Your customers are all abled differently, and your digital marketing materials should reflect that. Website accessibility has long been a core tenet of the internet, but as new digital channels proliferate and marketers become more aware of the needs of people with disabilities, it’s an even bigger priority.
Let’s discuss the basics of web accessibility as well as a few tips for CMOs to help their teams embrace accessibility best practices.
WEB ACCESSIBILITY: A BRIEF OVERVIEW
Developed by the World Wide Web Consortium, the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines outline the international standards for web accessibility. These guidelines provide recommendations and requirements to make the internet accessible to people with a “wide range of disabilities, including blindness and low vision, deafness and hearing loss, learning disabilities, cognitive limitations, limited movement, speech disabilities, photosensitivity, and combinations of these.”
Some common technical features that improve web accessibility include adding alt text to images, captioning videos, making text screen reader-friendly, ensuring all website functionality is keyboard-compatible, and choosing a color scheme that meets a minimum contrast ratio.
Beyond just meeting the WCAG requirements, prioritizing web accessibility has additional benefits for marketers, helping them to:
- Boost SEO: Search engines favor websites that meet or exceed accessibility requirements.
- Reach a wider audience: Accessible marketing campaigns target a larger base of customers and prospects.
- Maintain brand compliance: Standardized designs prevent marketers from straying outside of the approved brand style guide.
- Increase consistency: Design guidelines and templates improve brand consistency across digital marketing assets, whether they’re created in-house or by an agency.
- Improve the design: Following accessibility requirements often makes for a simpler, less busy, and cleaner design.
FOUR TIPS TO HELP MARKETING TEAMS EMBRACE WEB ACCESSIBILITY
Keysight recently launched a multi-year effort to evolve our website and improve the user experience, including enhancing its web accessibility. Here are a few key learnings from our in-progress efforts, as well as tips for applying them to your own accessibility strategies.
1. EDUCATE YOUR TEAM ON THE IMPORTANCE OF WEB ACCESSIBILITY
While the general public has thankfully become more aware of accessibility issues in recent years, some marketing team members may grumble about the extra steps or restrictions that accessibility requirements bring to website development.
To combat this, CMOs should encourage conversations or formal training on the topic of web accessibility, helping all team members understand why features like alt text and video captions are so important. Highlight the benefits of accessible marketing so they’ll be more willing to comply with these standards and see why it’s a good use of their time.
2. PRIORITIZE ACCESSIBILITY FROM THE START
When kicking off a new project—whether it’s a landing page, website redesign, or brand video—incorporate accessibility requirements at the start. If you don’t prioritize web accessibility best practices in the design phase, you’ll have to go back and fix things later, which can impact your timelines, eat into your budget, and frustrate the team. Ultimately, it’s a lot more work to update existing campaigns for accessibility than it is to create compliant assets from the get-go.
3. CREATE COMPLIANT TEMPLATES
To make web accessibility as seamless as possible for your team, create web page templates that incorporate the required features. These templates should allow no or only small changes, enabling teams to easily develop new content that supports accessibility standards.
Keysight launched a redesigned Solutions section of our website earlier this year. This section is a cornerstone of our website evolution, focusing on use cases that highlight how our customers can use Keysight products to innovate faster. Our web team built customizable templates for use case pages that are brand- and accessibility-compliant. While we’re still working to perfect the templates, anyone on the team can now easily add use case pages that meet accessibility requirements and have a consistent design.
Similar to templates, you can also build accessibility requirements into your content management system workflow. In our CMS, we created a rule that requires alt text for every image uploaded to the website. Without alt text, team members receive an error message and can’t proceed. Alternatively, some CMS platforms have dynamic web components that automatically add alt text to images.
4. USE TECHNOLOGY TO AUTOMATE ACCESSIBILITY TESTING
While it may feel daunting to optimize your website for accessibility, know that you don’t have to do it manually. Marketers can choose from a variety of technology tools to improve accessibility compliance. These tools automatically fix or report accessibility issues so you don’t have to painstakingly review each page yourself.
Based on our website redesign experience, we recommend marketers leverage several types of accessibility compliance tools. Here are some ideas to get you started:
- An overall accessibility and SEO tool that integrates with your CMS. This tool evaluates web pages and flags any accessibility issues so you can address them before publishing.
- A contrast testing tool to check whether the chosen color palette for fonts and backgrounds has a contrast ratio that meets accessibility requirements.
- A web video player with captioning capabilities to ensure all marketing videos have captions and other accessible-friendly features, such as avoiding autoplay.
IMPROVING WEB ACCESSIBILITY BENEFITS EVERYONE
By educating your team, incorporating accessibility into the design phase, and leveraging compliant templates and automation tools, marketers can reap the benefits of building websites that reach all customers, no matter their abilities.
Marie Hattar is CMO at Keysight Technologies, responsible for brand and global marketing efforts.
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