LAEDC and EcomBack host Webinar on Website Accessibility

Seta Zorabian

Good morning everyone. Welcome, welcome to today's LAEDC webinar and our partner here at Ecomback. And today's webinar is going to be navigating website accessibility compliance to protect your business. Again, thank you so much for joining. Today's webinar will be recorded. It will also go on our website. We will take question and answers at the end. You can either put that in the chat or you can also put it in Q&A, and we will definitely get to it before the end of the webinar.

A little bit about LAEDC next. Our vision and our mission is a reimagined Los Angeles regional economy growing equitable, sustainable and resilient that provides a healthy and high standard living for all. What is our mission? It's to reinvent our economy to collaboratively advance growth and prosperity for all.

Next, welcome again. My name is Seta Zorabian and I am one of the regional managers here at LAEDC of the business assistance program.

Next I would like to also introduce you to my colleague Larry Solak who is also a regional manager. Thank you, Larry.

Next wanted to talk to you a little bit about technical assistance. What is technical assistance and business assistance? So what does technical assistance offer? It offers business and technical assistance with complimentary and confidential consulting to small businesses across all industry sectors. We take a strategic approach. A team of multilingual business assistance experts are available Los Angeles countywide. We help businesses overcome challenges so they can sustain, grow and hire, with resources including workforce training and development, permitting assistance and expediting, tax incentives, financing resources, access to capital, grant and loan opportunities, site selection and relocation, connections to public and private resources and cities. We also help with cost-containment strategies, business resilience resources, programs for manufacturers, procurement opportunities, utility programs, direct help to employers to overcome challenges and retain staff position for economic recovery and resilience, safety opening guides and information, small business referral webinars such as today, and we also have our analysis and economic outlooks from LAEDC's institute of applied economics.

Next I would like to also introduce you to my colleague Larry Solak who is also a regional manager. Thank you, Larry.

Next wanted to talk to you a little bit about technical assistance. What is technical assistance and business assistance? So what does technical assistance offer? It offers business and technical assistance with complimentary and confidential consulting to small businesses across all industry sectors. We take a strategic approach. A team of multilingual business assistance experts are available Los Angeles countywide. We help businesses overcome challenges so they can sustain, grow and hire, with resources including workforce training and development, permitting assistance and expediting, tax incentives, financing resources, access to capital, grant and loan opportunities, site selection and relocation, connections to public and private resources and cities. We also help with cost-containment strategies, business resilience resources, programs for manufacturers, procurement opportunities, utility programs, direct help to employers to overcome challenges and retain staff position for economic recovery and resilience, safety opening guides and information, small business referral webinars such as today, and we also have our analysis and economic outlooks from LAEDC's institute of applied economics.

Next, and these connections to resources. Larry, please go ahead and talk about connections to resources.

Larry Solak:

Hi everyone. My name is Larry Solak, also a regional manager with LAEDC. If you are in need of any resources, that’s what we’re here to do and help you with, whether that’s with permit assistance, going directly to the city or the county or any of the other agencies that are involved to help you guys get those permits and expedite them as well as we can. Any financing that you guys are looking for, whether that be access to capital through loans or grants, we’re here to assist with that. If you’re having issues with any of your utilities, we’re here to help you with energy efficiencies and helping you guys work on those programs with you to make sure that you are not falling behind on your bills. Or if you need assistance with anything, we’re here to help you with that. If you're looking to fill jobs, train, or develop your employees, we are here to assist you with any workforce opportunities that are available to you through the city and the county. Our own in-house economic development or data team is here to assist with reporting, industry specific. If you're looking for real estate, we're here to help you guys with that, with what's available throughout the city and the county, and any forecasting and demographic data that you may need.

And then finally, if you're looking to reduce your bottom line and reduce risk, we have different organizations that we work with to help you guys with that, either through CMTC, which is a manufacturing organization to help you with lean manufacturing or if you're looking to work on workman's comp or unemployment benefits, anything that you guys need to assist with your HR issues and challenges.

