Every marketer’s ultimate goal is to create seamless, effortless user engagement. Your marketing efforts will succeed or fail depending on how easily a person can execute a crucial job and how well the material fits the audience’s expectations. However, the importance of digital accessibility in your marketing strategy cannot be overstated.
The quality of your user experience will drastically decrease if you try to make an online purchase and run into trouble entering your credit card information or if the item you wanted is out of stock. In each event, you failed to complete your goal because you had high expectations but ultimately couldn’t make it happen. This two-for-one attack will almost surely prevent you from visiting that website again!
You understand the importance of providing a positive user experience as a strategist. You might even be testing it or using analytics to gauge its effectiveness. For your marketing funnel to be optimised, accessibility in marketing is essential. In this post, we are trying to highlight the accessibility & user experience in digital marketing arenas: Email, Social Content & SEO. In a nutshell, this digital attribution possesses vast significance in digital marketing and inbound leads. This required attribution in digital marketing services is also vastly significant in outbound lead generation, creating a ROI friendly social media strategy, social media engagement, email marketing, creating some engaging content for content marketing and more.
Email Accessibility in Digital Marketing
One of the most effective tools in a marketer’s arsenal is email marketing. Businesses use email for customer service, transactional order confirmations, and promotional purposes. Today, it would be challenging to find a tech-savvy company that doesn’t make use of its many advantages.
Email marketing is a field that reflects the vast importance of digital marketing. Although almost all businesses use email to connect with clients, customers, and prospects, not all take steps to ensure the emails are accessible.
HTML versus Plain-text Emails
There’s a good likelihood that plain text emails from your firm are accessible. A person with a handicap may find it slightly more challenging to understand the main points of your message if your link text is not descriptive; nonetheless, this is not a titanic obstacle.
The issue is that most marketers adore HTML-based emails. What’s not to love, then? You may design them to reflect your brand, stuff them with gorgeous graphics and attention-grabbing GIFs, and make a more appealing email than you could with a standard plain-text email. Additionally, email is rapidly making a comeback as a significant digital marketing trend.
Sending an elegant HTML email is not an issue. The problem is that some people may not be able to thoroughly read your emails if you start enhancing them without taking accessibility into account.
HTML emails are similar to websites in that they use header, image, and stylistic tags to appear on email platforms. Emails sent in plain text are simply text. You must adhere to the same standards as you would for websites to make HTML emails accessible.
Use of Table-based Layouts
Table tags often structure most HTML emails since they provide the most consistent appearance across all email clients. Like many oter web design tools, the table tag was initially not meant to be used in this manner; instead, web designers have appropriated them for their uses. However, this presents a challenge for those who use screen readers because they continue to interpret table content as separate cells, resulting in a fragmented user experience.
You can get around that by including a little piece of HTML code. To let users know that these are presentation tables and not data tables, add role=” presentation” to the end of the code. Screen readers are not impacted by the presentation role’s hiding of the table structure; they consider it just as content. It would seem as though there never was a table for someone using a screen reader.
Use Tags Effectively
To ensure that everyone, regardless of visual ability, can understand the substance of your information in a logical reading sequence, make sure your headers are used appropriately (e.g., use the H1 for the title, H2/H3 for sub-headers, etc.). To offer more context, make use of title tags as well.
Use of Alternative Text for Images
You may have encountered the situation described below if your email client needs a user to click to download images: You open an email. Still, there are several blank spaces and little to no textual content to clarify what is happening. The graphics come when you click “Download photos,” and the jigsaw pieces start to fit together, but up until that point, you are completely baffled.
If marketers fail to provide alt text for the images, screen reader users will see this regularly. Therefore, please do include the alt text in the email photographs. Use the empty alt property for ornamental pictures.
Opt Digital Accessibility for Mobile
As per the latest trends, more people access their emails on mobile devices, and it is crucial to design an email with this consideration in mind. The fact is that mobile devices are subject to accessibility regulations.
