Published by: Maxwell Ivey. Host: Maxwell Ivey. Guest: Jason Barnard, Founder and CEO of Kalicube®. July 3, 2025

Listen here: Growing Value of Accessibility for Search Engines With Jason Barnard on the Accessibility Advantage

This time on The Accessibility Advantage I’m excited to speak with Jason Barnard The Brand SERP Guy®.

Jason, is an entrepreneur, CEO and founder of Kalicube®, https://kalicube.com a groundbreaking digital marketing agency that helps the world’s most dynamic business leaders move from being one amongst many to become The Reference in their industry. We talked about how the introduction of AI means there are even more bots crawling websites. And that accessibility is critical to framing your brand to reach both the traditional search engines and the AI bot conversations. He shared his three step method for educating the engines and the bots about who you are, what you do, and why they should care. The steps are claim it, frame it, and prove it. You can learn more about that about half way through our conversation. I think you will learn a lot from the advice he gave me about being #TheBlindBlogger among other things. And how I should go forward reeducating the bots about who Max is now. I hope this conversation will inspire you to want to improve accessibility on your own website or those that you manage.

Growing Value of Accessibility for Search Engines With Jason Barnard on the Accessibility Advantage

[00:00:00] Maxwell Ivey: Accessibility ain’t just for those with disabilities. Makes the world better for everyone. Online as well as in person. Hello, ladies and gentlemen. I am the Blind Blogger Maxwell Ivy, and this is the Accessibility Advantage where I’m hoping to advocate for more inclusion of and accessibility for people with disabilities through education and communication and collaboration.

[00:00:34] Maxwell Ivey: I really do want to bring home the point that accessibility is in everyone’s best interest, and you can find [email protected]. I am a 59-year-old Caucasian male with short, brown, curly hair that has some gray and some white in it or brown eyes. I am wearing a white button down shirt with a black tie and I have retinitis pigmentosa, RP, [00:01:00] and have only remaining light perception.

[00:01:03] Maxwell Ivey: Today I am gonna be talking to a gentleman about Search Engine Optimization and accessibility. But before I do his introduction, I wanna let you know that this episode is being sponsored by audio i.com. That’s audio EYE. And if after you hear us, you’re wanting to, get started accessibility and use it in the area of your improving your search engine rankings.

[00:01:26] Maxwell Ivey: Then you should check out their website and their free accessibility checker that can check for violations for up to 32 different points of WCAG, which stands for Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. You can find the checker on their website. Again, audio i.com. So today I’m very excited to be speaking With Jason Barnard…

[00:01:49] Maxwell Ivey: He is an entrepreneur, the CEO, and founder of Kalicube. It’s a digital marketing agency, which I probably got that wrong, but [00:02:00] his focus is, helping business leaders go from being just one among many to being the go-to person in their industry. He has also written a great book called the Fundamentals of SERP for Business, and he hosts a podcast called.

[00:02:22] Jason Barnard: Fastlane Founders and Legacy, if I may. There you go.

[00:02:25] Maxwell Ivey: Yeah. Fastlane Founders and Legacy. The host appreciates the guests jumping in to help the host out, which I love though because it’s a combination of how people can grow, but also build something that’s going to last forever. So I like to, y’all can find him at Jason Barnard dot com. And so Jason, I appreciate you coming on the podcast and also being patient during the process. I’m looking forward to a great conversation. Hopefully you also drop a little bit about your music and your children’s programming.

[00:02:54] Jason Barnard: Absolutely delighted to be here, Max. And yes, I can talk about music.

[00:02:57] Jason Barnard: I can talk about the cartoons. I can [00:03:00] talk about SEO, I can talk about Google, and I can talk about AI and the future.

The Intersection of SEO and Accessibility

[00:03:05] Maxwell Ivey: So one thing about your music and the kid stuff is you use a lot of what you do now in the area of sale in order to build those to especially kid stuff, to build it to the level that it was Yeah.

[00:03:19] Maxwell Ivey: Without really paying for a lot of stuff. Am I correct there?

