#212 – Anne Bovelett on How Web Accessibility Boosts Traffic, SEO, and Revenue

[00:00:26] Jukebox is a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress, the people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case how web accessibility boosts traffic, SEO, and revenue.

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[00:01:13] So on the podcast today we have Anne Bovelett.

[00:01:16] Anne is a seasoned accessibility strategist with many years of experience in the tech industry. Her journey into accessible design began several years ago, and since then, she’s become a passionate advocate for making the web a more inclusive place. Especially for WordPress users and developers. Drawing from her background in consulting, training, and her own experiences, Anne’s work focuses on the intersection of accessibility, universal design, and tangible business outcomes.

[00:01:46] This episode explores accessibility, not just as a moral imperative, but as a strategic advantage for website owners and businesses. Anne explains how neglecting accessibility means you are leaving serious money on the table, referencing compelling research from a variety of credible sources. These studies reveal practical data. Compliant sites enjoy increases in organic traffic, a boost in keyword rankings, stronger authority, and significant financial opportunities, sometimes running into millions and even billions.

[00:02:22] Anne talks about why accessibility hasn’t always been prioritised on the web, using analogies of the physical world, and the history of web development. She gets into the technical side as well, but this conversation is specifically geared towards the real world, bottom line, business benefits of accessible websites. Reach more users, boost revenue, and even reduce support costs.

[00:02:46] If you’re a website owner, developer, or digital business leader who’s ever wondered whether accessibility is worth it, this episode is for you.

[00:02:57] If you’re interested in finding out more, you can find all of the links in the show notes by heading to wptavern.com/podcast, where you’ll find all the other episodes as well.

[00:03:07] And so without further delay, I bring you Anne Bovelett.

[00:03:17] I am joined on the podcast by Anne Bovelett. Hello Anne.

[00:03:20] Anne Bovelett: Hi Nathan. Thank you for having me today.

[00:03:23] Nathan Wrigley: You are very welcome. Anne and I have been talking for quite a long time before we hit record and we’ve covered a lot of ground. But the ground that we’re going to cover today is all to do with accessibility, your WordPress website and why, well, why you are leaving money on the table if you are not pursuing the accessibility goals that you probably should be in the year 2026.

[00:03:43] Before we begin that, I guess it would be a good idea for you, Anne, to give us your credentials. Tell us a little bit about you and how come you get to speak authoritatively about accessibility in WordPress. So over to you, give us your bio.

[00:03:55] Anne Bovelett: It’s the most dangerous thing to ask me ever, right? Because I always talk too much.

[00:04:01] So let me do it differently this time. When I started figuring out about accessibility, about six years ago, I quickly realised that it’s not that complex to learn accessible coding. It’s not that complex to learn universal design principles. But what is hard for a lot of people working in accessibility is that many of them have this very social way of acting. I do too. I’m in it for the right reason, I think, because I want everybody to have freedom and also the freedom to make the same mistakes that we do, but also not to be constrained in any way.

[00:04:46] And then I was speaking to accessibility specialists, remediators, and in every layer of businesses, and I realised that they were being punched upon by organisations because they were just getting too many roles in one. The expectations were insane. So companies were 2 – 3000 people working for them, outputting I don’t know what kinds of digital products and websites, would expect one person to be the accessibility person to guard the compliance. And I mean this is a recipe for burnout 101.

[00:05:21] And one thing I don’t have a lack of is a big mouth. And one of the reasons why I started working for myself is because of that big mouth. I was not material to be hired, even though I managed to work for 22 years in employment. I realised at some point, if I ask a good fee, for some reason people take me seriously. Have you ever noticed that, Nathan? The more money you ask for, the more serious they’re going to take you. It’s absolutely ridiculous. But that’s what’s happening.

[00:05:59] And so I was trying to find my way in accessibility, like where do I fit in best? And then I thought, I’m going to be the flag bearer and I want to teach companies. And one of the things I like to do is to beat them with their own stick. Because I don’t care why someone makes whatever product, or whatever service they have accessible, I just care that they do. So if the stick that says money works, I’ll beat that. I’ll beat with that. It’s no doubt.

[00:06:35] And that’s where my career started changing, and especially since the past one and a half years. Someone said, you should change your job title. You should turn it into Accessibility Strategist. Well, here we are. I don’t care much for titles, but apparently that pretty much describes what I do.

[00:06:57] Nathan Wrigley: It’s kind of curious to me that if you were to, I say this phrase quite a lot on this podcast because there’s a lot of introspection going on and a lot of gazing back in time. It’s kind of curious that the accessibility bit never got importance from the get-go. And I mean right back from when the internet began.

[00:07:18] There was this great promise that suddenly great swathes of information, which would’ve been hither to unavailable to an awful lot of people, would suddenly be able to be parachuted into your living room via a computer and increasingly, you know, into your hand with a mobile phone.

