ROI of Accessibility

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ROI of Accessibility

Type: Breakout

Track: Organizational Success with Accessibility

By making your website accessible, your organization can capture a huge, overlooked market share, reduce your legal risk, lower call-center costs, and boost brand value.

 

Building accessibility into your development process and reaching your compliance goals shouldn’t be disruptive to your organization’s development velocity, or business operations. In fact, having an accessible website that is inclusive, increases brand loyalty, and expands your organization’s reach to a “hidden” market of $490 billion.

 

Greg Williams, Accessibility Program Office Executive at Deque, discusses the ROI of building accessible websites. You will learn:

 

How shifting accessibility left in the development process is more cost-effective than fixing accessibility defects in post-production.

How accessibility can help meet omnichannel goals and reduce costs.

The revenue potential by adopting accessibility captures an overlooked market share and boosting brand value.

 

>> Hello, everyone.  This is 

Leeann from Deque.  Thank you

for returning to the Return on

Investment of Accessibility. 

Please hang tight as we get

folks settled.

>> Hi, everyone, I'll be

moderating today's session on

Return of Investment of

Accessibility brought to you by

Greg Williams.  I'm going to

take a few -- care of a few

housekeeping items.  Today will

be hosted on demand for

registrants.  Second, slides for

today's session are available on

the website.  If you require

live sections for today's

session, you may access those on

the session page just below this

video stream.  Lastly, we'll

save the last 10 minutes of the

session for Q and A.  So please

post your questions in the Q and

A section, also located next to

this video stream.

Throughout the session you can

chat with the attendees in the

chat next to the video stream. 

You can sort messages by recent

messages, with that I'll hand it

over to Greg.  GROIG thank you

very much --

>> GREG WILLIAMS: Thank you,

welcome everybody to Axe-Con,

and this afternoon's session, I

think getting started now.

A couple Quebec things, you see

the chat you have there, some

people were talking about not

seeing it scroll.  So you might

want to switch it to most 

recent.  So you can see the

comments as they come in rather

than most popular, which is by

default, I think.

The other quick thing, just to

say I know if you haven't gotten

your book yet, some of the

things I'm going to talk about

here, a lot of it actually tunes

directly into the book that's

been discussed earlier today, so

make sure and get your book and

read through that if you haven't

had a chance to do that.

I'll go ahead and get started. 

The Return on Investment of

Accessibility.  I was listening

to the keynote speakers, and as

we talk about this, I think it

was said, ROI doesn't sound like

the right term here.  And he's

correct.  We really shouldn't

think about things in that way. 

But the business world being the

business world, we have to.  So

I may change the title on this

at some point.  More to talk

about the business case of

accessibility, because the

reality is, as you try to add

accessibility into your

organization, especially to do

the work to make it sustainable,

it's going to cost money and

time to do that.  And money and

time, when you're thinking about

being in the boardroom, just

saying it's the right thing to

do, unfortunately is not always

going to get you what you need. 

I think it should, and I think

some day it will.  But for right

now, we have to think about

these other aspects of it.  So

the information I'm going to

share with you today is going to

help you to paint that picture,

to maybe illustrate for people

who don't quite get it yet that

not only is it the right thing

to do, it's also just good

business as well.  And good

business for four main reasons

that I'm going to share with you

today.

So what are the aspects of

return on investment for

accessibility, or what are the

business cases that we can talk

about?  And as I said, there's

four main ones I want to 

discuss.  Those four will do

some seriously positive things

for your organization.

The first thing to think about

is your market share.  And we're

going to talk about market 

share, we're going to talk about

ecommerce.  We'll talk about the

disruption of COVID in 2020, and

what that meant to ecommerce and

what that meant to people who

might not have had any other

options other than the digital

storefront to be able to get the

product or service they wanted.

So we'll talk about that, we're

also going to talk about

operational costs, and this is

operational costs in the

omnichannel organization.  If

your organization has brick and

mortar storefronts and you've

got a digital presence, call

centers, we'll talk about how

shifting those costs in the

right channel are going to help

you and you can do that with

accessibility.

We are going to talk about risk

profile.  This is the lawsuits. 

And although I think this is

really a negative motivational

factor, and I put it third on

this list, in fact I should

probably put it fourth on this

list, but I put it third on

purpose because I don't think

that should be the main thing

that we pursue here, because the

value of the first two that I

talked about there, outweigh the

value of risk mitigation.  And

probably the fourth one, which

saw lining your digital presence

with your company core values

and thinking about things like

social justice, again, more

valuable to your company in the

long run, if you can get people

to think in those terms.  I've

helped dozens of companies

 

create a case, and get the 

funding they needed to produce

accessibility digital content,

so I'd love to help you as well.

