What is website accessibility and why do online casinos need it?

Any online business needs an effective and high-functioning website to reach out to every potential customer—including online casinos. Paying for spot ads is still a viable advertising strategy, but a website does a better job of finding specific target audiences. For online casino brands, your focus should be on the intuitiveness of the gaming platform, support for payment methods, and visibility of its pages. 

Online casinos are only as effective as their websites. After all, these brands mainly exist in the online platform, so every site feature is a priority and a challenge. Site maintenance, accessibility, and UX design are some of the most important factors of any online business. Casino brands must also consider their gaming features, account security, and customer support system.

All these factors work together to bring in traffic and customers to your business, but above all else, website accessibility is responsible for these goals. QWERTYlabs gives you everything you need to know about it—from making it work to common mistakes you should avoid. 

What is website accessibility?

Accessibility for the web encompasses everything potential visitors need to find in your domain to open and navigate it. It's a broad concept but with a relatively simple and universal end goal of attracting potential customers, clients, or users to see the services you offer. 

Web accessibility also encompasses user-friendliness. Your visitors should be able to use your services with as little assistance as possible. Likewise, customer services should be easy to reach if they ever need it. For online casinos, support for various banking methods is the key to making your service accessible. 

How to make a website accessible for online casino brands

Making a website accessible takes a fundamental understanding of your audience's needs and knowledge of the tools available at your disposal. A basic understanding of your business's strengths can help improve website accessibility. For instance, some casino brands feature live dealer games as their flagship offer, while others have slots and classic table games.

1. Consider factors in designing for accessibility

There will be factors to consider both within your website and outside web pages. Managing accessibility in the platform is about making it presentable but with enough details to present what your business is about. 

Dividing your website into web pages is one way to declutter your online platform, but this is where navigation becomes crucial. You can measure your layout and navigational means' efficacy on how easy it is for your visitors to find what they are looking for, even without customer assistance. 

Online casinos should display their game offers for bettors to see and click easily. Crypto casinos should also integrate open-source payment platforms so users can deposit and withdraw their digital assets straight to and from their accounts.

Accessibility from outside of the website means your virtual presence beyond your platform. Your methods can range from social media bots targeting users with interests aligned with your business or talking to them directly through content or forum threads. These can help make your brand visible and accessible through links they can click to your site.

Users' disabilities can be significant factors in how they access your services. Consider streamlining design for text-to-speech for the blind, who will be interested in the contents of your pages. Alternatively, you should be mindful of your format both for style and function. People with difficulty reading, like poor eyesight or dyslexia, will appreciate wise design decisions. 

2. Optimise content for SEO to increase visibility

SEO is how you make your web pages more likely to appear on search engines first-page results. You can do this by adding keywords or phrases that are commonly typed on internet search engines by your target audiences. Google keeps track of various word combinations its users use and measures how much traffic websites get that contains them. 

It's how they recommend which keywords to use for content or site build. You can use many SEO tools for your business to help make your website accessible. Using them still requires skills, and what you do with the data given needs creativity. 

3. Select a CMS (Content management system) that helps with accessibility

While online casinos can be considered another gaming platform, this type of business still needs content on its web pages. Besides designing accessible websites with a helpful interface for regular users and new visitors, you should also integrate a CMS tool that supports accessibility. One of the most popular CMS tools is WordPress, but you can choose other programs that fit your site's needs. 

Challenges in designing website for accessibility

Following the strategies above can put you in the right direction on how to make websites accessible. However, there will be challenges where you have to be creative to solve them. Here are three potential issues that you can face:

Over reliance on guidelines

Most web design and accessibility guidelines are meant to be easy to follow and serve a general purpose. Some of them will be for specific services but won't always fit the mould needed for your business. You have to add or remove some elements to personalise your casino brand to stand out from your competitors and to accommodate specific products (e.g. live casino section, original games) and offers. 

Relying too strictly on guidelines can also affect your decision-making, like choosing to mention a service off-handedly on the homepage or dedicate a complete webpage for it. Effects can be subtle and usually goes unnoticed until you're done with the design to realise it too late. 

