Get More Out of Your Black Friday and Cyber Monday Deals by Embracing Accessibility!
It’s that time of year when everyone gathers around the dining room table to celebrate an American origin story that centers the ideas of overcoming hardship, basking in the compassion of unlikely friendships, and opening yourself to deep appreciation. Naturally, a celebration of this kind begins by gorging on turkey and stuffing, mashed potatoes and gravy, cranberry sauce, green beans, mac-n-cheese, and pie. This gluttonous endeavor is then followed by a series of events in which everyone naps, watches football, navigates family turmoil, and begins planning for the holiday shopping extravaganza that has come to be known as Black Friday.
At AllyADA, because we’re in the business of helping businesses optimize their impact, reach, and profits through digital accessibility improvements, we have a unique perspective on Black Friday (and its online cousin Cyber Monday!). Our take? You can enhance your business’s year-end profits and overall online performance by embracing an out-of-the-box strategy that most businesses overlook- accessibility!
What is Black Friday and Cyber Monday
For the uninitiated, Black Friday and Cyber Monday are two of the biggest shopping days of the entire year. Black Friday is the name given to the Friday after Thanksgiving when retailers offer some of their most exciting deals to entice eager shoppers into spending as much money as possible heading into the December holiday season.
Black Friday
Though no longer directly relevant- the name “Black Friday” is said to have its origin in the color of ink used by bookkeepers back in the day. Red ink was used to denote budget entries indicating a loss for a given business, and black ink was used to denote budget entries indicating a profit. Hence, Black Friday was the day that many retail businesses came out of the “red” for the year and headed into the “black,” or profit-generating period of the year. While we don’t have any basis for validating the historical accuracy of this cultural tale, we can confirm that Black Friday is a time of shopping madness that has become a sort of unofficial holiday unto itself.
Cyber Monday
Black Friday, at least initially, was a heavily brick-and-mortar-based event, with shoppers waiting in long lines, rushing into stores, and using their best pro-wrestling moves to swipe the best bargains and make it to the checkout unscathed. Not to be outdone, the online retail space saw an opportunity to capitalize on this trend and began the digital equivalent called Cyber Monday. However, at this point, with the amount of shopping that is consistently done online, the two days have essentially merged into one gigantic long weekend of best deals and profuse spending.
What Is Digital Accessibility?
Digital accessibility is the term used to describe efforts to make the full spectrum of online shopping and resources available to blind and low-vision individuals. This means ensuring that blind and low-vision users can navigate your full website, including being able to complete purchases at checkout, experience video and other visual content (through textual descriptions), access and understand product and service descriptions, and not be inadvertently bounced from the site by pop-ups or other navigation disrupters.
Digital accessibility, like accessibility in the brick-and-mortar world, is regulated through federal legislation called the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and enforced through fines and lawsuits. In fact, many business owners who have integrated websites and other online services into their business models are unaware of digital accessibility barriers and requirements until they are hit with one of these lawsuits or regulatory fines.
Digital accessibility is also regulated on a global scale through the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), which is a non-binding (at present) initiative aimed at scaling accessibility broadly while keeping it uniform and consistent.
Why Does Digital Accessibility Matter to Businesses?
It’s easy for anyone to understand why digital accessibility matters to blind and low-vision consumers. Being able to fully and completely participate in the functionality and usability of a website elevates inclusivity and opens doors to greater purchase power and consumer engagement. It affords blind and low-vision consumers a position of equity, access, and independence that is frequently missing in the online world.
Unfortunately, it is not immediately understood by most business owners operating in the world of online commerce that they, too, have everything to gain from embracing digital accessibility. For instance, digital accessibility brings a shockingly broad scope of business benefits, including:
• Less Money Spent on Lawsuits Payouts & Regulatory Fines: As ADA lawsuits increasingly target online businesses and as regulatory fines get handed out left and right, businesses that take a proactive approach to digital accessibility get to keep their money in their business instead of being forced to write checks to disgruntled consumers and federal agencies.
• Tax Breaks for Investing In Your Own Business: What’s that we said about keeping your money in your business? Guess who else thinks this is a great idea? The federal regulators! Lucrative federal tax breaks were created to incentivize businesses to invest directly in their own digital accessibility efforts.
• More Customers and More Customer Loyalty: Blind and low-vision consumers make up a sizeable portion of the American consumer base- up to 12% by some estimates. By making your website accessible, functional, versatile, and useable for this segment of the consumer base, you reach more people. Plus, because most online businesses are still woefully behind in becoming accessible, you gain the advantage of building a loyal customer base with this segment.
• Optimize SEO and Search Rankings: Improving SEO and search engine rankings is a primary goal of every single online business. Many search engines, including Google, now directly favor accessible websites in generating search returns. This means that just by becoming ADA-compliant, you can enjoy an SEO boost that helps move your business to the head of the pack.
In the context of Black Friday and Cyber Monday, this means that blind and low-vision consumers (estimated as a whopping 12% of the American consumer base) can click more, shop more, and buy more from those websites that have prioritized digital accessibility.
Are Plug-Ins and Accessibility Apps An Easy Solution?
There is a huge market for apps and plug-ins that claim to correct accessibility barriers, and there is a huge market for companies conducting digital accessibility audits using apps and software programs. While all of these technological advances are an improvement over an online marketplace in which accessibility is misunderstood or ignored, they are inadequate solutions at best.
For businesses looking to shore up their accessibility on the front end without having to fully assess or improve their site or change their approach, apps and plug-ins may seem like an easy solution. They provide moderated improvements that attempt to address specific deficiencies but flub up overall performance across the site and may even make accessibility more difficult to achieve. For instance, with different manufacturers addressing specific problems, enabling use of these tech solutions on your website can actually cause more hiccups, glitches, and hurdles for consumers with disabilities than it can add to an overall streamlined user experience.
Similarly, digital compliance audits performed by algorithms rather than people lead to websites that are, unsurprisingly, good for algorithms, not people. This is because algorithms scan and assess websites using the only tool in their toolbox- code. But how people, and in this case, how specifically blind and low vision people, use websites is not easily or effectively captured in code. In other words, despite our culture’s seemingly insatiable desire to hand over every task to a robot (or algorithm), this isn’t necessarily ideal.
Rather, some things require a deeply experiential understanding. And digital accessibility is one of those things. Only a human can really assess, operate, and engage with a website in the way that another human would. More specifically, only a blind or low-vision human can really assess, operate, and engage with a website in the way that another blind or low-vision human would.
At AllyADA, because we come from the blind and low-vision community and because we have roots in the struggle for accessibility, we understand intuitively that human review is essential. This is why we utilize not just the current technological advances in digital review but also a highly skilled and competent team of manual reviewers from the blind and low-vision community. Our approach to digital accessibility audits leads to comprehensive and effective results for our clients and their very human customers.
Work with AllyADA
Even if your business isn’t ready for Black Friday and Cyber Monday from a digital accessibility perspective this year, the holiday shopping season has just begun! Get in touch with us today to take advantage of the huge business gains to be had by embracing digital accessibility going forward.
We invite you to explore the site, read our blog for more information, and get in touch with one of our CPACC-certified digital accessibility specialists today.
Finish out the holiday shopping season strong, and be ready for next year or any time in between! Call now to learn how we can help your business grow.