     Let's talk about market

share, and e-commerce.  I've got

claim your portion of the pie. 

It's a big pie.  There's a lot

of money and a lot of people

involved.  And I'm going to talk

about the U.S. market place.  I

do have efforts to get data on

the European market.  Different

places where I'm trying to get

more information, it's a little

harder to come by there, but

there's a similar story.  And we

know there's similar situations

exist, but let's focus on the

United States.

     We know the after-tax

disposable income for 

working-age people with

disabilities is approximately 

$490 billion, just short of 

$500 billion.  And this is a

group that are likely going to

need some type of accommodation

to work with your digital

storefront.  If you have a

digital storefront that's not

accessible or you're trying to

provide services and there's not

an accessible way to procure

those services this, is the type

of share you're looking at not

servicing.

     What does 4 husband 

90 billion mean in the larger

scheme of things?  The

African-American market is 

501 billion, and the Hispanic

market is 582 billion.  A

significant amount of money out

there and people who are looking

to achieve goods and services, I have a friend of mine, he said it's a great time to be blind.  And what he meant by that is that there's more than one choice for people today when before there were fewer choices.  If you're not accessible and your competitor is, somebody is just going to switch over and get their product or their service from somebody else

Then we talk about the people.  So 20 million, 35% of all people with disabilities, U.S. working age, adults age  16-64, this data comes from several sources, but I also heard Mr. Serf, talking about permanent or temporary disability.  Lots of money, lots of people.

We look across that disposable income, and say, where do we see which disabilities in this income statistics and this data we  have?  On the chart that I have here, it shows the disposable income again in billions.  So you get that billions scale.  But vision difficulty hearing, self-care, ambulatory,  cognitive, and independent living, with independent living being the highest and ambulatory being the second highest, and hearing and vision difficulty next.

This gives you an idea how those numbers are spread across the disability community.

Then picking that a step further, let's look specifically within the e-commerce specific data.  So from the e-commerce statistics that we can get, we understand, these are numbers from 2018.  I've got some draft numbers from 2019 and for a lot of reasons we probably will think of 2020 as an anomaly.  But in 2018, the approximate total there was $517 billion.  So based on some research that Deque did, with the research company, we commissioned a company to help us with this, 2% of those total e-commerce transactions are completed by people who are blind.  This is assuming less than half, so that 5% of the population, that means that total market available there is about 10.3 billion dollars.  Just that one piece.  So that's the e-commerce market size for accessibility.

And if we look in that research, we see that 90% and Dylan mentioned this earlier today, 90% of internet sites or maybe higher, have critical access bottle bill blockers -- accessibility blockers.  There's something in the flow, whether you're trying to get a service, buy a product, or pay a bill, that's keeping people from achieving the intent of the content.

So that's a I have high number.  And so if I take that 90% and I'm going to use the numbers here, that inaccessible e-commerce, retailers are losing out on 6.9 billion dollars a year, and to just give you an idea of the scale, I like to give people the scale of the numbers we're talking about too, Home Depot.com reported an annual revenue of 6.94 billion in 2019.  An entire Home Depot's worth of revenue is being lost out because customers don't just abandon that purchase, they're going to buy some place else.  They have other options.  They're going to use those other options

If you are talking to the people in your company who are making the financial decisions, if you're talking to them about the need to service this community, absolutely talk about that it's the right thing to do, but it's the fiscally responsible thing to do.  You look at these numbers, how can you say that a company with shareholders wouldn't say, this is something we should focus on?  Absolutely should.

The next thing I want to talk about is I want to talk about operational costs.  So let me define that a little bit for you.  We talked about omnichannel organizations.  Organizations that would have perhaps a mail-in center.  Let's use financial as an example.  They probably got some type of mail-in center where you can make payments or deposit checks.  They've also probably got brick and mortar, so if your brick and mortar branches, they're going to have the website, where you can do most if not all of your financial transactions now.  And there are -- they're going to have some type of call center where you can call in and get service and probably execute those same transactions.  In fact, a key for most omnichannel organizations is that this be similar if not exactly the same across each channel, and also give you the opportunity to pick up and move from channel to channel during whatever task you're trying to do.  So you may start out on the web, and end up on the phone, vice versa, however it is you're trying to complete your transaction.

