By Joanna Goodwin, CEO and Founder of Y Cewri
Designing for people who might otherwise be excluded often makes things better for everyone. It’s true both in the physical world (where we get the name for the phenomenon – the dropped-kerb effect) and in the digital world. Features such as text-to-speech, adjustable text sizes and voice typing can be essential accessibility tools, but they are now used by millions of people for convenience too.
So, digital accessibility should not be seen as an additional feature, a technical compliance exercise or something that only matters to a small group of people. It is good design. And increasingly, it is good business.
Image: Yay Images
It’s important to understand not only what accessibility standards say, but what those standards mean for real people using real services.
At Cewri, our approach is deliberately practical. Accessibility should not sit with one expert in the corner of an organization. Leaders need to understand it. Designers need to consider it. Developers need to build it. Content teams need to write for it. Procurement teams need to buy for it. And everyone creating digital information should have enough confidence to spot simple barriers before they reach a customer.
The organizations that understand this now have an opportunity. Not simply to meet a standard. Not simply to reduce legal risk. But to create better experiences, reach more customers, strengthen their reputation and build products and services that genuinely work for the people they were created for.
Organizations need to move accessibility out of the compliance box and into everyday business practice.
Why should businesses care about digital accessibility?
Around one in four people in the UK is disabled. The latest Family Resources Survey estimates that 16.7 million people, 25% of the population, are classified as disabled.
The spending power of disabled people and their households is often called the Purple Pound. A recent estimate from the University of Bristol and Money Advice Trust put its value at around £446 billion a year in the UK.
That is an enormous market for businesses to exclude unnecessarily.
And those numbers only tell part of the story. Any one of us can experience barriers.
You might break your arm and struggle to use a mouse. You might be holding a baby and trying to use your phone with one hand. You might be watching a video on a noisy train and need captions. You might be tired, stressed or experiencing brain fog and find a complicated form difficult to understand. You might be standing outside in bright sunlight and unable to see low-contrast text on your screen.
Disability can be long term, but access needs can also be temporary or situational.
Everyone who creates digital content has a part to play
You do not need to be a software engineer or a developer to start making things more accessible. If you create a webpage, document, presentation, email, social media post or piece of digital content, start here:
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1. Don’t put barriers between your content and your audience.
- Think carefully about color. Dark grey writing on a slightly lighter grey background might look stylish, but some people will struggle to read it. Make sure there is a strong difference, or contrast, between your words and the background. And never use color alone to explain something. Instead of saying “the items in red need attention”, add a word or symbol too.
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2. You need to tell as well as show.
- Alternative text, often called alt text, describes an image for someone who cannot see it. Imagine you are describing the picture to somebody on the telephone. What do they need to know? If the image is purely decorative and adds no information, it may not need a description at all. The important question is simple: what would somebody miss if they could not see this image?
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3. Create links that tell people where they are going.
- Avoid links that just say, “click here”, “read more” or “find out more”. Someone using a screen reader may navigate through a page by jumping from link to link, so every link should make sense on its own. Instead of “click here,” try, “book your accessibility training or read our accessibility guide.”
- Everyone benefits from knowing what is going to happen before they select something.
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4. Embrace headings and subheadings – use them as signposts.
- A long webpage without headings is like a book without chapters. Give your information a clear title, then use headings and subheadings in a sensible order. In documents, use the proper built-in heading styles rather than simply making words bigger and bold. Good structure helps screen-reader users navigate, but it also helps everyone scan information and find what they need quickly.
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5. Always prioritize clarity and use words people can understand.
- Plain language is accessibility. Use familiar words. Keep sentences reasonably short. Explain technical terms when you need them. Put the most important information first. Do not make somebody decode your organization’s jargon before they can understand what they need to do. Clear writing helps people with cognitive access needs, learning disabilities, dyslexia and people reading in a second language; it also helps somebody who is busy, distracted or simply wants an answer quickly.
None of these changes requires an enormous transformation program.
They require awareness.
And once accessibility becomes part of how an organization thinks, thousands of small decisions begin to change.
Accessibility is an investment, not a cost
Businesses increasingly need to stop asking, “How much will accessibility cost us?” and start asking, “What is inaccessibility already costing us?”
An inaccessible website can lose a customer before they ever speak to you. A confusing online service can generate avoidable telephone calls and support requests. An inaccessible recruitment process can prevent talented people from applying. A difficult checkout can mean an abandoned purchase. Poorly structured information can leave customers frustrated and employees spending time explaining things that should have been clear in the first place. And a brand that repeatedly excludes people sends a message—whether it intended to or not—about who it values as a customer.
Accessibility can therefore contribute much more than compliance.
It can improve customer experience. It can open products and services to a larger market. It can strengthen reputation and trust. It can reduce avoidable contact and service failure. It can help employees work more effectively. And it can demonstrate that inclusion is something an organization actually practices, rather than something written in a policy.
Accessibility can also make your content easier to find. Clear headings, meaningful link text, descriptive alt text, well-structured pages and plain language all help search engines understand what your content is about. These principles are becoming increasingly important in the age of AI, where search tools and AI assistants need to interpret, summarize and retrieve information accurately. Accessibility is not a shortcut to better rankings, but creating clear, structured and meaningful content can improve discoverability for both people and machines.
Start early, start now
If you’re starting a new business or project, building accessibility from the beginning is usually far easier than trying to retrofit it after something has been designed, built and launched. But whatever stage you’re at, the sooner you begin to make your digital offering accessible, the less work you’ll need to do to get where you need to be.
Digital accessibility is not about designing for a minority. It is about designing for people.
And that is something every business should be investing in.
Joanna Goodwin is CEO and Founder of Cewri, a consultancy, coaching and training business, helping organizations design and deliver digital products, services and technology that work better for people and the planet. The Welsh-based company’s work spans user-centered design, accessibility, inclusive design, digital sustainability, ethical technology, delivery, organizational capability and training. Cewri works with organizations to understand problems before committing to solutions, challenge assumptions, improve how teams work and make more deliberate decisions about the things they create, procure and operate. Cewri’s work enables products and services to be designed around real human needs, and across languages, cultures and abilities.
The views and opinions expressed in this blog post or content are those of the authors or the interviewees and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of any other agency, organization, employer, or company.
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