The 35th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) was July 26, so today’s episode is a special one.
Most companies obsess over SEO, performance, and conversion rates—but overlook 25% of their audience entirely. Why do so many businesses miss the opportunity to serve users with disabilities, and what are they leaving on the table?
Today I’m joined by Michael Paciello, Chief Accessibility Officer at AudioEye. Michael is a pioneer in digital accessibility and a longtime advocate for creating inclusive online experiences. While many business professionals focus on growth and efficiency, Michael makes a compelling case that accessibility is not just about compliance—it’s a powerful business opportunity. He’s here to help us understand how accessibility can improve everything from reach to reputation to revenue.
About Mike Paciello
Mike Paciello is the Chief Accessibility Officer at AudioEye, Inc., a digital accessibility company. Prior to joining AudioEye, Mike founded WebABLE/WebABLE.TV, which delivers news about the disability and accessibility technology market. Mike authored the first book on web accessibility and usability, “Web Accessibility for People with Disabilities” and, in 1997, Mr. Paciello received recognition from President Bill Clinton for his work in the creation of World Wide Web Consortium’s (W3C) Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI).
He has served as an advisor to the US Access Board and other federal agencies since 1992. Mike has served as an international leader, technologist, and authority in emerging technology, accessibility, usability, and electronic publishing. Mike is the former Founder of The Paciello Group (TPG), a world-renowned software accessibility consultancy acquired in 2017 by Vispero.
Mike Paciello on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michael-paciello-88a7a0306/
Resources
Audioeye: https://www.audioeye.com https://www.audioeye.com
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Transcript
Greg Kihlstrom (00:00)
Most companies obsess over SEO, performance, and conversion rates, but overlook 25 % of their audience entirely. Why do so many businesses miss the opportunity to serve users with disabilities, and what are they leaving on the table? Today I’m joined by Mike Paciello, Chief Accessibility Officer at AudioEye. Mike is a pioneer in digital accessibility and a longtime advocate for creating inclusive online experiences.
While many business professionals focus on growth and efficiency, Mike makes a compelling case that accessibility is not just about compliance. It’s a powerful business opportunity. He’s here to help us understand how accessibility can improve everything from reach to reputation to revenue. Mike, welcome to the show.
Mike Paciello (00:41)
Hey, Greg, thanks very much. really appreciate having me on the agile brand. It’s cool.
Greg Kihlstrom (00:45)
Yeah, yeah, looking forward to this conversation and definitely love this topic before we dive in though. Why don’t you start by giving us a little bit of your background and your role at audio eye?
Mike Paciello (00:56)
Yeah, sure. So I’ve been in the business now since the mid 80s, so 40 years of just accessibility and usability for people with disabilities and completely absorbed in technology fields. So I started off at the time a very large software company, Digital Equipment Corporation, found a little niche dealing with the blind and electronic documents, working on the accessibility of them. That led to a number of different things. eventually I worked at MIT as a volunteer and that led to the growth of the Web Accessibility Initiative and the founding of that through MIT at the W3C. Left that, started a couple of companies, sold those, and now I’m off over here working at AudioEye as their Chief Accessibility Officer. My role here pretty much is to kind of guide and navigate the company, the corporation along the lines of what we do and what we’re promoting in terms of usability and accessibility of people with disabilities and the products in the space that we sell.
Greg Kihlstrom (01:52)
That’s great. That’s great. Yeah, definitely. Great. Great background there. Yeah, I remember the early days of the W3, know, W AI and all that stuff. So I wasn’t a member, but I followed. I followed along. So, definitely been, yeah, looking forward to talking about this with somebody that’s that’s been been seen some seen some stuff. Right. haven’t we all. But yeah.
Mike Paciello (02:11)
Something that I want to admit.
Greg Kihlstrom (02:15)
So let’s start with the business case for accessibility. And as I mentioned at the top of the show, one in four US adults lives with a disability. Can you paint a picture of how people with disabilities access and interact with digital content? And what are some of the most common accessibility barriers on things like websites that impact the user experience?