So in doing this, if your digital channel is not accessible, obviously you've got a large hole in the  organization.  And one of the biggest holes in terms -- it will be just in terms of cost, because typically, and I would like to say always here, but I'll say typically but I can't imagine the digital channel is going to be the cheapest way to do business

I've done a study here, and this is when an actual fortune  500 company.  We were looking at the mechanics and the cost around making a payment.  Simply making a payment, a credit card, a car loan, a home loan.

If you looked at the cost of making that payment in this organization, if somebody walked in, this is a brick and mortar staffed agent facility, we're going to account for everything that goes on here all the way down to the power and the water for the facility.  Everything it takes.  About $15 to make that payment.  From a call-in perspective, you still have the brick and mortar facility, you've got a staffed call  center, trained people there, so although there aren't the call centers are typically large and fewer of them, it's still going to cost you some money.  But they do cut that money down to  $7.50, in half.

From a mail-in perspective, another brick and mortar facility, and I don't know if you have ever seen these giant mail sorters that take the envelope and open it up and pull the check out and scan the check and deposit the check, but it's quite the operation to see.  But there's also a ton of mechanical interaction.  So also some very costly places just to set up, let alone run with the people and the technicians you need to do that.  But it's a little cheaper at $2.50.

Finally, click-in.  I've got somebody coming into my virtual digital website, and doing this make a payment transaction, and again, I'm  taking in all the costs.

The data center costs, the servers, the power, the cooling, but it's just 50 cents for somebody to make a payment.  The difference between walking in and clicking in, $14.50.  Making a payment on your card.

So let's see, if we want to have a proper channel mix for our company, very likely we want to minimize walk-in and we want to maximize click-in.  So here we have what we want versus what it actually is.  What most companies want is they would target maybe 5% or walk-in.  Wherein actually it's probably 60%, but it's declining.  Your people go into banks every day, but still do the same transactions to get the same services.

Call-in, maybe 15% is the target is actually 20, mail-in, 20% of the target, it's actually 15.  And click-in, the target being 60%, but the actual is 5%, we're still in a position where the majority of the transactions  that we see people doing are not necessarily the e-commerce transactions, but that grows more every year.  And again for 2020 because of COVID, we saw a huge spike in the amount of activity in these digital storefronts.

Now, the channel costs for 1.5 million payments, if you look across though, I'm going to take the actuals.  60% walk-in, 20% call-in, 15% mail-in, 5% click-in.  I used the costs that I had before, is going to come out the total cost of payment processing all channels per month, if I think about  1.5 million transactions, which some of you, your companies are large enough you probably have  1.5 million transactions per  day, or 1.5 million transactions per hour.  We'll just say  1.5 million, we want to keep the numbers safe and easy to work with.  16.35 million dollars.  To take those 1.5 million make a payment transactions in a month.

What I'm going to try to do is improve the accessibility of the digital channel because I want to increase it.  So I had looked at 5% actual on the digital channel, which is  click-in, and I'm going to increase that up to 15%.  And for that total that I took for the 10% that I'm adding to the click-in, I'm going back and forth so you can see the difference, I'm going to have  15% now and add that reduction of 3.33% across those other channel and say walk-in,  call-in, mail-in will decrease by 3.33%, but click-in is going to increase by 10%.  I'm using the same per unit cost, I'm  using the same 1.5 million payments per month.

So if I improve the accessibility of the digital channel and I can add more people there, which I likely will, if people were using it before, now the total cost of those payment processing using the -- is going to cost me about 15.2 million.  The difference there comes out to a monthly savings, just for this one transaction, and then just a  3.33% change from one channel to another, to that monthly savings of $1.162 million.  If I look at this over an entire year, that  $13.9, almost $14 million, and who couldn't run an outstanding accessibility program on  $14 million a year?  In fact, who couldn't run an outstanding program on half that much?

If you're trying to make these numbers fit something that's going to get your chief financial officer's attention and you're in an omnichannel organization and they're trying to improve the usage of the digital channel, but it's not accessibility, this is a very concrete way to not only show them how you can gain money, and pay for more so you've got return on investment, because how much you've spent on accessibility is eclipse order how much you're going to save the company in these ownership rational costs.  This is some outstanding information to help them see that.

And by the way, after we do that, let's watch it and try to figure out some way through feedback or other mechanisms to attribute the growth in the digital channel to the usability overall to the accessibility of the channel

 For -- again, those organizations that have this, this is an outstanding way for you to show what's going on in those channels and to show your senior folks how this makes a big difference and how it actually pays for itself.  That's the second way to do it.

