Latest / Leaders on Shopify with John Readman / The £/$/€ millions ecommerce brands are losing by ignoring accessibility
Transcript
- speaker-0: Welcome to the Leaders on Shopify podcast, where merchants, app partners and agencies share what it really takes to significantly scale your Shopify brand. So welcome back to the Leaders on Shopify podcast. I'm really pleased today to have Imogen from Enable All talking to who is all about everything accessibility, legislation, ⁓ and how improving the accessibility of your website can improve conversion rate. So, Imogen, for those who don't know you and don't know Enable All, who are you and what does Enable All do? speaker-1: Hi, John. Thank you. Yes. So Enable All is an accessibility app that helps brands to make their websites more accessible, which means that basically it's going to work better for customers who rely on a keyboard only to navigate a site, which is about 7 % of the population, customers who rely on screen readers. So if they have a visual impairment, they might use a screen reader to read out content for them. It's about 3 % of the population. Meanwhile, so we're kind of fixing things in the code to make the website work better for these customers. And then also giving customers a toolbar where they can customize their browsing to suit their different needs. So what that kind of covers any customer with a disability or neurodivergence that can include things like AI sign language, enabling customers to click on text and hear it read aloud, enabling customers with epilepsy or vertigo to stop flashing animations and all sorts of different tools that make browsing more comfortable for different customers. speaker-0: Why accessibility and then why specifically in the Shopify ecosystem, what was it that ⁓ attracted you to this next challenge? speaker-1: So before this, I was working on queue management and appointment booking within retail, which is physical stores, but all still focused on customer experience. Over those years, I could see retail moving more and more online. And actually, the customer base who people forget, but they rely heavily on online because physical access is harder, is customers with disability or neurodivergence and these customers are basically being cut out and brands just don't realize. The really interesting thing is like once you think about accessibility, you start to see it everywhere. So in my day-to-day life before, I would never even think like, ⁓ I saw a blind person today, whereas now I'll see kind of three or four people a week. So I think it's just kind of bringing presence and support to these people that many brands forget and also helping brands realize that there's a massive customer group that they could be better enabling and also therefore build their revenues. speaker-0: That's interesting because that sort of links me on to my next question. A lot of people listening to this podcast will maybe file the accessibility thing into a legal risk or compliance type thing. But I I think you you've got other stories inside your business where it this can actually improve conversion rate, this can improve profitability. And how should people actually reframe that? What actually what actually moves for a store that gets this right? So when they they do this properly. What are the upsides for a a Shopify merchant who's doing this well? speaker-1: Yeah, really good question. So this is exactly a challenge that hasn't to date been that much data or case studies on how accessibility drives sales. For example, there's a Forrester report that shows businesses can receive about $100 back for every one pound they spend on accessibility, which is a huge, like 9,900 % ROI. But there's nothing on online accessibility specifically. So those are the case studies we've been building. And we've shown with one of our clients in the guttury retail space. that actually 6 % of revenue is using the R toolbar to help make their purchase. That's kind of clicking on it, opening at least one feature and using that to make their purchase. And those customers are converting at a ⁓ six times higher rate than average e-commerce benchmark conversion rates, which is huge. And so it's basically just kind of if they are supported and if a brand shows that it cares about them and they have tools. They're more likely to buy things. And our most used features are sign language, so that you can click on something and see an AI sign language kind of translate the content for you. It's changing the colors and the contrast, changing the site to dark mode, which any customer might enjoy and find useful, clicking on text and hearing it read aloud. And for people with learning disabilities, clicking on text and seeing it simplified into an easier to understand language. So just so that it... gives customers genuine usability of the site. But in addition, if you are improving accessibility, you are also improving your site's core structure. That's because what we do is we add alt text to all your images. We add labels to forms and buttons and form fields and buttons. And what that does actually is improves how a search engine sees your site, which helps SEO and it helps AI and LLM discoverability and GEO as well. speaker-0: Yeah, well that's interesting. We I know there's different rules in different countries and that's a bit of a minefield for merchants, especially when they're selling globally. What are the sort of watch outs and where should people definitely have this and where do people sort of put it in the nice to have box and why shouldn't it be in the nice to have box? speaker-1: Yeah, and actually the positive thing is that although it sounds like different rules in different countries, it's the same global standards that companies have to follow. So there's this Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, the WCAG Guidelines, which is basically these 80 different standards that you need to follow to make