Why Your Business Website Might Be Inaccessible to Certain Customers

When you create a website to sell your service or product, your focus will naturally be on the content and the design to catch the eye of any interested party. While this is extremely important, there is another aspect that is often overlooked, but is just as significant and essential. This refers primarily to the visitors to your website and in particularly, to those with disabilities. 

While most might take scrolling down a webpage or reading content for granted, there is an underserved minority that struggle with these everyday activities.

Here lies the reason why it is necessary for you to ensure that your website complies with the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) standards set by the Department of Justice (DOJ). In the US, if you have a public website, it needs to be accessible to absolutely everybody. Otherwise, you could be looking at a lawsuit and potential damage to your brand reputation. 

Over time, the customer/user experience has become even more important than what the business itself offers or sells. Interaction is one thing but interacting in the correct manner can put you on the path to success. By implementing decent practices into the company ethos, which should also be reflected in any representation of the company like on a website, you will begin to reap the rewards in the form of customer engagement, brand recognition and increased traffic.

Some factors that could be considered discriminatory are having font that is too small for some people to read or contrast that is too bright for those with light-sensitive eyes. 

Users with disabilities are an underserved segment but there is an easy way to provide assistance for this large minority group. Siteimprove’s ADA Compliance Website Checker will test any page on your website for accessibility. Full accessibility is the obvious objective and this provides fair and equal access for all users.

This Siteimprove tool will give you perspective on accessibility in the form of a score and you will also receive an email that can be shared amongst colleagues. 

The importance of having a fully accessible business website extends to other marketing aspects such as search engine visibility and SEO. Search engines such as Google and Bing will evaluate the accessiblity of a website, and prioritise those that have dedicated more time to this area. Better recognition by search engines ultimately results in a higher search ranking, which again, will only benefit the engagement, visitor and traffic numbers.  

The use of different individual tools to evaluate the SEO or accessibility of a website to achieve the above-mentioned results would not be time efficient and in a world that is moving ever-faster with the development of technology and quicker speed of information transmission, having a tool like Siteimprove’s Website ADA Compliance Website Checker will prove massively beneficial.

Not only does it provide a comprehensive check of your domain and subdomains, you can also rest assured that this is being conducted to conform with Web Content Accessiblity Guidelines (WCAG).