Why digital accessibility is no longer optional in an AI-first world - Interview with Jeff Coyle of Siteimprove

0:00So welcome to the next edition of the Punk CX podcast. With me today I have Jeff Coyle who is the head of strategy at Sight and Proof. He's been waving to the camera, that's fine. And on audio recording as well, that's just kind of like, use your imagination folks. Anyway, Jeff, welcome to the podcast. How are you doing? I'm doing great. So grateful to be on this podcast. You're very welcome. Now, Jeff, I wonder if you wouldn't mind, but help me, give me a thumbnail sketch, a bit of background on Jeff Coyle. and Siteimprove, who you are and the work that you do. Sure thing. I'm Jeff Coyle. I'm the head of strategy, like you mentioned, at Siteimprove.

0:37I've spent about 28 years in the search engine content strategy industries. I co-founded a company called Market Muse. We were a content intelligence company, which is now part of Siteimprove. I focus on something that we reference as agentic content intelligence. So what that is, it's how accessibility, technical aspects of a content site or a website estate, content strategy and performance can all get together and build a situation where, you know, accessibility, search engine optimization, now AI search and answer engine optimization and customer experiences, you know, funnels and conversion rates.

1:20but also is everybody able to see your site the way that you desire it to be seen? Right. That's all part of our puzzle and what we solve for at Sainproof. So it's brilliant. So like I have a bit of a pre-lection that sometimes I like to explore things that should be mainstream, but are often not mainstream. And you just mentioned it in passing there where you talked about digital accessibility or just accessibility in general. and there was something that we were working on the setup to this she said some things that i wanted to kind of highlight and and and bring that that whole accessibility thing to the fore and you said that digital accessibility has infamously been treated as a compliance obligation or a mission driven initiative right by enterprise organizations something to remediate or accommodate rather than build cx strategy on top of that has always been a short-sighted approach but AI has now made it untenable.

2:20Now, I love the untenable bit. Tell me more about the untenable bit. Well, I spent decades watching machines trying to understand content on websites, right? And humans had made that very confusing for them. So now when we're looking at an entire digital estate, you got to think about every page, not just every page, but every paragraph, every chunk, every passage of content, because they're all building what is being, you know, synthesized as a customer experience in these AI channels, right? So how do you turn a messy, sprawling digital ecosystem into an experience that's accessible, discoverable, you know, useful?

3:02And that's really how these things come together. And, you know, for years, accessibility lived after launch. So the team would build the experience, then legal or compliance or accessibility teams would audit it and remediate issues. And that model was flawed because it natively would exclude people and create inconsistent experiences. With AI, if your content is poorly structured, inaccessible, or ambiguous, it's not only harder for people to use, but it's harder for search engines and answer engines to understand it. So imagine this, If your pages weren't accessible and they weren't eligible and they weren't performing well before in a search engine, you just wouldn't be one of those top 10 blue links.

3:47You might be lower ranking. But now these systems are using your information, your ammunition effectively, so they can synthesize a book report. Sometimes it's a great book report. Sometimes it's not a fantastic book report. So where this makes this so obvious is if you're A, not eligible, or B, the parts of your pages aren't being used in the way that you wish for them to, or you're not uniquely differentiated enough to even be considered to be repeatedly selected by these AI surfaces. So the two pieces are, if the site's not accessible, when an agent comes to visit it and it has 200 milliseconds to figure out what your page is about and whether you answer the question, they're just going to exclude you, right?

4:37And then follow through. Even if you've done everything you could do technically, if the content isn't producing, what would then be a great customer experience? You're not going to win repeatedly. And that's what people are finding out. they're looking at this all the way at the end of the process and they're trying to correlate hey why am i not cited by chat gbt and it's because somewhere in that in that ingestion layer in that selection layer they made a decision that wasn't customer focused and so just to make clear this up when we talk about accessibility we're talking about it's almost people that don't necessarily sit in that sort of the average, let's kind of like say.

