know. It was a different world. But most of our websites are WordPress. In fact, almost all of them are. And one of our first kind of big name clients was a housing authority. For those of you who might not know, a housing authority they manage a lot of the public housing programs stipulated by the government, and they serve a population that generally has a lot of people that have disabilities or need accessibility on their website.
And so in our first conversations with them, I mean, it was absolutely a priority just because of the nature of their audience. And so we basically said, “Yeah we’ll make sure that it’s accessible.” And this was in 2018 when we first kind of landed that client. And, we did some research. I think back then, the main thing that we really thought about were, like, people who might be blind or with low vision. But what’s really amazing is actually there’s a whole much bigger, broader spectrum of people who might have disabilities. And I think that was one of the first eye-openers, which we didn’t discover later. But back then it was like, yeah, we have this client, they have this unique population, we need to look at accessibility.
Googling back then what accessibility was, it was sort of, color contrast, size of font, things like that. And that’s what we, what we looked at. And then as sort of a catch-all, it was like, well, okay, we’ll do most of the work that we can in the design of it. We’ll make things really simple and easy to read and easy to navigate. And then we’ll use this this plugin this badge that goes on the website, an overlay to sort of cover anything we missed. And the marketing from them was, “Hey, you install this thing and you’re 100% accessible.” And so we felt pretty good about that, and that’s what we did.
So from there, though, we had a public entity as a client that we did accessibility for, that then went into all of our other sort of our portfolio of things. And so when we started bidding on other projects, we used that as experience. And so we, we have a number of clients that needed accessibility, and we used that experience as sort of a a place where we could say that we know how to do this, and we know what we’re doing. And then, it’s of course transformed from there.
But that was back in 2018, that was kind of par for the course. And I think that, to be honest, we were actually ahead of our game a little bit as far as agencies in town that were doing accessibility or doing website design.
Chris: Yeah, it sounds like it got on your radar a bit earlier than, than everyone else, and it sounds like you were doing kind of a hybrid approach where you were doing some stuff manually and then the, the overlay or the toolbar was there with the intention that it would catch anything you missed. I am curious to dig into more, like outside of the customers that explicitly asked for it, was it something that you all found yourself bringing up in conversations with people that didn’t like explicitly say, “I want my website to be accessible,” when they reached out to you?
Roger Rowles: So, I mean, a lot of the clients, they don’t even know that they need to be accessible. I mean, so for the commercial clients that are more B2C, I think it’s less on their radar in general. But another client that we have is like a telephone co-op and like a public utility and all of the clients have the best intention of serving their customers, but they might not even know that this is a thing. For them, their world isn’t the website. Their world is, like, their expertise in what they do, and the website is sort of this other thing that they have to manage and update, and it’s important for marketing. But they trust us to, to know what their obligations are and what their responsibilities are.
We definitely brought it up in cases where it was like, “Hey, looking at your audience, you should really think about making your website accessible. Your demographic, your user personas, most of them are over the age of 60.” Things like that really help kind of show the client, first of all, that you’re doing the strategic work of understanding who their audience is, but second of all, also advising them on, “Hey, you need to be thinking about these other things,” because they’re really looking to you to be the expert on that.
Amber: I’m curious, so we’re talking about more than a decade ago. Did you get positive response usually when you introduced that? I feel like I’ve noticed a lot has changed with regards to how people respond when I introduce or talk about accessibility now from, 15 years ago. Were you getting positive responses usually back then?
Roger Rowles: Well, it depends on the client, and I think it also depends on how you frame it. We had certain clients– I mean, actually thinking about one client, she had a disability herself, and she said from the get-go, “I want my website to be accessible.” And that made a lot of sense, right? And then other cases, we’ll bring it up, and it will be like, “Well, it’s really important that everybody can access the information on our website.” And then sometimes people will just say, it’s really not a priority for us. We don’t have the budget,” or, “We don’t– we can’t, serve every single person out there,” or whatever. But it’s kind of a mixed bag. I think also it’s important to present it in a way that is also positive in their mind.
Like the user persona first and then tying the accessibility aspect to fit the user persona, I think is a good w-way to go because you build the case first, and you put the identity of the person first, and then do the utility part of it after that, so they can tie the utility of the accessibility work to the individual that they’ve just learned is their target audience or their target customer.
Does that make any sense, what I’m saying?
Amber: Yeah, for sure. I think there’s probably not a better way to put it than, you know, being able to connect the benefit not just seeing it as a cost.
