All right. All right. Welcome everyone to our webinar today. Why accessibility is a competitive advantage and why it's important. I'd like to introduce Russ is going to be on the call with us today. Good morning everyone. All right. Go ahead. Sorry. I was just going to say just a really quick intro. Before we go ahead. Sorry. Before we jump into the slides. My name is Ashley Barker. My name is Ashley Barker and I'm a solutions engineer here at Crown Peak and I specialize in our digital quality and management solution. And then I will hand it over to Russ for an introduction and to start our webinar. That's great. Thanks, Ashley Barker. Thanks for joining us. So I think I know you all. I'm Russ. I'm the regional director. Thank you to our customers from Australia, New Zealand and I believe we also have one joining us from Japan. So thank you to our customers from Australia, New Zealand and I believe we also have one joining us from Japan. So thank you for joining us. Thank you. We also have a partner on the call. So once again, thank you for joining us today. All of you today, as I'm sure you're all aware, are customers of Crown Peak. Some of you better know us as Fred Hopper. But as you know, Crown Peak has four key pillars for our digital experience platform. You all use Fred Hopper on the product discovery platform. We have three other key pillars of that. One being our CMS. And we have three other key pillars of privacy and consent management. And for today's webinar, we're going to be talking about accessibility and digital quality, which I think is really important in our market. And from conversations I've had with many of you, certainly there's a lot of interest in that. All righty. Thank you, Ash. Amazing. All right. So just a quick agenda. We went through those introductions. We're going to kind of set out the landscape here. And talk about brass tacks. What is digital accessibility? Why does this matter? What parts of our company does this impact? How Crown Peak approaches digital accessibility? And then, of course, we'll end on, of course, action plans and some next steps. Before we jump in, I do just want to point out if there are any questions as we're going through this, there is actual a Q&A box. And there's also the ability to raise your hand. So if you do have a question. So if you do have a question, please throw it in the chat box. And we will get to as many as we can. All right. So let's get started. What is digital accessibility? What are we talking about? When we think about accessibility in the real world, in the physical world, we think about things like ramps and making sure people have access into buildings and have access to the same public services that everyone else does. That same mentality really applies to digital accessibility. That same mentality really applies to digital accessibility. When we think about a website and everyone coming to our website, if it's not accessible and it's not a high quality website, they can't even get past the door. So in the physical world, we have the actual ramps, the barriers. In the digital world, there's some other things that we really kind of need to pay attention to. So again, at a really high level, digital accessibility is simply referring to the process of ensuring that the technology products and the things that you're using and designing are being designed with accessibility in mind. And this is something that is very interesting because when we think about accessibility, we think about how it impacts people, maybe those with disabilities. But what's really interesting is there's all kinds of temporary disabilities as well. And we'll get into some of these examples. But essentially, digital accessibility is really what's behind the curtain, what is keeping that website up and running and accessible to those consumers coming to your site. We'll dive in a little bit more into some of the regulations in a little bit. But one of the things that's really interesting to mention is that digital accessibility is really evolving. And especially in the last five years, we've seen a lot of different countries and organizations really start to require accessibility so that especially government websites, B2C, B2C companies, it's critical that we ensure our site is high quality to make sure we are maximizing on people getting to our site. We spend a lot of money to get people to our site. Let's make sure it's a good experience when they get there. And one thing to mention before we kind of dive into why accessibility matters is to think about accessibility as a continuous process. This is a continuous process. This is a continuous process. This is a continuous process because those websites are living and breathing. We have promotions. We have busy seasons. So it's something that we have to really stay on top of. Not to mention the regulations that are coming out. If you think about EAA, which is the European Accessibility Act deadline of June 2025, there are also specific regulations that are impacting parts of Australia and New Zealand. So this is something that is going to continue to grow as more and more people understand that it's not only the right thing to do, but it also has some really good business benefits to it as well. And a couple last things to kind of point out on here. When we say 97% of websites are not fully accessible, they're just really not accessible at all. And what's interesting is that all of these barriers that we identify utilizing our automated scanning tool are the barriers that are causing people to jump off a site, to abandon their cart. If you imagine someone trying to click on an item to add it to the cart. If you imagine someone trying to click on an item to add it to the cart, it spawns a new window, but it doesn't tell them. They will sit there and add an ad until they get frustrated and just leave the cart. So it's a really interesting dynamics that we kind of have playing right now that not only are regulators starting to require it, but our consumers' expectations are only getting higher. So, in the big scheme of things, we've kind of touched a little bit on, you know, digital accessibility means how people can interact with your website when they get there. Now, I want to break it down a little bit and give you what