5:20And it's always been a bit of a, as you say, when it gets illegal and compliance, you've got to make sure that we're accessible or readable or consumable by this population and this population or this group of people, this group of people. So let's get to the nub of all this. Why does this happen? yeah and i mean if you think about the the unfortunate realities is still only about five percent of the top of the global and the global 2000s websites have met all of the uh core standards of accessibility um the uh the the sorry can i say that again five percent five percent of homepages of web of the homepages across these topics have been fully full coverage where they've covered all aspects of this.

6:11If you get into PDFs or those types of pages, it becomes a crapshoot of whether those are going to be accessible for both machine readers as well as all types of disabilities that over 20 % to 25 % of web users have some form of a disability. And if you take that mosaic of potential needs, all of those standards, all of those disabilities, all of those accessibility standards, we find that we have to begin shifting left. We have to begin thinking when we build these templates, when we build the templates for our websites, when we build the templates for our PDFs, for example, we need to ensure that we're not going to recreate this issue over and over again and then have to go back and remediate.

7:04Because during that time where we have websites We've got web pages live and we've got experiences that aren't accessible. We're alienating so much of our potential audience. And then we're creating this problematic standard. Do you think that it's got a lot to do with why this happens? Is that people end up, it happens, it's not just in this sort of readability or accessibility sort of space, but people end up sort of building or designing experiences for people like them. yeah oh yeah absolutely right and because you're not creating an inclusive design kind of like kind of process where you're seeing i feel like you know that old analogy the beach ball that you look at it from different kind of like size and everybody sees different things and if you're not if you don't have that rich level of perspectives that you are kind of like sharing in that then you're going to get something that's suboptimal it's just that's just how it works right and And organizational misalignment, you know, a lot of times where, you know, this is siloed in information technology, it's maybe funded by risk or legal because the perception is that we don't want, if we don't do this, we may get sued.

8:16Right. And that's a problem, right? That compliance side of it. So the customer professional or the UX professionals or usability theory professionals, are they're thinking of this as a separate category? like how do i build even there was even a stretch of time where it was not uncommon for teams to build separate experiences and create like technical debt and also just you know a problematic separate experience for particular you know accessibility patterns rather than adopt it as an operation right oh if we do this and it's accessible we're not going to be able to be as creative or we're not going to be able to use the most you know uh leading edge technology and it's it's completely it's completely bogus right or matter right so but here's the here's the kicker right because you also said that if you get if you if you make your all your web estate and all your digital information if you make it digitally accessible for every everybody that actually, this is the kicker, it has a significant and positive impact from a technical SEO standpoint.

9:28Yeah. Help me understand how that works. Because that just sounds like dumb. Why are you doing this? Because it's going to help you. Well, it's one of those things where those two worlds often aren't intersecting. But the sharpest technical SEOs have been considering accessibility to be a must have since technical search engine optimization was kind of created. And fortunately or unfortunately, I was there when it was being created over 25 years ago. And I've been doing I've done more website migrations than I care to discuss. But the really sharp technical search engine optimization professionals were thinking, OK, well, I need to make sure that if a search engine crawler.

10:06Remember, 20 years ago, the search engine crawlers weren't that smart. I had to give them as many hints and as much help as I could. So when they came to visit, I was being represented. They were processing and parsing me the way that I wanted them to. Well, accessibility, the semantics of my HTML, the descriptive alt text, for example, on an image, which is something that says what would someone who can't see the image, how would you represent the image, right? Logical headings, which a machine reader can easily understand. Clear link and form labels, right? This is a way of making a machine reader, that type of surface, or a search engine crawler understand me more easily.

10:51Well, guess what? These AI technologies are even lower maturity. I mean, some of these agentic technologies are six months old, 10 months old, a year old. The Google bot, for example, which is the core of Google search results, it's over 20 years of development. It's smart. It's really smart. But imagine this thing that people haven't been working on that long. You want to give that as much help as you can. And that's where it goes into making it as accessible as possible. Also thinking about technical SEO. You know, a tenant of technical SEO is web speed and user experience. Does it paint the screen properly, right?