Let's talk about the aspects of that, though, before we get into the third one, and what I want to do is again, this was the study that Deque had commissioned that we did with people with disabilities group primarily people who are blind, and we interviewed them and collected information, but what we saw is that people who are blind call a company's customer service department once a week on average because of accessibility issues.  90% of those that we talked to said that they call multiple times to report an issue, even though they've maybe abandoned trying to do the transaction.  So  again, remember those costs, the cost difference between somebody calling in and somebody calling in multiple times for an issue and just imagine the cost of that continuing over time when you could address that cost by making your digital channel fully accessible.

Now let's talk about risk management.  This is the one that I think everybody starts out with.  It's the lawsuit.  Everybody is scared of the complaint, everybody is scared of the lawsuit.  We heard earlier this morning Christina talked about, she gave an entire hour's worth of updates on statistics, which I've got the same statistics in here, just for illustration.  But when we look at the situation, there are a lot of lawsuits that people are filing, and they're filing them in federal court, they're filing them in state court, they're ADA lawsuits, the Department of Justice gets involved.  The reason that's occurring is because we have the Americans with Disabilities Act.  We have Title II, title I, which covers what you must do for your employees, Title III.  Places of public accommodation is likely where you would see a complaint or lawsuit if your digital storefront is not accessible.

 

 

So let's talk about that and talk about those costs for a little bit.  One of the things you'll see here is the study that I did here, again with three fortune 500 companies, was to look and see what the actual cost of that was.  I have an entire presentations  that just on this part of it.  So you can jump out and look at that on Deque.com.

I'm going to summarize it here.  Why do we need to talk about it?  We obviously talk about it because I've Typhoon Koppued about that growth.  These are the year over year title three lawsuits filed, all basis, so this is both fiscal and digital accommodation.  But you can see in 2013, we had  2,722.  And year over year, some years with huge increases like from 13 to 14 with 63% increase, but then sometimes smaller, so 19 and 20, we'll consider 2020 an anomaly year.  Staying about the same or decreasing a little bit.  But we've seen those go from 2,000 up to -- in excess of 10,000 a year in 2018, 2019, and 2020.

 

In fact, what Christina shared with us this morning, I think they expect 2021 based on early data may be a record year because there's probably some pent-up frustration last year, things that were illustrated we maybe wouldn't have seen without the COVID lockdowns as well as action that didn't get taken because everything was locked down.  So we could see quite the year this year.

And thin where we are -- are we seeing these things focused at, I don't have the graphic for California on here, I couldn't get it in time, that's how late-breaking some of this is.  Where do we see those, this information from this morning's presentation, so California has about 5800, New York has 2200, and Florida having 1208.

They be they continue to be spread across a myriad of different industries, both products and service.  So there's really no place that's absolutely safe from these types of lawsuits.  If you are selling a product or service.  And you have a digital presence and you have a method for doing and providing services in a digital channel, then you need to make that accessible.  If you don't, very likely you're going to eventually see a lawsuit in that space.

So let's talk now about the cost of the complaint.  I want to talk about complaints first, then I'm going to talk about lawsuits.  What I'm doing here is I'm collecting information on what actually occurs when a complaint happens.  Not just the actual fine and settlement costs and lawyer fees and things that come from the lawsuit, but what actually happens?  What things occur?  Call center people have to get involved and probably call center management, we've got your compliance and regulatory people involved, your product management, developers, testing, deployment operations, because theoretically whenever the complaint comes in, you're going to have to fix it.

 

 

I've got a big chart that I'm not going to completely cover in this presentation, but of course once you get the presentation you can dig through it in the table.  But what this is showing is the number of people involved, number of hours they might spend working on this complaint, and the extended cost based on an average cost for people in your company.  So you can use the average hour for whatever you like, but you can see that when you get the complaint, you're going to have somebody who receives the complaint, you're going to document it, you're going to process it, you're going to spool up a project to fix it, then you're going to have to design code, and test what you're doing.  Then you've got to issue it back out to production and spool down the project and then finally follow up with the customer.

