Billions of people live with near vision impairment, which may have hindered their online screen experience. But with technology advancements today, anyone can get online and check for the latest news, vacation destinations, or restaurant reviews.
It ensures businesses and marketers make online content accessible for those with a good marketing idea. It is a form of marketing that considers factors like income, age, gender, religion, language, and ethnicity, which marketers cannot forge even if one brand is made for customers from all walks of life. Marketers must be wise, considering their eccentricities, personalities, and essential accommodations. It is part of inclusive marketing, making your online media accessible to customers and clients with visual impairments.
Online search engines don’t have magic, but they make your videos and images accessible. However, there are some things you can do to your online advertising and content development to ensure everyone knows and understands what is on their screen. You can use some features in applications like accessibility checker, which makes all your marketing materials accessible when necessary.
Enhance your images using bold descriptions
Alternative text will give you a different outcome from non-text content online, such as graphics, images, infographics, and more. Complete alt-text descriptions boost the accessibility of the Internet for those who experience vision impairments. When the screen reader experiences any pictures on a web page, it will read the alt text given aloud, allowing the image’s content or function to be understood by those who experience vision impairments.
Other than accessibility, alt text will increase your SEO ranking by providing search engines like Google and Bing with more information about what is on the web pages. The more info the web crawlers can understand and scan, the better your chance of ranking in SERPs. Since web crawlers cannot read an image and know its value, they will only understand the text. It is where the text can describe the image or media, or it will not exist.
These are some of the tips for writing the best alt-text description:
- You must be accurate and present the function and content of the image
- Be brief, as there are no more than a few words that are needed
- Refrain from redundancies
- Avoid using phrases like “images of” or “graphic of” in the alt text description.
- When you see the image is only about text within the photo, you can have it as an alt text.
- When the image is functional, you can link it to something else, which you must add in the alt text.
Use and make good URLs, file names, and image titles
The file name will help screen readers and search engines know what the image is and when it is applicable. Before you upload the image to your CMS, you must ensure the file name is accessible. It tells the subject matter of the media and uses the chance to add target keywords when suitable. You will learn some examples of file names and know which one is more understandable.
These are the same thoughts with URLs and image titles. You must take the time to add them and write the best ones that make sense and best describe the image.
Use layout data for media or images
Google, Bing, etc., use schema markup data to give you good search results. HTML coding or structured data markup provides more context to the search engines and lets you know where it can be read aloud as the featured snippet. Schema is mainly used to mark up anything, and Bing and other search engines use it. By using reasonable data markups, search engines can read the web page’s contents, changing how they appear in the search results.
Get access to videos, PDFs, and PowerPoints
Since video marketing is mainly used, you can think about the accessibility tips where it makes them more available to the visually impaired:
- Make and give the proper video transcripts on the page.
- Improve using open and closed captions for every video. Every text tile attached for closed captions is readable by search engines.
For PDF and PowerPoint documents:
- With the images, it makes search-friendly file names and uses your titles with keywords
- Add your company name in the author field
- Link the document internally and add backlinks with your target keywords
- Protect and write your documents to prevent others from editing and adding their links to your content
Modern marketing is a clear marketing
Comprehensive marketing is about making content and information ideal for everyone, especially the visually impaired. Following the measures that are given above helps you make your content more accessible and enhances not only the quality of the content but also the user experience.