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תוכן מסופק על ידי TRIBUS. כל תוכן הפודקאסטים כולל פרקים, גרפיקה ותיאורי פודקאסטים מועלים ומסופקים ישירות על ידי TRIBUS או שותף פלטפורמת הפודקאסט שלו. אם אתה מאמין שמישהו משתמש ביצירה שלך המוגנת בזכויות יוצרים ללא רשותך, אתה יכול לעקוב אחר התהליך המתואר כאן https://he.player.fm/legal.
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ADA Compliance of your Brokerage Website with LeadingRE

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Manage episode 273512641 series 2799160
תוכן מסופק על ידי TRIBUS. כל תוכן הפודקאסטים כולל פרקים, גרפיקה ותיאורי פודקאסטים מועלים ומסופקים ישירות על ידי TRIBUS או שותף פלטפורמת הפודקאסט שלו. אם אתה מאמין שמישהו משתמש ביצירה שלך המוגנת בזכויות יוצרים ללא רשותך, אתה יכול לעקוב אחר התהליך המתואר כאן https://he.player.fm/legal.

Enjoying Brokerage Insider? Please Subscribe Using Your Favorite Podcast Player.

In this episode, Eric Stegemann sits down with EVP of Operations for Leading Real Estate Companies of the World, Jessica Edgerton. They discuss the importance of making sure your brokerage website is ADA compliant.

Get an ADA audit of your brokerage website.

TRANSCRIPTION

Jessica Edgerton (00:04):

Hi, everyone. Thanks so much for joining us. This is Jessica Edgerton, executive vice president of operations and corporate counsel for LeadingRE. I am excited to have Eric Stegemann here. He is the CEO of TRIBUS and has a, was a realtor before reaching the age of 20. So he has been in the business a long time and knows it well while loving his days in real estate, he knew there was a larger opportunity to build a technology oriented brokerage. In 2004, he created river city real estate, which quickly became the largest independent brokerage in the St Louis area. There he oversaw the development of numerous real estate technology breakthroughs that were well ahead of their time. Eric is regarded as one of the brightest minds in the real estate technology realm has spoken at a number of real estate technology events. You may very well have seen him at one of ours in the past and has also spoken at Inman connect to New York, San Francisco and NAR annual conference.

Jessica Edgerton (01:03):

We see him everywhere and are very glad to have TRIBUS as part of our solutions group as well. So Eric welcome. Thank you so much today. We are talking about website accessibility. ADA real estate brokerage website accessibility issues have been around for a long time for our industry. In my NAR days, we heard about them quite regularly. Historically website accessibility has come under the umbrella of the Americans with disabilities act, which is protects people with disabilities, from dealing with public facing businesses that are inaccessible to them. So under the ADA, if you have a public facing business, you are required to take reasonable measures to make it accessible to people with disabilities. Now, once the internet came online, that was originally seen as a bricks and mortar have a ramp, make sure that people with, with in wheelchairs are able to navigate your, your aisles, things like that.

Jessica Edgerton (02:05):

Then along comes the internet and there was for a number of years some, a lack of clarity as to whether the ADA applied to public facing websites, our websites, a place of, of public access does is public. Do public accessibility laws apply to websites? The answer really now is pretty much yes, across the board. There's a little bit of haziness in some circuits, but the recommendation a hundred percent, I've never talked to an attorney that would say no, no, don't worry about your public facing website, right? So this is an important issue. Why are we talking about it right now, given that we've been hearing about it for years? First of all, we're all kind of still sheltering in place and opening back up to the public. There's a lot of transition right now in our, in our industry.

Jessica Edgerton (02:53):

This is a great time to be looking at your websites. Any changes that you are making or becoming a much website focused industry. This is a great time to be looking at accessibility for your website. Number two and more immediate, there has been a rash of accessibility letters sent by one law firm that have been hitting folks in Florida. We suspect that right now, it's in Florida. It will probably be spreading across the country. That's usually the way these folks work, but these letters are not your typical ADA demand letters in the past ADA demand letters and said, Hey, I have a client with a disability. Your website is not accessible to my client. You need to take remedial measures and you need to pay my attorney's fees. Dozens, if not hundreds of brokerages in Florida have recently got a similar letter saying, Hey, your website is not accessible this time instead of the ADA, they're invoking for housing.

