#The Silent Growth Hack: How Businesses Can Leverage Digital Accessibility

Table of Contents

You want your digital business to grow. That’s only natural, but there are so many ideas and strategies out there, where should you start?

A leading trend right now is silent growth hacks. These are improvements you can make to your business model that drives consistent growth by simply attracting more customers.

In other words, if customers like engaging with your site, then they’re more likely to make a purchase and come back in the future.

With this idea in mind, how do you build silent growth? One great starting point utilizes digital accessibility. Today, we’re going to learn about this concept, what exactly it can do for your business, and how you can go about incorporating it.

What Is Digital Accessibility?

Let’s start at the beginning. Digital accessibility is the concept of ensuring that your digital assets work with modern accessibility tools. In other words, you’re making sure that your website still serves people with disabilities that might inhibit a traditional online experience.

Accessibility comes in many forms, and that means building robust digital accessibility requires considerable thought, planning, and effort.

Still, it nets a number of benefits that can help your business grow. That’s why we consider it a silent growth hack. A site with strong digital accessibility will consistently outperform a comparable site that misses on this issue.

Common Accessibility Tools

To really help you think about accessibility, we can cover some of the most common tools. Remembering that there are far too many tools to count them all, these categories cover the most common types of accessibility features:

Text to Speech
Color Contrast
Voice Operation
Digital Assistants
Calculators

Each category covers a range of challenges that many of your customers might face, and when you aim to provide comprehensive accessibility, you avoid leaving anyone out. Technology has grown to even assist consumers with their personal and business taxes. This is a huge win and teaches us all the importance of finance, saving receipts, and more.

How Does Digital Accessibility Drive Growth?

Digital accessibility sounds nice, but is it really worth the investment?

In a word, yes.

Digital accessibility can help you grow your online business passively. Simply make a good site, and customer engagement does the rest.

More specifically, digital accessibility can help you grow your audience, build trust, and create a seamless shopping experience.

Growing Your Audience

Accessibility tools help grow your audience. Think about the sheer number of customers out there who might have trouble with your website without these tools. Even traditional red-green colorblindness can render a site completely unusable for a large number of potential customers.

When you build up your digital accessibility, you include this large audience which gives you access to a much larger customer base.

Except that’s not the end of the story- many accessibility features have use cases outside of common disabilities. Text-to-speech, for instance, can allow you to navigate a site when your eyes are otherwise engaged. These tools give you access to many more people and use cases, helping you to grow your audience for bigger total sales.

Building Trust

Accessibility tools also help with trust and brand recognition. When you solve a problem for someone, they tend to trust you. Solving accessibility issues definitely builds trust, and with that trust comes brand loyalty. People who have a positive experience with your site are more likely to recommend it to others, and you gain word-of-mouth alongside better digital visibility.

This goes even further. An individual with a disability might appreciate how you solve a problem for them. They might also express that to the people in their life, and those loved ones are also likely to build more trust in your brand. Digital accessibility exemplifies the concept of growth through a better user experience.

Seamless Shopping

Most of all, your accessibility efforts can help you build a seamless shopping experience. Removing obstacles improves conversions, even as you grow your audience. You’re benefiting two-fold.

You can probably think of examples in your own life. Have you ever ditched an online shopping cart because completing the sale was frustrating you? If so, you’re not alone. Many people will abandon a site that doesn’t work for them, and with so many options on the open internet, they have little reason to return.

Seamless shopping removes obstacles and overcomes that issue.

How Can You Pursue Digital Accessibility?

Digital accessibility offers powerful benefits that speak directly to your bottom line, but that doesn’t mean you can just stumble your way through the process. There are many tools out there to help you, and you should use them. At the same time, you can utilize the techniques below to ensure quality accessibility across your site.

Audits

“Audit” can be an intimidating term, but it doesn’t have to be. The real idea here is that you should test your sites as thoroughly as you can. Every time you go through your accessibility tools, you’re likely to find problems. Each problem you fix improves the site overall and helps you net benefits.

While you’re at it, try to get customers with specific disabilities to use your site. They will provide more precise and rigorous testing, letting you know exactly what does and doesn’t work. That’s the real key to building an accessible site that works for the vast majority of people.

Engaging With Customers

It’s important to engage with your customers. Whether you use social media or another mechanism, ask them how about their experience. Ask what they like and what they would prefer to change about the user experience.

These engagements can help you build a roadmap for your site that ensures the customer experience at all ends. Customer engagement is one of the simplest and most effective ways to get real-life feedback for your site.

Accessibility offers a lot to your site, and it can help you steadily grow over time. It also doesn’t have to be difficult to pursue. Many apps and tools already exist. You simply need to incorporate good tools into your site and make sure they really do work as intended. From there, it’s a steady climb to a brighter future.

Ashley Nielsen

Ashley Nielsen earned a B.S. degree in Business Administration Marketing at Point Loma Nazarene University. She is a freelance writer who loves to share knowledge about general business, marketing, lifestyle, wellness, and financial tips. During her free time, she enjoys being outside, staying active, reading a book, or diving deep into her favorite music.

If you liked the article, do not forget to share it with your friends. Follow us on Google News too, click on the star and choose us from your favorites.