Several technologies include the devices, systems, and tools that people use to manage everyday life, communicate, and work, make life more comfortable for most people. Using digital technologies does not depend on ability, age, gender, and race. But somehow, it needs to consider accessible technology for people with disabilities to make it inclusive.
It is not only in the physical world that people’s daily lives take place. The functions and activities continue in the digital world. More people embrace digital devices and digital access, integrating them with the activities people do each day. For most people, relying on the internet becomes automatic.
Digital access
While digital access is easy for people who can see and hear, it is challenging for people with disabilities. When you’re talking of true accessibility, it means ensuring personal, business, digital, and physical access in the digital space. For businesses, having a physical location and a phone number does not meet the current demands. Their websites and apps must be quickly accessible by people with or without disabilities. Accessibility will help them connect and relate to their current and potential consumers. It can also increase consumer trust and enhance the value of their brand.
Incorporating digital accessibility to businesses
Digital accessibility is vital to many businesses. Companies can improve their communication with the consumers they want to reach. For example, providing real-time captions to their marketing videos assure that they can reach people who can see and hear and people who are deaf and hearing-impaired.
The latter are consumers, too; thus, it is vital to provide them access to brand information, which can help them make better purchasing decisions.
Live events for marketing can keep more audiences engaged, including people with hearing disabilities. The same can apply to business conferences, marketing summits, training, and seminars. They can provide their audiences real-time captions through professional CART captions services that use robust captioning and transcription software for higher accuracy.
Providing captions or transcripts to product videos, marketing, and advertising videos can increase website foot traffic, especially since search engines can index videos with captions, improving their SEO strategies.
The hearing-impaired are not the only people businesses should consider. Companies should ensure that their websites are compatible with screen readers to help people with visual impairments. There are screen readers that read the information aloud, so the user knows what information is available.
Another disability to consider is the hand-mobility issue, which needs support from tools like keyboard-only navigation. Likewise, you can include speech recognition software on your website to allow the user to give questions or commands verbally, which will significantly help people challenged by problems with hand mobility.
Businesses should carefully consider the eCommerce solution they should use on their website to ensure that online shopping will be a pleasant experience for shoppers. When you keep your customers happy with updated information, a fair pricing strategy, and an easy check-out process involving fewer steps, there is a higher probability that consumers will keep coming back to your site.
You can check out the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), which has a list of regulations so that you can be ADA-compliant when you’re talking about accessibility without regard for the age, color, sex, and physical impairments of a web user.