Website accessibility is key in 2023. By making your website accessible to all – including the disabled – you can experience a huge number of benefits. Interested to learn more? Great! Here are the top 5 benefits of making your website disability-friendly.
How to Make Your Website More Accessible
These days, it’s easier than you think to make your website more accessible.
Here are some proven tips that you can follow:
- Choose accessible fonts (e.g., Tahoma or Calibri)
- Add alt tags
- Use descriptive headings and subheadings
- Consider which colors you add
- Make it easy to enlarge the text
Some of these options, like changing the text size on your website, will require accessibility overlays. This is a type of software tool that’ll make your website more accessible for the disabled. The “layer” goes over the top of your website and provides disabled users with a great range of options to choose from that they can select. A popular example is text-to-speech, which is when any text on your website will be spoken by a voice so that the disabled user can understand. Learn more about overlay information so that you can make your business website disability-friendly in 2023.
1. Increase Your Customers and Brand Reach
If your website currently isn’t accessible, you’re potentially losing out on thousands of customers. Obviously, this is something you don’t want, which is why you need to start making moves and get your website to be disability-friendly. As soon as it is, the new customers will start flooding through, and site traffic will be up. It’s a no-brainer.
2. Make Your Website Better
The process of making a website disability-friendly naturally leads to the quality of the website improving. For example, as you start to make changes to your website, you’ll probably have to clean up the code and destroy any bugs that are hiding in the background and causing you problems. Once everything is tidied up and upgraded, your website will look and feel better.
3. Easier Navigation
One of the biggest online customer demands today is an easy user interface and navigation. Without easy navigation, customers are more much likely to ditch your website.
The principles of making a website disability-friendly will spill over and provide you with other benefits: including easier navigation. From clearer headings to descriptive URLs, these types of changes make websites significantly easier to work with and enjoy as a customer.
4. Boost Your Industry Reputation
Pretty quickly, your website will start to earn your business a positive reputation due to the simple fact that it ticks all of the important accessibility boxes. As a result, more disabled people will become interested in using your website and purchasing products from it.
5. Avoid Possible Lawsuits
Lastly, you can avoid possible lawsuits.
When the Equality Act went active (2010), business website owners were obligated by law to make their websites accessible to all users, such as those with disabilities. Failure to make your website accessible can lead to ADA lawsuits. The bigger your business is, the more likely this is going to happen.
So, by making your website accessible and disability-friendly, you’ll never have to worry about potential cost implications, which is great news.