Whilst making your content fully Accessible to your audience isn’t required by law, it is certainly a smart move that will improve your digital marketing campaign and benefit your organisation. 

When you create content that is accessible you ensure that everyone can easily see what you have to offer. Perhaps more importantly it also gives a good indication that your brand understands and recognises the value of being inclusive – an important message in a society where inclusion and diversity are becoming an important part of how businesses operate. 

What is accessible content?

It is widely accepted that when it comes to web content, Accessibility covers the following four key principles:

• Perceivable – all users, including those for whom one sense does not work, can perceive all the information available
• Operable – it is possible for users to operate within the interface components and navigation
• Understandable – the information is understandable to users
• Robust – users can access the content using assistive technologies

The idea of Web Accessibility also looks at what can be referred to as “situational disabilities.” These are factors that are temporary in nature and can influence how a person perceives or access an app or a website. This might be a poor Wi-Fi connection that might affect a person’s ability to access the site on a mobile device, it could be a user who is outdoors who has their experience hampered by bright light or someone who has a problem with their hearing, for example, an ear infection, which prevents them from listening to content properly. 

Recent statistics show there are five billion international internet users (65% of the world’s population). 15% of the total world population are also believed to have some form of disability, and whilst not all these individuals will use the internet, they still make up a large proportion of those who do.

The most accessible content should be perceivable, usable and understandable regardless of where or how a person wants to access it. 

What content should be accessible?

According to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) who are the widely accepted global authority, web content is defined as: 

 “The information in a web page or web application, including natural information such as text, images, and sounds, and code or markup that defines structure, presentation, etc.”

This means that every single piece of content published digitally should be accessible, this includes

• Content that is text-based
• PDFs
• E-books
• White papers
• Video – both live and recorded
• Audio – both live and recorded
• Images and graphics

How can you fix inaccessible content?

First, you need to identify which parts of a website have issues and this is best done by performing a professional website audit so that you understand where there are problems and exactly what issues to fix on the website.

Descriptive text

For essential items on a website, a lack of descriptive text forms a significant accessibility barrier. 

Phrases like “learn more” or “read more” do not explain enough about what you are learning or reading more about. “Read our term and conditions” or browse our services” give more of a clue to an individual. 

Title page that are descriptive, headings, anchor text, meta descriptions and even meta descriptions – these are all things that help with a site’s search engine optimisation. These are the information that a search engine crawler is looking for, and they also provide helpful information to those who are using assistive technologies to assist with visual or physical impairments that help them to access the content of a website.

A staggering 26% of images found on website homepages are missing alt text information according to statistics compiled by WebAIM 2021. This can really make a difference to your rankings.

Colour contrasts

It is important to use sufficient colour contrasts. Light grey text, for example, when displayed on a white background can be hard for some people to see, and this isn’t just those with visual impairment issues. It can also be hard to see in natural or bright light and even on badly calibrated screens. 

The criteria specified by WCAG for a minimum contrast between background and text colours is:

• Contrast of 3-to-1 for fonts of 18 point or larger sizes (14 points if bold is used)
• Contrast of 4.5-to-1 with smaller font sizes

Unbelievably, 86.4% of home pages display low contrast text that falls below the WCAG standards, this is the most commonly found accessibility issue. (WebAIM 2021). 

Use alternative formats for audio and visual content

Videos, audio content, and webinars are all content that needs to be audio accessible, this means that they should include an alternative such as a transcript. Transcripts are text-based which also makes them useful for SEO. 

It is also worth thinking about minimising any background noise as well or adding a skip feature for those users with the hearing of sight capabilities. 

Create a good user experience

Digital accessibility is more than just colour contrast and screen readers. Web accessibility can often be about optimising the experience of users – something that is also a search platform priority as well. 

It is important to consider how navigation, and consuming the created content is as an overall experience. Blog content should be organised clearly into descriptive categories. The site should be searchable, images should be used to help break up long blocks of text, and pages should load quickly and be in the correct formatting. These all matter to your site accessibility.

Make appropriate language choices

Subtle language choices, believe it or not, can make a significant difference to accessibility for someone using a screen reader phrases like “as explained below” or as mentioned later in our article” create inaccessibility for a user who cannot see up or down the page. It is important to offer enough detail in the section being read. 

Language also offers a good opportunity for inclusiveness; to address such things as race, culture, and gender identity. Avoid content that utilises stereotypes, communicates prejudices and discriminates. 

Accessible content is good content

When it comes to content marketing and web accessibility initiatives the goals are the same. Ensure that as many individuals as possible have access to useful, well-thought-out content. This is something that requires meticulous attention to detail and a good plan in order to achieve the best results. 

With the most errors detected on a single home page, according to the WebAIM 2022 report, totalling 68,826 you might not be doing too badly, but this is one area where there is always room for improvement.