In this eye-opening episode, Angela Fowler shares how you can tap into a $2.1 trillion market by making your startup accessible to the disability community. If you’re struggling to stand out with limited resources, or if you’re worried about excluding potential customers, you won’t want to miss it.
You will discover:
– What customer service adjustments make your business welcoming to everyone
– Why accessibility gives you a competitive edge to attract more customers
– How to test your website’s keyboard accessibility to ensure inclusivity
Episode Transcript
Scott Ritzheimer
Hello, hello and welcome. Welcome once again to the Start, Scale and Succeed Podcast, the only podcast that grows with you through all seven stages of your journey as a founder and today, Angela Fowler is here with us to help you all figure out, as founders, as startup entrepreneurs, how you can in that stage grab hold of get this a $2.1 trillion market and beat out even some of your biggest competitors. Angela is a popular coach, consultant and speaker who shows organizations how to increase their bottom line by leveraging the power of accessibility to tap into that 2,002.1 sorry, trillion dollars of buying power of people with disabilities. Her philosophy is that most people want to do the right thing, they just don’t know how to do the right thing, and with humor and straight talk, tempered with patience, she shows organizations how to make the necessary adjustments, often with much less effort than they think. Angela’s courses offer common sense, cost effective solutions to help businesses make their products and services accessible to people with disabilities and more user friendly for everyone. She’s here with us today. Angela, welcome to the show. So excited to have you here, fascinated by the topic and how you help both businesses and founders, and I want to jump off here in that you’ve highlighted this, this massive opportunity, multiple trillions of dollars, that many businesses overlook. And for this conversation in particular, I want to dial in on that startup founder, if you will. They’ve got big dreams, but they have limited resources. Why should they see accessibility as a competitive edge for them to stand out in the market?
Angela Fowler
It’s even more important, right? Because you and I as as starters, as founders, and I am one. I’m in the I’m in the very stage that that that we’re talking about here. We don’t have the reputation yet to overcome accessibility barriers. So if a person with a disability goes on Amazon and they have an accessibility challenge, they and they want that thing, whatever that thing is, they are a lot more likely to push through it, whereas if they go on to, you know, my website, I don’t know who this Angela character is, you know, do I really want this thing? It’s not accessible to me anyway. So yeah, the ball game’s on. Yeah, you know, I’ll move on. But when we give our customers that, that feeling of ease when they buy from us, then, then we send the message, this is a small business that cares about me. Yeah, you know, these are, these are human beings running this business that know what I need as a customer. And even if they don’t think that on a conscious level, they’ll believe that subconsciously.
Scott Ritzheimer
I love that. I love that. And so one of the things that we do that’s not that, and it’s not for it’s not ill intentioned, we just don’t know better, is a lot of us focus on kind of what we’d be looking for, maybe big, bold, flashy websites that grab folks attention, but can unintentionally exclude folks with disabilities. What is a simple change that you see a lot of folks could make to their website in particular, to start reaching this community without sacrificing their creative vision well?
Angela Fowler
And it really is a mindset shift, right? Because you’re right. We live in a world that is designed for visual people, and only, only, only 33% of us, only a third of us, are predominantly visual learners, which is to say predominantly visual people. But we have been for whatever reason. We have been trained to focus on what we take in with our eyes, but we also want the eye to focus on the thing that we want our customer to do, right? So if I’ve got a bunch of pretty pictures and bold colors on my website, you know that website might look good, but it might distract people from the thing that I want them to do, which is, you know, contact me buy my product, so highlight the thing you want your customer to do.
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah, I love that within the context of again, this this kind of startup world, a lot of founders might not realize or even know, like, what an accessible website is. Could, could you just real simple 101, like, what is accessibility in the web space?
