How To Ensure Your Digital Marketing Is Accessible To Everyone
Besides the obvious reason that making your business as inclusive and accessible as possible is the right thing to do, audience inclusivity can positively impact your business performance. Consider a recent Accenture study that showed 1.6 times increased revenue for businesses that prioritize disability inclusivity as compared to those that don’t. Plus, you can avoid big legal fines for non-compliance.
Making big changes to your business marketing to accommodate disabilities can sound daunting so we wanted to share a list of small tasks you can tackle each week to make your business as inclusive as possible.
An estimated 16 percent of the global population lives with disabilities after all.
Disability Inclusivity In Your Business
The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) protocols all the ways you should make your physical store more accessible to customers with disabilities including space, restrooms, parking, and service animal requirements to name a few of them. It’s also a good idea to include these points in your emergency response plan if you have one.
Did you know that over the years consensus has emerged that the ADA applies to businesses online as well?
Make Your Website and Emails More Accessible
After you have all the in-person stuff figured out, you should also make a few upgrades to your website and emails.
There is a comprehensive guide for everyone to follow called the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines but it’s a little confusing so we recommend this brief explainer by AccessiBe.
Hopefully whoever designed your logo and brand assets has already considered the colors and fonts, but if not, you may want to start there. Ideally, your brand colors are different enough in tone so colorblind folks and people with low visibility can easily understand the message you’re conveying.
On that note, having large text (at least 11pt) and not teeny tiny fine print will also enable many more people to read your website. Having large thumb-size buttons on the mobile version of your website is important too.
Flashing content isn’t as trendy as it used to be but it’s still a good idea to avoid it since it can cause seizures and other sensitivities.
One easy thing to do is to add alt-text to your images in the backend of your website. Alt-text is not the image caption, but rather a little description that is usually only seen when you hover over the image or use a screen reader. Compatibility with all types of screen readers is important. Alt-text also helps your SEO by describing the content of the images to search engines so they can more accurately match them to your search.
Finally, be sure your labels for images, buttons, and any navigation are descriptive. It can be tempting to make them fun and cheeky but that could make your website difficult to navigate.
Not sure if your site works with screen readers or follows other best practices? There are awesome tools to help you check! These from the World Wide Web Consortium, and this one called AccessScan.
Create Content on Social Media For Everyone
Most social media platforms have built-in tools to make your content consumable by everyone, you just have to opt into them.
All audio and video content uploaded to social media should have the option to turn on captions or transcripts. Besides the accessibility benefits they provide, it’s just good practice to activate these since many people scroll social media when they can’t have audio on (the subway, in bed after their partner has fallen asleep, or while waiting in line for something).
In addition to captions and transcripts, consider the links and tags you include on your social media stories. Despite the aesthetics of your post, you should avoid making tags in your stories super small as they will be difficult to tap and access for some.
We recommend building these steps into your marketing moving forward, but you’ll also want to go back and correct your previous content when possible. You can block a Monday afternoon to tackle one thing at a time, alt-text on your website images for example.
Overall, most of this is common sense and kindness. We want our business to be accessible to everyone and inclusive practices make that so. If you want support initiating some of these changes in your own marketing, we’re happy to help!