Accessibility goes far beyond making it easy for those in a wheelchair to access your office. Those with impaired vision, impaired hearing, motor difficulties, and more need to be considered.
Accessibility also goes beyond business employees but applies to customers too. Making products, services, and facilities accessible to as many people as possible is the responsibility of individual businesses.
Why is accessibility important for your business?
Accessibility is incredibly important to any business for several reasons, just some of which include:
Legal obligation – first and foremost, there are laws and regulations in place dedicated to ensuring that accessibility is prioritised by businesses. Therefore, not taking this into account could have incredibly negative results including a fine or a bad public image.
Moral obligation – as well as a legal obligation, it is a business’s moral responsibility to act with compassion and have inclusivity as a core value. Doing so is both morally the right thing to do and comes with benefits to the business too.
How does it benefit your business?
As well as benefitting employees and customers/users, there are benefits to your business as a result of becoming more accessible. These include the following:
Expanded talent pool and consumer base – a more accessible business means more people can both work for you and be a customer of yours. This means you can benefit from a range of extremely talented people and loyal customers whom you may have otherwise missed out on.
Collaboration and investment opportunities – with accessibility becoming a more prevalent concern for many businesses, it is something that is coming under increased scrutiny when making investment decisions, tender awards, and collaboration strategies.
Brand image – investors aren’t the only ones who are concerned with how accessible a business is, consumers are also changing their shopping habits to align with their personal values. Therefore, implementing measures to become a more accessible business, and publicising these will help to strengthen your brand image and encourage consumers to support your business.
What do you have to do to make it accessible?
Physical accessibility – potentially the easiest place to start with becoming a more accessible business is by starting with improving the physical infrastructure. This could include installing a ramp, automatic doors, or paving the outside of your office or shopfront.
Once you have tackled the outside of the building, focus on the inside, everything from the bathroom to the table heights needs to be considered to accommodate for everyone as best as possible. If you are unsure where to get started, it could be wise to use the services of a professional fit-out company that specialises in creating accessible spaces.
Digital accessibility – being accessible online is an equally important consideration. Everything from font size used to adding closed captions to your social media content, there are plenty of ways that you can make your digital presence more inclusive.
Training – new measures and ways of working can take some getting used to. In order to make sure that this is done as seamlessly as possible, training is an effective way to support existing team members in understanding how they can back the cause of being more accessible. This also offers the opportunity for the team to contribute any ideas they may have to make further improvements.