Many financial services companies recognize the importance of adding accessibility to their digital roadmap. They understand the SEO best practices, recognize the legal risks of ignoring web accessibility, and see the futility of using third-party a11y tools that don’t address concerns relevant to fintech. Yet somehow, accessibility still isn’t the priority it should be, and all your company’s efforts at resolving accessibility defects feel superficial. Why?
As the product lead, you know accessibility should be prioritized in product development, but your leadership team is more concerned with sales, brand reputation, and broadening your audience. It may feel pointless to argue with a c-suite that isn’t convinced accessibility is more than an item on a checklist.
But what if your stakeholders knew a11y wasn’t at odds with their business goals? Your company’s objectives likely involve securing its brand reputation and broadening its audience, while staying compliant with federal regulations. The fact is, accessibility is low-hanging fruit that can easily be part of your marketing strategy to achieve these objectives. You’re doing your marketing and sales teams a disservice by not making accessibility a priority.
Here’s how a11y can fit in with your financial services enterprise’s business goals. Pass it on to your marketing team.
If you’re not making accessibility a priority, you’re missing out on a portion of the market that has the potential to become a loyal customer base. Digital products should be designed for everyone, yet customers with accessibility needs often have fewer options for digital financial services products they can actually use. Once they find a product designed for them, they’re likely to continue using it.
Putting customers’ accessibility needs at the forefront of your digital product experience (DXP) also broadens your reach in general. How? Improving your DXP’s accessibility improves your overall CX. Your products will be easier to navigate, your content more indexable, and your features more intuitive. Customers looking for a seamless, humanized financial services product are more likely to discover your product and actually use it. This can boost your brand reputation and brand loyalty.
While Google and other search engines don’t scan for accessibility directly, there is still a significant overlap between SEO best practices and measures that improve a11y initiatives. Here’s one example: Your content’s SEO benefits from a logical page hierarchy. After the H1 (the subject of your page), you should organize your page into content groups (e.g., H2s, H3s, etc). Under each headline, the content should include keywords pertinent to the content group. That way, you’re more likely to please Google spiders crawling for relevant content
But a good page hierarchy also improves your content’s accessibility. HTML markups re-format the details of a webpage into a functional outline that allows screen readers to quickly scan and easily navigate by the titles and subtitles on a page. A proper document hierarchy is critical to improving the experience for people who are navigating by section titles.
Here are few other best practices that improve SEO while also creating a better digital experience for users accessibility needs:
We optimize websites for search because it helps drive more traffic. But when you take a step back and assess why search engines prioritize these best practices, you can see the strong correlation with accessibility.
As we’ve mentioned, resolving accessibility gaps isn’t just an item on a checklist. It’s a journey, and many financial institutions are at different stages of remedying defects in their digital platform experience (DPX). This process can take years to fully implement and mature. But try telling that to a predatory lawyer looking to make easy money.
You’ve probably heard of “ambulance chasers” — lawyers who seek out injury victims and persuade them to file lawsuits. The financial services industry has its own version of this. There are firms who exist solely to run free accessibility reports on financial services websites to find inaccessible features. These firms file lawsuits against companies like yours, usually attaching a user with disabilities to legitimize the claim. Unsurprisingly, these lawsuits typically side in favor of the plaintiff. You may remember the infamous Domino’s Pizza accessibility lawsuit.
But while giant corporations can typically weather these lawsuits, the impact on small to midsize financial services companies is usually much more devastating. These lawsuits often end with the defendant on the hook for settlement and remediation costs, as well as a deadline for when these remediations will take place. Sound expensive? It is.
We all know the importance of compliance as a buffer against lawsuits. What your leadership team may not know just how easy it is for someone to file — and win — an accessibility lawsuit. Make sure you’re taking the steps you need to protect your business.
Even if your stakeholders appreciate the SEO, legal, and ethical urgency of accessible digital products, there’s still a right and wrong way to address it. It may feel tempting to use a third-party overlay while you remediate accessibility issues in an effort to avoid a lawsuit or other issues. Don’t.
While an a11y overlay sounds like an easy, cost-effective solution, it actually creates a minefield of problems. Realistically, overlays can only address a percentage (~30-40%) of accessibility defects. Moreover the remediation you apply in addition to extra “features” can introduce new deficiencies to your product or service that didn’t previously exist.
The accessibility updates it does implement are not permanent, either. They last only for the duration that the third-party overlay is in place. Once you remove the overlay, the defects remain until your design and product development teams remediate them at their source. Updating your design during this phase is also tricky. Sometimes, these updates can compromise or altogether destroy remediations that overlays applied.
No matter where you are in your accessibility journey, we recommend creating a “statement of accessibility intent.” On your website or digital product, provide a link that takes the user to the site’s footer, where they can find a statement detailing the company’s commitment to accessibility. In your statement, you should name:
While a statement of intent isn’t a bulletproof vest, it shows a good faith effort to mitigate accessibility gaps on your end. Even better? It signals to predatory law firms that they’re barking up the wrong tree. It’s challenging for them to file a suit against a company that’s so transparent about their accessibility efforts.
Before you dive into remedying your accessibility gaps, determine how you plan to maintain a11y over time across departments. You want your accessibility efforts to eventually feel like second nature in designing and developing a product.
Accessibility maintenance can include:
You may not have the personnel you need to support and maintain these accessibility efforts. That’s where a financial services CX consultancy can fill in. When you partner with O3, you’re ensuring that accessibility is a part of everything you do. We have you covered from product vision to development.