This past May, Acquia released its 2024 Survey Report: Consumer Perspectives on Digital Accessibility, which found several common accessibility challenges with digital platforms, including an inaccessible web layout, video or audio content without transcriptions and more.
Today we’re going to talk about what it means to provide a truly accessible digital experience and the impact it can have on your customers and your brand.
To help me discuss this topic, I’d like to welcome Jennifer Griffin Smith, Chief Market Officer at Acquia.
About Jennifer Griffin Smith
A well-respected international marketing executive, Jennifer Griffin Smith has more than 20 years of experience managing go-to-market strategies and corporate communications for public and private technology companies. She focuses on the needs of customers and partners in the ever-changing digital world, ensuring that Acquia solutions deliver exceptional value today and in the future, and that all programs and communications are addressing the unique needs of customers.
Jennifer leads the global marketing organization, including product marketing, GTM programs for customers and new business, brand, and marketing communications. With her extensive experience as a B2B marketing practitioner, Jennifer is passionate about new ways to grow awareness, improve marketing ROI, and create high-performing, award-winning teams.
Before joining Acquia, Jennifer held CMO positions at Brightcove, Alfresco Software (acquired by Hyland), Software AG, Workhuman (formerly Globoforce), Avid Technology, and Progress Software. She has also held senior European marketing roles at Microsoft, PeopleSoft, and Information Builders.
Resources
Acquia website: https://www.acquia.com
Acquia Consumer Perspectives on Digital Accessibility and Why Your Organization Needs a Digital Accessibility Strategy report:
Acquia Why Your Organization Needs a Digital Accessibility Strategy report: https://0a818d23.streaklinks.com/CJVgsJ1lZcdvFJePqQwSI-T-/https%3A%2F%2Fwww.acquia.com%2Fresources%2Freport%2Fwhy-your-organization-needs-digital-accessibility-strategy
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Transcript
Note: This was AI-generated and only lightly edited.
Greg Kihlstrom:
This past May, Acquia released its 2024 survey report, Consumer Perspectives on Digital Accessibility, which found several common accessibility challenges with digital platforms, including an inaccessible web layout, video or audio content without transcriptions, and more. Today, we’re going to talk about what it means to provide a truly accessible digital experience and the impact it can have on your customers and your brand. To help me discuss this topic, I’d like to welcome Jennifer Griffin Smith, Chief Market Officer at Acquia. Jennifer, welcome to the show.
Jennifer Griffin Smith: Hi, thanks for having me.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, looking forward to talking about this with you. Before we dive into the main subject here, why don’t you start by giving a little background on yourself and what you’re currently doing at Acquia.
Jennifer Griffin Smith: Happy to. I have more than two decades of experience in technology marketing, dare I say, always been in this space. I’ve been CMO at several companies, both public and private in technology space. the likes of Progress Software, Software AG, Brightcove, Ava Technology. I’ve been at Acquia now for a year and a half. What I love about this space is that I’m now actually talking to and serving digital marketeers like myself and my own team, and we have the delight of being the first user of all of our technology. So we get to see really how it works firsthand. So very excited about this topic, especially as we have been using accessibility solutions for over a year now, and have really seen the impact on our own marketing success.
Greg Kihlstrom: That’s great. That’s great. Yeah, love to love to hear the firsthand experience as well. So that’s that’s great. Well, yeah, let’s let’s start by talking about accessibility at a high level. And so probably a lot of people listening are familiar at a very high level about some of the things that accessibility entails. But reading the report, which we’re going to link to in the in the show notes, it highlights several areas from anything from color choices and contrast to keyboard navigation options, as well as some of the items I mentioned at the top of the show. All of this points to the fact that accessibility is not just some blanket term. There are many types of factors that a brand needs to consider when they’re really thinking about accessibility. Do you think that there’s a full understanding of what accessibility entails at a lot of organizations?