we call the business case for digital accessibility. And this is an interesting one because these are some of just the brass tacks in terms of why investing in digital accessibility is good for business. So, of course, when we think about innovation and inclusivity, it's huge markets that are out there. And we'll look at some numbers in the next couple of slides. The amount of spending power that is out there and untapped is phenomenal. So, being able to unlock some of those new markets and customer segments, one of the things that you will hear throughout different industries is customers, especially disabled customers, when they find sites that actually work properly and they can navigate their way through, they are the biggest proponent of that site. And, of course, the opposite is true as well. If there is a site that is constantly an issue with the community, it will start to raise a lot of flags. Now, a lot of times we talk about the numbers, saving money, making money. We'll break down some of those numbers in the next slide. But one thing I really want to focus on is boosting the ROI through that increased reach and that advanced customer loyalty. That's really where having a high quality, high accessible site allows us to open those additional markets and potentially get better returns on this investment. And when we think about accessibility, when we start to talk about the different items that impact digital accessibility, what's really interesting is that so many of these issues directly impact things like on-page, on-page SEO, on-page SEO. And when we talk about SEO, we know that technical and on-page SEO, that is, we do not want to leave that money on the table. We know Google acts as a blind user and crawls the site. And therefore, we crawl the site in the same way. And that's why it's really critical that we can associate digital accessibility improvements with also higher conversions and a potential on a better on-page SEO. And of course, we're not just about SEO. And of course, we're not just about being in compliance. It's really talking about doing the right thing. And oftentimes by doing the right thing, it opens up those additional markets that we have not been able to tap into previously. So I talked a lot about the numbers. Here's just a couple on the screen. What I really want to convey here is that digital accessibility and quality not only saves money, but can also make money. Oftentimes when we have solutions that are out there, yes, you have to write a paycheck, but what do you get in return for your investment? In digital accessibility and quality, it's really interesting that with a good quality site, you can avoid those demand letters. You can avoid some of those settlements that are naturally going to come out of things like the European accessibility and the European accessibility act. As the EAA is getting closer. As the EAA is getting closer, we're hearing rumblings from the APAC region that there's going to be some regulations or some kind of similar follow that's been happening kind of worldwide. So it's something that at Crown Peak, we are really keeping a watch and a handle on to make sure that our customers know as much in advance as we do. When we think about some of the same. This is, of course, more towards the US because it has lots of lawsuits, but we're starting to see the same regulatory bodies adopt the same policies for EAA and for some of the other regulations. So it's very important that we keep our company names out of those discussions and turn digital accessibility into a platform. And of course, the favorite part for everyone is how do we make money off of this? If we're going to spend money, how do we come back and make this money? When we think about the global population living with some type of disability, that's one sixth of the population, 1.3 billion people. When we talked earlier about disabilities, it's not always the permanent disabilities that we think of. It's also temporary ones. So think about writing on a train or in a very busy airport where you have to listen to a meeting or you have to have a transcript read out to you because you can't interact with the data there. That's another really big piece of the pie is it's not just those with an ongoing disability. It really does impact multiple people and on different levels. And if we translate some of the data there. And if we translate some of that out into actual dollar figures, just the spending power alone of this market is incredible because if they find websites, if they find goods in companies that prioritize accessibility and prioritize just a usable website, those people are very loyal and they build brands. And I cannot stress that. And I cannot stress that enough that being proactive about digital accessibility and quality is a feather in your cap because you do not want to be reactive. You don't want to be the person who has a lawsuit request come in and now we're scrambling to figure out what to do. Let's kind of get this baked in now so that we can help avoid some of these money pitfalls when it comes to digital accessibility. All right. So I'm not obviously going to read all of this information on this screen. What I really want to convey here is that the need for digital accessibility and web conformance is a global one. It impacts nonprofits. It impacts government agencies. And I like to have this kind of stat sheet on here because what's really interesting is as we go through the source of a lot of these numbers, you're going to notice names like the world health organization, United nations, UK government, digital services, every bond, everyone, all of these different industries, departments are starting to realize the importance of digital accessibility and that accessibility conformance. And so we like to put this on here again, to show it's a global thing. It's impacting everyone, not just one area and not just one site. All right. So we've kind of gone through the basics of what is digital accessibility. Why is it important in different aspects? What some of those business drivers for digital accessibility. Now, what I want to shift to a little bit is to kind of paint the landscape of who cares about digital accessibility, who's going to be involved and who has the potential to