Jessica Edgerton (03:52):

So why does that make a difference? First of all, it probably means that there's going to have to be some litigation around this more attorney's fees, blessed my colleagues and the attorneys around. But another I won't use the word alarming, but thing for us to watch is under the Americans with disabilities act, plaintiffs do not have the right to receive monetary damages. They get remedial measures. So you have to fix your website and you have to pay their lawyer. Same things apply under fair housing, but under fair housing, there's also the chance that a court, if it's taken all the way to court can hands down punitive damages as well. So plaintiffs are actually able to receive monetary damages under a fair housing legal scheme. So, all of that being said, even under these fair housing laws, the remedial measures that are probably going to be need to be taken are likely the same.

Jessica Edgerton (04:48):

And that means that you need to know what to do when you receive one of these letters and you need to be talking to your brokerage web provider like Eric and TRIBUS. So one of the things that we would like to talk to you today about Eric is what you are seeing from a technology standpoint. Let's take a step back and talk about what accessibility actually means. I think a lot of people don't have a clear view on, on what you would do to make your website accessible and what we should be doing today, tomorrow, and going forward. So, Eric what does website accessibility actually mean from technical standpoint?

Eric Stegemann (05:27):

Well, I mean, it's, it's a collection of a number of different things that needs to be done on the website to make it visible or accessible or interact allowing the person to interact on the website depending on what their potential handicap might be. And so from that perspective, it can range from things such as making your website usable with just the keyboard. So for example, some people, you know, can't interact with a mouse they can only use a keyboard or in other cases, you know, if the person might be blind, it might mean making your website able to work with a braille reader. And if you haven't seen videos of a braille reader an amazing piece of technology that somebody built a number of years ago to make the blind, be able to use the internet and get the same information that we get.

Eric Stegemann (06:22):

It actually, it's a little, little thing that sits in front of the computer. And, you know, as you imagine braille works it actually changes the little knobs for the braille as the person reads across that's each one of the lines of your website really definitely check out a YouTube video of how these things work. They're very great piece of technology that to allow the blind to be into the internet age. And so that, that could be one of them on people have visual impairments that aren't there necessarily blind, but maybe they can't read your website unless there's a high contrast between the text and the back of the website of the background with the website. So there are a number of these different things and it's not really just one thing. It's, it's actually a whole suite of items.

Eric Stegemann (07:08):

And I would tell people the best way to, to to start thinking about this is that the, there is a consortium of people that write the standards for how websites work or how HTML got adopted actually. And websites initially came into being the w three consortium is what it's called and they have a standard called WCA G that talks about accessibility and they changed this guideline on a regular basis to update it with new standards, to help more people out. And th the current standard is either two or two.one for that standard. So I would definitely encourage people if you really want to read up on this topic to go and, and Google WCAG two or 2.1 and read up on, on the numerous items. You know, the ones I've listed are just a few out of 30, 40, 50 of these things that, that your website should be focused on.

Jessica Edgerton (08:06):

So if in addition to looking at WCA 2.0 which I think is a good idea, but I don't know how many people are going to have time to do a deep dive into it. It's heavy duty stuff. What would you recommend sort of from a, a basic operational standpoint, what steps should folks be doing now? In terms of figuring out whether their website is compliant and any remedial steps they might need to take, whether they have gotten this letter, and I'll talk a little bit more in a minute about what to do if you've gotten a letter.

Eric Stegemann (08:37):

So you know, I think there's a number of things here, and I want to start by saying good accessibility of your website is not just a legal protection issue. It's also just good business as a whole because you may or not know this, but between five and 8% of all online users use some accessibility setting in their browsers are on their phones. And it can be as basic as text sizing. So you know, if you don't need accommodations to use a browser, you may have just accidentally increased the size of the text on your, on your browser at some point. And then all of a sudden, you wonder why all the texts on websites are car giant. But that actually is one of the accessible items in certainly in a list that you should pay attention to is you know, if you, if you increase the size of text, because, you know, as, as folks age, you know, he can't read the four point font anymore.

