When you come to think of it, we need to be nudged in the direction of even the good things. We like to evaluate everything, to understand if it’s going to be beneficial for us. Strange though it is — we should naturally gravitate towards the wonderful things, shouldn’t we? — we have come to grips that the same is true of technology. With inventions and innovations pouring down as hard as a rainstorm, techpreneurs are especially nitpicky about embracing a new trend for their offerings. It is somewhat understandable; nobody wants to get invested in an idea only to have it elbowed out by a new trend in a matter of months. If you are someone with an online presence for their business, you likely have heard of technology accessibility as a buzzword. You likely have grappled with the idea of making your online presence accessible. If you won the war of doubt, and went ahead with it, kudos!
But if you are on the fence about it, allow us to gently sway your opinion. The stark fact is that accessible technology is highly relevant in today’s screen-filled world. If you are not making your web content, or even mobile content or eDocuments accessible, you are losing out on a big audience.
Going back to evaluating things, you probably want some concrete data from us at this point. We do have it, and in this blog, we shall present it to you.
Why opt for accessible technology?
At the outset, let’s understand what accessibility means. In a nutshell, accessibility means the ability of a content to be viewed, read, heard, understood and enjoyed by everyone irrelevant of a disability. By making your eContent accessible, you are making it easier for those who need a little assistance in interacting with screens, digest and engage with your content.
Statistics (because somehow, they have a different weight when forming opinions):
- Globally, around 15% of the population has been afflicted with a disability. That’s almost 1 in 5 people.
- 71% of disabled people leave a website immediately if it is not properly accessible.
- 3.5% of the world’s population has some level of vision impairment. That’s around 285 million people.
You can discard a minor percentage of this demographic as not interacting with technology as much as other people. But that still leaves a big number of people who want or need to interact with websites, apps or text-based resources. The reasons can be entertainment, information or even day-to-day activities (example: online shopping). You likely invest with a lot of marketing initiatives to reach a wider audience, all the while discounting a considerable chunk of viewership.
Benefits of Web Accessibility
Besides just audience acquisition, there are some other benefits as well.
- Before, we talked about disabled people interacting with technology in their own personal space. But there are several disabled persons who are also conducting business. You are much more likely to win the deal with them if your online presence is accessible to them.
- There are natural side-effects of web accessibility that can boost your website performance. Most of the optimizations required for accessibility overlap with the optimizations demanded by search engine optimization and page speed optimizations. By undertaking web accessibility, you are automatically gaining greater visibility and clicks for all markets.
- Not all disabilities are genetic or even completely jarring. Growing age also diminishes eyesight capacity or hearing power. These people do interact intensely with technology despite of the limitations they face due to old age. They have money to spend, and are looking for newer opportunities to keep up with technological trends. By undertaking accessibility, you pull these people into your bucket of customers. Also, sometimes, there are videos in languages foreign to some people. By enabling captions, the video can be better understood by even those who don’t have a hearing impairment. This stratum of people was not counted among the disabled but they still got hugely benefited from you making your website accessible. You will retain this audience if you make it easier for them to view your content.
- Making your website or mobile app accessible also helps technical difficulties. Say there are terrible network conditions, or limited bandwidth. An application optimized for accessibility is going to render itself even in these conditions. Also, providing transcripts for multimedia is going to give those in a hurry another way to get the information they needed. Where a long video would’ve turned some people off, a transcript made them stay on your content.
There you have it! You know your business targets best. If you feel you could acquire a lot more business by undertaking web accessibility, absolutely go for it. Think that it is tedious and complex? Allow us to help. TekVision Softtech offers guidance and assistance for overall accessibility, be it for mobile apps, web pages, or even documents. Get in touch with us and we will guide you.
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