Angela Fowler
Well, accessibility in general, is building a world that works right, building a world that everybody can use. So, for example. Yes, I’m blind, so obviously I can’t use my eyes to find things. So what do I what I do is I use my ears. So I use a program called a screen reader, which quite literally reads what’s on the screen. Now, in order to use the screen reader, I also use the keyboard, because, you know, you guys move the mouse in elements of millimeters. I mean, you’re making very finite moves with the mouse based on the visual information that mouse pointer gives you in relation to what you’re trying to do. But I don’t have that information, and I move my mouse in elements of inches. So my mouse runs away. It scampers across the screen and off the screen and just just dives into his little mouse hole. I don’t know. So for blind people and for sighted keyboard users who don’t have the manual dexterity to move a mouse, and for a lot of advanced computer users who just choose to use the keyboard, everything needs to be keyboard accessible, and you can test that. In fact, it’s better to do it without a screen reader, because sometimes the screen the screen reader has built in cheat codes that that you know it tries to make up for for inaccessible code, sometimes successfully, sometimes not. But put your mouse away. I promise you, you can have it back later and start from the top of your website and just tab through everything. Can you tab to all the clickable elements, and does the order make sense? Yeah, is your, is your is your is your focus jumping around? And more importantly, can you see your focus? Because this is not important to a screen reader user, necessarily, unless, unless they have some residual vision. But a sighted keyboard user obviously needs to be able to see what they’re focused on. Focused on, right also, can you click on things using either enter or the space bar. So say, if you’ve got, you know, an accordion, where you where you click on the thing, and other information, you know, pops out. Is that thing keyboard accessible? Can I hit enter or space on that thing, and, and, and have it work just as well? That’s a very basic accessibility test that you can run that will not catch all of the accessibility defects, but it will catch some of the most serious ones, and anybody can do it. Yeah,
Scott Ritzheimer
I love that so simple and straightforward and so condemning my site doesn’t, doesn’t quite pass the test in a couple of ways. So beyond that, yes, yeah, it absolutely is. I love that, and that’s why we’re here, all right. So beyond the website, you know, there’s a lot of especially in some industries, there’s a lot of attention put into customer experience as a whole, but they might not always be thinking about the disabled in that process, so especially if they haven’t had it personally in their life, right? One of the things I’ve found is a lot of the people who do pay attention have experienced it, either firsthand or a loved one or a dear friend, something like that, but not all of us have had that experience, and it just doesn’t even cross our minds. So taking a step back, what would a practical step be that folks could could take to make sure that their entire business, their entire customer experience, is welcoming to the disability, the disabled community?
Angela Fowler
Well, make it welcoming, welcoming for everybody. And you know when I say that, and we’ve all had the experience, right? Customer service is a swear word, especially with big corporations. It is. It is very difficult to get to a person. When you do get to a person, they’re trained to read from a script and nothing. But so if you say, you know, look, I use a screen reader. I can’t buy this product because the website isn’t accessible. They’re not going to know what to do, and they’re not empowered to help. They’re not empowered to place the order for you. So make it easy to talk to somebody, and provide multiple ways, right? Some people don’t want to talk on the phone, some people want to email. Some people want to text. You know, it’s a generation thing. You know, we need to make things accessible to Generation Z as well. If you’re old like me, you might want to talk to a person you know, voice to voice, yeah, but make it easy to talk to a human being. Make sure that human being is has is encouraged to think critically and empower that human being to help somebody, if, if they could not even what you. Know, what about the person who, you know, somebody’s, somebody’s grandma, who didn’t grow up in the technology age and doesn’t know how to use a computer. You know, we need to be welcoming to them as well. Yeah, so it’s just, it just comes down to good old fashioned customer service?
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah, it really does. And what I love about that is it’s one of those ounce of prevention, pound of cure things, right? If you just take that little step ahead and and this is just a reminder for any of us, regardless of the circumstance, when you’re bringing on team members, take the time to train them not to do what you’ve told them to do, but to know why you’ve told them to do it. And like you’re saying, empower them, help them to think critically. And it’s similar to the way that that that you mentioned, I believe in your intro, but like they want to do it, your team wants to step up. They want to take ownership. They want to take that responsibility, but it is on you to train them and to give them the opportunity to do that. So just such a helpful reminder across the board, another place that was actually just very eye opening for me, but the whole idea of social media and and what does social media strategy or even tactics look like for a founder who’s trying to directly engage with the disability community?
Angela Fowler
Well, a couple things come to mind. And again, these are easy, easy things that you can do, describe your images. And when I say, describe your images, what information do you want me to get out of this image? So if it’s, if it’s an event, if it’s you want me to know the time and date of the event, you don’t need to know about all the fancy, fancy border shadings and colors and, oh, this has an image of a flower in the bottom left. I don’t care. I if you’re selling a house to me, I do want all those details, right? Because I want to know what I’m buying. And you know, a lot of the information that that, you know, decides you whether or not to buy a house. It is, is visual, right? Right? Um, you know, I always, you know, take somebody with me in situations like that, just just to give me information that I don’t, I don’t otherwise have. You can get a lot of information, but you can get a lot more information this way, right, right? So, if you are, if you’re a realtor, for example, and you’re putting up listings, please be thorough with your description. Don’t just depend on your images, because we can’t see them right?