[00:03:23] Jason Barnard: Yeah, you are. We started in 1998 and the website. Kwala, which were, who were the characters that we created with my ex-wife grew very quickly. And one thing we did back in the day was to bet on Google being the big player.

[00:03:41] Jason Barnard: There were multiple search engines at the time, maybe 12. Excite, Yahoo was around, Lycos Magdalene. And we needed to create a lot of different pages at the time to suit each of the engines. And then one day I thought okay, [00:04:00] let’s bet on Google. And so I focused just on Google and whether it was a lucky gas or it was intelligent thought process on my part, Google won the day and we ended up with 60 million views.

[00:04:16] Jason Barnard: Sorry, 60 million visitors in 2007 and a billion. 1 billion page views for that children’s website. And yes, most of it came from Google and from, what I would call organic popularity. So people would recommend the website and I think that’s key. And the website was such great quality that people recommended it.

[00:04:41] Jason Barnard: And I was smart enough to bet on the Google horse and win the Google game, and those two combined gave us a billion page view, page views in 2007.

[00:04:51] Maxwell Ivey: That’s interesting because I started my first website in 2007, helping people sell used Carnival and amusement park rides. And [00:05:00] over that time it seems like it’s always been create content.

[00:05:03] Maxwell Ivey: Ignore Google Game, Google. Don’t worry about content. I’m glad to follow across another person who’s we are gonna have to do both if we want to really get Google’s attention and the attention of the other search engines.

[00:05:14] Jason Barnard: Yeah, and what was intriguing was that we were using Macromedia and then Adobe Flash, which is absolutely not search engine friendly.

[00:05:24] Jason Barnard: So I managed to win the Google game by using a technology that was absolutely not digestible to Google. Nor indeed was it accessible. Flash was terrible for accessibility. Unfortunately. But the website was games for children. And as that, for that particular role, it functioned incredibly well.

[00:05:46] Maxwell Ivey: That is one of those discussions we have to have is businesses doing what they are capable of doing at the time, given the market, but the same time still having the goal of accessibility, which it sounds [00:06:00] like it’s what you were doing.

[00:06:02] Jason Barnard: Yeah once I exited Up to 10, I then created Kalicube.

[00:06:07] Jason Barnard: Which is my current company, K-A-L-I-C-U-B-E. And as you said, we’re here to help people, control and amplify their brand, personal, corporate or product brand online. And in that we’re very much more in the traditional way of communicating with search engines like Google and AI, like ChatGPT. And that does require accessibility.

[00:06:34] Maxwell Ivey: So that’s one thing I would really, I really do my best to emphasize, but I think you’re the expert here. And that is, is that Google and the other search engines, and we’ll talk a little bit about ChatGPT in a bit, are getting much better at detecting the basic minimum standards of accessibility and this can either help or hurt your brand. Is that correct?

[00:06:58] Jason Barnard: Yeah. The [00:07:00] problem with traditional SEO in the last 25 years, 27 years since I’ve been doing it, has been that the people in the SEO industry have tried to use or have successfully used accessibility as a trick to beat Google to win the Google game out tags for images, being the classic example out tags.

[00:07:23] Jason Barnard: Which are, I would imagine incredibly annoying to listen to those keyword lists when you are using a screen reader that were used many times by many people to trick Google into ranking webpages higher. The good news is Google have got smarter and the machines in general have got smarter, and that kind of simplistic tactic doesn’t work anymore.

[00:07:45] Jason Barnard: So hopefully people will come back to the original use of alt tags and other accessibility, op accessibility options. Use them properly so that, so that, excuse me, so that people with disabilities can [00:08:00] actually use them the way they were supposed to.

Educating Search Engines and AI About Your Brand

[00:08:04] Maxwell Ivey: I hope that you’re correct, but I haven’t seen any recent examples of people, making that decision.

[00:08:11] Maxwell Ivey: But it could be Google just hasn’t penalized enough of them yet for keyword stuffing in their alt text. I do find that I would love to have more description and less business jargon.

