Your online presence is how new customers find you. It is also how they gather information about your food and service to help them decide where they want to go for dinner.

If you have a great online presence, you will attract more customers.

But if your online presence is non-existent or inaccessible, people may not find out about your business or may actively choose to eat elsewhere.

“95% of disabled people UK-wide admit to searching for disabled access information about a place before visiting. It was found that 85% opt to check the venue’s website first, but if disabled access is not mentioned 47% of disabled people assume it is inaccessible and choose to go elsewhere.”

Euan’s Guide Access Survey

Your website needs to have clear information about your business. This includes directions about how to get there and whether there is a wheelchair accessible toilet inside. This means that people who need larger bathrooms will choose your business over a competing business that does not mention if they have accessible bathrooms. Making this information easy to find will save you time on answering questions over the phone and it will also boost your search engine results.

If you are aware that your business is up a flight of stairs and is unable to add in an elevator in the short term, please make this clear on your website. This saves your staff and customers from headaches from incorrect expectations.

If your venue has a unique service offering, explain it clearly on your website so patrons can read about it before visiting your venue. For example, if your restaurant serves family style meals, make this clear on your website and explain what “family style” means in plain English.

Provide options for online booking and online food ordering where appropriate. This allows people to complete these transactions at their own pace and without having to phone your business.

Put your menu online to help people make decisions ahead of time.

Make sure your menu is on your website in a screen readable format. That is, make sure that your menu is in a text format, not a pdf or an image.

Online written menus are picked up by Google and will help to improve your website’s search ranking, which means more potential customers seeing your website.

Making your website accessible is not as hard as it sounds. It means starting with a template that is already accessible or working with website designers that understand web accessibility.

If you’re interested in learning more, you can check out:

• Introduction to Web Accessibility
• David Berman’s online accessibility course

You can also install the UserWay widget onto your website. This widget improves keyboard navigation on your website and also enables users to independently change the font and contrast to suit their own needs and preferences.

Other considerations include:

• Use the Read-able readability checker to ensure your website doesn’t have too high of a reading level. Aim for grade 6 if possible.
• Do not have music or videos auto-play on your website.

Making your social media presence accessible is really easy.

If you have social media videos, add captions to the videos so that people do not need to turn the sound on to understand the video. This is also an important step in expanding your social media reach as Instagram and Facebook play videos on mute by default.

When adding images to your website or to your social media accounts, make sure to include image descriptions.

When adding hashtags, format them in #CamelCase so readers can see what the individual words are meant to say.

Remember to double check your venue information on Yelp and Google to make sure it is correct.

To learn more about how to create an accessible social media presence, visit Accessible Social.

• To check if your colour choices can be distinguished by people with colour blindness, use WebAIM contrast checker.
• The Visability website provides guidelines for print materials.
• The Web Accessibility Initiative has an Introduction to Web Accessibility that provides more information on how to make your website accessible.
• David Berman’s online accessibility course is a hands on course on website accessibility
• Accessible Social has a comprehensive guide to creating an accessible social media presence
• Use the Read-able readability checker to ensure your website doesn’t have too high of a reading level.
• The American Anthropological Association provides guidelines on how to write image descriptions.
• See Hear Communication Matters provides helpful ideas on how to caption your videos with minimal effort.