Making the Case: 6 Reasons Your Business Needs an Accessible Website

In today’s world, most businesses have a website. However, not all businesses understand why website accessibility is important. According to the World Wide Web Consortium’s (W3C) Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI), “Web accessibility means that people with disabilities can perceive, understand, navigate, and interact with the web, and that they can contribute to the web.” When you consider that most people use the web to do everything from purchasing products and services to finding jobs and paying bills, the importance of web accessibility becomes a little more clear: When people with disabilities are denied access to websites, they’re also denied their independence. 

Despite the importance of accessible websites for people with disabilities, it isn’t always easy to convince key stakeholders to spend the money needed to make your company’s website accessible. If you’re in the process of developing a business case for website accessibility, please consider the following six reasons your business needs an accessible website:

Reason 1 – Web Accessibility Helps You Reach Customers With Disabilities

Most businesses want to gain as many customers as possible. However, if your company website isn’t accessible, you’re likely missing out on a huge number of customers. According to the World Bank, approximately 15% of the world’s population has a disability. This works out to roughly 1 billion people. And the percentages of people with disabilities are even higher in developing countries. The Center for Disease Control estimates that 26% of adults in the United States have some type of disability, which equates to roughly 61 million people.

Obviously, there are a large number of people with disabilities in the world, and by making your website accessible, you’re also greatly expanding the reach of your business. Here are some examples of ways you can make your website accessible to users with varying disabilities:

• Add captions and transcripts to your audio and audiovisual content in order to make that content accessible to users with auditory disabilities. 
• Add consistent labels on forms and buttons, clear anchor text on links, and multiple ways to navigate your website in order to make your website easier to use for users with cognitive, learning, and neurological disabilities. 
• Optimize your website with full keyboard support, visible focus indicators, mechanisms to skip over blocks of content, and clearly labeled form inputs in order to aid users with physical disabilities. 
• Provide alternatives to voice-based interaction (e.g. text-based chat functionality or keyboard commands) and contact methods other than a phone number (e.g. an email address or feedback form) in order to help users with speech disabilities.
• Add text alternatives for images and controls; the ability to resize text, images, and page layouts; audio alternatives to videos; sufficient color contrast between foreground and background elements; and full keyboard support for users with visual disabilities. 

Please note that the above examples are not an exhaustive list. For more information on how people with disabilities use the web, please see this publication from the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). And to learn how to implement accessibility features on your website, please see the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, which are also published by the W3C.

Reason 2 – Web Accessibility Improves the Website Experience for Customers Without Disabilities

While it’s quite obvious that web accessibility improves website usability for people with disabilities, what may not be as apparent is that website accessibility also improves the experiences of users without disabilities. This includes people who are suffering from a temporary or situational disability, people with low bandwidth and/or older technology, older users, users with low literacy and those who are not fluent in the language of the website, and new and infrequent users of the internet. This also includes everyone who benefits from the improved usability offered by web accessibility features.

Web Accessibility Helps Users With Temporary and Situational Disabilities

Even if someone doesn’t have a permanent disability, there are plenty of situations in which they may be temporarily or situationally disabled. To illustrate this point, let’s look at three examples of people who are unable to use one of their arms:

• The first person, Michael, was born with only one arm. Michael is permanently disabled. He needs to be able to navigate the internet using both a keyboard and a mouse, and he needs to have plenty of time to enter information into any forms on websites.  
• The second person, Maddie, was born with two fully functioning arms. However, she recently broke one of her arms in a bicycle accident, and as a result, she is “temporarily” disabled. Because she is unable to use her arm while it’s in a cast, Maddie has all the same obstacles accessing the web that Michael has. 
• The third person, Max, also has two fully functioning arms. However, Max happens to be holding his newborn baby in one of his arms, rendering him “situationally” disabled as he accesses the web. In this moment, as he holds his baby, Max has all of the same obstacles faced by both Michael and Maddie. 

Other examples of temporary disabilities include a person who has lost their glasses and is temporarily vision impaired, as well as a person who has just returned from the dentist with their mouth numb and is unable to use voice recognition technology. Other examples of situational disabilities include a person who benefits from proper color contrast while reading in bright sunlight, or someone who uses captions when watching videos in a noisy environment. Although none of the people in these examples are permanently disabled, they all benefit from websites that are designed with accessibility in mind.

Web Accessibility Benefits Users With Older Technology, Slow Internet Connections, or Limited Bandwidth.

