On this bonus episode of Honest Ecommerce, we have Wes Buckwalter. Wes is the CEO and Creative Director at SeaMonster Studios. We talk about ADA & WCAG guidelines, agency & business's responsibility in site compliance, accessibility from different user perspectives, and so much more!
CEO and Creative Director at SeaMonster Studios, Wes Buckwalter manages a small team of geniuses, keeps them paid, and fights for their rights as employees of what he hopes is the best job they've ever had. He advocates for the creativity of my employees and contractors, managing day to day operations, finance, and client relations.
SeaMonster Studios have delivered over 1500 websites to clients over the last 18 years. They are a proud Shopify Plus partner and have become a top-tier partner with several app developers within the Shopify ecosystem.
Wes started out in the trenches, designing and building websites before a small screen had ever been considered and have continued to champion and pioneer skills in the web and ecommerce fields that gave him a start in this industry.
In This Conversation We Discuss:
Resources:
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Wes Buckwalter
It's pretty far-fetched most of the time that I see these lawsuits digging into some of the extremes, like: I can't navigate your website with a joystick. And so I'm going to sue you. A lot of times, it's really easy things to fix that just compound into a large problem.
Chase Clymer
Welcome to Honest Ecommerce, a podcast dedicated to cutting through the BS and finding actionable advice for online store owners. I'm your host, Chase Clymer. And I believe running a direct-to-consumer brand does not have to be complicated or a guessing game.
On this podcast, we interview founders and experts who are putting in the work and creating real results.
I also share my own insights from running our top Shopify consultancy, Electric Eye. We cut the fluff in favor of facts to help you grow your Ecommerce business.
Let's get on with the show.
Hey everybody, welcome back to another episode of Honest Ecommerce.
Today, I've got a very, very smart gentleman. I would say he’s truly a competitor in the ecosystem if we really think about it that way. But I believe Rising Tides raises all ships. We've been extremely friendly and forthcoming sharing things in our brief friendship in this ecosystem.
I'm so happy to welcome Wes Buckwalter, the CEO and creative director at SeaMonster Studios. Welcome to the show, Wes.
Thanks a lot, Chase. I really appreciate you having me. And yeah, great to be sitting in the room with the competition, I guess.
Chase Clymer
Yeah. I mean, the sandbox we play with in the Shopify ecosystem is unlike any other I've felt out there. Everyone's so nice. And your competitors are your biggest assets, I feel, in this weird corner of the internet we live in.
Wes Buckwalter
Agreed. Yeah. I think I found, especially in the Ecommerce ecosystem overall, but Shopify in particular, competition is friendly. We jump between projects together and seem to share projects sometimes. So it's always a good thing.
Chase Clymer
Absolutely.
Give me the quick backstory on Sea Monster Studios, how did you start that business and what's been going on the last couple of years?
Wes Buckwalter
Well, so we've been around for 18 years. This is the year 18 actually, believe it or not. So looking forward to saying I've got a 20-year anniversary coming up. But started quite a while ago.
I used to work in the coffee industry as a marketing manager and Ecommerce manager back when Ecommerce was primitive and in its infancy. Working for that company, I built their first e-commerce website and it did okay.
Along the way, we decided somewhere along the way we should build a subscription platform for coffee because people want to subscribe to coffee and nothing existed, so we sort of strung something together with spit and duct tape.
And after I did that, I sort of decided, “You know, I love this. I really enjoy building these things, engineering these things, designing them. And maybe I should try it on my own.”
And so I jumped off ship and decided to try my own company and here we are so many years later, still going.
So at this point, we've grown to 10 plus employees most of the time and built in the Shopify plus and Shopify ecosystem almost exclusively these days.
Chase Clymer
Absolutely.
I would say a lot of the projects we do are direct competition, but you guys are putting out some amazing things. Go check out their site and their work if you are looking for any help in the Shopify or Shopify Plus ecosystem.
But more specifically, something that they are getting really, really into that we actually don't really do. And that's what we're going to talk about here on the show: WCAG compliance and digital accessibility.
So this is obviously kind of a topic that maybe some merchants are annoyed about because they've been served with these lawsuits that are going around out there. So where do we want to start this conversation, Wes?
