Navigating Website Accessibility: Insights from Our Founder

Ramin: Welcome to today’s episode of the eCommerce Revolution podcast where we dive into the dynamic world of eCommerce and uncover the tools and tactics that empower today’s emerging entrepreneurs. Our podcast is part of our community with the same name. The community is geared to providing emerging eCommerce entrepreneurs with courses, content, and coaching to help you all launch and grow successful businesses.

Check us out at ecomrevolution.co. Let’s get things started. Welcome to another episode of the eCommerce Revolution podcast. Today we have an important topic to discuss, website accessibility. Our special guest is Nayan Padraiig, the founder of EconBack and a dedicated activist in the complex and legally challenging world of web accessibility. With a wealth of experience helping businesses create accessible online sites, Nayan has been at the forefront of fighting accessibility rights and compliance. In addition to his work in the e-commerce space, Nayan is a talented screenwriter and filmmaker and he will tell us more about that later. Merging creativity with a passion for positive change. Today we’ll explore the critical importance of web accessibility, discuss the legal challenges facing online businesses, and learn how emerging e-commerce entrepreneurs can stay ahead in making their sites more inclusive, and of course staying out of legal trouble.

So without any further ado, please welcome Nayan to the e-commerce revolution podcast. Nayan, great to have you here. I’ve been trying to get you here for I think a year and a half. I am so happy that you’re here. Thank you very much for making the time today.

Welcome.

Nayan: My pleasure.

Ramin: Thank you for having us. Of course. Of course. I know you were working on this, and I think you and I met, if I’m not mistaken, off of a phone call. legal issues and she did some research and she found you and you were gracious enough to spend time with us on the phone and kinda walk us through this maze, I’ll call it, if anything else of accessibility and you just shed so much information and just helped us out so much. I really wanted to make sure that you could bring this information to all these e-commerce entrepreneurs out there who’ve heard about this issue but don’t really know what to make of it. So if you don’t mind and we’ll just jump right in if you’re good with that, I will have a slew of questions for you. So maybe to start off with, Nayan, can you just explain what accessibility means for a website? What does this concept mean?

Nayan: Basically people who rely on assistive technology, people with visual disabilities or other disabilities, such as folks with hearing loss or motor abilities, where they need to use certain assistive technologies, a website has to be coded in a way where these assistive technologies can read or function with the website. Typically majority of the action, so to say, in this space is related to visual disabilities because folks who use screen readers, which are built into most operating systems and browsers now, so for example, if you get a new Apple computer, the second or third screen is accessibility.

When you download any app, it’ll ask you to turn on accessibility. So computers come built in with assistive technology now for the most part. And then there’s also other older screen reading software, such as JAWS or NVDA which are typically used on Windows operating systems. So those technologies need to be able to interact with your website to know what is a navigation bar or what is the checkout button basically. And if the website is not coded in that way, then those tools can’t work because they won’t know what the element on the screen is.

Ramin: Okay. And what if I’m using a platform like a Shopify or Squarespace or Wix? Am I already, do I already have some of the technology in place to manage accessibility or is that not really the case?

Nayan: Wix has an advanced accessibility tool, however it’s not very obvious and it’s not, I don’t believe it’s mandatory like the way they have with some of their other tools. For Shopify, the themes themselves are not fully accessible and when you modify the theme, which pretty much everybody does because you have to, that might break any accessibility that’s already built in, as well as when you add apps, those apps may not function correctly. Majority of the apps in the market are not accessible. The ones that are are great, but those are a few, and we’ve helped a bunch of apps become accessible over the past three years. But it’s getting there slowly, slowly. The awareness is coming, so folks are trying to do what they can to ensure that things function with each other in a symbiotic way so that as a whole, the website is accessible to people with disabilities.

Ramin: So I mean in general accessibility is a good thing, making your site accessible is an important thing, a good thing. I think lately it’s also created some fear out there for website owners and maybe also those who have built the website that, you know, because there are some rumblings and you’re hearing more and more that people are falling into the legal side, which we’ll talk about in a few minutes. But just in general, I want to make sure that everybody understands that this is a good thing to make your site accessible. Is that correct? You would agree with that?

Nayan: Absolutely. Everyone needs to have access.

Ramin: Exactly. Okay. All right. So we talked about the fact that accessibility is an important thing. Let’s talk about the legal side because as we mentioned, this is maybe where some of the fear comes in and the compliance. What are some of the things that an e-commerce entrepreneur should be aware of right out of the gate when it comes to the legal and compliance considerations out there?

