Digital inclusivity: 8 easy ways to make your digital content more accessible

Some 1.3 billion people live with a disability globally – yet only four percent of the internet is fully accessible.

You want your digital communications to be as inclusive as they can to people of determination (POD).

To make your digital communications – with consumers and your employees – inclusive, here are eight things to consider when it comes to your digital accessibility.

You should remember your website, your intranet, your emails and your social media channels when you’re looking at accessibility.

Accessibility law, guidelines & SDG-9

As well as being the right thing to do, there are very good commercial reasons to be digitally inclusive.

Accessibility is fast becoming the law. The European Accessibility Act 2019, for instance, mandates that products and services from those doing business in the European Union – including many types of online experiences such as e-commerce websites and mobile apps – are accessible to people with disabilities. Providers have until June 2025 to become compliant.

Yet according to the 2024 WebAIM report on the accessibility of the top 1,000,000 home pages, only four percent of web pages created are fully accessible.

Under SDG-9 of the United Nations’ Sustainability Development Goals (SDGs) is a mandate to increase access to information and communications technology (ICT) for people with disabilities (SDG-9.c).

In its UN Flagship Report on Disability and Development, the UN states that including accessibility features in mainstream technology reduces the need for costlier specialised assistive technology – for instance bigger fonts, special features for those who cannot use a mouse to navigate a site, or changing site colour combinations for those with a visual impairment.

The social model of disability used by Abu Dhabi’s Department of Community Development (DCD) (link goes to Aurora50 LinkedIn post about this) sees people as being disabled by barriers in society rather than disability being the individual’s problem. Those barriers can be physical (e.g. accessible toilets in buildings), caused by others’ attitudes, or digital.

The W3 Web Content Accessibility Guidelines say that for content to be accessible, it must be:

• Perceivable: It cannot be “invisible to all of their senses”.
• Operable: It cannot require interaction that a user cannot perform.
• Understandable: Content, or the operation of the user interface, cannot be beyond the user’s understanding.
• Robust: Content must be interpreted reliably by user agents, including assistive technologies.

Accessible content is also usable content.

If you make your content easily usable for every user, you generally make it accessible. That means you’re optimising it for search engines – affecting how well you appear in search engines (Google and others).