According to a 2022 report by WHO, an estimated 1.3 billion people worldwide have some form of disability. This means every 1 in 6 people have limited accessibility.
In such a dire scenario, developing products and services that cater to this audience is the ultimate need of the hour. As a business, you can do so by complying with accessibility standards. Yet, only a mere 2.6% of websites are fully accessible or ADA-compliant. The reason? Lack of awareness about its benefits.
So, in this article, let’s talk about the advantages of accessibility compliance, how it facilitates user experience and some simple ways a business can make its website and offerings accessible to all. Let’s start!
Table of Contents
I. Accessibility Compliance & its Impact on User Experience
II. 5 Unparalleled Benefits of Accessibility Compliance
- Increases Inclusivity
- Widens Audience Base
- Improves User-Friendliness
- Enhances SEO
- Mitigates Legal Risk
III. How Can You Make Your Digital Products Accessible for All?
- Improve Navigation
- Create a Responsive Design
- Add Alternative Texts and Transcripts
- Keep the Layout Consistent
IV. Wrapping Up
I. Accessibility Compliance & its Impact on User Experience
If a product/service is labeled as ‘accessibility compliant,’ it means it follows special standards that ensure it can be accessed or used by individuals with disabilities. Digitally, some of the most general accessibility features are captions, alternative texts, large fonts, easy navigation, etc.
Such features on a web page or eBook enhance user experience by a staggering amount. But that doesn’t stand true only for people with disabilities.
According to statistics, about 80% of people using captions don’t suffer hearing impairment. That’s simply because these features, while necessary for disabled individuals, also serve as an additional facilitating tool for people without disabilities.
Thus, adhering to accessibility compliance standards is extremely important for all users.
II. 5 Unparalleled Benefits of Accessibility Compliance
Better user experience is just the tip of the iceberg. In reality, the pros of accessibility compliance surpass this benefit. A website or a digital product that complies with all the necessary accessibility standards and regulations enjoys a list of other advantages, such as:
1. Increased Inclusivity
Today, inclusivity has become a basic requirement in every walk of life – from workspace to services and products – everything. Accessibility features encourage that by eliminating limitations from your products and making them available for everyone. Besides, they also offer enhanced ease of use, tailored solutions, and multiple other user-experience-related benefits.
2. Larger Audience Base
In a dynamic business environment, the only way to thrive is to ensure your audience base is ever-growing. Accessibility compliance assures that by making your products accessible for all. On top of it, its features also improve the user experience for your existing audience, thus promising long-lasting customer loyalty.
3. Improved User-Friendliness
Products that are accessibility compliant are light years apart from those that aren’t. Their most prominent hallmark is the increased user-friendliness. When it comes to their design, loading time, readability, and descriptiveness – it’s very easy to pick out an accessible product from a non-accessible one because of how user-friendly it is.
4. Enhanced SEO
The features that enhance the accessibility of a page or a product are also the ones that better enable search engines to crawl websites, making content visible to a larger audience. In simpler words, accessibility compliance improves your SEO rankings and ensures you rank higher on SERPs.
5. Mitigated Legal Risk
Several penalties and legal issues loom over organizations that fail to comply with accessibility standards. So, it’s always advisable to tick off every single accessibility compliance requirement. Besides enhancing user experience, it also keeps you at bay from legal problems.
III. How Can You Make Your Digital Products Accessible for All?
Adding intricate accessibility features that ease the usability of a digital product to the maximum is no longer a tardy task, thanks to digital textbook platforms like KITABOO. Yet, if you’re new to this topic and are looking for some best practices to follow, here are a few:
1. Improve Navigation
Your website’s navigation makes or breaks its user experience. So it’s important to pay attention to it. To increase accessibility, create clean, well-structured navigation menus that facilitate the user to maneuver the website. Add necessary links, categories, search bars, social icons, and other elements to help users find what they need without hassle.
2. Create a Responsive Design
Data suggests that 72% of people want websites to be mobile-friendly. Accessibility compliance starts with a responsive website design. This involves quick adaptation to different screen sizes, compatibility with mobile devices, navigation flexibility, faster load times, and more. So, it’s a no-brainer – a digital product or website designed to be this responsive will foster accessibility.
3. Add Alternative Texts and Transcripts
One of the simplest yet most robust ways to make a digital product accessible is by adding alternative texts, written descriptions of an image, and transcripts for video content. These formats are meant to facilitate user experience for people with visual disabilities. With 2.2 billion people globally being visually impaired, it’s essential to develop products and websites that are accessible to this community.
Adding this element to multimedia content across the website significantly elevates accessibility and makes your content more engaging. Leverage digital solutions like KITABOO‘s K.AI to achieve accessibility compliance. With features like alt text, read-aloud, and chapter summaries in audio and video formats, all learners can benefit from enhanced learning experiences.
4. Keep the Layout Consistent
No one likes a choppy, erratic website. So, before you move on to more complex accessibility compliance features, lay the foundation of great accessibility with a consistent layout. This means sticking with the same fonts, alignment, spacing, color scheme (with enough contrast), whitespace, etc., throughout the site. This ensures smooth website navigation for all.
Also Read: White Label eBook Platform
IV. Wrapping Up
Accessibility compliance is not only for individuals with disabilities. Today, it has become necessary for every person who engages in any kind of online activity, be it shopping, web surfing, reading – anything. So, if you are an online business, check your website and e-products to see if they’re appropriately accessibility compliant.
In this blog, we discussed accessibility compliance, its effect on user experience, benefits, and how to leverage them.
To learn more about how you can enhance your platform’s accessibility, reach out to KITABOO now!
To know more, please write to us at KITABOO@hurix.com.
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Kitaboo is a cloud-based content platform to create-publish & securely distribute interactive mobile-ready ebooks.
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