And then next, we want to wish you or welcome you guys to the program. Today we are going to have you guys meet our team here from Ecomback. I'm really excited to introduce them today. Ecomback is one of the few web development companies in the US that specializes in ADA compliance for websites. They’re based right here in the San Fernando Valley and they are company that audits, fixes and certifies websites for accessibility. Their founder and CEO is Nyion Padre. Nion runs an e-commerce business in Los Angeles and started Ecomback initially as an in-house agency, but then he soon expanded it to help other businesses who need web services. He’s been a vocal advocate for small business in California and Los Angeles. Ahson Rana is a partner at Ecomback. He leads the website accessibility team. His team has helped over 350 businesses make their websites accessible in the past few years. And with that, I'd like to turn it over to our partners at Ecomback. You guys can take it away. Let me see if I can turn my screen on and everything.

Nayan:

Alright. Can you see and hear me?

Larry Solak:

Yes.

Nayan Padrai:

Alright. Hi everyone. Thank you for joining the webinar today. My name is Nayan. I’m based right here in Canoga Park, which is where I have my main office, and our backend office is in Lahore, Pakistan where Ahson and Aziz are based basically. So I'll just give you a little bit of a background on Ecomback and what we do basically.

Like I said, my name is Nayan. A few years ago, a business I own was sued for website accessibility because there are about 4 and a half thousand lawsuits filed every year and tens of thousands of demand letters sent out to businesses by attorneys who specialize in accessibility litigation. So when that happened to a business I own, I had to do a few different things. One is deal with the lawsuit. I had to deal with making sure that the various websites that we own are accessible and understand the compliance risks of running anything on e-commerce, which have become greater and greater over the past few years with all kinds of legal ramifications and compliance issues.

So what I did was I built the team in-house at Ecomback with Ahson and we essentially had to remediate several websites that we own along with websites that we have for our clients. During that process, we didn’t have this expertise initially, we had to develop it because there are very few people in this country who know this space very well. But we were able to do that by hiring and training our existing developer staff and content staff. I’m based in Los Angeles, I’m actually a filmmaker. I moved to LA after making a feature film and I started my e-commerce business essentially as a side hustle and it grew into a much bigger business than I ever anticipated. At that point, we needed to have our own web team, so that’s when Ecomback was born.

So what I did was I started making a documentary film called “Blindsided,” which is almost done. The film exposes what I think has been happening in the name of the ADA — that plaintiff lawyers have been able to use the law to sue businesses, rightfully or wrongfully, in many cases. It’s become a niche industry that a lot of businesses only find out about when they actually get hit with litigation.

So that’s kind of the genesis and the origin story. Essentially what happened was while making the film, I met a lot of attorneys. Many of the attorneys I met asked me, “Hey, what are you doing to fix your website issues? Because we have clients that are getting sued repeatedly.” So we showed them our compliance program. A lot of them said, “Hey, can your team start helping some of our clients that are having this issue?” So that’s how we developed our compliance program — in collaboration with businesses, people with disabilities, and with attorneys to ensure that we can offer a very easy to understand and reduce the complexity of how to accomplish accessibility on the internet.

I'm going to have Ahson join in a second, but I just wanted to go over why accessibility matters. Two things can be true at the same time: the world needs to be accessible and litigation is probably not the best way to do it. One in four people in the US have a disability. Disabilities range from all kinds. They go from hearing to visual disabilities to motor disabilities, cognitive disabilities, and so forth. What you want to do is make sure that especially any digital asset that you have, whether it be your website or your mobile app or your PDF or a video or images, those have the necessary code and content so that assistive technology, which is what Ahson’s going to talk about now, can read them or view them.

It’s important because the ADA, especially in California — and I’ll just jump to that in a second — in California, businesses that have a physical presence are required to make sure that their digital content is accessible. So you have to protect yourself from this kind of risk that is out there.

Let me hand this over. I’m going to stop sharing my screen and Ahson can take over and kind of show you how to view assistive technology. Ahson, can you share your screen?

Ahson Rana:

Yes. I’m sharing my screen. Can you see my screen?

Okay. Hi everyone. Thank you Nayan, first of all, and thank you everyone for joining this webinar. My name is Ahson and I’m an accessibility expert in Ecomback. So I’m going to guide you about assistive technology and what kind of software a disabled person uses to basically navigate the website.

So as you can see on my screen, there are different softwares and different tools that a disabled person uses to access the website. For Windows-based platforms, we use NVDA and we use JAWS. For Mac, it’s a built-in software called Mac VoiceOver. These are the software or tools a disabled person uses to access the website.