Wes Buckwalter
Well, I think maybe defining it for people a little bit is probably a good idea. WCAG stands for Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. And a lot of merchants refer to it as ADA compliance, which is something that exists in the brick and mortar world for the most part.
And the ADA doesn't actually govern WCAG but it's a very loosey goosey gray area right now where the same rules that the ADA governs across the United States about accessibility to buildings or reasonable accommodation for shoppers in a store sort of apply here as well, just with sort of technical jargon.
And I think one of the sort of intimidating things about WCAG, it's very unglamorous. It doesn't necessarily make you money from a directly provable revenue stream. It’s sort of about being good to your entire audience and being accessible to everybody. And so I think a lot of folks that initially approach us only show up when they've gotten a lawsuit versus trying to prevent that from happening.
And I think a lot of what I've seen in the past about it as well is like, “I want to make my site compliant, but a lot of things that apply in the compliance world mean that I also have to alter my brand or sort of make things ugly or put in tools that don't look good as far as I'm concerned as the store owner or the e-commerce manager.”
And so, a lot of our conversation steers around like, “Okay, if you haven't been sued, here's what we can do to review the site or review your properties and make sure that you're not being discriminatory.” Because that's actually what's happening is you're preventing folks with disabilities from accessing your content or your site.
And at the same time, get these sort of shark skin suits wearing lawyers out of your face. But at the same time, I think we can also make things look beautiful and agree with your brand guidelines and not change the experience of your site for your perfectly able users as well.
And so I think a lot of our conversation sort of starts there by steering people towards: What are the right moves to make? What do you need to know of the 10,000 rules that you have to follow? Which are the ones that are the most important and which are the ones that sort of have to be worked on over time?
Because it's not a one and done process. It's a never ending cycle of keeping things right and making sure that they work for everybody all the time.
Chase Clymer
Yeah. And I think another thing that we always tell clients or prospects whenever this comes up is it's not a binary thing. Your site isn't just compliant or not compliant. It's such a wide area of gray.
And then there's also levels of compliant that you can be. Could you elaborate any further on that?
Wes Buckwalter
Sure. I mean, it works just like a page speed score. For example, if you're used to say Google Lighthouse or some of these other tools that give you a zero to 100% rating, 100 being the best and zero being the worst. Most sites fall somewhere in between 50 and 100% just by default when they're built and no compliance is paid attention to or just designers do their jobs and developers do their jobs. You're usually in mediocre to good shape.
And so a lot of it is sort of, “Where do I need to land somewhere between 50 and 100?” And the reality is you want to be 100, but most likely across say third party tools, you might get to a 94 and that's pretty good. What you don't want to be is a 44, meaning that you're 66% not compliant or otherwise.
And so it applies across all sorts of different things in your site or in your business model as well. It could be outside of your site also, the way your emails work or the way that your phone system works, things like that. But it's sort of an application to your entire ecommerce ecosystem or website ecosystem.
And sort of the way that it works, I guess you would say it applies to how your content is being managed, how your website is built, how robots and other assistive tools can traverse the site. So in a lot of ways, it relates very much to SEO tactics as well. If you've got a robot who can read what your photography is supposed to be by alt tags or by title tags and things like that, you're also becoming more WCAG compliant in the process.
And so the bonus for most merchants is by becoming more compliant, you also become more SEO optimized to some degree or another.
I think most merchants start with a “I read the WCAG rules and they make no sense to me.” It's often like reading, building standards or something, if you've ever built a house.
And so there's 25,000 standards that you have to adhere to. And some of them don't seem like they make any sense. Some of them seem extraordinarily technical and others are: The site needs to be readable, which is perfectly interpretable by most folks.
And I think the problem that a lot of merchants get themselves into is they look at their site through the lens of their well-functioning eyes, for example. “I can read it, so why shouldn't anybody else be able to read it?” Or “I can understand what's going on on the page, why shouldn't everybody be able to understand?”
And so what they're not necessarily considering in that equation is: What if you can't see anything and you have to use a Braille machine to read what's going on in the site or a screen reader has to interpret your site for you?