Nayan: Okay, so at the onset, I’m not a lawyer, but I’m very well versed in the legal aspects of website accessibility. And if you go to our website, econback.com, and you scroll to the bottom or on the top, there’s a section called Lawsuit Reports. And we break down all of the legal filings that happen literally on a daily basis across the US. Primarily out of New York, Pennsylvania, Florida and of course California. And essentially, there are about 25 lawyers or 20 lawyers, law firms, that have plaintiffs or clients who are plaintiffs suing businesses across the country. So you don’t have to be in any one of these states to get sued. You could be anywhere in the world. Primarily the businesses are in the US. And so long as the plaintiff is in one of these hotbed states, you could wind up getting a legal notice, a demand letter, which is a private communication, or essentially those are the two things.

You’re gonna get either a lawsuit or you’re gonna get a demand letter. You might get an email saying, hey, I’m trying to use your website and I found these issues, but that’s super rare. Usually it’s the lawsuit or the demand letter from the attorney saying my client is going to sue you.

Ramin: Have your attorney contact me.

Nayan: Wow.

Ramin: Which is in this sense, demand for a settlement, essentially.

Nayan: So no chance to really even do anything about it. No chance to fix anything. They go straight to the lawsuit side of things.

Ramin: Absolutely.

Nayan: And that’s the fundamental problem with the entire accessibility conversation, which is that businesses are literally getting blindsided by these lawsuits and that’s the title of the film I’m working on, Blindsided, about this topic of how accessibility has become a real challenge when you don’t know a what is required of you legally and you don’t have time to fix it and then you wind up paying legal fees to settle lawsuits or defend lawsuits instead of investing that money in accessibility which hasn’t been well advertised or well promoted or well educated to not just business people, small businesses especially, but within the tech community. There is a crop of developers and coders, but frankly, most people who build websites are essentially using drag and drop features across all these platforms that are pre-built. and not a lot of those people have real coding experience and even the ones that do don’t really understand accessibility because it’s a very niche subject that requires a lot of expertise and understanding of these voluntary guidelines which are called the Web Accessibility Content Guidelines WCA, which have been created by members of the W3C. So essentially the lawsuits that, or the legal demand letters, function in a way that is punitive without any kind of, typically I should say, any kind of remediation period.

And that’s, to me, very wrong. And how are they determining how, if a website is accessible versus not, or semi-accessible, how are they doing this? Do they have simple tools that they use that we should be using too to make sure that we’re doing it for the good of everybody? Absolutely.

Ramin: Yeah.

Nayan: I mean, there’s two ways. For accessibility audits, automated tools, there’s a bunch of them. The most famous is Wave by WebAIM. It’s very easy to install. It’s very easy to install, it’s free. You can get a browser extension on Chrome or any, I think, mainstream browser. And then there’s a few others.

Google Lighthouse also has a built-in tool. But a lot of the real issues can only be found through manual testing. And to do manual testing, you need to have expertise in that. So what the lawsuits oftentimes claim are issues that have been run through automated tests, perhaps some manual testing. Because it’s very easy to run these automated tests.

It’ll take five, 10 minutes to run them, and maybe half an hour at the most if you’re really digging into it. And what most businesses don’t understand and it’s I don’t think it’s their fault especially if they’re using any of the website creation tools that are out there, there are automated checks for SEO, there’s automated checks for running ads, there’s all kinds of tools that are built into most of these platforms. Accessibility typically isn’t one of them.

And if it is, it’s pretty well hidden. And it’s not easy for a layman to address any of this. You have to have expertise. So you have to do an audit, and in order to do an audit, you need to know the person who’s doing the audit knows what they’re doing. So it’s not easy by any stretch of the imagination.

As much as a lot of people on LinkedIn and others would like to have you believe, it’s not easy. Okay. So, we offer free audits at eComBack to a lot of businesses that are facing litigation or are curious about what they should do. And the way audits should be done is a combination of automated tests, which are done at scale, because websites have thousands of pages sometimes or hundreds of thousands of pages and manual checks. Manual checks are very important because the stuff that manual checks can identify usually the automated test will not and until there are tools that businesses can use that are very easy to identify the issue and how to fix that issue, this problem is not going away.

