Increase engagement across your entire audience with the benefits of an accessible website
With any web design project we work on, we bake accessible practices into the process. Not only is it more economical to start with accessibility in mind—rather than try to fix for accessibility later—but you’ll see the benefit right away with increased engagement and a broader addressable market.
Making your product or service accessible is done by removing barriers that prevent people from accessing your content.
Accessibility at its core is about reaching people with a wide variety of abilities and ways of interacting with and understanding your services, products, and content. Achieving this requires an expert mix of content, design, and code best practices. We’ve done the hard work of understanding these requirements, how to execute, and bring these practices to your team for ongoing improvements and future projects.
There’s no better time than today to bring a more accessible website to market
Start your next website project with an accessible approach to save your team from costly rework and redesigns in the future, and ensure you meet legislated compliance requirements like AODA (Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act) or ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act).
With ever more intuitive accessible software built into today’s computers and smartphones, there’s never been a better time to bring accessible website practices to your organization.
The success of your website begins with content
In addition to our user-centred and accessible website design and development processes, we’ll also support your team in the content strategy process for your next website.
For an existing website, it’s important to conduct a content audit to determine how current content is serving organizational goals and how it’s ranking on search engines. We’ll assess what content should stay or go, what content might need to be re-written to improve its effectiveness, and what keywords are most effective to write content for in order to grow the impact of your website over time.
If you’re starting with a new website, we guide your team through making a comprehensive content plan, which will help your new website accomplish your search engine, organic reach, transactional, and other on-site objectives for your website visitors.
These efforts will help increase traffic to your website, increase conversions across your website, and ensure that when you do work on new content, you can maximize that investment.
Three key areas to focus on for a successful website strategy
Websites are not just a marketing tool. It’s not enough to consider them as informational or storytelling for your brand.
An effective website facilitates the efforts of many aspects of your business, from marketing to sales, product and service to support. There are aspects of pre and post-sales to be considered. And any number of audiences and individuals who make up the diverse market you serve.
With all of these factors in mind, we work through a comprehensive process to understand the outcomes your website needs to facilitate in order to best serve your organization and audience.
Here are three of the key factors to work through before taking next steps.
1. Understanding how your website will serve a variety of stakeholders from across your organization
Your website serves a series of cross-organizational purposes. Across sales, marketing, product, service, and support, through to a cohesive customer experience, your website is a driver for activity and engagement across your organization.
Often, website objectives are driven by marketing, but talking to and identifying the needs of these different organization stakeholders will uncover key use cases, content, and transactional goals from across your organization.
These cross-organizational objectives will influence not only the design, but also the platform chosen, the features needed, and the content strategy necessary for success.
2. Understanding how your website visitors and target audience will shape your website
Depending on the unique nature of your organization, there are potentially numerous external audiences that will rely on your website. These audiences can include any number of customer groups, partners, suppliers, job seekers, and more.
It’s essential to understand where these visitor groups are in their customer journey—what stage of a purchase or product cycle they’re in—to understand how the website will play a role in serving them, aligning to your cross-organizational objectives.
This understanding of your audience will help shape the information architecture, content, calls to action, and user flows across your website.
3. Choosing the right website platform for your organization
Once you’ve established a content plan and defined transactional website flows that support your organizational and audience objectives, it’s time to consider the technology that will power your website.
With so many website and code platforms to choose from, the considerations of your staff and audience, as well as standards for performance, accessibility, content management, customization, and ongoing management will form the basis for deciding the best platform for your organization.
Check out our website platform accessibility comparison for an overview of just some of the factors we look at when helping your team choose the best platform for you.
Compare website platformsOur accessible design and development service mix
Strategy
- Identifying the key goals of the website design from the organization’s perspective
- Working with key stakeholder groups from across the organization to ensure the website is meeting the needs of marketing, sales, product and service, support, and partnership or fundraising teams
- Research and planning to determine essential audiences, use cases, and outcomes to help users meet their needs while driving them towards organizational goals
- Working with internal teams to understand where improvements to internal accessibility and inclusive design processes can be made
Design
- Creating interfaces and designs with accessibility in mind from the start, including straightforward user flows, plain language, and colour contrast considerations.
- Establishing how the website will look, feel, and function across different devices and use cases, including mobile, tablet, and desktop, all in consideration of different interaction models including mouse, touch, keyboard, and voice.
- Designing an intuitive user interface that will help users find the information they need, interact with content, and respond to calls to action (CTAs)
- Building functional prototypes with the organizational objectives in mind to accommodate both stakeholder approval and user testing
Deployment
- Work with your team to establish key milestones and coordinate deadlines for launch
- Deliver standards-based front end code with a focus on code optimization, reuse, accessibility, and multi-platform support, that complies with WCAG 2.1 requirements, and applicable regional accessibility legislation like AODA and ADA
- Providing best practices and support for ongoing content updates to help ensure content remains accessible
- Quality assurance testing to ensure the digital product meets and exceeds expectations for both the organization and the audience
Validation
- Providing a framework for monitoring engagement, conversions, and general performance, all with privacy in mind
- A/B and multivariate testing to identify the best possible variation of site elements, layouts, and flows
- Reviewing analytics data for insights into user behaviour
- Accessible user testing to identify additional ways to improve and refine the website for access and engagement
Need help making your existing website more accessible?
Get started today with the Inclusive Website Audit
Our expert team will audit your website for usability, accessibility, and inclusion considerations needed to capture your full potential market.
Explore the Inclusive Website Audit packagesAccessibility requires organizations to be considerate of their audience’s physical, mental, and cognitive states—from how people think, understand, interact or move, see or hear—and then design their products and services so that these diverse needs and behaviours are accommodated.
By removing barriers that limit access to your content—and providing access to your website in different ways—it means that everyone can choose the most effective way for them to engage with your website, including people with a broad range of hearing, vision, cognitive, or motor skills abilities.
Simply put: open up access to your content, and you ensure increased engagement and access to market.
Ready to bring web accessibility best practices to your website?
Get in touchSelected accessible design and development clients
Ready to bring accessible design and development practices to your team?
Get in touch