Accessible marketing is something that’s becoming more and more prevalent, which is a really, really good thing. Fifteen percent of the world’s population has a disability, which is a lot of extra people you can reach by making your marketing campaign accessible to them!
What does accessible marketing mean?
Accessible marketing means designing your marketing campaign with accessibility in mind, taking steps to ensure that your message can be understood by everyone, including people with disabilities. This is an important step towards creating a more equal world, and it also makes good business sense.
By making your message more accessible, you will reach more people, and you will also send a message to the world at large about your values as a company. Being a company that puts accessibility at the forefront of its plans shows that you have the kind of values that a lot of people resonate with.
Eleven marketing have written a thorough guide on accessible marketing, which you can view on their website https://www.eleven-marketing.co.uk/blog/what-is-accessible-marketing
How can you make your marketing campaign accessible?
There is no one way to make a marketing campaign accessible, and there is no perfectly accessible campaign, either!
The most important thing is at the earliest possible stage of your planning, start thinking about how you can make your campaign more accessible. With every decision you make, try to imagine how it will be received by people with disabilities. It can be helpful to bring in people who are used to working with disabled people to give you some pointers on this.
There are a few things you can consider:
Color contrast
When you are designing your website, social media content, or other visual media, try to ensure that you have sufficient color contrast so that text and images are clear and easily visible.
This will help to make your site more accessible to people who are partially sighted and also improve ease of use for people with ADHD.
Alt text for images
If you are designing a website, it’s important that you add alt text for every image that you use. An alt text will be displayed when the image can’t load due to poor connectivity, and it will also be used by people who are blind or partially sighted.
Blind people often make use of screen readers to help them to access content online, and these screen readers will read the alt text out to them so that they can understand the context of the image. For this reason, it’s important that your alt text descriptions are accurate and helpful.
Alt texts are also criteria for SEO ranking, so you will be doing yourself a favor by adding them.
Clear layouts
Try to ensure that your layouts are clear and only contain information that is absolutely necessary. This will help screen readers to understand the page and will also help partially sighted people to locate the information they need more easily. This is good practice anyway because people generally don’t like to look at a cluttered web page.
