It's crucial to make your business convenient for everyone.

Web accessibility is the practice of helping people with disabilities, impairments, and limitations to access websites equally regardless of the barriers.

Though this might sound intimidating and an added investment in the beginning, a web accessibility policy can have many other benefits. By following the accessibility best practices, you can improve the user experience, the SEO, and the versatility and speed of your website. All in all, if implemented in the right way, it can increase your website’s conversion rate by 100% and traffic by 150%. However, if you are still not sure about implementing it, give this blog a read and get to know about its amazing benefits.

1. Improved Mobile Usability

To use your website to its fullest potential, your website must be able to get zoomed in, offering a complete magnifying experience. This will also help users with low vision or vision impairment to see the contents clearly and without much stress. This capability also can help with mobile usability. It is the same thing if you magnify the content on the larger screen or if you do it on a smartphone. If your website can work on different devices, it is easily accessible to all. Responsive websites can easily switch between different devices and are user-friendly, which also improves your web accessibility.

2. Usable on a Jerky Ride

This is another important benefit of web accessibility that’s worth considering. It will help the users to access the website even under less-than-ideal conditions. A common scenario might be a jerky ride on a bus or a car. A user might want to access your website while traveling but due to bumps, they are unable to and they might end up hitting the wrong buttons always. Similarly, for a user suffering from motor control issues, it can be a big problem. With web accessibility in place, both users will be benefited.

3. Better User Experience

If the color contrast of the page is low, the fonts are pretty small, the menus aren’t opening properly, the pages aren’t getting loaded or the links are broken, it will lead to poor user experience and the customer won’t come back to your site again. This can be frustrating for anyone and if these issues aren’t addressed at the earliest, these problems are bound to crop up. However, by implementing web accessibility best practices, things can be made better for all types of users.

4. Improved SEO

There are many different aspects to Search Engine Optimization that greatly adds to the digital accessibility of your websites. These include improved user experience, good quality links, content and keywords. By improving the user experience, you can make your users stay for long on your website, which eventually improves SEO. Also, adding alt texts to images, removing broken links and interlinking the texts properly all help you to rank higher on SERPS along with improving your web accessibility. When you fix the commonly occurring accessibility problems, it directly impacts your SEO results.

5. Less Liability

According to web accessibility consultants, a large number of legal lawsuits associated with web accessibility are filed every now and then. If reports are to be believed, in 2018 alone, there were over 2250 lawsuits filed for web accessibility in the USA. And, this number is likely to grow with each passing day. So, it’s high time you consider this. If you are taking the charge now and are improving web accessibility, you will reduce the chances of a time-consuming and costly lawsuit later. For that, you need to create a plan and implement it in the right way while maintaining it altogether. Taking things in your hand at the right time is sure to benefit you in the future.

6. Empowering Everyone

The biggest benefit that web accessibility offers is that it can be used by all. The web accessibility best practices ensure that your website isn’t just accessible by regular users but fits well for people with special needs too. With just a few changes in the existing layout and content, you can expand the reach of your website. These minor changes will make the experience better, enjoyable and less frustrating for the users. Also, by closely following the accessibility guideline, you will be able to cater to a maximum and broad range of users.

Conclusion

Web accessibility is an important aspect and plays a big role in global web practices. Using the principles of web accessibility, you aren’t just making your website barrier-free but also accessible to all. As a result, you are bound to receive all the above-mentioned benefits.

The concept of web accessibility isn’t complicated. It’s just an effort to make website browsing easier for all. For this, you can use a few basic testing methods and implement a few policies that are proactive, to begin with. These smaller steps are going to ensure a smooth user experience going forward while saving you from discrimination and legal complaints.

All in all, the entire idea of web accessibility is to make general improvements to website usability so that people from all spheres can access the web easily.