So you can see the extended costs on these.  It very quickly adds up.  It adds up to a lot, right?  So the reactive fix cost here that we have is about 9,9 hundred freezing rain, when I add everything up in this  extended cost.  What we're talking about in scale factor versus design, that potential cost of this complaint, if you're practicing accessibility and you have a defect injected in the design phase and youd a receipts it, let's take an example, we should have had alternative text on an image that means something to the content, and it wasn't put  there.  If I fix it right then it's a very quick fix.  I've  fixed it in design, there's probably one or two people involved, we're done.  So the proactive fix cost on that is going to be very cheap.  It's going to be probably an hour or less of somebody's time.  Hopefully for an hour or less

The reactive fix loss we just figured up is almost 100 times that much.  So that's how much more money we're injecting into that when we see the reactive fixed loss at  9,949,000.  When you -- if you get a hundred complaints over a year and each ones  that type of activity associated with it,  now, this is probably going to be worse case, because hopefully you would bundle these up and put them in a project instead of having a project for every one.  But we'll take the worse case number and say it could be upwards of a million a year.  This is responding to complaints and fixing issues you've found in production versus fixing those issues when they occurred, or not having the issues at all.  This is what Deque refers to as shift left, shift left means you're fixing the issue, you're addressing accessibility as  early in the software development life cycle as possible.  And that's where you save the immense amount of money here.

 

 

Now I want to talk about lawsuits and what happens with a lawsuit.  Which is going to have some of the same activities that we have with the complaint, but now we're going to add some very expensive people.

In fact, I'm going to take the blended rate up to $225 an hour and say I've got senior company leadership, I've got those compliance regulatory personnel, internal legal counsel, internal legal support, internal subject matter experts, external subject matter experts, centralized accessibility team leadership, developers, QA deployment operations,  marketing.  Realize that all the people that I've listed here, all of these skill sets and all of the resources that I have, this is really what it takes to do.  That's what happens at these companies, these people have to come out and deal with this lawsuit and you're probably going to have to keep your C suite up to date on what's going on too.  It's taking expensive time from expensive people.

So the potential costs  here, you're going to have as I said, more expensive people and more expensive resources, it's going to have a protracted response.  There are very few lawsuits that happen over a short amount of time.  This is going to be burdensome.  Somebody is going to have to keep things rolling and figure out what's going on and report it back, and get direction, and take action.  As I said, it's going to involve the senior levels of your company, because they want to know about their company's aggregate risk.  I would if it were my company.  And typically it's also going to call for outside counsel.  So you're probably going to have to hire a law firm who can practice where the lawsuit was filed.

And who has experience in dealing with accessibility or Americans with Disabilities Act lawsuits.

So we're going to go back to the same type of table here, but you can see that now I'm talking about things that happen when the lawsuit comes in.  So the lawyers are going to have to be assigned, the business is notified, you're going to have to retain outside counsel, so you can see I've put a cost in for that.  You're going to have to issue hold orders to people.  That means during a lawsuit, you can't destroy any records that may be pertinent.  There's special processing that will have to take place so you're not doing any illegal records management, I'll put it that  way, on things that pertain to the case.  And that actually takes people time to do.  To identify those things and set them aside.  Some judges order very early discovery, so if the judge orders early discovery and you have to provide things like your policies and maybe your internal standards, or your software development life cycle documentation, that's going to take time.  You're going to have to prep for court status hearings, you're going to have to prep for negotiations, you're going to go to court, negotiate all these things that you're going to have to do, and keep in mind that this illustration is for a small quickly settled lawsuit.  This isn't even  counting one where you've  decided to contest and it we're going to go to court and fight the issue.

Then you've also got settlement drafts, settlement draft reviews, finalization processing, and now you've got to release your hold orders, so all those records that you kept, now have to be released so they can be destroyed when they're supposed to be destroyed on your regular retention timeline.  And then you've got to close the project and file and document everything.

So this means your litigation grand total, again, just the activities the people are undertaking in these  extended costs, plus your outside counsel retainer, so there's two things not  represented.  I haven't represented any potential DOJ fines issued, or any damages.  And also I haven't listed anything for a settlement cost.  So $356,775 just in activity of people doing things that are required when you receive and have to process a lawsuit inside of your company.  An immense amount of money.  Much higher than -- you hear people I settled it for 20 or $25,000.  Well, 20 or $25,000 plus the  $350,000 you just had to spend on all this activity.  There's no such thing as a cheap lawsuit in this space.  And I've had, I presented this a couple years ago, and there were a few lawyers, and most came and said they thought my costs were actually low here.  So we might use this as the best case example instead of the worse case example.

Then think about something else you could add on top of this, which could be potential DOJ action.  We heard this morning the DOJ could levy a fine up to $96,000 and change for first action, and $192,000 for subsequent actions.  As well as requiring your website to become accessible in probably a very aggressive amount of time.  So they're going to force you into action that's going to disrupt your company, it's going to take extra time and money and just not a good practice to get into when you could have spent all of this money proactively on building an accessible website.  Between, things that may or may not happen to your company, but things that have happened to a ton of companies and money that they've put some place other than where it would have done the best good for the company for the shareholders for the customers.

