Over the coming months, we will be highlighting digital accessibility. From the Focused Marketing social channels, you can expect practical tips on how to make your brand experience more accessible.
What is digital accessibility?
It’s about being inclusive through removing barriers that prevent comprehension. An estimated 15% of the global population live with a disability. Currently, there are significant barriers on the web for many people. They may be experienced through vision, hearing, mobility, and cognitive disabilities. Creating accessible online experiences is important because everyone should have the same potential to interact with information, services, systems and socials. Aside from being the right thing to do, it will widen your audience.
Digital accessibility is a pressing topic for businesses. Social changes will make it even more important to consider how inclusive your digital presence is, including an increase of experiences and transactions moving online, an ageing population, and shifting expectations. To ensure you aren’t accidentally excluding users, now is a good time to consider accessibility in your marketing and communications plans.
Accessibility benefits everyone
When you design for accessibility, you often stumble upon solutions that are better than those when we design for the norm. For example, a website that is accessible and well-structured improves SEO, making it easier to be read by search engines as well as people, improving the user experience for all.
What can you do?
Inclusion doesn’t happen by chance. Everyone needs to take responsibility for what they post online. If you have a website, you are a publisher. If you have social media, you’re in marketing. Do you communicate via email? You are a writer…
When it comes to creating a new piece of marketing material, a website or a campaign, bake accessibility in from the start, as remediating can be costly and time-consuming. When starting a new project, do accessibility checks at key milestones. Where appropriate, you may want to implement user testing. And get your suppliers on board!
There are so many great resources to help you be more inclusive online. We’ve shared a few of our favourites below.
- Alt Text as Poetry – Alt text is an essential part of web accessibility, and this resource challenges you to approach it thoughtfully and creatively.
- We’re all Human – Resources for better, more inclusive design, including colour management tools, typography guidelines, image use guidelines, and an accessibility checklist.
- Web Accessibility Initiative – Strategies, standards, and resources to make the Web accessible to people with disabilities.
For more upcoming tips on digital accessibility, be sure to follow our socials.
Recent Comments