- To ensure that people can read your message on mobile devices, aim to maintain your text above 14 px in size.
- Keep your colour contrast within established limits to make your information accessible to viewers of all visual skills.
- Avoid paragraphs that are centred (much harder to read, especially on a small device)
- Link text should be concise and informative.
Content Accessibility in Social Media Platform
Accessible Content With Multimedia
Videos and podcasts are excellent examples of multimedia that marketers can use to interact with their potential customers, raise brand awareness, and drive product interest. The good news is that making stuff like this accessible is relatively simple and can enhance everyone’s experience to bring traffic on site. Customer experience comes first in a customer experience strategy. Throughout the customer journey, at all touchpoints through omnichannel marketing strategies
Accessible Videos With Proper Captioning
Someone with vision problems cannot expect to see everything on the screen, whilst someone with hearing impairments won’t be able to hear the conversations. You can add captions to help viewers who have hearing loss or are deaf.
Visually challenged viewers may lose out on essential details without audio assistance. Audio descriptions are helpful in this situation. The events on screen are described in audio descriptions, and the visually impaired persons can understand the gist of the video from them. These increase the accessibility of the videos to a large extent.
Text Versions of Audio Content
For people with all kinds of disabilities, transcripts are pretty beneficial. They may be quickly accessed by those who use screen readers or have hearing impairments without having to watch the entire video. This function is also available to persons without disabilities.
Some resources only use audio. For instance, a podcast would be pointless to someone who can not hear it; a transcript makes it available. A downloadable text file is the simplest option to include a transcript on your website. Additionally, showing the text on the page will benefit your SEO efforts.
Use of Portable Document Formats
You should make your PDF accessible not only for inclusivity but also for better SEO. A web crawler can access it if a screen reader can read it, which will provide Google with helpful information about the content of your website.
Tools that can transform documents into readable PDFs have an advantage over other software. Microsoft has prioritised accessibility, whereas other businesses have not, and this is seen in the amount of work needed to produce accessible PDFs.
SEO and Accessibility
Accessibility plays a significant role in SEO services. What is beneficial to accessibility is valuable to SEO. Web crawlers and screen readers both have the limitation of only being able to read content on websites that are made accessible to them. That makes invisible things like inaccessible PDFs, pictures without alt text, audio or video files without a transcript, etc., obscured to search engines. Only the file name will be visible to them. Due to unavailable sections, your website may lose out on some fantastic opportunities to rank and lose a good amount of direct traffic. Hence, website design services play a crucial role in the realm of SEO and accessibility.
Other SEO best practices, such as utilising appropriate and sequential header frameworks and appropriate link text, correlate with accessibility standards. The diversity and inclusion in marketing practices offer immense possibilities in the arena of digital marketing.
Frequent Asked Questions
Digital accessibility is profitable for your business or organisation. Accessibility may boost your brand, expand your audience, lower your risk of legal issues, and enhance your SEO and usability.
Creating digital products, including websites, mobile applications, and other online tools, accessible to all people is a process known as digital accessibility.
- Image alt text.
- Keyboard accessibility.
- Sequential heading structure.
- Accessible hyperlinks.
- Consistent navigation.
- Choose a content management system.
- Choose an accessible font type and a font size that is large enough to read.
- Videos should have proper transcriptions or captions.
- Simple and lucid Language.
- Prepare digital documents for screen readers by formatting them correctly.
- Information should be arranged for simple reading.
Digital accessibility is significant to provide people hassle-free navigation to any online services offered by any company or organisation. From a business perspective, it is crucial for any organisation to achieve total corporate growth, maximum profit, and ROI.
The term "digital accessibility policy" refers to the standards of behaviour for digital content and services that are intended to be entirely usable by everyone, including those with some limitations.
Digital accessibility assists ordinary people with or without disabilities in navigating any website, mobile app or other digital platforms without hassle or obstacles and in fruitful interaction. It also allows any business to boost the brand, increase its audience and gain better revenue and ROI.