People affected by economic barriers, including low income and low employment rates, often have limited access to mainstream web technologies, assistive technologies, high-speed internet, and high-bandwidth connections. In addition, those who live in rural and other hard-to-reach geographic areas often lack access to high-speed internet and have limited mobile phone reception. Web accessibility benefits both of these groups in a variety of ways:

• The use of text alternatives for images, multimedia, and other non-text objects benefits people whose internet connections are too slow to download multimedia files, people who turn off images and multimedia to limit connection charges, and people with older technology who can’t access multimedia formats.   
• The use of sufficient color contrast between foreground and background, as well as finding alternative ways to convey meaning other than color, benefits people who have older monitors or are viewing web content outdoors where the glare of sunlight can make it difficult to see the screen. 
• Defining font size as a relative unit benefits people with older browsers that do not override absolute font sizes. When your font size is defined absolutely rather than relatively, those older browsers can prevent users from resizing text. 
• Using stylized text to convey information, rather than bitmap images, increases the download speed of your web pages, which benefits people with slow internet connections. 
• Using style sheets to separate web content from the presentation decreases the file size and download requirements, which increases download speed, benefiting people with slow internet connections. 
• Organizing your website so that it can be read and understood without style sheets benefits people with older technologies that can’t handle style sheets. 
• Making sure your web pages have complete start and end tags and are nested according to W3C specifications ensures that people with older assistive technologies can parse the content accurately without crashing. 
• Using clear and consistent design, navigation, and links benefits people with older web technologies, slow internet connections, and limited bandwidths by helping them open the pages they want and saving them wasted page load time from going down the wrong path.

The above examples are just a small sampling of the ways that web accessibility benefits users with geographical and technological limitations.

Web Accessibility Benefits Web Users With Low Literacy and Users Who Are Not Fluent in the Native Language

People who have difficulty reading or are not fluent in the native language of a particular website also benefit from website accessibility. By using straightforward language, incorporating supplemental illustrations, employing consistent design and navigation, dividing content into easily digestible blocks of information, preventing text from blinking or flashing, and providing users with enough time to read and use content, you can make your website accessible to these folks. In addition, if your website can be read by screen readers, users who have difficulty reading can opt to listen to your website.

Web Accessibility Benefits Older Web Users

As we age, our abilities are often impacted by hearing and vision loss, as well as cognitive and physical decline. Although they may not be regarded as having a disability, people with age-related impairments benefit from web accessibility in a variety of ways:

• Older people with hearing loss benefit from having captions and transcripts for audio content, as well as from having sufficient contrast between foreground “information” and background “noise.” 
• Older people with vision loss benefit from having sufficient contrast between foreground and background colors, as well as from having text that uses easy-to-read font, increased line spacing, and can be increased in size and read without the use of assistive technologies.    
• Older people experiencing cognitive decline benefit from many of the same accessibility features discussed in the previous section, “Web Accessibility Benefits Users with Low Literacy and Users Who Are Not Fluent in the Native Language.”  
• Older people experiencing physical decline benefit from being able to increase the clickable area of link targets and from being able to use the keyboard for website interactions (rather than having to use the mouse). 

Web Accessibility Benefits New and Infrequent Users

Many people around the world face cultural, economic, and social barriers that limit their access to mainstream web technologies, high-bandwidth connections (or even regular web access), training in web proficiency, and social environments that encourage web use. These new and infrequent users of the web benefit from websites that use clear and consistent design, navigation, and links.

Web Accessibility Benefits Everyone!

While the previous sections discuss how web accessibility benefits users with differing circumstances and contexts, the reality is that almost everyone benefits from improved web accessibility. Both user interaction design and web accessibility aim to deliver a more intuitive user experience. If both are done well, website content will render successfully across various devices, platforms, assistive technologies, and operating systems. And while accessibility features are developed for users with disabilities, they typically end up being used by a much wider audience. For example, innovations like autocomplete, text-to-speech, and voice controls were initially developed for users with disabilities, but have since been widely adopted by millions of others.

Reason 3 – Web Accessibility Improves Your Customers’ Experiences on Mobile Devices

This reason could have just as easily been grouped together with the previous section. However, I figured  that the mobile web is important enough to merit its own section. 

More than 6 billion people use mobile phones globally, and that number is expected to surpass 7 billion by the end of 2024. In many parts of the world, people don’t have access to a desktop or laptop and are limited to accessing the web through a mobile phone. Given these realities, it’s no surprise that so many organizations are focused on making their websites accessible from mobile devices. 

