The Importance of Digital Accessibility for Business Growth

The rise in the lack of digital accessibility is one of the major concerns for any organization in the modern world. According to the World Health Organization, about 1.3 billion people, or 1 in 6 people worldwide, experience significant disability. 

Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) can help organizations and businesses comply with laws and regulations, extend their reach in the market to include people living with disabilities, and stand out among their competitors.

Therefore, Organizations need to meet regulatory standards to make their digital property accessible to all people by following these 4 significant guidelines:

• Perceivable

• Operable

• Understandable

• Robust

In this blog, you can get a comprehensive guide on the importance of Digital accessibility for business growth and learn to leverage your business’s Digital accessibility with Voip features and technology.

🔑 Featured Points

• Digital accessibility ensures that people with disabilities can access and use various social networking sites. For example, this includes blogging platforms, content management systems, e-commerce websites, forums, wikis, and virtual worlds. 
• The WCAG guidelines provide techniques for making social media websites accessible to all users, including persons with temporary or permanent disabilities.
• Making your website more accessible will help with SEO (search engine optimization) efforts and improve online visibility.

Four principles of Digital Accessibility are Perceivable, Operable, Understandable, & Robust.

What is Digital Accessibility?

Digital accessibility is the design and development of websites, tools, and technologies in a manner that people with disabilities can use them, as it includes websites, software, documents, video, and other digital content that are practical, compatible, and accessible to everyone particularly the people with disabilities who are permanent or temporary impaired as defined by World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).

Digital accessibility ensures that all members of society, including the disability community person with vision impairments, hearing impairments‌, cognitive disabilities, and motor impairments, can fully participate in the growing digital world by providing equal opportunities to learn and engage with the world through digital products, services, resources, content, and technologies.

Furthermore, it can allow businesses and organizations to expand their audience reach and improve the user experience by optimizing SEO performance and building brand reputations.

Difference between digital accessibility and web accessibility

While digital and web accessibility are often used together, there is a noticeable difference between‌ them. 

Let’s take a closer look at the table below:

Types of Digital Accessibility

Digital accessibility ensures that everyone, regardless of their abilities, can perceive, understand, navigate, and interact with digital products and offerings, including various types of content, information, and resources. 

Here’s a simplified breakdown of the types of Digital Accessibility below:

1. Mobile Accessibility:

Mobile accessibility involves making digital content usable for everyone. Buttons and other interactive elements should be large enough for people with motor impairments to tap easily, and the language should be clear and concise to help people with cognitive disabilities.

 Mobile apps and websites should be compatible with assistive technologies like screen readers, where using proper and consistent brand color contrast between background colors and text colors is also essential for people with visual impairments and blind color issues.

2. Video Accessibility:

Closed captions and transcripts allow deaf people or individuals with hearing defects to follow the dialogue, while audio descriptions can act as visual information to blind and visually impaired people, enabling them to follow instructions and required actions independently.

3. Audio Accessibility:

Audio accessibility ensures that audio content is accessible to all. Providing text transcripts for podcasts, audiobooks, and other audio content helps those who cannot hear the audio. Descriptive audio adds necessary information to audio content, clarifying elements that might not be clear by listening to sound alone.

4. Text PDFs:

Making PDFs accessible involves several key practices. Ensuring a logical reading order helps screen readers convey the content correctly. Using tags to identify headings, paragraphs, tables, and other elements allows assistive technologies to navigate the document easily.

Additionally, including proper alt text or alternative text for images ensures that visually impaired users receive the necessary information from images within the PDF.

Principle of Digital Accessibility

The WCAG, which stands for Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, is the most widely recognized standard for digital accessibility, published by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).

WCAG is a comprehensive document that provides standard recommendations for making digital content, materials, websites, and web-based applications more accessible to people with disabilities and the public.

However, its success criteria are based on four main guiding principles:

I. Perceivable

In short, all content on your website or application should be presented in alternative formats that are easy for people with various disabilities to perceive. People should also be able to access it with complementary tools. 

For example, visually impaired people should be able to read from the screen using additional software. The interface should also be clean and straightforward to ensure responsiveness for people using mobile devices or having a weak internet connection. 

