Why It’s Important To Have Accessible Content for Everyone

Your customers are the heart and soul of your business. After all, without them, your company would cease to exist. Your customers give your company its purpose, direction, and identity.

Despite the profound role that clients play in the growth, performance, and longevity of an organisation, far too many companies continue to marginalise and even exclude large segments of the market inadvertently. This is a particular concern for e-commerce companies that rise and fall based on the visibility and accessibility of their online platforms.

This article explores the critical importance of web accessibility and describes strategies you can use to ensure that your content is easily accessible to all audiences.

What is accessibility, and why does it matter?

Simply put, accessible online content is that which can be consumed in a variety of ways according to the unique needs and preferences of individual end-users. This includes the provision of content that can be accessed and experienced by viewers with physical, sensory, cognitive, or developmental impairments in a manner equivalent to that of the “typical” end-user without special needs.

The advantages of producing accessible content are manifold. For one thing, web accessibility ensures your company’s compliance with international, federal, state, and industry statutes, particularly those codified under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). This can protect your company from a host of issues, including avoidable fines for non-compliance and even potential de-platforming of your online content.

Creating accessible content doesn’t just offer legal and financial protections, however. It can also dramatically expand your market reach. Accessible content is, by definition, open to any and all, meaning that your company will be able to engage audiences that have traditionally been disenfranchised and underserved in the online marketplace. You will be tapping into a vast and lucrative market segment, enabling your company to cultivate a brand defined by inclusivity and diversity.

Best of all, by ensuring accessibility, you are also ensuring that your audience will have a highly positive user experience when engaging with your content. They won’t have to struggle to read digital marketing content that is inaccessible to screen readers. They won’t have to ask for help in navigating your web pages because buttons and links are difficult to find and activate for those with mobility or developmental differences.

Your content will be truly functional and engaging for all.

Accessibility and SEO

Content accessibility doesn’t only pertain to your end-users ability to engage with and consume your online materials easily. Accessibility can also strongly enhance your target audience’s ability to find your content through an online search.

This is due to the fact that web accessibility and search engine optimisation (SEO) often go-hand-in-hand. If you’re not familiar with SEO, you should be, because SEO is perhaps the single most important technique you can use to ensure that your target clientele can find your online content amid a veritable sea of competitors.

It refers to a range of web design and content creation strategies that leverage search engine algorithms, particularly those used by Google, to place content highly on search engine results pages (SERPs). In general, if your content does not appear on the first two or three pages of a Google search, your target customers are likely not going to find you. Instead, they will select one of your competitors with a higher SERP ranking.

The good news is that site usability is one of the most important factors in determining your search engine ranking, and there are few better ways to make your content more user-friendly than by meeting web accessibility standards, such as support for voice search.

This would include, for instance, creating alt text for images to ensure that image descriptions are available for screen readers, providing closed captioning or transcripts for video content, and using short, descriptive titles and plentiful internal and external links for audiences with developmental, cognitive, and physical impairments.

In addition, accessible design should include multimodal capabilities, such as the ability for audiences with impairments to consume content across a variety of media and platforms. This means ensuring accessible and highly functional content for mobile devices, like smartphones, tablets, laptops, and desktops.

The takeaway

In this great age of digitalisation, online accessibility is neither a luxury nor an option. It’s a necessity. Creating content that is accessible for all, regardless of their particular needs or preferences, can protect companies from legal liability, potential fines, and even de-platforming.

However, the benefits of accessibility extend far beyond this. Accessible content also allows you to reach, engage, and gain the loyalty of large segments of the market that have for too long been disregarded and underserved.

It also helps audiences, both with and without special needs, find your content more readily by enhancing your search engine rankings. The end result is a better user experience, a more effective market outreach, and a more engaging content development strategy.

About the author

Amanda Winstead is a writer from the Portland area with a background in communications and a passion for telling stories. Along with writing she enjoys traveling, reading, working out, and going to concerts. If you want to follow her writing journey or even just say hi, you can find her on Twitter.

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