[00:07:34] And yet the technology developed, the browsers developed, the web design industry developed, and it never got that importance. I’m genuinely puzzled by how that occurred. How it is that we all ignored that. And it really is probably only within the last 3, 4, 5 years that this clarion call for accessibility has become mainstream. I know that there’s people that have been banging the gong probably right from the beginning, but it has been largely ignored and I find that really curious.

[00:08:07] Anne Bovelett: I think that is due to two things. First of all, because people approach this as a purely social issue that needs to be resolved, and that people can’t imagine that they have certain users, which is arrogance at its finest. But, you know, that’s another topic.

[00:08:27] The other thing is good intentions. Like they say, the road to hell is paved with good intentions, right? Because in the beginning of the internet, when things got more colour, I always say this is the point, where things got more colourful, when Google was still small, when Alta Vista was still a thing and Yahoo and you remember, and I think we had four digit or five digit numbers for ICQ members. Actually the HTML, the sites were pretty ugly, right? They were fugly, I would say. I remember we had to build with tables and stuff, and then jump through hoops to make something look the way we wanted to.

[00:09:08] But the thing is, around that time, all we had was semantic HTML. We still have that, but back then it’s all we had. And because we were using semantic HTML, it was great for screen reader users, for example, and other assistive technology. But then everybody always wants to improve. They want to do better. And there is a German word for it, and I haven’t found the equivalent for that in English. We call it verschlimmbesserung. It literally means, instead of improving it, maybe down proving it. It’s like over-engineering.

[00:09:48] So this is what happened. And then people always want to work faster and they love building tools that help others, because in a sense, we are a social species, if you like it or not. We’re just social in the wrong things often, I think as a society. And from that perspective, there’ve been developers that had a great idea, said, let’s make frameworks, and then let’s make things easier for our fellow designers and developers.

[00:10:13] And very fast, at some point, semantic HTML was not a thing anymore because people were coding with div and span. And the div and span are the chameleons, the useless chameleons if you talk about accessibility, because you can make a div look like something, but you can’t make it behave like something until you put a ton of JavaScript on it. Div is like tofu without seasoning, right?

[00:10:41] And the same is with span. And because semantic elements like a button is challenging to style for some, a lot of frameworks came that used div and span a lot. And then they’re relying on JavaScript. And then these frameworks were growing and then at some point people were like, oh, this is the biggest framework used by everybody, so it must be good. That’s like saying the opinion of the majority is the truth. Unfortunately it’s not.

[00:11:15] That is my theory. I’m saying this more often. There was this time when everybody was doing Duolingo and then making big messages on social media, look, I’m on a 682.5 day streak in Duolingo, developers, right? And I’m like, why are you telling me about your streak for that but you can’t remember 50 semantic HTML elements? That’s very much also bashing the developer, which is pretty unfair because the problem is, with accessibility is, it’s not taken into account from the beginning.

[00:11:59] Let me compare that with another situation. So our family home burnt down to the ground and we had to rebuild, and then we got the chance to improve some things because we got modern stuff. And then, because we were building this community seminar centre at the same time, we needed to think about how we’re going to build the toilets, right? And then we had to go, and here, because the architect that helped us, he was nice guy, but he didn’t think about wheelchairs, about accessibility.

[00:12:32] At that time, I wasn’t thinking about accessibility or digital accessibility at all. But I was like, what if someone comes in with a wheelchair? Or what if we have a guest that weighs over 190 kilos? Will our toilet survive that? What kind of toilet do we need? And just close your eyes and go into that little toilet room, bathroom you call it, probably, and then close your eyes and imagine, okay, I have trouble moving, I have pain, I have rheumatism. I don’t but, you know, and I’m on a stick. Where do I put my stick? Do I have a place to put that in the corner? Can I reach for the paper?

[00:13:13] All these practical things. These are decisions that you take before you even start building the room. And it’s the same thing with anything else. Digital applications, terminals, elevators. I don’t know, anything. And the thing is, the better you do it, the less people have to ask questions afterwards about, how does this work?

[00:13:39] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it’s kind of interesting because in the real world, I know that in the part of the world where I live, and I’ve made this comparison on different podcasts in the past. It’s so self-evident when somebody, for example, who’s using a wheelchair. It’s so self-evident when they can’t get in the building because, well, there they are at the door with some impediment. Maybe there’s three steps that are just unachievable. And it’s really obvious. There they are in the real world. You walk past and you notice it. It’s right there in front of you. Look, there’s a problem that needs to be solved.

[00:14:13] And so for the real world, the legislation in the part of the world where I am, came into effect many years ago. And so, for example, the ramps came in and all the premises that are publicly trading things must have ramps and so on and so forth.

