Website Accessibility: Reducing Risks and Improving Consumer Experience [WATCH]

[TRANSCRIPT]

Kristen:

Welcome everyone, thank you, for joining us, for our workshop on website accessibility today, we’ll be talking about reducing your risk and improving your consumer experience.

Ashley:

Thanks, Kristen! I’m Ashley, and together we are Merit Create, a consumer experience agency, that helps health plans and health care, organizations work more closely with their consumers to improve outcomes, on both sides.

We believe purely in meeting consumers, where they are and that revelation came after decades of consumer marketing experience, for both of us.

Our goal, is to make health care more accessible, more equitable, and generally easier for consumers to understand and navigate, so that in turn, health plans and health care organizations can have longer more mutually beneficial relationships with their members and consumers.

So, to give you a roadmap about what we’re going to talk about today:

Essentially, the who, what, where, why, and how? And even a little bit of when regarding website, accessibility, and user experience.

Why it’s important. What it consists of, and the risks and rewards associated with web accessibility.

So let’s jump in.

When you decided to sign up for this workshop, you may have seen my LinkedIn post or the blog post on our website with my analogy for traveling.

I do travel internationally, however, it came, to me later in life.

Predominantly, because I’m an extremely anxious travel traveler, and I have sero sense of direction.

Literally no sense. So, when I’m planning a trip, I’m extremely worried about if I’m going to be able to get where I need to go.

Am I going to be able to read and understand signs?

If I’m going to be able to communicate.

If there will be English speakers.

I had a Once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to go to Italy, a few years back most of the trip was via rail and I was so nervous, about those railway signage, and if I was going to get on the wrong train.

After 2 weeks, 4 stops within the country, and I onle got on the wrong train once.

So, it worked out pretty well.

The kind of concerns I have are natural when you’re planning a visit to an unfamiliar area, and often trips like that require a level of thinking and planning that are years in the making.

But what if you made a trip weekly or even daily?

What if you landed in a foreign country every single day and had to figure out where to go, how to get from point A to point B, and how to get help if you need it.

For individuals with accessibility or disability concerns, a visit to any website is not much different from a visit to a foreign country

When they first land on a website, they really have no idea if they’re going be able to find what they need.

For example, is a screen reading tool going be able to read out the content on a page?

Will images and content be structured in a way that narrates what’s on the screen?

Will the colors and objects on the website have enough contrast for someone that is color blind or has a visual impairment?

Will videos on the website have close captions? If there are live virtual events, do they offer closed captioning?

Will they be able to stop any motion if it becomes too distracting or triggering.

Can the website be navigated using assistive technology where the clickable elements are large enough to make it easy to use a touch screen for navigating.

And if someone doesn’t understand the language on the website, is there an option to switch to a different language?

Is the language that that person needs easy to find with information about translator assistance?

Is the information on the website easy to understand and written at a lower reading level?

Most folks read at a fifth-grade reading level, or even below.

Is the information written in plain language and simple sentence structures?

It’s just a whole lot to consider and if you don’t have lived experience with a condition or an impairment that affects your daily life, it’s really easy, and innocent, to overlook those considerations.

Even when we’re actively thinking, how do I get information A in front of person B, there’s a lot going on simultaneous to that thought.

For example, if we are required to communicate specific things – maybe from our regulator – we have to parse out “how do I fulfill that requirement.”

But then make it make sense for the end user, and a lot of times, specific language is prescribed to us about what we can say and can’t say, so that push and pull is really challenging.

And in my experience, it’s no more prevalent than anywhere than in health care.

I’ve been a marketing leader for a really long time now, and I’ve had the good fortune and the responsibility of overseeing several website projects.

Whether that’s a redesign or a design from scratch, and one of my favorite stories, and it’s relevant for us today, is when I first started working in managed care about six year ago.

My background was not in health care, and so the learning curve was steep.

Those of you that are in health care the – the acronyms, the jargon – it’s overwhelming.