As it turns out, in addition to benefiting people with disabilities, web accessibility also benefits people using mobile phones, tablets, smart watches, and other devices with small screens and different input modes. For example, both desktop users with a mobile disability and mobile phone users who only have a numeric keypad find it difficult to navigate websites that require the use of a mouse. In fact, when more and more people started using mobile devices in the early 2000s, websites that were already compliant with accessibility standards were also more mobile ready than their non-accessible counterparts, since they did not require the use of a mouse. 

From a design standpoint, there is a substantial overlap between web accessibility guidelines and mobile best practices. The W3C’s Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), which provide guidance for making websites accessible to people with disabilities, share a lot of the same criteria as the W3C’s Mobile Web Best Practices (MWBP), which provide guidance for making websites usable on mobile devices. 

Reason 4 – Web Accessibility Makes Your Website More Visible to Search Engines

Most businesses place a heavy emphasis on search engine optimization (SEO) for a variety of reasons:

• SEO is relatively cost effective. It doesn’t require much, other than the labor and/or time needed to optimize your online properties, and perhaps one or two search tools.
• SEO is a primary source of website traffic for many businesses, as well as a critical component of the buyer funnel. 
• SEO helps businesses build long-term equity for their brands. A good search ranking for a popular keyword can help elevate a brand’s profile. 
• SEO lets you find potential customers who are actively searching for products and services just like yours.  
• Because SEO targets keywords rather than demographics, it helps you gain customers from outside of your defined target audience. 
• Much like web accessibility, SEO has significant overlap with user interface and user experience design. As a result, optimizing your website for search also makes it more user friendly. 
• SEO is quantifiable. With the right tools, you can track your site’s rankings for different keywords, find out which keywords generate the most traffic to your site, learn which pages users from search engage with the most, and measure whether they complete specific actions on your website. 

Fortunately, there’s a significant overlap between web accessibility and search engine optimization. By making your website more accessible, you also increase your visibility to search engines. Here are some examples of elements that should be optimized:

Title Tags

A title tag is an HTML element that specifies the title of a web page. Title tags are shown in the top of a user’s browser bar. This helps the user understand what the page is about and allows them to quickly identify a particular page when they have multiple tabs open in their browser. 

Title tags are important for web accessibility. When someone uses a screen reader to navigate between pages, they hear the page titles read out loud. By using clear descriptive text that accurately describes the main topic of the page, title tags allow users with disabilities to more easily navigate your website. 

Title tags are also important for search engine optimization. Adding meaningful text to a page’s title tag helps search engines better understand what your page is about. Not to mention, title tags appear as the clickable headline used in search results.

Heading Tags

Heading tags are HTML elements that help structure web pages, organizing content into clear, digestible sections. This helps users quickly scan content in order to gain an understanding of what the page is about.

In much the same way that non-disabled users employ headings to scan the contents of a web page, screen readers allow users with disabilities to navigate pages by headings, so that they can quickly find the section of the page that’s most relevant to them. 

Headings also play an important role in search engine optimization, allowing search robots to better understand how content is organized on a particular page, as well as which subtopics are discussed.

Lists

A list is an HTML element that provides the structure for both bulleted and numbered lists on a web page. Lists define a group of related items.

When lists are coded with the correct markup, screen readers will inform users that there is a list, as well as how many items are in that list. 

From an SEO perspective, when you mark up lists correctly, you’re letting Google know that there’s a list within your content. And because search engines know that lists are useful for certain queries, your content is more likely to be used for Google’s featured snippet at the top of the search results.

Anchor Text

Anchor text is the text included in a link from one web page to another. When employed correctly, anchor text should describe the content of the destination page, helping users to determine whether they want to click the link to visit that page. 

Because screen readers allow users to tab through the links on a page, using descriptive words in anchor text is also an important consideration for web accessibility. Phrases like “click here” or “read more” don’t provide enough information for users with disabilities to understand what the destination page is about. Using descriptive anchor text helps them find what they’re looking for much more easily. 

Anchor text is also pretty important for SEO. When search robots find a link while crawling through a web page, they typically interpret that link as a “vote” in favor of the content on the destination page. The anchor text helps the search engines determine what the content of the destination page is about.

Alternative Text

Alternative text, or alt text, is an HTML attribute that describes the appearance and/or function of an image used on a page. When an image fails to load, the alternative text is displayed in its place. 

Alt text is read aloud by screen readers, allowing users with visual impairments to understand the content of images. By ensuring that alt text is clear, accurate, and meaningful, you also ensure that users with visual impairments experience your website in a way that’s similar to sighted users. 