This is a positive that will help you reach these people that we’ve just aligned. I mean, I think that’s really smart. Hearing you say that, it reminds me, I think there are a lot of agencies out there that aren’t yet doing that advanced, like, marketing scoping kind of planning part of a website that you’re doing. And that would be a piece of advice that I’d say for anyone. If you aren’t doing user journey mapping or creating, like, personas for your customers as part of your website build process, then you’re probably missing out on a lot beyond even the accessibility side of things.
Roger Rowles: One of the biggest risks in selling accessibility is a lot of people see it as kind of like an upsell. They come to you for a website and you’re like, you need a website, and then you also need this massive accessibility package. And they just kind of see it as like, you the car salesman selling you a car plus the…
Amber: Warranty?
Roger Rowles: Yeah, this other stuff. And so doing the research first and kind of presenting like what the whole story is and connecting that to an individual that they serve, I think really helps make that connection. And it doesn’t sound like an upsell. It sounds like a smart decision to reach their audience and serve their audience.
Chris: So we’ve talked a bit about where things started. I wanna shift into some things that have changed in how you and the agency are approaching this. And helping your clients in a bit of a different way. But before we get into that, we’re gonna take a quick commercial break.
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The After: How Made Right Media Has Evolved Their Accessibility Approach
Chris: And we’re back. So Roger, we know where you started, right, on your accessibility journey is not necessarily where you’ve ended up in the last year or so. So I was wondering if you could tell us a bit about how things have changed over the last year or two with how you’re approaching accessibility.
Roger Rowles: Yeah. A lot has changed. And I don’t think it’s just necessarily in the way we work, it’s also in just kind of the environment around accessibility, the technology, the awareness as well. So, when we first got our client that was in the public sector, we then used that to kind of segue and get a few more clients that were in the public sector.
And eventually we actually got a pretty big project that was also a public entity, and they were involved in a lawsuit, and they had to remediate their website for accessibility. It was a rat’s nest of a website, and I’m sure you find those a lot.
Amber: Oh, yes.
Roger Rowles: Like I want to say they had 2 or 300,000, like, pages of…
Amber: Probably many different post types?
Roger Rowles: Actually, no, it was all in one post type, and it was integrated with a piece of software that they use internally. It’s basically– It was like a public entity that is in charge of maintaining this website with information. And it’s public information. People use it as a resource every day, and it’s a lot of information. So they have this massive website with all these pages of public information for our state. And they have this sort of internal piece of software that they use to, to craft all of this that supports their internal processes for producing this. And this program was sending, basically, like, hard-coded HTML to all of the posts.
So it was basically like you look at any page or any given post, and it was, like, hard-coded HTML in the post itself. So we couldn’t work with the theme. We couldn’t do anything. Um, and it wasn’t even semantic HTML.
Chris: Oh.
Amber: Oh, no. It’s like everything’s a div.
Roger Rowles: A mess.
Every- everything is a div. It was, like…
Amber: Yeah.
Roger Rowles: So yeah, they got sued. They lost.
They have to remediate their website. We got brought on as a consultant for that project. And I think for us, I mean, we’re always trying to give the highest quality work that we can. And as we started to get more accessibility clients where accessibility was a focus, and we started to see the ground kind of shift and the DOJ ruling that they put a a hard sort of deadline.
It was like started upping our game as well. We started taking some courses. And to me, I think the light bulb moment was when I realized that not every image should have alt text.
Amber: Yeah.
Roger Rowles: “Oh, interesting.” And I went back to one of our other clients that were using AccessiBe, had one of their widgets, and I remember seeing that they automatically produce alt text for all of their images. And I opened it up. I think they’ve since fixed it. This was a couple years ago. But I opened up the inspector, and I saw that all the decorative images on the website had alt text generated on.
Amber: Like divider….
Roger Rowles: … actually violating…
Amber: … icon of computer. Yeah.
Roger Rowles: Yeah. I was like, “Well, this is not– this can’t be right. This is, like, not WCAG compliant.”
And that’s what they’re selling.
Amber: So was that the beginning of you realizing that overlays were not the solution? I guess I’m jumping ahead, but I’m assuming you’re not using overlays anymore.
Roger Rowles: Yes, that was my light bulb moment to think… And I was always kinda skeptical. I mean, any time you throw a widget on a website and it says it does everything, you always gotta kinda, like, be skeptical of that, ’cause it’s just not that simple. It never is. But that was the light bulb moment where I was like, “Wait a second,” like, this is a clear, pretty basic, like, violation of what they say they should be doing.