Mike Paciello (02:36)
Yeah, very good questions. So there are a number of things to take into consideration right out of the box. First of all, most of us tend to be familiar with people with disabilities who are blind, deaf, maybe in wheelchairs, right? They have mobility disabilities. In fact, they don’t even make up the population and demographic of people with disabilities. the largest population are individuals with some version of cognitive disability, maybe visual. We tend to think that dyslexia, for example, is a visual, but it’s not actually not. It’s a cognitive disability. So right off the bat, when you’re talking about a digital society which we live in, and everything is online, it’s how do I design and develop that in a way that they can render it so that they can understand it? And that is really where the rubber meets the road, so to speak, because it’s difficult.
We don’t always know even those in the medical field or professional field who work with people with disabilities, with cognitive disabilities, for example, they don’t know the wide variance. It’s so wide. It’s hard to get everything just right. So it’s important to understand right off the bat. In terms of the business value proposition that companies are doing, the fact that companies make a commitment to progress in making their sites accessible and usable according to the guidelines that are out there. Right now, those guidelines pretty much are international, and they’re driven through the World Wide Web Consortium, through the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. That’s WCAG and their acronym. If you follow those, by and large, that’s where you’re going to get the biggest bang for your buck. You’ll be able to get those profound disabilities, but you’re also going to start to reach in and touch the larger populations of people with disabilities, especially cognition. The challenge to that is, well, how do I know? Because privacy laws protect people with disabilities, right? So you don’t really know if I own Amazon or if I’m in Google or if I’m from your local bank or government services organization. These are all the types of vertical market spaces, education, that have to deal with the complexities of good user interface design for people with disabilities, but they don’t know how many of them are actually using it. So they use percentages like you said, a quarter, I think it’s somewhere between 16 and 17%, to be honest with you, of the US population are marked by disabilities. In the world, it’s pretty close to that same number. So you’re looking at somewhere roughly between a billion or so individuals with disabilities all over.
So you look at those numbers and they say, wow, that’s big, that’s huge. Why would anyone not want to go after that market? And it’s the reason why is because, or what makes it difficult is because it’s hard to capture who’s really, what people with disabilities are really using my services, know, SaaS or otherwise, or my products, or procuring them. So we’re hoping, and I do use the word hope because that’s really what this business is driven by.
Compliance is out there, but most organizations, most companies don’t like the notion of being forced because that’s the way they feel that or they interpret those standards as being some sort of enforcement. They don’t like that. They want to be able to do things innovative, creative, serve their customers for the people who are going to buy their products or their services as they are. So that’s the business value proposition. Sell what you’ve got but just to a broader audience and keep them in mind. So if you’re building things up from the ground up, then you can be assured that you’ll reach those individuals with disabilities regardless of what they are.
Greg Kihlstrom (06:09)
Yeah, yeah. Well, and you know, I have to say I’ve had a few episodes dedicated to greater accessibility. I have not heard someone focus on the cognitive disabilities and things like that because, don’t know why, but I won’t speculate. I think that’s really interesting thing to keep in mind. It might be that it’s straightforward to do like color contrast checking or some of the other things that might be associated with visual impairment or other things like that. But I guess there’s a lot of focus on some of the disabilities, but not others.
Mike Paciello (06:44)
They’re easier to, frankly, they’re easy to design and develop for, right? So if you know a person’s using a screen reader, so that’s an assistive technology that vocalizes what’s on the screen to a person who’s blind, visually impaired. There are other disabilities that use it, but primarily those that are blind. And so you can now design your website to ensure that things, for example, that we would do with a person that has the ability to navigate using a mouse, for example.