Or let's just say you're color blind and you can't see the color green and your brand happens to be primarily green. What happens to that user who loses the words of your brand or the buttons of your site simply because they can't see that color or it's not at a contrast ratio that works for them? Those kinds of things.
So I think a lot of brands show up and say, like, “We don't know what to do. Where do we start?”
And like every agency, it starts with a review of the site, getting to know what's going on with it, understanding its code, its design, and how your content managers are managing it.
And I think that's really always the toughest part for a merchant to bear. It’s the, “You're going to produce nothing for me, but you're going to spend several hours looking at my website, which is going to cost me money. And at the end of the day, you're going to tell me what's already there.”
And that's always, I think, the hardest hurdle to get over is that without knowing what's going on, we don't know what needs to be fixed or how good you are.
And the best news is you spent a couple of hours figuring out that you don't need to do anything.
Most merchants, I've yet to encounter anybody who's perfect per se, most merchants always have at least one thing to fix and some have hundreds. And probably more than half the time when folks are showing up to talk to us about it, they've already been sued or they've already been given a summons or something.
And so at that point, it's kind of too late. You're going to be required to fix the problem, but you've also suffered the legal ramifications of having not fixed the problems in the past.
And so in most cases, it’s about preventing that from happening. But at the same time, you look at it, 20 some odd percent of Americans are disabled in some way or another, and we all will be one day. We'll either have vision impairments or hearing impairments, or we'll lose agility in our fingers and have to use other tools to navigate like a keyboard or something.
One out of four of our customers, then, that means they need some sort of tool or some sort of compliance to help them shop and give you money. And so if you look at it purely from the greedy CEO model. It's, ‘Why would I cut out 25% of my revenue or 20% of my revenue?” If you look at it from doing the right thing model, “I can make 25% more money by opening my doors to a much broader audience.
And so a lot of times we steer the conversation in those directions. I mean, no right-minded merchant would ever be discriminatory on purpose. And most of the time when we encounter these things, it's entirely by accident or ignorance or otherwise.
There's no person who's like, I don't want blind people to see my website or read my website or otherwise. I didn't realize that they couldn't. And that tends to be often where the problem arises that you don't know that you've got a problem.
Your content manager may not be following best practices or your website developer may have skipped a step or missed something or otherwise. Or you may have decided to alter some facet of your site yourself or install an app that just pushes you outside of compliance and some mitigation needs to happen, I guess.
Chase Clymer
Yeah. I think oftentimes it's like, don't attribute malice when stupidity is probably the answer.
Wes Buckwalter
Definitely. And I think most of it is ignorance.
Chase Clymer
Exactly.
But I mean, I think we do need to, unfortunately, just address these lawsuits. They are extremely common. And it used to be they were only going after 8-figure merchants. But now it's getting... The ambulance chasers, I guess, have run out of those. So now they're going after merchants that are as small as a million dollars a year. And it is almost an open and shut case if you get caught.
Wes Buckwalter
For sure. Well, and I think several years back, the PGA was sued and lost. I think Rite Aid might have been one. Pizza Hut might have been one. Several of these like Fortune 500, Fortune 1000 sized companies were sort of sued and they were way off the mark. And s preventing users from buying pizza is a big deal, I guess, when you're a multinational company.
And now, I think, like you said, they either ran out of those or realized, “There's some lower hanging fruit here, these smaller merchants that might be a million dollars a year, five million dollars a year, they make enough revenue that I can get something out of them. They also probably don't have a legal team to back them up. And so they don't necessarily respond to things like lawsuits the same way a giant corporation would, which would be to throw their attorneys at the problem.”
And so what we see are these five or six same law firms regurgitating the same lawsuit over and over again. They're definitely...
Chase Clymer
With the same claimant.
Wes Buckwalter
The resolution is the right thing, but it's, yeah, it's the same problems generally against the same claimant doing or the same, family or person not being able to do something: buy sneakers, order food, whatever it is.
And the outcome is the right thing, right? We want to make the world a better place online and offline. And especially since some 50% or more of Ecommerce or commerce happens online in the States, you want it to be right.