[00:14:26] However, the internet is a different animal in that most of us are browsing in the comfort of our own home. Nobody has any idea what you are browsing. Nobody’s got any idea where it is failing for you because they’re not staring over your shoulder. And even if they were staring over their shoulder, it would be fairly hard for them to determine that, again, to use the metaphor of getting in the building, they wouldn’t see that you couldn’t get in the building even if they were watching your phone. It has to be reported by you, the user that can’t achieve the things. And so there’s this real kind of difficulty in matching it up.

[00:15:03] And also because a website kind of looks finished when it looks finished to most people, then you just put the tools away. There’s the website. It looks finished, so it is finished. We’re done. And of course, there’s this whole increasingly vocal cohort of people who, and we’ll get into them in a moment, who are not able to access these things, but they have to self-report.

[00:15:31] And who do you even report to? If I can’t access a building on my high street, let’s say the local library, I could probably even go to the police in all honesty. There’s a central place. I could go to the police, go to the council, and I could say, this must be fixed. And it, sure enough, it will be fixed. There is no equivalence here. Who would I go to to report a problem so that it will definitely be fixed.

[00:15:53] So there’s this whole sort of strange disconnect, which presents the problem of today. How do we encourage people who don’t get the self-reporting, that it’s a jolly good idea to fix the problems in advance?

[00:16:08] Anne Bovelett: Make it hurt.

[00:16:08] Nathan Wrigley: Or make it valuable, make the fix valuable. And in the scenario that you are describing today, we’re going to talk about some articles, one of which you’ve written, but also one which has been done by accessibilitychecker.org. We’re going to look into those. This is making the economic argument for doing it.

[00:16:26] Anne Bovelett: I’m sorry for interrupting you, but it was not just accessibilitychecker.org because then everybody’s going to go, oh, yeah, another accessibility site. This was Semrush. Semrush people. They did this together with accessibilitychecker.org.

[00:16:41] Nathan Wrigley: Sorry, I’m reading out the URL where I located it, so yeah. But the point being that there’s an economic imperative. And that kind of cuts through a lot, doesn’t it? You know, if you go to a business and you say to them, if we were to make this minor tweak with your business, we could increase your revenue by 0.5 of a percent. If we make these other tweaks, we can increase you by 8%, 9%, or what have you.

[00:17:04] Any business owner who hears those words is going to be curious. Okay, right, you’ve got my attention, now what? And although it kind of misses out the whole moral argument, like we should be making sites accessible just because that’s morally the right thing to do. Put that to one side. Let’s go with the economic imperative.

[00:17:23] So I will link in the show notes to anything that we mention today. So I’ll just drop that in. Go to wptavern.com, search for the episode with Anne, and all the links will be provided there, as well, I might add with a transcript of everything that we say today.

[00:17:38] Tell us the sort of headline pieces that you found curious in the accessibilitychecker.org piece, which is obviously, as you said, created by Semrush amongst others.

[00:17:47] Anne Bovelett: I’m just looking at the first page from Semrush itself. And it was interesting because they actually have an infographic on it that says, summary of findings. That’s not accessible at all, but we used it in our Hackathon project last year. But they tested 10,000 websites. And this is actually what I, and many of the people in my line of work have been waiting for, data, data, data. Because this is what companies care about. And I understand that. You know, they are responsible for people’s salaries, not just the revenue and the turnover, but also for the people that they employ, right?

[00:18:27] And so in this research it showed, after 10,000 websites, that 70% of the sites were not compliant. Well, that’s not news, right? But the thing is, they found a 23% traffic increase tied to higher compliance. 27% more keywords ranked with accessibility improvement. So this is major, but here’s the biggest one. 90% boost in authority score for compliant sites.

[00:18:59] And the thing is, when I read people, wow, we’ve been celebrating last Friday because we had a 0.5 increase in our click rates, for example. That’s another one. I’m like, that could be 10% or 15%. I’m happy to see that it now becomes clear that accessibility affects everything.

[00:19:21] And the thing is, people approach or companies approach accessibility from a technical standpoint. Like, what do we have to change technically? But accessibility is about people. It’s the same thing with all these solutions, the overlays, the whatever. They’re trying to approach it as a digital problem. But this is a human-centric problem. This is how people use the web.

[00:19:48] And now if you go back to SEO, one thing I learned a long time ago, I mean you can tell me about Google and other search engines, whatever you want, I don’t care how technical you are, their biggest customer is the people who search on the web, not the ones who pay them to show their stuff. And so this is what search engines are looking for.

[00:20:16] And now with AI, I’m having a blast because I see people writing stuff like, oh, we have to tell the AI to understand our website. But you are leaving your fate in SEO in the hands of something that is going to interpret what you are doing there.

[00:20:36] I’m not going to name the names. It would be unfair because I’m going to confront them with that before. But, there is a massive event that has a fantastic, big website. I find it hard to navigate, but that’s a personal thing. And that is a JavaScript invested monster. And just for fun of it, I just asked AI, can you find this and this and this for me on that page? And AI was like, no, I can’t. It’s rendering JavaScript. I can’t read this. What do you think that does to a screen reader or, because they’re all using the same technology to read it.

