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This section is part of the Introduction to Accessibility ebook content.
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Why is accessibility important?
Disclaimer: At the end of the day, I cannot get you to care about your fellow human beings. Nor can I get your coworkers or your managers. Sorry.
That being said, I CAN point to the following common arguments for improving digital accessibility.
1. Expanding Customer Base
20-25% of the global population have some kind of disability or impairment – this number is pre-Covid, and the more we are finding out about the long-term effects of the Covid-19 virus, this number may change. If you are focused on users at the individual level, improving accessibility not only helps non-disabled people (go to Curb Cut Effect section for more details), but also helps you reach more prospects in general!
2. Opening Business Segments
What if you are an enterprise concerned with other business clients (B2B)? Due to laws and regulations such as the European Accessibility Act, and Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act (USA), improving digital accessibility can help improve B2B relations and contracts, opening up functional audiences (government sector, nonprofit, European Union businesses) to you. In other words, if your company sees fit to comply with the European Union’s GDPR for data privacy, it should see fit to comply with accessibility requirements of their website as well for the same reasons.
3. Doing Due Diligence with the Law
Accessibility overlays such as AccessiBe have been found in court to not protect a business from legal liability (source: Overlay Timeline). The business, in other words, must still follow accessibility requirements otherwise risk complaints or suits – using an overlay plugin does not count as due diligence for legal obligations. This also means that some of the marketing for these overlays and plugins are misleading at best. Whether due to a specific accessibility-related law, or general nondiscrimination laws, improving your digital accessibility can help you protect yourself.
4. Competing With Advantage
This relates to the legal requirements (if any) and the factor of opening up customer areas.
Unfortunately, accessibility is NOT common throughout the Internet. The WebAIM Million Project estimates that in 2024, out of the million home pages tested, there was an average of 51 automatically detected errors per page (source: https://webaim.org/projects/million/ ).
While this test involves automatically detected errors and not the full scope of accessibility testing, this shows that just because a library, content management system, or website pattern is commonly used, it does not necessarily mean that system or library is accessible, or produces accessible output. The user pattern might also not be accessible to keyboard users or screen reader users, let alone anyone using dictation (speech to text) software. Libraries/components may have accessibility information, but that information may be limited: for example, the presence of an accessibility conformance report (or VPAT) does NOT mean that the product meets any accessibility requirements.
The silver lining of all this is that you will have a competitive advantage if you build in accessibility. If you can say you meet the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.1 or 2.2 at Supports or Partially Supports, you’re providing your product or service an edge; even if you cannot commit to meeting those success criteria at a given level, improving the accessibility with what you CAN build in goes a long way. Some companies also have their own accessibility resources freely available to the public. For example, Microsoft and Adobe already have tips and resources for improving accessibility within Office documents or resources for improving accessibility in Creative Cloud applications. However, be careful; some companies are better at marketing and legal efforts than the usefulness of their product, and ingrained bias is a known problem in technology. Accessibility overlay companies are an example of this, with a recent (as of this writing) lawsuit against one overlay company for misleading marketing.1
- For more information on overlays in particular, please check the Overlay Timeline and Overlay Fact Sheet ↩︎