Websites are built for various purposes ranging from e-commerce to just information sharing. There are thousands of new websites being created on a daily basis across the globe. Not only businesses but the organizations and even individuals have websites now. However, if you check those, one can find that most of these websites are inaccessible. It means that these websites do not consider the accessibility needs of around one billion people with disabilities, which is about 15% of the total global population. Considering these stats, accessibility is a necessity, which is also being mandated by low lately.
Digging down further details, as per WHO studies, about 430 million people around the globe need rehabilitation for addressing the hearing loss problems they have. So, disability of various sorts is a growing issue, and the projection of this figure is about seven hundred million by 2050. Along with people with disabilities, there is also another major demographic we need to consider while exploring the accessibility needs, the aging population. Loss of vision, improper hand coordination, motion disabilities, impaired cognitive abilities, etc., are the challenges related to aging, so accessibility should have concerns about this category of people.
Accessibility compliance explained by AccessiBe
Along with the ethics to support the disabled, it will really help to create an accessible and user-friendly website to strengthen brand identity and trust. As we have seen above, about 70% of the websites around the globe are not meeting the WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) guidelines, which were actually set back in the year 2017. On looking at it from the business perspective, AccessiBe points out that the websites that are not accessible will yield only lesser business, and they miss out on a critical category of potential customers.
We may look at a statistic that there are about fifty-four million people with disabilities living in the United States as per the Census Bureau. This may consist of about $1 trillion as of the overall income of this category, which may further translate to about $220 billion in their purchasing power. That is really a considerable amount to tap into that sector.
Ways to make website accessible
When it comes to building an accessible website, many brands are not aware of how to do it well. Here are a couple of tips.
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Try to work closely with people with disabilities while designing websites – This may sound to be a no-brainer, but web developers and designers used to skip this out while building websites. Making people with disabilities a part of site building is much easier.
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Use alt tags – The majority of the websites use images on various pages. If you put the mouse over it, you may see some text popping up, which is called alt tags. These tags are ideal for the screen readers to interpret the image as to what it is about. Alt tags will allow the website owners to add more details on the site, and you should take care that the description is accurate and reflect the identity of the brand well.
We will also discuss more tips and strategies for accessibility compliance for websites from the experts at AccessiBe in the forthcoming articles.