[00:21:10] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. When I’ve done podcast episodes about accessibility in the past, we’ve often dwelled not on this side, in fact, I don’t think we’ve ever touched sort of like the SEO and traffic benefit of it. It’s always been from the point of view of, what can you do? As an engineer, as a web developer, what can you do to go in in the weeds and fix things?

[00:21:28] We are just going to brush that aside. You can find that information out. You know, go and talk to Anne, for example, if you want to learn how to do it. But the principle here is more about the SEO and therefore the traffic side of things, on the flip side of doing the work. So you imagine, the work is not done. It’s poorer in terms of SEO and poorer in terms of reach, poorer in terms of search engine ranking, poorer in terms of revenue through your e-commerce platform or what have you. And then if you do do the work, all of those things increase incrementally.

[00:21:59] And in some cases the data shows fairly substantially. And so I’m just going to drill into each of those statistics one at a time because I feel it needs a little bit of like teasing out a little bit. So the first one is, well, there’s many statistics, but the first of the three that I’m going to mention, which you already have mentioned is organic traffic.

[00:22:17] So again, this is making the assumption that the work has been done. You’ve achieved the accessibility goals, presumably, which were many. You’ve jumped through all those hoops and you’ve got this benefit on the other side. And here’s some possible benefits.

[00:22:29] Organic traffic increased by an average of 23% as a site’s accessibility compliance score increased. So can I ask you, is that one directly related to search engines then? Because it feels like it is. You know, you did the accessibility work and a byproduct of that is that you became more visible on search engines. Have I got that right?

[00:22:50] Anne Bovelett: Yeah, of course because if assistive technology can’t read your site, the search engines probably can’t either.

[00:22:59] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. It’s kind of interesting though that you get that much of a boost. You’d think if you had improved things, you might see, I don’t know, a few percent here and there, but this figure of 23%. I mean imagine saying that to a marketing person, or the growth person inside of a company, 23% is possible. The word average in that sentence is bolded. So it’s an average of 23%. So presumably there’s a few that are lower and there’s a few that are higher, but an average increase of 23%. So I don’t ever use the phrase win-win.

[00:23:32] Anne Bovelett: It is win-win. It’s win-win on sides. Maybe that’s a little bit the dark side in me, but I go to business dinners, meetings, entrepreneur get togethers, blah, blah, blah. And then I always hear, at some point I hear people say, I don’t get it. We are paying our SEO companies so much money, and we are not getting better results. And we have had a redesign on our website. And then I look at their website like, hmm, yeah, sure.

[00:24:01] And then they will fix the site at some point, maybe they will improve the site, where the design goes, where the user flow goes. But still, it’s not ranking better, and still it’s not ranking better. And I wonder when SEO companies are going to become so smart that they’re going to tell their customer, hey customer, stop writing click here everywhere.

[00:24:25] Nathan Wrigley: That’s a great, concrete example of what you’re talking about, because I was going to drill into the next one because honestly, the next point does confuse me a little bit. Again, I’ll link to it in the show notes, but point 4, I’ll just read it here, is websites ranked for an average of 27% more organic keywords with a higher accessibility score.

[00:24:45] Can you tease that out for me? Because I’m genuinely puzzled by what that even means. I’m not sure how there’s this overlap between accessibility compliance, and the keywords and how the search engine would pick them up. So that’s me being ignorant.

[00:24:59] Anne Bovelett: I would say, set the compliance story on fire. Torch it, and throw it away because compliance is what makes people do the bare minimum. And I think, I know they had to use this term in the report because they’ve been checking it if the site is compliant. And then you will get lulled into a false sense of security when your score says, like Google does in Lighthouse, ooh, you are 97% accessible. And like, yeah, but the 3% that you say it’s not, is what’s blocking about 80% of a group of potential visitors that you are not having.

[00:25:40] But again, it’s about, in my opinion, it’s about the way things have been coded and the way things have been written. For example, what happens is buttons that aren’t buttons that are not really saying, how do you say it? It’s the same thing. It’s the read more thing again. I have to be careful that I don’t go into the rabbit hole here too much. But it’s the read more thing. It is text where links are actually named properly.

[00:26:08] And just to give you an example, I see a lot of people who try to do affiliate marketing. Let’s say food bloggers. They make humongous sites. They love using WordPress. I know that. There are tons of plugins also for food bloggers to play out the, what do you call that in English? The nutritional values of this and that. All right. And then these bloggers, people complain about it like, oh, why do they have to write their life stories and that of the spider in the corner on the ceiling before they give me the recipe? Well, that is because they’re trying to get caught in the search engines, right?