We've talked about the numbers, we've talked about the market share, e-commerce, we've talked about the channel costs, we've talked about risk.  Now let's talk about alignment with core values and let's talk about social justice, or to I think quote Mr. DSerf this morning, it's just the right thing to do.

It is the right thing to  do.  So what I've done here is just collected some company mottos, if you will, and I'll just read through them real quick.  You can maybe you'll recognize the company and maybe not.  But there's a cheat, at the bottom of the slide when you get the actual deck there's the names there.

Here to help life go right.  You're in good hands with.  Or life's better when we're  connected.  Our clients' interests always come first.  Leading a way.  Where there's a helpful smile in every aisle.  Our vision is to be the earth's most customer centric company.  Or, be what's next.

So with mottos like that, if your mission stated, again, look back and read them again, if your mission is to be inclusive, connected, customer driven, how can accessibility not be part of that?  It's just impossible.  So everything else, you going to the marketing people and say, look, you've got a great marketing strategy, but you're not following through with it.  How are you following through if accessibility is not part of what we're doing?

So another strong argument for just doing what is right, and social justice concerns are definitely on the rise, and if you have a group of people that's being treated poorly, let's say, you get a lot of negative press, or perhaps you'll get people saying I'm not going to buy your product, so some Sirius consequences.  So you want to be out in front of it and not behind it.

There's another piece, back in 2019, I found this, and I put it here because I just thought it was very interesting.  And I'll say since 2019, I'm not sure I've seen -- there's a group of CEOs who said maximizing shareholder profits no longer can be the primary goal of corporations.

This was just before COVID, the end of 2019, the story in the "Wall Street Journal" I think is referenced in the slide deck as well, so you'll get  that.  Think about what these groups of CEOs are saying after everything we've seen in the previous couple decades.  Profits is not the only thing that we need to do.  We need to be good corporate citizens.  We need to focus on good for all on inclusiveness.

Another way that you can work this into your  organization.

Again, we talked about social justice issues on the rise, there are tests -- tech companies that face pushback for contracts with immigration and border control.  Retailers face calls to halt firearm sales, increasingly vocal calls on social issues, racism, LGBTQ+ equality, people with disabilities, ageism, pick your issue and I'm happy to say that there are outspoken advocates now for all of these, and I  really like the way this is growing.  But again, because it's growing, you have to think about what you say and being inclusive means you're inclusive of everyone.

So a couple of other things to leave you with real quickly before we get to questions.  Customers are increasingly  looking to spend money with companies that share their  views.  This came from the study that we did.  In that study  also, we found that in the study group, customers who were happy or unhappy with a company because of accessibility, tended to communicate that strongly to their family, and friends, and colleagues, so you got a groundswell of either satisfaction or dissatisfaction based on that as well.

All right.  This brings us down to questions.  I think  Leeann has been watching as we go and home we've got good question and I'll try to answer what you put forth

>> Sure.  Thank you, Greg, that was awesome.  We have a few questions here from the participants.  So one of the questions is, are there any case studies or companies who had seen an increase in profit after making their website or application accessible?  This will be great information and ammunition when discussing accessibility of decision  makers.

>> GREG WILLIAMS: Yes.  The holy grail question.  I've given this presentation or parts of it several times and I always get that question.  I'll say that I think I'm closer than ever before to finding this.   However, it's going to be difficult to find, because companies aren't classified, rightly so, companies aren't classifying the difference between people with disabilities and the other people that are doing business with their companies.  So it's been very hard to pull that out of the data and say that this particular increase in profit occurred because of what we've done with accessibility.  So I'll say I don't have a concrete example of that yet, I'm working with several companies to try to build ways to do that.  But it's tricky to do that because of the way that we certainly don't want to track a particular population through the companies, I that I would be a negative thing to even ask anyone if they're using an assistive technology, it's just not the question you ask.

That's what holds us up from getting that.  I think we'll get it someday, but it's not quite there yet.  Good question, by the way.

>> Here's another question.  If you were to prioritize the various return on investment practices, which one do you think is the most important one to focus on?