Eric Stegemann (09:41):

And so you want to increase that size to be able to read what's on the page a little bit better. And so you want to increase that now, a lot of websites, and I see this a lot in real estate, when you increase the size of the texts, particularly on IDX pages it ends up where we refer to in the, in the web space as blowing out the website. So what ends up happening is the text actually goes off the page where you can no longer read it. And that would be definitely something that would break WCAG compliance and accessibility compliance. So from that perspective, you know, that that's number one is, is really to go on there and check if you, and by the way, if you have a math it's command plus that you can do to, to increase the size, our command minus will decrease it in command. Zero actually brings it back to normal, a hundred percent normal, but use that command plus on a PC, a windows based computer it's control plus, so control plus control minus it controls zero that you can use to check your website. And so if the tech starts blowing off the screen, you know, you have a problem that you're going to want to talk to your web company about. So testing, yep. Texts would be number one number two is, can the website be used without a mouse? Now, there was Probably the biggest and the first of the, the cases that came out on this was Southwest airlines. And it flew under, flew under the radar sorry for the pun not intended, but yeah it flew under the radar for a little while and people weren't paying too much attention to it, but they had to settle for, I, I think in the hundred million dollar range because their website, you could not book a flight on their website using only the keyboard. You had to use a mouse to be able to use their website. So, another thing to check on your website is can you access your menus? So can you navigate around the site using just your keyboard? And if you, if you haven't had accessibility issues, you may not know that a big proportion of the population that's the way of mood hovering around, you know, my dad had Parkinson's disease.

Eric Stegemann (11:53):

My dad never, while you had Parkinson's, he lived with it for 20 years. He didn't have the dexterity with Parkinson's disease to be able to control a mouse. His hand would move constantly, but he could have used a keyboard to move around on the website. And so you may not know, but if a website is built correctly to the standards, you should be able to use the tab key on your keyboard to move from menu, to menu or item to item on there and also be able to get through forms. So, for example, if somebody wanted to do an IDX search or search on your website, they should be able to get through every single one of those forms by using the tab key. So if you start with maybe the city neighborhood, et cetera, in a box and type in there, and they a tab to go to beds and baths and be able to get to the right number of beds you want by using your arrow keys.

Eric Stegemann (12:43):

So those are just a few examples and hitting the return key can process a form. It's a few examples of something that I would definitely be paying attention to you, and if your website, and by the way, one of the biggest ways that Southwest got sued was you couldn't do any of that. More importantly, when you try to create an account on southwest.com, you couldn't do it without using a mouse. So that's something else to keep in mind too. Can I create an account on the website without being able to use a mouse?

Jessica Edgerton (13:14):

Oh, go ahead. No, go ahead. I was going to ask, I love this deep dive into details because it really shows what people should be looking at and thinking of, and it has, and is a reminder of the human element here, right? Like the example of your father, when we receive one of these demand letters, it feels rolly, right? And you people use these words for these attorneys because, you know, I mean, it's, there is a financial component that the lawyer's going after, but we need to remember that behind these, these complaints, there are people who are frustrated by your website. These are, these are, you know, people. And so there's a human element, but it's also potential customers that you're losing. So I love hearing the details. Is there though any technology that people should be aware of that, or, or resources for people to do a thorough scan of their website check, right?

Eric Stegemann (14:09):

There's a number of websites that if you search for a WCAG compliance or accessibility compliance, now I fair warning. Almost all of them are trying to sell you something. So they're going to sell you a compliant, a full compliance audit perhaps, or they might sell you making your website compliant. So just be aware that most of them, that you'll go to these checkers or compliance tools, they're going to, they're going to spam you and try to sell you things. But there's other great tools that are out there. You know, if like a tribe, when we build websites for our broker customers, we obviously build all these things in, but we use third party tools to help us with that. One of the reasons why is because we want to make sure that we're staying up to date and there's a lot, I mean, it's, it's definitely a daunting thing.