Jennifer Griffin Smith: No, I don’t. And I think it’s very new. And we always start by trying to define there’s physical accessibility and there’s digital accessibility. And digital accessibility is fairly new. And, you know, for a long time, we’ve had kind of this physical environmental accessibility where You know, if you go into a facility, then it should be accessible for anybody that needs, you know, it has certain requirements. Digital accessibility is much more about, you know, how we can allow all of our consumers anywhere with any need to be able to access content and websites. And I personally had not had this as part of my marketing strategy. Up until I joined Acquia and over a year ago when we looked at obviously acquiring a solution and really was diving into, well, what does this mean? And I kind of think shame on me that I hadn’t thought about this even in the past. And when you get into the amount of people that have needs and how it impacts how your content actually can get to your entire audience. It’s really eye-opening, but I just don’t think it’s something that has been part of a digital marketing strategy in the past. And it is more than accessibility. We call it digital experience optimization. It’s really about, it includes accessibility, but it’s how can you build the most productive experiences, whether you are B2B, B2C for anybody in any location with any need accessing your content.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah. And it’s really that, you know, anybody, anywhere, and that idea that, yeah, there, there isn’t just accessible and inaccessible, you know, it’s not a binary kind of thing, right? There’s, you know, there’s, there’s lots of, of components to it. How does a brand, you know, whether they’re located in a single country or maybe global, you know, region, whatever, whatever the case may be, you know, how does a brand stay on top of not only accessibility regulations, but also best practices and areas they should be focused on? You know, where does this usually fall within a large or an enterprise organization?
Jennifer Griffin Smith: Yeah, it falls somewhere between IT and marketing is the simplest answer to that, but as we know with all digital marketing right now, those lines between what’s owned in IT and what’s owned in marketing are becoming blurred and that’s because Marketing has become much more digital in its nature and we need the systems and technology to be able to support that. We talk a lot about CTOs and CMOs and their organizations working much more closely together. In some of our customers, it very much sits within IT and digital transformation teams. In some of our customers, particularly when you look at consumer B2C, It sits within the marketing organization because they are responsible for delivering revenue firsthand out of a digital experience. So I think it’s still split, but I think the way that people can inform themselves is first of all, there’s regulation and it’s becoming more and more important. to really make sure that you’re keeping up with what is happening, not just in your country, but in your state. So there are regulations, web content accessibility guidelines that are put out there, particularly in the US, but each state within the US also has different guidelines that you need to follow. Government across the board, if you’re a government agency or any kind of government organization, you have to by their regulations, provide accessible websites and accessible content. For commercial organizations that will differ in different States and it differs around the world. So we see a lot more coming into play in Europe and in different countries in Europe. And so that’s really important. What we try and do is help inform on that, help inform customers what that means. So regulation is one, but then there’s just other, there’s just other aspects that you don’t even think about. You know, when you get into how does a screen reader really work, right? And who would know that? And it can’t work. It doesn’t work very well with regular PDFs because regular PDFs aren’t tagged in a way that a screen reader, a screen reader needs to be directed to the next logical place and PDFs aren’t naturally tagged with that. Knowing that and educating your marketing teams about that, and then making sure you do PDF remediation for anything that’s going on your website. It sounds pretty fundamental, but if you didn’t know that, how would you know?
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah.
Jennifer Griffin Smith: I think there’s many sources out there you can go to. And what we try and do is help our customers be able to educate their teams. And this is where we get into things like the research we’re talking about. And we have, you know, a list of top 10 tips of the very basic things that you can just do when it comes to just educating teams about what, what that, what that looks like to be able to provide more accessible content.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, definitely there’s, there’s, there’s a lot of. aspects to it. There’s also a lot of implications or opportunities as well. And that’s what I want to talk about next is really the impact that either a lack of accessibility or greater accessibility can have. And, you know, so you mentioned, you know, there’s certainly the regulatory component. There’s also just the missed opportunities because, you know, the right people aren’t able to see or experience things in the most optimal way. So, you know, first from a cost implication, there have been some high-profile lawsuits and some financial impacts from that perspective. But, you know, it’s not solely about dollars, right? It’s, you know, what is this lack of accessibility cost from a branding perspective?
Jennifer Griffin Smith: Yeah, and that’s the thing that’s hard to, it’s hard to measure, but I think it’s really, um, it’s really easy to see, especially in today’s social media environment where, and especially with a certain generation where people expect a, they expect this very productive digital experience and if they don’t get it, they take to social media very easily. And so. One of the things we looked at in our report is, and the report was 1200 self-identified individuals that have a disability. And we asked them about their experiences with websites. And it was fascinating because, uh, 89% of those people said that they did experience challenges when it comes to digital accessibility on sites. And that left them feeling, and there are statistics in the port, you know, 71% said that they were frustrated. 58% said they were disappointed. 24% said they were angry. And so then we went on to say, well, when you encounter these issues, what actions are you likely to take? And this was fascinating for me from a brand impact is 51% of those said that they would seek alternative solutions. 42% said they would just discontinue their use of that product or service. Only 34% said that they would complain directly to the brand, which I think is a change in the consumer behavior that We’re so transient now with digital purchasing availability that we don’t necessarily go to that brand and say, Hey, this is a problem. We just go to the next best provider. Now, 20% of those people said they would share it on social media. And that’s the piece as an owner of a brand and a marketer that worries me because if you rely on social media for anything, whether that’s to influence buyers or influence even your internal team members, anybody taking to social media in today’s environment can significantly hurt a brand. And I think that’s the. That’s the piece that’s hard to quantify from a cost perspective, but from a brand impact, it can be really negative.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah. And, you know, those comments on social media could be brought about by many different things, right? So, you know, would you say that it’s true that, you know, a brand might be, they might be doing a great job in being accessible in certain areas, but really falling behind in others simply because there are different definitions or just different facets of, of accessibility.
