Why Accessibility is Important
I’ve been speaking a lot about accessibility recently.
I hold two main beliefs on the topic:
1 — Accessibility is important, just as important as performance, or security or any other engineering constraint. It’s also really really important to your users, ‘disabled’ or not. If people (engineers, designers, product managers) felt how important it was, particularly for those who rely on it, then the web would be a much more accessible place.
So the goal of this blog is to convince you that accessibility is important and that you should put thought into ensuring whatever you are building is accessible by all.
2 — My second belief is that you can do a lot to improve the accessibility of your site with little time or effort. As a jumping off point, I wrote this checklist (“DO NOT push to production without checking these things”) to get you started. I hope you will find these suggestions so simple that implementing them before you push to production is a no brainer.
So, why is accessibility important?
When I ask this question at conferences, I usually get a combination of these answers:
So more users can use your product
So you can make money from those users
I then ask, why do you think accessibility is not always prioritised in web development projects?
And the answers are usually:
We don’t have time
We don’t make enough money from those users
It’s hard to make things accessible
Imagine this.
You are a cafe owner selling a selection of cakes. A vegan customer comes into your shop, but you don’t sell vegan cakes, so they can’t eat your cake and so don’t buy cake from you. Then a gluten-free customer then comes in, but your cake contains gluten so this customer also leaves empty-handed.
Think about this in relation to web accessibility.
You don’t have to consider accessibility requirements in order to put your site live and operate as a business, the same way that cafes are not required to offer vegan cake.
But if you don’t accommodate for these customers then you will lose their business, and if they come in with their friends, you will lose the friends business too. And worse than that, they are likely to never come back, even if you do later start baking vegan cakes. Conversely, if you are known for selling vegan cake, you have the potential to be the go to cafe for people with that dietary requirement.
Think of customers leaving your cafe the same as users bouncing from your site.
And whilst a few years ago, unless you were in East London perhaps, vegan customers might still have come to your cafe and just had a coffee with no cake; now your competitor cafes offer vegan cake, so your customers are more likely to leave with no cake and try somewhere else. In the same way, Google is starting to rank with accessibility in mind which is a real push to do better when it comes to accessibility.
Let’s return to those ideas that people usually come up with when I ask them at conferences:
Why is accessibility important?
So more users can use your product
In the UK, 22% of people are registered disabled. But the thing I find particularly interesting is that only 18% of those people were born with their disabilities. I don’t mean to shock, but anyone of us could find ourselves with specific needs at any point and wouldn’t we hope that those needs had been accommodated for by the products we love?
In addition, not all disabilities are permanent. For example who has ever broken their arm? I get migraines fairly regularly which often give me disturbed vision, and I love if I can tab with my eyes half shut or even better have Alexa speak to me without having to open my eyes. Some of these accessibility improvements actually make things easier for everyone, no matter what their needs are. For example, if you were to add subtitles to a video, this would also be really useful for people wanting to access your site from a noisy cafe.
Think of a “disability” as a mismatch between a design and a person. Imagine if using a wheelchair was the norm and everything was designed for wheelchair use. Those users who weren’t in a wheelchair would be the ones “disabled” by their environment. Don’t be the person disabling users by not making the products you are designing and building accessible.
Lots of innovation has come out of the need to adapt for specific needs. Did you know the typewriter was invented by Pellegrino Turi for his friend who was blind, to enable her to write. SMS text message was invented as a communication aid for deaf people, and voice assistant technology started with the blind community with the RNIB having a big role to play in its development.
When things are accessible, all people, regardless of how their body works have the same access to ordinary things. Children can play the same, students can learn the same, adults can work the same. But only if the product has been designed with a spectrum of needs considered.
“Without computers my life would have been miserable and my scientific career impossible.” Stephen Hawking
So you can make money from those users
The ‘purple pound’ (a collective term for the spending power of disabled households) is worth £249bn to the UK economy and those people tend to be fiercely loyal to disabled friendly organisations.
75% of disabled people and their families say they have not spent money because of poor accessibility
Think of that cafe analogy — how many people are you happy leaving your cafe?
“When we work on making our devices accessible by the blind,” Tim Cook said, “I don’t consider the bloody ROI.”
I want to leave you with this quote from Tim Berners-Lee:
“The power of the web is in its universality. Access by everyone regardless of disability is an essential aspect.” Tim Berners-Lee
