Digital accessibility is Bankable

The power of the Web is in its universality. Access by everyone regardless of disability is an essential aspect. - said Tim Berners-Lee, W3C Director and inventor of the World Wide Web.

Digital accessibility (or “a11y” as its technical contraction term) is a simple set of rules and good practices targeting to make available to all individuals, regardless of their hardware or software, their native language, their culture, their geographical location, physical or mental abilities to digital resources. But for most people's minds, “digital accessibility” is creating an ugly website that takes too much time and isn’t worth caring about.

Today I will show you digital accessibility is exactly what you need to improve your website and online business.

Understanding what digital accessibility is

A bit of history

Although digital accessibility is as old as the internet itself, the first recommendations were published in 1999 called the WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines). This document introduces solutions to make a web page open to disabled persons.

On December 11th, these rules became official with WCAG 2.0. From this point, it will be organized into 4 principles: perceivable, operable, understandable, and robust. Each of them is composed of success criteria with 3 levels from A the minimum of compliance to AAA. Those recommendations evolve all the time with WCAG 2.1 and WCAG 3.0, … which try to add more precisions and considerations on people’s needs, particularly with people with a diverse range of cognitive capacities, try to cover more and more supports and platforms and ease the understanding of level’s conformity.

Social Obligation & Law’s Evolution

Europe recognizes digital accessibility as a civic obligation to guarantee equal opportunities for all and to contribute strongly to the full participation of citizens in economic, cultural, and social life. Several laws were written in order to force people to make their applications accessible and since 2000 it keeps evolving, enlarging the perimeter of companies involved and increasing the economic sanctions.

Laws evolution in France from 1999

Today in France, online public communication services, organizations delegated a public service mission, and companies whose turnover exceeds 250 million euros are now concerned. In addition, an obligation to publish a declaration of compliance with digital accessibility which will be sanctioned by a fine capped at 20 000€ if it is missing in the case of an eligible service.

In conclusion, digital accessibility is becoming everyone’s concern when developing an application as GDPR was a few years ago and might become something mandatory for everyone soon. So maybe it’s better to anticipate this to avoid creating a strong and time-consuming evolution of your service.

It can be very interesting for your business

Digital accessibility is a vital key to your application, especially during conception. But it can lead to a lot of exciting benefits for your company.

Economic benefits

Indeed, building a more accessible application logically implies that you can reach a broader customer base. As a matter of fact, digital accessibility is not only for strongly disabled people. It is true it is the initial purpose however, as Microsoft said in its document Inclusive Design, building an application for a permanently disabled person can also help and attract people with a situational or temporary disability. More generally, a11y is about making it easier for everyone to use a website.

For example, developing subtitles for your videos for a hearing-impaired person will also help someone with a temporary disability (like an ear infection) but also for a situational disability like being in a subway without the ability to hear the sound. Of course, it has a lot of other impacts like:

• it is used for TV in public places like hospitals, and railway stations, to display news channels. Without subtitles, this wouldn't be possible.
• It helps the non-native speakers
• It can be used in noisy places like the subway, but also a quiet places like the library
• It can help when the quality of the audio is not good

Otherwise, we know that disabled persons are more inclined to use websites due to their situations (less able to move, easier to take time on a website than at a counter, …). In France, we estimate the number of people suffering from a disability of any kind is around 15% to 20% of the population. If we add temporary and situational disability from the Persona spectrum written in Microsoft’s document, not working on digital accessibility for your website is to ignore millions of potential users.

Better indexing of your website

Thank’s to Google, we know that a11y is an important criterion for indexing. They say they prioritize accessible websites when you search for something. Indeed, a lot of rules from WCAG are in common with SEO rules.

Also, a good design and accessible website can improve how long people stay on your application and increase the probability of conversion. Indeed, Amazon experimented on this subject with its registration form. Their website was not accessible at all and they decided to change their sign-up form in terms of accessibility (no real design changes and new features that do not concern a11y) and they manage to have 20% more users registered inside their website. After this experimentation that worked very successfully, they decided to improve accessibility to the whole website, especially the checkout.

Social accountability

To a different degree, building an accessible website can be used for public relations when inclusivity is a trendy fight nowadays, sometimes it can be a good advantage in facing other rivals. Also, it will reduce the risk of image damage due to discrimination.

Conclusion

As you can see in this article, digital accessibility has become increasingly present on the web during the last few years, and it has become almost necessary to manage the accessibility of your applications. But in fact, digital accessibility can lead to a lot of economical, competitive, and social benefits for your business.

However, don’t forget that this requires some effort to reach any accessible level, so you need to focus on what’s relevant to your needs. Of course, it is better if you start your project with accessibility in mind and determine the correct datum that fits you.