[00:26:44] And then they have all these links. Like, someone creates a great meal with a fantastic expensive pan and a pot, and I don’t know what, and they have all these articles from Amazon. And all they have is click here, click here, click here, click here. And then imagine someone who is using that. I mean I love, I have a nice little, what do you call that, extension in Chrome? I’ve been speaking German all morning. This is why my English is so rusty right now. I have this extension and it just, in a big article, if I want to know, oh, what was that tool that she was using again? I’ll go get the link list with that little extension there, or I’ll just run the screen reader and get the link list, because that’s easy for me to do. And then all I see is click here, click here, click here. So I’m not finding the link through that pan, and so I’m not buying it through her link.

[00:27:35] Affiliate websites could make so much more money if they would just do the right thing in their content. Let’s forget about the code of the theme that they chose, just the content. If that is played out correctly, and it’s not some JavaScript generated hoo-ha, which doesn’t happen in WordPress Core, they would make a lot more money.

[00:27:58] Nathan Wrigley: Because I haven’t really been following the SEO industry for a very long time, I really don’t have much intelligence around what search engines these days look for. You know, back in the day when I was building websites, there was a, almost like a playbook that you could go through. And if you did these things, you could achieve reasonable results in SEO.

[00:28:18] And that was the state of the internet 15 years ago when algorithms were less sophisticated, and people were just beginning to kind of get online and use things like Google all the time. But it sounds to me as if we’ve got to a point with search engines, as if they’re able to, I’m maybe going to overstate this, it feels like the more human you have become as a website, the more likely Google will favour you.

[00:28:48] I’m not really encapsulating that very well, but what I mean is, if you put content on there, which is human readable. If you make it obvious where to click to do the thing, rather than stop it with keywords and things which, you know, is not really in the best intentions of humans, that’s clearly done for the algorithm only, it does sound like you are saying that the search engines favour, I’m doing air quotes here, humanity.

[00:29:15] Anne Bovelett: They always have. Let me circle back to what I said before. We, as the people who use search engines, and nowadays they’re AI in whatever they do, we are the biggest customer for them. Because if we’re not there to search, to use them, they can’t sell their services to the people paying to be found.

[00:29:37] I might be, how do you say that, unorthodox in this approach, but I’ve seen it. I have a friend, Manuela van Prooijen, she’s the owner of a company called Weblish. In the Netherlands she trains people in how to set up businesses with WordPress and how to build with WordPress. And you wouldn’t expect it when someone is just focused on that, but she’s got a very broad perspective of things. And she dove into SEO in a way that I’ve never seen before. And some of the SEO experts that I know, and we know together, were like, why didn’t we ever think of that? And it had to do with structured data. And of course, everything she builds is accessible.

[00:30:24] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, so I’m going to pivot slightly. However, I think we’ve made the case that if you are endeavouring to make your website more accessible, I think by reading that piece, you will understand that there are definite benefits in terms of traffic and search engine rankings and so on. So let’s just take that one as a given.

[00:30:43] And then I’m going to move over to a piece which you yourself wrote, not that long ago actually. Almost exactly a year ago, March 4th, 2025. It’s on your website, annebovelett.eu. It’s called The E-commerce Industry’s Billion Pound Mistake. And in here you make the argument, and you bind it to money, to actual dollar terms and things like that, which is quite interesting.

[00:31:05] So I’m wondering if you’d just paint the numbers around what you were saying here, if you can remember. I know it’s a year ago now that you wrote it. But broadly speaking, what was the economic case that you were making?

[00:31:13] Anne Bovelett: It’s actually, this is based on a British report, actually. It’s called the Click Away Pound Report. It was brought in 2019. And that actually measures how much revenue people left lying on the street by not making their shops, their online shops, accessible. And the economic case is, we say in Dutch, you thief your own wallet, if you’re not doing it. And again, these are, this is data, these are numbers.

[00:31:48] So in 2016, for example, the click away pound increased by 45%. Let me just throw around some numbers, right? So in 2016, the money that people left lying on the street by not making their eshops accessible was 11.75 billion. Billion, not million, billion pounds. In 2019, that was already up to 17 billion. Really, I don’t know if they’re going to do another Click Away Pound Report again at some point, but I think we’re going to be shocked. Because since 2019, the state of the internet actually worsened because of all this technology. And it’s getting worse because of all this vibe coding voodoo, where they’re using AI that is trained on inaccessible code. But that’s another thing.

[00:32:45] So there’s another article that I have. I think it is so much money that people leave lying on the street, this is larger than the Chinese economy, that amount. It’s in an article I wrote about e-commerce in 2022, where I was criticising CMSs, including WooCommerce, who actually did a great job. Now WooCommerce Core is now accessible. And said, okay, if your system sucks, the people using your system are going to lose without being able to help it.

[00:33:18] Nathan Wrigley: If you send me the link to that piece, I will obviously add that into the show notes.