a site accessible. So that could be things like adding alt text to images, making sure content doesn't flash, ensuring certain contrast levels. And so all of these laws refer to these global standards. So the most litigious and challenging one is in the US. If you are selling to the US, you need to follow the ADA, which requires following a certain version of the WCAG standards. The EAA, European Accessibility Act, came into force last year in June, and that relates to any new content online. covering e-commerce companies with more than 10 employees or 2 million revenue. So you could have 10 employees, it's a lower level of the threshold for most businesses. And that in 2030, I think it is, potentially even earlier, those restrictions are coming down. So actually, businesses have to comply by these certain deadlines and more businesses over time will have to comply. And then in the UK, you have the Equality Act, which also refers to these guidelines. It's just less enforced because individual customers would have to raise a suit against yourself. Whereas in the US, what you have is you have these plaintiff legal firms who will find a customer with a disability and raise a claim on their behalf. So I'm sure many of the people listening to this will at least know someone who's kind of received an accessibility claim and they've been asked to settle for it. And it feels annoying and in a way it feels like it's the wrong side of the law because it's a bit vigilante that they're just raising claims. But at the same time, is in good faith in terms of what it's trying to do is make websites more accessible because people just completely forget to make sure a customer on a keyboard doesn't get repeatedly stuck in the menu every time they hit a new page or a customer with a visual impairment. can't understand what a button is meant to do because it doesn't have a clear label. So those are just some of the challenges that people face every day online. speaker-0: And I suppose if I've understood this correctly and from understanding your app and your business, this isn't just a thing for the merchants that's going to make their life easy. And it's not like all automated. The end user can actually have this toolbar and set up all their own bits and and they get familiar with using it. ⁓ so there's benefits from both sides of the coin. speaker-1: So for the brand, you've got a bit more understanding that we're supporting all these legal standards to some extent. And then the other thing is that customers online have all these incredible tools that take you up above the kind of standards to like AI sign language isn't within the WCAG guidelines. It's like a triple A level standard, which is just going above and beyond to show inclusion. So you get a lot of interest from B Corp brands and just brands in the ESG who are really ahead of things as well as just brands who know that they need to do better by their customers, celebrity brands particularly as well. speaker-0: And ultimately, and no, your s your tools actually go in and structurally improve the site, but in the past, I know a lot of accessibility tools have have had a bit of bad press about like they're not quite doing this and it's not really solving the problem. How would you sort of address that and why is enable all different? speaker-1: Yeah, so the tools traditionally in the market have been what we call, or just kind of termed by the industry as overlays. What they typically do is they apply the accessibility changes like codefic, so like image alt text, ⁓ labeling forms and buttons on the surface level, so after the page loads, which therefore isn't typically read by an accessibility checker, which is what these law firms are using to find brands. What we're doing is we're fixing as much issue as we can in the page before it loads. So actually it does support customers better. But in addition, we're also being very honest about the fact that automation alone cannot ensure full WCAG compliance. And therefore we kind of give customers access to additional features that they need to fix in order to make their site more compliant. Because we're not going to change anything hard coded into the site. So there are things that some brands do need to change to become more compliant. Just to add, it is actually very difficult to become fully WCAG compliant. So it's just an evolving project, but brands, number one, need to show that they're working on it and that they care about it. And the accessibility statement online is very important because that shows what you're doing and it acts as a triage first point of contact for customers to understand what you're doing to support their needs. speaker-0: Often people say, I'll set up business where there's legislation or it's gonna help people make money or save money, there needs to be these different drivers. I suppose from your side, what do you see when you're talking to your customers? Are people buying because they genuinely care? Or are they buying because they're scared? speaker-1: It's an interesting one. I everyone will have a conversation because they genuinely care. I think it's often the fear that can drive the final purchase. But we're seeing that change because there are more more brands that just do genuinely want to care and do well. speaker-0: do the right thing. If I'm a Shopify merchant listening to this and I'm thinking, ⁓ this is another app, I've got to get development involved. This is going to be a big lift. I'll put it on the list. How easy and or slash hard is it for someone to put in enable all onto their tech stack? What's involved and and what how should they go about doing that? speaker-1: So it's very easy. We have a lot of clients just sign up online and suddenly you've got the little toolbar on your site and the code fixes happening in the background. With larger clients, we might work where they can give our CTO a collaborator access, he'll install it for