[00:08:23] Jason Barnard: Yes. I can. A hundred percent agree with you on that. It’s always annoyed me also the, rollover tank, the title tag for the anchor text is something people have commonly spanned, added lots of business jargon instead of actually telling you what the link is about.

[00:08:45] Jason Barnard: The fact is Google has been famously blind. So the bot itself wasn’t able to see the content for many years. Now it can. So it does what we call rendering. So the machine will take a look at the [00:09:00] page as though it were a person. So that simplistic trick doesn’t work quite so well anymore, and Google are moving towards a smarter set of algorithms that don’t rely on keyword counting, which is.

[00:09:16] Jason Barnard: The particular weakness that, that trick exploited Google now understand the world in a semi human manner and so does ChatGPT so does Microsoft Copilot, Perplexity. They’re all moving towards the idea of understanding the world better, which should theoretically reduce that terrible abuse of the accessibility standards.

[00:09:41] Maxwell Ivey: And hopefully it will encourage more people to go beyond the accessibility standards, because I know one thing that you’re very big about teaching the search engines in the bots who you are. Now that I understand that the more, recent versions look at your business or your page as a person, [00:10:00] I understand you’re, you really want to educate them and, accessibility is a big part of that.

[00:10:08] Jason Barnard: Yeah, a hundred percent. The engines are getting smarter. So they see me, Jason Barnard.. as a person. They now understand who I am, that I’m an entrepreneur, that I’m a digital marketer, that I am the CEO of Kalicube. I was the CEO of Up to 10. Before that, I was the CEO of WTPL music. It understands all that, and that allows me to then feed it information both about who I am, what I do, who I can serve.

[00:10:33] Jason Barnard: Why I’m a credible solution, why it should trust me, and when it should deliver me to the subset of its users who are my audience. So the idea of simply using keywords and links is now pretty much dead, and we’re looking at brand, personal brand, corporate brand, product, brand. Can I educate the machine, educate it as though it’s a child to understand who I am, what I do, who I serve, and why I am a credible [00:11:00] solution for the subset of its users who are my audience.

Claim, Frame, and Prove: The Kalicube Model

[00:11:04] Maxwell Ivey: Okay. Now, I warned you in advance and I warned all my guests that I am prone to ask people questions that basically Max is the only one who wants to know the answer, and he hopes that sometimes other people will listen too. So here’s my question. As a person who has been a carnival owner. An amusement equipment broker, a coach, a podcast guest instructor, and booker, and now an accessibility expert.

[00:11:28] Maxwell Ivey: I’ve been Mr. Midway, the blind blogger. And Mr. What’s your excuse or no excuses? Is there any of this that I need to be. De-emphasizing or emphasizing, is there any of this that I should be hoping Google forgets? Get Google to see Max as the expert that people should hire as an accessibility lead for their company or organization?

[00:11:49] Jason Barnard: Yeah, I think that’s a question that everybody wants to know the answer to, to be honest. and it comes back to the reason or when I was pivoting from the ed tech company [00:12:00] Up to 10. To Kalicube is my problem, was that when I exited Up to 10, Google represented me as a cartoon. Blue Dog. Boowa are the cartoon Blue dog.

[00:12:13] Jason Barnard: I’m sorry. Because although I was the CEO and the founder of Up to 10, I also gave my voice to the cartoon character. Oh. And the problem was that online things like IMDB Wikipedia, Wikidata, Rotten Tomatoes listed Jason Barnard.. as the voiceover actor for a cartoon Blue dog and Google focused in on that.

[00:12:34] Jason Barnard: So if you search my name, it said, Jason Barnard.. is Cartoon Blue Dog. And I was trying to build a career in digital marketing and start a digital marketing agency. The first thing I had to do was solve that problem so that when people Googled my name, those people at the bottom of the funnel ready to sign a contract with me, that they didn’t see Jason Barnard as a cartoon blue dog. They saw Jason Barnard.. as a successful entrepreneur and a [00:13:00] major world expert in digital marketing. And it took me, I dunno, a few months to get that to, to start working a year to figure it out. And then after two years I realized that this is a huge service that everybody needs. We all have that multifaceted life.