[00:33:22] Anne Bovelett: It seems I’m on the cold side of accessibility because that is something that forever stuck with me. Someone called me cold hearted, because I’m talking about the commercial side of accessibility all the time. But, you know, there was a time, this is maybe a strange segway, but there was a time where I weighed way over a hundred kilos. I was so heavy. I had trouble moving, I was in pain, I was uncomfortable. And for me, buying clothes became an uncomfortable exercise. Going into these shops, especially these nice boutique shops, with their very small cabins, you know, trying to turn around and not being able to step into a pair of pants or whatever. Just uncomfortable.

[00:34:13] But the most uncomfortable thing about it for me was that I got blatantly ignored by the ladies that were selling the clothes in the stores. And three years after that, I had lost about 37 kilos. And I came into that one store where it was very, very apparent that they really weren’t interested in talking to me at all. I came in and they immediately jumped me, both of them, the shop owner and her assistant. And I got madder and madder and madder and madder.

[00:34:49] And at some point I said, you know what? Keep your clothes, just tell me don’t you remember me? Don’t you know who I am? No, we don’t remember you. And I was like, well, here’s the picture. Oh yeah, I’ve seen you before. And you know what, the fact, at that time I was thinking, maybe it’s because you’re too busy or you are, you know, I don’t know. But the fact that you jumped me right now with the same amount of people in the place tells me something else.

[00:35:15] Now, why am I telling this story? This is how a lot of people that need assistive technology feel, and also how older people feel on the web. I mean, I don’t know about the UK, but in the Netherlands, you can’t do your taxes without a couple of apps on a phone. Well, if you jump through a million hoops, maybe you can send it in on paper still, but it’s almost impossible. If apps like that don’t work correctly, you’re putting people’s fate in someone else’s hand, because you’re working with their tax number.

[00:35:54] I don’t know in the UK, in the Netherlands, your personal tax number, never ever give that to someone. Never. Your social security number, don’t do it. And then you’re like, maybe 60, 70-year-old, and you’re right before that stage where the technology’s getting too hard for you, but apps to do these things are too difficult.

[00:36:17] There is a local tax office in the Netherlands that had a full accessibility redesign done by Level Level in Rotterdam. And for them, the support requests went down, I think by 30% or something. I couldn’t find the case on their website anymore.

[00:36:35] But this is because people are being empowered to do things by themselves. That’s what they want. And for example, in Germany, there are statistics about that. This is an article that I actually published today that, I think it says like 90% of all German users will always try to first solve something by themselves, and if it doesn’t work they’ll walk away.

[00:36:58] Nathan Wrigley: That’s one of the curious things that come out of the article. The first part of this conversation was all about SEO and what have you. We didn’t really talk much about the person experiencing the problem. It was more about search engines and maybe how you would technically fix things. But this is so interesting. In your piece, you, and I’m just going to quote it because that’s going to be the easiest way to get the information into the record.

[00:37:20] And it says, a shocking 75% of disabled customers have willingly paid more for a product from an accessible website, rather than struggle with a cheaper inaccessible one. And that kind of sums up the whole thing really for me, that if you are faced with a struggle to do something, let’s say, I dont know, you want to buy a widget and it’s $100. The calculus that you are going through is, I could spend an hour and a half trying to get that $100 widget, or I could go to this other website and pay $120 for it and be done in three minutes. Well, that’s obvious, I know which one I’m going to do, which is really interesting.

[00:38:02] Anne Bovelett: Yeah, yeah. And there’s another thing. People are always like, oh, accessibility is only for the blind. No. The people that go forgotten in that, and I have to tell you, disabilities rarely come alone, right? I’m just going to take myself as an example. I have ADHD on steroids. I’m in the spectrum. I’m old. I need two pairs of glasses, one for my computer, one for my regular stuff. I’m starting to lose my hearing in certain regions. I am the target group. If I need to go and order, and I’m B2B, right? I’m a business.

[00:38:41] I will order B2B because then I can deduct the VAT. And I have to buy hardware. And I always try to buy the best. I will go to a store, maybe, and it’s B2B and I will go online. If I can’t figure out their stuff, I’m leaving. If I need to look at a manual, a video manual, that has background music while someone is talking, but there is no subtitles, I’m gone. I can’t follow it. My brain won’t let me.

[00:39:15] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I mean the analogy in my head is kind of, I don’t know, you’re going into a clothes shop or something like that and you need a new pair of shoes or something, and you discover that all the shoes are in a locked cupboard in a corner. And in order to get to the shoes, you need to ask a receptionist for the key. And then they go and find the key, and then they give you the wrong key and the key doesn’t work. And then they don’t point out where the box of shoes is, so you’re completely confused.

[00:39:36] That whole thing is just avoided by going to the next shop along the street where all the shoes are right there for you to pick up and try on and what have you. You’ve made the journey easy, and it turns out that price isn’t necessarily the prime mover here, which is really interesting. I find that statistic fascinating, that people will pay accordingly if they can get what they need out of it. I mean I know it sounds like common sense, but having it painted in those stark colours is.

