The Seismic Shift of Accessibility in Government with Don Torrez

In this episode of HearSay, Don Torrez of CivicPlus shares his journey of advocating for accessibility within the local government space, proven strategies for municipalities, and his personal experience partnering with AudioEye.

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HearSay is produced by Sojin Rank, Mike Barton, and Sean Bradley. Edited by Grant Lemons.

HearSay is a podcast focusing on the advocates, heroes, and leaders making the web more accessible. We’re interviewing these change makers to hear what they have to say, to set the record straight, and offer their perspectives on how we can all work to make the web accessible to all.

Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction
• 8:23 Starting Point for Municipalities
• 23:19 Office of Civil Rights
• 28:40 Partnership with AudioEye
• 36:20 Celebrate Accessibility

Transcript

0:00

I know AudioEye solves problems, and it solved problems that really made stress go away, but also made sure, if you have a disability, if you use a screen reader, if you have trouble navigating, our sites work. Hi everyone. Welcome to the HearSay podcast. I'm your host, Ty D’Amore, and I'm pleased to be joined today with a long time partner of AudioEye, and a great friend of mine, Don Torrez. Don is a Partner Manager at CivicPlus advocating for digital accessibility and the government in the municipality space. Don, how you doing? Great, great. It’s good to see you. Good to see you as well. And thanks for jumping on to chat with us today. Don, where are you– where you calling in from? I'm calling in from CivicPlus headquarters in Manhattan, Kansas. We call it the Little Apple. Uh oh, everyone always argues between us, Don. Who's the real Wildcats? That’s right. I was an Arizona Wildcat, and you're a Kansas State Wildcat. So– still got that debate going on. Absolutely. I bleed purple. There we go. Did you go to Kansas State, Don? I did. I'm a first generation college student, first generation college grad, and I went to Kansas State. There we go. That's awesome. That is awesome. You guys are having a great year. Yeah. Well, Don, you know, you and I have been partners now, I think going since 2017. You know, and it's just been a great partnership. But for our listeners, can you walk through what CivicPlus does, what you focus on, and some of the products that you offer out there? CivicPlus serves local governments. And so we have counties and special districts, so on. Local is our specialty, and we make resident facing software. So the city you live in, the city that you're going to. We do just under 10,000 websites and other software including city clerks, parks and recreations, emergency notification, that sort of thing. So all of our software is resident facing and we've been doing that for just over 20 years now. And we've got a– we got a great rapport with our clients where we really try to be very reactive to what local government needs. That's awesome. I mean, the local government space just needs it so much on modernization of the technology. And, now I've been out there in Manhattan, Kansas. You guys have a beautiful office. It seems like it's, you know, just absolutely growing. And the team's been awesome to work with. Don, just kind of like thinking about how AudioEye and CivicPlus partnered was just kind of a great story. I think our listeners would love to hear that today. You know, I think it started again in 2017. But, you know, maybe let's relive that a little bit. Sure. Let’s relive that story of– how did the partnership come about and really how did we, how did we find each other? And I think a good friend of both of ours, Dan Sullivan, was part of the story as well. But I’d love to hear, you know, how did you find AudioEye and really how did we get that first client together? Absolutely. So I was a product manager for our website, which was our largest product, and the product that we normally landed with local government in. And so I was tasked with finding accessible technology for our websites. We launch websites to be very accessible. Once we turn them over to clients, there's a lot of things with accessibility that can make them inaccessible. So what we were trying to do was find a good way to become more accessible and demonstrate to our customers we are accessible. So I was working on a partnership and negotiating one with a major scanning provider. One of the issues we were having was the scan was so much into the detail, it had false positives. It really made our sites look not accessible, and that was not the opinion we had. We've done a lot of testing and thought they were. We didn't want to turn over to clients something that first, we didn't agree with, but secondly, made our websites look like they weren't accessible to people with disabilities. Around that time I got a call from Dan Sullivan, who asked if I would consider AudioEye. And we did some research on AudioEye. You were small at the time, and we didn't know if– We were tiny back then, Don. We were just a small little shop. Absolutely. So we listened, and we did a demonstration, and we did a demonstration with our technical folks. We'd been looking at maybe seven potential partners other than AudioEye, and the demonstration and just the quality of culture fit that we found with AudioEye was exactly what we were looking for. Beyond that, your solution made sites accessible, which is what we were looking for because no one else in the industry was really doing that. And there was a lot of, kind of aloofness in the industry telling us that we had a lot of work to do to make our sites accessible. Which again, we tested them, and we didn't feel that way. One of the things AudioEye did that was extremely attractive to us was they actually put a certification on the website that said it was AudioEye trusted