Whenever I am asked to speak about accessibility, I usually begin by talking about the real benefits that come from making things easier for everyone to use. After almost twenty years of teaching people about inclusive design, I have found that you often need to start by explaining why it matters in the first place.

We have to do a much better job of showing what’s in it for them. Which is easy because there are so many benefits to improving accessibility.

We can’t simply depend on fear of compliance regulations, lawsuits, or negative publicity. If we could accomplish true inclusion through compliance alone, we would already be there. Or we would be substantially closer to the goal of full accessibility.

As a community, we do a very good job of emphasising the stick and spend almost no time on the carrot. By fully explaining the business benefits of inclusion, I’m hoping to motivate more entrepreneurs to begin making their online presences more accessible.

The following are three main reasons why you should care about accessibility. They are improved user experience, improved organic traffic, and the power of the disability community

1 - Improved User Experience (UX) for Everyone

When you improve the accessibility of your products, services, and content, you will also improve the lives of all your users, including those who don’t have disabilities.

There are many great examples of this.

Dark Mode

This is the option to invert text colours so you have a light colored text on a dark colored background. This was initially intended to help people with vision loss who have enough vision to depend on screen magnification. It resulted in less eye strain and allowed them to read for longer periods of time with higher engagement.

It has since been determined that being able to invert the colours makes it easier for people using mobile devices in very high or very low light. They have a more enjoyable experience, so they are likely to spend more time on your website.

Forms

Since it takes longer for adaptive technology users like me to navigate a page, site owners are highly encouraged to break forms up into smaller sections. This keeps people using screen magnification from having to constantly scroll to enter their information. It also makes it easier for screen reader users to identify and correct errors. Breaking up forms like in a checkout process makes it easier for sighted visitors to complete their purchases. Again, this improves the experience for mobile users who have a much smaller screen to work with.

Closed captions

Originally created for the deaf and hearing impaired, but are now enjoyed in large numbers by people who can hear perfectly. This is because it allows people to enjoy videos in situations where they can’t or would prefer not to play the audio.

Transcripts

Transcripts of podcasts and other audio content allow the hearing impaired and people with learning challenges to comprehend your content. But they also make it possible for busy people to digest lots of information.

These benefits don’t just extend to online business. Just think about how curb cut-outs benefit parents with strollers and delivery people. Or how talking GPS was originally developed especially for the blind, and now helps people navigate their world on a day-to-day basis.

2 - Improved Organic Traffic

I don’t know anyone running an online business who doesn’t want more traffic and who doesn’t want to work less to get that traffic. Accessible content is a great way to accomplish this.

Google and other search engines do a great job in evaluating websites for whether or not they meet the basic standards of the WCAG (Website Content Accessibility Guidelines).

Search engines look for things beyond basic alt text; they scan for proper heading structure, accessible font choices, clearly labelled buttons & links, and whether or not buttons are clickable by adaptive technology users.

Search engines tend to reward sites that are well-structured, fast, and easy to navigate, all things that come from building accessibility. And it’s not just search bots anymore. Today, AI systems are also scanning and learning from the web in massive numbers. The more accessible and well-organised your content is, the better both humans and machines can understand what you do.

AI systems are increasingly crawling and learning from the web, interpreting websites much like search engines do. The clearer your structure, text alternatives, and labelling, the easier it is for both people using assistive technology and AI models to understand your content accurately.

The best way to help AI understand your website is to make your content clear, well-structured, and accessible, so it’s easy for both humans and machines to identify what you do and who it’s for.

The clearer and more accessible your website is, the better AI and search systems can interpret it accurately. Right now, you have the chance to shape how these systems understand your business. If your content is confusing or poorly structured, it’s much harder to fix that impression later than to get it right from the start.

You shape how AI understands and represents your business. The best way to do that is by creating clear, accessible content across everything you publish: your website, blog posts, podcasts, social media, and newsletters.

One aspect of accessibility that most people don’t realise involves site maintenance and page load times. When you build an accessible website, you naturally develop cleaner, more efficient code. This makes future updates faster and easier to manage. Plus, accessible sites tend to load more quickly because they avoid unnecessary elements and use less code overall with each page load.

3 - The Power of the Disability Community

So, how powerful is the disability community?

Any good conversation about the clout of the disability community has to start with just how many people it represents.

It is generally agreed upon that about one in six people worldwide identify as having a disability. If we used that ratio, we would come up with about 1.3 billion people globally and about 60 million in the US alone. However, those are only the people who identify.

Many people refuse to tell their friends, family members, coworkers, employers, or researchers that they have a disability. The majority of these people have an invisible disability like autism, dyslexia, epilepsy, attention deficit disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder, etc.

Many of them fear being stigmatised, even more so than those with visible disabilities. They often believe that they will be better received by employers and society in general by hiding their disability. This process is called masking. The point being, we probably aren’t counting these people.

But there is an even bigger group of people who choose not to identify as having a disability. I’m talking about people getting older. They will recognise that they are losing vision, hearing, motor control, and even cognitive function, but they will never see themselves as having a disability.

Nevertheless, both of these groups can benefit from improved accessibility and will show their appreciation for inclusive websites through their wallets.

I believe that the total number of people who live with the challenges of a personal disability is probably closer to one in three or four, and that doesn’t include people who have someone in their immediate circle who lives with the challenges of a disability.

Because so few companies make an effort to be inclusive, people with disabilities tend to be very loyal consumers. This loyalty applies not only to products and services but also to all types of content. In fact the current estimate is less than five per cent of the net is fully accessible.

As a group, we have a strong motivation to do what we can to help right-minded business owners succeed.

If they make a product or service we need, we will stick with them through good times and bad. We will often see accessibility as a value-added proposition that has us even paying more for certain products because they are delivered in an accessible manner. Any business owner or teacher can tell you that it is far easier to keep your existing customers than it is to constantly be chasing new ones.

There is still one more piece to the puzzle of the power of the disability community. That has to do with advocacy.

Again, we want to see these inclusive businesses succeed and even become the model of future success. So, we will promote companies that are making an effort to be more inclusive. We will tell our friends, family members, coworkers, and social media followers.

Many influencers who live with a disability have huge followings. Yet, very few of them have been tapped into by the national or international brands.

Millions of people care about the inclusion of all people as part of their social consciousness. Accessibility of products and services or inclusion in your workplace can draw positive attention from people who care about improving the lives of people living with disabilities.

These people would include motivated individuals, journalists, and a wide variety of advocacy groups.

I like to say that ‘when you improve accessibility, it opens up access to influencers you don’t have to pay.’

When you multiply raw numbers times loyalty times advocacy, it equals a market you can’t afford to ignore.

Inclusion Conclusion

The truth is that improving accessibility isn’t just the right thing to do. It is simply good business. Accessibility isn’t solely about compliance. It’s about reputation, innovation, and growth.

And when you make the effort to improve accessibility, you give yourself the opportunity to grow your business by standing out against your competition.

In fact, accessibility is one of the best ways I know for smaller companies to achieve a competitive advantage against larger, more established firms. Smaller, newer companies will usually have an easier time implementing accessibility best practices, as its much easier to build accessibility from the ground up, rather than retrofitting.

I hope that you have now come to understand the potential value of improving accessibility to your business, nonprofit organisation, or government agency, and that this post has motivated you to start taking steps to make your products, services, as well as their digital homes more accessible.

I hope you will also realise the value of sharing your journey towards improving accessibility. The folks at Accessima look forward to guiding you through the process.