Episode Summary
Accessibility Breakdown — Show Notes
In this episode of Accessibility Breakdown, Mark Miller and Justin Stockton dig into three timely accessibility topics: online retail accessibility, CSUN’s new innovation track, and whether PDFs are finally on the way out.They start with an article by Claire McDonald, based on research from Nexer’s The Hidden Journey report, which highlights how online retail still creates major barriers for disabled shoppers. Mark and Justin discuss why these issues keep happening, how cart abandonment and loyalty intersect with accessibility, and why the problem often comes down to leadership, ongoing integration, and organizational maturity rather than a one-time audit.
Next, they shift to CSUN’s upcoming innovation track, a new initiative designed to give accessibility innovators a place to present ideas, get feedback, and connect with vendors and users. They explore how this could become a kind of incubator for assistive technology, and why CSUN continues to evolve as a hub for both established companies and new ideas.
Finally, they discuss an article asking whether we’re witnessing the slow death of the PDF. The conversation covers the limits of PDFs on mobile, the challenge of maintaining accessible PDFs at scale, and why HTML often provides a more flexible and user-friendly alternative. They also reflect on how PDFs became so entrenched in the first place and why many organizations are still trying to move away from them.
Topics covered
- Why online retail accessibility still fails disabled shoppers
- Cart abandonment, loyalty, and the business case for accessibility
- The role of leadership, QA, and third-party audits
- CSUN’s new innovation track and pavilion
- How accessibility innovation gets pressure-tested
- The future of PDFs versus accessible HTML
- Why accessible web experiences help everyone
Key takeaways
- Accessibility issues in retail remain widespread, even in 2026.
- One-time fixes are not enough; accessibility must be built into organizational processes.
- CSUN’s innovation track could help surface and shape the next generation of assistive technology.
- PDFs remain common, but HTML often offers a better path for usability and accessibility.
- Better accessibility improves the experience for all users, not just disabled users.
Mentioned in this episode
- Online retail accessibility is failing disabled customers
- The Hidden Journey, Missed revenue opportunities and recommendations for responsible retailers
- INNOVATION TRACK: WHERE THE FUTURE OF ACCESSIBILITY COMES TO LIFE
- Are We Witnessing the Slow Death of the PDF?
Transcript
Mark Miller (00:06)
Hey, welcome to the Accessibility Breakdown. I am Mark, and this is every week we pay tribute to those who stand out to us as leading by accessibility by picking three topics that strike us in some way. This week, we’re gonna talk about online retail accessibility as failing disabled customers. Yes, we’re gonna be talking about this again if you’ve been in the industry for a while. This is a topic that seems not to want to go away.
Justin Stockton (00:10)
Justin?
Mark Miller (00:35)
so we’ve got an interesting article by Claire McDonald on this, and then her article is based on research by a company called Nexer, N E X E R, and they did a a study called The Hidden Journey, Missed Revenue Opportunities and Recommendations for Responsible Retailers. So we’re wrapping those two into that one discussion. and they’re they’re tied together.
The next thing we’re going to talk about is innovation track, where the future of accessibility comes to life. And this is a CSUN. a couple things that CSUN, for those of you who are familiar, know that CSUN is the California state university. And it’s also a a huge accessibility assistive technology specifically conference that happens every year. So
Justin and I, it’s kind of our our the big deal every year where we go and meet a lot of people that we are great friends with and that do this work and that it was our first episode was about our trip to CSUN. and this is sort of something new and very, very cool that they’re doing. And then the third topic is Are We Witnessing the Slow Death of the PDF? And this is by Mac Clemmens.
Clemmens and it’s a interesting somewhat trenchant, not surprising, look at kind of where PDFs fit or don’t fit as the case may be in this modern web landscape.
So we’re gonna start with this online retailer, online retail discussion here. So the two things here are Claire McDonald’s online retail accessibility is failing disabled customers, and she pulled this article, which the her article is a great article to go to because it really summarizes all this. But she pulls it from this big kind of thick study, which Justin and I really kind of got into the study.