and explained exactly what the procedure was and the testing did. That is fantastic because now a resident can come to a CivicEngage website and read specifically what you are doing, and we didn't see anyone else doing that. So we really wanted to give it a try. Our technical folks tested it. It didn't slow down website load or performance at all, which was kind of an amazing trick. The way that your website sits. And I don't mean trick. Little technicality, right? The architecture behind it, I mean– It was fantastic. Core vitals and making sure that page load speed is super important. It did a great deal of work So there’s a lot of things. with no lift from us– with very little, light lift from us. Clients were very concerned about that, but AudioEye did a fantastic job of working behind the scenes to make sure that the site was accessible, and then worked really hard to demonstrate that on the website. I think a couple of things too, Don, like early on in the partnership that were just like huge for us, and I still hold true today is like the culture fit for the two organizations was just phenomenal, right? Your Shaul and your entire team, Brian, yourself, like the culture fit was just always doing the right thing by the client, relentlessly prioritizing the client, and what the client's needs are. And I think that was like the first thing. I remember my first trip out to Manhattan, and I was like, “Wow, these guys got it together.” Since then you guys have just grown crazy. I think at the time AudioEye was pretty small. We were like 30, 40 employees. You guys, I think at the time, Don, were only 200 employees. I think today you guys are over a thousand– That’s right. employees. You know, the partnership, I think from that perspective. And then the second thing that you said there that's just huge is CivicPlus at the time, you guys were investing a lot of time and energy into building sites with accessibility. And it was really that start of like, hey, how do we do this? How do we make sure that we're designing and developing? But as soon as those websites were handed over to the municipality, all of a sudden it was just content getting thrown in everywhere. And you know, that accessibility and all that work you did was was breaking. And I think that's where, that’s really where the lightbulb clicked of like, hey, we can work together from a platform perspective to increase the knowledge base and accessibility. Which you've done a phenomenal job at CivicPlus doing, but also solving those content problems. I like to think of it as you can build the most accessible building in the world, but the moment you put furniture into that building, if you make it so that a wheelchair user can't get through the hallway or, you know, the couch is in front of the door, it’s gonna break, right? It’s gonna break accessibility guidelines. That's the same thing with the content management system is the moment that that content starts plugging, it becomes very, very difficult for the client to, you know, to be to become accessible and maintain accessible. So, you know, those are some of the early highlights besides being in a room with you and Shaul. You know, and negotiating out how we're going to take this to market. Those were fun times early on. And I think today, just looking at the partnership, I think we have somewhere around 500 municipalities working with us. Does that sounds about right? We just went over 600. Wow. That's awesome. Well, great work. The partnership, again, it’s just been awesome. But, you know I think it's evolved, too. From where we started to where we are today, it has evolved in just the industry and the knowledge base. From your point of view, looking at this in 2015 to 2017 on the knowledge base of municipalities to where they are today, give us a little there and now comparison of what you saw on that front. In 2017 clients were really focused on checking the box and not getting sued. And we really tried to educate our client base and make them think more about the human issue. AudioEye really helped with that. AudioEye’s very human focused. Let's make sure that the human being can access all of government services. And now our customers are a lot more focused on making sure that people, you know, with disabilities can see, and really get the content from the website that we wanted to have. It works with the screen reader. It navigates very well. Those are kind of things that AudioEye helped us with. But to answer your question, because of DEI initiatives, just because of, awareness that 20 to 25% of the citizens and residents have some form of disability. Local governments are very human focused now and want to make sure that they do the right thing. Absolutely. I’ve seen that just across the board, right? It’s like, I think in the beginning it was also a lot of focus around assistive technology and you know, how to make assistive technology accessible for compliance reasons. And now I think we're really moving into this universal access point of view and being able to talk around like, not only does this help individuals using assistive technologies and people with disabilities, but when we design with accessibility in mind, we design for all. And I really see that shift, and I hope that we can keep that momentum shift going. But a lot of this has been pressured, you know, Don, from the DOJ, right? And from the legal criteria. That’s right. What do you hear from your clients on that? Are they scared? Are they still not knowledgeable on it? You know, what do you hear from them on kind of where they are today on their knowledge base of the legal requirements? Especially with municipalities, this is a different market, right? This is, you know, a regulated market. So what do you hear? It's– there is fear. I've had hundreds of calls with local governments. All of them want to do the right thing. They