I’d be in meetings, I’d hear somebody just rattle off an acronym, and I would write it down and later, I would go to our website, and look for it.

And let tell you, our search on our website produced zero results, I’m not exaggerating.

I could not find anything.

Now, I’m pretty savvy. I’m educated, and I know my way, around a website.

So if I was trying to understand what my organization did and how they could help people, I can’t even imagine what a mom would be going through who has a kiddo that’s just been diagnosed with a disability.

Or, a veteran who has PTSD and in that very moment decides that they want to get mental health help.

Then they can’t find what they need.

That’s the kind of website we had. Our website was written for those people.

So, we knew it was a big project on our to do list.

We actually went through the process of bringing on a digital agency partner who did a comprehensive analysis.

We got a 280-page PowerPoint analysis and ultimately, it was a two word conclusion.

We had a dumpster fire.

Not exaggerating those are the exact words our agency used.

It really had become a document repository. It was an online place where thousands of documents were stored and where, I like to say, information went to die. That’s really about it.

It was designed with pure and good intent. There were IT professionals, marketers, clinicians, and lots of staff at the table.

It was on a tough platform, and because it was health care there’s So much information. Everybody just kept piling on and piling up, and it lacked input from user experiences.

It wasn’t regularly maintained for monitored for trends or best practices.

So the fire started, maybe as a small flame. But every time we added TPFs, announcements, unstructured landing pages, and broken links it became a full-blown dumpster fire.

We did an 18 month project and completely overhauled the website.

I hope those that are here are not consequently going through that right now, but if you are, and if you ever want to call me and vent, please do, it’s a tough undertaking.

If you’re here, I do assume that you’re thinking about updates to improve accessibility, experience, and achieve compliance with regulations.

So when we’re taking a project to where we’re going to achieve regulatory compliance, you’re definitely starting with accessibility as the starting point.

There’s several standards and guidelines that will influence your direction.

We’re going to get into 508 and the Americans with Disabilities Act a little bit later when we talk, about risk, but for right now, I just want you to have an overview of everything that is sitting at the accessibility table with us.

The first is your Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, commonly referred to as WCAG.

Those are the first and most familiar. They were published originally 23 years ago. Currently WCAG 2.1 AAA is the gold standard achievement in website Accessibility.

But 2.2 guidelines are coming.

One thing to note, if this is your first foray into this, the WCAG were developed independently and they’re not affiliated with any sort of government or regulatory entity.

The second person at the table is the Federal Government via Section 508.

The Amendment to the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 is where Section 508 appears and it requires federal agencies to make their electronic information and technology accessible to people with disabilities.

The most recent update to these standards, went into effect in 2018, and it made changes to reflect more current trends, technologies, and standards.

Then we have the ADA Titles II and III.

This part of the Americans with Disabilities Act prohibits discrimination against people with disabilities with all services, programs, and activities of state and local government.

This includes services, programs, and activities offered both in person and an online.

In July of this year (2022), the DOJ announced that it’s going to be adding website accessibility, guidelines to Article II of the ADA for the very first time.

They expect to roll those out initially in March and that will be followed by some listening, questions, some tweaking, and final implementation by the end of the year (2023).

Their early indication is that WCAG 2.1 will be the regulatory standard.

So any organization who receives federal funding will have to meet that standard.

And lastly, we have statewide requirements at the table with us.

Many managed care and other health care contracts at the state Level are now having accessibility standards incorporated.

Most of them, reference WCAG and Section 508, but then add on their own specific expectations.

For example, here in North Carolina, where Kristen and I are based, we see that Medicaid contracts are being updated with WCAG and 508 Compliance requirements, but then there are also performance standards around uptime, page speeds, and where things have to live on a certain part of your website.

We’re not going to jump into those today, because they’re so unique to each state, it’s just important to know that your contract will likely have additional standards beyond WCAG and 508.

So, with that I’m going to toss it to Kristen and she’s going to take us through some specific components that make a website accessible.

 

Kristen: Thanks, Ashley. So we talked a little bit about why we might be addressing accessibility.