Scott Ritzheimer
So that brings me to my next question, which is right in line with that I feel like somewhere I saw on your website that the disability community is somewhere around 490 billion in disposable income. But that and this stat, stunned me, 80% of them won’t do business with brands that don’t value accessibility or that make it hard on them to do business. Are those stats, right? And if so, as a startup founder, just setting all this up for the first time, how can they position themselves as a brand that cares.
Angela Fowler
Right, um, so first, let me clarify this statistic, because that 480 billion is a government statistic which does not include seniors and it doesn’t include anybody under 18. So you know, if you, if you see, you’ve heard two different numbers on this podcast, and that’s why, um, so. So if you haven’t set up your website, you have a wonderful opportunity, right? Um, to set it up excessively and to make it easy to fix when you make a mistake, because you’re going to make a mistake, you’re human. Use and use WordPress when it’s with an accessible plug in accessible theme and accessible plugins. Avoid those drag and drop editors. And WordPress has drag and drop features as well, but avoid the ones that, you know, oh, use AI to build your website. You know, one click and it’s done because those types of things are oftentimes not built with accessibility in mind and right. When there’s a mistake, you don’t have the ability to correct it as easily, right? Another thing you can look at is your third party plugins, your your forms, your contact forms, you. Uh, I use formidable, that’s the form plugin that I use, because the forms that come out of it are accessible. There’s other form field form plugins that have components that are not keyboard accessible and don’t communicate well with the screen readers. So we don’t know what we’re what we’re getting, what we’re doing, right? But, but the good news is, if you use WordPress, it’s it’s a lot easier to switch out your third party plugin. So true. So if you’re an advanced developer, it’s a lot easier to go in and correct mistakes in the code. Yeah, yeah.
Scott Ritzheimer
Excellent. So Angela, there’s a question that I ask all my guests. I’m very interested to see what you have to say here. What would you say is the biggest secret that you wish wasn’t a secret at all? What’s that one thing you wish everybody watching or listening today knew?
Angela Fowler
Well, we’ve come full circle, haven’t we, user experience Trumps esthetics. And I’m not saying you can’t have an esthetically pleasing website. You can and and a lot of a lot of esthetically pleasing Ness, if that’s even a word, is ease of operation. It’s, it’s, it’s a smooth, graceful design. It’s a design that, you know you feel like you’re you’re on a nice, smooth water slide, instead of a big, exhilarating roller coaster, right? Um, so I liken it to building a house. What do you do? You know, you’ve cleared the land. What do you do? You start painting right,
Scott Ritzheimer
Exactly first step.
Angela Fowler
And everybody’s laughing. But people take the same approach to their website, yeah, first thing they do is design it visually. I say, build the user experience first, yeah, then you can style it.
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah, that’s so true. It’s so true and so good. Angela, before I let you go, there’s some folks who would love to have some help making their their website and their business more accessible. They’d love to learn more about you, what you do, what you have to offer. Where can they find more out about you and the work that you do?
Angela Fowler
Absolutely because the tips that I’ve given you are only the tip of the iceberg. There’s a lot more, and a lot of those aren’t very expensive to implement. So what you’re going to do is you’re going to www.reallifeaccess.com that’s www.reallifeaccess.com because we are making things accessible for real people, living real life. And you can find all the things. You can find my socials. You can contact me. You can you can read about the new the the courses and things that I have, um, as well as as well as get on my my waiting list, my newsletter list. Um, subscribe to my newsletter. That’s how the kids are saying it these days. Um, so you can know about upcoming things.
Scott Ritzheimer
Absolutely, absolutely well, Angela, love, love, love, what you do? The opportunity that’s here for founders and entrepreneurs to come in and not only create something special, but make it available to everyone is remarkable. Keep up the great work. It was an honor and privilege having you here on the show today, and for those of you watching and listening, you know that your time and attention mean the world to us. I hope you got as much out of this conversation as I know I did.
Contact Angela Fowler
Angela Fowler is a popular coach, consultant, and speaker who shows organizations how to increase their bottom line by leveraging the power of accessibility to tap into the $2.1 trillion buying power of people with disabilities. Her philosophy is that most people want to do the right thing; they just don’t know the right thing. With humor and straight talk tempered with patience, she shows organizations how to make the necessary adjustments, often with much less effort than they think. Angela’s courses offer common-sense, cost-effective solutions to help businesses make their products and services accessible to people with disabilities and more user-friendly for everyone.
Want to learn more about Angela Fowler’s work at Real Life Access? Check out her website at http://www.reallifeaccess.com/