But at the same time, I think what a lot of merchants don't realize is that the claimant doesn't make any money from this.
The attorney's paying them. It's the attorney that gets the money from the lawsuit. So if you're sued for 50 grand, the attorney makes that money. It's not that the person who wasn't able to buy your product gets some sort of restitution for the lack of being able to purchase it.
The attorney gets all that money and chooses to share that with the person who's actually, let's say, the blind person who couldn't see your website or otherwise. And to me, that strikes like kind of a scummy game.
What I'd really like is to take money out of the equation until the merchant refuses to mitigate the problem, which seems like the right thing to do to me. Not being the legal expert here, I guess there's probably some reason that money is always involved in order to make action happen.
But I don't get the impression that most of these lawsuits are trying to make the world a better and more accommodating place. They're trying to net a law firm a ton of money.
Chase Clymer
Absolutely not. Yeah. These lawsuits are definitely a cash grab in this environment where the law is very gray.
And it takes me back to, like, the people that made these choices aren't educated on how technology works. And I always think about when they're ever interviewing any tech CEOs and they just are so lost. They're like, “Well, how come when I talk, my phone knows what's going on.?” It's like, “I don't even own that product, sir.”
Wes Buckwalter
For sure. And I tend to analogize it like, imagine if you built your own house, but you never looked at a building code. You could probably put together a house that could stand up on its own that has windows and doors and it works generally the way it does.
But as a building inspector shows up, they'll find 1000 things wrong with it. And that's, I think, a solid analogy in so far as in this equation, we're trying to be both the building inspector and then the subcontractor you hire to fix all of the problems, right?
And I think what I found too is that a lot of agencies don't focus on this either, either as a general best practice or as a knowledge area where if I just did these things while I was building or designing a site or designing a brand, I would solve most of these problems along the way. And so I think there's just as much ignorance in the agency world.
And I think what got us started was we started to see these lawsuits pop up. We started to review our own work. We sort of went back in time and looked at sites that we had built several years ago and sort of said, “Okay, what's good and what's bad about these?”
And I think we found the same level of ignorance amongst ourselves as an agency and sort of said, “Well, we can correct our practices and solve these problems by default as we go. And as long as we're aware of what are the solutions needed, we don't have to create the problems to begin with.”
I think the other thing that's worth noting is because of how gray this sort of application of rule is, depending on where you are in the United States, or if you're outside of the US, the laws are applied differently everywhere. Each circuit court applies laws differently within the US and I think there's more than nine of them anyway.
And so if you're in Florida, you may have a different application of discriminatory laws as compared to say California and California tends to set the standard.
And I think one of the things that is worth for every agency on the podcast to understand is that the first agency ever was sued by California, the state for not building WCAG compliant websites. And so not the business owner, but the agency was sued.
And so it's starting to tip into the realm of as an agency, you better know what you're doing in the same way that if you were a building contractor and you didn't build a safe home, you're responsible for that, not the homeowner. And so I think we're starting to see laws getting applied against the builders of the sites or the agencies that are helping with marketing or design.
And once that ball starts rolling downhill, there's a lot of really big agencies out there who make a lot of money. And so why not double dip and sue the merchant and the agency in the process?
And I think agencies have the aptitude to understand the problem and solve it. It definitely takes effort and it takes continued practice and the standard keeps changing. But it's just as much about protecting yourself as an agency, as it is protecting your clients.
And at the same time, I think, like I said, the outcome is to make the world a better place on the Internet, right? To make sure that when your grandma's shopping for shoes and she can't see or hear very well that she has the means to keep going versus sort of give up in the process.
And I think the reality is, we've got an expert on our team who goes so far to do severe human testing. Like navigating as if you have no hands or interpreting a site as though you can't see or hear to get to the extremes of compliance versus, “I just need to make this blue a little bit darker and all of a sudden my site can be seen by 92% of my audience,” or something like that.
I think it's pretty far-fetched most of the time that I see these lawsuits digging into some of the extremes, like: I can't navigate your website with a joystick and so I'm going to sue you. A lot of times, it's really easy things to fix that just compound into a large problem.
