Most business owners don’t acquaint themselves with the laws and guidelines about website accessibility rules and regulations. It is the reason why some brands and business owners often face lawsuits. It is essential to make a website responsive as well as accessible to everyone. That way, it will increase brand awareness as well as website visibility.
What is website accessibility?
Simply put, website accessibility indicates ensuring that your website provides easy navigation from one webpage to the other. It is user-friendly to everyone, which includes people who have vision issues, suffer from color blindness, are old and has hearing issues as well. It gets best defined as the subset for usability testing. The WAI (Web Accessibility Initiative) outlines and also puts forward all the ways for conformance and initial reviews of sites accessibility testing. It comprises of several web accessibility tools that act as an accessibility validator. The tools also assist in conformance assessments.
There are several reasons why websites should opt-in for website accessibility testing and tools. It comes with several advantages like:
Helps you to stay away from legal issues and discriminations
With online technologies becoming more advanced today, it is essential to pay ample attention to website accessibility. This accessibility gets considered as a civil right for individuals who suffer from disabilities. The ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act) urges that disabled people should be able to make the most of all kinds of public services, such as schools, restaurants, theatres, and the like.
Indeed, the ADA doesn’t directly or extensively address web accessibility queries. However, it’s the legislation that is expansive that it has stretched the interpretation to the online domain as well. In the majority of legal situations, the U.S Department of Justice asserted that when there no website accessibility, it will get considered as ADA act violation. Hence, when website owners adhere to website accessibility best practices, they can stay away from any legal hassles.
It helps in developing useful public relations
The 21st-century world gets characterized by digital activism. Hence, several organizations wish to assist those companies that openly share their perspectives, viewpoints, and ideas. Recently, a study conducted by Accenture Strategy reflected 62% of the customers decide to buy products from a brand that doesn’t shy away to share their views on various social matters. They love brands that are willing to share their stories and are not afraid to take a stand as well. Also, about 47% of the respondents are interested in sharing if they get disappointed by an organization’s actions or words in anyways. The remaining 17% shared that they might not come back to the brand anymore.
Hence, website accessibility is an essential reason for people with visual or hearing issues, as well as their loved one. It is also necessary for a disability rights advocate. When you take your stand on matters related to web accessibility, you have the chance to establish a favorable brand image for your company. Disabled people will also look upon your website in the positive lens and will always have something useful to say. Furthermore, they might recommend your site to their friends and also share it on their social media profiles.
A smart way to start developing positive PR is to write down an accessibility sentence for the site. And this document can define the commitment you have for your website accessibility. It further explains the actions and practices that you followed to make things work for people who have specific disabilities. And this way, you also comply with the WCAG guidelines.
You can reach out to more online audiences
When you enhance your website accessibility, it enables you to do well in your business. It is challenging to come up with a website design that is accessible to all. However, when you have fundamental changes and modification areas, it can help you in the long run, by making the website available to people with disabilities. Additionally, with feature mobile device assistance, closed captions, and transcripts, basic website design can benefit most users.
It helps to improve the website SEO
Your website gains more value when it becomes truly accessible. It also helps to make the website to get noticed by enhancing the SEO. The main objective of SEO is to generate increased traffic to the content by improving the website rank in the major search engines, for instance, Google or Bing. While the precise details on how webpages get ranked in Google remains a mystery, few SEO best practices can help the online marketers to make the website more accessible.
In the majority of the cases, the objectives of SEO and website accessibility are similar and aligned. Designing and hosting websites with a clean interface and easy navigation helps everyone, including disabled people, to browse through a website and read the content. It also reduces the bounce rate. It engages more people on your website, which adds value to your website SEO. For instance, when you offer transcripts and closed captions for the content, you have a shared objective of SEO and web accessibility.
Do you want to offer everyone (even disabled people) the access your video content? If yes, then you need to provide a text equivalent of the audio and video files. It is a crucial website accessibility practice that you need to follow without fail.
Also, it is essential to realize that Google and various other search engines are usually text-based. It indicates that they aren’t able to scan for the speech in your website audio and video content. Hence, here, the transcripts and closed captions assist the SEO. They provide the necessary text that eventually gets discovered and indexed by search engines like Google and others. It also helps the users at large locate the essential data on your website.
These are some of the crucial advantages of website accessibility! Before you implement one, you can get in touch with an ace service provider that can help you understand website accessibility better. The service provider can also provide you with a personalized website accessibility strategy that will enhance your overall website performance.
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