Why accessibility matters

Perhaps you’ve heard the term accessibility before but aren’t sure if it affects your work – or perhaps you’re already aware of accessibility but are struggling to get stakeholders on board with your strategy? On Global Accessibility Awareness day, take a few minutes to understand why accessibility is really important for everybody. 

What is accessibility? 

Accessibility is all about taking steps to make it easier for people with disabilities to interact with your product or service. Not only does this mean ensuring your website is designed and built with accessibility in mind, but also those who are producing content play an important part too, such as marketing and in-house teams. Being aware of how to create accessible content will improve your website's user experience. How an online article has been set up will affect how assistive technologies (ATs) are able to navigate it, such as screen magnification software, screen readers and digital braille display boards, which are essential for some users.

As a starting point, three areas where you can make a difference are:

• concise and descriptive alt text
• using descriptive link names which indicate the purpose or destination
• having a clear hierarchy of headings 

All of the above can make a big difference for relatively low cost. 

Disability affects more people than you realise 

Almost everyone will experience some sort of disability in their lifetime, even if temporary.

Disabilities can include not only visual, auditory, physical and speech disabilities but also people affected by cognitive, learning or neurological disabilities. And accessibility can actually benefit even more people than that – it can help those affected by neurodiversity, old age or struggling with technical ability (especially important as we have an aging population, almost 40% of people in England are currently over 50, and almost 20% are over 65**). 

People with temporary and situational disabilities benefit too – whether it's a mum holding her baby and trying to use her mobile one-handed who appreciates the bigger touch targets, or someone travelling on a train with low bandwidth who benefits from alt text when an image is unable to load. The image below shows a couple of examples.

Also lots of people who don’t identify as disabled still use assistive technology – for example someone sitting in a loud room trying to watch a video will read the subtitles, or someone using their phone outside on a sunny day who can read the text due to having good colour contrast. Accessibility provides everyone with an improved user experience.

Improved accessibility = better user experience

Not only is making content accessible simply the right thing to do (why shouldn’t everybody be able to access digital content, regardless of disability?) but there are lots of other reasons why you should improve accessibility. It’s better for business – not only will it help build your brand's reputation, but accessibility improvements can result in a better user experience and increased engagement. Using alt text, semantic html and well structured headings will help search engines to better understand and index your content, so the SEO benefits will follow too. In recent years, companies have become even more reliant on their online presence, so ensuring customers can fully access and interact with their website is vital. 

Alongside providing a great user experience, SEO benefits and expanding your audiences, legislation also plays a key part in the reason why you should be more aware of accessibility. People working within the public sector may already know about the 2018 accessibility regulations (which in some cases can apply to charities depending on their funding) and as of June 2025, the European Accessibility Act (EAA) will come into force affecting businesses which sell goods or services to EU consumers (even if they are based outside of the EU).

Is my website accessible? 

It's important to understand that whether a website is accessible or not doesn’t have a simple yes or no answer – it’s helpful to see it as a sliding scale, and everyone can look at how they can make improvements to the accessibility of their website.

We’ll be doing a deep dive into the dos and don’ts of accessibility in upcoming blog posts, so follow us on Linkedin if you’d like to learn more about how you can make your content more accessible (and how to decipher WCAG!).

Jo Kempster,  Senior Designer

*https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/family-resources-survey--2 figures from latest report for 2023/2024.  **https://ageing-better.org.uk state of aging report 2025.