https://youtu.be/0XhXv0p-wm4

Nathan Porter Speaks About the Importance of Website Accessibility

Our transcript of the discussion between Nathan Porter and Jameson Files host Carrie Webber has been lightly edited for flow. To enjoy the audio conversation, you can watch on YouTube or listen to our podcast on iTunes, Google Play, or Spotify.

Jameson Files Episode 144

Carrie:

Welcome to the Jamon Files. I'm your host, Carrie Webber, and we're thrilled to have you joining us for another episode. Today, we are going to focus on the realm of marketing. It's always fun to learn about marketing. What's the new trend? What are things that can help us be found more successfully or to bring in more new patients or to refresh our brand? All of those are always fun, but what we don't think about as business owners is what we are doing to make sure that we are being compliant and that we are protected in how our website is present online and is performing. 

The ADA (Americans with Disabilities Acts) and Website Accessibility

You may or may not know that there are pieces to your website that must be compliant according to the Americans with Disabilities Acts. And so I am so thrilled to have our Chief Marketing Officer, Nate Porter, with me today for this episode to talk about not only what you need to be doing to make sure you are protected and being represented correctly according to those ADA standards on your website, and how to evaluate to see if perhaps you need to do some updates, but also we're going to talk a little bit about your website in general. We often set it and forget it. Some of you may be a little more active and intentional in your marketing efforts, and you may be doing a lot of things well. Some of you may have some changes or some updates that you need to be considering. We're going to talk about those today. 

Nate, thank you so much for being with me.

Nate:

Thanks for having me.

Carrie:

So, to start things off, let's really just give everybody a scare, shall we? Let's talk about websites from the side of being compliant according to the Americans with Disabilities Act. What does that even mean?  Why are we even talking about this? Can you give a little bit of an update, maybe a news report, on what we're talking about today?

Nate:

So about 15% of the population has some sort of disability that would impair them from interacting with your website in the way that you and I would. It can be anything from someone who's colorblind to someone who is fully blind or deaf. And so, the web platforms have been a little bit of a gray area for some time. The ADA has not been very forthcoming with their regulations and definitions for that. There's certainly been some talk about it since 2015 or 2016, but the legislation hasn't been there. So what's driven this though for business owners and people who operate websites, whether it's e-commerce or whatever, is legal actions.

Domino’s Loses Lawsuit Concerning Website Accessibility

In 2016, there was a landmark case against Domino's where someone was trying to order a pizza allegedly, and they were not able to complete the process because they were blind and they couldn't navigate to make that work. And so, people use assistive technologies like screen readers and things like that to help them in that process. Domino's lost that lawsuit. They appealed it all the way up to the Supreme Court, and in 2019, the Supreme Court declined to overrule that decision. In a way that established the standard for what was acceptable when it comes to accessibility. Now here we are a few years later, and we're seeing that the volume of lawsuits against people has really increased in this area.

Carrie:

So what you're saying is since these lawsuits have started to take place, doctors' practices may be thinking, well, Domino's Pizza is a little bit bigger than us. But what you're saying is, at this point in time,