How to Make Your Web Presence Accessible to All

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In this episode, guest expert Emilie Steinmann explains why accessibility in your business is important — and how to implement a few important (yet super easy) changes to improve your brand and web accessibility right now to give all of your users a better online experience.

Emilie Steinmann is the founder of Buoyant Marketing, a bold and empowering creative agency that believes your time and money are ridiculously valuable and worth maximizing. They specialize in building accessible websites for creative service providers who are ready to break through the booked-busy-burnout cycle.

Website // Instagram // Website Accessibility Checklist

The episode:

Katrina Widener: Hi, everyone. It's Katrina. And today I'm here with Emilie of Buoyant Marketing. I'm so excited to have her come on the podcast today. We actually first met through the Rising Tide Society, and I actually never realized this until we figured it out later, but we were at the same conference together and I am so excited to have her on here today.

I actually first found out about her because I watched her website accessibility presentation through a different conference and loved it so much and then posted about it on Instagram. She DM’d me and it's been amazing ever since.

So I'm very excited to have you come on. Today we're going to be talking about digital accessibility through all of your different platforms.

So I don't know, Emilie, if you really quickly wanted to introduce yourself before we dig in.

Emilie Steinmann: Absolutely. Okay. So my name is Emilie Steinmann. I am the founder and CEO of Buoyant Marketing, and we serve small business owners who want brands and websites that are bold and beautiful in form, but also unapologetically strong in function.

We are really huge advocates for accessibility and user experience. We believe in accessibility first design principles so your website is available and perceivable to all visitors, regardless of their need for assistive devices.

And I am here and I'm so excited to talk, not just about websites, but also how you show up on your social media, in your email channels, and all of that fun stuff. So I'm looking forward to this conversation.

Katrina Widener: Yeah. Emilie's also coming as a group coaching expert for the Badass Business Squad, which I'm really, really excited about as well.

But I find this topic to be something that is incredibly important and often overlooked, which is why I was so excited to bring it to the podcast so that people on a wider audience can also get information about making your digital presence more accessible overall, which really like Emilie was saying allows you to reach new markets because it's not something that is always on the forefront of people's minds and yet is so incredibly important in so many ways that people don't even think about.

Emilie Steinmann: Definitely. I think one of the things that we see in, in my little, my little nerdy zone here of accessibility advocacy is that accessibility is looked at as a reactionary measure. You can see this very easily with massive corporations. What they do is they kind of put a bandaid on things. They slap something together last minute, but it wasn't part of their original purpose, their original mission.

They just threw it on because, to be frank, they're afraid of lawsuits. And as small business owners, entrepreneurs, we are less likely to deal with the massive lawsuits that these multinational corporations would deal with. But the reality is we are more accountable to our clients. If we provide a really great client experience from the very moment they step foot on our website, so to speak, then they're going to see so much potential in the way that we serve them when they actually do hire us or when they do buy our products.

So if we're giving them a great experience right off the bat, then they're going to expect that down the road as well. Conversely, if we have a digital presence that is really difficult and inaccessible for people to interact with, then they are going to more likely determine that your services and products are also going to be hard to interact with.

So, you know, I think accessibility is one of those things that we have to be a little bit more conscientious of upfront as part of our primary goals and it's tied super closely with client experience, user experience. Shouldn't be an afterthought.

Katrina Widener: So I actually had Emilie go Live with me on my Instagram page as well about web accessibility. And we talked just a teeny, tiny bit about this, but I loved how you mentioned there. Just the wide variety of accessibility that people don't really think about, or disability maybe I should say, that people don't really think about and the fact that like, when we normally think about someone who's disabled, we imagine like, a, wheelchair, when in reality there are so many different types of ways that someone might diverge from the norm. And if we're not being open to addressing and having that ideal client experience for all of them, then we're really ignoring so much of our potential markets.

Emilie Steinmann: That's for sure. So the whole issue here is we, we make assumptions, you know, and it, and when we make assumptions about who needs accommodations, who needs alt text, but to be honest When we are going through and we are making assumptions about who needs accessibility, we're limiting really what that means.

To be honest, everyone needs some sort of assistance when it comes to digital formats. So people that need accommodations or people who use assistive devices are probably the vast majority of people. If you've ever tabbed through a website because your mouse died, you just use it a form of assistive technology, so to speak.