Ramin: So, what do you see right away when you do one of these audits, what’s generally the first thing you see that jumps out at you as a problem in most cases? Missing labels, missing alt text, navigation bar not functioning correctly with screen reading tools, captions on videos or transcripts on videos. There’s a whole host of things and some of them could be small innocuous things that are littered across the website or sections headings that are not coded in a way in a congruent manner where things are going left to right top to bottom. Sometimes when elements will skip from the top to the middle and jump over a whole section of content.

So there are some things that are easily easily fixable and should be done on a regular basis, like adding all text to any images, ensuring your form labels or ensuring labels on elements, which the designer or the coder should be doing, the developer should be doing. But some of it is hidden, especially when you use a lot of different apps, which a lot of businesses use, you know use 10 to 20 different apps on their website at any given point.

And sometimes those apps create conflicts within the code. It happens on a daily basis. And those sometimes are hard to check. So we obviously have an expertise in auditing and fixing, but we don’t expect every business to know that, nor should they have to.

So working with someone who understands accessibility and compliance in general is very important now. Even things like privacy, there’s a lot of lawsuits related to privacy, especially out of California. So these are, the you know poses its own business liabilities now. Wow so this is very this is very interesting I mean it’s I’m very curious about the the app side of things I mean you could do everything you need to do to your website to get it accessible and then you introduce an app and that app might not be accessible, right? And is that’s what you’re saying and then potentially you’re now putting your site in you know in jeopardy again? Well even the you know if the app is accessible an app pushes out a code this just happened last week to a website. They’re using an app for a form, a contact us form, to fill out for a lead generation. It was working fine for months or more than a year, and suddenly they create a new element or a new version of the tool. The update is pushed automatically,and the website owner or the developer doesn’t necessarily know what’s happened on the back end and only through a routine audit we discovered wait we just fixed this why is this happening oh they made a new update well when they made the update they screwed up what was already working well in the first place and now it’s not and now they can’t go backwards could they push this update out to everybody so it’s gonna take a few weeks or a month or whatever time it’s going to take and you’re exposed during that time basically for no fault of your own. So these are some of the things that can happen as well meaning as you can be without your fault.

Ramin: Interesting. you know, alt text. This is something that, you know, just as an e-commerce, you know, coach, advisor, myself, you know, this one thing I always look for and I noticed this time and time again, the lack of alt text across the board. This seems like it’d be like one of the things that most entrepreneurs kind of forget to deal with when they load up an image on their website And you know we always talk about this, so this is a big part. This is almost like a glaring problem For accessibility maybe one that gets caught very quickly if I am an entrepreneur and I Launch my site, but I forgot to you know put the Access forgot to put the alt text on maybe a thousand images, but then I find out that I need to do this. Merely fixing this one problem is only the tip of the iceberg. There’s so much more that you have to look at, and running this audit through your site could be a great situation to figure out what else is wrong, correct?

Nayan: Yeah, that’s literally just the tip of the iceberg and that’s the easiest thing to fix. But even that, it’s not very obvious to most people that they need to add this. It’s not a requirement. It’s a best practice. And unfortunately, it’s hidden in most of the CMS tools that are there. So it’s not necessarily someone’s fault for not intentionally doing something.

But yeah, it is definitely the easiest, but oftentimes the most overlooked. But there’s a lot of more significant issues because now, as far as the alt text is concerned, most browsers have AI tools built into them. And those AI tools will be able to generate alt text where it’s missing as per the user. And dig into it, we’ve seen tools where even like ChatGPT and others, where the user will be able to control how much or how little off text they want the browser to read to them or tell them basically or generate for them. So a lot of this will be fixed through AI as the AI gets smarter and the browsers get more AI tools built into them. I think a lot of accessibility issues will be resolved through automated functions using artificial intelligence. However, that doesn’t let you off the hook. You still need to ensure that you’ve created a website that fundamentally uses most of the best practices, if not all of them, where possible, because not everyone is going to be adoptive to the new technology as quickly as one would want.

Ramin: Interesting. Well, then that brings me to this is generally a place where most business owners tend to go to. They go to look for a tool or a piece of software, these overlays we call them, right? You mentioned to me a while back, and I’m curious to know if the position is still the same, that these overlays almost draw more attention to there being a problem.

Is that still the case, or have they gotten better? They are red flags for lawsuits. In my film, we had interviewed a plaintiff attorney who worked at one of the most leading law firms in this space on the plaintiff side where they filed thousands of lawsuits and he said literally every time you see one of these widgets, it’s like waving a red flag.