really interact with this. And when we think about the ideal company profile. Shocker, it's everyone, right? If you have business with B2B, B2C, if you are in highly regulated industries, especially e-commerce, man, e-commerce is a big, big one right now. And what we've seen, and I can give this stat, and this is so far for the US, but we have seen 80% of the latest lawsuits regarding digital accessibility are from e-commerce because e-commerce has the most people coming to the websites, the most people interacting with those customer journeys. And so again, when we think about the impact, it is really far. It's why it goes past regions, past industries. And that's really why we like to show this is everyone. It's not no one's getting picked on. This is something that we have to prepare for and that we know is coming. And then if you want to break it down, just kind of one more level, who cares about digital accessibility? Of course I do. I think everyone should. However, what is the bottom line to this? So of course, it's going to impact all of your digital marketing, your marketing teams. If they can design and put out content that is thinking about accessibility that has some of these ideas in mind, you can then help ensure that that on-page SEO is being followed, that we are actually doing what we're committing to. When we think about the different departments that are involved. When we think about the different departments that are involved, developers, operations, IT, marketing, policy makers. All of this is important because digital accessibility and quality can really impact every single one of those areas. And this is also where we see a lot of buy-in from companies where we can really help with the buy-in and say, this is multiple departments. Now let's get everyone reading the same information instead of getting the same information instead of having people in multiple areas. So why is it an imperative? I know we've been talking about this, but I feel like when we can kind of summarize some of the imperatives of why this is so critical to marketing and to your website, again, the $8 trillion and the spending power, the ability to potentially open up with the ability to potentially open up new markets and new consumers because it's a usable experience because it's an accessible experience. And then of course, if we can improve that SEO, we can get more people to our website. That's key. But do they stay on our website? Can they navigate our website? If we can help improve that SEO, then we know you have a better chance for the higher conversion rates. Of course, reducing legal risks. Of course, reducing legal risks is going to be a big thing. But in general, what we're starting to see a really big change to is instead of it being a legal or they have to do it, it's really about how can we show our customers they're important and we understand some of the issues that they experience. So really being able to cultivate some of the audience. So really being able to cultivate some of that loyalty from those various audiences. Because again, when you think about the amount of the market that is often ignored, that's what we want to tap into. That's where we want to say, hey, we hear you and this is what we're doing to make sure that your experience is a great one. So how does Crown Peak look at the approach to digital accessibility? Very quick statement. Digital accessibility is still an ongoing process, right? We still have all of the different regulations that are constantly being evolved. We utilize those WCAG guidelines, those WCAG guidelines, as the basis for a lot of the basis for a lot of our digital accessibility. But it's very important to understand that digital accessibility and quality is kind of broken into two parts. And those two parts are really the software side of it. So everything so far that we've been talking about, the things that the different issues we can catch, the items that impact on page SEO, as well as digital accessibility. Those are all based off of an automated scanning tool. And that automated scanning tool is, of course, Crown Peak's digital quality management. We lovingly refer to it as DQM. So you'll hear me say DQM throughout the presentation. But it's a really important part of the journey is understanding the landscape using that automated crawler. And it's crawling the websites the same way that Google would. So if Google is going to penalize you for things like missing metadata or missing alt text on images, we're going to show you as well so that, again, we can identify, correct, and then train our teams not to make some of those same mistakes. In talking about digital accessibility, it's really important to understand the two sides of digital accessibility and quality, if you will. So the first one, we're going to show you as well. The first one, we're talking about the automated scanning and all the information. The second part to that is what we call manual testing and remediation. These are actual certified manual testers that can go on your website and certify some of the items that an automated scanning tool cannot catch. And it's not a Crown Peak thing. This is an industry-wide item is that things like making sure the captions match up to the videos and the appropriate time frame. Those are items that still require a manual tester or someone with a little bit deeper knowledge. And that's why it's really important to understand that software and services do work together in this bundle, making sure you have that automated scanner within DQM, as well as the ability to have that expert tester to say, yes, you're good. Yes, there's a VPAT. There's an accessibility statement. There's an accessibility statement. That's really where manual testing and some of the remediations can really come into play. All right. So DQM platform, this is kind of what we talked about a little bit before, digital quality management platform. What's really nice about the DQM platform is that at the core is, of course, web accessibility. But what you're also going to see down there are things like the natural search engine optimization, which we've been talking about, brand standards, as well as regulatory compliance. And I love to talk through this slide because web accessibility, it's really