that those things are done through the keyboard. Most assistive technologies, not all, but most assistive technologies are bound to keyboard operation. So that’s a big thing to keep in mind. You mentioned color contrast. That’s also important, but I can tell you most AT is designed to interact using a keyboard interaction model. So if you’re doing that, you’re probably going to be able to capture a good portion of the disabilities market space just by doing a few simple things color contrast, keyboard accessibility, making sure that your images have alternative text, so the text rendering of that image, your videos have captioning for the deaf, Your forms are accessible to screen readers and ATs as well. Those tend to be the big ticket items. The other thing that I always recommend, because I often talk about the engineering life cycle,
An engineering life cycle includes a workflow, right? So generally speaking, you’re developing requirements as a software company or people who are building your web environment for you. Those requirements usually work by persona development. So who your customers are, where you want to go, where you want to drive them to, and what parts of your web environment you want them to use, and then workflow. So can they
Logging in, right? Can they make a purchase? Can they see that they’re making that purchase? Is there a successful conclusion from A to Z, so to speak, at that level? Those things are actually, you know, the type of enhancements or design requirements that are good for every individual. They just have sometimes a little bit more of a stricter focus for people with disabilities to do them right so that they can accomplish them.
Greg Kihlstrom (08:53)
And so, you you brought up the regulatory component and, know, lot of companies treat accessibility as kind of the checkbox of like, yes, you know, we kind of have to do it. But for one reason or another, it feels just like kind of a box to check and and not really having a strong business case for it. How you know, what what’s the business case to be made for accessibility beyond simply risk mitigation or not that risk mitigation is simple, but, but you know, what’s the, what’s the business case here?
Mike Paciello (09:24)
It’s great question. can’t even tell you how great that question is because right now we’re at a time, we’re living in a time when compliance is in the assistive and accessibility world is as much as a driver as it’s been is probably going to take a backseat to a lot of other things that are going on in the world right now. And so while lawsuit, you know, I call them fear-based incentives, which I can’t stand, I think it’s just a bad way of doing business. But that frankly is the number one way by which companies are kind of forced to comply. I don’t know any company, and I’ve worked for many, that says standards, compliance, the law, sure, let’s go for it. I’m all in, right? They don’t, unless they’re pushing their own agenda, which happens if you’re in a standards business. So what’s the business value proposition? A couple of months ago, I would have said,
The numbers are out there, so the population supports that you should make sure that your website is, or your digital property. I don’t even like saying websites anymore. Digital properties that you have out there, your digital services, your SaaS services, the things along those lines, that they are usable and accessible to people with disabilities. If you do that and you follow the guidelines, not compliance, but if you follow the guidelines that are out there, if you build that into your software lifecycle, development lifecycle,
So your architects, your requirements people, your developers, your designers, usability specialists, and the accessibility staff you may or may not have on, if they’re all agreed to following through to those guidelines, well then you’re gonna build a good consumer foundation for people with disabilities. So consumers are still who we’re aiming at, right? I mean, that is who we sell to by large, unless you’re doing strictly B2B or B2G, even then the end user is very likely the recipient of whatever it is that you’re designing and developing. So, you know, the government was up until recently, I don’t know what the numbers are like right now with all the layoffs that are going on, but was the largest employer of people with disabilities in the US bar none. So anytime you sold to the US government,
The value proposition was to meet their guidelines that they had that were there. So that helped win contracts, but you could do that. I’d like to believe that there are financial incentives and tax incentives that are out there. There are, there are some small ones, but they’re nothing like we’ve seen in say, for example, the automotive or the banking industry, you know, those, those triggers that were, that were put out there for them. Those are, they’re not there.
So frankly, to answer your question right now, that business value proposition is something we’re working on. I spent most of the day today, I just came out of meetings and I came out of earlier meetings. We need to somehow change our message because compliance is no longer going to be the means of driving this industry to get companies to buy into it. The other big one has always said, well, it’s the right thing to do. And that’s true.
But when was the last CEO that you met who truly, when he sat down there with his board and his C-suite team said, okay folks, now everyone that wants to do good and drive our business, let’s own up to it and put our priorities.
Greg Kihlstrom (12:30)
The way that works is when it’s tied to the bottom line. mean, you know, kind of to your point is, you know, it’s not that it can’t happen. It’s admittedly rare, you know, when it does. But when it happens, it’s because it’s tied to the stock price or, you know, something very, very tangible and and and external. I mean, I do wonder, you know, 16 to 17 percent of the audience being left on the table. Like to me, that’s that’s pretty compelling. You know, when when everybody’s fighting for market share.
