Jonathan Hassell, CEO at digital inclusion and accessibility agency Hassell Inclusion, discusses his experience of winning big at the Digital Impact Awards. He offers his thoughts on the importance of accessible design, how it can be delivered on and how it can continually be invested in.

Accessibility and inclusive design are now seen as a non-negotiable in corporate communications. So, as the strategists who helped our clients win Gold and Silver accessibility awards at the Digital Impact Awards over the last three years, we have outlined three key areas that the winners had in common, to help you understand how your organisation could win from accessibility.

1. What have you got to win from accessibility?

While there are innovation and ethical benefits to accessibility – whether that’s for websites and apps, online events, social media or online campaigns – the key areas that organisations focus on are the legal and financial benefits.

For example, if you are a B2C organisation in banking, travel, streaming, publishing, or if you sell via eCommerce, you need to make your website accessible, to meet the June 2025 deadline of the European Accessibility Act, to avoid fines in each of the European Member states you operate in. If you’re a bank in the UK, you’ll need to make all your online communications accessible, not just your site, to comply with the FCA New Consumer Duty.

If you’re a B2B software company selling online tools and platforms to corporations, it's key to work out how many of your clients won’t be able to buy your product if you don’t deliver accessibility.

If you’re one of the literally hundred of agencies that email me wanting to know if they could build an app or a website for Hassell Inclusion, you need to work out how accessibility can make you stand out from all of the other agencies doing digital transformation. Growing numbers of organisations won’t touch an agency that can’t deliver accessibility.

And, if you’re one of the marketing comms companies relieved that you don’t build websites, so “don’t need to do accessibility”, will your clients want to work with you if you can’t deliver their social media messages to all the population, including the 40% who have accessibility needs through disability or ageing?

2. How do you deliver accessibility in a continuous way?

In 2025, online corporate communications is more about repeatedly creating accessible content than creating brand new accessible websites.

This means you need to think about the long-term, not just short-term accessibility fixes, and not oursource accessibility as a one-off. You need a plan and strategy.

Here are two examples of what should be in your strategy:

Get trained, not confused: If you get an agency or tool to audit your site/app, will it get you to your aimed level of accessibility? Will the tool test against all of WCAG 2.1 AA? Will you understand the audit report from the accessibility supplier so you can fix the issues found? The answer to these is likely to be ‘no’. So it’s better, and more scalable, to train your staff in accessibility – how to get it right from the beginning, and how you can test your own site/app’s accessibility without having to pay accessibility suppliers to frequently do that for you.

Get accessibility into your processes: You’ve no doubt seen a lot of promotion about how AI can help you with content accessibility. And, yes, it’s great. Until it isn’t and becomes a brand fail. So, you need to work out what AI is good at, what it's not good at and how to train your staff to work with AI to create accessible content effectively and efficiently. That’s the process you need.

3. How can you continue investing in accessibility?

Finally, you need to prove that your work in accessibility is helping you win in practice, whether that’s more revenue from your customers, lower spend on serving customer queries, more clients for your SAAS or more clients for your agency.

You need to benchmark where you are now and count the impact of your accessibility improvement work. That’s how you can prove ROI and unlock funds to continue investing in accessibility. It’s not just about getting the money to do accessibility right, it’s about being able to prove that has been worth it, so you’ll continue investing.

And, that’s how you get recognition and win awards.

So do your ROI metrics. Get good. Put in your entry. And maybe you’ll win next year…