Web Accessibility: The Missing Piece In Your Martech Stack
Marketing leaders today recognize that sales and customer loyalty increase with more personalized digital experiences — and are investing in tools to help them deliver the right message to each customer, when and where they want to receive it.
In order to create exceptional customer experiences, most organizations are building a robust marketing technology (martech) stack, with tools to automate routine tasks, optimize messaging, improve website conversion rates, appear higher in search results, and more.
Unfortunately, not every organization is considering the impact of accessibility on all of these marketing KPIs — or looking to integrate a digital accessibility solution into their martech stack. And frankly, we think this is a missed opportunity.
In this guide, we:
- Discuss why accessibility should be part of your martech stack.
- Explain how accessibility can support key marketing metrics.
- Share key considerations when choosing an accessibility partner.
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What Are the Benefits of Marketing Technology?
Before we discuss the benefits of an automated accessibility solution, let’s review what a marketing technology stack is — and how it supports marketing KPIs.
Typically, a martech stack includes some combination of the following tools and solutions:
- Analytics tools to measure and analyze website traffic, user behavior, conversion metrics, and more.
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO) tools to identify keyword opportunities and track where pages appear in search results.
- A Marketing Automation Platform (MAP) to nurture leads, automate email campaigns, track campaign performance, and more.
- Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tools to manage customer data and deliver personalized experiences at scale, i.e., sending personalized emails to different audience segments.
- Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) tools to conduct A/B tests and multivariate testing to optimize messaging, landing page flows, form placement, call-to-action buttons, and more.
Unfortunately, many organizations have a massive gap in their martech stack — and it’s not just affecting their ability to deliver an accessible customer experience to people with disabilities but negatively impacting all of the other KPIs — from website performance metrics to pipeline and customer lifetime value — that marketing teams are responsible for.
Why Should Accessibility Be Part of Your Martech Stack?
One of the primary benefits of a modern martech stack is the way each tool can support and evaluate the ones around it.
For example:
- Landing pages perform better when you’re able to A/B everything from headlines and form placement to calls-to-action — and use a CRM to target high-intent audiences.
- SEO efforts can be accelerated when you’re able to optimize web pages for engagement and conversion — signaling to search engines like Google that your web page matched the search intent.
- Marketing automation software can make every customer touchpoint feel more immediate and personal — no matter the channel.
Done right, martech stacks create a symbiotic environment where tools — and teams — work better together.
Unfortunately, accessibility issues (whether it’s an image without alt text, a video ad without closed captions, or a checkout form that cannot be filled out using a keyboard alone) can disrupt the user experience for people with disabilities — and undo all the hard work you’ve done to create targeted, personalized, optimized user experiences.
“If your website isn’t accessible, you’re losing customers. And even if it’s technically accessible but a real pain … you’re probably still going to lose some customers.”
Christy Smith, Digital Accessibility Advocate
Accessibility Is Good Business
Even if you put aside the ethical and legal reasons to prioritize accessibility, there are plenty of purely business-related reasons to ensure everyone can interact with your brand online.
Think about all the time and money you invest in paid search, SEO, email nurture sequences, home page updates, and social media campaigns. Now imagine that 25% of your audience might struggle to fully understand or interact with that content if it’s inaccessible.
What kind of impact would that have on your bottom line? Or on the KPIs you’re accountable for, like pipeline generation, cost-per-lead, and customer lifetime value? How would your leadership team react if you told them your big campaign might miss 25% of the population?
5 Benefits of Web Accessibility
There’s an old saying that “a rising tide lifts all boats.”
The idea was popularized by John F. Kennedy, who suggested that investing in economic development would benefit everyone who participated in that economy. However, it can also be applied to the impact of accessibility on website performance.
When we talk to business leaders about the benefits of web accessibility, we usually mention that prioritizing accessibility can support other key marketing priorities — from driving more organic traffic to improving brand perception.
Here are some of the benefits of plugging an accessibility solution into your martech stack:
51% of marketing leaders believe that investment in martech could increase revenues by 10% to 40% over the next five years.
iResearch, 2022
1. Accessibility Elevates Other KPIs
The goal of accessibility is to ensure equal access, opportunity, and enjoyment for everyone, regardless of ability.
But it can also improve other KPIs that marketing teams are responsible for — from the conversion rate of email campaigns to customer lifetime value.
For example, improving the accessibility of your website and digital channels can help you:
- Boost sales or pipeline: Common accessibility issues like missing image alt text, vague links, and unlabeled forms aren’t just bad for accessibility — they also add friction to the customer journey. If people with disabilities can’t understand what your images are supposed to convey, navigate between pages, or fill out a contact or checkout form — they can’t convert.
- Increase watchability: Adding captions to videos doesn’t just support comprehension for people with hearing impairments; it can also benefit people watching videos on mute or in noisy, public environments. Of course, improved comprehension can reduce bounce rates and lead to more clicks and conversions.