We wanted compile a list of 12 of the most critical components to look at.

This is not everything. We know there’s more, but we also wanted to make it digestible and easy to tackle.

We warned you is a long list; so we’re going to get started.

The first thing to tackle would be Alt Text. Or you may hear this is alternative text, alt text, or all tags.

These are referencing your images and your videos on your website, and sometimes your links.

I’ve shown some examples here on the screen.

I see this all too often. In alt text, it is often auto generated by your website platform, as whatever the file name is that you’ve uploaded.

So you may have imagedate.jpeg, shutterstock image, or you may try to use it as a call to action.

The best way to do this is to clearly and concisely describe what the picture is showing.

So here we see 3 young adults, standing together and smiling while they’re looking at their phones.

Someone that’s using a screen reader, or other assistive technology, will read the page and dictate what is on that page for the for the end user. It’ll describe the image.

That person is now getting the same experience and the same context, that someone who may be seeing abled.

A little pro tip here, and you’ll hear me throw these out throughout –

Accessibility also really helps with your search engine optimization.

So alt text will also, help search robots, like the Google bots, go through your page and comb and categorize your content.

Your alt text is also telling Google what a person may find on your site.

So just like someone who can’t see it, the search crawlers also can’t see and helps tell them how to categorize your content.

So a double win.

On the next slide here, we have hyperlinks.

There’s a few ways to do this.

We all have required PDFs. So, I showed an example here of a Member Handbook required to be on your website and required to be accessible.

When you post it, it may be a really long URL, because it’s buried in a document library somewhere.

That’s a terrible way.

To do that the next way is to say click here and I’ll go over the reason why not to do that.

Another good way is you can embed the link on the relevant text on the screen.

My recommendation is for important text that is hyperlinked be called out into a button.

The biggest reason for that is both for seeing and non-seeing abled individuals this highlights it and this brings it out of the content.

It’s a lot easier to find for someone that is seeing impaired, or maybe blind, because their screen reader will look at hyperlinks and it’ll read within the context of the of the page. But it also allows the user to skip through the page and look for a highlight.

If everything says click here, the person using the screen reader doesn’t know what they’re actually clicking on.

So, it gives them a more clear expectation of what they’ll find.

Maybe it helps them narrow down what they’re looking for quicker.

And I think that’s just an easier way for everybody.

On our next tip, we have video and audio.

The important thing here, just like your alt text, you want to provide users that cannot actually hear your content, the ability to read it.

So offer transcripts, offering closed captions, offering other modes of being able to read what is on the screen and close captioning and transcripts.

While we are most often creating videos in English, you can and should offer in other languages as well.

I want to pause, here. I’m, going to show on the next slide, there will be some motion, some blinking.

We’ll talk about why that’s important but if that’s triggering to you in any way, if you have any kind of impairment that might be impacted by that type of motion on screen, please look away.

And I’ll let you know when we’ve gone past it.

On our next slide here, ‘tis the season.

We may be updating our website with festive images or we may use graphics to animate a story on our page.

Flashing, blinking, and moving elements like this should be controlled by the end user and the biggest reason of that is it can be distracting or can even cause seizures for those with photo sensitivity.

So, for someone being able to turn it on or turn it off, they get to control the experience on that website.

For someone that may have a visual processing disorder, it could be really distracting, and they may not be able to get through your content or really understand what your pages tell them.

You always want to give the option.

The recommendation here is always have the motion disabled, so that the user can clearly identify how to enable and they have the option to choose their experience.

Our next tip. Here is color contrast.

Color contrast is in reference to a background color and a foreground color.

We most often talk about text on backgrounds. But this also applies to your icons, your graphics, and your buttons.

The biggest thing here is to make sure that anyone has poor vision or is colorblind can see what is on your page.

I’ve showed an example here.

The background of our top of our slide is a darker blue and the white text is on top.

**coughing** Excuse me.

Alright, so again the top of our slide here is the darker blue, the white text on top of that is a white text show in the contrast of 7.64 : 1.