11:33And that, imagine customer success as a customer experience there, as well as accessibility. When those things all work well. I mean, I always like to think about it as, is it fast? Is it good? Can I understand it? Is it clear? And then those can be for accessibility or technical SEO or any sort of experience. I mean, it's, yeah, I'm so blown away by those kind of figures that you shared. There were 5 % of the kind of the fortune, was it? I think it's a global 2000s webpage. and this was a couple years ago, have covered all the most leading-edge standards. And that's really interesting along the line because this is the homepage too.

12:17I mean, imagine amongst their entire digital estates. And that's just really it. I mean, it tells you about the extent of the challenge. And if you talk about there's like some research shows that there's 20%, 25 % of the global population, they experience some sort of disability then it just it's just like a you know this kind of shows up as friction oh yeah in the um in the in the in the customer experience if you make things difficult for people then they you know the likelihood is that they're going to give up and go somewhere else to somewhere else that they or somebody else that can serve them kind of like better and more easily and more respectfully and so it's like i just think this is like open the curtains you're like there's a thing and a lot of people just can pull the curtains back and go like oh we'll do that for that later because it's a bit hard and it's also being made harder in the last couple of years particularly the rise of as you mentioned before the aeo and geo and stuff but tell me how this all kind of complicates kind of things because there's you've got the aeo kind of engines in the middle and then how they read the websites but then this is the output but then And so here's two questions.

13:30One, are the AO engines themselves accessible? And the one is the one question. And is the kind of output that they're spitting back out accessible? Or does that, is that predicated on whether the website is accessible or not? Do you want to tell me what I mean? I understand the question and it actually made me think about a different way of answering it than I might have just at, at for surface value. you. So when you because you asked the question, are these engines themselves accessible? And I would say, functionally, are they accessible? Absolutely. But what I would what I would, you know, maybe a little bit on the edge here to say is, they aren't very accessible for all people, not all people have access to AI technology.

14:22And then when they use it, it feels a lot like Like there's a concept called the Oracle dilemma, which is I it's kind of like I type in something into this magic box and I get responses and I believe the responses. So the fact that all of these AI engines and AI technologies work differently, yet that's completely invisible to the user. I believe that's a form of inaccessibility. And that's where someone like Google building an AI overview on top, chat GPT responding, sometimes with an agent behind it, fetching things from the web, but sometimes not. I feel like the burden should be on the AI technologies and user experiences to tell us how that's being built every time.

15:11Because someone who's just using that on their phone, how are they supposed to know how that outcome, how that output was derived unless someone tells them? So I feel like a person even who does not have a disability is currently in an inaccessible state with most AI. It's knowing how it works. I know that's a little bit controversial of a perspective. But frankly, I think 95 % or more, this is a Jeff math percentage, have no idea how AI responses get to them. And so the impact on AI-powered search there is significant. because I don't know how different chat TPT, Grok, and AI overview, wildly different algorithms, wildly different ways that that information gets into my head.

16:01But I might go on my phone and take a picture of that bush outside my window and say, what is that? And literally every single AI works completely differently to tell me that I push and I trust it. That's just the Oracle dilemma, right? The way that you asked the question hit me there was, no, I don't think anyone understands, except maybe the top 10 % of users, how that information is actually getting to them. And a lot of people are trusting things maybe they shouldn't. But from an accessibility, a digital accessibility perspective, like we were discussing, answer engines read content the same way or similar way that a screen reader and a search engine does.

16:42Right. So it's damaging discoverability. Your brand can't even be eligible in most AI channels if the page is inaccessible. And so as users shift to these black boxes and these AIs to be like their top of funnel, middle of funnel, and bottom of funnel, A, if you haven't written for the middle of the funnel or the bottom of the funnel, you're not going to be there. And then B, if they can't read your page, how are they going to select you? So it creates multiple dilemma. And it's not just about, you know, whether I've got the highest quality content. It's can this particular AI channel, can this particular AI ingester read it when it needs to?