Eric Stegemann (

  continue reading

54 פרקים

Artwork
iconשתפו
 
Manage episode 273512641 series 2799160
תוכן מסופק על ידי TRIBUS. כל תוכן הפודקאסטים כולל פרקים, גרפיקה ותיאורי פודקאסטים מועלים ומסופקים ישירות על ידי TRIBUS או שותף פלטפורמת הפודקאסט שלו. אם אתה מאמין שמישהו משתמש ביצירה שלך המוגנת בזכויות יוצרים ללא רשותך, אתה יכול לעקוב אחר התהליך המתואר כאן https://he.player.fm/legal.

Enjoying Brokerage Insider? Please Subscribe Using Your Favorite Podcast Player.

In this episode, Eric Stegemann sits down with EVP of Operations for Leading Real Estate Companies of the World, Jessica Edgerton. They discuss the importance of making sure your brokerage website is ADA compliant.

Get an ADA audit of your brokerage website.

TRANSCRIPTION

Jessica Edgerton (00:04):

Hi, everyone. Thanks so much for joining us. This is Jessica Edgerton, executive vice president of operations and corporate counsel for LeadingRE. I am excited to have Eric Stegemann here. He is the CEO of TRIBUS and has a, was a realtor before reaching the age of 20. So he has been in the business a long time and knows it well while loving his days in real estate, he knew there was a larger opportunity to build a technology oriented brokerage. In 2004, he created river city real estate, which quickly became the largest independent brokerage in the St Louis area. There he oversaw the development of numerous real estate technology breakthroughs that were well ahead of their time. Eric is regarded as one of the brightest minds in the real estate technology realm has spoken at a number of real estate technology events. You may very well have seen him at one of ours in the past and has also spoken at Inman connect to New York, San Francisco and NAR annual conference.

Jessica Edgerton (01:03):

We see him everywhere and are very glad to have TRIBUS as part of our solutions group as well. So Eric welcome. Thank you so much today. We are talking about website accessibility. ADA real estate brokerage website accessibility issues have been around for a long time for our industry. In my NAR days, we heard about them quite regularly. Historically website accessibility has come under the umbrella of the Americans with disabilities act, which is protects people with disabilities, from dealing with public facing businesses that are inaccessible to them. So under the ADA, if you have a public facing business, you are required to take reasonable measures to make it accessible to people with disabilities. Now, once the internet came online, that was originally seen as a bricks and mortar have a ramp, make sure that people with, with in wheelchairs are able to navigate your, your aisles, things like that.

Jessica Edgerton (02:05):

Then along comes the internet and there was for a number of years some, a lack of clarity as to whether the ADA applied to public facing websites, our websites, a place of, of public access does is public. Do public accessibility laws apply to websites? The answer really now is pretty much yes, across the board. There's a little bit of haziness in some circuits, but the recommendation a hundred percent, I've never talked to an attorney that would say no, no, don't worry about your public facing website, right? So this is an important issue. Why are we talking about it right now, given that we've been hearing about it for years? First of all, we're all kind of still sheltering in place and opening back up to the public. There's a lot of transition right now in our, in our industry.

Jessica Edgerton (02:53):

This is a great time to be looking at your websites. Any changes that you are making or becoming a much website focused industry. This is a great time to be looking at accessibility for your website. Number two and more immediate, there has been a rash of accessibility letters sent by one law firm that have been hitting folks in Florida. We suspect that right now, it's in Florida. It will probably be spreading across the country. That's usually the way these folks work, but these letters are not your typical ADA demand letters in the past ADA demand letters and said, Hey, I have a client with a disability. Your website is not accessible to my client. You need to take remedial measures and you need to pay my attorney's fees. Dozens, if not hundreds of brokerages in Florida have recently got a similar letter saying, Hey, your website is not accessible this time instead of the ADA, they're invoking for housing.

