Why should you improve the accessibility of your website and e-commerce?

Improving accessibility is referred to as the process of considering those users who are not able to get access to your website due to specific reasons. According to World Bank data, approximately 15% of the global population have some kind of disability. If your digital product is not accessible, you are excluding a big chunk of your audience, meaning your brand is not inclusive. To sum up:

• Improving the accessibility of the website plays a significant role in making the site usable to each and every user. 
• This would further help generate more traffic and it improves conversions, which would be beneficial for the business in several ways. 

In this article, we will talk about why businesses should work on improving the accessibility of their website and e-commerce. Additionally, it will share the best ways to improve it. Let's get started.

Why it is vital to improve the accessibility of digital products

Better user experience:

One of the reasons behind making the site accessible is to improve the user experience. When we talk about the e-commerce business, mostly everything depends on a user's experience – from their landing to exiting from your site. When developing a website, it’s vital to ensure that every user gets a satisfying experience in every facet such as navigation, searches by voice, etc. At the same time, the aesthetic of the digital product must not be forgotten. The trade-off between aesthetics and accessibility needs to be properly assessed. Talking to an expert might help you find a way.

Enhances business:

When you improve your website accessibility, it greatly delivers an optimistic message that further leads to market reputation. Forecast indicates that tech companies who focus on accessibility will generate $10 billion to $16 billion in design spend per annum in the US and Canada. This indicates that apart from an ethical priority, accessibility is vital from the finance point of view. 

Additionally, future-focused organizations are focusing on diversity and adopting disability inclusion as a part of this strategy.

Better visibility:

Improving web accessibility surely leads to better visibility on search engines. It is crucial to consider adding transcript and alt text to let all the users access your site. The addition of video transcripts, alt text etc., plays a considerable role in making your site accessible to disabled users as well. 

Make business future ready:

The future tech is digital and accessible by design process. In addition to this, the features of an accessible digital product often can solve several unpredicted problems.

Minimize legal threats: 

Rules are now getting stringent in many countries regarding digital accessibility. For example, in Italy the AGID, which is the Digital Italy Agency, is responsible to check the violations and take necessary actions for accessibility remediation. Therefore, now it is essential for digital companies to adhere to site accessibility.

Four steps to improve accessibility

Here are the simple and practical four steps that can improve the sites’s accessibility.

Training:

Designing an accessible product requires less effort than fixing an existing one. Therefore, proper training sessions to the design and UX team through experts can make a big difference. Moreover, awareness on the benefits of inclusion of accessibility features while designing can help the developers create a future-ready solution.

Assessment:

Nowadays it is vital to comply with the latest Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). Assessment helps to identify the level of accessibility of the digital products and all the potential adjustments. In this case, an ICT accessibility expert can check exactly what's missing and help you  fix those lost parts.

Remediation:

After identifying the improvement points in the digital product to make it accessible, it's time to eliminate the accessibility barriers left for people with disabilities.

Crowdtesting:

The vital part to ensure that the product is meeting the users’ expectation is to perform the crowdtesting. Advanced organisations like UNGUESS perform Accessibility testing via experienced ICT accessibility experts and real users with disabilities, considering all the possible viewpoints. . This is the only way to ensure that the digital solution complies with the WCAG regulations and brings the best solutions.