In the highly visual world in which we live, there is a group of people who are often overlooked when it comes to marketing campaigns: The visually impaired. When devising marketing strategies, it’s easy to just sweep the blind under the rug. After all, a sighted individual must certainly be shopping for them, so no need to market to them, right? Wrong.
Sighted individuals are bombarded with so many graphical ads unseen by the blind, it may be difficult to imagine the visually impaired going on a shopping expedition.
Yet, blind individuals purchase products and services just like everyone else. And they account for over 10% of the population, so as long as businesses choose to ignore them they continue to lose potential profits.
Not sure how to market to the blind? The following suggestions will get you started:
- Put together focus groups of blind individuals to get a feel for what products they want and how they would prefer them to be advertised. They are not often consulted and would welcome the opportunity to provide their input.
- Ensure your website is accessible to the blind. Visually impaired individuals use screen readers (audio programs for blind people) to browse the internet and shop online. Refrain from designing webpages with top-heavy navigation, because this forces visually impaired people to sit through long descriptions of menus before reaching the actual content of the page. And always include appropriate ALT and TITLE tags for images, as screen readers use these to interpret image data.
- When featuring the visually impaired in marketing campaigns, use the blind and visually impaired as opposed to actors pretending to be blind. Blind consumers appreciate the gesture of featuring visually impaired individuals in advertisements, but they also want individuals who can relate to being blind.