interesting because it really does sit and impact multiple areas of the website. So when we talk about digital accessibility. Think about adding a, you know, again, a promotion, a marketing promotion. If that one picture doesn't have the appropriate alternative text, or it's not long enough or descriptive enough, you're going to get dinged for that one image. Now take that image, times it by your promotions, times it by the busy seasons, and you'll really understand that web accessibility is directly impacting other areas. And that's why the business case for digital quality and accessibility is that it really impacts all users, all sites. And it does it in a lot of different ways. The other thing I wanted to mention that I think is really interesting is within our core product offering a DQM, something that we've really started to encourage our customers to integrate with is brand standards and brand guidelines. So because our software, so because our software, so because our software, so because our software, because it's an external crawler, and it's crawling the entirety of your website or following a site map, depending on which works best. Oftentimes, it's we're just looking at accessibility, usability, on page SEO, but we also have the ability to start adding in brand standards. And what I mean by that is you can start to add in, make sure the company name is written correctly, not necessarily a digital accessibility issue, but it is a quality issue. But it is a quality issue. Ensuring that the company name is in the appropriate font or the appropriate color. Some of these brand and regular, or some of these brand standards and guidelines, we can actually incorporate into that scan, so that you're getting not only the accessibility, but you're also getting your brand and brand standards followed throughout the entire system. Now, when we think about how DQM works, we're just looking at this super high level. Essentially, it's that crawler that goes out, scans the entirety of your site, and then pulls all that information in, aggregates that data, and then really produces actionable insights. So when we talk about online dashboards, this is really all the information that's being collected, and presented in a way that we can look at the data, and then we can look at this, prioritize the issues that we want to fix, and then actually measure KPIs based on that. The other part to this is page checker. So with DQM comes what we call a page checker, and it's literally that. It checks whatever page you're on. If you have access to it, then it can crawl it. Meaning, if it's in a staging environment, you can utilize page checker, and run an instant check on that one page to see if there are any digital accessibility, or even on page SEO issues that we're looking at. That pre-publication kind of piece of it. If one of our CMS connectors is not the CMS that you use, page checker can be a really great way to validate some of the pages before they go live. The other thing page checker is often used for with our company, customers, is when they go in and make a change. They run page checker immediately to see if that change, in fact, is the correct change. Was it implemented? So it's a great way to be able to either spot check your work, but also know exactly what's going on on the page that you're scanning. And I know I mentioned some of the integrations and CMS connectors a little bit earlier, but I did just want to go through the CMS connectors and what that means with DQM. So out of the box, we actually have some direct integrations with CMS platforms. So we have an integration with Sitecore, with Adobe AEM, but the one, of course, I am going to talk about is our first spirit and DXM integration. So Crown Peaks own CMS module, our own CMS software. This is natively integrated within our CMS. We are the only vendor in the market that actually has a native digital accessibility integration available in the CMS. So this is really where we can truly shift left when we think about digital accessibility and quality. We think about digital accessibility and quality. The CMS connectors allow all of those checks, all of those brand standards and guidelines to be processed prior to publication. To give you a quick example, in our first spirit CMS, not only can we do real-time monitoring of the content as it's being created, letting you know, hey, this has an issue. We can't really do real-time monitoring of the content as it's being created, but you can also set the guardrails up on publication. And what I mean by that is we can say you must have a 90% or above on accessibility in order to publish. The possibilities are really endless when we think about introducing the CMS connectors and introducing some of these integrations. But suffice to say that the more we can catch these issues, as early in the process, the better it is possible, the better it is for us. Not only is it cheaper for us to make these updates, but it also is easier for our teams and more standardized. So again, several out-of-the-box integrations. We are CMS agnostic. So if your CMS was not one of the three I mentioned, still reach out and we'll see if that particular integration is on the roadmap. All right. So I know we've gone through quite a bit of information, lots of slides and really all of this, what it comes down to is digital accessibility and quality is an important cornerstone of business. And not only is it important, but it's imperative that our teams understand that digital accessibility really impacts multiple places of business. Multiple places of business, multiple areas and multiple departments. And so just simply starting to understand that landscape is really a key. So when we talk about next steps, oftentimes when we hear all this information, okay, great, Ashley, you gave us all this information. What do we do with all of it? So here's your next steps. First step, evaluate the current state. And if you need help with this, Crown Peak is there. We contact your Crown Peak representative and learn how we can help you with that. To give you a quick little insight, the way we evaluate the current state of websites is we'll often run demo scans on your actual live website so that as we go through DQM and demo the different parts, we're using your