- Appear higher in search results: If you compared a list of accessibility best practices and a list of SEO best practices, they’d look almost the same. For example, clear and concise page titles work better for search engines (which “crawl” websites to get a sense of what each page is about) and screen reader users, who often skip between page headers to get a sense of what each page is about.
2. Accessibility Expands Your Audience
When we first talk to organizations about accessibility, we sometimes get responses like, “Oh, we don’t really have customers with disabilities.”
Wrong!
Every organization has customers with disabilities, whether they realize it or not. In fact, over 1.3 billion people globally live with some type of disability — making the disabled community one of the largest audience segments in the world.
By failing to invest in accessibility, organizations are missing out on the chance to tap into this audience — who often describe themselves as being fiercely loyal to companies that prioritize accessibility.
PRO TIP
If you’re struggling to build support for accessibility in your organization, ask people to consider what it would mean for your business if 25% more customers could fill out a contact form, complete a purchase, or find the information they need on your website.
3. Accessibility Is Key to Memorable Customer Experiences
For people with disabilities, accessibility is kind of like the last mile of service delivery — or the one-yard line of a football field.
It doesn’t matter if you know that a specific customer is more likely to click on an email promotion than a social media ad. Or that A/B testing shows customers are twice as likely to open a subject line that reads “50% Off Every Item!” instead of “Holiday Closeout Sale!”
If the email isn’t accessible to screen reader users, or if it points customers to a landing page with missing image alt text and keyboard accessibility issues, you didn’t just miss a chance to have a memorable “one-to-one” conversation; you had a memorably bad conversation.
Failing to prioritize accessibility across the entire customer journey can undo all the work you did to get people to the precipice of making a purchase.
Worse, an inaccessible buying experience can often lead people with disabilities to leave your website — and seek out another, more accessible competitor.
60% of marketing leaders said that customer lifetime value (CLV) will become a key performance indicator (KPI) over the next five years — a 2.5X increase from the number of companies currently treating CLV as a KPI.
iResearch, 2022
What Else Do I Need to Make Accessible?
If you want to deliver an accessible, inclusive experience to each of your customers, you need to make all of your marketing materials accessible. That means:
- Emails — which tend to be inaccessible to screen reader users — should be carefully designed and created, with descriptive image alt text and a clear reading order for assistive technologies.
- Videos should include closed captions for people with hearing impairments (or anyone listening on mute or in noisy public spaces) and audio descriptions for people with visual impairments.
- Social media posts — which tend to be highly visual — should include descriptive image alt text, closed captions on video content, and inclusive language.
- PDFs, ebooks, and other digital assets should work well with screen readers and other assistive technologies, with descriptive links, proper heading orders, descriptive image alt text, full keyboard accessibility, and more.
- Landing pages should be fully accessible, with clear, descriptive labels on any forms a user needs to fill out to make a purchase, submit their information, or download an asset.
“People with disabilities tend to be more loyal consumers. We will stick with companies that go out of their way to make us feel welcome.”
Maxwell Ivey, AudioEye A11iance Advocate
4. Accessibility Equals ADA Compliance
Web accessibility is increasingly being tied to the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and other accessibility laws. Plugging an automated accessibility solution into your martech stack can help you find and fix many common accessibility issues — moving you closer to ADA compliance without straining internal resources.
Each year, thousands of businesses of all sizes and across industries face compliance lawsuits that cite violations under the ADA and other laws. According to Seyfarth Shaw LLP, the number of ADA-related lawsuits increased by 400%.
Over the last four years, the number of web accessibility lawsuits filed in federal court has increased between 12 and 14% annually.
Seyfarth Shaw LLP, 2023
In July 2023, the U.S. Department of Justice issued a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking that would make the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) the standard for compliance for state and local governments covered by Title II of the ADA — strengthening the link between the ADA and web accessibility.
5. Accessibility Is a Growing Requirement for Many Vendors
Most marketing leaders constantly look for ways to optimize every step of the customer experience.
Unfortunately, many don’t have an answer to the question, “What are you doing about accessibility?”
As accessibility becomes less a feature and more a requirement, B2B service and technology providers are being asked this question during the vendor selection process — and expected to have a clear answer and a mature accessibility program in place.
DID YOU KNOW?
In addition to the DOJ's efforts to connect WCAG and the ADA, Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act requires federal agencies and their contractors to make sure their digital content is accessible to people with disabilities.
Learn More About Section 508 Compliance
What Is the Gold Standard for Web Accessibility?
Before you start evaluating accessibility vendors, it’s worth taking a moment to define your goals — and where you need the most support.
There is a wide range of solutions available today, from simple overlays and accessibility consultants to vendors that pair automated testing and remediation with expert human audits and ongoing support.