[00:13:17] Jason Barnard: Some like yourself and myself more than others, but Google and the AI don’t know for a fact that all of those people you just mentioned are the same person. So the first thing to do is make sure that it understands it’s not five or six different people, that it’s five or six different jobs that Max has done.

[00:13:41] Jason Barnard: Five or six different personas that you’ve had.

[00:13:43] Maxwell Ivey: Right? So is that why when I asked you which website to send people today to today, you said you used Jason Barnard dot com Partly because it’s easier, but partly because that’s a place where all of your personalities are drawn together.

[00:13:57] Jason Barnard: That’s a very good way of putting it.

[00:13:59] Jason Barnard: Thank you very much. Saved [00:14:00] me trying to say it quite so eloquently.

[00:14:03] Maxwell Ivey: Eloquent is not a word I get often, so thank you. But I’m just trying to follow along at home as I’m hoping our audience is so

[00:14:10] Jason Barnard: Okay. So as you say if you want Google to perceive you and represent you as an AC accessibility expert, you need to get it to understand more that all these people are the same person, and number two, that the, current focus is accessibility. So if you don’t have a personal website, you need to create one because Google and AI are looking for what they call the point of reconciliation. Some of them call it the Entity Home.

[00:14:41] Jason Barnard: Where they can get the information from you about you, about all of your different personas and which one it should be focusing on right now and on the Entity Home. You can write your clear story about the focus today, what you want to be known for today, and how you can serve the subset of their [00:15:00] users, who your audience.

[00:15:01] Maxwell Ivey: Okay. earlier this year I was giving a talk for CSUN that’s the California State University North Ridge Conference on Adaptive Technology. And as part of that I filed for a new domain because it was easier to print and braille on my business cards. And so we filed for Maxwell Ivy and also Max ivy.com and we went with Max Ivy ’cause it’s obviously fewer braille characters on the front of the business card.

[00:15:28] Maxwell Ivey: It almost sounds like that was a, was not necessarily a bad thing to have done if I’m looking at this point of reconciliation that you were just talking about.

[00:15:39] Jason Barnard: Yeah, it’s a great thing to have done if you look at it, if you take a step back and look at my career, for example, I am mentioned on the website of my first company, W-W-T-P-L Music, I’m mentioned on the website of Up to 10 limited.

[00:15:57] Jason Barnard: My second company and on my own [00:16:00] Kalicube website today, the only place Google can find those three pieces of information in one place is on my website. So those three different companies that I founded, and I was the CEO of all mention me, but the place Google will find that full information is on my own website.

[00:16:18] Jason Barnard: And that goes for my books, it goes for my music albums, it goes for my TV series. It goes for everything I’ve done.

[00:16:26] Maxwell Ivey: Yes, I noticed that about your homepage and I was almost over informed as far as finding points of information for our conversation today. which is, is a bit of a, an accessibility item that most people don’t talk about is how, you mentioned earlier my screen reader, how slowly it talked because that’s how I have my screen reader set.

[00:16:49] Maxwell Ivey: The more information, the longer it takes to digest the information with adaptive technology. But I was, I did notice if you have everything there, your books, your podcast, your you’re working [00:17:00] various different fields. Your public speaking and everything. So if, nothing else, you are definitely someone who does things the way you’re teaching other people to do them.

[00:17:11] Maxwell Ivey: And I’m impressed by that.

[00:17:13] Jason Barnard: Thank you very much. The point of the website is to guide the bots, Google ChatGPT, Perplexity, Microsoft Bing, to better understand me and to hopefully present the information that’s actually interesting for people front and center. So we have two different audiences, one of which is people who will look at typically four or five pages.

