A great website doesn’t just look good, it’s built to be functional and easy to use for everyone. Accessibility plays a key role in usability, reach and brand perception, making it one of the most overlooked drivers of digital performance.
Here are five ways accessibility makes your site and brand stronger:
1. Accessibility Expands Your Audience
About one in four adults in the United States lives with a disability that can affect how they interact with the web. When websites aren’t accessible, brands are unintentionally excluding a portion of their audience.By ensuring your digital experiences work for people with visual, auditory, cognitive and motor differences, you expand your reach, increase potential conversions and make your content usable across more devices.
2. Accessibility Improves Usability for Everyone
Accessibility and usability go hand in hand. When a website is designed to be accessible, it’s also designed to be clearer, more intuitive and easier to use for all users, not just those with disabilities. Consider these web browsing scenarios:- Captions on videos support all users in sound-off environments
- Larger tap targets make mobile and tablet navigation easier for everyone
- Strong color contrast improves readability in all lighting conditions
- Clear headings help users quickly scan and understand content
Bottom line: What’s good for accessibility is usually good for UX. When usability improves, metrics like time on page, task completion rates and conversions improve too.3. Accessible Sites Build Brand Trust and Loyalty
When a website is accessible, it sends a message that the brand has intentionally designed its digital experience to work for all users, not just the majority. For people with disabilities, that effort is immediately noticeable. For everyone else, accessibility shows up as clarity, ease of use, and consistency, which are all qualities of a trustworthy brand.
Accessible experiences also help reduce frustration and friction, which means users are more likely to stay and explore, return to the site in the future, and recommend the brand to others.
4. Accessibility Reduces Legal and Compliance Risk
Web accessibility isn’t just a best practice, it’s increasingly tied to legal and regulatory expectations. While no single checklist guarantees legal protection, following established accessibility standards from the organizations listed below helps demonstrate good-faith effort to provide equal access:- ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act)
- Section 508
- WCAG guidelines
Accessibility helps protect your organization legally, financially and reputationally while ensuring your digital experiences are usable by everyone.5. Accessibility Future-Proofs Your Website
Accessible code is more semantic, more maintainable and more compatible with assistive and emerging technologies. This means your site is better prepared for voice interface integrations, AI-powered browsing, screen readers and other assistive technology updates, as well as the introduction of new devices and browsers.In short, accessibility isn’t just about meeting today’s requirements. It’s about building a website that can grow, adapt and perform well into the future.
What You Can Do Right Now
If reading through the WCAG guidelines or trying to tackle accessibility updates on your website seems overwhelming or intimidating, you’re not alone. Accessibility upgrades don’t mean you need to completely rebuild your website, and there are steps you can take that don’t require deep technical expertise. Smaller, intentional changes such as these can make a meaningful difference:
- Write clear, descriptive content: Use plain language and short paragraphs, and break up text with meaningful headings. This applies to links and buttons as well! Link text should make sense out of context (avoid “click here” or “learn more”). Buttons should have descriptive labels that say what they do. Read more about link purpose and context here.
- Add alt text to images: Most CMS platforms let you add alt text (alternative text) without touching code through a media library. Alt text should describe what’s important in the image to provide context for users with screen readers. Read more about images and their text alternatives here.
- Use accessible colors and contrast: Check that text has enough contrast against its background and avoid relying on color alone to convey meaning (e.g., “fields in red are required”). The WebAIM Contrast Checker is one of our favorite tools for checking color contrast.
- Add captions to videos: Captions can be uploaded to videos hosted on platforms like YouTube or Vimeo, or transcripts can be provided directly on a website.
Need help making your website or brand more accessible? Let’s talk.
