Ensuring your content works for people of all abilities only takes a little extra foresight. The last thing you want is to leave any of your audience behind. If someone can’t make out an ad because of the colors you used or lack of alt tags, you risk them bouncing to a competitor. It’s far better to create an amazing experience for everyone than risk a bad UX for anyone.
According to the World Health Organization, over one billion people experience some type of disability. Marketers should consider everything from physical disabilities to vision impairments such as color blindness when creating campaigns. Depending on your niche, you may find you deal with one type of disability or many.
Is your campaign accessible to those with cognitive and physical impairments? Even though marketers today have the ability to create highly targeted campaigns, those efforts tend to miss the mark with accessibility.
How Can I Make My Marketing Accessible?
Accessibility looks different for different impairments. Adding some alt tags might work for images in a post, but fall flat on social media, for example. It’s important to think through the full scope of your audience and how to best meet their needs.
Here are our top tips for ensuring your marketing campaign is accessible to all abilities. You may find additional efforts work better, depending upon the makeup of your audience.
1. Consider Mobility Impairments
How do people interact with your site? Can someone without the use of one or more hands still navigate easily from Point A to Point B?
Apple is a good example of considering mobility impairments. They offer Assistive Touch and Face ID as features to help all abilities create texts and emails.
Ads with a target to close need to have a large enough X for people to press. Small targets become very complicated for those with mobility impairments.
Another issue can be with drop down menus. People with impairments may have a difficult time hovering over a set point. However, if you make the menu so when they click on the tab, it stays open until clicked on again, the task becomes much easier. It’s a minor design change with a big accessibility impact.
2. Include Everyone
Source: https://www.marketingcharts.com/advertising-trends-118287
Most people feel they aren’t well represented in advertising. Around 44% of global users think they don’t often see people like them in marketing messages.
When coming up with your advertising campaigns, you should consider different types of customers. You want to use images and examples that feature all races, genders, ages and abilities.
One example might be a series of ads featuring your customers using your product. You would seek out a diverse selection of case studies.
3. Offer Alternative Formats
One way to overcome accessibility issues is to offer information in more than one format. Different people use different readers and programs to help them navigate the internet.
Let’s say your marketing campaign includes a piece of content about how to build a robot. You might post a guide on your blog and link to it via social media. However, you could also point out you have the guide in other formats, such as a PDF, Word document or video.
By providing additional ways to access the information, you overcome the physical barriers some might face in viewing what you’ve provided.
4. Know the Law
If you don’t comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), you could open yourself up to legal ramifications. It’s hard for small business owners to comply with all the regulations, but at a minimum you should address accessibility in your marketing efforts and make your best effort to meet the needs of everyone.
Source: https://www.marketingcharts.com/customer-centric/customer-experience-109247
According to Marketing Charts, 2018 saw a spike to 10,165 lawsuits pertaining to website accessibility. Larger corporations may be more of a target, but anyone can be at the receiving end of litigation.
If you’re unsure what you need to do, check the ADA website and talk to your customers about anything creating issues for them.
5. Get Feedback
It’s vital you reach out to your target audience and ask them what you can do to improve their experience. Just meeting the standards of the law might not be enough. You want your leads to have an amazing user experience (UX) from the first moment they encounter your brand.
How can you improve UX for all abilities? Start by going over the items mentioned here, but then reach out and take surveys. Find out where people hit snags and get stuck. Perhaps you can add a larger button, different colors or an additional format to fix those issues. If even one person struggles to access your material, they’ve had a bad UX and may not return. Put your focus on the one to make your site and marketing amazing for all.
6. Choose Fonts Carefully
You might think fonts don’t matter, but they can make a huge difference in the appearance of your marketing materials. Stick with common fonts, so readers can process them. While a fancy script might be pretty, it isn’t very effective if the user struggles to understand the headlines on the page.
Sticking with tried and true fonts also helps your non-disabled users, as they may not have certain typefaces installed on their operating systems.
7. Be Aware of Colors
Businesswire recently reported around 75% of those who are colorblind experience issues completing tasks at work. Be careful of creating apps or tasks that are color-coded. You should always offer a backup way to complete items, such as text or speech.
Be very careful to offer high contrast between your background and your content. Some colors are less clear to those who are colorblind. Stay away from shades that trend to grey for them, because the text may get lost into the color.
There are numerous colorblind filters online. Run your ads and your site through these wizards to see how they appear to your users. You can then make tweaks as needed to ensure they are viewable by all users.
Source: https://www.toptal.com/designers/colorfilter/
8. Use Random Focus Groups
It’s easy to fall into prejudice without even realizing it. People have a tendency to move toward people most like them. One way to avoid this in your advertising is to use random focus groups. You’ll get feedback from a diverse selection of individuals. Hopefully, any issues get fixed before getting published.
Ask your groups about accessibility and diversity. Are you hitting both and covering all your bases?
Are You Making Accessibility a Priority?
Ask yourself if accessibility is a priority. If you make seeking diversity and inclusion a common part of each ad campaign, you’ll focus on those things and be more likely to hit the high notes. When you notice an issue, fix it immediately.
If someone complains they can’t see an image, have trouble reading text or the buttons are too small, reach out to them and find out what their challenges are so you can work to rectify any issues with your marketing.
About the Author: Eleanor Hecks is editor-in-chief at Designerly Magazine. She was the creative director at a digital marketing agency before becoming a full-time freelance designer. Eleanor lives in Philadelphia with her husband and pup, Bear.