There are some other devices as well like Braille is another device, and there are some other tools, voice-over command tools. Different browsers have different kinds of tools to help disabled people access the website.

I’m going to show you a demo, an example, so you can see how this VoiceOver or screen reading software works. So we have Ecomback opened right now, and I’m using Mac. Mac comes with a built-in software called VoiceOver, and we can easily activate that tool using the Command+F5 from our keyboard.

VoiceOver on Chrome. Ecomback vertical line ADA and WCAG website compliance solutions. Google Chrome window. Ecomback vertical line ADA and WCAG website compliance solutions. Memory usage 228 megabytes. Selected tab group. Chrome has new window. You are currently on a selected tab group inside of a group. To exit this group, press Control + Option + Shift + up arrow.

Okay. So as you can see, when I turn that on, first of all the VoiceOver gave me the information of what kind of website it is and what services we’re offering. Obviously this is in the title of the website. Second thing, it is showing me it’s a tab and third, it’s telling me that if I use Control + Option + Shift + up arrow, I can directly go inside the website and navigate further.

So these tools basically help a disabled person to navigate the website. And how these software work is, when we go inside the website, the developer needs to make the website accessible, so they need to use ARIA labels, they need to use coding in a way that these tools can easily read the website properly. Most developers don’t have knowledge of it and they skip it. So it is very compulsory to have the website accessibility according to these software.

Ahson Rana:

Nayan, VoiceOver off. You can take over.

Nayan Padrai:

Okay. There we go. Can you see my screen?

Ahson Rana:

Yes Nayan, we can see.

Nayan Padrai:

So like I mentioned earlier, there are two parts of the ADA. This is something a lot of businesses and public entities need to be aware of now, which is in Title II of the ADA. From next year, from next April, making the website accessible as per WCAG standards is going to be a requirement. That’s also going to affect businesses that serve public entities. So if your business is serving the City of Los Angeles or a school district or if you have any interaction with anything that’s funded by the government, your digital presence is going to be required to be accessible.

The specific risk for businesses in LA is that just this year alone in 2025, in the first quarter, there have been 25% more lawsuits filed than in the first quarter of 2024. This is nationally. But in Los Angeles, 82% of the lawsuits filed in California originate out of the LA Superior Court. So businesses in LA are certainly at the highest risk in the state of California for these kinds of lawsuits. And the ones that are the most vulnerable are the ones that have a brick and mortar—so a restaurant with an ordering app or a website. So any brick-and-mortar business has the most vulnerability in California.

Some of the things that need to be accessible are things like low contrast, which you can see here, a sunglass image with text that’s barely readable. So that’s low contrast. You have missing alt text—which is not defining what a button or an image is supposed to basically say to the screen reader, because the screen reader can only read what’s presented to it, other than through some new AI technology where it can gather that information. But essentially the business owner needs to make sure that images that are on your website or on your social media have alt text.

Then you have inaccessible forms and pop-ups. So if you have a business, say a real estate business—and you have forms on your website, those forms that people fill out need to be accessible and they need to be fillable. Same thing with videos and captions—you need to make sure that your videos have captions or transcripts. Ideally, they should have audio description. And the website is navigable—you can navigate the website without the use of a mouse or a trackpad. For that, it needs to be coded in such a way that the website moves in the correct structure from left to right, top to bottom and so forth. And there’s nothing that’s getting skipped.

The common question that people ask is “Okay, that’s all great. How do I make my website accessible?” And for that, there is something called the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, which is created by the W3C. And why this is important is that almost 99.9% of lawsuits that are filed reference the WCAG. In essence, they’re stating that if your website were to follow the guidelines of the WCAG, it would be accessible. And because you’re not doing that, you are therefore discriminating. That’s the fundamental basis of a majority of these lawsuits. So it’s very important that these guidelines be followed. These guidelines are not the law, but they’ve kind of been adopted as the law at this point.

And one of the main things we see—and it’s something that I had done as well—is people say “Okay. How do I fix this? How do I add accessibility?” And oftentimes you’ll see a little icon on a website — that’s the wheelchair symbol or an icon like this. Those things are called overlay widgets. Most businesses think that they’re doing the right thing by installing something like an overlay widget, assuming that it’s going to make your website accessible. But what’s happened is there’s been a lot of aggressive marketing around these tools. And oftentimes these tools don’t work — they actually create more problems than they solve. So we don’t advise using overlay widgets.

