The Business Benefits of building Accessible websites

There’s a good business case for making your website more accessible to the UK’s disabled community.

If your website is at the design stage then ask your designer what they’re doing to ensure that people with sight difficulties and cognitive impairments can still use your pages. It’s undeniably easier to build accessibility in from the start. Don’t despair if your website is already up and running, though, you can still retrofit.

BOOST YOUR CLIENT BASE
It’s not just best practice or ethical to ensure your pages are accessible, it has the potential to make a real difference to your customer base. According to the Employers’ Forum in Disability – a global collection of employers dedicated to helping firms recruit and retain staff members with disabilities – just over 10% of people in the UK have some form of disability. The disabled community also packs a powerful spending punch. According to the forum, they have an estimated £80 billion-worth of spending power in the UK and 71% of UK disabled people use the web to find information on potential purchases.

Of course, needs will vary quite dramatically, but the point is that a sizeable minority of the population have additional requirements when browsing your site. So, if your pages comply with best practice, you’re going to add to your potential client base. Not only that, if your competitors are failing to make their websites accessible, you could be winning their clients.

Associated Link: More: Business benefits of building accessible websites

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