If you think accessibility is just some “nice to have feature” that you’ll take care of “someday”, you are wrong.
You might be losing sales and leaving money on the table today. Here are just two examples I’ve personally encountered in the last year:
Example One: Can’t choose a shirt variation
A cool start-up is doing gender-neutral clothing (really cool, actually!). Pretty much every product they sell has a variety of colors/patterns/fabric choices. But keyboard navigation barriers prevent selecting ANY color/pattern. Which means that no person who depends on keyboard navigation (including people with visual impairments or mobility impairments) can EVER get a product into the cart because of course, you have to chose a variation.
Example Two: Can’t Submit the order
On another eCommerce site, users who need keyboard navigation could get a product into the cart and get most of the way through the checkout, but once they entered the last part of their credit card number, there was no way to tab into the submit button to finalize the purchase. Imagine how frustrating THAT is for the user! They invested all that effort via keyboard navigation to choose a product, get it in the cart, enter all their billing & shipping info, then they can’t actually make the purchase.
Note that both of these examples are only found with manual testing. Just having an automated testing solution (and certainly not an overlay!) will not help you find or fix all your barriers.
Ignoring accessibility is losing revenue
But my point is the bigger picture: if you aren’t taking accessibility seriously you are likely losing revenue.
After all, people with disabilities in the US represent more than $490 billion per year in disposable income (and that’s a 2018 report! ) Newer reports cite that globally, the disposable income of people with disabilities is $8 trillion. And when their friends and family members are added in, that goes up to $13 trillion.
Do you need some sort of “evidence” for talking to your C-suite leaders or clients about this? This Accenture report shows that companies that improve accessibility 1.6X revenue.
If you have a goal that includes growing revenue, getting accessibility barriers out of the way would be a great part of your strategy.