[00:17:38] Jason Barnard: They wanna know about my companies, they want to know about my books, they wanna know about me. giving keynotes talks, me as an innovator potentially. And then a lot of information behind the scenes that is less easy for people to where I’m helping the bots to better understand who I am, what I do, and who I serve.

[00:17:59] Maxwell Ivey: [00:18:00] Okay. So that is that is important. Would you say that either of those audiences is more or less important or you have to hit, you have to nail ’em both equally?

[00:18:09] Jason Barnard: You have to nail them both equally. And the, for me, the very important thing is not to push the content that won’t, people won’t find interesting in front of them.

[00:18:22] Jason Barnard: So if I’ve written an article that explains to Google, for example, I wrote an article the other week saying, Jason Barnard.. is the world expert in Brand SERPs. Jason Barnard.. is the world expert in Knowledge Panels Brand SERPs first Knowledge Panels is the search result for somebody’s name. Online Reputation Management is effectively managing the search result for your own name.

[00:18:43] Jason Barnard: Therefore, Jason Barnard.. is a world expert in Online Reputation Management. Now, some people might want to hear that. But the aim was to get Google and AI to recognize me as a world expert in Online Reputation Management. [00:19:00] With that, which is what we call in Kalicube claim frame and prove, I make a claim, I’m a world expert in Online Reputation Management.

[00:19:08] Jason Barnard: I frame it by saying, Brand SERPs, Search Engine Results Page for brand name plus Knowledge Panel expertise together, make Online Reputation Management expert. And then I prove it by linking out to places where people have said that I’m an expert in Online Reputation Management, Brand SERPs, and Knowledge Panels.

[00:19:27] Maxwell Ivey: Okay. So the three points again are, and I noticed the last one, proof is is an important part of it. So what are the three parts to your Kalicube approach? Again.

[00:19:36] Jason Barnard: Claim frame and prove, make a claim. Frame it in a way that makes sense to your business today, that helps you today and prove it. So your example would be you have multiple personas in the accessibility space so you can actually make those claims and frame them to serve your business today.

[00:19:57] Maxwell Ivey: The one I was recently exposed to [00:20:00] through people that I’ve been associating with lately in the disability community is Max. The fact that you were open about your disability in 2012 when most people were still hiding their challenges online. Basically put you in the forefront of advocating for accessibility.

[00:20:17] Maxwell Ivey: So I can claim that I’ve been access advocating for all these years. I have the experience of things I’ve done through the blind blogger.net and then, the proof being the, people that I’ve actually, actually educated or informed on accessibility through my writing, speaking, or consulting.

[00:20:39] Jason Barnard: A hundred percent. And the fact that you’re a precursor, that you were one of the first to come out and start talking openly on the blind, dogger blind blogger net, gives you the proof as well. You can say one reason that I should be considered an expert in an Authority in my field is because I’ve been talking about it for 13 years [00:21:00] online, and here’s a link.

[00:21:01] Jason Barnard: To that blog that proves that I started in 2012. That kind of proof is also very useful. And then, as you said, people writing reviews for you or writing articles about you is another proof IE your audience appreciating your work within that field.

The Future of Search and the Role of Accessibility

[00:21:19] Maxwell Ivey: Okay, so up till now we’ve been talking about, mostly I think about Google.

[00:21:25] Maxwell Ivey: I could be wrong. I’m wondering if you could talk a bit about how ChatGPT and the many other AI bots that are coming online are affecting Search Engine Optimization and at the same time how they are, how or whether or not this makes accessibility more or less important going forward with AI.

[00:21:48] Jason Barnard: ChatGPT for example, is, able to have a conversation so that changes the nature of search. Rather than Google coming up with the 10 blue links, I click on the 10 blue [00:22:00] links to do my own research ChatGPT perplexity, and now Google AI mode will summarize the search results for me. So I don’t need to visit as many websites and that’s terrible news.