Jessica Edgerton (03:52):

So why does that make a difference? First of all, it probably means that there's going to have to be some litigation around this more attorney's fees, blessed my colleagues and the attorneys around. But another I won't use the word alarming, but thing for us to watch is under the Americans with disabilities act, plaintiffs do not have the right to receive monetary damages. They get remedial measures. So you have to fix your website and you have to pay their lawyer. Same things apply under fair housing, but under fair housing, there's also the chance that a court, if it's taken all the way to court can hands down punitive damages as well. So plaintiffs are actually able to receive monetary damages under a fair housing legal scheme. So, all of that being said, even under these fair housing laws, the remedial measures that are probably going to be need to be taken are likely the same.

Jessica Edgerton (04:48):

And that means that you need to know what to do when you receive one of these letters and you need to be talking to your brokerage web provider like Eric and TRIBUS. So one of the things that we would like to talk to you today about Eric is what you are seeing from a technology standpoint. Let's take a step back and talk about what accessibility actually means. I think a lot of people don't have a clear view on, on what you would do to make your website accessible and what we should be doing today, tomorrow, and going forward. So, Eric what does website accessibility actually mean from technical standpoint?

Eric Stegemann (05:27):

Well, I mean, it's, it's a collection of a number of different things that needs to be done on the website to make it visible or accessible or interact allowing the person to interact on the website depending on what their potential handicap might be. And so from that perspective, it can range from things such as making your website usable with just the keyboard. So for example, some people, you know, can't interact with a mouse they can only use a keyboard or in other cases, you know, if the person might be blind, it might mean making your website able to work with a braille reader. And if you haven't seen videos of a braille reader an amazing piece of technology that somebody built a number of years ago to make the blind, be able to use the internet and get the same information that we get.

Eric Stegemann (06:22):

It actually, it's a little, little thing that sits in front of the computer. And, you know, as you imagine braille works it actually changes the little knobs for the braille as the person reads across that's each one of the lines of your website really definitely check out a YouTube video of how these things work. They're very great piece of technology that to allow the blind to be into the internet age. And so that, that could be one of them on people have visual impairments that aren't there necessarily blind, but maybe they can't read your website unless there's a high contrast between the text and the back of the website of the background with the website. So there are a number of these different things and it's not really just one thing. It's, it's actually a whole suite of items.

Eric Stegemann (07:08):

And I would tell people the best way to, to to start thinking about this is that the, there is a consortium of people that write the standards for how websites work or how HTML got adopted actually. And websites initially came into being the w three consortium is what it's called and they have a standard called WCA G that talks about accessibility and they changed this guideline on a regular basis to update it with new standards, to help more people out. And th the current standard is either two or two.one for that standard. So I would definitely encourage people if you really want to read up on this topic to go and, and Google WCAG two or 2.1 and read up on, on the numerous items. You know, the ones I've listed are just a few out of 30, 40, 50 of these things that, that your website should be focused on.

Jessica Edgerton (08:06):

So if in addition to looking at WCA 2.0 which I think is a good idea, but I don't know how many people are going to have time to do a deep dive into it. It's heavy duty stuff. What would you recommend sort of from a, a basic operational standpoint, what steps should folks be doing now? In terms of figuring out whether their website is compliant and any remedial steps they might need to take, whether they have gotten this letter, and I'll talk a little bit more in a minute about what to do if you've gotten a letter.

Eric Stegemann (08:37):

So you know, I think there's a number of things here, and I want to start by saying good accessibility of your website is not just a legal protection issue. It's also just good business as a whole because you may or not know this, but between five and 8% of all online users use some accessibility setting in their browsers are on their phones. And it can be as basic as text sizing. So you know, if you don't need accommodations to use a browser, you may have just accidentally increased the size of the text on your, on your browser at some point. And then all of a sudden, you wonder why all the texts on websites are car giant. But that actually is one of the accessible items in certainly in a list that you should pay attention to is you know, if you, if you increase the size of text, because, you know, as, as folks age, you know, he can't read the four point font anymore.