>> GREG WILLIAMS: So I think the most important one that's going to help you sell this is probably going to be the market share, and if you're an omnichannel organization, the argument about channel costs.  At some point in your organizational change  management, as you begin to help gain awareness on the peoples with disabilities community, to help gain awareness on how easy it can be to put accessibility into your products if you focus on it at the right time, using the right types of tools and the right types of processes and procedures and guidelines, that people are going to say, oh, this is just the right thing to do.  But until they get that part of it or they truly understand disability accommodation and accessibility, you're going to have to talk their language, and their language is going to be exphoin they're going to want to know how much is this going to cost me, how is this going to save me something on the other end, how is it going to grow my business or meet some type of goal that my business has.  So that's why I think those two are probably key to focus on at this point.  Coming up very quickly is the social justice one, anybody who hasn't had their head in the sand in the last two or three years should understand that that's coming to bear, and start to work on that too.

There's a lot of unmeasurable potential there that I think people are starting to understand.  Also a good question.

>> Great.  Another question comes in, the big picture is to make everything and everyone have the ability to play in the same arena.  With that, the biggest investment is driving consumers to your website, instead of a competitor.  Will you stay that is your best return on investment?

>> GREG WILLIAMS: Ask you that question again?  I'm not sure I got it.

>> I think the question  is --

>> GREG WILLIAMS: Restate the question, I'm sorry.

>> The biggest investment is driving consumers to your website instead of going to a competitor's website.  Would you say this is your best return on investment argument?

>> GREG WILLIAMS: Yeah.  It's -- I think I understand what they're asking.  It is a huge part of that argument to get people to your website.  And I think that we're -- where we typically have not looked at accessibility as a competitive advantage, I don't think everybody always thinks of it that way.  It's becoming a competitive advantage, and it's becoming that way just because of what my friend said a couple years ago, it's a great time to be blind, because I have  options, because I can do different things.

So, yeah, I think getting people to your store and doing business with you and helping them be satisfied in everything before the sale, during the  sale, after the sale, is a key to business retention, and there's just so much competition out there that getting the word out that your storefront is completely accessible is going to become a competitive advantage.  If it isn't already.

>> Here's another question.  Tell me more about why that lawsuit cost in your study seems higher than what I've seen?

>> GREG WILLIAMS: So the difference in what I did and what others have done, people have typically just focused on, what were the legal fees, what was the settlement cost, and what were the fines?  If any?  So if we just focused on legal fees and settlement cost and fines, sometimes those are -- most times those are quite a bit lower.  But it's really all the activity that's generated because of the lawsuit or because of the complaint and not only the activity, but the disruption to your business as you have to address something that maybe wasn't immediately in your timeline.  Now you're disrupting other plans, other movement, and you're trying to do something out of sequence, plus you've got all of this activity taking place with people who have other jobs to  do.  There's nobody just sitting around at your company saying, okay, waiting on a lawsuit, when it gets in, I'm going to take care of those records.  These people all have other jobs.  That's where you're going to get the issues that come in, and that's why I did this study in that specific way, to show you that even if you settle for $1, let's do the price and right, it's now $350,000 and $1, because you still have all that activity.  That's why I think that surprises people, and they like to debate it.  I'd love to debate it to see what your company processes are, I think it's fun to talk about those things.  That's just me.  I would love to have more information on that, but that's why it seems higher.

>> So here is another question, is 2.0 the goal, what is the returns on investment to go beyond that?

>> GREG WILLIAMS: This is a great one.  That's -- this is -- I'll get a huge argument started up here.  I will never advise a company that their goal is to be conform ant with a guideline.  Web content, accessibility guidelines.  It could be the goal, if that's specified in the legislation.  But really your goal is that your content can be used by everyone regardless of ability.  Or regardless of whether they're using accommodation tools or not.  And what that means is that you have some Leeway within the guidance itself to make things  accessible, but maybe not 100% conformant.  Don't get too caught up into the notion of trying to make it 100%  conformant because the last bit you go after may have almost no impact on the user experience at all.  But it's expensive to get to.

Conversely, there are things you can do that WCAG may not require that would have a tremendous impact on your experience, and the way the thing is designed, and the inherent usability.  I sometimes for some things don't go all the way there, some things you blast past it.  Remember, it's a competitive advantage world.  This is becoming -- so the  usability of your website including accessibility becomes something that can set you  apart.  I'll say there's no top end to it, just make sure that you know your audience, and that you're making sure that your content can be used by everyone regardless of ability.  That's a great question.

>> So we have a question from Garrett, he's asking, do you have stories for the return on investment on making internal employee facing systems accessible?