[00:22:13] Jason Barnard: For blog publishers and SEO professionals, but it’s great news for users who want a much better user experience. So the aim of search now is to become part of a conversation between a machine and a human. So what I want to do as a marketer is ensure that ChatGPT or Google AI Mode, Google Gemini, Microsoft Copilot, Perplexity, introduce me to the conversation with the right people at the right time when I can solve their problem, when those people are having a conversation with the chat bot.

[00:22:53] Jason Barnard: That for me is a fundamental shift and a fundamental shift in the way we need to think as [00:23:00] marketers. Is that we need to think about how do I make myself top of mind at the critical moment when push comes to shove and somebody asks that machine for the solution to their problem?

[00:23:16] Maxwell Ivey: Wow. It’s that’s much more, that’s much more momentous than I thought about it. Anytime I’ve actually used one of those chat bots.

[00:23:29] Jason Barnard: One way I’d like to say is how, can you become top of algorithmic mind? It’s like when you’re having a conversation like the two of us, and you say to me, oh, actually, Jason, could you tell me somebody who can solve this specific problem, make me a beautiful website who happens to be top of my mind at the moment?

[00:23:46] Jason Barnard: You ask me? All that question is critical because it could be one of 10 people, but I’m only gonna give you one name. Okay. How do, we make ourselves top of algorithmic mind at that critical moment when somebody’s asking the machine [00:24:00] for the solution to their problem? And we call that the perfect click, and it’s Fabrice Canel from Microsoft Bing, who told me this is that the idea of copilot ChatGPT AI mode is to bring the user down the funnel through awareness, consideration, and to decision.

[00:24:19] Jason Barnard: And that moment of decision is what they call the perfect click. Which website should I send you to? Which supplier should I send you to? When you ask me who will solve my problem the best, and that supplier company, Kalicube, Jason Barnard.. or Max, that the machine sends the user to at that critical moment is the one that it trusts the most.

[00:24:45] Maxwell Ivey: Okay, so in the past, the goal was to be on the first page of results. Yeah. Those first 10 results. That was, if you were on that first page, you had a good shot. Yeah. But now we need to be that first of first [00:25:00] when somebody’s having that conversation with the bot, asking them, who would you recommend as if they’re having a conversation like we are, as you mentioned.

[00:25:09] Jason Barnard: Yep. A hundred percent. And it’s, a really tricky problem for marketers because it’s very difficult, if not impossible to actually measure. How do I know as a marketer that conversation includes me? Because there is no way for me to measure it as a marketer because each conversation is private and no data is released.

[00:25:32] Jason Barnard: So the key is actually to build yourself, to be the market leader. In your niche. So for you, building up your personal brand to be the market leader in accessibility would be your aim. And then you would have to work on the belief that the machines are actually introducing each to the conversation.

[00:25:53] Jason Barnard: And one of the things that we do at Kalicube is the claim frame and prove model where we write the content that [00:26:00] claims and frames and proves to the machine that we can solve these problems and that we are the best, the most trustworthy source.

[00:26:08] Maxwell Ivey: Okay, so where does accessibility come into this? As far as the brand or the marketer?

[00:26:16] Maxwell Ivey: When they are creating their websites and their content, are they going to know that accessibility is important, or is accessibility going to even be important to the bots, or is that gonna be on people like me to show the bots that it is important? How does that all work?

[00:26:35] Jason Barnard: Which is a great question.

[00:26:36] Jason Barnard: The bots all use the same web source, the same data source, and that’s the web. The only way I can educate the bots about me is by changing my digital footprint. And the key to educating the bots is to make sure that your content is indexable. And I’ll go through the process of how a bot thinks and functions.

[00:26:59] Jason Barnard: [00:27:00] So we need to differentiate between. LLM Chatbot, which is ChatGPT, search engine, which is Google, and the bot that actually goes around the web sucking up all the information. So I’ll call ChatGPT, Google AI mode, Google search, assistive engines. So we’ll call them all assistive engines for the moment.

[00:27:24] Jason Barnard: The bot goes around the web and there are five stages. Number one discovered, they discover a webpage, so they might see a link to a webpage and they see, okay, there’s a new webpage. I’ve discovered that I know it exists. Now the question is, do I select it or not? If it’s selected, it goes through the webpage.