That alone could be a compelling point.
Mike Paciello (13:01)
Yeah, absolutely. And if you look at it holistically like that, that is a big number to work for. And again, the guidelines that are out there to help you make your digital properties useable and accessible are there. So if you follow those, mean, ideally, you know, the old, it’s the old notion of shift left, right? If you build it from the ground up and you’re building to those guidelines, you’re golden. I mean, you’re going to hit 80, 90 % of that marketplace just.
as a natural outgrowth of your commitment to those guidelines. But again, I think when you get into demographics and you get into market studies, they tend to pick apart those demographics. they say, well, know, the reality is that there’s only 3 % of the total population is blind. And how much of that market buys our products? We make surgical items, right? Tools and things like, so they will do things like that. And unfortunately, that’s why usability and accessibility tend to get a bad name for themselves. And therefore, because accessibility has something that usability will probably never have, and that is a civil rights law, right? That becomes a motivator and a driver. You have to do this because ADA says you have to in this country. And most other countries, Europe right now is ready to roll out the European Accessibility Act. Most other countries and continents have Disability Discrimination Act. So they’re all pattern-cut after the ADA. So that tends to be the motivator still out there, that compliance.
Greg Kihlstrom (14:35)
Yeah, well, and you said something earlier about the shift left kind of mentality. I want to get to that as well, which is building in accessibility from the start. I know from other approaches with like shift left, it’s less expensive. It’s easier when you do it from the start. So can you talk a little bit about that and your experience there of like, if we just start there, what can companies achieve?
Mike Paciello (15:00)
You know, there was a time in my life when every time my car broke down, I just went out and bought a new one. Right? It was easier. It was built. It new. Had everything in there. Right? I just did the, or that’s the notion of a lease, right? You get it every two years, you get a new car. You never have to worry about the maintenance. But the reality is that’s not pragmatic. Right. It’s just not practical. We build things. We try to build them to last. And so if we don’t build them right, you know, if you take a house, you build the foundation to the house and that foundation is shaky then the rest of it doesn’t matter how good it looks. The same approach has to be taken in terms of accessibility. If you don’t build accessibility into the core of your software environment, then somewhere along the line, it’ll catch up with you. You’ll either employ people with disabilities, which is almost a guarantee it’s going to because the population is so large, because that percentage is spread around across all the vertical markets that you can think of.
Right. You’re going to end up finding or someone’s someone with a disability is going to come to your storefront or your government service organization and realize they can’t use it. And a lawsuit is going to come out. So now what do you do? Well, first you spend money on lawyers to try to, you know, fight your way through what you have to do and have. So there’s a cost. Right. Then you’ve got to hire people, probably specialists, because you probably don’t have them in your organization to help you.
build this in, find all the errors, do a vulnerability assessment, do an audit, and then build a strategy. All of this is very time consuming in cost. It’s why for years, having built at least two businesses around this in a professional service, we made money. We were very, profitable because we’re specialists. I mean, we’re the surgeons of the software industry because we’re in a very specialized area. We could contract from very high hourly rates and get that because no one else could do the work that we could do. So that’s the cost that people need to think about in terms of maintenance and added costs for not building something right in a shift left and designing it from a shift left perspective. It’s a maintenance cost. It’s incredible.
Greg Kihlstrom (17:03)
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, yeah. And again, to go back to it, would be great for people to do the right things for the right reasons and all that stuff. But, I think for whatever it’s worth, like it’s it’s always good to have these other these other kind of levers to pull to say it’s going to cost you more in the long run. It’s going to get you more revenue. I mean, you know, for for better or worse, like having these these additional kind of arguments or backing to the case, it helps people do the right thing and have the financial justification.