Chase Clymer
What would you say to... There's a quite vocal group of folks out there that are trying to make Shopify solve this problem? Why is that almost an impossible ask?
Wes Buckwalter
I think it's just related to the way the ecosystem works. If you're familiar with Shopify, you've got a theme repository with multiple vendors of third party themes being made, which are all typically pretty great.
What I have seen is Shopify is applying a minimum standard of accessibility for anybody who submits a theme. And so I think they're making steps in a really good direction and doing it pretty well. They're not necessarily building in tools for what happens once the merchant has manipulated the theme, put in content, altered the code.
They're not forcing a review, say within the admin or something like that. I don't think there really is a great automated review tool that can solve 100 percent of the problems. You can get yourself most of the way there with a review tool, just like Google Analytics tells you about your traffic.
You can know most of it, but without other analyses or human intervention, you're not going to know everything.
With the theme ecosystem that gets the ball rolling into the moment you touch it, the closer you become to not compliant. And then it may not be perfectly compliant to begin with. And then the moment you impose your brand and your design, you edge closer to lack of compliance.
And then likewise, when you stack a bunch of apps, which are made by folks that have all sorts of laws applied to them, whether somebody's in Vietnam building a really great app, or in the United States building a really great app, the laws in Vietnam may be very different than the laws in the United States.
And I don't think in any case that app developers are totally concerned with compliance. I see a lot of app developers jumping on board. You look at some of the things that I would consider best in class apps. They're making concerted efforts to get there. But the moment you start stacking multiple things together, one can cause a problem with another one.
Maybe the app dev for this one tool that you really like has not chosen to become compliant and they don't care and they don't have to.
So you have to be really careful every time you add something into your ecosystem within the Shopify ecosystem. You need to review it for compliance.
And I think Shopify is a corporation who wants to run a marketplace of themes and apps and tools – it can't control everything. It's just too big. In the same way that Amazon can't stop all fraudsters from knocking off products and selling them. They do their best to stop it, but it's really up to their audience or the users of the tool to do the right thing.
And so it's your responsibility as a business owner. And I don't see why anybody would look at it otherwise. I mean, if you built a brick and mortar store and you didn't accommodate somebody in a wheelchair being able to get into it and instead said, “Well, I can't get you in my store, but I set up this tent out back and you can just roll yourself to the parking lot behind me and shop.” Like nobody in their right mind would do that. It's extremely disrespectful, it's discriminatory.
And I think we have this digital barrier between us that allows us to be a little bit disconnected from that scenario. And I think if the guy who built your office building 60 years ago showed up and said, “Hey, you're doing the wrong thing here and you need to fix it.” Would you listen to them? Probably not.
And I think in the same way, Shopify can't show up and say, “You're doing the wrong thing with your website. You need to change this or something.” I just don't think it's something that they can totally control.
Now, if they were to put tools into their admin that allow you to review things a little bit better provide you with some tips and pointers along the way, or can see the color contrast, some of the simple things, font sizes, color contrast, how alt text works and force you to do the right thing. I think they can nudge you in the right direction with the tools that they have available to the merchants.
But at the end of the day, they're a global platform and applying what isn't necessarily US law to a non-US system wouldn't make a ton of sense either.
Chase Clymer
Yeah.
It needs to be repeated that when you're designing within these constraints of these themes or customizing them with design and development customizations, if you're not following these compliance guidelines when doing that, you as a merchant or the contractor that you've hired or the agency that you've partnered with, you are then taking something that could have been compliant and making it not compliant.
And that's kind of where Shopify is kind of too far removed to be able to set a global standard on these things because you have the ability to do whatever the heck you want. Therefore, some people will do the wrong thing. Either... Not on purpose, but it just... It'll happen.
Wes Buckwalter
The best part of the platform is you can use it to build whatever you want. It has an insane amount of flexibility to build out a site or tease it into doing something that it's not necessarily meant to do. And I think that's what makes it great. And if they were to sort of force the hand in certain directions, it would lose its luster from a flexibility or capabilities perspective.
Even though it might nudge towards the right thing, no matter what, I think accidents will always happen and you'll always become non-compliant by not necessarily following the rules or playing by the code or otherwise. And so I think Shopify, just like any other business, is trying to make the most amount of money and have the happiest customers and build the best platform because of its flexibility, amongst other things.
