According to the World Bank, 1 billion people across the world experience some kind of disability. But disability shouldn’t be reason enough to deny access to the internet. Hence, it is essential to make the internet more accessible to this massive population and ensure equal opportunities for them.
Ensuring web accessibility allows differently-abled people to have easy access to your website’s content. However, its advantages aren’t just limited to providing easy access of websites to differently-abled people. An efficient accessibility testing service brings a host of other benefits for the business which can impact your bottom line.
Eliminating Discrimination and Meeting Legal Compliance
Internet access has a necessity for people to execute their day-to-day tasks. Hence, web accessibility has become an essential thing for differently-abled people. Several governments have also taken a step in the same direction to ensure web accessibility for differently-abled people. Web accessibility comes under the purview of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). It has become essential for organizations in several countries including the USA to ensure WCAG compliance testing and Section 508 Testing.
This is the reasons that the number of web accessibility lawsuits have skyrocketed. The number of web accessibility lawsuits filed in 2018 spiked to 2,258 in the USA only. Several high profile enterprises were caught in the battle of web accessibility for disabled people. Hence, businesses need to make their digital assets easily accessible to differently-abled people to avoid claims of discrimination and legal action.
Increase Reach to Wider Audience
People are disabled in different ways including visual impairment, hearing disability, cognitive and motor disabilities. According to the World Bank, 15 percent of the global population is suffering from some or the other form of disability.
Enterprises should look at this huge number of people as a business opportunity instead of a liability. As per the survey published by Click-Away Pound; UK online retailers lost over $15.5 billion in 2016 because their eCommerce websites were not designed to meet the needs of disabled people and they couldn’t purchase anything.
It is not practically feasible to develop a website which is accessible to every single person. However, investing in web accessibility makes a great business sense while ensuring that disabled people stay connected to your business. Including features like smartphone compatibility, transcripts and closed captions along with a simple design can benefit every user in accessing the site easily.
These compliance with WCAG being subset of Section 508 is referred by organizations globally to develop a more accessible digital product and service to attract more market share and better compliance. The policy of this compliance keeps on updating on a regular basis which comes in an organized and comprehensive document for easy access. The standards mentioned in these compliance documents offer several acceptance criteria to ensure flexibility in adoption at different levels depending upon the accessibility maturity of organization.
Enhanced SEO
An easily accessible website also helps Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Efforts and better rankings. In fact, web accessibility and SEO both are aligned to each other. Websites with a cleaner interface and easily accessible UI enable people with disabilities to navigate the website easily. It helps in gaining more engagement and reduce the bounce rate.
For instance, putting up transcripts and closed captions is necessary both SEO and web accessibility.
To make video content completely accessible to differently-abled people, enterprises need to provide subtitles and audio content which is equivalent to the video content. This practice also helps the business to rank better in search results because Google indexes closed captions and transcripts and includes them in search results.
Similarly, to make images and infographics accessible to differently-abled people, an alt text description of the visual content is also uploaded to ensure assistive tools can read it. Transcribing images helps search engine to have a better understanding of the content present on the website.
Better Usability
Web accessibility is the sub-domain of usability which aims to make the digital world more accessible to differently-abled people. To ensure that the website can be navigated by differently-abled people, developers need to develop a well-organized website. To achieve this, developers need to put all the navigational elements in a set hierarchy to help users locate the content more easily.
Other web accessibility best practices include using alt text for images and objects. It also includes glossaries with definitions of acronyms, technical terms and rare words to help people with cognitive challenges and language unfamiliarity.
Better Quality Code
Developing an accessible site for differently-abled people requires developers and designers to write higher quality code. Capable accessibility testing tools including a11y® testing platform will not spare errors which could create usability issues.
Cleaner code will result in lesser bugs, faster load time and better user experience which will subsequently help in SEO ranking as well. Hence, building an accessible site is like an investment in your codebase.
Positive Feedback
Web accessibility is a life-essential cause for differently-abled people. And people support those enterprises which take a stand on issues which matter. As per the survey done by Accenture, 62 percent customers prefer shopping from organizations which help in making a better world.
Hence, taking a noble stand on web accessibility can help enterprises build a robust and positive brand image for years. Aside, differently-abled people who will benefit from your accessible website will also recommend your business to family and friends.
Conclusion
Web accessibility being done for the good of only differently-abled people is one of the common myths. Web accessibility can help enterprises harness a lot of benefits including increased engagement, greater customer base and increase search engine rankings among others. It is the only way to make digital assets more engaging and usable for a larger set of audience.
QA InfoTech is one of the leading independent QA and Software Testing companies in the world. We have pioneered web accessibility testing service over the years and offer state-of-the-art infrastructure along with a capable team to meet all your business requirements.
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