17:25Yep. At the speed that it needs to. I think the thing I think about from the accessibility perspective on these answer engines is that they're a lot better than some of the search engines when it comes to the multimodal input. And so that increases almost the accessibility in terms of the access. There's different problems about who gets access to what and things. That's kind of fine. but in other things remaining equal if you look at kind of like does it help kind of people can i speak to it can i show it something can i kind of type something in you're like oh no yeah then that kind of and does it understand kind of like um mistyped text more often than not so it can deal with spelling mistakes and and so that that sort of like the thing it's of it does well on that but as you're absolutely right if you're even if that access is fine you're not actually understanding where it's coming from and the veracity of it all that's the kind of problem but also it's not drawing on the right sort of resources that are optimized for kind of everybody and for accessibility across the piece then it's a bit like well you've got your own this limited search area and so yes it's it's problematic but i just still come back to that sort of five you know the two numbers five percent and the 20 25 and you're like going there's a problem you should we have a problem you know and and that that means there's a lot of work to do and it excludes a lot of people and it excludes a lot of people and it also bends the the influence of individual websites dramatically um and and without exposing that to the user um and i think from a not so much from an accessibility perspective but from a trust perspective if a particular forum or discussion forum or a particular publisher can really influence that response in an unnatural way.

19:26That can also create significant biases. And I think that there's bias in the fields of computer vision, for example, where if you ask for images to be generated, they will typically be of particular you know, types of people. And that's a problem. But there's bias in our AI response where perhaps Reddit is controlling the way that recommendations are made when we're buying a brand new mattress. All right. Why is that the case here? And then, you know, you also have the case of, you know, brands, big brands who are more influential than you'd expect. So whereas before you were given a buffet of information right here.

20:13Here's the pages you click as the as the answers become more recommendation focused. We're trusting them to be our guide. They're trusting them to pick our wine at dinner, for example. And and that's a it's a big, a big thing. And I think that that's where I, you know, get excited about the innovations here and how, you know, Google, for example, on their web developer website just said, yeah, when our technologies can't access and fully render a page, we have to back, the backup is the accessibility tree. Okay. And so they're like, yeah, when we don't have enough time to read the page, we have to have it.

20:57So what's that doing? It's making accessibility as a foundation of AI readiness, you know, top priority. And so for people that are in the customer experience, kind of field they may not necessarily kind of enjoy getting kind of nerdy about kind of technical seo um even though that it's important but to try and bring it to life jeff i mean you've got a couple of examples of brands that you're working with you well obviously that you can tell us about that are sort of leading the way in this this kind of regard i they just get it you know it's not just a mission driven thing it's not compliance thing they just go it's about everybody's thing right and they just get it they're investing in it they're doing it and help me understand what they did challenges that they faced and how they're kind of benefiting what sort of outcomes they're driving yeah absolutely um a couple of them one would be a shell you know the oil and gas company and i had the good fortune of speaking at a conference with the um the accessibility and he leads a number of aspects of customers customer experiences throughout all the digital properties prior to their adopting this as part of a center of excellence, they were doing a continuous audit and remediate process.

22:14What he's been able to do is bring it very, very early in the ideation phase and bring in customer success, in this case, user experience professionals. and before anything publishes, they are confident that all user types, all disabilities are able to experience any experience in the same way. So I think Shell is a really great example of some, even with extreme enterprise scale complexity, you know, hundreds and hundreds of sites. Even with the fact that six or seven different platforms were migrating to one, they were able to do embedding by design i think sorry kind of just on that i have the you know because most people think they were saying oh that's like this seems like a massive amount of work have they been able to agentify that so they're being able to embed it in the workflow so they can it can they can codify that sort of the sort of approval process and then allows them to do the the embed so they do the design work up front and then it gets because Because otherwise it feels like it could be creating a bottleneck of sorts.