but I don’t know that that’s what everybody’s gonna want to look at. But if you kinda wanna see some of the the real power behind the numbers and the things that Claire talks about in her article and she links to it as well, there’s a really interesting report called The Hidden Journey, missed revenue opportunities and recommendations for resell tail tailors by Nexer is very interesting to dig into. But so the whole reason I wanted to talk about this
is because thirteen years ago when I got into accessibility, a great part of the work that we were doing was to help make retail sites accessible. And this was back in the kind of days of Target, you know, the big big Target lawsuit that drove accessibility and that there was there was a couple of kind of retail related things that changed the
view on whether or not you needed a physical location as a nexus for online sales and so there’s a lot of stuff going on in retail at this time. We’ve had a lot of lawsuits around it. We’ve had a lot of for years, over a decade, we’ve ha we’ve got there’s overlays which we all know are really band-aid solutions. They don’t nothing’s automatically fixing your website for accessibility.
and then we have organizations out there that have come up with specific solutions and and market focuses on just retail. So it was really interesting to me, Justin, to see this article and to look at some of the statistics. Like it says eighty one it found that eighty-one percent of disabled shoppers have issues buying online with fifty five.
things saying things such as navigation of pops up to causing a lack of accessibility while browsing retailers. This 81% this about, around, more than what it was. I don’t remember what it was back in the day, but I was like, yeah, that’s kind of what I’ve always heard. and the other percentage that’s in here, I don’t know if I can pull it up really quickly, but the the the idea is that shoppers in general
That have a hard time on a site, abandon it. There’s a cart abandonment issues. There’s just I can’t I can’t get the information I want and the thing I want, I can’t add it to the card, I can’t whatever, and they’re out. And people with disabilities are all almost double down on that. They they get to a site they can’t use and they’re out. And then when they find something they can use, the loyalty is incredible.
So whatever degree there will the people will abandon stuff for when they like it, they just stay with it. It is such a powerful market position to be in. It is absolutely shocking to me that this article is not something trudged up from ten years ago, but is it this is June twenty ninth, twenty twenty six, this article came out. It’s now.
Justin Stockton (06:11)
Yeah.
Mark Miller (06:12)
So what’s going on Justin? Why are we still talking about this?
Justin Stockton (06:17)
well there’s lots of reasons. But I I did feel like when we were kind of when I when you proposed this article that we we could have started it with, you know, breaking news, accessibility still a problem for retail. Like that would be our clickbait title for this.
Mark Miller (06:18)
Yeah.
Is that yeah is that really breaking news, right?
Justin Stockton (06:37)
Right, exactly.
but no, it’s I mean, the there’s so many there’s I think that it’s come a long way, especially for the major retailers. Your your targets, your Walmarts, your Amazons, like those those major retailers, I feel like they’ve come a long way. I think without I mean they don’t get into the data in the nexo report, like who they actually like
Mark Miller (06:55)
Hmm.
Justin Stockton (07:04)
What were the sites that were visited? Like when were they visited? the so it makes me does does make me wonder like, is this like predominantly like small business shops? Is it shops that are maybe on platforms like Wix or you know some of these other secondary kind of e-commerce sites, like stand-up e-commerce sites? in which case do like
Mark Miller (07:30)
Mm.
Justin Stockton (07:33)
If we were to look go through and kind of look and see like, actually, you know, forty percent of these sites that were visited, these retailers that were visited are all, you know, Wix sites. Then wow, if we just go to Wix and we fix them, like boom, forty percent taken care of. Everyone’s accessible. You know, we just up that margin you know, that quickly.
I don’t know. Like w that’s one of those things where you just don’t get into that level of data or hood or approach or you know, that sort of stuff. But
Mark Miller (08:06)
I think that’s a good point. I mean it’s like if we look at a lot of these companies that have specialized in in the accessibility of retail sites, they’ll they’ll say things like we’re a sho we we do Shopify, right? You know, we we focus on the accessibility of of sites written on top of Shopify or something like that. So, you know, that’s a really good question. Is it like the Shopify s sites are all set but there’s still so many things off of something like Shopify? And and this is this is not a statement, this is like
making your point, right? I tend to think it’s a little bit of everything, right? Like it’s probably there’s still a lot of sites on these major platforms that haven’t gone through this process. There’s it’s probably a little bit of people have chosen shortcut solutions, whatever those might be. And also that
I I think the one and done probably has a lot to do with it, where four or five years ago a major retailer may have dug deep into accessibility, but they didn’t integrate it into their everyday practices. They haven’t continued to have audits annually or or whatever the case may be. They haven’t educated their content teams, their development teams, their QA teams properly. They don’t have accessibility integrated into their purchasing
etc. etc. et cetera. So those in those cases it’s gone down. Because I’ll tell you Justin, like I did a lot of major retail sites. I also did a lot of like, hey, we sell pet supplies. And that’s our thing. You know, like a boutique pet supply. I did a ton of those over the past you know
Justin Stockton (09:48)
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Mark Miller (10:01)
more than a a decade and still do, you know? And it’s so I think it’s a lot of we haven’t done it yet. We did it and we’re not integrated yet and we didn’t you know we didn’t like the cost of doing it the right way. So we did some other solution that just turns out is still frustrating customers. That’s gotta be it’s gotta be a little bit of everything, you know.