And so to remove that, to apply one standard where there are thousands of standards to apply, wouldn't make a ton of business sense.
Chase Clymer
Absolutely.
We talked a lot about the problems and how people got there. Let's start talking about solutions. Sure. There are a bunch of them out there. A bunch of ways to attempt to be compliant.
What are some of the recommended solutions that you and your team like to use? How do you guys tackle this, say, for like if a client hires you to do this?
Wes Buckwalter
So there's really no substitute for human testing. And so a lot of times when you engage with these really robust WCAG and ADA compliant testing companies that only do that, they literally hire folks with very specific disabilities who are experts in the field as well to use a website in the exact way that they would normally use a website in an attempt to sort of pull it apart and find problems with it.
Most of the time that comes at $1,000 an hour cost or a $500 an hour cost and it takes 50 hours to deal with that kind of testing. And so most merchants shy away from it pretty quickly simply because they don't have the revenues or the funds to justify such an amount of testing.
And so in our case, we try to use as many analytical tools as possible to provide a little bit of a cost crutch in that scenario. And then we also do what I would describe as human testing as well. And so while we don't have a fleet of people with unique disabilities to actually use the website in the same way that they would normally, we've got experts on our team who can emulate those things.
And so, you know, it's as simple for any merchant to close your eyes and let the screen reader read back the website to you and try to navigate it. Try to put a product into your cart and so forth using the tools that your browser already affords you.
And so a lot of it comes down to a tool that we found we really like. It works a lot like Google Analytics. It's called Accessible Web. We happen to be one of their partner agencies as well. And it sort of plugs into a website, scans all the pages, looks for all of the sort of low-hanging fruit fixable things and gives you a score.
And it has a really nice analytics platform, just like Google Analytics would work, where you can see over time, benefit and detriment to the changes you've made to your site. And so we sort of typically start there. We plug our tools in, we review the site with the robotic tools, I guess, fix all of those problems.
And then we dive in for the human testing side of things to pick off all the things that are way too difficult for an AI system or a robot to figure out.
I think a lot of the other tools that people use are called overlays. You'll see the little accessible person icon sitting in the bottom of a site. When you click on it, a little window pops up and it lets the user, say, increase font sizes or change color contrast or set it into colorblind mode, which maybe makes the site black and white or gray scale or a high contrast ratio or something.
We initially used those tools quite a bit as well, thinking like, “Well, there's a plug and play solution, we can click some buttons.” And what we started to discover is depending on where you're at in the United States or Canada, some of those tools are starting to be picked apart by the system as well, saying like, it actually impedes a certain type of disability from using the site because the tool gets in the way of this thing, whatever it might be, color contrast or screen readers or something.
What we haven't found yet is a perfect tool that you can just plug into your site and it solves many or most of your problems. And so we started to shy away from some of those like automated fix-it tools and really went into automated testing tools so we could discover the problems but then apply like a developer or a human fix to it. I think something is always better than nothing.
But one of the things that sort of shied away from those overlay type tools was we started to see those overlay companies get sued as well. And I think a lot of them have taken corrective action to sort of solve for whatever they got sued for.
But typically when we've interviewed folks with certain types of disabilities or folks who use assistive tools on the regular, a lot of them spoke up to us and said, “I really hate these tools. They actually get in my way,” or “They mess with my assistive tools, which are a combination of hardware and software that goes above and beyond what a browser can do. And oftentimes they disrupt my standard flow,” “They're better than nothing, but they make my job harder or slower.”
And so we sort of started to shy away from them just for those reasons. We got less than positive feedback. And I think I don't necessarily want to tell people not to use them, but I guess the way we look at it is there's a better solution than just that, or there's a do it right versus put a bandaid on it solution that we would prefer anyway as an agency.
Chase Clymer
Yeah. And I think it goes back full circle to what we said at the beginning.
There are multiple levels of compliance that you can be. And I think you had a very poetic way of putting it. It's like: You want 25% more of your customers to be able to buy from you in a better way? Maybe it's time to invest a little more time and energy and effort and probably budget into making updates above and beyond what those overlay tools can do.