23:27Or a case where you're spending so much time on the top end by the time you publish those sites. Maybe they're outdated. Sure, sure. They've been able to advance using our technology. They've been able to do automated evaluation of pages for accessibility challenges. as well as looking at other page text. So we very recently released a PDF remediation and auditing solution effectively. But they've been able to identify those on an automatic basis. Okay. The shift left part, which is all that means, is basically doing it before you publish. It's developer-focused. So we're able to analyze our code, the templates of our pages.

24:16prior to analyze whether they're going to have accessibility challenges before you ever even publish them. So the big win there is you're very rarely having to go back after publication and make edits. They're published. They're accessible by design effectively. And the speed that that creates, I did another presentation with a very large healthcare organization who presented that it was um 10 million dollars just on her team of savings um from not having to go back and edit pages after the fact um so there's massive massive time and work savings um not just the value that it brings downstream so perfect um and so boil it down jeff what should what should brands be doing to address this i mean obviously apart from calling yourselves and going help you know but i mean what should i mean a lot of this time is you know a lot of this stuff is about kind of how should they be thinking about it what should they be actually doing kind of like kind of first i mean a you just get started on this because you know if there's like again if you come up with that sort of thing it's like five percent i mean there's a lot of brands out there that have got a lot of work to do so where should they start well i think one one answer that is it tells a little a quick story i'll try to make it real quick but when i you know the first first company that I had, which was from about 99 to 2007, we were we were generating leads for software companies were the one of the first people telling people to have content on the internet, you know, telling Dell, hey, you have to publish content for the website.

25:53We were, we were acquired by a large publisher. And that was where I was only focused on performance, right? I was I was like, we need to generate more traffic, more leads, any way possible. and they had a 300 person editorial team. And I remember first when I walked in the door, they were saying, wait, what do you know about these topics? I've been writing about this for years. And first I was like, I don't care. I want travel. And going through the journey that I had where I was like, wow, these editorial processes have a lot of value. They're the subject matter experts. If I can figure out ways to collaborate with those subject matter experts, one plus one absolutely equals three for generating traffic and building great reader experiences.

26:43So I think there's a moment now for customer success professionals, for user experience professionals to think about the websites, the code a little bit differently, to think about accessibility a little bit differently and say, well, if we made this experience more accessible, 25 % of our potential users are going to have an easier chance to convert. So let's maybe we don't move the ownership, but we begin to shift and say this needs to be a more collaborative experience. Let's take the accessibility accountability out of the legal only silo and wire it in to the teams and the dashboards already accountable for content, already accountable for customer success, digital performance and say, you know, we only we may own the experience and you only accessibility.

27:34That's not the right one to punch here. We both need to share that. And by the way, the wonderful side effect of that is we're going to grow our search engine optimization and AEO influence. But that I think is one thing that brands should do now. And then think about it, that shift left experience, that shell point of view is the more we catch this stuff early on, the less we're going to go back and waste money down the road, editing and fixing downstream. I remember an editor, his name was Rich, I worked with for years. And he told me, amongst other things, he told me, he's like, you can't edit your way to a great story, right?

28:16In this case, you can't fix your way to being perfectly accessible. The earlier you start, the better it's going to be. I love that. Can't edit your way to a great story. No, not never. So, Jeff, that's about it for me. Before I get to my kind of quick fire questions. But anything else that you want to highlight before we can get to the quickfire questions? You mentioned it before about agentic technology, but I think that the core is technology has moved very quickly. So adopting technology that powers accessibility strategy, AI-powered technology, it can introduce a success story for you. But if you're adopting technology that ignores accessibility or ignores search, that can create risk.

29:07So making sure that you're not thinking about things only in terms of search. If you're buying a point solution for AI visibility and you're buying a point solution for search, they're likely not thinking about technical SEO. They're likely not thinking about accessibility. So they may tell you, hey, go write an article about this or go deliver. deliver, you know, just like I might say, build a separate section of your site for people with disabilities. Wow, that's not okay. You're starting to see that happen. Go build a separate section of your site for AI agents. Guess what? You're creating technical debt.

