All too many business and website owners assume that website accessibility is little more than a nuisance. However, from a professional perspective, there are plenty of benefits associated with website optimization for persons with disabilities that you should consider. As part of this goal, our own accessibility tools and accessibility checker could help you work on your website to make it the best it can be!
Website accessibility can help you and your website in a number of different ways. And no, we aren’t just talking about the fact that website optimization will help you to avoid an ADA lawsuit (although this is a notable point); there are also benefits for your website itself associated with making a few tweaks to improve accessibility.
One of the biggest benefits to your website is that of the improved reputation. Reputation is incredibly important to your website users and customers. If your website doesn’t have a good reputation, it will likely lose a lot of customers and visitors, and this obviously isn’t ideal. By contrast, if you work to make your website more accessible for persons with disabilities, you will likely find your reputation will improve and so your customers’ loyalty will also get stronger.
As previously mentioned, a lot of people don’t see the importance of taking specific steps to optimize their website for persons with disabilities. This, however, is a big mistake. In fact, it is estimated that approximately £2 billion is lost by UK businesses on a monthly basis due to the barriers that 73% of disabled users face. In total, this spending power could easily equate to well over £11 billion, due simply to the number of disabled users who click away from websites which aren’t accessible for them to use.
Think about it for a minute. There are not a huge number of websites that offer specific features for disabled users. This can make using the internet a very limited experience for disabled individuals, and so, they will be limited in regards to the websites that they can use. This represents a great opportunity for you to diversify and increase sales of use of your website!
If your website is optimized for disabled users then you will likely find a lot more people will start to use it. As many as one in four Americans could be living with a disability, and this represents a very large proportion of the market; clearly, having the ability to tap into this market at will by using website optimization could be a big opportunity.
Many website owners who have not considered website accessibility before may find themselves wondering about how accessible their website is. We can help! Our website accessibility tools, including our own unique accessibility checker, can help you work out how well your website is currently performing. This, in turn, will allow you to make the changes that you need to make your website accessible for use for all people.
