Kasper Kubica - Review & Testimonial

If you could start by telling us a little bit about how you learn about web accessibility?

Yeah, so I think web accessibility is something that's always been in mind when I designed our website and any websites before that. Over the last few years, it has become an increasing point of litigation, both in good faith and perhaps not in good faith. The challenges that I think that a lot of what we do with design is with accessibility in mind, alt tags, things like that, easy navigability.

There are so many edge cases and so many challenges and nuances to making sure you're compatible with screen readers like it’s almost impossible to integrate without some

sort of solutions sitting on top of what you've already built. And accessiBe is the only thing that I've seen that effectively does that without interfering with your website; it’s not coming in and changing anything about your website. Genuinely, I did not believe this until I started using this; it’s completely invisible to regular users and completely usable and visible once you know how to activate it, or if you have a screen reader or if you need the accessibility features.

Amazing. Perfect. So next question here. So why is web accessibility important for your business?

First of all, we want to be accessible to everyone, and I certainly know; I mean, I checked with our customer service staff when we started getting into the form of web accessibility. The legal side of things like, Hey, do you ever speak with customers who, maybe a blind and have trouble using our website?

And they say, Oh, we've spoken to many customers who might be blind or something like that or have some, I don't even know what the polite word is to use. Sorry, what's the blanket term that you want me to use?

Yeah.

As somebody with a disability or an impairment, it's a barrier, right?

Anybody with a disability or impairment who's calling and trying to order the products and having trouble using our website, and they've said, no. We don't know that there are any issues with the website, but we do have many folks like that call. So we do know, we have customers like that. So we want to be accessible to all of them, and there's also been the litigation stuff happening in the last few years that we want to make sure that we're in the green with.

So it's like a combination, one of risk aversion obviously, and making your products and your services as available as possible to the audience that’s needing and looking for those things.

And there's a revenue aspect there as well.

Right. Yeah.

I mean, it should make business sense just to make your product and your pages as accessible to everyone as possible. The frustrating thing about the legal side of things is that I feel like there's genuine accessibility. And then there are accessibility standards

that sometimes have very little to do with what's real about accessibility. So I'm not going to redesign my entire website with colors that violate my brand guide because there's some arbitrary standard about contrast.

If I can have something that allows that to be enabled for the people who need it, that's ideal. And that's what accessiBe can provide.

Amazing. You sounded great there. Okay. So last question, what ultimately made you choose accessiBe?

I chose accessiBe because it's. Man, I don't want to; I don't remember the exact, I don't

remember the exact things that I checked. I have faith based on my research that

it has held up to the legal challenge, which was important to me.

So, I mean, basically, first, I needed something that held up the legal challenge. And beyond that, I needed something that was genuinely accessible for all users.

So, what worried me about accessibility solutions that they would not make the web-accessible. That they either wouldn't make the website practically accessible. They just meet these stupid legal requirements that are pretty arbitrary. They would hamper the experience for people who don't have an impairment, or a disability would meet these legal standards. And again, accessiBe's whole philosophy is like; we’re not there unless you need us to be.

So I haven't noticed any issues with site load speed or whatever. I looked at the waterfall cascade on sites loading this other accessibility plug-in that a dev team put into our site when we were building a new one, and it was ending like two seconds to site load, which is insane.

So accessiBe hasn't done anything stupid like that accessiBe, just very lightweight. I don't even notice it. It was so easy to customize and easy to get set up in my way, which I didn't want there to be a hovering image. I wanted it to be accessible whenever a screenreader tries to trigger it when you hit tabs so you can tap through the site correctly or just in the footer.

And even with Shopify, I think I could get that photo link enabled, even though it's like a JavaScript firing without editing theme files, or if I did have to edit the theme file, it was 30 seconds of work. So just super simple, got everything done. It didn’t get in the way, honestly, the perfect solution.

Amazing. Kasper, you were awesome. I appreciate that. That's all we need. Thank you for your time. You've been incredible.