How can accessibility improve your conversion rate optimization efforts?

First things first – what I mean with conversion rate optimization (CRO)? Well, CRO is the process of increasing the percentage of users / visitors to take a desired action, such as buying a product, leaving contact details and more.

What does CRO have in common with accessibility? Actually quite a lot of things, I will expand on them later, but for CRO to succeed we need to have good usability and good usability and accessibility are very interconnected.

Can we measure direct impact of accessibility on CRO? Not so much, because it’s difficult to know or prove what really worked for a person that “converted”, but we know for a fact that some usability and accessibility related methods perform better than others, because they were tested with people. It’s also difficult and sometimes impossible to be sure that users use assistive technology or not. That is less true on native mobile applications where operating system makes it possible for developers to detect what accessibility features are enabled (yes, it’s possible to detect when screen reader is running (opens in new window)). So, as far as web is concerned, we can not really be sure.

Best CRO practices = directly related to usability and accessibility

Product must work without glitches, that is a prerequisite. It has to be responsive – support different screen sizes and zoom. It’s also important that it is fast and performant – and keeping document object model (DOM) elements low helps with faster rendering and robustness when it comes to assistive technology (AT). Some AT can even stop working if the webpage (or app) is too complex and slow. Especially screen readers and voice control can have huge problems and even crash.

People will not activate interactive elements that they do not know what they do or where do they take them, so clarity and proper naming is vital for everybody. Buttons, links, form elements need proper naming and clarity. It goes of course beyond interactive elements – all content needs clarity – starting with content like page title, document structure, headings, images (with alternative texts) – basically the whole page. Clear contact possibilities and proper search are extremely important. And both need to be usable and accessible.

Product and service information and descriptions need to be well described and interactions needed must be obvious, clear and accessible. That includes images and multimedia and they need to be accessible and usable. Alternative texts help with search engine optimization (SEO) and are essential for different groups of people with disabilities. Image alternative texts, podcast transcripts, video captions and transcripts makes content not only accessible but also searchable for both people and machines. Audio descriptions are not very popular yet, but when video production is planned for accessibility we can make the narration a part of the video and when important visuals are consistently described in voice, we don’t need an extra audio description track. Additional bonus is that we can use that kind of video as a podcast, directly, without additional work (just take the audio track).

When we want to reach widest possible audiences we want to use plain language and explain all the complex terms, avoid professional jargon and slang (or at least explain it with plain language) and use other plain language best practices. Making content as understandable as possible helps everybody.

CRO is often a crucial part of e-commerce, and making sure critical user journeys are accessible is vital. Checkout, registration, add to cart, search, contact, support and so on – they all need to work, be usable in be accessible.

CRO loves experiments, A/B testing, multivariate tests of different parts of pages and views or whole pages and views. Making sure all variations are accessible is crucial when deciding which one converted better. The culture of experimentation needs stakeholder and management support, as much as accessibility.

CRO, SEO, accessibility and other vital initiatives needs to be pushed to the left and need to co-exist and cooperate for common benefits and synergies, otherwise they may harm each other. So basically we all need trainings on accessibility, CRO and SEO, so that we can successfully cooperate and improve.