A huge portion of advertising involves the use of the consumer’s sense of sight: the billboards that line the highways, the commercials on television and the internet, the flyers your staff hands out on the streets, etc. They all require potential clients to take a look for you to make your sales pitch.
However, there is a portion of the population that cannot see. The World Health Organization says that at least 2.2 billion people around the world have some form of vision impairment or blindness.
Marketing to those who have low to no vision is not just important to businesses that sell aids for the visually impaired. Every company should take part in the effort to make the world more accessible to people with disabilities.
So, to cater to those who cannot see, here are some strategies that your business should adopt.
Website Optimization
You have optimized your website to be the first link that search engines recommend to use. Why not take one step toward inclusivity by adding features that will enable consumers who have low or no vision to browse your content.
Individuals who have visual impairment usually access the internet using assistive technology. WebAIM offers tutorials and tips to help make your website friendlier to those who have poor eyesight. Some changes you can make include labeling buttons and links, adding alt text descriptions to images, using dark text against light backgrounds, etc.
Optimize Social Media Pages, Too
People with disabilities use social media, too. There are tools provided by Twitter and Instagram that make your content accessible to the visually impaired. Some helpful tips include sticking to using the platform’s default font (which is, most likely, sans-serif), minimizing the use of emoji, keeping the text simple, adding image description, and providing a transcript to your videos.
Hire Blind Models in Your Campaign
Representation matters so much in media and marketing, and it is important that you give equal opportunities to people with disabilities and able-bodied individuals.
If you want to send a message to the public about visual impairment, do not hire just any model and make them pretend that they are blind. Hire actual blind models. For example, Google’s ad for the app Lookout, launched in 2018, featured regular people who have a visual impairment.
The public will appreciate the authenticity and inclusivity.
Ask Experts for Advice
If you are in the process of making your content accessible to people with disabilities, you should consult members of the community. Excluding them from this conversation would make your efforts seem disingenuine. Worse, you can make mistakes that will give you an outcome that is the exact opposite of what you intended.
Ask people with disabilities for their input, and implement their suggestions. By making these changes in your marketing strategy might inspire others in your industry to move towards inclusivity, too.
Marketing to people with visual impairment will not just boost your sales; after all, individuals with disabilities have jobs and, therefore, can make purchases, too. It will also give your business a favorable reputation. The public will know that money is not all you care about, and they likely will choose your products and services over your competitors’.
More importantly, people with disabilities should have access to everything that able-bodied people enjoy. They are members of the society, too, and they should never be an after-thought.