We’re delighted to announce that we’re hosting a social media accessibility workshop at the Harrogate Civic Centre this November. The course will help businesses to access the annual spending power of the disability community which in the UK is worth £274bn.

Funded by York and North Yorkshire Growth Hub and Harrogate Borough Council, our workshop will take place at 1pm on Tuesday 13 November. The 90-minute workshop will provide organisations with the skills they need to create accessible social media content from the get-go.

Little Seed Group founder Ellen Cole began exploring digital accessibility due to not being able to easily shop online. She says: “I have four invisible disabilities and life can be quite challenging as society has not been designed with people with differences in mind. Going self-employed gave me the opportunity to pursue my interest in digital accessibility. It also gave me the time and space I needed to speak to a broader range of disabled people and those with differences on the state of digital inclusion. What I uncovered was that approximately 80% of social media channels were inaccessible. This means organisations are missing out vital sales due to having no understanding of how accessibility works online. From this, I began exploring social media accessibility and have come up with a proven solution which over the last two years has been heavily vetted.”

According to The Purple Pound Report, 75% of disabled people and their families have walked away from a UK business because of poor accessibility or customer service. The result of this is that businesses (as a whole) lose approximately £2bn a month by ignoring the access requirements of disabled people and those with hidden differences. To read The Purple Pound Report, click here.

Ellen continues “Social media accessibility and digital inclusion is relatively straightforward and has the potential to generate business growth; however, organisations that embrace full disability accessibility through all their publicity and digital assets, physical organisation presence and recruitment processes tend to develop greater business growth due to their genuine commitment to inclusion.”

Ellen’s social media accessibility workshop is part of the Harrogate Business Growth Programme which is fully funded by the York and North Yorkshire Growth Hub and Harrogate Borough Council. Delivering an extensive range of business support programmes, the aim of the project is to support business owners, managers and employees on a wide variety of subjects.

Ellen ends “I’m grateful to be able to offer my social media accessibility workshop as a fully funded course. I hope it will inspire more organisations to adopt good accessibility model practices to generate economic growth.”

For more information on how to secure a fully funded place on our social media accessibility workshop, please sign up and express your interest by clicking here.