Making an Accessible Website with Nick Longtin and Eileen Noonan of Insi | Disability Rights Podcasts
Eileen Noonan (Chief Technology Officer) and Nicholas Longtin (CEO) of Insi share how their accessibility-first platform was born from years of work with nonprofit and government clients through their parent company, ArcStone. Speaking from the NCIL Conference, they explain how Insi is transforming accessibility from a costly burden into a powerful, affordable tool that improves websites across the board — from SEO to mobile performance to user experience. Eileen and Nicholas also speak about their long-standing partnership with NCIL, the importance of building inclusive digital infrastructure, and how accessibility is not only the right thing to do — it’s smart, scalable, and sustainable.
Transcript
[00:00:07] Eileen Noonan: My name is Eileen Noonan. I am the Chief Technology Officer at Insi.
[00:00:12] Nick Longtin: I'm Nicholas Longton. I am the CEO of Insi. We are a spinoff of our parent company, Arc Stone, which is a full service digital agency that was started in Minneapolis in about 1997, and in the kind of 20 teens, 2010, 2012.
You know, we were doing a lot of accessibility work for clients. We had some very large. Nonprofits, um, and, and clients who needed funding from the government and they had to comply with all these rules. And back then most agencies really didn't know a lot about accessibility, so we really dug into it.
But as we started to do more and more of that work, we just couldn't find tools that, um, you know, met our client's needs, met our needs, and were affordable. Kind of worked well. Um, and, and Eileen was also. Uh, working at Arc Stone back in the day and is a brilliant programmer and we thought, let's make our own tool.
Arc Stone has done several spinoffs, and that's kind of like our jam is let's take a very complicated technical problem and let's make a solution for it that more people can use and find value of.
So, um, and this, this goes beyond accessibility and, and something that we found is that, you know, when you make your website accessible, it is not only conforming to, you know, laws and rules that you are supposed to follow, but it, it just makes your whole website better. It works better for SEO works better for marketing.
It works better on mobile. It's faster. You rank higher in search engines. There really is. No reason not to do the accessibility work, except that previously it was difficult and expensive. We are making accessibility accessible. I just feel really lucky to be able to have found a, you know, a project, a niche, an area to work on. That it, it, it helps, it helps everybody. It, it just makes the world better. It's, it's a, it's a good business decision to make your website more accessible. It's a good moral decision to make your website accessible as a nerd.
[00:02:21] Eileen Noonan: Uh, I just find the tech really interesting and so it's, it's just intellectually very fun for me to work on. So it really, it really hits all of the, all of the points that I, that I value. And I think most people do value when they really get down to it. And I think just being at this NCIL conference has really driven at home because this community is just so incredible
[00:02:41] Nick Longtin: I would echo that NCIL is very clearly a leader in their work and is doing a lot of incredible things. So we're, we feel very, very fortunate to be affiliated with them. Our parent company, Arc Stone, designed and built their website, um, in partnership with them and, and we do some of the accessibility work on it and have worked with them for a while now, and their whole staff and their whole community is absolutely fantastic.