Come sue me, basically. And that’s what’s happened where I think every month about 25, between 20 to 25% of websites that we audit that have been sued were already using one of these overlay widgets. And one of the leading, if not the leading, overlay provider was just sued over the summer in the Southern District of New York for making allegedly false claims or fraudulent claims about the effectiveness of their tools by a business in New York.

Ramin: Wow. Wow. So, you know, this brings, you know, this becomes an issue because most, you know, small businesses, especially people starting out, you know, more specifically focused on the world of e-commerce, they don’t have big budgets to come and do massive audits. And it sounds like they’re usually coming to you after the fact, after they’re already in trouble in some cases, right, to get help. Is there anything they can do that would be low cost to help them get started out on the right foot when it comes to accessibility?

Nayan: Our audits are free. Our audits are free. So we provide- The audits are free, but then what if you find a lot of problems, then we’re talking about a situation where they will have to make some sort of investment, correct? Absolutely, and it can range anywhere from typically around two to $5,000, depending on the website. Usually it’s less than that, it’s between two and $3,000. It could be more, it could be less, it just depends on the situation and how much work is involved basically.

But there are companies that will charge five times that, ten times that, depending on the situation essentially and what their cost structures are or their pricing models are. But unfortunately, it is no longer cheap or easy or risk-free to launch an online business like it was maybe 7 to 10 years ago where, you know, for $20 a month or $30 a month, you can have a website and essentially your expenses rise with your revenue or sales.

Now there are upfront costs that are definitely going to play a vital role in the creation or the not creation of businesses on the internet. And what do you just, maybe in comparison to the potential lawsuits that you’re seeing out there, are they ranging? I mean, I remember seeing one for $5,000 and I’ve heard of another one for $50,000. So they get up there. So maybe making a $2,000 to $3,000 to $4,000 investment is a much better situation to make sure you’re in good shape.

Nayan: It’s always cheaper to have the website to be accessible in the first place. The lawsuits, there’s no rhyme and reason for what the amount is. It’s however much they think you can pay because the ADA does not require payment. What the ADA requires, there’s no statutory penalties in the ADA. What the ADA says is that you have to make reasonable accommodations upon request. If you haven’t already made those accommodations in the first place, then you have to do it upon request without fundamentally changing or altering the nature of the business of the goods or services that you provide. And so long as it’s not an undue burden. Now, you have to go to court to prove all of those things, whether it’s an undue burden, whether it was required, all of those things cost money, and the lawyers cost money. In California, that’s not the case.

In California, there are statutory fines that are $4,500 or $4,000, I forget, per violation. So in California, it’s extremely profitable to file accessibility lawsuits. And from what we’ve heard, the minimum payment would be probably $10,000 to $12,000 to the attorney and to the plaintiff, if not more. So typically typically when these demands come in, they will say, you know, my client expects $75,000 or my client expects $50,000 to drop the case and for you to do this, that and the other. The client in New York is usually getting $500. The attorney is getting the rest typically, obviously. And there’s not a lot of work involved in filing hundreds of cases because most of them are boilerplate. They’re copy-paste lawsuits, as judges have pointed out repeatedly in their rulings. But from the business’s point of view, the business is stuck because they still have to defend this. They have to go to court. They have to retain a lawyer. They have to do... It’s a distraction. It’s a huge, huge mental drain, a resource drain. So knowing that this is the situation, it’s better to obviously fix any issues or create the website properly in the first place by working with companies that are knowledgeable in this space or developers that are knowledgeable in accessibility. And accessibility isn’t the only legal hurdle businesses face now. Privacy is another one. There’s like laws in every single state that are related to privacy and other issues.

But accessibility is the one that is definitely in the forefront of the conversation right now and it’s going to be for the next several years. Yeah, do you see, I mean you brought up an interesting point, so if I’m going to be building my site from the ground up or you know using a platform like Shopify or Squarespace or Wix, I should become well-versed and is there an opportunity to, rather than doing that audit, getting that consultation, does your company offer that initial consultation that I would need as a small business to get myself set up correctly before I even put myself out there?