them, test it. And we've literally done that within 20 minutes of having a demo call before. So it's very easy to implement and manage. speaker-0: So it's not a big lift and it's the the benefits are sort of instant from a from a a merchant's point of view. speaker-1: Exactly, the benefits are instant. The customers can start using the tool straight away. We generate an accessibility statement that you can use on your site to show that you've started to implement accessibility features on your site. speaker-0: F from your point of view, is could this be sort of just almost enforced p and and I don't know where Shopify's stance is on this or even if you've had any conversations, but I'm just thinking surely Shopify should be working with people like you and technology like you to almost say every time someone builds a new website, they should be doing this. speaker-1: Well, I think it's a challenging one because they can't show any bias towards any singular app, I imagine. And there are other apps on the platform. They do things slightly differently with just the toolbar rather than the code fix elements. But I imagine that's why. also like because of the legal requirement, they can't be seen to be recommending something legally. And we ourselves will say like, we don't recommend this as a legal solution fully. Like you still need an audit. You still need to work on. other parts of the WCAG guidelines that our app maybe can't support. So we tried to be quite honest about those. speaker-0: And is there any reason I'm just sort of thinking out loud now, if I was a merchant or my my is there any reason why they shouldn't do it? And I suppose what are the costs involved in doing it? speaker-1: I really don't see any reason why brands shouldn't do it. The proof is in the data. We've got 6 % of clients using the toolbar to aid their purchase. We've been doing, and any brands are welcome to get in touch with us for this, we've been doing these commercial value reports where we look at your specific data and what financial value of customers we can help you enable online. And the benefits are normally 400 times the cost of using a platform. It's a simple subscription fee and businesses can make that many times over, offered just with a couple of customers making an extra purchase. speaker-0: Yeah, and is it one of those things do you think, and I don't know if you've got data to ⁓ back this up, is but I'm thinking as someone who's been involved in e-commerce for for a long time, is it's not just a case of losing that one sale. You might lose that customer forever if you don't give them the right accessibility journey. And I suppose is that something you believe in as well? And and have you got any data to say, well, actually we we can we can not only get you those higher conversion rates from users with accessibility challenges, but you're then going to keep that customer for long speaker-1: We haven't done any data on loyalty. It's kind of the next thing that we're working on, but definitely there are studies that show around 69 % of people that have an accessibility barrier on site won't stop their purchase and they often won't return as a result. And if competitors have more accessible sites and they're obviously going to them, why would they not? So I think it's just in order to keep pace and do better than competitors, offering accessibility is a really interesting strategy. speaker-0: So are there speculaticals where there's more people taking it up? So actually you could go well actually if I analyzed all our enable all customers, fashion, it's beauty, it's home, are there particular verticals that seem to be ahead of the game on this? speaker-1: Yeah, so some of the key verticals we see are luxury higher end brands, jewelry, because customers are making higher value purchases and they want a really strong experience. Mum and baby, because you are talking to customers at a really important time in their life, where life is already difficult, you can't cut people out, you need to make it as accessible as possible. Those are the key ones we're seeing at the moment. We're also just growing the different types of businesses that we're getting in touch with at the moment. celebrity brands as well because they represent the celebrity and that celebrity needs to be as inclusive as possible to many different types of customers. speaker-0: They want to be making sure they're accessing all their potential followers and a percentage of which will always have accessibility issues. Is there is there a sort of sweet spot of when I get to a certain size as a merchant that I should be considering my accessibility, or is it affordable for a merchant of any size? speaker-1: Yeah. So we offer a freemium plan for small businesses that are just starting out with lower level traffic. So there's really no barriers to starting early. The EAA requires if you've got the 10 employee threshold, but also if you're selling to the US, then that's also very important. So tends to be slightly later stage for some of our main customers, but we also see a lot of smaller businesses join on our freemium plan as well. speaker-0: F from your side, I I know you're very focused on Shopify, but your technology works across all different platforms, but why the focus on Shopify and where do you see the opportunity for your business within the Shopify Snap Store and ecosystem? speaker-1: I mean, why Shopify? Obviously because it's the biggest and it's also just got a really clean and lovely experience. And that's what it's been built around. It's got lots of great brands on it and increasingly larger and larger brands as well. So that's kind of why we love Shopify. We're looking at other platforms at the moment and we can also do custom headless CMS as well. Then I guess growth areas, so the moment we're building like an automated scanning tool, so that will allow you to check your website accessibility and get kind of a