Online business and accessibility best practices

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I try to reflect on practical best practices to make an online business more accessible. Most of advice is very tactical and some is a bit strategical. Hope at least some of it can improve the accessibility of your business.

Best practices for online businesses are an ever evolving subject, as the businesses themselves. I will try to reflect on some of them in this post, and hope that at least some of them will improve overall accessibility of your online business.

You are what you measure statement is underrated

I borrowed the thought from wiser people, but I strongly agree with it. Online businesses measure a lot of things to improve and act on things. There is a reason for web analysis tools, A/B testing, prediction modelling and so on. When we measure the right things we can constantly improve. The same goes for accessibility. The only difference is that measuring accessibility is way harder than measuring chart abandonment, as an example. There are automatic accessibility testing tools that help a bit, and in case of native mobile applications we can even track usage of assistive technologies if we want (opens in new window), unfortunately (please don’t or you might get even legal problems). But to really know how accessible is our product or service we need proper manual audits and usability testing with people with disabilities.

Large organizations that are aware of the benefits of accessibility have teams of people working solely on accessibility and one of their responsibilities is also gathering data, so that management can prioritize and act on it. Automatic testing surely helps a bit, but sooner or later you need people with experience to document your end to end accessibility.

Customer experience starts before website or app and ends after it

When we think of customer experience we need to think of the whole journey. It often starts way before your homepage or app install. It often starts with social media or advertisements, right? Social media accessibility is becoming almost a field itself, with diverse possibilities for advertising, promoting, evaluating and so on.

Each channel you use needs to be as accessible as possible or you loose groups of people already there. Publishing a nice image of your product and not adding proper alternative text to it will for sure cause problems for people with different disabilities.

Accessibility of social media

Some social media (SoMe) are quite decent in regards with accessibility, some social media have issues even after hundreds of people complained and some are not accessible. So making sure to cross-post accessibly is the only possibility. Provided your social media managers are informed about possibilities. Please check Accessible Social for a list of known SoMe accessibility issues (opens in new window). They offer a lot of practical guidelines for better accessibility in social media.

Advertisement accessibility

A lot of advertisement possibilities are aware of the importance of accessibility, but we have again a very diverse platform and it’s up to us to check how accessible our solutions are. We also need to consider off-site ads, even our TV commercials, printed materials and radio commercials benefit from better accessibility. So this part can go way beyond digital platforms, so we need to make sure our ads are accessible too.

Some basic examples – good text contrast benefits on all formats, or for example avoiding flashing content that may cause health issues to people sensitive to such stimulation. It’s again almost own science, but some basics are actually covered in the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) despite the name Web.

Accessibility of emails and other communication

Email is still quite popular, despite lots of trials to replace it. Unfortunately it’s also a bit “behind” technically, so it’s often more difficult to make it visually as pleasing as our website can be. But a lot of emails are very poor when it comes to accessibility and it’s not only because of the older technology that has to be used in some cases. It’s often because of lack of knowledge in the responsible department or maybe even due to poorly designed tools that don’t produce accessible emails.

It can even be quite obvious when emails are not accessible, even for people not familiar with accessibility at all. The reason is that a lot of email clients block email images by default and only show so called alternative texts instead. So next time you open an email that doesn’t show any images – please read the texts and then enable the images to compare if texts were appropriate alternatives. Often they aren’t even by chance. If they are – congratulations, somebody considered it before sending it to people. Heck some people even ignore HTML emails and always prefer text only emails, so please plan accordingly.

Documents – invoices, contracts, terms of service and so on

If you can use HTML instead of documents you have better chances to get it right – to make it accessible. When you offer PDF or other formats you need extra care. Even if you use popular tools to generate PDF the end product is by default not quite accessible. It needs some manual things, almost always. It’s even worse when we use programmatic solutions that generate PDFs from our back-ends. Often nobody really checks such documents for accessibility. Or maybe we offer scanned PDFs where PDF actually includes a scanned image and not raw text. That can be a huge barrier for groups of people. So next time you offer a document – consider if you can make an online version instead. HTML can be way more accessible than PDF.

Invoices, contracts and similar documents are often generated based on templates so a lot can be done beforehand, but we still need to check the end results. Or rather – make it a part behind login and you can have it in HTML format, easier to make accessible and still possible to print.

Customer support

When customer needs support it must also be accessible. That’s maybe logical, but practice shows that it’s often another forgotten part in regards with accessibility. If customer support insists in phone calls, for example, we can leave out groups of people, especially hard of hearing and deaf. If we insist on our chat and chat solution is not accessible it can again block people out.

If people with disabilities ask us for alternative format of a document and we aren’t prepared it can take a lot of time and effort to generate it and with that steal the customer supports time that could be used way more efficiently for other customers.

When customer support sends emails or chat messages they also need to be accessible and to be able to have an accessible customer support they need proper training and knowledge.

Before you have internal knowledge reach out for outside help

It takes time to build any knowledge. It takes time to build knowledge on accessibility. It can be done purely internally, but often it takes more time and is therefore potentially much more expensive. While we learn we also need to make our business more accessible, so it’s not only the time investment in learning. It’s also all the missed opportunities because our business has poor accessibility.

External accessibility help can also be hard to get. At least in terms of quality and if we don’t know anyone to ask for references or similar. With awareness about accessibility we can quickly fall into marketing campaigns that offer cheap, fast and perfect accessibility. Some call them accessibility overlays or widgets or plugins and so on. Short note – they over-promise and under-deliver. And don’t just trust me, please trust people with disabilities that are advocating against such shortcuts as well.

Effective and trustworthy external accessibility help means years of experience, cooperation with people with disabilities and often, but not always, professional certification. I am certified myself as a Web Accessibility Specialist (WAS) by International Association of Accessibility Professionals (IAAP) and can only say that certification itself isn’t enough. For me it meant that I need to learn even more. For me it opened my mind even more, so that I am aware that it takes time, practice and especially cooperation with people with disabilities. Years of experience helps naturally, but it’s also important that years of active work in accessibility can be documented. Due diligence and verifiable references count, like with all types of external consultants.

I always suggest that companies invest internal time for basics and then when basics are a part of the process continue with expert external accessibility help. There is abundance in high quality basic accessibility knowledge (opens in new window), just to get a company started. As I always emphasize – accessibility isn’t only for developers or testers, it needs designers, content providers, project managers, stakeholders, marketing and so on.

To make business accessible requires change management on almost all levels. We need to have budgets of time and money to start the program, we need support from top to bottom of the leadership levels and we need proper change management to integrate accessibility into required processes.

I hope I described some best practices that can be applied to your online business as well. If most of this is known to you and you also have full control over it then I have to congratulate you – your business is probably quite accessible. When I was a bit younger I thought accessibility is absolute, but now I appreciate the continuous improvement of it as it’s difficult to have all aspects totally accessible when we consider that even conformance to whole WCAG doesn’t actually make things accessible.

Author: Bogdan Cerovac

I am IAAP certified Web Accessibility Specialist (from 2020) and was Google certified Mobile Web Specialist.

Work as digital agency co-owner web developer and accessibility lead.

Sole entrepreneur behind IDEA-lab Cerovac (Inclusion, Diversity, Equity and Accessibility lab) after work. Check out my Accessibility Services if you want me to help your with digital accessibility.

Also head of the expert council at Institute for Digital Accessibility A11Y.si (in Slovenian).

Living and working in Norway (🇳🇴), originally from Slovenia (🇸🇮), loves exploring the globe (🌐).

Nurturing the web from 1999, this blog from 2019.

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