Eric Stegemann (09:41):

And so you want to increase that size to be able to read what's on the page a little bit better. And so you want to increase that now, a lot of websites, and I see this a lot in real estate, when you increase the size of the texts, particularly on IDX pages it ends up where we refer to in the, in the web space as blowing out the website. So what ends up happening is the text actually goes off the page where you can no longer read it. And that would be definitely something that would break WCAG compliance and accessibility compliance. So from that perspective, you know, that that's number one is, is really to go on there and check if you, and by the way, if you have a math it's command plus that you can do to, to increase the size, our command minus will decrease it in command. Zero actually brings it back to normal, a hundred percent normal, but use that command plus on a PC, a windows based computer it's control plus, so control plus control minus it controls zero that you can use to check your website. And so if the tech starts blowing off the screen, you know, you have a problem that you're going to want to talk to your web company about. So testing, yep. Texts would be number one number two is, can the website be used without a mouse? Now, there was Probably the biggest and the first of the, the cases that came out on this was Southwest airlines. And it flew under, flew under the radar sorry for the pun not intended, but yeah it flew under the radar for a little while and people weren't paying too much attention to it, but they had to settle for, I, I think in the hundred million dollar range because their website, you could not book a flight on their website using only the keyboard. You had to use a mouse to be able to use their website. So, another thing to check on your website is can you access your menus? So can you navigate around the site using just your keyboard? And if you, if you haven't had accessibility issues, you may not know that a big proportion of the population that's the way of mood hovering around, you know, my dad had Parkinson's disease.

Eric Stegemann (11:53):

My dad never, while you had Parkinson's, he lived with it for 20 years. He didn't have the dexterity with Parkinson's disease to be able to control a mouse. His hand would move constantly, but he could have used a keyboard to move around on the website. And so you may not know, but if a website is built correctly to the standards, you should be able to use the tab key on your keyboard to move from menu, to menu or item to item on there and also be able to get through forms. So, for example, if somebody wanted to do an IDX search or search on your website, they should be able to get through every single one of those forms by using the tab key. So if you start with maybe the city neighborhood, et cetera, in a box and type in there, and they a tab to go to beds and baths and be able to get to the right number of beds you want by using your arrow keys.

Eric Stegemann (12:43):

So those are just a few examples and hitting the return key can process a form. It's a few examples of something that I would definitely be paying attention to you, and if your website, and by the way, one of the biggest ways that Southwest got sued was you couldn't do any of that. More importantly, when you try to create an account on southwest.com, you couldn't do it without using a mouse. So that's something else to keep in mind too. Can I create an account on the website without being able to use a mouse?

Jessica Edgerton (13:14):

Oh, go ahead. No, go ahead. I was going to ask, I love this deep dive into details because it really shows what people should be looking at and thinking of, and it has, and is a reminder of the human element here, right? Like the example of your father, when we receive one of these demand letters, it feels rolly, right? And you people use these words for these attorneys because, you know, I mean, it's, there is a financial component that the lawyer's going after, but we need to remember that behind these, these complaints, there are people who are frustrated by your website. These are, these are, you know, people. And so there's a human element, but it's also potential customers that you're losing. So I love hearing the details. Is there though any technology that people should be aware of that, or, or resources for people to do a thorough scan of their website check, right?

Eric Stegemann (14:09):

There's a number of websites that if you search for a WCAG compliance or accessibility compliance, now I fair warning. Almost all of them are trying to sell you something. So they're going to sell you a compliant, a full compliance audit perhaps, or they might sell you making your website compliant. So just be aware that most of them, that you'll go to these checkers or compliance tools, they're going to, they're going to spam you and try to sell you things. But there's other great tools that are out there. You know, if like a tribe, when we build websites for our broker customers, we obviously build all these things in, but we use third party tools to help us with that. One of the reasons why is because we want to make sure that we're staying up to date and there's a lot, I mean, it's, it's definitely a daunting thing.

Eric Stegemann (

  continue reading

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