Justin Stockton (10:24)
Yeah.
It’s yeah. Well I mean you can you know, the the number you look at let’s say well just generic large retailer. no matter who it is, I guarantee you that there are far more developers working on that site than there are QA and even less people working focused on accessibility. You know, a lot of those companies rather than going to, you know,
Mark Miller (10:48)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
Justin Stockton (10:56)
vendors, for consultants, for accessibility testing, that sort of stuff. A lot of them are bringing those things in house, but their teams are still fairly small and they’re, you know, it’s a battle. it’s speed to market, pushing, you know, pushing the market. Yeah, we’ll work about we’ll we’ll focus on that in Q two, Q three instead. instead of making it a driving force that, you know, we’re gonna establish accessibility. It’s gonna be a
Mark Miller (11:08)
Right.
Justin Stockton (11:26)
core competency for all of our developers. It’s being driven by vice president of information technology or whatever it is. It’s that top down leadership that we always talk about.
Mark Miller (11:33)
Right.
Set
ex accessibility, maturity, leadership down, looking at the whole organization processes, procedures. I mean, we’re seeing so much of that right now. Like you and I see it a lot in higher education with Title Two and HHS that you know, which those deadlines have been moved. But the questions that we get as consultants are not like th they are like, Hey, we need this audited, right? Like but it’s more like how do we do this? How do we deal with this edge stuff? Like
Justin Stockton (11:39)
Yeah.
Mark Miller (12:05)
to use a cliche, they’re you know, we see them sort of getting into the weeds because they’re afraid of the consequences of not and and and a lot of them also just wanna make sure that their students have good experiences and I think that it’s no different for
Justin Stockton (12:06)
Okay.
Mark Miller (12:22)
retail, you know, that it’s not as simple as like, let’s audit our site, let’s run some scans, you know, that you have to be looking at from the leadership down, you have to be looking at the whole organization and make sure that it’s included. And you can’t ignore the third party part of it as well. Like I think that third party comes in with an authority that causes leadership to pay attention. Certainly
you have a much more well regarded V PAT when it’s produced by an objective third party. And when it pulls in house it’s easier to push those people off. You know what I mean? Like, you know.
Justin Stockton (12:52)
If only there was
yeah, yeah. But if
if only there was an international standard out there that helped you helped an organization maybe design for all people.
Mark Miller (13:08)
You mean like EN seventeen sixteen one? And or or guy you were just you were testing me. You were testing me, I know. So we’ve been we should take a pause here and say we’ve been we’ve had been off for a couple of weeks just
Justin Stockton (13:12)
You remember.
Test.
Mark Miller (13:21)
summer schedule and like that. So I should have forgotten that, but I didn’t. but it’s also EN seventeen sixteen one and what where you know I’m I’m an an invited expert on the accessibility maturity model. That is why those things like that, and I think those are the two sort of leading predominant things right now, are where now that organizations have come in and done audits and
Justin Stockton (13:38)
Mm-hmm.
Mark Miller (13:48)
maybe done a few things for integration, maybe they’re scanning on a regular basis, all good stuff, really turning their attention to the maturity of the organization itself. and we’re of course speculating. You know, we’re looking at this as long time accessibility of people and being like, my gosh, why are we still talking about this? And why are the percentages and numbers the same as they were years ago? so all this is speculation on our part in terms of why that might be. So don’t take any of that as like what’s actually going on. What’s going on is these numbers are what they are.
and that hasn’t changed a whole lot and that there’s still a significant amount of frustration. And by the way, let’s not forget about the curb cutout effect. If this frustration is happening with people with disabilities, this is retail across the board can be a better experience for everyone.
Justin Stockton (14:33)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah. Well and the
And I mean just the what’s the the customer service thing, you know, when one person doesn’t like something they tell ten friends and then those ten friends tell ten friends. I mean
Mark Miller (14:50)
It’s a shampoo commercial from the 80s, yes. That’s where that came. Yeah. I’m trying to remember the shampoo, but there’s it starts off with a single single frame, and there’s a woman that’s really happy with the hair, and she said, I use boo-boo, my hair came out. And then I told my friend, and they told their friends, and they did it, and that the whole screen fills up with a little tiny square. Yeah. So yes, this is exactly like shampoo. So write that down.