Recently, the FTC had fined one of the largest sellers of these kinds of tools a million dollars—or required them to pay a million dollars as a settlement amount—for claims that their tool works in a way that it doesn’t. And that’s the same thing that’s happening across other tools now as well where they're getting taken to court, challenging the validity of the claims that they're making. So adding a quick fix is not going to make the website accessible.

What is going to make the website accessible is ensuring you do a proper audit. These are the services that we offer. There is a proper audit using manual and automated testing. One of the critical things to understand is automated testing only catches about 30% of accessibility errors. The rest have to be manually checked because there are some things that are subjective in terms of what is or isn’t usable, what is or isn’t accessible.

Then fixing those issues at the code level. Once you fix it at the code level, unless the code drastically changes, your website will be accessible from a technical point of view. But you have to look at accessibility in two buckets: there’s code and there is content. The developer can fix the code, but the content is usually the responsibility of the person who is running the website. That’s where text, images, and all the visual elements come into play. Those have to be created in such a way that assistive technology can interact with them.

What we also do is while making our own websites accessible and creating the process for ourselves—what I did was I went out and met a lot of people with visual disabilities to understand what it is that they need. Through that, we tied up with certain organizations that train people with disabilities for jobs. We employ these people now to test websites for us on recorded sessions so that you have validated user testing from a third party saying “Yes, I was able to use your website. I didn’t have any issues.”

There is no national certification, but the certification can be done through vendors like ourselves where our experts are certifying that to the best of our abilities, this website has been made accessible. There are things that you can’t fix because those are controlled by third-party software. But whatever you as the author can control should be accessible.

We advise publishing an accessibility statement that we offer and having a feedback form that folks can fill out and say “Okay, I wasn’t able to use your website or this page wasn’t working for me,” etc.

We also provide periodic reviews. We believe at least once a quarter the website should be checked, because technology is moving very fast. Every day, every week code changes are happening behind the scenes that you may not even be aware of if you’re using any CMS platform like a Shopify or WordPress, WooCommerce, Square, any one of these tools, or the apps that are being used on these platforms.

So having a periodic check is very important. Then, training and guidance as to what to do. And we’re providing some of that guidance here in this call that we’ll be able to share.

can claim. So, I think you have to spend over $10,000 — if you spend $10,000 you get $5,000 back. If you spend $1,000 you get $500 back. There’s a minimum, I think, of $250. But in most cases, half of what you’re going to spend you’re going to get back as actual credit to be applied at your tax return. And it’s a simple form, 8826, that any accountant can fill out.

Obviously, making your website accessible expands your consumer base because what it also does is it cleans up the code of your website. When you clean up the code of your website you’re making the website more readable and more — what is the word for it — search engine, the SEO. It’s basically you’re boosting your SEO because the website’s code has been cleaned up.

And obviously you’re protecting yourself from lawsuits. There’s never 100% on this aspect — I want to be clear about that — but 99.9% if you have done the basics, you shouldn’t have an issue with a future claim.

We’ve created a special offer for LAEDC members. One is that we’re going to provide a free one-hour audit. You just have to get in touch with us through the LAEDC or directly and let us know that you’re a member and we’ll give you a free one-hour audit. We’ll check the website and tell you what’s wrong with it or how it can be fixed or what are the issues there.

We’re also going to be offering a 10% discount for the members. And there’s a compliance guide that you can download from our website that will show you what to do basically on your own — for your own teams or for yourself — in terms of what’s needed for accessibility.

So that’s the presentation that we have developed and we’re open to questions now.

Seta Zorabian:

Okay, well great. Thank you so much Nayan and Ahson. Again, we are open to questions and answers and there is a Q&A and also a chat button. Please do not hesitate to put your questions and answers in there and we’ll have both Nayan and Ahson take care of that for you.

Seta Zorabian:

Larry, do you see any questions on your end?

Larry Solak:

I don’t yet. There’s something in the Q&A right now. It says, “I am a tiny business with little to no capital. What is the best way to get started with making my website accessible?”

Nayan Padrai:

So it depends on the platform that you’re on. Are you using like a WordPress or Shopify or any one of these?

What platform is your website on?

Larry Solak, Ahson Rana, Seta Zorabian:

That is WordPress. WordPress.

