It all begins and ends with your website.
It is your open-all-hours digital store on the World Wide Web, helping you reach millions of shoppers.
Much has been written about content optimisation, involving various tactics to make your website fully customised for your target audience. However, not every user can enjoy digital content with the same abilities.
For example, recent developments involving mobile apps have enabled people with different capabilities to easily navigate online and take full advantage of the internet despite their disabilities.
Making your site accessible to all is important.
But how do you know if your website is accessible? The most universally accepted web accessibility standard is called WCAG and is maintained by the World Wide Web Consortium, AKA W3C. It provides a wide range of recommendations and best practice guidelines, making web content more accessible across your online presence.
The most recent version of the WCAG 2.1 was released on June 5th this year. It does not supersede or cancel WCAG 2.0. It expands the guidance provided in the previous version to include more coverage of mobile accessibility and provisions for users with cognitive and learning disabilities.
To date, the most common web accessibility requirements were keyboard-based control, voice-based navigation, text description to images and video captioning.
In order to validate how accessible is your website you can rely on a free public evaluation tool which will asses your conformity with the W3C three-tier structure success criteria.
To provide best in class accessibility, you can aim to achieve the AA Level, removing barriers for disabled users to allow a barrier-free web access experience. Digital technology innovation makes this a reality.
Based on recent statistics, 13.3 million disabled people were recorded in the UK (2018) and with a spending power of 200 billion per annum, they shouldn’t be ignored when it comes to web accessibility.