How accessible is your landing page?
You’ll struggle to find anyone who will say that web accessibility isn’t important. In fact, it would take an impressive level of arrogance and prejudice for someone to plainly state that websites shouldn’t be available to everyone.
Unfortunately, what people say and what people do are often completely different things.
Of the top million websites in the world, only 1.9% of them meet the industry standard WCAG accessibility guidelines according to the WebAIM Million Project. These guidelines aren’t over-the-top or unachievable either, but so many websites still aren’t meeting them.
The obvious issue here is that so many landing pages and websites aren’t usable for people with disabilities or impairments. But as we can see, that’s clearly not enough motivation for most companies.
Instead, I’ll put it in terms that businesses might take seriously.
26% of adults in the US have some sort of disability, and by ignoring these guidelines, you’re effectively telling them that you don’t want their business. By not having an accessible website, you’re excluding a quarter of your potential customers.
Imagine if someone came to you with a guaranteed way to get more customers? You’d snap their hand off. But for some reason, we don’t.
Why are so few websites accessible?
As I said earlier, I don’t think the problem is that SaaS companies don’t want their website or landing page to be accessible. The problem seems to be that most people don’t realise how easy it is to identify accessibility issues, and how simple it often is to resolve them.
It’s a common misconception that accessibility issues are complex and therefore expensive to fix. This results in accessibility being pushed back and back in the priorities list, often forever.
It really isn’t that difficult though!
It’s actually very easy to get started
In fact, I reckon that it will take less than a minute for me to walk you through an accessibility test of your landing page. All using a tool you probably already have installed:
- On a PC or Mac, open Chrome
- Navigate to your landing page
- Press the F12 key
- Click the ‘Lighthouse’ tab
- Tick ‘Accessibility’
- Click ‘Generate Report’
What you’ll end up with is a score out of 100, and a list of accessibility issues that have been found. You can then expand these issues to see more information about what the issue is. Google even provides a ‘Learn More’ link for each issue so it’s simple to understand the problem and the solution.
Even if you’re not the person who made the site, you can use this information to prioritise the issues and communicate them to the person or agency who made your website for them to be fixed.
What next?
I should mention at this point that running an audit like this isn’t the be-all and end-all when it comes to accessibility. An audit can only find certain issues.
If this is something you really want to take seriously, I’d recommend looking into more advanced accessibility testing techniques, or finding an agency or consultant that specialises in accessibility testing.
But, this is a great start. Just running the audit and working to improve your score will put you ahead of the majority of your SaaS competitors.
More importantly though, you’ve decreased the chance of making someone feel excluded and unwelcome. By having a more accessible site, you’re helping the internet become more inclusive.
You’re helping to make the world a better place, for everyone.