Search engines also recognize the information in alt attributes. This helps them to better understand how images inform the overall content of your page, while also helping your images rank in image search.

Transcripts and Captions

Just like alternative text provides a text equivalent for images, transcripts and captions provide a text equivalent for audio content. 

Transcripts and captions are important for web accessibility because they allow users with hearing impairments to access audio content. They also help other users, such as people with a learning difference and people watching or listening in noisy environments. 

From an SEO perspective, using captions and transcripts can help your content get indexed more quickly and rank higher in search engines.

Bread Crumbs

Breadcrumbs are a series of links that act as a secondary navigation, allowing users to quickly determine where they are on a website and understand the path they took to navigate to the page they’re on. Because users are able to quickly find and return to a page they visited previously, this also provides a better user experience. 

Breadcrumbs improve web accessibility in at least two ways. First, they allow people using screen readers to quickly navigate through a set of grouped pages. Second, they prevent people with memory problems and low attention spans from becoming confused as they navigate through a set of grouped pages. 

Search engines use breadcrumbs to understand how a website is organized. They are also a great way to improve your internal linking, which makes it easier for search robots to crawl through your website and discover new content. 

Navigation

A website’s navigation helps users easily find what they’re looking for, while also displaying the most important pages on the site. 

From an accessibility perspective, it’s important to ensure that your navigation links are tab-able, which means that keyboards and screen readers are able to read them. You should only include the most important, top-level pages in your navigation. You’ll also want to make sure that the layout and presentation is consistent across all of your web pages. This helps people with cognitive differences and visual impairments predict where they can find important navigation links on each page. Finally, you’ll want to consider adding skip navigation, which allows users of screen readers and other assistive technology to skip past the main navigation when tabbing through the links and headings on a particular page. 

From an SEO perspective, your website navigation plays an important role in helping search engines crawl and understand the structure of your website. Similar to web accessibility, when optimizing your website for search engines, you should only include the most top-level pages in your navigation. This signals to search engines that your website has a flat architecture, which means both users and search bots need to make fewer clicks to find important content.

User Interactions

User interactions are the physical interactions users must take in order to access content on your web pages. 

When it comes to user interactions, both web accessibility and SEO face similar challenges. Screen readers are unable to perform physical interactions, such as clicking buttons or opening accordion-style content sections, unless instructed to do so by the user. And search bots are unable to perform these actions at all. For these reasons, it is recommended that you cut down on the number of physical interactions required to access website content. 

If you must have an accordion-style content section on your website, you’ll want to make sure that any hidden text can be found in the source code. This will ensure that both screen readers and search bots are able to read content without needing to perform any user interactions.

Sitemaps

Sitemaps give both users and search engines an overview of the content that can be found on your site, while also helping them understand how that content is organized. 

Sitemaps help people using assistive technologies access all of the important pages on your site from one place. They also help people with cognitive disabilities by giving them a page of text without any other distracting content. 

Likewise, sitemaps help search engine crawlers find the most important information on your website that relates to a user’s search query. And if they’re updated regularly, they also help search bots find and index new content much quicker.

Readability

Reliability describes how easy it is to understand the textual content of a page. In order to improve a website’s readability, you should avoid using jargon words, difficult language, or long sentences. You’ll also want to make sure that text is left-aligned and your content includes plenty of headings and lists to make it easier to digest. 

When writing content with web accessibility in mind, it’s important to remember that not everyone has the same level of literacy. In the United States, 54% of adults are reading below a 6th grade level. In addition, some people have reading challenges like dyslexia, while others may speak English as a second language. By making your content readable, you’re ensuring that all people can access and understand it.  

Improving your website readability also helps your SEO efforts. Search engines track the behavior of users on your website. When your content is easy to read, visitors will stay on your website longer, indicating to search engines that your website content was useful to them. In addition, as voice search grows in popularity, search engines will give greater preference to content that uses clear, easy-to-understand language.

Reason 5 – Web Accessibility Is an Important Aspect of Corporate Social Responsibility

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) involves operating your business in a manner that treats internal and external stakeholders ethically, increases human development, and is good for society and the environment. By implementing a corporate social responsibility program, your business can achieve a number of important benefits, including an improved brand image, increased sales and customer loyalty, improved workforce diversity, and more. 