understand that they need to do the right thing. There are federal announcements, federal law to be concerned with. Now there's state laws. They get more specific about software and accessibility. And so there's a real fear there that they need to do the right thing. WCAG, Web Content Accessibility Guidelines can be large and deep and they don't know how to comply. And so it's, first it's an unfunded mandate. There aren't funds for this in most municipalities. And secondly just, there's not accessibility expertise in most I.T. departments, in most local governments. We have a lot of small and medium sized local governments that just don't have the budget to hire an accessibility expert. Many of the I.T. folks, you know they went through, they got their education 15, 20 years ago when we weren’t really talking about this. And it's hard to get the knowledge you need to comply. And they, like I said, they want to do the right thing. There's no one that wants to delay this or put this off or not do it. It's just really hard because the laws tell you that you need to do this. They enforce it if you don't. And it's hard to get knowledge on how to do that. Yeah, I think that's it, right? I think it's still that knowledge base and every conversation I have with someone. Like this, this dates back like to 2012 when we started, you know, started really pushing AudioEye. Everyone always wants to do the right thing. They want to make their site accessible. I think it's kind of this overarching like, how do I do it and do I have budget to do it? And I think that's something that, you know, continues to be a hurdle that we have to get over. But it's extremely important. And by utilizing technology, we can make it more affordable. You know, I was just reading actually yesterday, Don, about a case in California, with a parks and rec website Yeah. that settled for a $2 million settlement because the site wasn't accessible. Which is just, you know, just disappointing that that it wasn't accessible, disappointing for the users that that were trying to come to the site and access it. But those penalties can be very large if you don't prioritize it. You know, so when you look at how do we get this out there, right? Like how do we– you have 12,000 clients, right? What kind of techniques are you guys implementing at CivicPlus to get the word out, to talk about accessibility, to educate not only your clients, but your internal employees around how important accessibility is? We have a broad– we have a real focus on that. So I think that it was really helpful to start at the beginning and educate our customers at 30,000 feet what web accessibility is. We also had webinars to tell local government what WCAG was, what a lot of the terms were, what federal law, Title II, they didn't know about that. And we wanted to hit local governments where they were. Some of them were already accessibility experts. So what we did was we started way up high strategically at 30,000 feet and went down until we were able to hit them where they didn't know and educate our customers. And, you know, we weren't trying to sell products. We were just trying to say, these are the kind of things that will help you if you know. And so, you know it works because there's a lot of fear out there and there's a lot of people taking advantage of that. And they're selling very expensive products. What we told local governments were, our partners in local government, that you need to have an opinion about what your website is. Test it, reach out to your community and ask, you know, if there's any programs or services that you can't, let us know. So ask the question, what do you want to do but you can't because of our software? And really, if they start fundamentally like that, then there's a lot of– there's less fear of what they're doing. And we did that with our employees, too. Had a lot of internal conversations. In fact, AudioEye’s, you know, Sean came, Sean Bradley came and spoke at one of our sales summits or one of our employee gatherings and just told us from the very beginning what accessibility meant and what AudioEye did. And it’s been really helpful. I, yeah, I remember Don, kind of going down memory lane again. There's like– I remember one of those first meetings, and shout out to CivicPlus and yourself, and Shaul for really helping us and challenge us to think different. But I remember one of those first meetings we were in and I was driving back with Sean and I just had Sean on the podcast, it was great. We kind of talked about, you know, everything on the start of AudioEye and how we got to where we are today. But we're driving home from Manhattan, Kansas, we're driving to Kansas City to fly out, and we just walked out of the meeting where we started to understand the municipalities, and we started to understand the constraints that they might have on resources and budget. And we really looked and said, okay, we got to solve this in two folds. We got to be able to partner with CivicPlus and create the platform as accessible as possible by implementing strategies of making the content management system accessible. And then we got to find a solution that's affordable for these municipalities to make their content accessible. And we really went into this entire partnership with that. Knowing that there's going to be investment from CivicPlus to do what they need to do at the platform. Which, you know, you guys have been awesome to work with, whether it's our platform feedback where we're, you know, sending reports over to you and your engineering team on a quarterly basis to make sure that you're getting these implementation of accessibility requirements into the platform or it’s being able to deliver a cost to clients that's affordable. But that really challenged us and, you know, really made us think differently on how we work with municipalities and local