When it comes to the actual people who you are thinking of in terms of disability or needing these, these accommodations, it's really anyone who might have low to no vision, people maybe with migraines, with auras, that they struggle with the brightness of a screen and they need higher or lower contrast. It could be people with auditory processing disorders. It could be people with a cognitive disability. It could be people with mental health conditions, people with limited dexterity. This is a lot of people and, you know, we may also fall into those categories too. I do in several of those categories and there's obviously nothing wrong with any of that.

It's just a matter of making it a good experience for everybody who does come to your site.

Katrina Widener: Definitely. And I think even oftentimes people forget that, hey, if someone is slightly neurodivergent or if, like when I injured my finger, for instance, and I was trying to type and utilize the computer in the same way.

Like that isn't what people normally think of when they think of making their website accessible or having their digital presence be accessible. But it really, it incorporates a lot of people. I ended up taking a step back from my work when I was injured, because there wasn't a lot that I could do. I ended up using my talk to text commands and all of those sorts of things a ton in that situation.

And that's something that not a lot of people really think about. And you know what, it kind of also meant that now when I type out my captions on Instagram, I use the talk to text dictation all the time.

Making sure that we are able to have our presence really accessible and adaptable for those sorts of situations, whether it's a disability or an injury or something that's part term or longterm, et cetera, et cetera, it's only beneficial for you and your business.

Emilie Steinmann: Exactly. You hit the nail on the head right there. One of the things people often assume is that disability and chronic illness is something that is from birth to death. And what we often forget is that injuries happen and they could be a temporary situation, or it could be completely life altering for the rest of their life. So you could go from being 100% fully functional in the ways that you were used to, to now something's completely different and that can happen literally overnight. A good example would be, I often get tendonitis in my hands and my wrists because I have a chronic illness that relates to hypermobility. So my joints get often very sore because they hyperextend. So I had to buy a special mouse that was better suited for my hand.

So I would reduce the risk of injury and it's made a huge improvement for me, but before I got it, oh my my right hand hurt so bad and I am a web designer. I'm a graphic designer. I need that mouse hand so badly, you know. But in the meantime, because my hand hurt so bad, I had it in a splint and I was icing it constantly, but I was using my left hand and I was tabbing through the websites that I needed to go to or I was using my phone in my left hand to interact on social media channels. And luckily we have multiple types of devices we can use in our businesses, but you have to really think what if somebody injures that dominant hand? What if, what if you have these situations, you need to have alternatives and make it easy for people to work with.

Katrina Widener: I am so glad that you brought up even just something as simple as thinking about how some people might need different mouses. The type of equipment that we use even is something that no one really considers, and yet it's so important when it comes to making your digital presence accessible, to think about these sorts of things, to think outside of the box, to not just sit down and be like, oh, this is pretty, I'm going to move on with my life. But is this, like you were saying beforehand, is it functional?

Emilie Steinmann: Exactly. One of the things that I wanted to teach on today, which, you know, I'm really a huge advocate for actionable content.

So I wanted to share a couple things that were really, really important, but easy to implement. One of the big things that I would say is, we focus so heavily on the form over function. So the, really the beauty of things as creative entrepreneurs, we are obsessed with how things look. But unfortunately, sometimes the function goes to the back burner and I want to challenge everybody to think about how those things can be married together.

You can focus on function without sacrificing form. So point number one I wanted to make is talking about reducing excess motion.

Now this is not like a super sexy topic by any means. People love videos for a reason, they convert super well on YouTube. They're amazing when you embed them into an email and when you put them on a website, they just give it that extra little like oomph. You know what I mean? It gives it a lot of great character and people can very easily visualize what you do and the client experience that they're going to have.

However, just like if you were to have some random website, you go to a website and you click on it and you're scrolling through and all of a sudden, a video starts playing out of nowhere and it has sound and you're like, I'm watching this video and I'm about to go to sleep. And this is going to wake my kids up. And what just happened? Where did this, where did this tab with music come from and how do I close it out? The same kind of thing can happen with a lot of motion on a website. And this is where the video piece comes in.