II. Operable

All the components of your digital product should be easy to use with different tools, including third-party ones. The interface should not contain elements that users with disabilities couldn’t interact with, such as single-mode inputs, complex interactive components, and timed elements.

III. Understandable

A simple website layout, consistent text font, brand color, and easy-to-use user interface allow digital accessibility and understanding for everyone who interacts with them. This means encouraging simple user flows, increasing the predictability of user actions, offering input assistance for users, and so on.

IV. Robust

A digitally accessible solution must be compatible with different platforms or systems. This principle ensures the gradual replacement of specific solutions that cannot be used by the vast majority of end users, for example, due to constant freezes, errors, etc.

Why is Digital Accessibility important for business growth?

1. Maximize reach and base audience:

By making your products and services digitally accessible to all types of people, abled and disabled, you’re opening the door to a large new customer base and maximizing your reach of potential customers and targeted audiences.

Since disabled people worldwide and in various communities have a significant number of people who have disposable income, they need to get or at least explore the offered products and services that can be valuable to them.

2. Regulation and Law compliance:

Laws have been passed in many countries to ensure equal access to digital content for digital accessibility for temporary disability and permanent people. According to the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), businesses and organizations must develop their websites to be accessible and compatible with people with disabilities.

In the European Union region, the EU Web Accessibility Directive, adopted in 2016, mandates that all public sector bodies, like various government departments and public health services, must make their websites and mobile apps fully accessible for all kinds of able and disabled people.

Based on this, the European Accessibility Act, expected to come into force in 2025, aims to standardize access to digital products and services across Europe. By prioritizing digital accessibility, businesses complying with legal requirements can minimize the risk of legal issues and protect their organization’s reputation.

3. Improve customer experience:

Accessible digital platforms with user-centric content improve customer experiences, and a simple user interface (UI) leads to improved customer satisfaction and engagement.

Clear and consistent information and presentation make it easier for users to interact with the dashboard and menus to achieve desired action promptly, which can result in the opportunity to drive positive word-of-mouth recommendations and help businesses with recurring revenue in the long term.

4. Positive brand value:

A commitment to digital accessibility can enhance your brand’s reputation. The public often prefers to support companies that prioritize inclusiveness and demonstrate social responsibility. This positive brand image can increase trust, positive customer relations, and customer retention.

5. Edge of competitive advantages:

Search engines like Google prioritize website structure and content accessibility with speed and performance. By making your website SEO-friendly with AI chatbots and apps digitally accessible, you can improve its search engine ranking, enhance your brand visibility online, and increase the chance of acquiring new customers before your competitors.

Conclusion

In conclusion, making your digital property open means simply that you will get closer to your clients, creating lasting impressions on them, which mainly involves improving customer-brand relationships, law and regulation compliance, and driving brand awareness that has an overall influence on your company value as well as customer loyalty through which sustainable revenue growth is achieved.

Remember Dialaxy for advanced digital accessibility for your business. It’s a cloud-based contact center solution that serves as the icing on the cake, with features like sentiment analysis, IVR (Interactive voice response), Call forwarding, Text-to-speech, CRM Integration, and omnichannel communication presence.

FAQs

What are the benefits of digital accessibility for my business?

Here are the benefits of adopting digital accessibility for your business:

• Maximize market reach

• Improved customer experience

• Enhanced brand reputation

• Reduced legal risk

• Online visibility and traffic

Is digital accessibility just about websites?

No, accessibility applies to all digital experiences, including mobile apps, documents, and physical locations with digital elements (for example, digital signs and displays).

What are the key differences between Digital accessibility and Web accessibility?

Here is the key difference between them:

Digital accessibility is the bigger and broader term. It encompasses making all digital experiences usable by everyone, regardless of the ability of the users or general people. This includes:

• Websites

• Mobile apps

• Electronic documents (PDFs, Word docs)

• Multimedia (videos, audio)

• Kiosks and digital signage

Web accessibility, on the other hand, specifically refers to making websites accessible to everyone. It’s a subset of the broader concept of digital accessibility.