Nayan Padrai:

Oh okay. So on WordPress, you can send us your — you can book a call and we can go through and see if there’s any issues or what the level of issues are.

Seta Zorabian:

Okay, so it looks like there’s another question that says, “Do you offer discounts to nonprofit websites for the one-hour audit?”

So as Nayan mentioned, the first one hour is of no cost. So that is one hour of no cost and I think that that’s a great opportunity for any business.

Nayan Padrai:

Yes, and also to answer the previous question, you can download — you can use this Chrome extension called WAVE. That’s W-A-V-E. It’s developed by I believe it’s University of Utah, if I’m not mistaken. But WAVE is a free tool that anyone can use to get automated testing, just the basic testing.

You can also use Google Chrome has LightHouse as a tool, basically.

What is it called? Google Lighthouse.

Ahson Rana:

And there’s a training video on our YouTube channel as well. You can go on youtube.com/ecomback and there are many helpful videos like how you can check your website for accessibility, how you can use the WAVE tool, how you can use Google Chrome to check the — Google Lighthouse. So lots of information is there.

Larry Solak:

I have another question here. “How can we reduce our legal liability while working toward compliance?”

Nayan Padrai

Well, the first thing is make sure that you’ve published an accessibility statement. Although that’s not a legal cover for anything, it starts to demonstrate your commitment towards accessibility. The second is either contact us or any other provider, or if you’re a developer, or if you have the technical skills to audit the website and understand what to do, start making those fixes. And if you’re using third-party tools, ask them if those tools are accessible.

Larry Solak:

Great. There’s another question here. “Do you have any design resources that teach ADA compliance designs for communications?”

Nayan Padrai:

Yes, I believe on our YouTube we have some and there’s plenty of information out there on the internet. When you’re talking about design — are you talking about graphic design?

In terms of design, you have to follow the WCAG guidelines. Those guidelines are publicly available. But to just give you a quick answer — making sure your contrast levels are correct, making sure your fonts are readable, ensuring that you’re not creating — when it comes to communication, if you’re doing a video for example, ensuring that the video has a transcript or an audio description where necessary. So following those basic things will definitely help towards being accessible. If you’re posting on social media, use the alt text features, things like that.

Also, what I will say is for the design part, what a lot of folks get stuck on is how to write alt text. And ChatGPT does a fantastic job now — you upload the image and if the image, suppose it’s a business and it’s making a banner for a Mother’s Day sale for example, you upload that image and it’ll tell you what the alt text should be. Obviously, you have to read it and validate it, but you can write pretty darn good alt text using the help of ChatGPT. And we have a link for that also that we can share with you on how to do that.

Seta Zorabian:

Wonderful. Thank you Nayan. Also everyone — unfortunately chat is not taking Q&A but Q&A is taking Q&A. So — but there is a comment: “This has been so helpful. Could you please reiterate what you said about using platforms like Square and Shopify?”

Nayan Padrai:

Absolutely. The platforms, in and of themselves, may claim that they’re accessible. But the minute you touch their themes and you modify them, you’re probably going to have inaccessible content or inaccessible features on them. So, both Square and Shopify — Shopify is the leading platform, and because it’s the leading platform, it also has a lot more accessibility issues because there’s tons of apps on Shopify.

So if you have a Shopify website or if you have a Square website, it’s best to get an audit done.

Square, there’s a little bit more limitations in terms of what you can do with the code. On Shopify, you have access to a lot of the code — not all of it. And you don’t have access to any of the apps basically, in terms of you can’t modify the code of the apps. So that’s where folks like us are able to help app developers. And what we routinely do is, if we’re working with a client, we will contact the apps that they’re using and tell them, “Here are the issues that you have, and here’s what you need to do to fix them.” And when that happens, it helps everybody else that’s using that app also because the problem gets solved at scale.

Larry Solak:

Nayan, you had mentioned there are some tools that people are using that say they’re going to make your website accessible, and you said they don’t really work. Can you go over what some of those tools are so people know?