governments. But also just, it opened our eyes to understand how much the technology resource center in a municipality is dealing with and accessibility isn't always the number one priority for them. So we have to find fast ways to work with them on it. Our companies grew up together. So we were, we weren’t new to accessibility. Our platform was built on WCAG 2.0 principles because that was the code in place at the time. AudioEye really helped us beyond the software that we were offering customers. We had regular, and have, regular quarterly meetings with AudioEye where your engineers tell us where issues are coming. You know, where we might build guardrails into our software to make sure that local government leaders were staying within the bounds of WCAG. We've built that into our software. One of the examples is AudioEye was telling us about the alternate tags, and alternate tags are very inconsistent. An alternate tag makes sure that screen readers can read aloud things that are meant to be visually interpreted. So if I have a visual disability, I can turn on the screen reader and it reads it. Our alt tags were very inconsistent. And so one of the things that we did with AudioEye’s guidance was make sure that there were parameters around how long an alt tag could be so that it wasn't unlimited. I think some social media platforms let you go unlimited, which is a very bad experience for a screen reader user because they don't want to listen to what the image is all day. But we also put guardrails in place to where if you upload an image or something that's visually perceived on our software, it's very difficult to do that without an alt tag. We warn people several times that you have to do that. And so with AudioEye’s guidance, that's just one example. There's dozens where our software is more accessible because AudioEye is our partner. I love that, Don. And one thing that's interesting too, just kind of looking at how you jumped full cannonball into the accessibility space. I mean, what were you doing prior to all of this accessibility work landing on your desk at CivicPlus? I was a Product Manager, so I would do regular webinars to tell our clients what the updates were. I mean, we use Agile for development, we have regular sprints. And so what we wanted to tell our clients was the functionality is automatically being pushed out to them. At the time– Got it. You know, we are trying to be really innovative. Local governments are not usually bleeding edge when it comes to technology, so we know what's going on in the industry. We try to bring that to local government. At the same time, I think it was 2016 or 17, the Department of Justice said they were going to start heavily enforcing accessibility policy. And we had a client that had an investigation from the Department of Justice and ended up being fined heavily. To be clear, our software was pretty accessible. But if the Department of Justice, if they start to investigate your facilities, which was happening, they'll widen the scope. But now your website is under scrutiny when no one complained about the website. And so to answer your question, I was doing more technical leadership of what the website would do, and we got so many calls about, “Is my site accessible? how do I determine it’s accessible?” And my focus really shifted over to accessibility. Which, you know, became a wider and wider job for someone to do, as customers were asking about it. 100%. And I remember those early days of working with that client and really trying to walk through the process and show. But I also like Don, I commend you. I know it's like, all of a sudden accessibility was on your desk. You’re like, I got to figure this out. You went out and got your, you know, your certifications and just, you know, really became an advocate in the space. And one of the leaders in the municipality space on accessibility, in particular digital accessibility. So, you know, thank you for following and just jumping in full force with us and really becoming that leader It's my pleasure. across the board. What I started to do was go to some accessibility conferences and just shut up and listen, and listen to the obstacles people were talking about– the real human element. I mean, the stories of people who really wanted to participate and couldn't, not just in local government, retail, and everything else. Where AudioEye really came in was, I've said this before, but the human focus. Your Yeah. origin story is fantastic around really trying to solve problems. I mean, AudioEye was not started to make lawsuits go away. AudioEye was started to make sure that people could take advantage of technology. That was attractive. It was attractive to CivicPlus because we want to do the right thing for the right reason. And our experience shows if we do that, we don't have to worry so much about lawsuits, whether they're frivolous or founded or investigations. Doing the right thing usually makes sure that local government bodies or federal bodies will work with you. Absolutely. And it's like, it's always that pitch at AudioEye, right? It's trying to teach people, hey, you're going to do the right thing. At the end of the day, when you implement this software, and you implement this process and this culture, right? That's a new thing we talk about is like, you're implementing an accessibility culture when you partner with us or when you work with us, even our enterprise clients. We're not just coming to implement software, we're implementing a culture. A culture that's going to say, hey, we're gonna be inclusive for everyone. Everyone's gonna have, you know, accessible websites, and where everyone's going to be able to use your site or whatever digital information you’re gonna have. But then there is the legal side, right? And the legal side does draw a lot of attention. It gets, you know, it gets the process done