Justin Stockton (14:56)
Really?
yeah.
Which
you can also buy through retail.
Mark Miller (15:21)
Which
you could buy through retail, yeah. How are you gonna have a good experience with shampoo? Can’t buy it through retail. yeah, and then so both of you and I kinda like breezed through because we sort of got into the report.
Justin Stockton (15:23)
Right back in a circle.
Yeah.
Yeah, and the
cool part I think the for me, the cool part of the report was there is an entire section in here. So there’s an executive summary and all the fun things. But there is a barriers to access section section three of the report. And what I thought was actually cool about this was they actually looked at the specific areas of the e commerce retail.
Mark Miller (15:49)
Yeah.
Yeah, section three. Mm-hmm.
Justin Stockton (16:07)
kind of user experience or the or the user journey and looked at it from like the actual browsing for a product, selecting a product, purchasing a product, paying for the checkout process for a product, and then kind of the after checkout process. And then they focused on the specific problems like where were the specific off ramps during each one of those steps? And I thought that was a particularly interesting I haven’t seen that in a report
Mark Miller (16:14)
Mm-hmm.
That’s a really interesting data.
Yeah. So I think you bring up a really good point here. The one thing I will say about this report is it has new and interesting data that rewind ten plus years we weren’t seeing. So I you and I both I think need to dig into this a bit deeper. And then you also called out that they you learned that what was it, Purple Day? I can’t remember what it was called. What
Justin Stockton (17:00)
Purple Tuesday?
Yeah. So Purple Tuesday and hold on, I’m gonna bring it up because I don’t want to butcher this because it’s too important.
Mark Miller (17:01)
Purple Tuesday, yeah. Talk about Purple Tuesday.
I was trying to find it too. That’s why he passed it off to you.
Justin Stockton (17:12)
so Purple Tuesday.
It’s a little bit like it’s like small business Saturday. kind of it’s happens in typically in November, but it is a time where the let me let me I got it up here.
Purple Tuesday is an initiative that helps organizations take real practical steps to improve the disabled customer experience. It was launched in 2018 with one cle clear goal to turn accessibility into action. So kind of it says think Black Friday, but instead of discount codes, we’re talking about inclusive practices. And it typically happens in November leading up to like the Black Friday Christmas, holiday shopping season.
Mark Miller (17:42)
That’s pretty cool.
Is
Justin Stockton (18:01)
And it’s a way to focus in on, you know, making sure that persons with disabilities have access and can shop and do all the things that everyone else trying to, you know, to buy things for their loved ones or people that they don’t like get you know get to do that as well. Started in the UK. anyway, this is one of those like things where like you read one article, it leads you to another article, and that article leads you off to a third article.
So yeah, Purple Tuesday seems like a really cool thing and I
Mark Miller (18:33)
So like sham
like shampoo?
Justin Stockton (18:36)
Yes. If the articles were people shampooing their hair, then yes, it led from one shampoo to the next.
Mark Miller (18:44)
Got it. Alright.
Everything everything leads back to shampoo. the so did you was there any information like is purple to say something that happens in the US as well? Is it is it over in in the in Europe only right now or or is that just not addressed? ‘Cause if it’s
Justin Stockton (19:00)
I think it th it got started
it just got started in the UK. so I don’t think I’ve ever seen it in the US. But yeah, definitely something to put on our calendar to
Mark Miller (19:08)
I haven’t seen it either. We need to advocate for it this year and see if we can get it going in the US. Everybody help us.
All calling all accessibility companies, let’s make a big deal out of Purple Tuesday this year, even if you’re in the US and let’s just see if we can make this a thing across the board. All right. Well, Claire, thank you so much for your article that brought us to
Justin Stockton (19:23)
That’d be awesome.
Mark Miller (19:32)
that that summarizes this great that’s actually like I said the first place I would go if you’re interested in this and then we appreciate you linking out to the Nexter’s report Nexer’s N E X E R Nexer’s report and then Nexer I did a little research on them they’re kind of an interesting dev company thank you for doing this report really good stuff let’s jump over to
Justin Stockton (19:37)
Mm-hmm.
Mark Miller (20:00)
This CSUN was almost like a news thing that they put out or a like a press releasey sort of thing they put out. And it was it’s on the innovation track where the future of accessibility comes to life. So talk to us about that.
