Digital Smiles
At Acquia’s Engage Boston conference this week, the company unveiled a new brand positioning centred around web accessibility for people with disabilities. The company purchased Monsido, a tech platform that automates finding and fixing website features that aren’t compliant with international Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). The conference keynote was delivered by Haben Girma, a disability rights lawyer and the first deafblind person to graduate from Harvard Law School.
CMO Jennifer Griffin Smith spoke of the business benefits of accessibility, explaining that “if you’d have asked me in my last five CMO roles, ‘Did accessibility and creating a safe future feature high on my list of building a website?’ The answer is no and that’s shame on me because actually I’m losing probably 20% of my web visitors [because of that]. So where the money comes in is first of all, I can differentiate myself. Hopefully, that means I can actually rise up to the top of the awareness stack and get more people to want to talk to Acquia.”
Optimizing the online experience for disabilities not only helps a large and underserved audience, but can also improve the website experience for all customers. In the US, 26% of adults have some type of disability and have an annual disposable income of nearly $500 billion. Meanwhile in the UK, 22% of the population have a disability and a combined annual disposable income of $288 billion. Globally, disabled people have a combined annual disposable income of $1.15 trillion. Optimising for accessibility via simpler layouts, better contrasting colour schemes, clearer directions and captioned video materials can make websites operate better for everyone.
Accessibility is a brand differentiator for Acquia, as it is not easy to think of a tech company that has made it a core brand value. Making web accessibility a focus of its marketing and technology is a good thing in terms of helping people, and also a good thing in terms of business: it enables the company to grow and differentiate itself.
Originally reported by Martech: https://martech.org/acquia-sees-web-accessibility-as-a-good-thing-and-a-brand-differentiator/
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