Accessibility In Business
As of 2024, there are 33.2 million businesses in the United States. 93.79% of businesses use social media. 77% of small businesses use it to market themselves to get sales and clients, and 71% use social media to market themselves. This would include businesses such as social media influencers.
Social media is truly a great tool for growing your business. You have so many options like photographics, infographics, regular text posts, videos, and livestreams. Entrepreneurs put in a lot of time and effort into making their content and getting it ready to upload. But there’s one thing that they don’t think about before they upload their new image or video: accessibility. Digital accessibility, if you want to be a bit more specific.
Digital accessibility helps bring in a market that people may have unintentionally been leaving out: disabled people. More and more disabled people are creating their own businesses and they want to learn how to grow as well. This is where businesses have the chance to obtain a whole new audience or clientele before someone else gets them, whether it’s specifically for sales or for obtaining new clients. When businesses make disabled people feel welcome, they have a better chance of getting them as clients as they will be trusted.
How can you make your business more accessible online? Let’s go over some common and easiest examples.
Captions
With video content becoming increasingly popular to use for marketing, it’s important to make sure they are accessible to your audience with captions. There are closed and open captions. Closed captions are captions you can turn on and off, and even customize when you’re viewing them on platforms like YouTube. Open captions are burned into the video and cannot be customized or turned off. Closed captions are popular on YouTube. Open captions are popular for short-term videos like YouTube Shorts, TikToks, and Instagram Reels.
There are numerous ways to caption a YouTube video. If you already have a script, you can paste it and YouTube will generate the timing for you. You can also use the automatic captions, but wait! Don’t use the automatic captions themselves. They are not accessible. Instead, take the time to edit the automatic file and fix words, formatting, and grammar.
The setup is the same with TikTok and Instagram. Both platforms come with automatic caption options, as well as the ability to edit them. Take a few extra minutes before uploading and make sure they’re correct and legible. Contrast is key to making captions readable. A black background and white text, or vice versa, is the most accessible combo. Also, make your font large enough to read and place it as close to where your head is as you can. Captions that are extremely small in size, with zero contrast, and shoved to the bottom corner are not accessible.
Transcripts
Transcripts are both deaf and DeafBlind friendly. They’re like captions, but text on a document or web page. These are great for podcasts and as an extra with video. With transcripts, people who are low vision/visually impaired/blind and DeafBlind can zoom in on the text to make it easier to read.
Image and Video Descriptions
Image and video descriptions are beneficial to people who are low vision/visually impaired/blind. Many businesses will post flyers promoting their business or an event with the information, but the caption in the Instagram post won’t contain any of the information a blind person would need to know. What is the location? What is the time of the event? If someone is posting about the team or a product. What does the CEO look like, or the product?
When you add image/video description to ALT Text or as separate text in the post, ScreenReader or VoiceOver will read the text aloud, giving access to the content just like a sighted person would.
Of course, it doesn’t stop at digital accessibility. We must talk about offline accessibility too.
American Sign Language (ASL) Interpreters
Whether you’re hosting an event, workshop, panel, or if you have a deaf client, interview candidate, etc., ASL interpreters are essential to making future and current deaf patrons feel welcome and have access to information.
Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART)
CART can be used for both online and offline accessibility. These are captions being made in real-time. They are used at workshops, conferences, etc. both online and offline for people who need access to information and don’t know sign language.
Accessibility is an ongoing process and never 100%. We learn new things every day. And when we learn something new, we’ll be sure to share that information with you!
AKay Marketing is very proud to recently learn about accessibility and bring what we’ve learned to our business- on our website, social media, and in real life. We encourage you to do the same. You won’t regret it.