WCAG recommends that at least 4.1 : 1 for normal text meets the 2.1 Level AA but for Level AAA you need a little bit higher contrast.

Oh, sorry! I apologize for the Larger text. You need a 3 : 1 ratio.

So we’ve met the requirements here.

What I like about this tool (www.accessibleweb.com) the most is that it demonstrates what an icon will look like, demonstrates what a large or small text will look like, and the way you’re able to test visually online what it will look like.

Our next tip here is headings.

With our headings, there’s a few different things here. It is an HTML component of your site.

What it does is when you identify that that top text of your website is the page title, as an h1, you’re telling your website to pull from a style that is defined in the background.

That stylesheet makes sure that your whole website looks consistent.

All your headings are the right size, they’re the right colors, they’re the right font style.

By doing that, you’re also telling screen readers what is priority content; what is the most important content, and then going down.

With some sub headers, you’ll start to see how the content is categorized, how it’s broken down, and it shows the hierarchy of how to read through.

So using this is also big for your SEO value. Just like just like your alt tags, the search robots will be looking for what’s the most important topic on this page and your page style will likely show that for them in the headings.

Alright, your next tip. We just mentioned page titles so again, page, titles are the text that appear at the title bar of your website.

It may also appear right on your page.

Your meta descriptions are in the background.

Let’s say it’s your library card where it kind of indexes what is that page about what. That tells Google or other search engines what is the purpose of this website, what will someone find on it, tells someone that is Google searching what will I find on this page.

So you want to make sure, that it’s clear, concise, and right to the point.

Because, pro tip, you only have about a 160 characters, or less in the meta description and it’s about 60 characters in that page title.

So it has to be super short, super clear, and for a user that may not know your site is even exists and using screen reading technology, when they go to search the internet for a topic that your site provides, those page titles will help those readers, the searchers look and find your information.

Okay, our next is keyboard navigation.

We have talked about assistive technology, this is for someone who may be seeing impaired, but it also may be someone that is mobility impaired, so they need to use assistive technology to navigate site.

A person may not be able to physically move a mouse around, so they may be able to tab up and down, side to side with their keyboard.

It’s really important to make sure that your site has the ability to respond to those keys.

This also applies to stopping and starting video, being able to start and stop any other interactive content, and being able to tab through hyperlinks or content, and be able to “click.”

Next one.

For our forms on our website, we all have forms that collect information in one way or another.

It’s important to make sure that your labels are outside of your form fields.

The reason for this is screen readers are not able to actually read what is written inside that label box, so if you’re looking for a name it should be beside or above a field, so that users know in this box I need to enter my name.

You should also make sure again, keyboard navigation. Make sure they can bounce through the fields as needed up and down.

We also see this a lot – that we’ll talk a little bit on the next slide – about responsive design, but forms is another one that really needs to respond so that your experience of using a touch screen versus a laptop versus your phone and a smaller screen, forms need to scale and adapt to those different uses so that people can actually use it, the same, no matter what they’re using for a device.

And speaking of content (our next component), so a big part of this is responsive design.

What I’ll focus on here is really the screen sizes and how you have to make sure that your site is designed in a way that the experience is consistent.

The visual cues are consistent, the structure of your page is consistent, when it scales up and down.

Make sure if text is going left to right and right to left [alternating] with images, you need to make sure that they are stacked at the order that they’re supposed to be so when you’re scrolling through on a smaller screen, you’re not losing those visual cues of the context the images are trying to tell you.

Another content appearance tip – there is no true definition of what your text size should be.

As you saw on our accessible web screenshot of color contrasting, they do make recommendations of what your text should be.

But because fonts are different styles, and they might appear in different ways, there’s no predefined check the list for font size.

So I recommend making your bare minimum as a 16 pixel, minimum for your body text. We do see 18 and 20 point font being a pretty standard across the board, as well.

And compatibility is our next tip. We’ve mentioned this a couple of times – when you’re building your site, you don’t always know what your end users are going to be using.