When you have videos or sliding galleries that are automatically advancing or automatically playing, especially at the very top of your website, it can really turn people off. For people who are not neurodivergent, for people who do not feel turned off by it, it looks beautiful, but for a lot of people it's really jarring and that's kind of a concern. You might have to consider how do you remedy this? One way would be to add a pause button, something where it's very easy to see, but where you can allow your website visitors to pause the content.

Most email marketing tools have an option where you embed a video and it's usually linked through Vimeo or YouTube or something so you actually have to click play. Nothing automatically goes that's ideal. And then of course, social media, if somebody is on Instagram stories, they're going to obviously see that there's a video starting immediately. That's pretty normal. And we've come to accept that. But you usually want to add a pause button on your website if there's something that you want to have go automatically. That's my biggest suggestion. Reduce that excess motion for videos.

And then of course, if you use things like gifs in your emails or, you know, fun things like that, of course, who doesn't love a good GIF or GIF, whatever you want to say... when it comes to the motion, just make sure it's not blinking excessively. And it doesn't have high contrast, black/white/black/white, or red/white/red/white, because that can actually cause seizures. And we don't want that obviously.

Katrina Widener: That's something that when you talked about excess motion in the workshop that I attended, and then I did download your freebie afterward also and looked at what I could quickly do on my own website... my website, when I redid it, I purchased a template from someone else and I just followed their instructions on Squarespace of how to implement all the different things of the template.

And I just followed it immediately. And mine was one of those websites where as you scrolled, the images and the background kind of scrolled at different rates and one was slower and that was, I remember one of the first things I was like, it's so easy to turn that off. I had to hit one button on the entire website, but it made it so much easier for anyone coming and it did not affect the form of the website at all.

It looked just as creative, it looked just as nice. It just was that much a little bit easier. And so I love that this is one of the implementable pieces of advice that you wanted to bring up because this podcast is all about implementable and what can you take away and go do the second that you hop off of apple or Spotify or Google or wherever you're listening. And so I'm really glad that you brought that up.

Emilie Steinmann: Yeah. So what you're, what you're talking about is called parallax scrolling and it's where the background image basically stays the same and stays static on the screen while you scroll the foreground content up and down. And I really have a hard time with this one because I love the look of it sometimes, but I know it's really hard for others to perceive that content without feeling a sense of actual motion sickness and I don't want to cause motion sickness for people. It's a real thing. We spend a lot of hours on our computer every day and I don't want my website or my digital content to be the cause for someone's misery.

So I love the idea of being able to say, let's just uncheck the box and let's just accept that it's beautiful the way it's created. It doesn't have to have funky scrolling on it just to seem more creative. We're here not to make a beautiful website, but to have our businesses grow and to serve our clients well. So if we have our priorities set on making our websites look extra funky, I think we have our priorities wrong.

So, those are my 2 cents, but it's easy to switch things on and off if you want to make a very quick fix, that would be one of them.

Katrina Widener: That reminds me of when I, in my previous life when I was a magazine journalist and I worked at Better Homes and Gardens magazine, we had, I don't remember his real name, but he, he goes by Mr. Magazine. He came and spoke to our corporation and the biggest takeaway that I have told so many people from that speaker event is he's like, if someone wins an award for the best graphic design on magazines, I will not hire them. Because that means that they are designing for themselves and they are not to designing for the audience.

And it was something that stuck with me -- this is probably over 10 years ago that I heard this -- and it's something that has stuck with me for so long because it's, it's not about trying to be the most innovative or trying to create the coolest stop motion or video or whatever it is. It's about really making sure that you are addressing the needs of your audience. And really, it translates to the bottom line too, because if you're not addressing the needs of your audience, then your audience is going to go someplace else. And that was like his whole thing. He's like, you know what, like my job here is to serve the needs of the people who are reading this magazine and if we're doing award winning graphic design, we're not serving their needs, we're serving ourselves and our own creativity, creativity, and there is a place for that, but that's not here.

Emilie Steinmann: Oh, man, that strikes the ego really hard, doesn't it? It's this is one of those you know, one of those conversations, I think accessibility and talking about function instead of the form or, you know, with the form. But, making sure that we really prioritize function, it, it kind of hits the creative ego a little bit. And I think we need to pause and say, what are we doing here? Why are we so focused on making things look pretty? Why are we not working that hard to serve our clients?