Nayan Padrai:

I don’t want to name — I don’t want to call them out — but if you Google “website accessibility widget,” you’re going to see the top ones. And two of them have recently been sued, privately, in New York and I think in Delaware. One has been — there was a settlement they just did with the FTC, which just published their settlement information. So these tools, while they mean well, oftentimes introduce more barriers than they fix. There was a big New York Times article about this a couple years ago where the fix is worse than the flaw sometimes. So those tools are not going to be covered, in that sense, for any kind of litigation. In fact, there are plaintiff attorneys that specifically target websites that use these tools. So the best thing is: fix it at the base, at the code level, and learn the basics. It’s not that hard once you get into it. It can feel intimidating in the beginning, but it’s not that hard.

Larry Solak:

We have another question here from Victoria. It says, “I’ve had a lot of difficulty finding accessible themes for WordPress. Do they exist or do all themes need to be adapted for compliance?”

Nayan Padrai:

You can answer this one.

Ahson Rana:

Yeah definitely. So basically, you know, in WordPress and in Shopify, if you just use the child theme, most of them are accessible. But when you are going to start adding the content, adding the plugins and applications — that’s where the accessibility, I can say, messes up. So basically, you know, if you want to have a good design website, it’s very hard to find a theme in the market. And as per my experience, we haven’t been able to find anything which is accessible. So if you want to have a good website, you want new add design, graphics, applications — then remediation is necessary and compulsory for all that. So only the child theme is accessible, but obviously that’s not useful because it’s just a plain theme and nobody's able to sell on that theme.

So in other words, if you want to buy anything from the market — that requires the accessibility.

Nayan Padrai:

What I would say is actually, try not to — especially for Shopify — try not to use the third-party themes. Use the themes that are built by Shopify.

WordPress is also — it’s not that hard to fix if you’re using hosting that allows you access to the code. Because certain WordPress hosts, they won’t give you that code access. So you got to make sure that you have that.

Larry Solak:

For those people that are using a web developer or an agency, what questions should they be asking them to ensure that they’re building their websites with accessibility?

Nayan Padrai:

Ask them if they have any experience in accessibility. And we’ve actually just published our accessibility checklist. It’s available on our website in the Learn section. You can share your screen and maybe show everyone that. Ask them if they have experience in this — because oftentimes, what we find is that this is just not something that’s in people’s wheelhouse. They may have a general understanding of it, but it’s just not in their wheelhouse because they haven’t been trained in it. And that’s where this gap is coming — where well-meaning people who want to do the right thing are unable to because the folks that they’re working with also have never been taught this in school or in their training.

And in the last couple of years — in the last year specifically — we’ve worked with many, many agencies and developers who have clients. So they come to us and say, “Listen, I can do this but I can’t do that.” So we share those responsibilities and help them.

Larry Solak:

If you’re working on a — oh here comes — here’s a question right here. “For a small business, that is in general — what is the general price range we’re talking about to fix their website? Can you give a ballpark?”

Nayan Padrai:

Yes. So basically, it depends on which platform the website is based on, Kelvin. But it can range between $2,000 to $4,000. Sometimes less, sometimes more. It all depends on the complexity and how many pages you have, how many templates you have, and how much leg work there is to be done.

Larry Solak:

If someone’s going through the process of updating their website, is it going to change their website at all? Will it change any of the pictures or any of the content that’s on those websites? How does that work when you’re working at the back end?

Nayan Padrai:

Minimal. Usually it’s minimal. Usually it’s color contrast — where say, you have a light blue background, and then you have text that’s kind of two-tone and it’s hard to read that text. Well, in that case, you might want to increase the — change the color scheme a little bit. But generally, maybe 5% change. There are some that need a little bit more elements to be added, but we don’t see wholesale changes to websites.

Larry Solak:

I have a question that is based off of my own experience, and that is I’m color blind. And I often run into problems where there’s a contrast issue and I cannot read what’s on a screen. That is obviously one thing that you guys work on, but can you touch a little bit on some of the other issues that exist? What are the other processes that people are using to access websites above and beyond hearing and visual — what other types of access are used by people?

Nayan Padrai:

The folks with motor disabilities need to be able to use the website without the use of a mouse — or a touchpad, for example.

Wait, Larry, did you say you’re color blind?

Seta Zorabian:

I am color blind, yes.

Nayan Padrai:

I’ll tell you a funny story. When I was writing screenplays way in my 20s, my writing partner was color blind and I don’t think he really knew he was color blind because I would make changes in like, red. And I would send it to him, and he wouldn’t do anything with them and we used to get into these fights. And then we finally figured out he can't see the color basically that I’m changing. So I learned about this the hard way — that okay, we can’t use certain colors anymore in highlighting or in… So it does — these things impact a lot of people. So it’s very important to be cognizant of things.