Chris: Yeah.
Roger Rowles: So, we took the courses. I don’t remember how I stumbled across your guys’ plugin, probably in the repository or in a blog post or something like that. We’d always been kind of moving, shifting left, as Chris says the accessibility work of the website. Like, it needs to come in the design phase when you’re picking out fonts and colors and your color palette. So we were already doing that, but it was also like, it’s gonna be so much easier if we start making sure that the header is accessible before we build the whole website, or that this design is gonna work, in the mock-up phase as opposed to after the fact.
And then I started hearing about the lawsuits that those guys were getting and losing and it was like, wow. So then we had this conundrum of, okay, we have some legacy clients that are still using this widget that I recommended, and we’ve been reselling ’cause we were part of their affiliate program. And this is gonna be like, how do I reach out to them and tell them, A, it’s gonna be more expensive than just paying for a widget. B, it was a recommendation that we made, it was the best at the time, but it was also like, we’re kind of undoing our own work from several years ago.
Amber: Yeah that that takes a little bit of positioning to figure out how do you go to your clients and not sound like you’re saying, “I was dumb. Sorry. I made a mistake,” I think a lot of agencies are nervous to do that, but tons of people, and I mean, even we have had to go and be like, “These websites that we built in 2012, like, they’re not as compliant as we thought they were, or told you they were.” You know, and it’s, hard, so I do think you have to figure out how to position that. How did you approach that?
Roger Rowles: We did this a couple years ago, and Chris talks about this in his course too, which we kind of aligned there, which made me feel good. I still got a lot out of that part of the course as well. But basically it was like reaching out, and the websites were old in general, and I think it’s important to understand that like the shelf life of a website is, five years. That’s a good shelf life. It’s actually like three to five years. And some of our clients that were using these were, four to six years old. So it was a good opportunity to reach out and be like, “Hey, your website’s out of date, and, this is the standard lifespan of a website. We should think about rebuilding it.”
And then I usually would try and instead of putting it in email, I try and get on a call with them so that I could kind of discuss it, and I think it’s easier to have these sort of conversations in person as opposed to just an email that might be read the wrong way. And what I said was basically, at the time, that was the recommendation. That’s what everybody was doing at the time.
But over the last few years, the ground has shifted. This is becoming much more important. There’s this new DOJ ruling, and technology has changed a lot, these widgets have been losing to a bunch of lawsuits for false advertising which we were victims to. We’re now doing it in-house. We’ve been taking a bunch of courses. We have some new things, and so I think we should evaluate whether we, I know it’s important for your audience. I think we should take a look at it and remediate it.
And then went pretty well, actually. I mean, so far it’s been good. We’ve been reaching out to like three or four different clients over the past six months or so, we’ve been kind of warming up that conversation. The first good response I’ve gotten was, they go, “Well…” I mean, those widgets are not cheap, right? Especially if you have a website with a pretty big audience.
Chris: Yeah.
Roger Rowles: It’s like 150 bucks a month or 100 bucks a month or something like that. The first response I got was like, “Well, we’d love to have you guys do the work instead of paying this big corporation back East.” So that goodwill, with your client relationship was like, that’s great. You can definitely ride that.
Amber: And it’s a one-time cost of you actually fixing it for real one time versus signing up for a monthly subscription the moment you stop paying, the fix is gone, right?
Roger Rowles: True, but we do sell it as kind of a package.
Amber: Mm. Okay, gotcha.
Roger’s Take on Selling Accessibility
Chris: That leads me to what I was gonna ask, which is, you know, you just said it, you’ve had some good conversations. I love how you’re positioning this and all the points you’re making about how things are shifting, right?
But I’m wondering when it came to the actual part of the conversation where they’re like, “Okay, we understand that this needs to change, so what do we do about it?” What, what was the offer you approached them with, and are there particular tips you could share that made it easier for them to say yes to it? If there was, like, a particular thing that you felt resonated more than others.
Roger Rowles: Yeah. So, going back to the conversation about doing the strategic work of user personas and being the expert on the website for your clients who have a lot better things to do than worry about their website. I think it’s really good to position yourself as sort of like transferring knowledge and supporting them in meeting these compliance requirements and getting the benefits out of accessibility. When I approach them, of all, we do at least three different options for everything. We always include options in all of our projects, and there’s a lot of pricing information that goes into that, and like psychology and whatnot. But we always make sure that there’s three different options for them to choose from when it comes to implementing accessibility.
