Nowadays, almost every business has an online presence, whether that be a social media account or a central website where they display all of their products. While this move into digital space has vastly increased how easy it is to access stores and browse products, this change hasn’t equally affected everyone.
Especially for those with a disability, the internet can actually be an incredibly difficult sphere to navigate, with many websites being almost impossible to access due to poor formatting, text choices, or simply an inaccessible design.
However, by incorporating a web accessibility overlay onto your business’ website, you’ll be able to directly accommodate a range of disabilities. These overlays sit between your website and its code, and make all content accessible without actually changing the source code.
Why Should I Make My Website Accessible?
Once your site is completely accessible to anyone on the internet that’s trying to get onto it, you’ll be able to achieve the following goals:
- Increase your customer base
- Boost SEO
- Enjoy a smooth design
- Enhanced mobile-friendliness
- Safety from lawsuits
Let’s break these down further.
Increase Your Customer Base
One of the central reasons for making sure that your website is accessible to those with disabilities is that you’ll instantly be opening up your online business to a wide variety of new customers.
Considering that one in every four adults in the US has some sort of disability, there are millions of people across the States that simply won’t be able to use your website if it isn’t accessible. Not only does this limit your potential customer base, but it also means that you’ll be losing money on potential profits that you could have made off this demographic.
If you want to ensure that your business has as many customers as possible, accessibility is one of the central ways you can do so.
Boost SEO
SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is the main reason why some sites rank higher on Google than other sites. Typically, SEO takes into account a range of factors to decide who moves up and down the rankings.
One of the factors that is currently significantly impacting SEO and website ranking online is whether the website is accessible to all audiences.
If Google wants to recommend the very best websites to their customers, then one that cannot be accessed by a large percentage of the population clearly isn’t going to be the right choice.
Due to this, if you take the initiative to create an accessible website, you’ll be ensuring that you have a much better chance of ranking well on Google.
Enjoy a Smooth Design
Part of accessibility is ensuring that your website design flows easily, with parts of the site being accessible to everyone once they land on your webpage. A poorly designed site is flagged as inaccessible and will both deter your customers from staying on the site alongside ensuring that people don’t know how to move around the website.
Part of accessibility is ensuring that your website flows logically and is easy to operate. These changes will help both disabled and able-bodied customers find products with ease on your store.
Enhanced Mobile Friendliness
Part of effective accessibility is ensuring that your site is easy to use when on mobile. Much like having a well-designed and structured website, ensuring that your store is accessible by mobile will help users of all sorts to access your pages.
Considering that 56.89% of global internet traffic comes through a mobile device, this is just as important as a laptop-accessed website. While creating an accessible website, you’ll also be ensuring that your site is a breeze to access, no matter the device someone is using.
Safety From Lawsuits
Thousands of businesses across the United States are sued every single year due to not complying with accessibility regulations. Going beyond just doing the right thing by creating an accessible space for everyone, having a website that has the correct accessibility features is required by law.
In just the first half of 2021, over 6,000 businesses were sued for their website not being compliant with the Americans with Disabilities Act. To settle a lawsuit of this size, a small business would typically have to pay around $25,000.
Final Thoughts
If you’re looking to create an accessible website to boost your client base, comply with legal decrees, and ensure that everyone has an equal opportunity to browse through your business, then adding a web accessibility overlay is by far the easiest way of doing so.
With just a few clicks, you’ll be able to add this to your site and instantly make your business’ website more accessible to everyone. It really couldn’t be easier!
