Skip to main content

Driving Digital Inclusion: The Value of Website Accessibility Audits in Marketing Strategies

Maintaining your website accessibility can be a good practice that ensures that people with varying levels of disabilities can access your products with no hassle. The disabilities may be of different types, such as permanent, temporary or situational, including motor, cognitive dysfunction, hard of hearing, and visual disabilities.

By adhering to accessibility standards, you are not only shouldering a social responsibility but also fulfilling the legal obligation. Therefore, it is important to undergo Web Accessibility Audit on your website to stay relevant. 

What Is the Impact Of Web Accessibility On Marketing? 

It is evident in countries where web accessibility is a legal requirement. The tenets of accessibility are to provide equal access to all regarding digital assets without any discrimination.


Therefore, it transpires that by maintaining accessibility, you can avert costly and lengthy litigation. At the same time, you can allow diverse users to navigate your website, thereby a positive change in your business growth. Accessibility Audit, in that case, merits significance. Palpably this can affect your marketing strategy significantly in the following ways.

Enhanced Brand Visibility  

You can find a staggering disability amounting to 57 million people In the US alone. You cannot reach nearly 20% of US disability segments if your website is inaccessible. 

According to a study by Click-Away Pound in 2016, the UK people revealed that 71% of consumers with disabilities leave the website if they find out the designated website is inaccessible. 


Interestingly, the same consumers have a spending power of 11.75 billion GBP. You can be surprised that it makes spending 10% online in the UK.     


So, it is certainly a significant pointer that develops your website accessibility for all, allowing you to tap untapped disability sectors that help your business grow significantly. Ignoring it, you are likely missing the bus. Therefore, pay attention to Accessibility Audit.

Accrue Search Engine Optimization Benefits 

You can develop your website based on the accessibility guidelines that require you to maintain your content in structured format employing heading tags. 


At the same time, you should be such that it helps user-friendly navigation, incorporating transcripts or closed captioning on your video, and introducing alt text for images. You can develop descriptive anchor text regarding hyperlinks. 


Top-notch search engines have strongly recommended this guideline to enhance on-page factors relating to search engine optimization. It concludes that practising recommended guidelines on your website can dramatically increase the SEO ranking. So, the Web Accessibility Audit is surely considered a game changer.  

Enhance User Experience (UX)

The important consideration of UX design is to enhance the usability of a product. It is one of the vital aspects for you to comprehend user behaviour, their motivation level and your ability to develop products based on this.

When designing, you must comply with WCAG( Web Content Accessibility Guidelines), which recommended four principles such as perceivable, operable, understandable, and robust. Adhering to these principles helps your website to be more accessible.

Based on these principles and relevant guidelines that accompany the best in the following:

  • Website designing should be responsive

  • Permit users to navigate all the website features through the keyboard  

  • Developing website content should be easily readable 

  • Select appropriate colour contrast for visually challenged people

  • Developing web forms that are easily navigable 

Enhance PR Value 

People prefer to go with those brands that focus a lot of value on their requirements. Developing an accessible website for all conveys a message of inclusiveness. The BoIA (Bureau of Internet Accessibility) recommend corporation publish an Accessibility statement displayed on their websites to showcase their accessibility policies. So, the importance of Web Accessibility Audit is thus ensured.

The following reasons, according to the BoIA, why require an accessibility statement:

  • Endorse Inclusivity

  • Mention the accessibility standard employed

  • Allow users to discover that certain website parts are inaccessible and provide a workaround.

  • State Accessibility accomplishments 

Summing Up 

Web accessibility can be time intensive and expensive in the light of changes you may contemplate introducing on your website. Despite that, it is undoubtedly a prudent investment considering its far-flung impact. Therefore, it is an onus on your part to go for Accessibility Audit appropriately to drive digital inclusion.                        

          


Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Accessibility Audit: Guidelines and Standards You Should Follow

A startling revelation of statists is that billions of people worldwide have some level of disabilities, and it continues unabated. In this grim situation, the only ray of hope stems from introducing technology inclusive and performing an  Accessibility Audit.  An accessibility audit is a process through which it checks a website or application to maintain accessibility guidelines comprehensively. It becomes a mandatory process that satisfies the guidelines of people with varying levels of disabilities. Generally, the audits involve the following manner. Take a look: Conducting automated and manual testing conducted by accessibility professionals  Performing testing in the direction of people with cross disabilities  Checking and analysing the overall user experience and design of the website or applications  Finding out any potential accessibility chinks present in the website  The main objective  of Website Accessibility Audit  is to evalua...

The Business Case for Investing in Website Accessibility

The importance of a website is imminence, particularly in the digital era, because it is a significant bridge between organizations and their audience. Accessibility has become vital, especially if you have an online presence. Despite the importance of accessibility, many companies and businesses have yet to focus significantly on accessible websites. So, investing in accessibility is a prudent step. It is not only confined to satisfying legal requirements but also refers significantly to business cases. Hence, the importance of Website Accessibility Audit is simply undeniable. Why Are Organizations Providing a Top Priority to Accessibility?  Giving priority to accessibility by the organizations provides a dollop of benefits. Let’s walk through it. Increase Target Audience Reach  Undoubtedly, by developing accessible websites, businesses can explore the uncharted terrain of people with disabilities and connect with diverse audiences.  According to the World Heal...

PDF Accessibility Remediation: Why Does It Matter?

In  earlier times, when Government organizations or private agencies wanted to share important information, they usually communicated through periodicals, newsletters, newspapers, radio, and other traditional methods. Although the mode of communication remains almost the same, the emergence of the digital world has transformed the traditional method significantly and, to some extent, even replacing the traditional mode.  When COVID-19 wreaked havoc in early 2020, there was unprecedented consumption of digital information documented overnight. Consequently, all governments and private organizations have started communicating through digital media. Here comes the  PDF Accessibility Remediation. What Is PDF Remediation? It is the process of tagging PDF digital elements to documents so they can be read with the help of assistive technologies. The tags the assistive technology regarding the order they are supposed to read. Many organizations use the PDF format—the reason ...