faster. And every industry is different. If we look at our partners in the restaurant space or the dealer space or our direct customers that are in the enterprise space. Everyone has, you know, different motives and priorities. But municipalities are different because the Office of Civil Rights can get involved. And when the Office of Civil Rights gets involved, that can be a grueling process. And, you know, it's all for the best outcome to make sure that sites are accessible for people with disabilities. But again, it can be overwhelming. So what– for our listeners today and municipalities that are listening in, what does that process look like? You know, how does the OCR get involved? What do you have to do to, you know, really get past the OCR complaint? But also, how can you prevent the OCR complaint as well? This is an excellent question. We have experience with that. The office of Civil Rights doesn't generally focus on investigating local governments, but libraries are a heavy focus, and we have libraries connected to local governments and we've had investigations of our software as a result where they'll do a deep dive into it. And in our experience, AudioEye, I don't know that anyone else is doing the kind of legal protection that AudioEye’s doing. Where if we tell you there's a compliant, a local government, and they have AudioEye software on their site, and they're going through an Office of Civil Rights investigation. We've actually had AudioEye join those investigations, tell us what they're doing, and in my experience, the Office of Civil Rights to their credit, is very open. They’re very human focused, and if we can either show how we have made sure that our websites are not an obstacle or fix the obstacle that the Office of Civil Rights is investigating. I've seen several investigations dropped by the Office of Civil Rights because the client had AudioEye and was able to demonstrate how the person could access the software. So it's been amazing. And I think, the way that I look at it when the Office of Civil Rights or even when we're dealing with demand letters and on the, you know, the private markets is it's about transparency. Don, you have a background in CPA, right? Yeah. An accounting background. And I think a lot of times we're coming in and we're not only auditing, but we're auditing our own work. We're auditing the functionality. We're not only looking at it from the technical, but also the human aspect of, hey, there's a person with a disability, can they have an access barrier here? Do they not have an access barrier here? How is that functionality going? Can they perform the action that the website is presenting to the end user of the, you know, an able body user? So that's really where we focus. We have a team here and we talk a lot about it of our A11iance community, which is individuals with disabilities that work with us and test our websites and really come in and make sure that our sites are not only meeting the compliance requirements, but meeting also the accessibility requirement, or the usability requirements as well. So when the OCR does come knocking, that is really where you want that partner, right? It's like if the SEC came knocking, and you're a publicly traded company, you're going to want, you know, EY, or you're going to want one of those auditors on your back saying, “Nope, our books are clean.” That's the same thing here is you really want that partner that's going to be able to come in and show you the transparency of where your site is accessible, what you're doing to maintain accessibility. And that's part of the process, right, of what we do. Other vendors in accessibility are washing their hands of this. So if you choose certain software for accessibility, and you have an investigation, they back out of it and say that they don't want to hear about it. And that just makes us so grateful that we partnered with AudioEye, and we have help because we believe our sites to be accessible. We work hard to make sure that that is, that they're really completely accessible to people. AudioEye is like firing the winning shot. I mean, if you have AudioEye on your website, you have such a parade of people who will help you make sure that your website is accessible and can demonstrate that to someone who might sue you, The Office of Civil Rights, Department of Justice. We have examples of all of that where AudioEye has really helped. There was a California customer who was sued, and they had a lawsuit that was really taking up all the time of the staff. And we brought in AudioEye. The day they signed the statement of work to give you permission, we pulled a STAR plan. We showed it to the attorney. The website– the lawsuit was dropped. Yeah. I'm not an attorney. It's hard for me to know the details of that. I know AudioEye solves problems, and it solved problems that really made stress go away, but also made sure, if you have a disability, if you use a screen reader, if you have trouble navigating, our site's work. Absolutely. I love that, Don. And, you know, I think municipalities out there, they're starting to make the right choice. And, you know, prioritizing accessibility. And a lot of that is just by the education and the investment that CivicPlus is doing. Some of the other things, because not all of our listeners are going to be, you know, in the municipality space or so forth. But I want to take a second just, you know, talk about this partnership, right? The partnership has been just such a shining bright light for us in the relationship and learning from each other. What are some things from– what are some things from your side, Don, that equate to great partnership? And you worked for a boss, you know, you work for a boss that I think is like, I learn from him, right? I look at him as a mentor. Every time I get to spend with Shaul, it's this great time. But what do you look