It’s in every charity’s best interest to make their marketing and content accessible to as many people as possible. Not only will this help them reach a wider audience which could result in more donations, but if your charity is founded to support people, you want to ensure that all your media and marketing can be accessed by them comfortably.

It’s the best practice that all businesses make their marketing accessible, but for charities that might be providing resources for disabled people and other minority groups on the internet, then it is a necessity. Here’s a look at some of the stuff you can do to make your charity marketing accessible.

Accessible Design

A crucial part of internet accessibility is the way things online are designed. When making marketing campaigns or even websites, you need to create them so that as many people as possible can read and see them clearly. An ADA compliance checklist for websites includes ensuring accessible fonts, high-contrast color schemes, alt text for images, keyboard navigation, and transcripts for audio/visual content. It also involves creating clear forms and intuitive layouts for screen readers. This means using fonts and a colour palette that is easily seen, using larger buttons on your website to be navigated more easily, and even adding accompanying transcripts to visual media so that blind users can use text to speech software to interact with the content.

This is what accessible design is all about – helping those who might struggle to access the content. Now, content creators and marketing agencies are taking notice. Eleven Marketing, for instance, bakes accessibility into every piece of content they create for their clients. This means that content reaches and makes impressions with more people.

Captions

Videos and images are a great form of rich media that charities should utilise, as it makes their content more engaging and can add life to marketing campaigns. However, with that being said, if you don’t make your visual content accessible, you can alienate a large portion of your audience. One of the best ways to ensure that all can enjoy your videos is to add captions to the content. It means that deaf individuals will be able to read what is being said in the videos, meaning that they can interact with it and still obtain the information said in the video. There is software that can automatically generate captions. However, these are not 100 percent reliable, so it’s best to write them yourself or employ a captioning service to do so on your behalf.

In addition to captioning video content, it’s also a good idea to provide alternative text for your images. Not only is this a great way to improve SEO, as it lets Google crawlers ‘see’ what the images are, but it also benefits users who might be using text-to-speech software.

Translation

Translating your marketing is a good idea for global charities, as it ensures that more people can engage with it, but it’s also a good thing for local charities who support refugees, for example, to implement. This is because allowing foreign individuals to access your content in their language will make it easier to use and will be more comforting. Web browsers such a Google Chrome have inbuilt software that can translate a webpage; however, the content will not be perfect and could create a confusing experience – not great if you’re trying to disclose vital information. Instead, it’s best to hire a translator to create original content for your web pages to ensure that the correct colloquial phrases are used. This could be a bit more costly but will ensure that your webpage is accessible to everyone that needs to use it.