Transcript
Dave Gardy here at the M-Enabling Summit, 2018 in Arlington, Virginia and we're at the Siteimprove booth. It's a pretty crowded booth. And with me is Jennifer Chadwick, who is the Lead Accessibility Strategist and Kevin Rydberg, who is the Senior Accessibility Consultant. Thank you guys for joining us. First of all, just give us an overview of the company, Jennifer, what's it all about?
So Siteimprove is a global company, founded in Denmark, probably about 15 years ago, founded by developers who had a goal to create a crawler tool that would access websites for a number of reasons: SEO, analytics, broken links, misspellings, but one of the key things we focus on is accessibility, ensuring that people are aware of how to look for specific accessibility issues and how to fix them. So we kind of provide an overall solution, on not just the software but manual testing services to go along with an automated testing platform and consulting, and guiding people through the process to make themselves and their companies accessible.
So is the primary benefit of the company accessibility in addition to some of the other things that Siteimprove does?
I think we do everything well, but it all sort of contributes in that way. I don't know, Kevin, if you would agree with me, but I think SEO in particular, the way that you structure a site for that, also aides with accessibility. So, it all comes full circle.
We like to think of our company as digital inclusion, which means we're taking a holistic approach to improving all of your processes, providing the tools, the training, the software, et cetera, so that you can manage information in a very efficient way, with accessibility being one of the key drivers and components of that process.
Now do you have federal clients of the US government?
We do, we actually have clients pretty much across any vertical, any industry you can think of. Education is a very strong area for us as well as federal, state, and local governments, retail, hospitality, legal ... So if you have a website, we can assist you.
Siteimprove is probably all Section 508 compliant, then, if it's federal agencies?
Yeah, Section 508 compliant. We actually have folks on our team that specifically are there to make sure that the tool itself is compliant and works well for many of our users who are persons with disabilities.
So how's the show been for ya? What are some of the questions people are coming up and asking you guys about your product?
I think one of the key things is, because Wick Egg 2.1 has now just been released, are we aware of that? And I can actively say we're actively involved in it. So one of the key things ... We partner with the W3C, we're active members in a Y Tools project, which makes sure the testing requirements for Wick Egg 2.0 and 2.1, we're out working to create those along with the W3C. So it's gonna be incorporated into the tool as soon as possible. We just wanna make sure what we're providing is at the forefront of the innovations in terms of policy and development, but also what customers need to understand.
What do you tell customers who wanna know what distinguishes you from some of the other companies?
Well, I think the suite of tools is one of the first differentiators, and I like to think of our team, our folks, as a product unto themselves. We have an excellent support training community, education department, the developers and the involvement that they've got at many different levels. But I really think it's about the people fully as much as the product.
Excellent, how's the show been for you so far?
It's been great, it's really nice to see a lot of different vendors offering services and products that coincide with what we do. It's just really inspiring.
And if people wanna find out more about Siteimprove, where do they go on the web?
That would be Siteimprove.com. We have a global site, but we're in several different continents. So you can go individually into each of those regions and find out more.
Siteimprove.com, I've been talking with Jennifer Chadwick and Kevin Rydberg. Guys, thanks so much for giving us that perspective. I'm Dave Gardy here at M-Enabling Summit. Stay tuned for more.
