Accessibility doesn’t cost anything; it PAYS!
Accessibility Inclusion can lead to 60% more revenue!
Hi, everyone! I’m writing this post on digital accessibility (a11y), focusing mainly on how every business can increase its revenue and raise its brand value by considering accessibility in the short and long term.
Have you ever heard of accidental accessibility?
Accidental accessibility is when a product or service is designed without considering varying user communities and, because of its unintentional inclusive design, becomes much more accessible for everyone, like elderly people and people with disabilities.
For example, Microsoft’s Calc98 and voice assistants like Amazon Alexa and Apple’s Siri were created to be convenient. However, they later proved to be an invaluable accessibility tool for those with limited mobility, those who have difficulty handling physical devices, the visually impaired, and people with age-related ailments. Everyone benefits from its inclusive design. Technology with inclusive design reaches a wider audience group and gains more success faster!
Accessibility is considered a core value at brands like Apple. That’s one of the major criteria for its brand’s success!
Making your product accessible adds a multitude of people to your potential market!
How digital accessibility can impact your revenue?
If accessibility is not a part of your digital strategy, you are missing out on significant opportunities to grow your business, generate more revenue, and strengthen your brand image in a value- and trust-based market.
Businesses may be entirely unaware that they’re missing out on potential revenue from customers with disabilities. According to the survey, more than 90 percent of customers who experience accessibility challenges don’t reach out to the business running the website.
If your business earns a poor reputation among shoppers with disabilities, news can spread quickly among their friends and family. This will negatively affect your brand overall.
Potential users and how accessibility PAYS you!
First, let’s go through some scenarios, in which people with disabilities use e-commerce shops.
- Imagine that the fields in your registration form are not labeled properly and customers using screen readers are not able to sign up or complete their purchase.
- Imagine that your product images are missing informative alt-text, which describes the product’s specifications. At this point, visually impaired users will stop their purchases.
- The number of shoppers on mobile is growing and with it, the percentage of e-commerce purchases completed on mobile devices. Imagine that your website is poorly designed for mobile devices or not accessible on mobile and/or tablet devices.
- Imagine the frustration users must feel when they add an item to their shopping cart, entered their information, and cannot submit their order because something at the end of the transaction, e.g., the ‘submit order’ button, isn’t accessible.
All the scenarios listed above are not edge case scenarios. About 20 percent of the world’s population have some sort of disability, and these issues happen daily to around 20 percent (probably more) of online shoppers. This indicates that there is a high chance these users switch to similar products from other brands whose web shops are more accessible. An interesting fact is that these users are ready to pay more for a similar product with another brand that has an accessible webshop.
Brands with poor accessibility are missing out on one in five potential customers. What a pity!
Business like numbers, numbers, and numbers!
Let’s do a simple calculation on how many more customers may interact with your brand if you had accessible digital sites!
Let’s imagine a European brand that has monthly revenue of €200,000,000 and has 400,000 potential active customers on average per month.
The typical average revenue per user is €500 per month.
The number of people with disability in the EU is around 135,000,000. Let’s just take the statistics for the visually impaired: around 30,000,000 people are blind or partially sighted. If ten percent of these people start purchasing from your brand this year, which is 3,000,000 people or so on average, you will have 250,000 more potential customers every month.
Your brand then reaches 650,000 potential active customers every month, and you have an average monthly revenue of €325,000,000, which is a 62-percent increase because you included ten percent of the visually impaired community.
Amazing, isn’t it? A 62-percent revenue increase in the short term by including a minor community in your digital shop. Have you ever thought about how a11y could positively impact your business revenue growth and brand’s success in the long term?
Avoiding legal fines: The second payoff of including accessibility in your digital strategy is the costs you save by lowering your risk of litigation. As you can see, the rise in accessibility-related litigation is an ongoing trend. The number of disability discrimination lawsuits has consistently increased over the past decade. So, making your digital sites accessible reduces the risk of legal fines.
Here is a quick overview of numbers and some examples of how a11y benefits every digital business.
How can e-commerce retailers adopt an accessibility mindset and cater to customers with disabilities?
The good news is that digital accessibility is not that difficult to achieve, and by following standards such as WCAG outlines, websites can meet the needs of users with different disabilities.
While there are many factors involved in digital accessibility for e-commerce websites, here are some key areas that solve more common a11y issues and make your sites more inclusive for users.
Summary:
When you design your webshop with more inclusion for various personas, your brand reaches a wider community. There are fewer legal risks. Your business shows empathy to your beloved customers. Accessibility benefits everyone. It’s crystal clear that ACCESSIBILITY PAYS YOU more and more!
All these arguments aside, I would say it’s the right thing to do for any business! It’s a basic human right! Let’s make the digital world accessible for everyone!
Sources :
https://www.forrester.com/blogs/retailers-make-your-website-accessible-or-leave-money-on-the-table/
https://www.siteimprove.com/blog/how-web-accessibility-really-pays-off/
https://techcrunch.com/2021/07/21/the-real-roi-of-making-your-products-more-accessible/
https://www.deque.com/blog/the-business-case-for-accessibility/