29:42And by the way, in the end, that doesn't work, right? So adopt technology that understands that accessibility, technical SEO, content quality are the base of great experiences. And if they're giving, if those technologies are giving you advice that violates one of those three foundations, say, hey, you're putting craps in our foundation. Let's only think about tools and solutions and platforms that accelerate the wins. And I know, obviously, I work for one of those companies that does that. But But the thing is, make sure you're thinking about ownership, not just the faster remediation queue. Because the more people that are on the bus with this, the quicker wins.

30:31And that's just from real experience working with thousands and thousands of companies. Awesome. Thank you. So a few quick fire questions before we finish up. So first one might be a similar one, but it's a slightly different one, I think. And it's about your best advice. and to get your best advice, I'd like you to complete this sentence for me, Jeff. And the sentence is this. If you want to improve your customer experience, Jeff says, do this. Only publish content, only publish pages to the web that you would tell your CEO about, right? So build on a foundation of quality and build on a foundation of ensuring that all machines, readers, humans coming to it, you're representing your best foot forward, and you'd be willing to show that page or that collection of pages to your CEO and be really, really proud of them.

31:31Because that's one way you can ensure that you're not building things knowing that they're not your best foot forward. Is this something that no matter who my CEO was, no matter who my number one customer was, no matter what accessibility needs they had, or whether they were an AI agent, that you can be confident that you're building that, you're putting your best foot forward. Awesome. Thank you. We should give it the CEO test. Yeah, the CEO test. How many blogs have you written? Or how many blogs have you written? And you're like, whoa, would that person really want to show that to their CEO?

32:08And would they be proud of that one? imagine that that had to go through a machine reader and it didn't work a quick anecdote there I know this is the quick fire but quick anecdote there was a website we saw and there was a page about myths about X a list of myths the header wasn't readable by certain AI agents so all of those AI engines thought that they were saying that all the things in that list of myths were truths Wow. Imagine that. So those types of things, make sure that you're putting your best book forward. Every page matters. Wow. Okay. Yeah, there you go. You heard it here. So my second question is a punk-related one, obviously.

32:52Punk's yet its podcast. So here goes. What company or brand do you think takes a more punk approach to customer experience and why? Oh, wow. That's a good one. I think that, you know, there's radical simplicity is what I'm always looking for. So clarity, not necessarily marketing gloss, you know, published for principles that anyone could take. I think that that's more punk than a direct to customer brand, big rebrand. So, I mean, I look at some of the more advanced government websites and maybe even the UK government site. And I know that's probably pretty, pretty punk method, but they had so many departmental sites.

33:39You know, they don't have brochure where they've got really clear design principles and they've made accessibility non-negotiable. Yeah, it's radically simple. I think that's very, you know, I think that's pretty punk. I think there's, you know, from a U.S. direct-to-customer brand, I think Costco is a really great example. Yep. Really owning the fact that they really care about their members. They're accessibility native, and they say, you know, we will bring, you are in an advanced state when you really care, you know, if you are a member of us, and we will tell you everything. Like the experience you have when you're a member there is really you feel loved.

34:22You feel like you're getting a like secret pass to great deals and they have non intrusive return policies and they make it really clear. Like if you even if you buy a couch and don't like it, we'll take it back. Right. I love that. I think that that's really aggressive for a for a membership system to do. So Costco, UK government, those would be two cool examples. Yeah, no. I've heard about the Costco example many times before, and I hear about some of the stuff that they do, and I think they're a company to be watched and admired. I think the UK government particularly the GDS the government digital service they're responsible for the design principles and then having accessibility completely baked in and that simple entry point where you go for everything radical simplicity is great so that in principle I think that's a great example but one final question before we wrap up And now, at the time of recording, we're getting towards the end of the World Cup, and this is going to come out in the early part of August.