A business Case for Accessibility on the web.
Advantages
Legal
To help show the wide range of "legal requirements" across the world here is a list of all countries web accessibility laws. http://www.w3.org/WAI/Policy/
On the legal side of things the DDA ( Disabilities Discrimination Act ), says generally, that you have to show that you've made "reasonable adjustments" to your site. As a rule of thumb, people seem to have been assuming that if you comply with the Priority 1 ( single A ) guidelines of WCAG version 1 you'd probably be ok.
Please note that this is only a "probably" and what is deemed reasonable would depend on your resources - size of your company etc. What is reasonable for a medium sized business might not be reasonable for a major corporation.
Organisational Requirements
As both the UK and European parliaments have dictated that any sites representing them have to be AA or priority 2 standards as a minimum. There are large numbers of sites that have a different defacto standard that is above the legal minimums.
Increased user base
The vast majority of the Accessibility work will actually help all your users for example ;
- Look at proportion of the population with disabilities
- Look at aging population and projected increase in people with disabilities
- First IT literate generation of OAP’s
- Level of spare time of ageing population
- Level of disposable income of elderly
Some relevant figures
- People with a disability (total) 8.6 million (14 %)
- People considered to be 'IT disabled' (i.e. upper limb, visual, other sensory or cognitive impairment) 5 million ( 8%)
Plus ...........
- 7 million suffer from Arthritis
- 3 million suffer from colour blindness
- 2 million are visually impaired
- 1.5 million have Learning disabilities
That’s nearer 25% of the population !
Don’t forget we have an aging population and that as you get older the proportion of people with disabilities increases.
Evolving scale of Impairments:
- 15 million over 50s have some form of impairment
- after 65 this becomes 55%
- In 2004: 40% of UK population is over 45
- By 2031: 60.4% of adults will be over 45
- Continuous increase of Elderly means increase of disabilities of 23% between 1995 and 2020
Write once use many times
Accessible code ( includes navigate without mouse ) means pages work on other mediums – PDA, Interactive TV etc.
Using CSS ( Cascading Style Sheets ) to separating content and style allows content to be repurposed easily
Search Engine Friendly
Validated code allows search engines to index page easier therefore increasing ratings and more visitors.
Using CSS allows search engines to index page easier therefore increasing ratings and more visitors.
Lower running costs
Using CSS means smaller page size therefore
- lower bandwidth usage
- lower hosting costs
- faster download speed = happier customers
Lower Maintenance costs
- Valid code easier to maintain.
- lower support costs as less bugs and user problems.
- CSS based pages easier to change the appearance of pages
- Templates easier to maintain
- Less browser compatibility issues
CSR ( Corporate Social Responsibility )
- The feel good factor
- Customer perception
Major corporations all over the world spend vast sums of money on promoting themselves as “good citizens” they believe the feel good factor works for them.
Improving the usability and getting accessibility awards is a very cheap way of adding to that “feel good factor” in the biggest markets of all.
Speak to your sales and marketing people - the greatest cost is in getting a new customer, it’s cheap to keep one, all this will help you keep yours.
Disadvantages
Day one
Slightly higher build cost less than 10%
Depending on type of site ( amount of content ) Higher content creation ( staff training ) and checking costs less than 30%
Ongoing
Depending on type of site increased ongoing checking of site depending on size and churn of content.
Therefore surely the question shouldn’t be
Why make your web site accessible?
It should be
