Ignoring accessibility is, frankly, leaving money on the table. It’s like opening a store with a step at the entrance and wondering why some people can’t come in.
Getting Practical: Where to Start Your Inclusive Campaign
Feeling overwhelmed? Don’t be. You don’t have to be perfect on day one. The goal is progress. Here’s a simple starting point for your next campaign.
- Audit Your Current State: Run your website through an automated tool like WAVE or axe. It’ll catch the low-hanging fruit like missing alt text or contrast errors.
- Write Better, Right Now: Adopt a style guide that champions plain language. Read your copy aloud. Does it flow? Is it clear? If you stumble, rewrite it.
- Build a Simple Checklist: For every new asset—email, social post, landing page—have a pre-launch checklist. Does the image have alt text? Is the video captioned? Can I navigate the page with my keyboard? It becomes habit, fast.
- Involve Real People: This is the most crucial step. Include people with disabilities in your user testing. Their feedback is irreplaceable. You’ll discover issues you never knew existed.
Beyond the Checklist: The Mindset of True Inclusion
Here’s the deal: tools and checklists are fantastic, but they can only get you so far. True accessibility-first marketing is a culture. It’s a default way of thinking.
It’s in the questions your team asks during a brainstorm: “How would someone using a screen reader experience this interactive quiz?” or “Are we describing this product in a way that someone who can’t see it can understand its value?”
It means moving from “Is this accessible enough?” to “Who might we still be excluding, and how can we include them?” That shift—that empathy—is what separates performative inclusivity from the real, powerful thing.
In the end, an accessibility-first approach isn’t a constraint on your creativity. It’s the very thing that fuels it. It forces you to think deeper, to communicate clearer, and to build things that are genuinely better for everyone. And that, you know, is just good marketing.