They may prefer Google Chrome. They may prefer Microsoft Edge.

They may be using their phone and using safari or another.

Or opera is one that I’m actually not familiar with, but it has about 2% of the market share.

With these different browsers, you want to make sure, your website [appears consistently on each browser].

I want to make sure that your website can produce the same experience on each browser and same thing with operating devices.

For operating systems, you have Android, Apple, Linux, and Windows as your top.

You want to make sure that however your website is designed and built, it can accommodate the way that those different systems present the information.

A little pro tip for your web teams and your developer teams out there, there are paid and free tools that will help you test those. My recommendation is to always develop and build in a staging environment, test those and see how they are produced before publishing.

You don’t need to buy a laptop of every style, and you don’t need to Download every Browser.

These tools will show you what they look like in different experiences.

Content Accessibility – so this image shows you that there’s a clear way to get there, and there’s a tangled way to get there.

Your website should use clear, concise, and plain language throughout your site.

You should accommodate different reading levels and make sure that you go for the lowest possible.

Another part of content is language.

Many of us may have used Google translate while trying to read a map in another country.

Google translate will only auto generate a translation of what the screen is seeing.

While it may be somewhat correct, it misses that tone, it misses that jargon, the context that that language may be providing if it was translated by a human.

So I strongly recommend making your content available based on translations from humans.

And also stress test it with humans that can read it to make sure from top to bottom: does this content make sense?

A couple of tips that I like to share, I really like that the CMS has a toolkit, I reference it all the time about how to write clear create effective materials.

The CDC has a plain language communication tool. I use this a lot when I’m entering public health terms or different things about medical related, that may not be easy to explain in very simple terms.

Because we don’t use simple terms all day long in our day jobs, it helps get some standard ways to provide stuff in simple language.

And my last tool that I really like to use, is the readable.io. It gives me a rough reading level score, show’s how it’s rating and then it’ll tell me the areas that maybe the words, are too big so I can address my Content Right there on the website

**coughing**

This is our last tip – user experience. This is our most important one of the day.

All of the components that we’ve talked about, they can indeed, make your website more accessible.

They could check the checklist of making sure you are WCAG or 508 compliant, but a very critical accessibility factor that is often overlooked is checking off the list of user experience.

Everything mentioned is useless if it cannot be found.

It needs to be organized in a logical, helpful, natural, and I would even say intuitive way.

If your content can’t be found, you’ll just be sitting on that dumpster fire.

But to check that, you want to make sure that your content is not buried behind endless clicks to get there.

How many pages does someone have to go to find that handbook or that brochure or that screening tool?

The navigation – is it organized in a way that makes sense to the end user? Or is it organized in a way that maybe your organization operates so, to you, it makes sense in these boxes.

For the end user that doesn’t show up and do your job every day, do they understand where the content logically should be stored for PDFs?

Again, we all have PDFs that we have to share. Is there an option to read that text on the screen? Is there a way to see that on the screen, versus in a new tab?

Both of these will offer the screen readers an easier time reading what’s on that PDF.

It’ll also offer the user a way to choose whether they open or not the PDF or can they stay on the website, so you don’t lose them bouncing off the site.

Cross linking – making sure that people can access information side to side, top to bottom of your site.

This could be breadcrumbs at the top, showing the trail pages it took to get here.

It could be a sidebar, or a bottom bar, where related links are appearing, this not only helps keep people on your website, but it helps them in their journey to finding the information.

That’s relative to them and related to what they’re, looking for.

Search – this is super important. No matter how hard you work at the navigation, or organization, some people just want to type in a search and find what they’re looking for.

So when they do that, can someone filter their results? Can they sort their results?

Do they have the ability to type in related keywords that may produce similar results? They didn’t know the actual terms, but they know a similar word.

It’s really important to customize your search and not just use an out of the box, widget testing and getting feedback.

I cannot stress this enough. We’re all humans. And we all have different experiences.