We’re also reaching out to clients that have older websites. Everybody’s a little bit different, but we kind of landed on take down the widget, let’s take down the overlay, let’s take care of critical issues, and then let’s think about rebuilding your website ten months from now. Or like, let’s start the conversation about actually rebuilding your website and making it fully compliant. But for now, let’s just kind of put out this fire. And so that right there is two options. It’s like option one is like remediate critical issues right now and work on rebuilding your website.
That also puts you in a pretty good defensible position if something comes up, somebody wants to try and sue them, they can say, “Well, hey, we know about this. We’re trying to fix it right now, and we’re planning on building a new fully compliant website.” That’s a pretty good argument to, to get out of trouble if they get into trouble. And it also sets you up for building a website, starting the conversation to rebuild a website.
Another thing would be just doing a lower monthly retainer. It’s like, here’s a fixed amount per month. It’ll take us six or seven months to get through all of this work, easy monthly payments. We’re gonna train your team. Because the other thing is that it’s not just about you fixing all the problems. If they’re producing any sort of content, their team needs to understand what the accessibility requirements are, what they should be doing, and so supporting their team, on an ongoing basis, that’s also another option.
So that’s kind of the playbook we’ve been using so far, and people are– I mean, it is expensive, but we also do our best to make it and fits within their budget and, no matter what they wanna do, we try and find a good solution for them.
Amber: Yeah. I think it’s worth highlighting, too, your point of rebuilding the website 10 months from now, right? I think sometimes people who are less experienced agency owners sort of think, “I’m gonna go, I’m gonna have one or two conversations, and a client’s gonna sign on right now for, like, a whole new rebuild.” But the reality of most businesses is they have to budget for that over time, and it’s something that you start a conversation now and you nurture and you help them be like, “Okay, we could help you figure out what your budget should be.” Like, all of these things, and it’s not just a one quick, I’m gonna send an email and suddenly a bunch of my old clients are gonna want their websites rebuilt.
Roger Rowles: You said, “We can help you determine what your budget is.” You need to have a relationship with your client where you’re trusted as the expert, to where when they need to put together a budget, they call you. And they say, “Hey, I’ve got to put together my budgets for next year. What are we looking at?”
That’s the kind of position that you wanna be in, and that comes from the very beginning strategic work of putting together the user personas and doing all that work and advising them. It’s not just… We try to position ourselves as not just order takers, right?
Of like, “This is your website, do this,” we want to position ourselves as like their web experts that they can come to for anything. So you have to maintain that long-term relationship, and, talking about a website rebuild next year should be a normal conversation to have.
Chris: Since you’ve engaged in some of these processes now and you’re working closely with some of these customers and it may be too early to know, but have you noticed any results from this accessibility work that you can share? Either for, for Made Right Media, or for the customers, or for both of them?
Roger Rowles: Yeah. So a lot of the customers… I mean, to be honest, one of the first things we did when we signed up for actually your plugin, I don’t mean to be plugging your plugin all the time, but I really like it and we use it a lot.
Learning Accessibility and the Results of Making That a Priority
Amber: Thank you!
Chris: Well, thank you.
Roger Rowles: We used one of the licenses on our own website as a way to get to know it and learn about accessibility. So that was one of the first things we did to kind of start training our team, was like… and the documentation that’s in the plugin itself is some of the best documentation on the internet. So it was a great way for our team to kind of get their hands dirty and start remediating things and figuring out like what the rules are and how it should be done. And if we’re using a page builder, then we should do it this way.
So, and as soon as we did that, actually, we got a pretty decent jump in SEO rankings. Like within a couple weeks. And I mean, it could have been a coincidence, but I don’t really think so. And I think we consistently see that, and we do SEO as a service as well and we’re quite good at SEO, but a lot of this finer…
Amber: The technical SEO.
Roger Rowles: The tech– yeah, and all the stuff that like goes into like making sure the link has context around it and that you’re not just saying like learn more for every single thing, but building that context into it from an accessibility standpoint.
Those are things that our SEO team might not provide in their service, or might not prioritize, but it actually has a really significant effect. So that’s the biggest thing for sure.
Chris: I wish I could say I was surprised that you saw an SEO jump.
Amber: Yeah.
Roger Rowles: I was surprised.
