Not only is digital accessibility great for your users and legally required of you as a company, but digital accessibility is also excellent for your business. Read on to learn more about the benefits an accessible website or app offers your company.
Clarity and Usability
One benefit to your company in having a universally accessible website is usability. Not just people with disabilities benefit from a clear, organized site; it benefits everyone who lands on your pages. When you’re trying to grab a few seconds of someone’s time online, you want your message to be memorable and straightforward, and this has to happen quickly. Following digital accessibility guidelines makes your site tidy, clear, and simple, benefiting your users. You’re much more likely to get views, clicks, inquiries, or sales if your site or app is easy to view and use. Accessible websites achieve this aim for everyone.
If you’re following accessibility guidelines, your website will be easy to navigate, as people living with blindness and neurodiversity prefer tidier sites with more streamlined ways of getting around. Luckily, this is good for everyone, and your site will look much more professional instead of messy and confusing. Navigable sites get you more views and retain your viewers for longer. A complicated site or app leads to abandoned baskets or the loss of your viewers. With so many websites offering the same thing, your viewers won’t stick with a messy site, whether they have disabilities or not.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Accessible websites get you ranked more highly on search engines like Google. Digital accessibility is excellent for SEO, and Google, in particular, ranks sites that are accessible via text only highly. Google’s bots rely mainly on text and alt text, so if you’re ranking highly on Google, your site is probably reasonably accessible to people living with blindness and low vision. To improve this, ensure your site covers color blindness and provides text options for everything. For example, offer descriptive captions to images and gifs, and provide transcripts or articles alongside videos, podcasts, and audio clips.
Your brand will gain popularity with higher search engine rankings and better accessibility. Non-disabled people also like to buy from brands that seem to care about all types of people, so your accessible website will appeal to everyone else.
Avoiding Complaints and Legal Issues
Another helpful way that improving your digital accessibility helps your business is to cut down on complaints and avoid legal issues. If you comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) by offering a range of accessible ways of browsing your website, you’ll avoid lawsuits. You’ll also save time and resources on managing the inevitable complaints you’ll get from both users and activists.
Digital accessibility is a hot topic right now, and it’s well worth your time. An accessible website will help all your users, not just people living with disabilities. You’ll also rank higher on Google, get more sales, lose fewer viewers, and avoid lawsuits.
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