Nayan: Yes, absolutely. We create websites using accessibility in mind from the ground up basically. Because it’s oftentimes easier to build it correctly in the first place than to have to rebuild it later. And many times when clients come to us to fix the website after they’ve been sued, we advise them that let’s rebuild the site from scratch and move the content over, rather than fix an old theme or a theme developed by a third party that when it updates, the work that you’ve done might get wiped out. So sometimes it’s cheaper to build it properly in the first place. So yes, we definitely offer those services. And I would say to anyone listening to ensure that whoever your web developer is or your designer is, because you need both.

Accessibility is two buckets. It’s essentially code and content. The code has to be created in a way that it conforms to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, which are voluntary in a way and they’re not voluntary in a way, because they’re the ones that are being used for filing all these lawsuits. In fact, they’re de facto regulation. Content in a way in the sense that you as the business owner or your design team or your content team or your SEO team, content on your website, your product team, your data team, or that might all be you as one business owner doing everything yourself like I’ve done in the past. The content you create resides on the code. So it’s both those things. And understanding the basics are vital basics.

Ramin: Interesting. Okay. Well, I know that you know, you know, at the top of the show we talked about, you know, you’re very involved in trying to get this, you know, some of these legal issues resolved, fixed out there, legislative elements, and getting, I mean, with the you know, some of these legal issues resolved, fixed out their legislative elements and getting, I mean, with the hopes, I assume, of getting back to what this is really all about is, you know, helping businesses get their sites more accessible, which is a good thing to do. One particular fight that you’ve taken on in California where you are is AB 1757 if I’m not mistaken.

And this is, I remember reading about this because it pulled in the world of developers and designers and it was a very big bill. And you managed to, through your efforts to squash it at the moment. It is now no longer something at least, and I think you said every so often it can come back and maybe in a different form. Maybe could you tell us a little bit about this AB 757 through the lens of how does it affect maybe other states? Are other states looking at this? Federally are they looking at this? So I don’t believe that any state should govern accessibility. I believe it’s the job of the Department of Justice and the federal government to create regulations that, whether they be related to privacy or anything related to the internet, shouldn’t be done on a state by state basis. There isn’t anything different in any state that, you know, one person living in one state shouldn’t have different requirements or a living in one state shouldn’t have different requirements or business in one state shouldn’t have different requirements from one state to the other because the Internet doesn’t live state by state. The Internet lives globally. So at the minimum, the federal government should be the one that creates sensible, easy to follow, easy to understand and easy to execute regulations on what is website accessibility. For example, that’s my personal view. In California, obviously California functions as a mini country in many ways because it creates the most amount of regulation probably of any state in the country. There’s almost 3,000 bills that are introduced every single year in California. Not all of them obviously make it thankfully But in the case of AB 1757, it’s a well-meaning bill. I know the author I’ve spoken to her many times and They’re trying to solve a problem However, I don’t think that they’ve been able to solve it in a way that is reasonable To businesses and to the tech community. Because a lot of what has been driven has been punitive to me, from what I feel. So I feel that the simplest and easiest way to enhance website accessibility is to create education around this topic, federally required regulations around this topic, have a notice to cure when there is a problem because there will be a problem, and mind you every single lawmaker in California has a website because they all run for election. Every single one of them is inaccessible. The state of California has a certification on their website which we showed them last year, was faulty because their website is not accessible, although it claims to be certified to be accessible. The sponsors of this bill and the sponsors of a lot of these things are organizations whose own websites are not accessible, which we have proven to them. So there’s a lot of hypocrisy which annoys me because there’s a lot of finger wagging on what other people should do when you yourself can’t do it or haven’t done it or should have the wherewithal to do it in the first place. So instead of creating a punitive environment where accessibility becomes a fear from the position of the business, it should be something that is celebrated and should be something that is done in a positive way, not in a manner, you must do this or else way. And that’s what my biggest pain point is where I feel frustrated that in our country, in the recent past, businesses have been, especially small businesses have already gone through the wringer with the pandemic. I don’t see the government doing much except for talk on how to support businesses by having less burdensome regulation, less burdensome environment to function and prosper. There’s all these hidden rules that benefit attorneys, that benefit the legal industry, but they don’t necessarily benefit the small business or the consumer, although it’s couched in that way. It’s couched under consumer protection. It’s couched under we’re doing good for humanity or we’re doing, you know, anyone who tells you that is usually full of shit. And the tech industry is usually full of shit when it says things like that, right? But that’s one of my biggest things. So when I saw this bill with my partners when we were making the film, we were astonished. And I took it upon myself to contact every single lawmaker involved in the various iterations of this bill to educate their teams, their policy teams on on the topic and fortunately through help with other folks on a grassroots basis I mean none of us are lobbyists, everybody who was involved did it on their own were able to convince certain lawmakers that the way this topic is being addressed isn’t necessarily fair isn’t necessarily going to achieve the results that the bill says it’s going to achieve, which is to provide protection to businesses against lawsuits when all they would do is create more lawsuits.