Amber: I’m sort of curious, do you have stories on the flip side? I mean, obviously you sort of shared the story for people that we were using an overlay and we realized, oops, that was a mistake. Is there anything else that if you went back to the beginning you’d do a little bit differently that you would recommend for other agencies?
Roger Rowles: I think probably the biggest thing is, like, fear. And it’s kind of a big daunting task to say, “I’m gonna make you WCAG, 2.2 AA compliant.” Like, that’s a big technical term, and it’s got all these things, and it’s really scary to sound like that’s your responsibility. But don’t be scared. Like dig in, learn about the resources, use the tools that are out there. When you talk about it with your client, frame it as a way that it’s not a checkbox that you are gonna say is complete. I mean, unless you’re doing a VPAT or something. But even a VPAT, from my understanding, is not necessarily like, something that’s saying that it’s completely compliant, right?
It’s simply a statement saying that these are the things that we do to make our website accessible. Like there’s no finish line necessarily. It’s like going to the gym. You have to constantly be doing it and working on it, but there’s no day where you say, “I’m fit. I’m done. I’m outta here.” And accessibility is kind of the same way. Like, it’s something you constantly have to be doing. So from a dev perspective and from an agency perspective, making that promise feel so scary.
Like, you can do it, and there’s a lot of tools out there to help you, and yeah, that would be the biggest thing.
Chris: Makes perfect sense, but Amber and I are both a little biased. Although, you know, I’m I’m hoping our audience and any agencies or freelancers watching this, or even just members of teams at agencies who see this, them hearing you say it and not us say it I’m hoping will be a little more convincing, right?
We’re here saying the kinda stuff you’re saying all the time. But sometimes it’s nice to hear somebody else say it, right? Who doesn’t have as much skin in the game ’cause their entire company isn’t built on others adopting accessibility best practices necessarily, right? It, I think it cheapens it a little bit when we’re the only ones saying it. So we appreciate you being here.
I do want to give you the opportunity before we close out the conversation, which has been wonderful, if there’s anything about something you’re working on or Made Right Media, I just want you to have the opportunity to shout out anything about you or what you’re doing to our audience so they can go check things out.
And I know I’m springing this on you. It wasn’t on the agenda, but…
More About Made Right Media, Bora.ai, and VistaWP
Roger Rowles: that’s okay. We do a lot of things. I mean, Made Right Media go check out our website and the work that we do there. We’re getting a lot into AI. We’re starting to do a lot of like custom AI implementations, which I know everybody on the block is doing that. But we’re starting a new venture called Bora AI, and that website is bora.ai. And it’s a little different. We’re doing on-prem open source LLMs customized for businesses. Yeah, it’s a little– it’s a bit different.
Amber: What are you using for your container? Can I ask? I know Chris is like, “Wait, we’re supposed to be wrapping up,” but now I just, I wanna…
Chris: No, it’s okay. It’s Okay
Roger Rowles: Well, so I have a technical partner in that who is really deep in the LLM world over the past year or so. And so I do a lot of the strategic side and the agency work of going in and building a website, you have to go in and figure out how the business operates and what they need to say, and a lot of the LLM AI stuff is the same way. And we’re always seen as kind of like the tech experts. But it’s all about figuring out, what the problem is, what the sticking points are, and then building a solution around that.
So I guess to answer your question I mean, choose whatever model it is based on their use case and then doing local installations, not huge servers, but you know, small computers that sit on your desktop. I mean, it’s a lot cheaper. It’s local. It doesn’t consume crazy amounts of water and has, less environmental impact, which I know is important for a lot of people. And using it in targeted ways and not reinventing the entire business, but using it in tar-targeted ways.
Chris: That’s really, really cool
Amber: We audited and did a VPAT for LibreChat, which is an open source like chat-based interface that you can connect to any of them, but set up local installs with as well that a lot of the universities are using. So I always find it interesting when other folks are doing things, so I will definitely have to go check that out.
Chris: Yeah.
Amber: Bora.ai
Chris: Bora.ai. And we’re gonna keep going here ’cause I, I gotta ask too, what… Is there, like, a particular machine that you’re using to run the models locally? I’ve got, like, a Linux, I’m touching it, a Linux box right here that I’ve run, a few open source models on with my graphics card, and it, and it does okay, but it, the context length is still too short to do anything super meaningful.
So I’m curious, what you’ve arrived at as, a good solution.
