Digital

Accessible Websites: Inclusivity for Both Humans and Artificial Intelligence (AI)

Aug 5, 2024

Website accessibility is critical to ensuring greater inclusivity for users of all abilities in addition to mitigating potential lawsuits for having an inaccessible website. Adding alternative text for images, ensuring good color contrast, enabling keyboard navigation and captioning videos will empower more users to engage with your content.

Some advice, however. Be cautious of quick-fix plugin solutions or overlays to address accessibility. Adding one line of code will not fully fix your site’s accessibility issues. In fact, it may leave you more vulnerable to legal action. Optimizing for accessibility requires expertise, testing and ongoing improvement efforts.

In August 2023, the U.S. Department of Justice published a new rule under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) mandating more specific web accessibility standards for state and local governments. The ruling underscores the necessity of digital accessibility and increases the likelihood of similar requirements being placed on private businesses as well.

If you are planning a website redesign, design an accessible website from the start. It is simpler than retrofitting an inaccessible one. In addition, keeping accessibility front and center from the beginning not only helps you align with legal standards but also increases your site’s user-friendliness, expands your potential customer base and promotes a positive brand image.

Accessible websites also improve search engine optimization (SEO) performance. Clean markup code, helpful metadata and descriptive content all contribute to making your site more accessible, search engine friendly and — drumroll, please — AI friendly. Structured data enhances the machine-learning process enabling search engine and AI algorithms to crawl and read content more efficiently and with greater accuracy.

In today's rapidly changing digital landscape, having an accessible website gives you a competitive advantage. A positive experience for users of all abilities will have beneficial impacts on your organization, now and in the future.

Let’s talk: accessibility@finnpartners.com