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:

- Why accessibility gives you a competitive edge to attract more customers

- How to test your website’s keyboard accessibility to ensure inclusivity

- What customer service adjustments make your business welcoming to everyone


This episode is ideal for Founders, Owners, and CEOs in stage 2 of The Founder's Evolution. Not sure which stage you're in? Find out for free in less than 10 minutes at https://www.scalearchitects.com/founders/quiz

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/

To learn more about Scott, visit https://www.scattritzheimer.com.

To get help scaling your own business or nonprofit, visit https://www.scalearchitects.com

Mentioned in this episode:

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Founder's Quiz

Hello, hello and welcome.

2

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.

3

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

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market and beat out even some of your biggest competitors.

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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 2.1 trillion

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dollars of buying power of people with disabilities.

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Her philosophy is that most people want to do the right thing, they just don't know how to

do the right thing.

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And with humor and straight talk tempered with patience, she shows organizations how to

make the necessary adjustments

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often with much less effort than they think.

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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

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for everyone.

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She's here with us today.

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Angela, welcome to the show.

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So excited to have you here.

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Fascinated by the topic and how you help both businesses and founders.

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I want to jump off here in that you've highlighted this massive opportunity, multiple

trillions of dollars that many businesses overlook.

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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.

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Why should they see accessibility as a competitive edge for them to stand out in the

market?

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It's even more important, right?

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Because you and I as starters, as founders, and I am one, I'm in the very stage that we're

talking about here, we don't have the reputation yet to overcome accessibility barriers.

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So if a person with a disability goes on Amazon and they have an accessibility challenge,

and they want that thing, whatever that thing is.

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they are a lot more likely to push through it.

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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?

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It's not accessible to me anyway.

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So yeah, the ball game's on, you know, I'll move on.

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But when we give our customers that, that feeling of ease when they buy from us.

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then we send the message, this is a small business that cares about me.

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These are human beings running this business that know what I need as a customer.

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And even if they don't think that on a conscious level, they'll believe that

subconsciously.

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I love that, I love that.

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And so one of the things that we do that's not that, and 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,

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bold, flashy websites that grab folks' attention, but can unintentionally exclude folks

with disabilities.

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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?

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Well, and it really is a mindset shift, right?

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Because you're right, we live in a world that is designed for visual people.

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only 33 % of us, only a third of us are predominantly visual learners, which is to say

predominantly visual people.

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But we have been, for whatever reason, we have been trained to focus on what we take in

with our eyes.

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But we also want the eye to focus on the thing that we want our customer to do, right?

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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

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do, which is, you know, contact me, buy my product.

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So.

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highlight the thing you want your customer to do.

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Mm, yeah, I love that.

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Within the context of, again, this kind of startup world, a lot of founders might not

realize or even know what an accessible website is.

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Could you just, real simple, 101, what is accessibility in the web space?

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Well, accessibility in general is building a world that works, right?

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Building a world that everybody can use.

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So for example, I'm blind.

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So obviously I can't use my eyes to find things.

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So what I do is I use my ears.

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So I use a program called a screen reader, which quite literally reads what's on the

screen.

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Now, in order to use the screen reader, I also use the keyboard because...

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You you guys move the mouse in elements of millimeters.

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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.

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But I don't have that information and I move my mouse in elements of inches, so my mouse

runs away.

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It scampers across the screen and off the screen and just dives into this little mouse

hole.

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I don't know.

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So...

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For blind people and for sighted keyboard users who don't have the manual dexterity to

move a mouse, and for lot of advanced computer users who just choose to use the keyboard,

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everything needs to be keyboard accessible.

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And you can test that.

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In fact, it's better to do it without a screen reader because sometimes the screen reader

has built-in cheat codes that it tries to make up for inaccessible code.

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sometimes successfully, sometimes not.

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But put your mouse away.

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I promise you, you can have it back later.

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And start from the top of your website and just tab through everything.

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Can you tab to all the clickable elements and does the order make sense?

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So is your focus jumping around?

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And more importantly, can you see your focus?

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because this is not important to a screen reader user necessarily unless they have some

residual vision, but a sighted keyboard user obviously needs to be able to see what

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they're focused on.

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Also, can you click on things using either Enter or the space bar?

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So say if you've got an accordion where you click on the thing and other information pops

out.

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Is that thing keyboard accessible?

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Can I hit enter or space on that thing and have it work just as well?

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That's a very basic accessibility test that you can run.

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That will not catch all of the accessibility defects, but it will catch some of the most

serious ones and anybody can do it.

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Yeah, I love that.

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So simple and straightforward and so condemning.

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My site doesn't quite pass the test in a couple of ways.

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So beyond, yes.

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Yeah, it absolutely is.

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I love that.

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And that's why we're here.

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All right, so beyond the website, there's a lot of, especially in some industries, there's

a lot of attention put into customer experience as a whole.

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Mm-hmm.

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but they might not always be thinking about the disabled in that process.

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So, especially if they haven't had it personally in their life, right?

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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

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us have had that experience and it just doesn't even cross our mind.

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So, taking a step back, what would a practical step be that folks could...

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could take to make sure that their entire business, their entire customer experience is

welcoming to the disabled community.

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Well, make it welcoming for everybody.

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And when I say that, and we've all had the experience, right?

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Customer service is a swear word, especially with big corporations.

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It is very difficult to get to a person.

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When you do get to a person, they're trained to read from a script and nothing but.

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So if you say,

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You know, look, I use a screen reader.

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I can't buy this product because the website isn't accessible.

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They're not going to know what to do.

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And they're not empowered to help.

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They're not empowered to place the order for you.

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So make it easy to talk to somebody and provide multiple ways, right?