Jennifer Griffin Smith: Yes. Yes. And we always say, so progress over perfection, right? There’s many areas, but if you can take the logical steps. If the kind of made guidelines that we’d recommend, or you can use a solution like we have to actually help you understand where in your site is not accessible, where you’ve got broken links, where it can ultimately help your teams really identify what to work on. That’s where to help teams, right? We all know when it comes to a digital experience or there’s lots that go into it, right? There’s lots that go into it. And so that’s why we say kind of progress over perfection. And it’s why we help brands look at how their accessibility rating is increasing. And then what we try and do is help them measure with that. Well, what does that mean for conversion rates? Cause it’s one thing to say, well, I think the standard best practice is that you should have an 85% accessibility rate on your site. Well, okay, so you get to 85%, but what does it really mean? And what else is left there? And we’ve certainly looked at when we’ve implemented these accessibility solutions on our site, we have seen an increase in at least 2% on our conversions because I look at If the statistic is that you’re losing 17% of your audience, that’s one of the statistics we quote from Garner that said, people are missing out on almost up to 17% of your audience. That was the piece that hit home to me where I’m kind of looking at my marketing budget and my digital strategies, and we all know that budgets aren’t growing like they used to, and we’ve all got to do more with You know, in some cases less and it’s the digital landscape is so crowded. Oh my gosh, I’m missing 17% of my audience just by not having accessible content. This, I mean, that could be, that could be even more impactful than saying I’m going to increase my SEM, you know, my, my SEO spend by X percent. So there is a lot to think about, but definitely progress over perfection.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, yeah, definitely. And so, yeah, I mean, 17%, if we go by the 80-20 rule, that might be a rather significant amount of missed opportunity. You mentioned a few things from the report, and I know I did as well, but are there areas that you saw that seem to be overlooked more than others and maybe overlooked in terms of the impact that they can have when we’re talking about accessibility.
Jennifer Griffin Smith: The other piece of the report that was interesting for me is the generational difference. Which I think is kind of obvious to a lot of marketers, especially if your audience is, you know, if you’re in a consumer space, for example, we have a lot of customers in that. We have a lot of higher education customers who are not using their sites as a monetary place, but they are measuring conversions and consumption of content because they’re looking at, you know, student applications or student engagement or what kind of content should they generate. So when you look at the generational divide, I think that’s really important too. Now we always think, okay, let’s look at millennials and Gen Z. But for me, you know, there was a ton of businesses out there, mine included, where your buyer may be baby boomer. And so you have to look at. Well, what does that mean for that audience? And am I actually segmenting my audience in the right way? And am I truly looking at accessibility for the type of audience that I’m targeting? The other thing that is interesting is we did see some regional differences and it came down to some of the trusts in brands too. And we found out that, and I can say this cause I’m British, that the UK actually, especially around baby boomers had less trust in brands than in the US. And again, I think that just tells us as marketers to think about who we’re targeting, where, and what that content needs to be. And when you look at some of the statistics of. you know, how the demographic is changing. And it’s something like, you know, there will be 2.5 billion people projected by 2050 will have some kind of hearing loss. Then you have to think about what am I doing with my videos? And if my videos don’t have closed captions on them, then that’s going to be an issue for a giant part of the population. So there were lots of things in the report that as a marketer personally made me think more about segmentation in a much more deeper way and how accessibility can impact different regions and different generations.
Greg Kihlstrom: You know, we’ve spent a bit of time talking about both the challenges as well as some of the opportunities. And, you know, much like the caption, the captioning thing that you just mentioned, I want to spend a little time here talking about, you know, what organizations can do about it, right? Because there are there are tools and there are there are methods that are available to help. So, you know, could could you talk a little bit about that? You know, what is a where where does a brand start with being more accessible and being as accessible as possible?
