Whether you’re new to the business world or consider yourself seasoned, it never hurts to make improvements within your company.
One of the best ways to spread the word about your business and reach potential customers or clients is through your website. Your website can serve as a way for you to connect with your audience and sell your products or services.
It makes your business inclusive
As a business owner, you want to ensure you’re serving all demographics. Your brick-and-mortar business may have ramps, and you may provide sensitivity training for your employees, but is your business digitally accessible?
This is often overlooked in business plans and marketing strategies, but disregarding persons with disabilities means overlooking a large part of society. The demand for digital accessibility is growing, and it's more than just a keyword or talking point.
According to the CDC, roughly 12 million people in the United States live with vision impairment. And about 3 million adults in the United States have hearing trouble.
That's a lot of people, which means the possibility of a potential client or customer having vision or hearing impairment is very high. And if your website is inaccessible to them, you're both hurting their experience and selling yourself short.
Ways to put digital accessibility into play
By keeping accessibility in mind, you can do the following:
- Expand the outreach of your company, which broadens your potential customer base
- Comply with ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act) regulations, which helps avoid potential lawsuits
- Enhance SEO (search engine optimization) and increases the performance of your site
- Attract and keeps new customers and clients
Adding accessibility enhancements to your website should be a top priority. Doing that could look like the following:
- Including alt text for all images
- Using closed captioning for all videos
- Providing a visually-friendly design with appropriate contrast levels (the minimum recommended color contrast is 4.5 to 1)
- Limiting the use of automatic media (i.e., videos or speech that begins to play when your site loads
Inclusivity is important
These are just a few ways to create an inclusive, accessible user experience for those with vision or hearing impairments. Keeping this list and accessibility in mind will increase your reach, which is especially useful for e-commerce companies and service providers that may serve customers and clients worldwide.
And business benefits aside, having an accessible website includes an often-overlooked group that makes up a large part of our world. Web accessibility isn’t just good for business, it’s the right thing to do.
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