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Some people don't want to talk on the phone.

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Some people want to email.

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Some people want to text.

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You know, it's a generation thing.

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You know, we need to make things accessible to Generation Z as well.

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If you're old like me, you might want to talk to a person, you know, voice to voice.

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But make it easy to talk to a human being.

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Make sure that human being is encouraged to think critically and empower that human being

to help somebody.

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If they're, think it's not even, you know, what about the person who

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you know, somebody's grandma who didn't grow up in the technology age and doesn't know how

to use a computer.

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you know, we need to be welcoming to them as well.

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So it just comes down to good, old-fashioned customer service.

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Yeah, it really does.

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And what I love about that is it's one of those ounce of prevention pound of cure things,

right?

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If you just take that little step ahead, 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

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train them not to do what you've told them to do, but to know why you've told them to do

it.

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And like you're saying, empower them, help them to think critically.

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And

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It's similar to the way that you mentioned, I believe in your intro, but like, they want

to do it.

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Your team wants to step up.

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They want to take ownership.

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They want to take that responsibility, but it is on you to train them and to give them the

opportunity to do that.

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So it's just such a helpful reminder across the board.

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Another place that was actually just very eye-opening for me, but the whole idea of social

media and...

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What does social media strategy or even tactics look like for a founder who's trying to

directly engage with the disability community?

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Well, a couple things come to mind and again, these are easy, easy things that you can do.

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Describe your images.

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And when I say describe your images, what information do you want me to get out of this

image?

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So if it's an event, it's the, you want me to know the time and date of the event.

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I don't need to know about all the fancy-pantsy border shadings and colors and, this has

an image of a flower in the bottom left.

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I don't care.

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Yeah

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Now, if you're selling a house to me, I do want all those details, right?

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Because I want to know what I'm buying.

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And, you know, a lot of the information that, that, you know, decides you whether or not

to buy a house is visual, right?

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You know, I always...

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You know, take somebody with me in situations like that just to give me information that I

don't otherwise have.

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You can get a lot of information, but you can get a lot more information this way.

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So if you are a realtor, for example, and you're putting up listings, please be thorough

with your description.

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Don't just depend on your images because we can't see them.

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Right.

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So that brings me to my next question, which is right in line with that.

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I feel like somewhere, I saw on your website that the disability community has somewhere

around 490 billion in disposable income.

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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.

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Are those stats right?

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And if so, as a startup founder,

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just setting all this up for the first time, how can they position themselves as a brand

that cares?

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Right.

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So first, let me clarify the statistic because that 480 billion is a government statistic

which does not include seniors.

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So that and it doesn't include anybody under 18.

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So, you know, if you if you see you've heard two different numbers on this podcast and

that's why.

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So.

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So if you haven't set up your website, you have a wonderful opportunity.

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to set it up accessibly and to make it easy to fix when you make a mistake because you're

going to make a mistake, you're Use WordPress with an accessible theme and accessible

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plugins.

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Avoid those drag and drop editors.

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And WordPress has drag and drop features as well, but avoid the ones that, know, use AI to

build your website, you know, one click and it's done.

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Because those types of things are oftentimes not built with accessibility in mind.

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And when there's a mistake.

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you don't have the ability to correct it as easily.

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Another thing you can look at is your third party plugins, your forms, your contact forms.

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I use Formitable.

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That's the form plugin that I use because the forms that come out of it are accessible.

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There's other form plugins that have components.

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that are not keyboard accessible and don't communicate well with the screen reader so we

don't know what we're getting, what we're doing.

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But the good news is if you use WordPress it's a lot easier to switch out your third party

plugin.

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Also, if you're an advanced developer it's a lot easier to go in and correct mistakes in

the code.

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Yeah, yeah.

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Excellent.

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So Angela, there's a question that I ask all my guests.

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I'm very interested to see what you have to say here.

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What would you say is the biggest secret that you wish wasn't a secret at all?

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What's that one thing you wish everybody watching or listening today knew?

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Well, we've come full circle, haven't we?

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User experience trumps aesthetics.

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And I'm not saying you can't have an aesthetically pleasing website.

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You can.

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And a lot of aesthetically pleasingness, if that's even a word, is ease of operation.

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It's a smooth, graceful design.

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It's a design that you feel like you're on a nice, smooth water slide instead of a big,

exhilarating roller coaster.

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Um, so I liken it to building a house.

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What do you do?

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You know, you've cleared the land.

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What do you do?

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You start painting, right?

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Exactly, first step.

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And everybody's laughing.

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But people take the same approach to their website.

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The first thing they do is design it visually.

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I say, build the user experience first.

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Then you can style it.

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Yeah, that's so true.

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It's so true and so good.

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Angela, before I let you go, there's some folks who would love to have some help making

their website and their business more accessible.

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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.

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Absolutely, because the tips that I've given you are only the tip of the iceberg.

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There's a lot more and a lot of those aren't very expensive to implement.

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So what you're gonna do is you're gonna go to www.reallifeaccess.com.

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That's www.reallifeaccess.com because we are making things accessible for real people

living real life.

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and you can find all the things.

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You can find my socials, you can contact me, can you can read about the new the the

courses and things that I have, as well as as well as get on my my waiting list, my

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newsletter list.

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subscribe to my newsletter, that's how the kids are saying it these days.

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so you can know about upcoming things.

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Absolutely, absolutely.

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Well, Angela, love, love, love what you do.

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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.

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Keep up the great work.

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It was an honor and privilege having you here on the show today.

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And for those of you watching and listening, know.

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that your time and attention mean the world to us.

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I hope you got as much out of this conversation as I I did.

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know I've got my.