Mike Paciello (17:37)
When we go into clients, look, we know that more often than not we’re firefighters, right? We’re putting out fires. But in that same discussion, we already say, don’t let this be the only thing that kind of absorbs you around accessibility. There’s a lot of opportunity here. There are, as you said, there are all kinds of marketplaces and market spaces that we could be in that we can enhance and start to drive and then talk about it. I think maybe one of the biggest and most valuable aspects of accessibility is the fact that people with disabilities, if they’re using your products, you can advertise that, you can market that. Have you ever seen some of the commercials that Microsoft, Amazon, Walmart, McDonald’s, I’ve seen these companies and it may seem like they’re taking advantage of people with disabilities. The reality is, is they’re saying that we care, we’ve enhanced whatever it is that we’re building so that users with disabilities
can use them. Look what Apple’s made a whole life on it. Their whole iPhone, their whole iProduct line is all usable and accessible by and large for most people with disabilities. Amazon has done the same thing. Microsoft has done the same thing. it shows you that, yeah, okay, we got a fire to do today. But look at the market and look at how we can tell everybody else the good things that we’re doing. That’s how you get brand loyalty and customers, more customers to come to you because people are people, right? We’re empathic by nature.
Greg Kihlstrom (18:56)
Yeah, yeah, definitely. So as we wrap up here, let’s talk a little bit about the future. Certainly, we talk about AI every episode. Certainly, it’s been top of mind for a lot of organizations for the last few years, at the very least, if not last few decades for some. But what role is AI playing in improving digital accessibility? And where do you see that heading?
Mike Paciello (19:17)
Yeah, I just did a panel session out in California at a conference a couple of weeks ago on AI and accessibility. So there are a lot of products that are out there that have integrated products for the blind like Be My Eyes, which is their own organization. They’re working along with Microsoft and Meta now with the Meta glasses that have also been designed for people with disabilities. All have integrations or some aspects of AI built into it.
we’re using here at AudioEye, we’re using AI as a basis for doing remediation. you know, customers come to us because we scale, because we have automation and our costs, our value proposition from a cost perspective is much lower. There’s a big value, cost savings value at that. But what we could do with AI and automation is we can scale and build it faster and fix things, enhance things faster. Now,
Can we do it as well as software developers and engineers? No, but we’ve provided a tool and a platform to get people booted and moving along faster and quicker than they ever could, especially if they didn’t design it out of the box accessible. So that’s where I think AI is gonna play a big part, a big role, it already is, in what we’re doing in terms of scale and automation of
digital properties to make them usable, accessible, quicker, faster, better out of the box. Not absolute. You know, we’ve got a long way to go, but we’re definitely pushing the envelope in that direction using AI.
Greg Kihlstrom (20:49)
So there’s still a role for humans somewhere in all this, right?
Mike Paciello (20:52)
There will always be because again, it’s like I said before, you know, we’re surgeons the best people in this industry are literally surgeons for accessibility and they really know how to pinpoint something so this is how it has to be done and in right now technology is as much as I love software It’s it’s still got a long ways to go. It sells a long ways ago. Yeah
Greg Kihlstrom (21:13)
Well, Mike, thanks so much for joining today. One last question before we wrap up here. What do do to stay agile in your role, and how do you find a way to do it consistently?
Mike Paciello (21:23)
You know, keeping up with what’s going on in the industry is a big thing. AI is making a big play. I follow a lot in terms of VR and augmented reality and activities like that. there’s an awful lot that’s going on in our industry. I read a lot. These days, you know, and this might be good for some of your users, there’s two probably reports that they might want to look at to kind of get a better idea of what’s wrong, what kind of things that need to be fixed on websites.
and what the perspective of the world is. So if you look up at the Web Aim Million report, gives a total breakdown of our industry and web pages. And the fact of the matter is that 95 % of the pages that they’ve looked at, just home pages, still have tens of errors that are on there. Another good one is what we’ve done here. Even at AudioEye, we have our digital accessibility index.
Again, we’ve gone through vertical markets and gone literally gone through and done some full based audits using AI and our technology there to go through. And what we’re finding is the same thing. You’ve got 80 to 90 % of the websites that are out there. So this is what I’m focused on right now, reading them, understanding demographics, understanding the statistics so I can share them with audiences like yours.