list of other things that you need to fix beyond what our Codefix can do, as well as just how do we make accessibility more important for and included within the Shopify CMS itself. speaker-0: 'Cause I know when I was at ⁓ doc dev recently there was a lot of ⁓ talk about built for Shopify versus other Shopify apps. Which route are you going down and is that something on your list ⁓ as an able or? speaker-1: We are, we have the built for Shopify badge. I should have known that. We actually haven't done a lot with it yet. It kind of came in and we've been talking to lots of other customers just generally. So we haven't figured out how to use that better. Any advice is welcome. speaker-0: Well, for the listeners and for yourselves, from what I understand, the built for Shopify is you're now one of a say less than a thousand apps in the world that have got that badge, which means you are fully enabled with inside the Shopify ecosystem and you've got Shopify's badge of approval. But what Shopify have seen over the last sort of eighteen months, particularly the last six months, is a lot of vibe coded apps just flooding the app store, which don't have real human beings behind them, maybe don't have proper customer success, proper customer onboarding. I know they're just a copy type app of something that's maybe a smart person seen. ⁓ that when we're talking to other app builders, everybody seems to be like, no, we want to get built for Shopify. Then the next level above is then the Shopify technology partner, which which could be something that an ab Able will push for in the future. Because like if Shopify go and get approached by a big brand, they have some recommended things in the text app. ⁓ really. And like things like Clavio and all these big, big apps that have been around a long time. And if you've got built for Shopify, they'll be less nervous and have more confidence that it's been rigorously checked by people at Shopify and it's not gonna break my site. So I think that that's a really interesting tick and approval. So well done. You you should make more noise about that. And I suppose going forward, right, and we've done really well, not to mention AR. Yeah. How do you 'cause you use quite a bit of AI in in your elements, certainly around the sign languaging and different bits, how do you see that helping enable all improve? And then how do you sort of see this whole agentic commerce world moving forward and do you do you have a view on accessibility within that? speaker-1: Yeah, it does. So we're obviously kind of building more more features like the alt text is powered by AI. It's kind of looking at pictures and generating descriptions of them. The sign language, the simplified text is understanding what somebody says and simplifying it. A couple of other features in there as well, a readout text as well. Agentic commerce, I mean, Any retail event you go to at the moment, every talk is about something to do with agentic commerce and every suppliers booth now is something to do with agentic commerce. And you're starting to see it in places, obviously, like Next have something, Bruno Cucinelli have something. I personally shop a lot. haven't used agentic commerce that much yet, because I'm like scrolling through a whole collection of things to see. I don't want to miss anything. I think to me, deploying agentic commerce before you've made your site accessible. just feels wrong, like it feels like a bit of a kick in the face to people because it feels like you're enabling people who are already enabled. And if your agentic commerce experience isn't accessible, then you're further cutting people out and leaving them behind. So we're working on how do you make agentic commerce accessible, very important. And how do you make the agentic commerce tool something that also enables accessibility? So actually it is part of the accessibility stack. speaker-0: Yeah. Well that makes sense. And who are some of the brands you work with who are doing this really well, who you're super proud of, they're doing a great job, just so people want to go and look and somebody doing a good job. Which brands are doing this really well in the Shopify world using Enable Or? speaker-1: So you can see the brands on our website. I may not be able to name them all, but a couple that I'm sure would be delighted for me to name them on the podcast are Asha, who is set up by Tasha Goury, who was a contestant on Celebrity Love Island, who was deaf from birth. So she's very excited by the tool when she launched her resort wear brand. Dewey Clothing, which is jeans for very petite women. Unhidden, Victoria Jenkins, who is founder of Adaptive Clothing brand. We've also got Sabatino who are in the US, sell truffles online and a number of other amazing brands. speaker-0: In terms of if people want to find enable or imagin, where can they go to find you and how can they get in touch with you? speaker-1: Yeah, sure. So can find us at enableall.com, get in touch via a form on the website. We're a small team, so I see any forms that come in. As well as you can also try it on the Shopify App Store. If you're a bigger brand, we'd recommend getting in touch because we'll help you with the installation. But if you are a smaller brand, you can literally just give it a go yourself and see how it works on your site. speaker-0: That's that's been great and and hopefully that's opened up a few people's eyes into this isn't just about legislation and regulation. This is also going to improve customers' actual transactions conversion rate. Look, it's been great having you on the podcast. Thank you very much for your time and and we'll catch up soon. speaker-1: Amazing. Thank you for having me, John. Thank you. speaker-0: Thank you for listening to today's Leaders on Shopify podcast, which was sponsored by Asbosco AI Analytics and Insights. To find out more about AsBosco, visit Asbosco.io or search AsBosco in the Shopify App Store.