at that has really made and built this foundation of partnership? For some of our listeners out there that work in business development or work in partnerships or need a partner with technology partners. What do you think has really drove those points for us? Culture fits number one. CivicPlus Yep. has rejected lots of partnership opportunities where the software was fantastic. If they weren't a culture fit, if they didn't want to come alongside us and really solve problems, we weren’t gonna do it. AudioEye also helps us far beyond the software that we resell in local government or that we offer in local government. AudioEye’s helped us become accessible really from the ground up. They've educated our technology people. This is far more than a partnership where we co-sell software. This is a partnership where we really reach out to local government. You've helped us on webinars to explain complicated topics. You'll join us for calls with clients to make sure they understand accessibility and how to look at it. It's just the culture fit kind of covers everything, but also the way that the technology works. It does more than other providers or helpers in accessibility do. We work with your research and development team. We've had lots of local governments ask for things and AudioEye’s adapted the software to include it. Those kind of things don't generally happen with business partners. Business partners are prioritizing profit or margin. Look, we sell software. We're trying to make sure that we cover our costs and make a profit. But that's not the focus of what we're trying to do. When we approach local government, when we approach people and, you know, educate them and tell them these are the things that we're seeing across local government. We don't have to worry about profit and margins and focus on that. When we do the right thing, when we accomplish the mission, everything else will follow. So to answer your question, and I know that's a long winded answer, but it really is all about focus, culture fit, approaching solving problems together, all of that together. And also, from a business perspective we share in results. We make sure that when the customer wins, AudioEye and CivicPlus win. That kind of thing, you know? It's not a cold partnership at all. It's very warm. We know each other very well. We've been friends for years. That doesn't always happen in business. That doesn't always happen in partnerships. I think you're spot on on that, Don. Culture fits number one, right? I think it's the long game. Like a lot of times when we bring in new reps or we bring in Partner Account Managers here at AudioEye, I like to say,“What does this partnership look like in five years?” Right? And I think, that was a lot driven from early lessons that I learned from CivicPlus is, you know, hey, it's not going to be that homerun hit. Like, I look back at 25 year old Ty, walking into the room of CivicPlus. I was counting the dollars, Don. I was like, 5000 websites, we're going to charge this per website. This is going to go great. We're going to get all these sites. And then I think it was a big reality shock of like, hey, we got to look at this long term. We got to look at this from, how can we solve the client's problems? And I think that that's one thing that I've learned from this partnership is patience, and the amazing outcome that you can have when you have patience. And, you know, not only with getting clients onto the platform, but also with getting development, you know, into the engineering resources to fix at the source. I think a lot of listeners don't know this but like, what are, what the clients see on the website and everything that they're getting and delivering on an accessible experience is just really the tip of the iceberg. We're doing so much work in the back end with you guys. From platform feedback, from working with developers, from doing, you know, trainings and helping you set up a disability resource center at CivicPlus with a group of individuals that are pushing accessibility across the organization. Like I said, it's a culture– it's a culture shift when you work with us. So I think it’s culture. It's looking at it from a long term strategy play on how this develops over time. And then the other thing I think is accountability, right? When we look at our partners, we look at them to hold us accountable to make different changes. You know, early on in AudioEye, I think that we struggled around reporting and the transparency of what we deliver to our clients. And that is something that, you know, CivicPlus challenged us on, and we took that back, and not said, “Oh wow, they're pushing us.” But said, “Hey, they're making us better.” And, you know, and still to this day, we had a conversation yesterday about how CivicPlus could see that AudioEye could fit better for their clients. And we're gonna take that back, and we're gonna go actually follow through on the challenges that our partner brings us to create into an opportunity. So, I just, you know, I think it's a shining light to just learn from great partnerships on how they work, because a lot of times it can be a ton of work upfront and then nothing becomes fruitful for it. And I think a lot of that is greed in the beginning or, you know, like you said, the business and looking at it from a profit standpoint and not a partnership standpoint. Well, if I can add to that, you mentioned patience first. Local governments cycles can take a year and a half. So once we introduce AudioEye, it's not like we get permission to add it to the website. Sometimes it only takes one day. A lot of times, Yep. you know, if you're– they have a request for proposal and accessibility is part of it. They want to build a website. If they started today, we might– it might be 2025 before we get the opportunity to build them a website and add AudioEye to it. So your