actual information so that no matter what, you will know, hey, here are some of the issues that DQM has found. DQM has found. Here's how we interact with them in the system. So if you need any assistance in terms of evaluating where you're at now and how your current technology stack can be impacted, please feel free to reach out. The next step that I have is planning for integration. I know this sounds a little bit scary, especially coming up to our very busy seasons, but the reason I like to really talk about this is that the more we can introduce digital accessibility and quality into our processes, the better outcomes we have. So when we think about on-page SEO, we want to train our teams on how to put out good quality content that not only is good and high ranking in Google's eyes, but that's easy and manageable for all users. And I think, again, very important. The sooner we can introduce these ideas, the easier it is to get everyone on board and the easier it is or the cheaper it is to actually make these adjustments. And then, of course, last point, set up a consult with our team to really understand how Crown Peak can bolster your technology stack. When we say that, it just allows us to understand what CMS you're utilizing. And if we have a direct integration and if we have a direct integration and we can demonstrate that. It really is a great way to get a couple experts on the call with you for 30 minutes and just understand what that landscape looks like. Because when we think about, again, digital accessibility and quality, it's still a newer process in general. When we think about some of these guidelines, they've only been around for 10 or 15 years and compared to other things, that's quite new. So with Crown Peak and, of course, having experts in the field and having our Crown Peak representatives like Russ and Peter out there, this is really where we can take a look at your landscape, take a look at a couple high traffic pages, identify where we can make a good difference, and then demonstrate that to you, again, using some of your own information. All right. So I'm going to take a quick check to see our Q&A box. And also, Russ, if you had any additional remarks, anything to add while I'm taking a look at the Q&A? No problem. Doesn't look like I can see anything in there. But I think just going back to the legislative requirements, I don't want to interrupt you there. Just to really touch on that, my understanding, correct me if I'm wrong, Ash, is that any retail in Australia that ships or sells in either the European or the US market will still be required to comply with those regulations in those markets. Am I correct in saying that? Correct. And I'm glad you brought that up, Russ. So with Australia, so there's a couple of things going on in the APAC region in terms of the United States. in terms of accessibility standards and requirements. When we think about Australia specifically right now, what's kind of directing a lot of this is the Disability Discrimination Act or the DDA. And it really, at its high level, it basically prohibits discrimination as it applies to digital content. So the current DDA in Australia and also New Zealand, there's a couple items with New Zealand. And the Human Rights Act. The Human Rights Act ensures that accessible, all government websites must be accessible. So a lot of the APAC regulations that are coming up are really saying, hey, we need to recognize that this is an issue. Do you have a vendor of choice? Do you have someone who is monitoring this? Do you have a vendor of choice? the APAC region. Thanks, Ash. Perfect. Awesome. Let's see. Okay. And I think we actually answered one of the questions. The question came in regarding SEO and yes. So the question was, what type of SEO is this impacting? And digital quality management, the solution we're looking at, again, on-page or technical SEO. So it's not necessarily replacing any of your SEO efforts like SEMrush. What it's doing is identifying the different parts and pieces of accessibility that are directly impacting your on-page SEO. And with the ability of doing custom checkpoints, which we were talking a little bit about that when we were looking at the brand guidelines, that's another way that we can really bolster some of that on-page SEO is to create some custom checkpoints to ensure anything that we know is an issue, we can start to record and then also figure out how to remediate it. Okay. And question came in regarding some of the APAC regulations. So the question was more high level around some of the APAC region regulations. We are happy. We went through a couple of them here, but I'm happy to provide an update or a resource document that will just kind of do a quick call out of the APAC region. And here are the current digital accessibility laws that we're looking at. And here are the ones that are upcoming. So absolutely happy to provide that information. All right. All right. Are there any additional questions or comments, anything that I can review or clear up any additional comments from the Crown Peak team? Nothing from me. Thanks, Sash. Great. Thank you. Well, we will give you a quick call. We will give you a little bit of time back in your day. That doesn't happen very often. But our whole goal again today was to really introduce you. What is digital accessibility? How is it going to impact your on-page SEO? And how can digital quality really impact your customer base? So please, if there are any questions and follow-ups, especially around that consultation, or evaluating the current state, please reach out to your Crown Peak representative and we will do a scan and present it back to you. Thanks for that, Ash. Please reach out to Peter or myself at any time. We'll certainly follow up with you and see if there's any questions post the call. But as Ash has said, we're certainly happy to have follow-up deep dive sessions. We're also happy to run a scan for you and give you a quick overview of where we see the opportunities. So I certainly want to thank all of you for joining us this morning. And Ash, thanks for hosting the session. Great session. Absolutely. Thank you. And thank you everyone for taking the time and looking forward to seeing how we can help you guys further. Thanks everyone. Take care. Bye.