Although corporate social responsibility has been an important business practice for some time, it has become even more important since millennials overtook baby boomers as the largest adult population. According to a recent study, millennials are more aware of company activity and more skeptical of CSR program authenticity than any other generation. Due to millennials’ increased buying power and natural skepticism for corporate ethics, “the field of corporate social responsibility is moving closer to the forefront of corporate concerns as it climbs the hierarchy of consumer needs.”

Given that web accessibility provides improved access, interaction, and social inclusion for people with disabilities, a clear commitment to web accessibility can demonstrate that your business has a genuine sense of corporate social responsibility. Furthermore, employing people with disabilities helps diversify your workforce, which is an essential component of corporate social responsibility. And in order to employ people with disabilities, the technology that they use, including websites and applications, must be accessible.  

Reason 6 – Web Accessibility Helps Your Business Avoid Costly Lawsuits

While all of the previous reasons look at ways web accessibility can improve your business, it’s also important to consider the negative ramifications of not making your website accessible. Between government oversight and regulation on the one hand, and increased legal action on the other, the legal landscape is rapidly changing in favor of equal access. And if your website isn’t accessible, your business may find itself in legal trouble. 

Since the turn of the 21st century, as web use became an integral part of modern life all over the world, governments and regulators began to mandate laws and policies that strengthen the rights of people with disabilities to access and use online websites and applications. As more specific laws and policies were enacted in countries around the world, the legal risk to businesses also increased. 

By 2018, more than 175 countries had ratified the United Nations (UN) Convention on the Rights of People with Disabilities (CRPD). This comprehensive human rights document includes a direct reference to the rights of all people to have equal access to communications technology. One notable country that has yet to ratify this document is the United States. 

For Businesses in the United States, Web Accessibility Laws and Regulation Are Less Clear 

Beginning with its first public assertion in 1996, and continuing through the 2000s, 2010s, and 2020s in various consent decrees, settlement agreements, and published guidance, the US Department of Justice (DOJ) has repeatedly weighed in on web accessibility for businesses, stating that business websites are considered “places of public accommodation” under Title III of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), a comprehensive federal civil rights law prohibiting discrimination on the basis of disability. 

As “places of public accommodation,” the ADA requires business websites to be accessible to users with disabilities. However, because the ADA was written in 1990, prior to the rise of the internet, and because Congress has not updated the legislation to specifically address web accessibility, federal courts have been divided in their opinions of whether a business website is a “place of public accommodation.” 

In addition, despite issuing regulations to bring the federal government and state and local governments into alignment with the World Wide Web Consortium’s (W3C) Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), the DOJ has not established specific regulations clarifying web accessibility standards for businesses. 

Without introducing a set of federal regulations to govern web accessibility for businesses, the DOJ’s only means of enforcing their interpretation of the law is by weighing in with their opinion on public statements and during lawsuits. And although the DOJ has publicly advised businesses to consult the WCAG guidelines, many businesses have pushed back, noting that they are published by a private organization, and are therefore less reliable than a set of regulations officially published by the Department of Justice.

As Legal Action Continues to Accelerate, the Risks to Your Business Are Clear

Each year, the number of web accessibility lawsuits filed in the United States continues to grow. According to a report published by UseableNet, a leading advocate for digital accessibility, there were 4,605 web accessibility lawsuits filed in 2023. The report also notes that while this trend started with lawsuits against well known brands like Dominos, Netflix, Nike, and Amazon, plaintiffs are now turning their attention to smaller businesses. 

With thousands of lawsuits filed, and hundreds of thousands of demand letters issued, the legal risk of maintaining an inaccessible website becomes quite clear. If your website isn’t accessible, and your company hasn’t received a legal complaint yet, it’s only a matter of time until you do. 

Not only will a legal battle cost your business financially – it may also damage your reputation. As savvy consumers focus more and more on issues of equity and inclusion, they take notice of brands that don’t prioritize accessibility. And if your business should find itself in the headlines for having an inaccessible website, those consumers are more likely to spend their money elsewhere. 

Final Thoughts

Web accessibility is not just a legal obligation or moral imperative—it’s a strategic business decision that offers a multitude of benefits. Incorporating it into your business strategy fosters inclusivity and equal access, drives customer satisfaction and loyalty, and enhances your brand reputation. Moreover, it positions your business as a forward-thinking leader committed to serving all members of the community.

Now is the time to act. Evaluate your current website, identify areas for improvement, and take the necessary steps to make it accessible to everyone. By doing so, you’re not just complying with guidelines—you’re contributing to a more inclusive and equitable digital world, benefiting both your business and society at large.