[00:40:04] Anne Bovelett: Yeah, yeah. This is one of the things I did want to mention as well. I have the privilege of talking to Mark Weisbrod a lot from Greyd. You know him? He’s the CEO of Greyd. I think he’s unique, especially in the world of WordPress because he’s looking at things solely from a business perspective. He’s not distracted by technical issues or whatsoever. He will get it from there. He’s someone who often says to me like, okay, I like the story now show me the data.

[00:40:39] But then at some point, I remember it was before the European Accessibility Act was coming into effect, I think. So this, we’re talking about this in 2023 or something. And then I said, I don’t get it. Why is everybody so focused on the European Accessibility Act? Look at how much money they can make by leaving people their dignity. Because that’s basically what it is by making your stuff accessible.

[00:41:06] If you get past the stupid idea that if something is accessible, it can’t look nice. I mean, go to github.com without being logged in, that’s accessible. It’s a wonderful website. And then I said, where is the common sense? Why, if I talk to the C-suite of a company in one of those business things, and I say, listen, if you would make this and this and this more accessible in your web shop, your turn over would go up by so many percent, why are they not like, we’ve got to invest this money right now?

[00:41:39] And then he said, no matter what, people will always think with their wallet today and tomorrow. They’re not thinking about next week. Only the most visionary leaders in the industries think way more. And this is something I say now, because he said, he was telling me about they were selling, in a company he worked for, they were selling solar systems. And these systems would save the buyers so much money on the long run, but it was very hard to sell them because it was in the long run.

[00:42:20] And if a CEO or a CFO, I mean I know it sounds offending, I don’t mean it that way, but in large corporations it’s to eat or to be eaten. Managers are always afraid of their managers kicking down on them and the others kicking up, and they’re always trying to defend their own spot in the business. It’s only in smaller companies that people can have more leverage. So there are always so many powers at play in a company that if you start talking to a company about, it’s for the greater good of your company, it’s the same argument as it’s for the greater good of humanity.

[00:42:59] And I’ll just give you another number for example. Based on the Click Away Pound Report, and some other data that I have, I’ve been working on building a calculator. You tell me which country your web shop is in, you tell me how much turnover you have per year and then that calculator is going to tell you how much potential revenue you are walking away from by not making it accessible. I did this for very, very big supermarket chain in Switzerland, and the outcome was you could make 0.94% more revenue. And then you’re like, yeah, less than 1%. Yeah, sure. Ah, it’s still 350 million Swiss Francs.

[00:43:43] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Less than 1% but still that kind of money, wow.

[00:43:47] Anne Bovelett: Yes. And then you get this perspective thing. Because I’m pretty sure the day that this knowledge seeps through to the unions of the employees of this company, the employees are going to go like, why do we have to save money, or why do we not get a raise where you don’t take the opportunity to make that much more turnover? And then someone else with other interests in the company says, yeah, but the stakeholders, you know, or the investors, this is why this is not happening. I mean, we all think common sense is the greatest good in the world. People do not have common sense, period.

[00:44:33] Nathan Wrigley: It’s that sort of invisible layer to people who don’t experience any of the accessibility problems that the industry is trying to tackle. For example, you’re fully sighted, you can use your legs and walk about and use a mouse and use regular computer and use a regular screen and your ears are working fine and all those kind of things. All of that stuff is just sort of hidden from you, and so it just somehow doesn’t drive itself to the front of your consciousness.

[00:44:56] Which is why this is so interesting because, although you said you’ve kind of been berated in the accessibility community for banging the gong about money all the time, it’s a great way to cut through, isn’t it? You can go to the CEO of a company and make the economic argument, I would imagine, much more readily than you can do with the moral argument.

[00:45:16] Anne Bovelett: I’ve been thinking about this a lot, about writing up a profile for a position in companies that I don’t think exists yet. Because normally, we call it the sheep with five legs in Dutch. It’s very hard to find that sheep with five legs. If someone is an accessibility officer in a big company, they are being banged on for compliance. If someone is working on accessibility in a lower rank, they’re getting overworked because people have so many expectations or they just don’t do things.

[00:45:52] It’s always, this person is screaming in the desert like, hey, this is happening. I’ve seen this happen, I was guiding a company with more than I think 13 or 14 development teams, over 85 people, and they didn’t talk to each other. Design, didn’t talk to development, development didn’t talk to development in other areas, because that was how the company was structured.

[00:46:18] And I think people need to be educated in two ways to have this position that doesn’t exist yet. It’s a position where you are able to kick the shins of the C-suite in a professional manner, of course, but also sit down with development, design, and content teams and make them communicate with each other in a way that works.

[00:46:48] And for that, you have to understand these processes. And normally, I’m absolutely not for people in managing positions that know the job that the people they’re managing is doing, because they very often become that, how do you say that, the driver on the carriage running in front of the horses? You know, that’s really dangerous. You shouldn’t interfere into detail level too much.

