The new year is just about in full swing and countless opportunities await those who are diligent enough to fine-tune their businesses for success.
Preparing for a bright future can be tough at the very best of times, but when you don’t know what exactly you’re preparing for, it can seem like an impossible struggle.
By endeavoring to make your business more accessible, both for your employees and your customers, you can build some solid foundations on which to tackle the road ahead.
By making your business inclusive, you can not only develop a more enticing brand image for yourself, but you can benefit from an extended reach, as everyone gets to benefit from your company, no matter what their personal situation is.
Plus, it is the moral route to take, particularly in an age where corporate responsibility is in the crosshairs for many modern consumers.
If you felt like you could be doing a little more to make your business accessible, here are some top tips to help you get started.
Use Captioning Services
Any video content you make needs to resonate with everyone, even if they cannot benefit from the audio component.
Click here for some good tools like video captioning software available nowadays, there is no excuse not to put accessibility first.
Moreover, this great bit of software can make your audio searchable online, giving your SEO efforts a boost in the process.
Video captioning software does not just benefit those with disabilities either – it benefits everyone. There are plenty of occasions where audio may be out of the question and the message of your video or virtual meeting starts to suffer, so introducing a tool that gets around this is a must in terms of accessibility options.
Write an Accessibility Statement
It is, unfortunately, not always good enough to bolster your business’s accessibility without telling the world that you are doing so.
Writing an accessibility statement does have benefits other than PR though, such as:
Reassuring your employees – Your employees may feel more comfortable working for a company that commits to writing an accessibility statement. Not many people enjoy working for a company that cares nothing about its disabled employees and customers, so writing a statement could be a way to remind them you’re not that kind of company, and you do in fact care for your people. You probably want to avoid the mass resignations happening right now.
Increasing Trustworthiness – If you can write a statement and stick to it, you will likely have an easier time convincing people of your trustworthiness, an important element in business.
Legal Support – An accessibility statement might be a legal requirement in some places, but it could also provide you with a document to fall back on should you need to enter into a legal dispute for whatever reason.
Offer Your Staff Diversity and Inclusivity Training
It can be difficult to successfully manage a business that puts accessibility at the forefront when your staff do not represent the same notion.
If your staff have never had to concern themselves about accessibility, then they may be insensitive to it, or to what it represents, or who needs to benefit from it.
Offering your team diversity and inclusivity training can be a good remedy for the this. Training in general is good for developing your team’s professional skills, and the return is massive over time, so you rarely need to worry about it being a waste of money.
The more your team know, the more sensitive and aware they will be about the importance of accessibility in the workplace.
It is important to make sure that everyone is on the same page when making changes of any kind in business, but especially when that change might affect the company culture itself.
Develop an Accessible Website
Digital accessibility, or rather digital inaccessibility is thwarting many people’s chances to get enjoyment out of the online world.
Businesses need to take digital accessibility far more seriously if they hope to make their online presence more accessible and do their part to improve the internet for all, not just those without disabilities.
In this regard, your first point on the agenda should be to develop a more accessible website, one that is easy to navigate, highly functional, fast loading and contains accessibility options like alternative text and voice search optimization.
Your ability to do this easily will likely depend on the content management system that you use to build your website.
If you can, think about choosing a more accessible theme, one that is easy to perceive and understand and does not obscure your products in any way.
You may need to enlist the help of a coder or a web developer to do this, but most of the time, your CMS provider should be able to get it sorted, and you will probably be able to get them to write you some custom code for free should you need it.
Provide Physical Solutions
Contrary to what the rise of the digital world might have you believe, physical stores do still exist, and they need to be accessible too.
Making sure your physical space is accessible means providing the right solutions at the right time. For example, your premises needs to be wheelchair-friendly, service animals should be allowed to enter the property, and there should be enough space for people to navigate around with ease.
Proper signage is important in this area too, as people need to know where to turn, what to watch out for and whether or not you are able to support their needs in the first place.
A well-trained workforce will be a huge help in this area too, as they will likely know how to act around potentially sensitive situations regarding a customer’s physical disability.
Ultimately, an accessible business is one that strives to benefit everyone, regardless of their personal ability or circumstance.
Those who strive to create accessibility provide testament to their trustworthy character, and they are effectively playing an important role in the entire landscape of modern business too.
