How has Website Accessibility gained prominence in recent times?

With the number of internet users on the rise on a daily basis, making your website accessible to everyone out there is important. If you look closely, website accessibility is no longer a luxury for businesses as more and more people are seeking information on the website before making any move surrounding a product. It is applicable for users with disabilities like colour blindness, cognitive disabilities, hearing impairment or others, as well.

Website accessibility is about making the website accessible to people from all backgrounds. In fact, it has been learnt that almost 71% disabled users leave a website if it is not compatible to their needs. This results in a loss of more than $14 billion in UK alone, every year. All these numbers are a clear indication of how important it is to make your website accessible to a wide variety of audience.

How can you get your website or web application accessible to everyone?

More than a business move, it is a social responsibility for you to make your website accessible to all, irrespective of the physical background of the user. For this, you need to follow the Website Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), laid out by the World Wide Web experts. The best way to make your website compliant to WCAG is to perform web accessibility testing on it.

The ideal aim for any website, particularly for a huge brand, should be to make the website accessible even for users with colour blindness, blindness, deafness, less hearing, motor impairment and so on. For this, you need to get in touch with a set of professional testers and developers who have good experience in this field.

What are the benefits of running your website through Website Accessibility Testing?

• Makes your website accessible to people with disabilities

The most obvious benefit of running a series of website accessibility tests on your website is that it will help you make the website accessible to people with disabilities. By making a website compatible with screen readers, and be enabled with voice prompts and colour corrections, you are addressing the issues faced by the less-fortunate people in society while they access your website.

• Gives you an opportunity to increase your user base

It is vital for any business to improve their user base and that is exactly what you get to do by optimising your website in a way that it can be used by a larger section of society. Moreover, one thing to note here is that, not only help people with the disabilities but the ones without any also enjoy such features, as they make the website easy to use.

• Paints positive brand awareness

Once your website becomes WCAG compliant, your brand gets a positive response from a wide section of the society, thus generating a good image for your company. In fact, this is one of the best ways to get word-of-mouth publicity, as members of certain groups of society will recommend your website to their peers. Furthermore, this also paints a picture of your company being socially responsible, which goes a long way in improving your brand’s name and the business as its direct result.

• Usability of the website improves for all kinds of users

Once the website is gone through website accessibility testing, many of the regular flaws too come to notice, which helps you make the website more usable and functional. Fixing such problems will improve the efficiency of your website and help you retain users. If your website is not easy to use, you will lose potential business, irrespective of the physical background of the user.

• Improves search engine optimisation

As a direct result of a bigger user base, the search engine optimisation (SEO) of your website increases. This helps in improving your website’s ranking and reaching the first page of search results for all kinds of keywords that have been searched related to your business offerings or products.

• Helps you avoid legal complications

Even though a website or a company has no intentions of discriminating a certain faction of the society, not having a website accessible to all can lead to legal ramifications. For example, Domino’s faced a lawsuit filed against them recently for their website being not accessible to blind people even through a screen reader, which led to a lot of bad PR for the company. Naturally, any company would want to avoid such situations.

Now that you know the benefits of performing website accessibility testing on your website, you must get in touch with a software testing company like TestUnity who has multiple years of experience in this field. Creating a website that is accessible to users of all type will not only make you socially responsible but also increase your business. So, why wait, get in touch with us to know more.

TestUnity

Testunity is a SaaS-based technology platform driven by a vast community of testers & QAs spread around the world, powered by technology & testing experts to create the dedicated testing hub. Which is capable of providing almost all kind of testing services for almost all the platforms exists in software word.