And I want to mention something else that is, I guess my second tip for being here today is creating consistency. Now I know this doesn't sound like a, what, what does this have anything to do with accessibility?

But in reality, consistency is everything. You know, if you zoom out any pause, like literally pause the podcast right now and take a second to think about this. Think about from start to finish the client journey of when your client first finds out about you to the time that you are asking them for a testimonial and they're referring all of their friends to you.

Think about. What experience did you give them the whole way through? Was it consistent? Was it timely? And I'm going to say this tongue in cheek, because we just talked about form, but was it on brand for you? This is a huge piece of branding is consistency, right? It's not just the visual aspect. It is also about the structure. This is where it gets a little bit roll up your sleeves, get in the weeds a little bit about this, but you have to think about the structure, making sure your website and making sure everything you do has intentional structure to it.

You can't just be Willy Nilly about everything on your website, everything on your social media, everything in your emails, because people are going to say I don't understand who this is coming from. Is this the same website? If you go from page to page and it all looks different, if they're confused about that, they're going to leave first of all, and they'll never book you. And then of course, if you're working with them through the entire client process, and you're very inconsistent about your business onboarding or your client onboarding, if you're inconsistent about the way you serve, and maybe you have a feedback process for whatever that might be, or maybe you have multiple sessions or multiple calls or whatever you do in your business.

Making sure that the consistency is there on what to expect next... that helps a lot of people. People that are dealing with all sorts of cognitive or mental health conditions. And, you know, I have, I have anxiety along with 30% of creative entrepreneurs. We kind of like to know what to expect as a client, as a customer.

So if you are consistent, people know what to expect. They then trust you and then they will refer all of their friends to you. So keep that in mind.

Katrina Widener: I am so glad that you brought up anxiety, because I think that so much of our world has anxiety. I know so many people who are suffering with anxiety and even something as simple as having a contact page where you can email someone and provide another option, whether that's fill out the form or send me an email. I love on my contact form to just say, here's the link to sign up for a consult right now, because they don't have to think about, oh my gosh, do I have to make a call? I don't want to make a call. This is so stressful. What if I email her like, and she doesn't get back to me.

I want to make it as easy and streamlined and simple for people. Not only because that breaks down the barriers of entry of them getting to me and actually signing up for my services and right, again, promoting my bottom line, but also it just makes it easy for them. And why wouldn't I want it to be as easy as possible for people.

Emilie Steinmann: Oh, for sure. For sure. When you provide that, it's not only great for you and your business, but it's great for them. The whole point of accessibility bottom line here is that it's about removing barriers. That's it. It's really simple. And then a lot of the ways of going about it is really simple, too.

It's not something that needs to be a very daunting task and you don't have to get it done all at once. You can work on it, chip away at it, little by little, you can say, you know what? I would really like to start adding image descriptions to my Instagram posts. I would really like to start adding captions to my Instagram stories.

I want to be more intentional about that and just being conscious of it and start trying. You, you don't have to be perfect about it. Just start trying. And that's the whole idea we can always do better when we just get started.

Katrina Widener: I think that is the perfect thing to end on for the day. Thank you so much for coming on here. This has been amazing. I think people are going to get a lot of first clarity and a little bit of confidence of okay, I can do this, this isn't so scary, but also just these are the first steps that I can start taking. So thank you so much for coming on.

Emilie Steinmann: Yes, thanks Katrina. It was really fun. And I'm so glad that we were able to talk about just a couple teeny, tiny little actionable steps, just to get yourself moving in the right direction. There's always more to do, but let's not make it overwhelming. Let's just take a couple first little steps together.

Katrina Widener: Yes. Yay. Okay. So how can people find you after this call?

Emilie Steinmann: I'm on Instagram at @buoyant.marketing. And then you can also find my website accessibility checklist that I created and Katrina had referred to already if you go to BuoyantMarketing.com/katrina, you'll be able to find that enter your name and email. You'll get it straight from me. And then of course you can always hit reply to the email and you can ask me all sorts of questions about accessibility. I love nerding out about this topic obviously and would love to clarify anything that might be clogging up your brain.

Katrina Widener: Perfect. Thank you so much again, I hope that this has been super helpful for so many people.

Emilie Steinmann: Thanks, Katrina.