So it’s really important to get that feedback from outside human eyes human hands and make sure that when they navigate your site, it gives you feedback were things where they expected? what path did they take to get there? So that you can optimize the path that they took for others making sure that your content is adaptable to everyone’s different journey, is so important.

And you won’t know that until you ask them.

Get vulnerable and get some feedback.

Alright that was my 12 components of website accessibility.

 

Ashley: Awesome. Thank you.

So if you can accomplish at least those 12 things but then you do it with an eye towards user experience at the end of that you’re going have an improved consumer experience.

If you do all those things you will have a fully accessible and inclusive website.

You kind of use that as the proverbial guidebook, if you think of our travel,example that I shared at the beginning, that helps everyone.

You know, I’ll never forget when I took my kids to Disney for the first time somebody said to me “you got to get that book: Disney with kids.”

You know, if you have kids or if you’ve gone to Disney, it’s overwhelming. So you know my husband made a lot of fun of me for having the book.

Well, by day 2 before we did anything he’d say what does the book say?

So a guidebook is a good thing to have.

And it’s for everyone, not just those with disabilities, but anyone who decides to visit your site.

When health care consumers can easily access information and engage with their content, they are one step closer to a healthier outcome.

Improved consumer experience translates to more engaged consumers and improved consumer engagement creates outcomes.

It creates outcomes for individuals, and it creates outcomes for health plans and health systems.

To validate that thinking, we really only need to look at the Medicare Advantage quality scoring metrics.

While customer experience measures have been part of the star equation, for years, under the new methodology for calculating quality scores, consumer experience related metrics will determine a 57% of overall star ratings by 2023.

That’s a 25% increase from this year’s ratings, and with 1.5 billion plus in stars incentives available to health plans. Consumer experience is nothing short of critical.

It’s also worth noting, and Kristen did a great job of pointing this out, but a more accessibly designed website naturally improves your SEO because it presents more on page content for search bots to find.

This comes in real handy when we have open enrollment or opt in periods, reenrollment periods, program awareness, anything where people need to find your organization.

Consumer experience and accessibility, will deliver SEO, time and time again.

The other side of that coin, or let’s say the index of the guidebook if you will, is when you achieve accessibility, it reduces your risk of lawsuits, fines, or consequences, from your contracts, and your accreditations.

A Section 508 Compliance violation – the max penalty, which will be for most of our organizations, is a $55,000 fine for the First violation and a $110,000 for each subsequent violation.

That’s not a small amount of money and we mentioned earlier the DOJ recently announced plans to impose new website accessibility rules under Title II of the ADA.

Previously, website accessibility has fallen under general accessibility rules under Title III.

There’s nothing specific to digital or web accessibility.

But even with Title III as the standard, there were over 2,300 website accessibility lawsuits filed in 2021.

That’s a double digit increase over 2020 and its continuing to grow current estimates show that 1 in 5 of all 88 cases and from the DOJ are related now to digital accessibility.

So when Title II goes in to effect, most likely in 2023, any organization that receives federal funding is going to be required to adhere to WCAG 2.1.

So the bad news is this will mean more DOJ complaints around the ADA and it’s going to continue to increase.

But the good news is that it’s going create a very clear set of parameters for consumers so they can know what to expect from any website.

And for health care organizations, on what do I have to deliver within my website experience.

The other good news is that as health care organizations are preparing for compliance, which is hopefully now for those of us that are that are on the call, we get an opportunity to do more than a facelift.

You don’t have to put lipstick on the pig, or pile onto the dumpster fire with a bunch of third party widgets in place.

We have time, to take a more comprehensive approach to accessibility design.

And so hopefully at this point, you’re saying okay, well, I’m a little overwhelmed but “how at risk is my current website, and where do I start?”

We’ll give you just four quick tips and it’s the for A’s so it’s pretty easy to remember

The first is to audit.

You want to start with a comprehensive internal audit, it’s really important to get a baseline of where you’re site is from an accessibility perspective.