Ramin: Well, I appreciate your efforts in that. That’s one state, but a big state and one that is very active at least from a legal standpoint. The lawyers out there are very active in that. So on behalf of entrepreneurs who are in the California area, I mean that’s a great job that you did and I’m glad that at least you got to stop it at this point. If I’m an entrepreneur listening to this and I guess my action steps if I haven’t launched my side site if I’m just planning on building is to you know work with a company like yours to figure out the right things to do to make sure my site is going to be accessible and I guess if I’ve already launched and I’m into it whether I’ve received hopefully you haven’t received the lawsuit but good to get an audit, right? Come to Econ back and have an audit done to find out what your exposure is, right?

I mean, maybe those are the two action points that somebody can take out of listening to this podcast and put their sight in a better place. Put their sight because accessibility is an important, it’s important. I feel like what we’re saying here is it’s gotten overshadowed by the legal troubles that it’s caused, right? There’s also many other benefits to making sure that your website is accessible, because if it’s accessible, it’s also following some really important structural guidelines, which will make the website leaner, cleaner, have better SEO. I mean, that’s something you’re very familiar with. And it’s just a good, hopefully, user experience for everyone. So it’s not just websites. It’s also mobile apps.

It’s also your mobile website, obviously. Most people use the internet on their phones more than on their desktops when it comes to shopping. So ensuring that, one of the things I notice is websites create way too many bells and whistles, have way too many apps and have way too many things that no one uses or you install and you forget about and that are causing problems on your website, whether they be slowing it down or many other things that are not really relevant to the consumer experience but might look cool to you and your team. So really understand why do I have to have this on my website instead of how much shit can I throw against it.

Nayan: Yeah, that’s well said. Well, maybe just take a few minutes also to tell us about the movie. You’ve referenced it a few times. It’s on accessibility, but when should we expect it? Where can we find it? Where can we watch it and learn?

Nayan: The title of the film is called Blind Sighted. We are in the final stage of post-production at the moment, so hopefully in 2025 it’ll be out and you’ll be the first to know when we have it locked in and have the distribution set.

But yes, we are planning to get it out to as many people as possible and make it widely available, because it is a topic that I think will be eye-opening for many people. No pun intended. Yeah, no, I’m excited to watch it. I think it’s gonna be beneficial. Please let us know. We’ll make sure everybody in the community is aware of it and watches it and wanna definitely support you in this process. As we wrap this up, and this has been really informative, and I just, I think it’s such an important topic. It maybe, you know, it doesn’t get the attention that some of the digital marketing efforts in the world of e-commerce get and AI and all of these things, but it’s such an important element for many reasons. One, to obviously make your site accessible is a good thing. There’s a lot of benefit to it, but also to hopefully keep you out of the legal crosshairs that are out there. So as we wrap it up, I want to ask you, you mentioned AI, I think every podcast that I do these days, the topic of AI comes out.

I’m curious from your standpoint, is there anything lately, and I always like to ask this last question, that you’ve done on AI or used in AI that has just blown you away, that you just had a moment of like, wow, I can’t believe that I could do something like that. It’s more of like a polling question here more than anything else.

Nayan: Oh, absolutely. And that’s another thing California seems to be hell bent on shaping or stopping or trying to get in the way of, which it should not. But no, AI is fantastic. I think if you know how to use a tool, you won’t be scared of the tool. Obviously guardrails need to be built in and no one is saying that they shouldn’t be built in, but there’s a lot of scare around the word AI. And I think AI democratizes content creation. It elevates people for whom English isn’t a first language, who did not go to Stanford, who are not the Ivy League assortment of people. I have seen in our own teams people for whom communication and language isn’t necessarily their strong suit be able to use AI at the simplest level of writing emails or whether it’s writing content or writing product descriptions, creating image ideas, creating banners, creating audio, creating video. We use it every day in every way possible, from creating formulas for Google Sheets to automating functions. I mean, it is just endless potential.