Lack of technical skills and creative ideas

Website accessibility is not a one-person job. Companies dedicate enough resources and budget to build a department to handle this part of the job. Maintenance is also a full-time job where it takes two or more people to maintain the online casino systems and gain consistent traffic.

Creativity might be an issue because ideas don't come easily to the inexperienced. You need to know what catches your audience's attention before making your website accessible.

Lack of awareness on users’ struggles on your website

Try visiting your website from a browser with no history leading to it. It's an essential practice you can do at any time. Dedicating at least five minutes a day to do so is often enough. The only challenge is knowing what to look for to determine if the website is in good condition or not. 

Among the biggest challenges, you must overcome understanding what gamblers need from different countries to use your service. Their main concerns are their local laws on gambling and whether their banks would allow connecting to your online casino. You can address these by providing a copy of your operating licence and supporting local payment methods.

Perfection in website accessibility is easy to take for granted. Problems like long loading times, faulty links, and off layouts are easier to notice. The minimum action you can take is to fix these issues with simple tweaks before you go about your day doing anything else. A more experienced eye will consider those mentioned above as possible visual problems for your users. 

You can conduct surveys for suggestions or ask your visitors how to improve your website for their sake. Aside from content and SEO services, QWERTYlabs also has website-building services that can help you with website accessibility.

Why accessibility is important

The goal of a website is to provide a platform between you and your customers, but accessibility is what ensures they reach it easily in the first place. That is the gist of it, but here are more details to explain its importance better: 

Traffic translates to sales

Website accessibility is only one of many stages in a business. It is the part where you bring your products and other offers to people. The number of visitors you attract is what the word 'traffic' refers to. It is the number of chances you have to sell your product or service. 

If 500 people visit your online casino website in a week, you can already turn a profit even if just a handful, a quarter, or half of them become customers. Thus, more is always better. With the proper website accessibility coupled with impressionable content, you can get thousands of visitors in the same time frame. 

Makes services you offer more appealing

Turning traffic into sales only works if your visitors like what they see or if they see what you are offering at all. Any technical difficulty or bad web design can deter them. As mentioned, website accessibility also includes how they navigate your domain. 

Quality of life improvements to make the website as user-friendly as possible can significantly attract customers. It happens because the comfort provided by the platform also shows professionalism on your business's behalf. 

Common website accessibility mistakes to avoid

Mistakes can range from minor to major in terms of how harmful they are to your business. They are common with easy solutions, but their frequency makes them easy to overlook. Here are some of the most common mistakes to avoid:

Settling for amateur visual design or lack thereof

One of the biggest challenges in designing for accessibility is balancing aesthetics and composition with functionality. Web developers must study the fundamentals of a proper layout, and professional page designers have to be credited for their skills. Plenty of web builders like Wix and Squarespace make this work easier for independent firms.

However, a web builder can help you create a functional website. You will still be the one to make it presentable to your potential customers and clients. Hiring professionals like QWERTYlabs is a worthy investment if you want to guarantee your site's accessibility. 

Over-reliance on words

Many beginner business owners rely too much on paragraphs to explain their offer. Unfortunately, this is not the best way to catch an online casino visitor's attention. It's where expertise in multimedia and minimalism would factor in. 

You can place all the details on a dedicated webpage for your products and services, but you should also try not to use too many words. Break them down into bullet points or talking points to better sort the information you wish to provide.

Keeping links to inaccessible sites or files

One of the best ways to make navigating your online casino site easier is to prepare links to other web pages. It's called 'internal linking', and it lets you integrate your website's other content or your business' offered services into any content you make. It's a common practice that lets you somewhat control traffic flow within your domain. 

However, there will be times when you have to change parts of your website. It ends up changing URLs, making hyperlinks lead to a non-existent domain. Likewise, files can be corrupted if you reorganise your site's contents or replace the cloud service you are using. Always check internal links in old pages to fix them immediately.  

Reach out to QWERTYlabs for website accessibility services

QWERTYlabs has a team of professionals who can do it for you. On top of that, we already have a strong network of web pages where they can find great spots to promote your services. QWERTYlabs has and continues to work with top online casino brands, meaning we have experience in the online gaming industry. Contact us now and make your business visible to your target audiences.