People with disabilities often have to face unnecessary barriers in their personal and professional lives. Only 19% of Americans living with disabilities find a job. They have to face discrimination from employers that might be unintentional at times. The human resource and recruitment page, which is the first step towards seeking employment is often inaccessible to them.
Why Should Your Recruitment Page Be Accessible?
Making your human resource website accessible to people with disabilities is not just a moral gesture. If your HR and recruitment page is not optimized for website accessibility, you might have to face legal charges. The Americans with Disabilities Act prohibits discrimination against employees and individuals with disabilities under title I and III. Title I prohibits discrimination regarding a job application, hiring, promotion, and compensation. On the other hand, title III implies that all business presence, be it real or digital must be accessible to everyone, irrespective of their abilities.
Other than legal requirements, there are several other benefits of making your website accessible to job seekers with disabilities.
Hire the Best Talents
It may come as a surprise to you, but a lot of people living with disabilities have hidden talents. A blind person might be more intelligent or talented than a person with a vision. A lot of autistic people have shown higher levels of IQ than others. Having such people in your workforce can be beneficial for the progress of your organization.
On the other hand, if your recruitment page is not accessible, it might dissuade many talented individuals from seeking jobs at your company. It would give them the feeling that you might not believe in fair treatment even for people without disabilities. Recruitment of talented individuals can affect your revenues directly. Studies have shown that companies that employ individuals with disabilities in their workforce have significantly higher revenues than their competitors.
Social Stance
You can highlight in your digital accessibility statement that you welcome employees with disabilities in your workforce. That will promote your brand’s value and help you reach out to your target audience better. There are many Americans that sympathize with people who live with disabilities. Showing that your company is socially responsible can draw many customers towards your brand. It can also be a significant factor in promoting brand loyalty.
Support Diversity
Making your website accessible and recruiting employees with disabilities can be the first step towards diversifying your workforce. People living with disabilities face a much more challenging life than others, which makes them resilient. They can bring a lot of knowledge and skills for the workforce pool. You can also include many social aspects to your human resources when you welcome employees with disabilities.
How to Make Your Recruitment Page Accessible?
To make your website ADA compliant, you must follow the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) set forth by W3C. The latest set of WCAG 2.1 guidelines state various parameters that must be met for different levels of accessibility. There are many approaches to optimize your recruitment website for accessibility. You can modify your entire website with the help of web developers and programmers who have knowledge and expertise in ADA and WCAG guidelines. But it might prove to be an expensive and lengthy process.
You can achieve equal and better results with fully automated modern solutions. accessiBe recently raised $12 Million to incorporate AI into web accessibility. A robust AI engine can make your website compliant with ADA and WCAG by tweaking each element of your website to make an accessible experience. It is a fully automated solution that can be applied by adding a few lines of JavaScript. Here are a few ways in which AccessiBe can optimize your website
- Your HR website might have videos that are helpful in the recruitment process. The software can provide captions and transcripts for the videos.
- The AI-powered web accessibility solution scans your website’s existing content, as well as any new content to find out accessibility problems to solve them. If your website has relevant images that are missing alt text, the AI-powered software provides an accurate alt text.
- For job seekers who are visually impaired, the accessibility interface can get adjusted to suit the needs of the user. Changes can be made to the color contrast, text sizes, and other aspects of the website. Several other options modify the website to enhance user experience.
- The interface adds support of assistive technologies, such as screen readers, screen magnifiers, complete keyboard accessibility, and many others.
- The interface can stop animations and flashy elements so that it does not startle users with epilepsy. It can eliminate other types of distractions to increase focus for job seekers with ADHD and other neurodevelopmental disorders.
The interface can get adjusted for almost every type of disability that might be found in people. If you are not sure how accessible your website currently is, you can use their testing page for free. The test generates an elaborate result of issues that you can download to share. Making your recruitment website accessible to job seekers with disabilities will not only save you from lawsuits, but it will also benefit your company in several other ways.