One needs to invest time and resources into understanding it, into understanding how it can work for you without getting overwhelmed, because you could get overwhelmed. But it’s, you know, it’s the world is not going back. AI is going to get stronger, it’s going to get smarter, it’s going to help us do our jobs, it’s going to replace some jobs, it’s going to create some jobs. That’s the nature of evolution. But I don’t subscribe to people who try to scare you into why something is bad rather than tell you how it’s good and how we can make it safer. That’s usually the position I take.

There’s another very important point that you’ve mentioned to me in the past and that you really wanted to bring up and I just wanted to give you the floor to kind of talk about it. I think business owners, developers, designers need to participate in a couple of different ways. One is join the W3C. We’re members of the W3C. Join the International Association of Accessibility Professionals, but more importantly the W3C, because the W3C is where all the action is in terms of creation of these guidelines for accessibility, as well as for other core functions of the internet. And if you are not part of creation or maintenance or feedback related to what the future of the internet is gonna be, then you’re essentially out of the loop. And from what I see, a very small contingent of people are involved in creation of guidelines, in creation of rules, in a sense, voluntary rules or voluntary standards, I should say. And there needs to be more diversification. There needs to be more practical, hands-on involvement from folks that run agencies related to web development and businesses that are on the internet in how the internet should function. And I think that it’s just, it’s part of being involved in the business that you’re in, essentially, right? You need to know how the sausage is made, basically, and be part of it, rather than be a passive recipient. So that’s one thing. And the second thing is be aware of regulation that is coming down across state or federal levels because that might impact you and your business in many ways. So I see people who are very passive get hit with information or with a lawsuit or with a situation that they then don’t know how to handle. So, you know, that’s the second. The third is the Chamber of Commerce’s or your industry associations. A lot of them also rely on lobbyists who may or may not really understand technology as well as that they could because they don’t have subject matter expertise.

So get involved in your industry associations. And I think, frankly, we need an industry association for internet sellers or e-commerce sellers, because I don’t really see a voice that we have in any of these conversations on a mass level. There’s millions of businesses in the United States. Well, maybe in your spare time, maybe you’ve got to take that on. Now that you got the bill squashed, that’s a great opportunity and it’s a good point. It’s an absolutely great point you’re making.

There’s no union for small business. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce is not a union for small businesses. It’s just not. There is no union for small businesses. We create most of the jobs in this country. Why don’t we have a stronger voice?

Ramin: Yeah, no, it’s fascinating. I don’t have the answer to that. I don’t know, but you make a very good point in representation, I guess, for an industry, if you will, that creates so many jobs and revenue and taxes and all of that that comes with it. Well said on that part. Well, I want to thank you very much for coming on. I mean, again, such an important topic.

You just provided so many nuggets of information. I feel that when we come to do the social clips, we’re gonna have a lot to work with here. And I think it goes back to your point. It’s about education, right? The more you know about this topic, rather than sitting on the sidelines saying, oh, I’ve heard about this accessibility situation issue, I don’t really get involved. Join these associations, read up, go to econ back, you have a lot of content on your site, reach out to you to your team and have an audit done if you’re in that situation where you’re worried. But get educated, get involved, and above all make your site accessible. That is a good thing and that is what we’re here to say. We don’t want people to forget that. So thank you again for making the time in your schedule today to come on to the ecommerce revolution podcast. If you just take a second to tell people where they can find you, econback.com, I know that. We’ll put that in the show notes.

Anywhere else? LinkedIn, etc? Yeah, I’m on LinkedIn. I’m not very active on any of the other social networks, but on econback.com, you can find me there or look me up on the internet. I would be happy to chat with anyone that needs our help or needs any advice, basically, or would like to talk about any of what we talked about on the show today. Absolutely. Great. Yeah. Thank you so much and have a great rest of your day. That brings us to the end of. Absolutely. Great. Yeah, thank you so much and have a great rest of your day and that brings us to the end of another episode. Thank you very much everybody for joining us. You can find all the information down in the show notes and stay tuned for future episodes. Thank you very much. See ya. Alright, that brings us to the end of another episode of the Ecommerce Revolution podcast. Don’t forget to check out past episodes which are all available on demand on YouTube and wherever you listen to your podcasts. Ready to join the revolution? Become an exclusive part of our growing community of emerging eCommerce entrepreneurs at ecomrevolution.co. of emerging eCommerce entrepreneurs at ecomrevolution.co. Until next time, see ya.