Jennifer Griffin Smith: Hmm, well, first of all, I would say there are lots of organizations out there that have lots of helpful tools for you, ourselves included, Acquia.com. I would recommend there are some guides on there that are industry analyst guides on what, you know, why your organization needs an accessibility, a digital accessibility strategy, right down to things like we have a web accessibility handbook, so, you know, you can pick up easy tips from places like that on where to start. The other thing is there are some good guidelines of customers doing it well. And we have a lot of those and we have videos out there that are quick to see where you can just look at the things that you should really be focused on. And then I think it’s actually building out that strategy and looking what good might look like in different stages.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah. And you mentioned that this is something that falls to the marketing organization and the IT organization. Who all should be involved? Are there others that should be involved as well? Who should be involved in this process, even if maybe they’re not already involved in thinking through accessibility?
Jennifer Griffin Smith: Yeah, we often see that you get legal teams involved too, and it’s actually a way for marketing to build a justification for a solution because you can talk about meeting regulatory compliance. So that’s good. And quite often, obviously in large, large organizations, you have procurement involved and this is something that becomes standard. We find that building the ROI for a solution like this tends to be a no brainer when we look at what it can do for clients. We do see it mainly falling in the digital marketing space because it helps them know that if we’re spending money on outreach and on content creation, how can we drive a greater ROI? And then it becomes, well, how do we use it within a digital, like a website, a web team? And IT gets involved usually in large organizations where that would be a large implementation across, you know, web infrastructure. But it’s, you know, it’s so easy to use. And because we use this ourselves and so we have various tools and quite often I’ll be talking to some of my team and they’ll pop up the user interface and they’ll say, here’s Acquia TV, for example, and here’s how we are building. our videos on Acquia TV, and by the way, we’ve made sure that every video that we have on there, and there are many of them, have closed captioning. That was one thing that we said, every video has to have that. And then we look at, well, okay, so now there’s this very simple navigation tool where I can write a new description for a video, but I can automatically just press a button and I can say, optimize this for accessibility and it will immediately bring back those things that are either broken or that need some work. And AI built into that really, really helps. So it’s not as hard and it’s not as cumbersome as people might think. It’s actually user intuitive.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah. Yeah. And how do you recommend that, um, you know, you mentioned ROI and, and, uh, as a, as a measure of success here, you know, what, what measures of success should a, should an organization look at in terms of, you know, tracking their progress? I mean, you know, they’re, they’re not necessarily going to be fully accessible to, you know, based on every facet of, of accessibility on day one. So, you know, how, how do you recommend they kind of measure their progress?
Jennifer Griffin Smith: Yeah, so the one I did mention was just the percentage, are you running against benchmark of how accessible your site is and so if it’s anything under, I would say 80, 75%, then you really need to be putting some solutions in place. There are other things we look at like, okay, number of visitors and then the conversion of those visitors and so we have some models that says, well, if you are a B2C and you have average number of visitors, which I think HubSpot quotes, it’s something like 300,000 visitors per site. And then we know that you have a certain conversion rate. Then we can look at conversion rates and then we know you have a certain average order size. We can actually build out a model that says, well, if you just increase that conversion rate, or if you take even half of that 17%, you might be missing. there could be millions of dollars there, millions that if you can, because you’re going to a bigger audience and you’re increasing conversion rate. And so we try and help work on what might some good KPIs look like to be able to see that you’re actually making progress with this.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, yeah, love it. Well, Jennifer, thanks so much for joining today. One last question before we wrap up, you’ve given a lot of great advice and insights already on how organizations can become more accessible and how they should track their progress. What’s one piece of advice for organizations to take an agile, iterative approach, again, one step at a time? How do you recommend they take that approach to accessibility?
Jennifer Griffin Smith: I would say work with your digital team, make a list. I could give you my top five of the things that I thought, I’m not sure if, like I mentioned PDFs. I mentioned things like capture tests are really hard, color contrast I was amazed about. I’ve learned a lot about color contrast and color blindness and you could take those top three things, maybe I just mentioned three or four things and just start there and then build it out and then start looking at KPIs and actually it then becomes For me, it opens your eyes into bigger digital optimization areas because then you start looking at, okay, now we’re starting to look at the content consumption overall, not just accessibility and how can we drive just better content consumption and conversion of that consumption. Accessibility is just one part of digital optimization, but there are easy steps to get going with it.