[00:27:50] Jason Barnard: Then it goes through the process of crawling. So you’ve got discovery, selection, crawling. Then it renders, which means it shows the [00:28:00] webpage to itself as though it were a human or as close as it can, which is where accessibility is hugely valuable as it crawls. Accessibility will make the crawling easier and the rendering easier.

[00:28:13] Jason Barnard: So accessibility helps with already those two phases. Then it indexes the webpage. Now this is crucial accessibility. Is as you said earlier on the, standards of the web, including HTML five, semantic HTML five, and I’ve been obsessed by semantic HTML five since the beginning, let’s say. And the reason is because semantic HTML five gives a role to each part of the page.

[00:28:43] Jason Barnard: And the reason that’s important is it means the, bot can break the page down into blocks and analyze each block each, passage or each section. Individually, and then it stores that webpage in multiple blocks or multiple [00:29:00] sections in the web index, which is then used by both ChatGPT and Google search.

[00:29:08] Jason Barnard: So both the LLM chat bots and by the search engines. And the key here is that when the bot puts the content into its index, it annotates every piece of content. Get puts a little post-it on the piece of content with a confidence score. Accessibility, items will always help the machine better understand which pieces of the content it should be putting in the index, what each piece of content is about.

[00:29:44] Jason Barnard: Increase its confidence in the post-its the annotations that it puts onto the content. So in fact, accessibility goes through the entire process of discoverability, selectability, crawlability, render ability, and index [00:30:00] ability. All five stages are greatly served by accessibility items.

The Future of AI, Search, and Accessibility

[00:30:09] Maxwell Ivey: That is very encouraging because if accessibility is in the best interest of business owners, marketers, designers, there’s a better than average chance.

[00:30:19] Maxwell Ivey: They will embrace it over time. Yeah. They may still try to game it, as we discussed with alt text, but I’ve found over the years, I have a much better chance if I can show somebody why it’s in their best interest as opposed to tell ’em, you need to do this or else.

[00:30:36] Jason Barnard: Yes. simply saying to them, the more you adhere to accessibility standards, the easier it is for the bot to discover, select, crawl, render index, annotate with confidence every single step of the way, you’re gonna be at an advantage.[00:31:00]

[00:31:00] Maxwell Ivey: and that last part, confidence is very important because it’s yeah. not only the confidence of the bot, but the confidence of the people reviewing the information that they are going to receive as a result of all this tech, this automated stuff being done on the back end.

[00:31:19] Jason Barnard: Yeah. one, one huge problem.

[00:31:21] Jason Barnard: I was watching a program about it yesterday that the amount of AI content being produced is a huge problem and it’s. Scary worrying. And it’s gonna get increasingly difficult to decipher what is created by AI and what isn’t. I’m in a position now where with the claim frame and prove model, building personal brands, I feel like I’m in a good place.

[00:31:52] Jason Barnard: I’m in a fair place. I’m in a place that’s gonna help the world. And for myself and Kalicube, I’m very proud of [00:32:00] that.

[00:32:00] Maxwell Ivey: I think that we’re starting to see in this discussion, more and more talk about how people like you who are trying to help people create real representations themselves to take advantage of what the bots are already doing.

[00:32:17] Maxwell Ivey: People that are using their unique voices to create content and resisting the siren call. Of making life easy and letting AI do it for you or with you. I feel like the, people like me and you are on the right side of this, and hopefully we’ll continue to be benefited by being on the right side of it.

[00:32:36] Maxwell Ivey: And the one thing I would say is look at all the people over the years who have been harmed because they gamed Google. And they did great for short periods of time, sometimes even medium periods of time. But eventually Google got smart and those businesses paid severe penalties for the results they had of gaming Google.

[00:32:58] Maxwell Ivey: And so you just have [00:33:00] to believe that, while it is challenging the people who, who continue to do things the right way, for lack of a better phrase. are going to ones be the ones who benefit over time. And I’m glad to see you and your company are approaching this with the right mindset.

