What is Accessibility

Accessibility is the design of products and services so that they’re usable by people with disabilities. The concept of accessible design and practice of accessible development ensures both ‘direct access’ (i.e. unassisted) and ‘indirect access’ – compatibility with a person’s assistive technology (i.e. screen readers).

While accessibility primarily focuses on people with disabilities, it can benefit everyone, making your system or service more inclusive overall!

The Impact of Accessibility

At Impact Upgrade we strive to help make your mission more impactful! While we often focus on the “backend systems” that help you run and manage your organization, we realize there are additional avenues to upgrade your organization’s impact on the world. If your users, donors, and staff are not able to access your systems and services, you may not be impacting the world to your fullest potential.

Accessibility Helps Everyone

Accessibility is not only the right thing to do for all users, but often also brings benefits to everyone. For instance, video captions that help people with hearing difficulties also help a person who is watching the video on mute (i.e. in a social media feed). Legible, high-contrast text that helps people with vision difficulties can also help someone with perfect eyesight who is viewing your website outdoors in bright sunlight. Many users, whatever their abilities, will face challenges due to demanding contexts.

Legality of Accessibility

From a legal point-of-view there may be penalties (see legal article links) for failure to create accessible services. While this can be a valid concern, we try to focus on how it can have a positive and lasting impact on your organization. Here are a few ways accessibility can be an asset instead of a liability to your organization:

  • Improved SEO
  • Opportunities to reach more users on more devices, in more settings/environments
  • Enhanced perceptions of your organization

Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD)

While we always work towards helping organizations to be more accessible and inclusive, today being GAAD, we wanted to take this opportunity to keep the conversation moving and organizations thinking about accessibility and how it can impact the success of your mission.

If you would like to discuss accessibility further, we are always happy to listen and then partner with you to build and support your mission in the most accessible and inclusive way!


Additional Resources

Legal Articles