Justin Stockton (20:19)
Yeah. So it looks like next year at CSUN they are going to be offering a separate innovation track. That innovation track is going to feature not only sessions, but there’s going to be a what they’re describing as an innovation pavilion. and this is gonna be a place where innovators that submit a specific
Mark Miller (20:27)
Mm-hmm.
Hmm.
Justin Stockton (20:47)
tool or concept or idea to CSUN will have a space called out where you can go and see their session so you can see them present on their particular topic or idea. There will be an innovation challenge so that you there will be an overview following the keynote where people can go and kind of look at these. You can vote on which innovation challenge is kind of the most interesting, in which case there will be an award
recipient. And then they’re also give the innovators a a place where they can do on-site research and user experience testing but what’s really neat about this is that it to me this kind of it’s kind of smelled a little bit I use smell kind of weirdly here but it kind of smelled to me a little bit like CSUN starting to kind of get into like a little bit of an incubator esque spec
Mark Miller (21:44)
Mm-hmm.
Justin Stockton (21:45)
Place where they’re not necessarily setting up in like an incubation and you know throwing money at these at these folks, but they’re giving them a place to say, hey, come here, present your new technology idea, concept around assistive technology, and talk about it. Be around the people that are going to be able to really push back on.
They’re gonna let them talk to vendors, they’re gonna let you know, put them in a room with with other companies and things to help that’ll help push back and provide them information on it. So it sounds r like a really, really neat idea.
Mark Miller (22:19)
Another
Yeah. So I I agree with you and I think that you know, I I don’t know how I’ve been going to CSUN for thirteen years, you’ve been going for longer about that. I don’t know. Yeah. I yeah, I missed a couple here and there for for whatever reasons, pandemic and a couple other but and what I like about this, and I think C Sun’s always done this to a degree, is that they’re evolving.
Justin Stockton (22:35)
Not continuously, but for probably about probably about that that long.
Mm-hmm.
Mark Miller (22:53)
Right. That they’re saying what it’s been such a great platform for assistive technologies, for vendors of assistive technologies. You know, a lot of the big players sort of kind of dominate it, you know, right now. And it’s in in in like any conference, there’s a lot of like, here’s our services, here’s what are about, here’s why we should you you should use us. but there’s also a lot of innovative things that show up at CSUN. They’re just sort of like once they’re baked and ready to go.
Justin Stockton (23:17)
Mm-hmm.
Mark Miller (23:22)
I’m really impressed that they’re coming in and saying what else can we do with this conference? And I love the idea of it being more of a collaborative, you know, having this more collaborative thing and I will say that I was just at C Ven, which is C Ven is a
a technology that is for conferences, right? So all the fancy stuff that you do, the little app you have so you can see the schedule and connect with people and you know, all ever anything and everything else you can think of around a conference, C Vence does and they do all the the software associated with CSUN because they’re very, very accessible, I would argue the most accessible solution out there. And I ran into An Andrew Elkins, who is the event and marketing manager of the CSUN conference.
So I literally was just chatting with him yesterday, as it was, or the day before, day before yesterday. fantastic individual and and me and and Stephen Kuchings, who was part of C Vent, CSUN and C Vent. I know it gets confusing. but we were just talking about how much we enjoy not connected, not well, sort of connected, but we were just talking about how much we enjoy CSUN and what a great conference it is, particularly for people like.
Justin Stockton (24:30)
Not connected. Sort of connected.
Mark Miller (24:40)
us. But I think that this it it is, you know, for for folks like us, in a really wonderful way, it’s sort of the same thing year after year, just just f with a level up of of what is going on in accessibility at that, you know, at that given time. This is a really cool move, I think, to
offer something different, and and and what’s really needed and to push it from, hey, this is what we do to this is where we could go if we all put our heads together. So really neat.
Justin Stockton (25:18)
Yeah. Yeah, I’m excited about this. I’m excited to see how it turns out, how it goes. definitely I will be next year at Season I will be making a beeline for that pavilion. I wanna see what’s there. what’s going on. If you’re watching this or listening to this and you hear and you’re interested, the registration for the if you wanna participate as an innovator, that innovation track opens on August thirteenth. so
Mark Miller (25:30)
What’s going on, yeah.
Justin Stockton (25:47)
That’s coming up within the next about a month from now.
Mark Miller (25:51)
Do it. Do I hope that it’s I hope there’s tons of participation. Ugh.
