Accessibility in digital marketing: a new must-have
From summer 2025, digital accessibility will be a requirement for B2C companies operating in the EU. But accessibility also increases reach, improves the UX, and strengthens trust in your brand. So, what’s the key to accessibility in marketing?
Digital accessibility: a legal requirement and a marketing essential
In June 2025, the European Accessibility Act (EAA) enters into force. This means that B2C companies operating in the EU will have a legal requirement to provide accessible websites and content. Similar accessibility legislation is in place in the US with the Americans with Disabilities Act and Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act. But digital accessibility is much more than a mere necessity. Focusing on accessibility helps your business succeed: You benefit from greater visibility, a more inclusive brand experience, and a better ranking in Google search results. Turn digital accessibility into a strategic advantage and find out how to make it a crucial part of your marketing in our story!
In our whitepaper “Accessibility Act: What you need to know now!,” the experts at SKW Schwarz sum up the most important aspects of this topic.
Digital accessibility strengthens inclusion and benefits your brand:
- Broader target group: People with disabilities make up around 15 percent of the world’s population. Making your content accessible allows you to reach more customers and open up new markets.
- Better SEO performance: Accessible websites with clearly structured content and alternative text for images can achieve better search engine rankings, which increases your organic traffic.
- Voice search: Having clear, structured content means that accessible websites also benefit from the growing use of voice-enabled search queries.
- Optimized usability: Easily legible font sizes, an intuitive navigation, and plain language improve the overall user experience and significantly reduce the bounce rate.
- Stronger brand image: Companies that champion inclusion are perceived as socially responsible by customers.
Inclusive design: Making websites, online stores, and other digital content accessible
To implement a more inclusive marketing strategy, you need to design your digital content so that everybody can use it – regardless of whether they have an impairment that affects their vision, hearing, or motor or cognitive abilities. Keep the following factors on your radar to ensure digital accessibility:
Create accessible content: simple language and structure
To make your content accessible to a broad audience, you should present texts in plain language without specialist vocabulary – or at least offer this as an alternative option. Coherent hierarchies of headings ensure a logical structure and make content easier to navigate. Being able to adapt fonts and font sizes to suit individual needs helps people with visual impairments read content easily.
Optimize images and videos for accessibility
Digital accessibility also applies to visual content. To make sure images – for example, product photos in an online store – are “visible” to all users, detailed alt tags are essential. They describe what is shown and enable screen readers to convey the content to visually impaired users. Add subtitles or transcriptions to videos to make them accessible to people who are deaf or have a hearing impairment. What’s more, audiovisual content should be understandable even without sound or images. Describing visual elements or adding texts to accompany audio content are two ways to achieve this.
H3: Ensure intuitive usability for improved navigation
An intuitive navigation with easily identifiable buttons and links makes your website easier for everybody to use. And it makes sure that your content is also accessible via keyboard or voice input. For people with motor impairments who can’t use a mouse, a keyboard-only website is essential.
Adapt your web design
If digital accessibility is a top priority for your business, creating a suitable website design is a must. A higher contrast between the text and the background improves readability and helps make your content accessible to people with visual impairments. Don’t use colors alone to underscore important information. Instead, add symbols or written explanations so that the significance of key points is also clear to people with color vision deficiency. Using a color blindness simulator will help you optimize the design so that all users can understand the content easily.
Want to find out more about inclusive design for website accessibility? Our story “Think big! Here’s what you need to know about inclusive design online” is packed with valuable tips.
How to ensure social media accessibility
Accessible social media marketing will enable you to reach the biggest possible target group on Instagram, TikTok, and other social platforms. Here are our top tips:
- Add meaningful captions so that people with impaired vision can experience visual content with the aid of screen readers.
- Use simple language so that a broad audience can understand your content – this is especially important when addressing complex topics or using technical terms.
- Subtitle videos so that people who are deaf or have a hearing impairment can consume the content without any difficulties. But don’t try to cut corners: Automatically generated subtitles are prone to errors. You should check them manually and correct them.
- Write hashtags with compound words in camel case. For example, use #DigitalAccessibility instead of #digitalaccessibility. This will allow screen readers to detect the words correctly and read them out.
- Avoid using too many emojis. Screen readers read them out one by one, which can disrupt the flow of the text. If you do use an emoji, be sure to combine it with written content.
More practical tips for accessibility in marketing
If you want to identify and remove obstacles to digital accessibility, here are some simple, concrete steps that you can take to produce accessible online content:
- Use an accessibility checker, such as WAVE’s web accessibility evaluation tools or Google Lighthouse, to identify potential weaknesses in your website design and remedy them.
- Test the accessibility of content with a screen reader, such as NVDA (Windows) or VoiceOver (Mac), to make sure that all the information is conveyed correctly.
- Implement a user-friendly zoom function so that people with visual impairments can enlarge content without any difficulties – but be sure to keep usability in mind.
- Give your marketing team regular training on inclusive language and accessible content design to ensure better communication in the long term.
Accessibility in marketing as a competitive advantage
Website accessibility is more than a legal requirement – it’s an opportunity to expand your target audience, improve your SEO performance, and build a positive brand image. Companies that invest in inclusive content will attract new customers, increase their credibility, and create a better user experience for everybody. By focusing on inclusive design and accessibility in your digital marketing strategy, you’re not just demonstrating your commitment to diversity – you’re setting yourself up for long-term success.
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