Making sure your website and digital assets are fully available to potential customers who have physical, sensory, mobile, or cognitive disabilities is critical for businesses today. By taking a few simple steps to ensure accessibility, you can open your business up to a new market of customers and improve the overall user experience for all of your visitors.

The W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) provides a comprehensive digital accessibility checklist, which is a great place to start. The following are some general tips to get you started:

– Make sure all images have alternative text descriptions
– Use descriptive links and titles
– Create clear and concise forms
– Use headings and subhead.

Some of the above changes clients can do themselves if they are technical enough. There are also companies that offer digital accessibility software, promoting how they can help you from potential lawsuits by installing a widget on your site, but the truth is, some of the more important changes must be done manually on the site within the code level. The software that is usually offered will simply show you what you need to do, and in some cases will give you a digital accessibility menu. That for sure can help your customers, but it doesn’t solve the big issue of making your site fully accessible.

So often we see beautifully designed websites that are completely illegible to people who use assistive technology such as screen readers. In order for your site to be fully accessible, you need to make sure it can be used by everyone, including on mobile devices. If you need help making your site accessible, please contact us for a free quote.

Although millions of consumers surf the web daily and spend billions of dollars annually on the internet, not all online businesses can succeed without professional help. Yet, many companies who promise you the moon may not be able to deliver, because they only have expertise in one or two areas, such as development platforms and marketing channels. That’s why it’s important to hire an online consultancy that understands how all the elements of your business work together as a unified entity and guides you to navigate effectively between your offline and online efforts.