One more thing you mentioned in terms of what are the other kinds of disabilities — last year if I’m not mistaken, there was a person in New York who sued the New York State — one of the agencies in New York — because the way they had created their form and their structure for some benefits was so complex and written in such difficult language, that the person — I think they had dyslexia or they had another kind of disability — using plain language to define and to make it easy for anyone to read and understand is so critical when it comes to accessibility. Because oftentimes, and now that we’re using ChatGPT a lot to write content, it becomes easier than it used to be.

But ensure that whatever you’re putting out is not full of jargon that no one can understand. It should be easy, step-by-step — make it simple, basically. That is a very common disability that not a lot of people know they have or acknowledge that they have. But if you make it very complex, people are just going to move on or they’re not going to interact with you.

Does that make sense?

Larry Solak:

Yes.

What is a typical timeline when somebody starts the accessibility process? How long does it usually take from start to finish?

Nayan Padrai:

For us to remediate a website, it can be two to six weeks, generally. So in the first couple of weeks — a lot of the folks who come to us are going through litigation — so in the first couple of weeks we deal with all of the low-hanging fruit issues. So we’ll do the audit, and our team will go and do all of the quick fixes. Then we’ll go back in and do another deeper-dive audit using more tools. And then we do a manual review and manual test. And then we’ll do a blind user test, basically. So it can take 2 to 6 weeks, typically around 3 to 4 weeks. It can take longer also when you’re dealing with third-party applications — we can’t control the timeline on that, only they can. That’s the general range.

Ahson Rana:

The major issues can be taken care of in the first two weeks’ time, and after that we can discuss with the third-party application, documentation, and the stuff.

Nayan Padrai:

We just created this actually, Larry, and it’s based on our discussions a few weeks ago. So, if you scroll down — and this is available on our website for everybody to use — what we’ve done is created a simple checklist using the most common pages that you find on e-commerce websites or on any content website. So, you have your homepage, product page, collection page, content page, blog page, and contact form. And what are the elements on these forms that need to be accessible?

So, we’ve created this as a tool for you all to use, and you can also download this as a Google checklist or save it as Excel for yourself. It’s broken down, and it also has — what we tried to do is assign the responsibility. So who’s typically responsible for this element?

There was a previous question on how can I kind of get started with my accessibility journey? You can follow these steps. And we’ve tried to boil down all of the guidelines into a very easy to understand and usable format.

I’ll give you — while we wait for any other question — maybe I’ll give you some suggestions. Like, if you have content, if you’re writing content in MS Word or any other word processing software, and you just simply copy-paste that into WordPress or Shopify or Square or whatever — you might introduce unnecessary code. So, use free tools like HTML Cleaner Pro. It’s a free website. You can go in, put in your content, clean out the code, and then copy-paste that into wherever you’re going to put that content.

You can use apps for alt text. So, if you have a Shopify website that has 10,000 products — you don’t need to write content for 10,000 products. You can use tools that are from apps like Hextom — and we can guide you on this stuff. It’s very easy, it’s not expensive. And those kinds of apps can generate alt text across all of your products based on certain rules that you set. Or it can be done using coding as well. So these are some basic things that are on our checklist that you can use.

Then there was another question about how to make your website accessible that we always get asked. You can use tools like WAVE and Lighthouse and you can see this video here on the Ecomback YouTube channel for how to do that.

There is some work that needs to be done. You’ve got to kind of understand it because one of the main things that we see often is accessibility isn’t a one-and-done thing. It’s not a set-it-and-forget-it. You have to be involved in it because you're creating content on a daily basis usually — or on a weekly basis. So you've got to understand how that content is going to live on your digital property or on your social media and so forth.

Ahson Rana:

Also, on the right-hand side of the page you can see we have videos about how you can check website compliance, how you can see the overlays part — like how you can remove the extra tags, how you can make a website accessible, how you can use ChatGPT to generate good alt text. So there are different helpful videos there which are free and everybody can watch them and make their website accessible.

Larry Solak:

Can you guys touch a little bit on WCAG? What their role is, how they work with you guys and the accessibility world in general?