>> GREG WILLIAMS: Yes.  So we didn't really talk Title I too much here.  Unfortunately I've seen, I think this is the lawsuit effect, this is why I don't list lawsuits first.  Unfortunately I've seen Title I, which is you do for employees, get pushed to the back because typically you can accommodate your employees a little easier than you can accommodate somebody out in the public.  But I do have stories about that.  And I'd love to have more and I'd love to talk about them.  You think about an employee, you've just hired the smartest person and the best person for your job, and yet you're not providing them something they need to do their job.  This is the whole neetion, the person wants a PIN, don't save a dollar for lack of a million dollars.  So when you enable that person fully to bring their self to work and to not have somebody beside them reading a screen to them, to be able to schedule PTO on their own, to look at their own W-2, the job satisfaction, the productivity, the increase in the -- in their ability to overcome issues or innovate for your company, it's incredible things you get there.  And so my answer to that is, why in the world would you hamstring somebody coming in?  You want the best people to work.  That's also a very good question, and I didn't have that stuff in here because this is primarily covering Title III.  I'm  gathering information to talk about Title I, so more to come on that one.  Did that answer that?  I got a little excited about that one.

>> We have a question, but it's a little bit on the legal side.  So we might not be able to answer this.  But the question is related to, for legal reasons, do courts go by  WCAG or usability?

>> GREG WILLIAMS: This is a little legal -- I'm not a  lawyer.  This is not legal advice.  I'm just telling you what Greg -- GW, they call me  GW, what GW has seen.  Most is going off of that.  The predatory lawsuits, there's some people out there filing lawsuits just because they want to get a settlement.  A quick settlement.  They use it because it's easy to say I call it the murder  lawsuit.  They list 10 different ways you could commit murder and say, I accuse you of committing murder.  Here's the web content accessibility guidelines, I accuse you of not following those guidelines.  Because that's been referenced at some point through some litigation.

So that's typically what you see people coming through.  It's not about the usability, they're trying to say you're not meeting some portion of that accessibility guideline, which comes back to usability.  But some companies aren't very -- some plaintiffs aren't very specific when they say that.  They'll just quote the criteria and accuse you of not following it.  I think the main thing here is it should be talking about some type of injury, what can or can't they do because of how your website is built or architected?  I don't see it nearly as much on the actual  usability, they're arguing about the guidelines.

>> So I think we have time for about one or two more questions.  Here's another one.  How could we make a case for accessibility in companies outside of the U.S., where the law isn't so clear and the risk of lawsuit isn't a driver?

>> GREG WILLIAMS: Forget about the law and the risk of lawsuits, I guess.  That's number three moving to number four on my list.  I would again say that even though it may not be -- think about a marketplace where this is not required at all.  And think about those market statistics that I just gave you.  Whether we choose to focus on it or not, there is still this community of people with disabilities in the world that may be a billion people.  So if they're not focusing on it at all, and you focus on it, and you create that competitive advantage where nobody else -- that's brilliant.  So I would say focus on those other pieces, especially if they're not mandating it.  If all your other companies are lazy and not doing it, and you do it, think about the advantage you just built.  It's tremendous.

>> Absolutely.  So one last question.  What would you say to people in a company actively trying to stop accessibility efforts.

>> GREG WILLIAMS: Oh, my, actively trying to stop.  I guess I would have -- I've run into this too.  It's happened.  The main approach I have to that is to try to have adult conversation, but sometimes you can't, you have trouble with the adult conversation, because if somebody is saying that, they haven't been informed, or perhaps they don't have data to back up their position.  But try to have an adult conversation about why.  Why don't you -- steer away from, it's the right thing to do.  That's an obvious one.  This is like arguing politics.  If you're a liberal and you're arguing with a conservative, are you really going to change each others' viewpoint?  Maybe not.  But in this case you can change it with data, especially the data I had about the market share, the data I had about the omnichannel, the channel costing.  And those types of things.  So break -- bring it down into a business question and I would bet you're going to be able to back them into a corner on that business question where they can't say this is a bad idea.  Because if it's a large company, you're not going to spend a billion dollars making -- it doesn't cost  a billion dollars make your content accessible.  It's a very reasonable cost when you look at the overall I.T. budgets.  I would say -- I would back them into a corner with those business questions and try to stay away from the emotional parts of it.  But thous a loaded question.  Depends on the person and why they're saying -- why they're trying to stop it.  Some people are just mean!  I don't know!  Hopefully that's not the case, but try to use the data.  Always use the data, data-backed decisions, and back them into that corner and say, I -- here's all the data, if you admit this is right, how can you say this is not the right thing to do?

>> Great.  Thank you so much, Greg, for a great session and thank you to everyone for attending, enjoy the rest of Axe-Con.

>> GREG WILLIAMS: Thanks, everybody, I appreciate it.  Have a great day.