Justin Stockton (25:53)
Yeah.
Yeah. With the way technology’s
moving now, I mean it is there’s a lot of different ways that can go. So I’m really excited to see. That’s I like I kinda wish that I had the time and the the capacity right now to to to think of something. But at the same time I’m like, no, no, I want to see what other people do
Mark Miller (26:03)
Mm.
Ooh. Well here’s Well, that’s
that’s right, but here’s here’s why C Sun’s the right place for this. Because one of the things that we see is we see people come up with these great ideas that have already been done. Right? Because they’re new to the industry or whatever the case is. And that’s well and all well and good, but what I would say is do your research and see if the thing that’s your good idea is already out there or not.
Because if it is, that’ll maybe move you on to the next good idea and get you to a place where you know you could find something just completely useful and disruptive in the industry. So CSUN has both of those things. If you want to know what that what’s out there already, you’re gonna see that at CSUN. And then if you wanna know i in pressure test the ideas that you have, you now you’re gonna have that at CSUN as well. And I I will I will tell you that
This young kid out of Harvard walked up to I tell you the story already? I I probably should have told you
Justin Stockton (27:16)
No, no. I was I was
literally going to say this exact same thing.
Mark Miller (27:19)
Okay, so this young kid from Harvard years ago at CSUN walks up to me with his backpack on and he says, I have a weird question for you, and he asks me, I I won’t get into the details of it because I don’t want to get too boring here, but he asks me, you know, why does the industry not do this? And I had some explanation for him, which w I think he appreciated, but I think he
Heard my explanation and went like, okay, that’s permission to keep moving forward. And I didn’t think about it anymore. And then two or three years later, at CSUN Mike Brevel, I think is how you say his last name, shows up. He’s got a company called Test Party, and he’s doing a new and disruptive innovative thing.
in so so the fertilizer for that kind of information information innovation that fertilizer for that kind of innovation already existed at Seesawn. This is just a great formalization of it to really I think launch it off. That’s my feeling.
Justin Stockton (28:24)
Well, if you go back
and if you go back to our to the trash the trash can conversation from episode one, like we met this woman from PhD student from Notre Dame slash University of Washington. And you know, she was working on some really great stuff. Like this is this is exactly who like should like that’s for. So I do kind of like when I read this, I was kind of wondering like
Mark Miller (28:29)
Hm. yeah. PhD student.
Mm-hmm.
Justin Stockton (28:51)
Ooh, I wonder if someone picked up like if she talked to enough people that they picked up on it and they’re like, you know what? We should set up a center of innovation. Like let’s do something.
Mark Miller (28:58)
That’s a good thought.
It’s it’s the expansion of the trash can discussion. And the reason, if you go back to our first episode on Season, you can hear this whole story, so I’m not gonna part with you again. But th this discussion that Justin’s talking about started because I bumped into this young woman that’s a the the PhD student at a trash can and she literally turned to me and she’s like, Can I ask you a question? Because she heard me tal I was with a couple of other people and we were talking about accessibility. And
Justin Stockton (29:03)
Exactly, exactly.
Mark Miller (29:27)
And then I brought her to Justin and but just exploded into this whole thing. Go go back and listen to it on the episode one. But that’s it. will we I think you and I should take credit for this. It’s the trash can. Somebody you know what? Somebody listen to the trash can story on our podcast and that’s why they’re doing this, Justin. I know it. I can just feel it. That’s what happened. All right. We’re kidding. It was somebody Yeah, it’s somebody it’s somebody smarter than us that came up with this. I’m gonna tell you that right now.
Justin Stockton (29:46)
Okay. You’re much better at marketing.
Mark Miller (29:56)
Alright, so let’s dive into our last one here. Are we witnessing the slow death of the PDF? And when I told you about this, yeah, you that’s your reaction. You’re like, I hope so. So I you know, this is interesting to me. And if you look at it right now, there’s so many companies coming out with like in AR quotes AI solutions, and some of them are pretty good, you know, that are trying to make PDF successful.
Justin Stockton (30:25)
Mm-hmm.
Mark Miller (30:26)
But when it because of Title II and all these things that we’ve talked about, but when it comes down to it, PDFs are they’re literally like I think of a PDF and I’m like the next step below a PDF is a piece of paper. Right? It’s just it’s so old, it’s so antiquated, it’s kind of the stuck in the muds solution. And and I I think you know in reading this article.
Justin Stockton (30:50)
think you’re gonna send Adobe’s
market share down a point just with that statement.