Depending on your goals and internal capabilities, you may want to focus on a more complete solution that can help you address accessibility issues — and the barriers they create for people with disabilities — from every angle.
Most organizations don’t have a mature accessibility program in place — and that’s okay! As you compare solutions, take stock of your internal capabilities. Do you have web designers and developers who know the best practices (and legal requirements) of accessible design and development? If not, you might want to focus on vendors that offer personalized training and support.
PRO TIP
Many manual-only accessibility consultants simply provide a list of accessibility issues to be fixed, putting tremendous strain on internal teams to do the heavy lifting.
Learn Why Some Accessibility Consultants Fall Short
4 Considerations When Evaluating Accessibility Solutions
In the market for an accessibility solution? Here are 4 considerations that can help you find the right mix of technology and human support, based on your needs and goals:
1. Does the solution scale?
One of the biggest challenges in accessibility today is the size and fluid nature of most websites. Each update — whether it’s a new product page or a form to capture leads — is a chance to accidentally introduce new accessibility errors to your website.
Accessibility consultants who rely on manual audits to test websites are ill-equipped to keep pace with these changes — which can let accessibility issues slip through the cracks in between audits. Worse, these solutions often leave customers with a long list of issues to fix themselves.
PRO TIP
Fixing every accessibility issue across hundreds or thousands of pages on a regular basis is an insurmountable task — even for the best-equipped teams.
If you want to solve accessibility at scale without exhausting internal resources, choose an accessibility provider that offers automated testing and remediation, which can find and fix many common accessibility issues before they can impact customers. And for issues requiring human expertise and support, make sure they provide personalized guidance and support.
Ideally, your solution should offer automated testing for each user session instead of scanning the entire site daily or weekly. Doing so can reduce the likelihood of an accessibility issue going unnoticed between scans — and disrupting the customer experience for anyone who visits that page.
DID YOU KNOW?
AudioEye's automated accessibility platform scanned for accessibility issues ~40 trillion times in 2022 — and automatically remediated over 685 billion issues over that span.
Learn About AudioEye's Automated Accessibility Platform
2. Does the solution offer real human testing?
The focus of this guide may be on technology, but people still have a crucial role to play in accessibility testing and remediation.
As you compare different automated accessibility solutions, it’s important to remember that no automated solution can find or fix every accessibility issue by itself — or ensure that each customer touchpoint is a positive, accessible one.
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Automated accessibility solutions are an effective tool to help scale your accessibility efforts, but they aren’t a silver bullet — or a magical cure-all.
Expert testing (and ongoing accessibility training) is also critical for things that automation cannot fully test, such as emails, videos, social media campaigns, and more.
The best accessibility solutions blend the best of both approaches — providing customers with comprehensive support.
DID YOU KNOW?
AudioEye customers saw a 67% reduction in valid lawsuit claims when using AudioEye’s full suite of accessibility testing tools and Expert Audits, compared to other industry solutions.
Learn About AudioEye's Expert Audits
3. Is the solution easy to integrate?
One of the primary benefits of a modern martech stack is that it brings all of your insights under one roof, knocking down some of the information silos that typically sprout up when organizations do everything manually.
Look for a solution that is easy to incorporate into your existing tech stack and operations, with robust capabilities for reporting, sharing, and project management.
“We looked at a number of other accessibility providers, but chose AudioEye for three main reasons — ability to both identify and solve accessibility issues, one-click integration with Duda, and transparency.”
Russ Jeffery, Director of Ecosystem & Product Strategy @ Duda
4. Does the solution make it easy to monitor progress?
Most accessibility solutions offer some sort of issue reporting and tracking. Prioritize solutions that provide a real-time list of all issues identified, resolved, and outstanding with details about the number of instances, the severity of the issue, and where it appears on your site.
Ideally, this information should be captured and presented in a way that helps your teams understand:
- Where your site needs work to be more accessible and compliant.
- What accessibility issues are most common on your site — and which accessibility guidelines each issue violates.
- How to address issues that cannot be fixed automatically, including customized guidance for complex issues.
All these details can help you prioritize which issues to address first, based on user impact and business goals. For example: If you’re an e-commerce site, you’ll likely want to address accessibility issues on your product pages and checkout flows first to reduce buying friction.
DID YOU KNOW?
AudioEye’s Active Monitoring processes over 2,000 requests per second — fueling our pipeline of real-time insights and reporting for customers.
Learn About AudioEye's Active Monitoring
Ready To Put This Guide To Use?
Choosing the right accessibility solution takes time. Use this guide to help compare different approaches and understand how accessibility impacts many of the performance metrics and business goals you’re responsible for as a marketing organization.
To learn more about digital accessibility and how AudioEye works with organizations to scale accessibility and drive business value, request a meeting.
