How optimizing accessibility can help your business!

Some businesses want their products to appeal to a small niche, others to a large market. But no business wants customers to be unable to use their products at all. As the world’s consumer base grows, so too do the number of users who need to be considered when optimizing accessibility. Increasing your product’s accessibility is something that could benefit all your customers, but it’s difficult to know exactly where to start. Here are a few options to help you optimizing accessibility: 

1. Adapt to different platforms -  

   1. You’ve experienced it yourself plenty of times: a website that works great on browsers and terrible on phones or a service with an app for some platforms but not others. To make room for the widest possible usership, the largest possible number of platforms need to be accounted for. The key, however, is not to roll out onto as many devices as possible but to optimize the platforms that you are on and expand when you can.  

1. Prioritize Capability of your platform -  

   1. A product can’t be usable without being durable. If high influxes of activity crash your site or slow down your service, you’re already losing customers based on accessibility issues alone. Your product needs to be able to handle whatever is thrown at it if you want it to work effectively for everyone.  

1. User feedback -  

   1. No one knows your users like, well, your users. If you want to build products that suit their needs, you’ll have to ask them what their needs are first. Listening to your customers is the first step towards developing a truly optimized product, one that offers as few barriers to usership as possible. The first step towards getting high volumes of user feedback is to develop a good way to take it in. Most businesses already have some kind of customer survey system in place, but these are often clunky and don’t boost candid responses. There are many different types of digital CRM platforms, these optimize its feedback system by offering several different ways to respond — with text, emojis, a number scale and more. The more routes you give your customers to express themselves, the more willing they’ll be to do so.  

1. Listen to the experts -  

   1. If you’ve got a shy customer base, try learning from those with valuable insight to share. Nearly 20% of Americans have some kind of disability and listening to them, their advocates, and the advice they offer can go a long way in helping you maximize your product’s accessibility. 

Every time you make your product more accessible, even by a small margin, you’re adding potential customers. This isn’t just about your bottom line, though: the more people who can engage with your product, the more people whose lives you’ll be impacting. Accessibility isn’t a luxury; it’s a responsibility that business owners are using daily!