[00:33:18] Maxwell Ivey: Yeah. Do you, yeah. So one thing I’m hearing though is that while, AI may affect employment, AI will not result in accessibility being ignored by the internet, which is a very encouraging thing too. I have come to understand in just about a half hour or so. So I really appreciate you giving me some Yeah.

[00:33:39] Maxwell Ivey: Positive belief there on the future of the net and accessibility. And so before we finish, I’d just like to give you a chance to, what are some of your thoughts about the current condition and future of AI and search And if you can, add in a little bit of [00:34:00] accessibility and they’re fine if not.

[00:34:01] Maxwell Ivey: This is your time. So what would you want people to take away from meeting Jason Barnard.

[00:34:09] Jason Barnard: Fundamentally, how AI understands and represents you as a person, your company, your product, is an existential problem, and it’s an existential problem you must address at some point. If you want to make money online with your business, your personal brand or your product, and the time to do it is now.

[00:34:31] Jason Barnard: Because these machines are nailing down the foundation of their knowledge in the next couple of years, and once they’ve got to a point where they feel they understand enough about you, they have no reason to come back and ask you for more information. So you need to make sure that these machines understand who you are, what you do, who you serve, and why you are credible in the next three to four years, so that they can help you reach your audience, your [00:35:00] ideal audience.

[00:35:01] Jason Barnard: And always remember that these machines are gonna be having conversations with your audience, just like you as a user, having conversations with them, and you need them to have you, your product, your business, top of mind at the critical moment when somebody asks that machine, who should I trust to solve this specific problem?

[00:35:29] Jason Barnard: You need to be top of mind and the time to start building that top of mind strategy for algorithms. The time to start is right now.

[00:35:42] Maxwell Ivey: Our, my good friend Alex Sanfilippo, who created Pod Match. Yeah. he, loves using a quote and I forget who he got it from, but he talks often about how the best time.

[00:35:55] Maxwell Ivey: To start planting a forest was 20 years ago, but the next best [00:36:00] time to start planting a forest is right now. And so I couldn’t help but mention my good buddy’s name when you were talking about that. So I do hope y’all will check out Jason at Jason Barnard dot com or at Kalicube dot com.

[00:36:15] Maxwell Ivey: I really appreciate you coming on the podcast. I also hope that y’all will. Check out the sponsor for this episode and consider sponsoring a future episode of the Accessibility Advantage. audio i.com. Audio EY e.com has a very solid accessibility checker that will help you get a good start, baseline.

[00:36:37] Maxwell Ivey: As far as where you’re at now, it will test for up to 32 different types of violations under the web content accessibility guidelines or. WCAG and that’s at audio ey.com. And I do hope that y’all will visit the website, the accessibility advantage.com. Feel free to reach out. send me an email. I really [00:37:00] enjoy having conversations where I can learn and also educate people about how accessibility.

[00:37:05] Maxwell Ivey: Many benefits everyone, so.

[00:37:08] Jason Barnard: That’s brilliant. I’m gonna go and take a [email protected] right now and check my website and I’m sure I’m gonna fail quite a lot of those tests. Oh, I doubt it.

[00:37:16] Maxwell Ivey: I, doubt it because the only thing I really noticed about your website is there’s an awful lot of content there and that’s not something indexed under WCAG, so I think you’re probably pretty good.

[00:37:27] Maxwell Ivey: So hey guys, I do hope y’all will, join us the next time. And until then, please do take care of yourselves out there.

[00:37:35] Jason Barnard: Thank you so much, Max.

[00:37:36] Maxwell Ivey: Thank you. Sure. Let me do my, let me do my ending music and then we’ll press stop. So disabled people, we tell our friends and share to our social sides. Don’t think about how hard it is, just focus on those dollar signs cause [00:38:00] accessibility.

[00:38:03] Maxwell Ivey: Ain’t just for those with disabilities.