Mark Miller (30:54)
Yeah, no, it’s no
dig on Adobe. I mean Adobe’s people the PDFs are around because people still are using it and want it. And I think that a large part of the reason why that is I mean, it is there is an antiquated aspect to PDFs, but there’s also a reason why they’ve been around and and have been being used for all these years, right? There’s kind of two sides to that coin. And I think one of the reasons and this is in this this article by Matt
Clemmens sort of says this along the way, but one of the reasons is that we deal with a lot of different document types. You know, you’ve got documents, you’ve got Excel spreadsheets, you’ve got PowerPoints, you’ve got all sorts of stuff. And it’s like when you just want to get things into a format, regardless of what that source is, this PDF’s been a pretty good answer in terms of
Let’s turn it to a PDF. And then you can have a pile of things that are PDFs and it doesn’t matter what the source document was, everything kind of drops down into this PDF. but the article is making the point that PDFs aren’t very usable in this highly technical day of HTML, and in in we’re so used to interacting with things with HTML, we’re so used to things being able to show up on our mobile phone really well.
And you know, with a PDF you’re kinda doing this weird zoom out, you know, trying to see it. You’re s you’re it gets big, it doesn’t reformat to your s that smaller portal size, you’re scrolling all over the place. When you’re dealing with it on
Justin Stockton (32:31)
Good way to explain
low how low vision users navigate.
Mark Miller (32:36)
Yeah, I I mean that’s we haven’t even got into with the accessibility discussion yet around PDFs, right? But but you’re right. I mean never mind if you have low vision you’re try it. That’s what we’re all doing. Yeah, so that’s actually a good point, right? That that this kind of like if you get frustrated with the experience of a PDF on your phone
Justin Stockton (32:37)
Yeah.
Yeah.
It’s a similar experience. That’s and that’s what we’re all doing.
Mark Miller (32:55)
Because it’s kinda like the more you zoom out, which you need to do, or yeah, zoom zoom out, zoom out, zoom in, zoom in, which you need to do half the time to see the PDF, the more you’re looking through a straw and the more it’s difficult to keep track of where you are. And and this is that you’re you’re you’re getting a small taste of the frustration that a person with low vision has when they try to zoom into anything. That’s a great point, Justin. But anyways, HTML
We are all now very used to the functionality of HTML, the ability HTML has to reorganize itself for our portal sizes, not just be zoomed into. and the the author Mac makes this argument that in in observation that we’re we should be and kind of are slowly moving to HTML instead of which can be a catch-all, right?
instead of instead of PDF and that it’s much much more accessible and I think that this this to me really highlights the if you pay attention to the accessibility
You create a better experience for everyone. So we just talked about how frustrating this experience can be for people without disabilities on their phones, just the clunkiness of a PDF on the computer. So if we didn’t have to deal with them anymore and they went to HTML, that would make all of us happy. And then, particularly if that HTML is made accessible. So this sort of solution for accessibility,
is a solution for everyone. And because of Title II, because of HHS, people are looking more and more into how do we create a document that’s more easy more easily to make accessible and to sustain the accessibility of it because it’s also expensive for organizations now to maintain and deal with PDFs.
Justin Stockton (34:59)
Mm-hmm. Yep. I mean
Mark Miller (35:03)
Did
I cover everything, Justin? You have nothing to say? Okay, go ahead.
Justin Stockton (35:05)
No, no. You you covered everything.
And I think it’s you know, one of the things that they kind of push back on is, you know, you know, there’s people that, you know, it was really kind of more focused at like governments, like municipalities, city, state governments, that sort of thing, not like you know, nations. but the like this idea of governments like, you know, you gotta pay for subscriptions, you might have to do this, you might have to, you know, you might have to buy something. What is procurement for that look like? And
Mark Miller (35:31)
Mm-hmm.
Justin Stockton (35:34)
You it’s easier to just throw something in a PDF and kind of call it a day. and be like, Yep, box checked. There’s a way to do that. but the cost to remediate that, it’s probably gonna be ch more expensive than it is to purchase the subscription for a year for for a form somebody to come in and say, you created that as a PDF. We’re gonna create that as this, it’s gonna be hosted here.
Mark Miller (35:42)
Mm-hmm.
Right.
Justin Stockton (36:04)
as part of a service and it’s n amount of dollars per year and now you don’t have to maintain the PDF. It’s accessible. You don’t have to remediate it. So you don’t have to deal with someone taking in the managing the fax machine, managing the email, all of these things. We’ll we’ll capture all the stuff for you. I mean
Mark Miller (36:20)
Mm-hmm.