You want to rate and review each of the main areas that Kristen just went over. You really want to do that strictly internally to start and not just with your team.

The marketing team is going to be probably the first ones to do that, but it’s important to get feedback from the rest of the organization as well.

Once you have this information, you’re going want to test your findings and then augment them with what you hear from the second A.

Which is your audience.

Who’s visiting today? Can they find what they’re looking for? Are they leaving satisfied, or they happen to have more questions than they came with.

You can collect this feedback through surveys and interviews, and then combine that with your own audit and your own analytics.

The reason to do them in this order is that when you do the audit, what you’re going to experience is that everybody’s going to have sort of their – for me, my pet peeve, and everybody that’s working for me knows how much search is so important to me, that if you just can’t find what you need quickly, it’s a huge miss.

But everybody’s going to have their own areas, and they’re going to say, “we think consumers are really struggling here, we think they’re really struggling here.”

Then when you go and you actually poll your audience, you’re going find a pretty big divergence between those two things.

It happens. It’s fascinating, but it really helps you to kind of blend, those two together.

So then the third A is looking at your analytics.

We’ve talked to who’s visiting our site, but who is not coming? What and who do we want to show up.

When we took our website at Cardinal, the website really was written for individuals, for members, who were utilizing services that were managed by our company.

However, 80% of our visitors were providers, and we knew that we had to shift that pretty seriously in order to achieve what we wanted to achieve.

So you want to understand what are your audience preferences what are, their internet behaviors, where do they come from?

Maybe they’re going to your DHHS website, and they come to you from there.

Find out where they’re coming from and then use your SEO strategies and web analytics to monitor the, as we call it, nonverbal feedback that your visitors provide you.

For example let’s say you post something on social media and it’s targeted to an audience that you want.

Maybe you have a new smoking cessation program and you want people to opt in.

You really want to monitor what happens on the time horizon after that post. Did people show up? How or where did they go once they showed up? How long did they stay? Did they, in fact, opt in or where did you lose them?

Those kind of analytics are really, really important to stay on top of on a regular basis.

And then the final A – and Kristen already talked about this a little bit – is just accessibility testing.

We want to regularly test: how’s it performing? We want to use qualitative and quantitative analysis.

And I know quantitative is a little quicker, but qualitative as really important equally important.

If you create an animated video and you post it. Leaving it you’re like, yeah, we finally did an animated video, it’s going to be so peaceful.

Well, is it? So you want to send your content to your content advisory board.

The link when you get feedback, you want to see how it performs on the page, and then iterate accordingly.

So I know. We talked about a lot today.

I hope it was helpful for you I hope you’re excited to get started ahead of all these regulations that are coming. But also, just because it’s the right thing to do.

And hopefully, you’re kind of wondering why Kristen and I care, and why we want you to have a better website.

So, most importantly, we have both sat in your seat and when we decided to launch Merit, we really just wanted to be the kind of partner that we needed when we were trying to do right by our members, and manage requirements, and be awesome marketers, and deliverout comes to the organization.

And personally, we have a soft spot for Medicaid and Medicare consumers, and we made a conscious choice to try to take what we learned and do good in the world, for them, by way of their health plan.

The great thing about that is that it helps health Plans and health systems, do better.

So we’re not developers, we are not going to write code for your site, but we are absolutely the team that can help you assess your current state, gather all those missing insights on your consumers’ experience, and gather their feedback to help understand what does your audience want and candidly, deserve, and help you create and manage your plan.

So if you’d like to know about how we do that we’d love to share more, we can connect.

You can reach us on LinkedIn.

You can go to our website, meritcreate.com, or you can send us a quick email info@meritcreate.com.

Kristen, with that, I’ll pop it back to you. If there’s any questions. If you want to run through, those, and if not, we’ll, we’ll send you on your way

 

Kristen:

I think we’re over a little more than we anticipated – a lot of good information today. So I’m going to wrap them up, and we’ll address them individually. But I wanted to thank you everyone appreciate you joining us.

 

Ashley:

Awesome, alright, be well.