Wes Buckwalter
Definitely. Well, I think what the overlay tools don't do for you under any circumstances generate the right content.
So if you think about alt tags for images that describe what the image is, when a robot like a search engine sees an image in a site, it simply sees it as an image, nothing more. If you put an alt tag that says man trying on shoes, now the system interprets what it is.
And if you make it one level further, man trying on blue Nikes, now the user or the robot understands the image even better.
And the benefit to that is your images show up in image search a lot better. When your user traverses the site and they're looking at a grid of products, they don't just hear the screen reader saying image, image, image, image, image, product button, they see, blue Nikes, red Adidas, you know, purple Reeboks, whatever it might be, and are now way finding their way around the site in a way that they otherwise couldn't.
At the same time, search engine robots are also seeing all that same content and actually amplifying their attractiveness to your site as well. And so I think a lot of the things that we see most commonly in the site are, “Oh, you forgot to put an alt tag for every single image you have in the site.”
And if you use human readable texts that include your product names and follow SEO best practices for keywording and so forth, it also helps your users. And so, I think you get a lot of benefits there.
And likewise, you link titles and so forth, ARIA labels, which are all things that most Shopify themes, for example, have the ability to have input. It's a matter of knowing that they need to be input and repeating the process and really developing, I think, the standard for your content team or your Ecommerce management team to follow a playbook of every time you make a new product, these are the boxes that have to be checked to maintain compliance.
And guess what? You're also benefiting SEO. So maybe you can save a little dough with your SEO agency who might be filling those things in for you at less than frequent cadence.
So I think there's an intrinsic benefit everywhere with doing this, not just making your site more compliant and accessible. But I think it benefits your spend every year when it comes to dealing with just how your content gets managed or that it's put in correctly and those kinds of things as well.
Chase Clymer
Absolutely. I mean, obviously, we kind of barely scratched the surface on your team's level of expertise here.
But if I'm listening to this podcast, and this is something on our to-do list, or maybe we've even had to deal with lawyers and lawsuits already, but I want to reach out to you and kind of see what you can do for me, what should I do?
Wes Buckwalter
Well, so you can head to seamonsterstudios.com/contact and just mention that you saw me on this podcast. And we're more than happy to give your site a free review.
We'll sort of run through all of the sort of low-hanging fruit, talk to your team about maybe what your needs are, what your desires are, whether you're in the midst of a just- served type lawsuit, or you just want to attack this problem and get ahead of it.
Really, you just have to ask. And I think for most merchants, the toughest part is getting over the ask, right? “I don't know what I'm asking for other than I want to be compliant,” and that's really all you need to say. We can sort of coach you along the way from there, “What does that mean? What level of compliance do you need to be?”
And I think like you mentioned, there's multiple standards and multiple levels of compliance. Most merchants need to be in the 2.1 or 2.2 AA standard, which is sort of for regular businesses. If you're running a site that is accessed by the military or by the federal government, you've got a different standard to apply
But 99% of the people that we work with are merchants and they don't necessarily have to be like the post office and be perfectly compliant from a government standard.
And so simply saying, “Here's what I do. Here's what my needs are. I just want to be compliant and I don't exactly know what that means,” Or “I've just gotten this letter from an attorney and I need to help mitigate the problems that they're pointing out.”
Just give us an email or give us a call and we'll jump right in and set up a discovery and figure out how we can help.
And like I said, we're more than happy to give you a free sort of review to start and say, your good, better, best kind of standard. And then formulate a unique plan that helps you sort of deal with it on your own.
Chase Clymer
Awesome, Wes. Thank you so much for coming on the show and sharing all that stuff. I'll make sure to link to the website and the contact form down below in the show notes. And I'm sure I'll have you back again in the future.
Wes Buckwalter
Right on.
Thank you very much for having me and looking forward to talking to folks from the show.
Chase Clymer
We can't thank our guests enough for coming on the show and sharing their knowledge and journey with us. We've got a lot to think about and potentially add into our own business. You can find all the links in the show notes.
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Until next time!