What happens when you want to make a change, you know?
Justin Stockton (36:27)
What happens
when you make a change? You want to add a new field? You know, you know, what happens if someone already had the previous version of the PDF downloaded? I mean, there’s lots of benefits to moving to the to the web.
Mark Miller (36:40)
Yeah, for sure. And we see it like with some of our customers who within one organization you’ll have people going like we need to get out of this PDF thing. It’s cost it’s difficult to maintain, to sustain. It costs the organization a lot of money to do, but then you have people within that organization that are used to PDFs, tied to PDFs, that don’t want to give up PDFs.
So and aga and again that is a testament to what somebody created years ago. I wanna say the PDF started in the nineties, like early, early web days. Like I don’t I can remember when I was putting stuff stuff on a i Omega zip drive, people s talking about PDFs and and everybody going, What is PDFs Jan for? you know.
Justin Stockton (37:38)
Mm-hmm. Now you gotta tell people
what an I Omega zip drive was.
Mark Miller (37:42)
I know. That is death. Cause you’re wondering if I was an old man now, you know. Yeah, so I o I Omega, that was think of an eight track tape. If you want a visual of this thing. It was pretty close. Maybe like a little like if you if you if you were making a movie and you wanted like
Justin Stockton (37:47)
Mm-hmm.
Mark Miller (38:05)
i i in the you wanted a futuristic looking eight track tape, you would come up with this I Omega zip drive. And there were these big big like things you would pop into and they held I can’t remember that w like two hundred and fifty
K or something. I think they were they got to like a megabyte and that was like a big deal. Like the one megs zip drives were a big deal back then. I mean stuff that was like if you don’t have something on your keychain that’s a hundred times that right now, at least. Like you can just you know your phone, your phone, right? Your phone is capacity is a bazillion times bigger than that.
Justin Stockton (38:43)
Yeah, right.
So
Mark Miller (38:52)
So anyways, but that was
Justin Stockton (38:52)
yeah, absolutely. So PDF
came out in nineteen ninety three and became an open standard in two thousand eight.
Mark Miller (38:58)
Yeah.
Yeah. So I was publishing a magazine and we were moving the pre press files of the magazine around on an IO Mega Disk driver on that time. So that’s that makes sense. Yeah. We weren’t doing we weren’t putting it into PDF, I don’t think. Maybe we convert it to PDF and put it on the thing. Because you were trying to get it still was not a lot of information. I mean still not a lot of space for the information, but and literally driving it. There was no like, we’ll email you know, we’ll send this to you or can we upload it? You know, it was I literally
Justin Stockton (39:10)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Mark Miller (39:31)
Took it off my computer and these things and drove it to the pre press place and said, Here, here is the zip disk. Go do your thing. So
Justin Stockton (39:39)
Yeah.
But the whole point behind PDF was that it was a portable format. So you could this the same file could be displayed on Windows. at the time, OS two warp, Mac. those were the early days of the Macs. not OS X yet. We were still back on pre Mac days. so yeah, I mean it was
Mark Miller (39:43)
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Justin Stockton (40:06)
was a different time and that but so it was at the time it was a great technology.
Mark Miller (40:08)
And ahead of its time.
Yeah, and ahead of its time. And this is this is twenty twenty six man and we’re still using it. So it’s just a I don’t it’s it’s it’s impressive, it really is impressive, but it’s it’s definitely providing challenges for folks today. Alright, well I think we did it. We got through all three of Justin. Congratulations. Is there anything
Justin Stockton (40:13)
Wildly, yeah.
Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Yeah and
Mark Miller (40:37)
Else that you want to add about PDFs or anything else?
Justin Stockton (40:41)
No, other than I’ll miss them when they’re gone. I’ll pull one out.
Mark Miller (40:47)
And
like we said at the beginning, let’s get this Purple Tuesday thing going everywhere. We gotta and out we need our all of our accessi all the accessibility companies out there, right? All are we you know who you are, right? Let’s band together and like make a big deal out of it accessibility. I was gonna say accessibility, Purple Tuesday. Remind me you gotta have to remind me about that that I said we were gonna do that, Justin. All right. Well, thank you once again. And now that we have broken
Justin Stockton (40:53)
Yeah.
Mark Miller (41:16)
down accessibility for you. We hope you go forth and keep it accessible.
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