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Accessibility Work & Wellbeing Diversity and Inclusion

Accessibility on a budget: how small agencies can make big improvements

By Chloe Johnson, writer and editor

April 11, 2022 | 5 min read

Chloe Johnson is editor of Conscious Being, a magazine by and for disabled women and non-binary people. Here, she says financial constraints are no excuse for failing to meet accessibility standards, and details how smaller agencies are making big improvements.

sign language

Where do you start as a small business that wants to make sure you are accessible? / Image via Pexels

Within advertising and marketing, it is doubly important to make sure you are including disabled people in your work. Disability inclusion is still often seen as more words than action and has a knock-on effect. Although one in five people will experience a disability, only 40% of disabled adults in their prime working years (25-54) have a job, compared to 79% of all non-disabled adults of the same age, which means that disabled individuals are 50% more likely to experience poverty.

Disability inclusion within marketing, then, has a real chance to implement a worldview where disabilities are accommodated for, as well as representing a large commercial opportunity; the Purple Pound in the UK is worth £249bn, and on average companies perform better when they demonstrate disability confidence with a 28% higher revenue than those that don’t.

So, where do you start when you as a small business want to make sure you are achieving accessible standards?

George Bates, SEO of Limelight Digital, suggests that one of the ways their digital marketing agency aims to make their business accessible is to cater for employee access needs in terms of hybrid working:

“We have the luxury of being able to offer hybrid and remote working to our employees which, for a smaller agency with limited accessible office space, is very useful.”

Making sure your environment is able to employ disabled people is one of the ways you can make your small business accessible. Focusing on what you can do, which may have been learnt over the pandemic, instead of what you may not be able to replicate due to finances, is a great way to start your accessibility policy.

Bates goes on to comment: “As a digital marketing agency, we work hard to ensure that our website follows accessibility best practices. This includes adding descriptive Alt Text to images so that screen readers can accurately describe images to those with visual impairments and descriptive anchor text on links rather than 'click here', for example, so that users are aware what they're clicking through to.

"Whilst we are proud of how accessible our company is currently, we're aware there is always room for improvement and we believe that our openness to change and suggestions to further improve accessibility is just as important as the above mentioned point”

Florie-Anne Virgile, CEO of the storytelling agency Myth-to-Measure goes on to comment: "One of the needs we have identified while working with clients is to help them make accessible content, which is why we offer subtitles at an affordable price for social media and corporate videos. The key for businesses to get more accessible is to not aim at perfection, or they'll feel discouraged. Little things count, which is why it's important for us to make some services affordable for all and not gatekeep accessibility.”

All businesses have a duty to make their services accessible and include disabled people under the Equality Act (2010), but not knowing what to do or how to act, due to fear, is one of the most common ways businesses avoid access elements, with the second being cost. But there are ways that you can add access requirements that are a worthwhile investment in your business ethos.

Challenging your unconscious bias, as Virgile suggests, is a great way to increase access. Many disabilities are invisible, such as those with sensory impairments, mental health conditions and neurodiverse conditions, and therefore making sure you dedicate time to staff training, and not making your own assumptions on what disability should look like, can be one of the ways you can learn from information already out there, or committees that can help you with the planning process of disability inclusion.

In marketing and advertising, making sure your customers and employees can access your information well is one of the best places to start with accessibility.

Website and app accessibility are crucial, and catering to common disability access software such as screen readers is a quick way to update your comms. Having different ways to contact your employees, and different versions of information – including easy read and spoken word articles on your website – are features that can be budgeted for to increase the amount of people your comms can reach.

Disabled customers are often overlooked, and it is outdated to say that disability doesn’t fit with the brand, or an idea to put off for future years. Disability inclusion is part of how businesses commit to diversity, and therefore it is vitally important for all companies to pursue – especially advertising and marketing.

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