patience has really helped. You know, we try to be leaders in picking out local government to where we can bring you the customers and then you can help us solve problems. You mentioned being responsive to needs. A lot of those requests, reporting, for example, didn't come from CivicPlus. It came from local governments, who, they needed accountability. I've had AudioEye for a year. A lot of what you do helps screen readers work correctly. So there's nothing Yep. to visually show. I can’t show what AudioEye’s done because you turn on a screen reader and it shows you. You know what I mean? Yep. There’s not a lot of pizzazz sometimes behind. But what we can do with reporting is if I'm a local government leader, I see what AudioEye’s doing. I see an extremely high score on my site. I see depth– detail behind what AudioEye helps solve. I can show that to my city council, to my mayor, and they understand the great work that AudioEye’s doing. Because the worst thing that could happen is, and this is rare, but a local government leader could say, “I can't demonstrate what AudioEye’s doing. Cancel the subscription.” And now they're not protected by... they're not accessible. Which is one of the– Yeah. Which, our goal is to make sure everything is accessible. Absolutely. And talking about making everything accessible, one thing for municipalities listening, and for anyone is, I want us to get better as an industry to celebrate accessibility, right? I want us to say, hey, we're accessible. Check this out, put this in your newsletter, put this, you know, talk about this at your board meeting or your council meeting. Really celebrate what you're doing and making sure that everyone has access because that is so important, right? You know, what we always say is, people with disabilities want to support businesses that support them. And so, you know, whether it's talking about it, whether it's writing about it, or really just promoting it. That's something I would say, you know, definitely do. Because it is very important to show inclusivity, and it's very important to be able to show that to your municipality or your constituents as well on what you're doing. That demonstration has been super important. I mean, one example is I mentioned our websites were built on Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, 2.0. That was the standard for, what was it, Ty, eight or ten years? It was a long time. Yeah, it was a long time. And it took us a long time to get to the 2.0 standards. And, you know, there's a lot of debate, and then things go in things go out. WCAG 2.1 was passed. We had to upscale our software. 2.2 was passed this year. I mean they've been debating it for a while, but it became standard this year. Yep. Those are difficult things for a software company like CivicPlus, you know, it takes a long time to turn a boat around. And so to make sure that we were complying with the new standards was difficult. I was showing a customer or I was showing a local government leader what AudioEye did. And I knew that your certification said that you hold it to 2.1 standards. So I opened up and I said, AudioEye is very reactive. It's, you know, WCAG 2.1 certified. The website, the certification that I was showing said, WCAG 2.2, and that was the morning after WCAG 2.2 was accepted as standard. So AudioEye is testing the standards even before they're accepted so that you're out in front of that. And if I'm a local government leader, I can demonstrate right away when the standards are increased that my site complies. That's huge. I don't know anyone else in the industry who is able to adapt and adjust that quickly. And those Absolutely. standards are important too, right? Like the new standards that were added to the old standards are the reason that was adapted is because technology was falling short in general. And so it's important to do not just to comply, but to make sure that the problems are solved that have been debated. Especially with how fast the Web's moving today, Don. I mean, like with AI and everything that's going on. I mean, new things are constantly coming out. I mean, we have a whole team at AudioEye that's like really focused on cutting, you know, cutting edge technology. What is the new thing that we're using? You know, I remember one of the first forms that we worked on at AudioEye was this form for the FCC that was a react form. And making it accessible was like so difficult. And we were really trying to get ahead of that. Nowadays, you know, that's something that's very common for us to be working with. To be able to say, okay, if this form field hits this button, then this form button below changes. Let's make sure that that's accessible as well. So it's just, you know, the cutting edge of everything that is going on. It's been fantastic. But Don, you know, I know that we're running in on time here. But I just you know, I just want to say to the entire team out in Manhattan, Kansas, and everyone else in the CivicPlus family, you know, we're just grateful for this partnership and what you guys are doing to really push accessibility to the municipalities. So, you know, if there's ever anything, as always, reach out to us and we're here. But thank you so much for jumping on the HearSay podcast and chatting with us today. It's my pleasure. I mean we've patterned the way that we do partnerships around our work with AudioEye. So, that's the highest praise I can give AudioEye is, it's the pattern that we use, the, you know, the template that we use when we approach any other partners. So we appreciate you, we enjoy spending time with you and Sean and everyone else from the team. And here's to another six years. Absolutely. Thank you so much, Don. Appreciate it. Thank you. HearSay is produced by Sojin Rank, Mike Barton, and Sean Bradley, and edited by Grant Lemons. 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