5 WAYS TO MAKE YOUR MARKETING MORE ACCESSIBLE
According to the CDC, about 61 million adults in the U.S. are living with a disability. Yet, encountering a truly inclusive customer experience can be rare if you’re one of those people.
One step many brands have taken is to showcase disabled people in their marketing efforts. It’s a great start, but making that your customer experiences are accessible from start to finish ensures that all people, regardless of their abilities.
When it comes to marketing your business online, it’s important to know how to design and create your content for an accessible experience. Here are five places to start:
Utilize color contrast in your branding and other materials. Color contrast is a huge help to those with vision impairments. Ensuring that your logo stands out and that your text is easily legible to everyone will lead to more brand awareness by more people.
Choose your fonts wisely. We’ve all been there - someone got fancy with their fonts and now we’re struggling to read it. Don’t be that brand. Make sure your first impression is legible! Be careful with script and decorative fonts, and even lettering in all caps or all lowercase.
Providing structured content on your website is important, not only for accessibility but also for search engine optimization (SEO). Use headlines and subheaders, and make sure each page of your website is focused on a specific topic.
Include alternative text. Alternative text (alt-text) is extra text that describes the content of the image and that displays if an image cannot be loaded. Alt-text can also be read by screen readers and search engines, so using descriptive alt-text for images on your website also has the added benefit of helping with SEO. Platforms like Instagram allow you to edit the alt-text for your feed images, but you can also always add an image description to the caption of your post. This ensures that everyone can consume the information in your images and graphics.
Include captions on your video and audio content. Video is one of the best and most popular ways to engage your audience, but unless they contain captions or transcripts, your content is not accessible to all. Thankfully, with the click of a button most social media platforms offer auto-generated captions for videos so you can produce engaging, accessible content. Just be sure to edit those captions as necessary… translations are not always spot-on.
Ensure your business is inclusive by taking an audit of your marketing materials. Not sure where to start? We can help! We can take an audit of your website, print collateral, and social media platforms to see what’s working and identify opportunities for improvement. Depending on your needs, we can help you implement needed changes or we can provide you with a list of recommendations for you to execute in-house. Fill out our contact form to learn more.