Roger Rowles: There’s a couple of them coming out and actually NVIDIA makes something, it’s called the NVIDIA Spark series, DGX Spark series, and it’s basically, built to run local AI. But also, I mean, the Mac mini computers have kind of been running, flying off the shelves too. I think those work also.
You just need like a massive amount of RAM basically.
Chris: Hmm. Yeah.
Roger Rowles: To do this.
Chris: Very cool
Roger Rowles: But I think the number one thing is like everybody kind of thinks it has to be this massive thing and AI needs to do everything. It’s really more about, smaller targeted applications and tasks and training, an agent or a model to do that one specific thing. And then perhaps having another higher level agent that orchestrates all the work among all the little sub-agents.
Amber: Honestly, that is a fabulous parallel to going back to you saying, like, accessibility doesn’t have to be scary, right? Because a lot of accessibility implementation is very similar. It’s like, do this small thing. Okay, you made this one thing better. Now do this other small thing, and then over time you get the big picture.
I don’t know. It’s, it’s interesting how there’s parallels in all this stuff, right?
Roger Rowles: I would love to hear how, AI is going to affect accessibility and how it can be used in… I mean, there’s certainly use cases where maybe these widgets can be a lot better, but it’s also kind of this like, big mess of where you can’t just unleash it on everything, right?
Chris: Yeah.
Roger Rowles: To be small and targeted. And now with WordPress 7 coming out, you have kind of built-in AI. So I’d like to hear your guys’ roadmap for your plugin and how AI…
Chris: I don’t know if there’s…
Roger Rowles: …in the…
Chris: Is there a lot we could share?
Amber: This will have to be a future episode, and I’m already thinking about that as you’re talking. I, I think I’m gonna ask our friend Alex Stine, who is blind back-end engineer outside of WordPress. He does all kinds of, like, crazy coding stuff that goes right over the top of my head. But maybe we could ask him and Chris and our partner Steve to talk about AI and accessibility and a little bit about where… ‘Cause I know we’ve been experimenting with stuff, but I don’t wanna take it out of Steve’s mouth, so…
Chris: yep, yep. There are f-
Amber: That will be a good future episode
Chris: … multiple proof of concept features that involve AI and Accessibility Checker that I will not name specifics on that have, that have been tested. But we’re, we’re sitting on our hands a little bit because as you, I mean, you, you said you like the plugin. And you know, it’s like, I think one of the reasons that a lot of people like the plugin is because we don’t rush stuff out.
So AI’s obviously been out for years. We probably had every opportunity to like, find a way to just shove it in there like so many other products have done. But we’ve purposefully waited until we are, have the, you know, utmost level of confidence that it’s going to actually add value and also not break accessibility.
And that’s the chief concern.
Amber: And not use all of someone’s tokens in a…
Chris: yes.
Amber: Right? We don’t want to cost you money.
Roger Rowles: Right.
Amber: I think this has been a fascinating conversation. I really appreciate you being willing to come and share everything that you’re doing on the accessibility front, and also a little bit of AI, because what podcast episode is not complete without that these days, right? Roger, where can people find you if they wanna follow up outside of the Bora.ai?
Is there a good social media platform or your website for your agency?
Roger Rowles: Website for my agency. Send me an email, roger@maderightmedia.com. I’m really not on LinkedIn as much as I should be. I don’t know. I just– I feel like everybody’s selling something on LinkedIn, and I have a…
Amber: I don’t like it either.
Roger Rowles: … hard time getting on there.
Amber: Yep.
Roger Rowles: And it’s too much brainpower to make sure I’m saying the right thing.
So, I just kinda keep my head down, focus on my work. But feel free to send me an email, roger@maderightmedia.com. Check out maderightmedia.com, Bora.ai. Oh, and one more shout-out. We also have a plugin, I forgot to mention this for real estate agents called Vistawp.com. That’s kind of a newer project. It brings in MLS data WordPress page builders, so you can build a custom template using Elementor, for example, with MLS data.
Chris: I can see how that would be useful. Well, thank you so much, Roger, and thank you everybody for watching, and we’ll see you here in a couple weeks for the next episode. Bye everybody.
Roger Rowles: Thanks for having me. Cheers!
Thanks for listening to Accessibility Craft. If you found this episode valuable, please help us reach more people by subscribing, reviewing, or liking the show, and sharing this with your colleagues. Accessibility Craft is a production of Equalize Digital Inc. Steve Jones composed our theme music. To learn how Equalize Digital can support you on your accessibility journey, visit us at EqualizeDigital.com.