Business Acumen

Making Accessibility Strategic: A Communications Professional's Guide

 

Let's be honest — accessibility often gets treated like the spinach of communications planning. Everyone knows it's good for you, but it somehow always gets pushed to the side of the plate. It’s not that communicators don't care; it's that we've been thinking about it all wrong.

Accessibility isn’t an edge case; you will have colleagues and customers affected. Here are a few stats that support this:

Instead of viewing accessibility as a compliance checkbox or an afterthought, what if we flipped the script? What if accessibility became the secret ingredient that makes our communications more effective, more engaging, and ultimately more successful?

Beyond the Ramp: Accessibility as Strategic Advantage

When people hear "accessibility," they might immediately think about ramps into buildings, or dropped curbs to provide access for wheelchairs. If they work across digital channels, they may think it’s about screen readers and alt text. Those matter enormously, but strategic accessibility thinking goes much deeper. It's about recognizing that when you design communications that work for people with the widest range of abilities and circumstances, you end up with solutions that work better for everyone.

Take captions on videos. Initially developed for D/deaf and hard-of-hearing audiences, they're now used by 85% of Facebook videos, watched without sound. That's not a coincidence; that's accessibility innovation becoming mainstream behavior. And those ramps? Helpful for those with pushchairs and suitcases.

The lesson? When you solve for the margins, you often discover solutions that benefit the center.

Starting With Strategy: The Questions That Matter

Accessibility is often treated as a production issue rather than a strategic one. By the time you're asking how to make something accessible, you've already limited your options. Ask the following questions in your earliest conversations.

Who are we trying to reach? Not just demographically, but functionally. Are we reaching people who might be using mobile devices with poor connectivity? People who are distracted while consuming our content? People whose first language isn't the one we're writing in?

What barriers might prevent our message from landing? This isn't just about disability, though that's crucial. It's about cognitive load, attention spans, cultural context, and technological constraints.

How can we build flexibility into our approach? The most successful accessible communications aren't rigid; they're adaptable. They work across different channels, formats, and consumption patterns.

Execution That Actually Works

Organizations may nail the strategic thinking but fall apart in delivery because they haven't built accessibility into their workflows. The key is making it systematic, not heroic. Below are four steps to follow.

  1. Start with content structure. Can someone quickly scan and understand your main points? Would the content make sense if someone were listening to it rather than reading it? A clear information hierarchy benefits everyone, but it is especially essential for people using assistive technologies.
  2. Design for cognitive accessibility. This means writing clearly, avoiding jargon when possible, and providing context for complex ideas. Think about how much information you're presenting at once and whether you're giving people multiple ways to engage with your content.
  3. Make templates that work for everyone. Is your information readable? A beautifully designed infographic is useless if the text is too small to read on mobile or if the colour combinations make it indecipherable.
  4. Build testing into your process. And not just automated testing. Include real people with different abilities and perspectives in your feedback loops. The insights you'll gain will improve your communications in ways you never expected.

The Ripple Effect

The beautiful thing about strategic accessibility is how it compounds. When you start designing communications that work for people with various cognitive processing styles, you end up with clearer, more compelling messages. When your content works across different technological capabilities, you build more resilient communications strategies.

We’ve seen organizations discover that their accessibility improvements led to better SEO performance, higher engagement rates, and stronger brand loyalty. That's not accidental; it's the natural result of communications that truly serve their audiences.

Making Accessibility Sustainable

The biggest challenge isn't learning about accessibility; it's sustaining the practice when deadlines loom and budgets tighten. The solution is integration, not addition. Instead of treating accessibility as an extra step, weave it into your existing processes.

Include accessibility considerations in your creative briefs. Add checkpoints to your review processes. Celebrate accessibility wins alongside other campaign successes. When it becomes part of how you work, accessibility stops feeling like a burden and starts feeling like a competitive advantage.

The communications professionals who are thriving aren't the ones with the flashiest campaigns; they're the ones whose messages reach and resonate with real people in all their busy, complicated, beautifully diverse reality.

Accessibility isn't about limiting your creativity; it's about expanding your impact. In a world where attention is scarce and audiences are increasingly demanding authentic connection, that expansion might just be the strategic edge you've been looking for.

Want to take your accessibility knowledge even further? Watch the IABC On Demand Master Class recording of Navigating Accessibility Compliance: A Guide for Communicators Worldwide with Matisse Hamel-Nelis and Lisa Riemers. Learn practical strategies for making digital content accessible across websites, social media, videos, and documents, while staying compliant with global accessibility standards.