Nayan Padrai:

We are members of the W3C, which is the worldwide consortium that creates guidelines and standards for all things internet. And the WCAG is one of their work products, basically. We are members of the committees that are working on the next set of guidelines — the WCAG 3.0 — but the 2.2 is the most current standard. WCAG 2.2 Level AA is the most preferred level of conformance that you should aim for.

That has around 60 different success criteria. A lot of them are technical, some of them are content based, and we have those resources available on our website as well.

Larry Solak:

You were touching on some of these lawsuits that are happening, and you mentioned you are working with clients who had just been notified that they are out of compliance. What does that mean for the client as far as the lawsuit that has started? Does it reduce any fines that might come along with that? Does it change what the law firm is asking for, or does it prevent them from going to court if that does come up?

Nayan Padrai:

So, there’s a couple of different ways this usually pans out. You’re going to get either a demand letter — which says essentially, “We’re going to sue you unless you give us a call.” Or you actually receive a lawsuit.

In California, it's — California has incentivized these lawsuits by putting in place statutory penalties. So you’re going to pay a minimum of $4,500 to the plaintiff. And then the attorney is probably going to ask for $10,000. So you’re going to be in for at least $10–15,000 is the general range, depending on the law firm.

If the lawsuit is from another state — because they can still sue you from any other state — then it depends on the law firm. But even there, you know, the range may be between $5,000 to $15,000, or $5,000 to $20,000. Whatever they can ask for, they’re going to ask for — which is the plaintiff attorney.

So that’s kind of the range that we see. And judges have begun to criticize what’s essentially known as boilerplate lawsuits or copy-paste lawsuits. Because essentially they’re filing claims stating that their client, who’s a bona fide customer — or in California they say that they are testers — had an accessibility barrier and they couldn’t access the website.

So, it’s a murky legal area. And whenever a legal area is murky, it opens up opportunities for claims that one might argue are not genuine, in terms of the validity of the claims that they're actually just making.

In California, our legislature has not provided for any notice to cure at this point. So you have no opportunity to fix the issue for a reduction in fines or penalties. That’s the penalties under the Unruh Act.

Businesses in California, especially in Los Angeles, have been hit with hundreds if not thousands of these demand letters and lawsuits. And we have worked very hard to educate members of the legislature and the Senate in California on these issues as well. Because what I feel is necessary is businesses need to have time to fix these problems before they’re dragged to court. And that’s not happening.

Larry Solak:

Interesting.

Nayan Padrai:

You also have other issues that are being worked on right now in California — which is privacy claims. So make sure that your website has a privacy app, where you’re collecting consent. Because that’s another area in which there’s a lot of litigation happening at this point. I know the legislature is working on a bill to help stop that, but that’s still a bill at the moment.

Larry Solak:

Great. I think one last question for you guys before we’re out of time here today — and thank you so much for providing your insight on all of this — once you are in compliance and you're moving forward with your day-to-day activities, how often should businesses be checking their sites? And what processes should they be going through to make sure they don’t fall back out of compliance?

Nayan Padrai:

At least every 3 months. Essentially, if you create a workflow where you’re checking — like if you publish new content, you’re running a WAVE scan — which is very easy, on a page to run, you’re going to know if there’s a problem immediately. So building it into your daily workflow with either you or your staff, or whoever is working on this, or even an external vendor — to ensure that when they’re making any substantial change, or when they’re publishing content, they’re running some basic accessibility checks. That will help a lot of issues down the road.

On an overall basis, checking the website or checking the digital asset at least once in 3 months is a good idea. And that’s what we offer — like a quarterly check.

Seta Zorabian:

Okay. Well, wonderful! Thank you so much Nayan and Ahson and EcomBack. As mentioned, this webinar will be recorded and it will be on our website. This was very, very informative. Also, please reach out to larry.solak@laedc.org. if you do have any questions. And he will be more than happy to do that warm introduction to EcomBack for your needs.

And thank you so much for being here. Any other last minute comments, questions, or anything like that — Nayan, Ahson, or even Larry?

Larry Solak:

I’m good.

Seta Zorabian:

Good.

Okay. Wonderful. Very good. Wonderful. We do have another upcoming webinar coming up at the end of May. We will be sending that information out. It will actually be on our website as well. Please join us at www.laedc.org. That is where this recorded webinar will be. And thank you very much, and have a wonderful rest of the day.