[00:47:15] But if you understand it on a detail level, from design content and development, you can get these people to talk to each other and help each other. Because there’s absolutely nothing wrong with a developer that sees a design and is like, woah, that design, the way that is made, that’s going to cause some accessibility issues. Those are issues.

[00:47:39] And normally they will just, no, no, I was asked to develop this. I’ll develop it. Instead, you need to raise a culture where people go to the designer and say, hey, I noticed this. What is your thought behind this? And they can’t. And if they had a middle person for that where they could go to and say, look, I got this, I’m not sure about it, then you would have a fantastic flow in a company to make things accessible.

[00:48:06] Because this goes through so much more. So an article that I published today is about how much money you lose in support. It’s the same thing. If a support, people doing support are not used to really listen and someone says, I’m hard of hearing, or someone says, I have dyslexia. When you’re saying, yeah, go read it, it’s on that page on our website. If this person calls you because he couldn’t find, or understand the page, and then you force this person into vulnerability by admitting that he or she has dyslexia. And that is going to leave a very bad taste in someone’s mouth. And what happens? They’re going to walk away. If you’re not some government thing that everybody needs like, I don’t know, taxes, because otherwise they’ll come and rob you.

[00:48:54] Nathan Wrigley: It is genuinely so interesting because a lot of the content that I’ve made in the past has been definitely about the ways to fix your website. So here’s the WCAG guidelines, go figure. This episode’s been really entirely different.

[00:49:07] So first of all, looking at Semrush, and the data. Just sort of painting the picture of the improvements that you can get in terms of traffic and visibility across search engines should you go down the accessibility route. But also then getting into the financial bit, which it sounds like is your thing.

[00:49:27] So I think that’s hopefully of interest to some people who perhaps have just always thought about accessibility as a, I’m a web developer, there’s another job that I’ve got to do. Well, now you’re kind of armoured with things that you could maybe even approach clients with. You know, you’ve got a website, we haven’t looked at it in a few years, you are always looking for ways to make more revenue out of your website. Well, look, I’ve got this thing in my back pocket. This is a really credible way that we can do some tweaks. I know what I need to do. There’s guidelines that I can follow. Let’s do that and see if we can improve the revenue.

[00:50:00] I think we’ve probably covered that. And so with that in mind, Anne, just before we end, I’m going to try and link to the piece that you mentioned. I’ll certainly, anything that we’ve mentioned in this podcast, I’ll try and link to in the show notes on WP Tavern. Do you just want to tell us where we can find you? I did reference your website at one point during the podcast, but do you just want to give us that again, or maybe social networks or something like that where you hang out?

[00:50:23] Anne Bovelett: If you remember how to spell my name, just put it in Google, you’ll find me everywhere. Okay. No. So it’s Anne and then Bovelett, which is B from Bernard, B-O-V-E-L-E-T-T. You can find me on LinkedIn a lot. I’m there a lot because I talk shop a lot.

[00:50:44] Very active on X, Twitter. So that’s where you find me. And don’t be afraid to approach me. Just, if you send me LinkedIn DMs, it can take a while because sometimes I get too many, and then I’m overwhelmed and, yeah. But the best thing is to send me an email. Just go to the contact page on my website.

[00:51:06] Nathan Wrigley: All that it remains for me to do is to say, Anne Bovelett, thank you for chatting to me today. That was really interesting. Thank you so much.

[00:51:12] Anne Bovelett: Thank you for having me and giving me the platform.

[00:51:13] Nathan Wrigley: You are very welcome.

On the podcast today we have Anne Bovelett.

Anne is a seasoned accessibility strategist with many years of experience in the tech industry. Her journey into accessible design began several years ago, and since then she’s become a passionate advocate for making the web a more inclusive place, especially for WordPress users and developers. Drawing from her background in consulting, training, and her own experiences, Anne’s work focuses on the intersection of accessibility, universal design, and tangible business outcomes.

This episode explores accessibility, not just as a moral imperative, but as a strategic advantage for website owners and businesses. Anne explains how neglecting accessibility means you’re leaving serious money on the table, referencing compelling research from a variety of credible sources. These studies reveal practical data. Compliant sites enjoy increases in organic traffic, a boost in keyword rankings, stronger authority, and significant financial opportunities, sometimes running into millions and even billions.

Anne talks about why accessibility hasn’t always been prioritised on the web, using analogies of the physical world and the history of web development. She gets into the technical side as well, but this conversation is specifically geared toward the real-world, bottom-line business benefits of accessible websites, reach more users, boost revenue, and even reduce support costs.

If you’re a website owner, developer, or digital business leader who’s ever wondered whether accessibility work is ‘worth it’ this episode is for you.

Useful links

Semrush

Accessibility Checker website

Manuela van Prooijen’s Weblish

The e-commerce industry’s billion-pound mistake

Click-Away Pound Report

Anne on LinkedIn

Anne on X