What is Digital Accessibility?

Digital Accessibility

Building a strong brand is a must for companies to succeed in the digital age. Creating accessibility in web experiences offers your company two great opportunities: demonstrate a true commitment to accessibility, and greatly increase your audience.

It’s a common myth that people with disabilities don’t use computers. Or that they are not a potential consumer audience. However, according to the World Health Organization, it is estimated that more than 1 billion people live with some kind of disability in the world. In other words: it is very unlikely that your company will, in fact, not reach this market. So if your websites and applications are not accessible, sooner or later you will have to consider the huge market share you are losing.

What does digital accessibility have to do branding?

• Accessibility allows for more people to have positive experiences with your brand. The foundation of a positive brand image are the many people who have positive interactions with a brand. When web experiences aren’t accessible, some people are automatically excluded from ever having the opportunity to have that positive experience — although they may definitely have a negative one.
• Accessibility creates more opportunities for brand advocates. When people have one positive interaction with your company, and then another, and then another, they are more likely to become loyal to your brand. When they feel that the service or treatment they received could benefit people they know, they’re going to make recommendations to their close circle in-person or perhaps their larger ones on social media networks.
• Accessibility improves SEO. In order for people to have any experience with your brand, positive or negative, they need to find you. Some people are surprised to learn that SEO best practices and conformance to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) overlap.

And how do you start?

WCAG has a list of practices to apply to web content, but to start, there are some simple improvements that you must implement and put as a standard from now on.

• Include subtitles in all videos
• Include alt text in all images
• Have text and/or audio options for all non-text content
• Use content that can be presented in different ways without losing marketing context;
• Have all functionalities accessible by keyboard;
• Don’t include elements/shapes known to cause seizures.
• Offer ways to help users navigate
• Allow screen readers to review a website for a visually impaired user.

Investing in digital accessibility is not just a good SEO practice or an user experience improvement, but it is a way to position your company as a brand that genuinely cares about, supports, encourages and puts diversity and inclusion into practice.

The myths around accessibility

Accessibility makes the interface ugly

There’s truth in this because to design an accessible interface, there are a couple of guidelines to follow, and they can be restricting for designers.

But there’s technology and innovation available to dribble that and develop interfaces that can be both: your website can look good and still be accessible.

It costs too much

Taking accessibility into account requires a greater investment of time, this is true.

However, thinking about this aspect early in development can lead to lower costs in the long run.

Eventually, your product will have to go through revisions and new versions. This way, considering accessibility first will mean less time spent including these digital tools later.

It’s not worth it because it’s not an expressive number

When companies look at their data, they might perceive the marketing market as too small for such an investment because people with disabilities don’t even visit their websites.

But, this myth is quite ironic. Who came first, the chicken or the egg?

If your interface is not yet accessible for people with disabilities, how do you expect them to come to you?

People with permanent disabilities are just a fraction of users using accessible tools; individuals with no impairments find themselves in many situations where they need to turn to accessible tools and features.