Most designers probably agree that accessibility matters: We want to create designs and interfaces that don’t exclude users with disabilities. There are plenty of obvious moral reasons that accessibility matters, but, unfortunately, accessibility considerations are often one of the first things to get cut when resources or time becomes scarce. From a business perspective, it seems reasonable that it’s better to release something that the majority of people will be able to use, than to delay a product or website launch. After all, users with disabilities only make up a smaller percentage of the customer group. As you might already suspect, the truth is a lot more complex, and choosing not to create accessible designs for financial reasons is not only often illegal but also short-sighted in terms of the business value you can gain from accessibility.
Here, we’ll look at a few examples from the history of designing for accessibility which illustrate why accessibility is great for users and for business. We’ll also take you through the primary reasons for why you should care about accessibility in the digital domain. If you’re a designer, we’re probably preaching to the choir when we say that accessibility and digital inclusion matter, so use our examples and arguments next time you have to argue for the importance of accessibility in a project in your own organization.
One of the primary reasons that accessibility has wider benefits than allowing people with disabilities to use your products is the curb-cut effect. The curb-cut effect refers to the fact that designs created to benefit people with disabilities often end up benefiting a much larger user group. The curb-cut effect takes its name from the ramps cut into the surfaces of sidewalks – as you see in the image above. In many countries, curb cuts are omnipresent in areas with foot traffic, allowing people with strollers, bikes, etc. easy access to the street when they need to cross the road. While curb cuts are used by all kinds of pedestrians, they were originally created for the sole purpose of allowing people in wheelchairs to cross the road. Curb cuts only started to become commonplace through the hard work of political activists who demanded that wheelchair users should be able to move freely about in cities, but they turned out to have more universal benefits. Most of us no longer think of curb cuts as accessible design, but simply as the most logical and user-friendly way to design sidewalks – hence the term “curb-cut effect”.
Another great example of the curb-cut effect is closed captioning on video material. Captions were originally created for people with hearing impairments (who, indeed, still use them), and thus intended for a limited user group. They turned out to be a great help for much larger user groups, such as people who watch videos in noisy environments and foreign viewers who read translated spoken content in different languages – meaning that closed captioning or subtitles have become a huge business.
Legal, Moral and Business Reasons for Designing for Accessibility
In both of our examples, legal, moral and business reasons go hand in hand to create a triple-layered win-win situation, but is that still the case for more current design challenges such as web design? In this video, Frank Spillers, CXO and founder of the award-winning UX firm Experience Dynamics, will argue why accessibility is essential for web design for legal, moral and business reasons.
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video transcript
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For me, having been involved in accessibility for so many years, I've realized that yes, you can meet standards and yes, you can get to the level of compliance that guidelines will have. You get to. But how do you actually make your experience so that it actually, you know, is sensible, meaningful and successful? Like really successful for users?
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So it's the same issue of just sort of meeting usability standards, but how do you actually go to the level of, you know, creating, wow. Or creating a meaning for a user, you know, helping them with their task, helping them get to the next level. So accessibility has been part of the story of the World Wide Web. And the creator, Tim Berners-Lee, said it best that, you know, it's really about universal access.
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So there are there are three cases to be made for accessibility the legal, the moral and the business case. Now, the legal case, close to 20% of the U.S. population has a disability, and that's one in five people. And that's both the U.S. and the U.K. In the E.U., it's like one in seven people. The thing with access and accessibility is it's moving more towards being seen as a human right internationally
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as opposed to what's termed an accommodation. Right. So accommodation is like if you're in a school situation, your child has a disability, they basically get more time to finish a test. And as opposed to sort of being seen as a bolt on, as an add on to your coding or your design efforts. Accessibility is seen more, is being seen more now by companies as more of a fundamental right and as part of the fabric,
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the basic foundation of good coding and good UX design. So accessibility is actually required by federal law. And there are, you know, many lawsuits in the period of 2015 to 2017, over 250 different businesses were sued in the U.S. And there are some very famous cases. There are some very big cases, like AOL was sued years ago. You know, Target,
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which is a very popular store in the US, was sued. Charles Schwab, the financial investment company Netflix, the video company. So many different lawsuits have taken place. And, you know, outside of some the money side of it, the the PR side of it, which is one of the business issues that we're getting into, is is also at issue. And the legal picture is really important because in the United States, most companies are motivated by lawsuits.
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That's the primary motivation. It's not really empathy, it's the lawsuits. And so it's really important to understand the legal side of it. The moral side of it now is that universal access and interoperability are really part of everything we're doing on the Web, or they should be, you know, and if you have tried to send a calendar from Gmail to your Apple calendar or, you know, for example, to interoperability of, you know, QuickTime and it just doesn't work on on PCs as well as, you know, works
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smoothly on the Mac interoperability issues are everywhere. You know, responsive Web design has been a champion for any device, any resolution. So inclusiveness is built into responsive web design. And it turns out that responsive web design is actually a really good opportunity for you to address your accessibility project.
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So there's corporate social responsibility. Many companies have a corporate social responsibility policy. The other thing is that many people with disabilities face huge discrimination in employment, but some of the things we heard are the, you know, the common mistakes that you find in the developing world, for example, that users with mobility issues so they're in a wheelchair, will go to a job interview. And then the the interviews
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on the seventh story in the there's no elevator with elevators broken. So this happens all the time. You know, I was in the New York subway and there was a woman in a wheelchair that in a in a push wheelchair. And the elevator was broken. I actually saw these two two guys. So this woman look like a refugee as well. And these two guys came over, these two kind of businessmen just ran over to the to the to the woman and grabbed her wheelchair and and ran her up like three flights of stairs.
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Just incredible. That's really what we're doing with accessibility, is we're providing that like automatic like access. Don't even think about it because the discrimination that users people with disabilities face is huge. There's a 70% unemployment rate, for example, with the blind community in Portland, in the US here, and
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users with disabilities, according to the latest census, tend to face like 70% less earnings type of issue. You know, So access to services and online content is a huge issue. And the other thing is that many people with disabilities suffer from health issues or multiple disabilities. So you may have somebody that has multiple disabilities as well. So it's kind of compounded. The access issue is compounded.
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Now there's the business case for accessibility, as I mentioned, lawsuits, a big one, but accessibility actually encourages us to do clean coding and to think about the usability of our sites, you know, because you're thinking about the user. Any time you're thinking about the user, you're doing user advocacy. User advocacy gets you to walk in their shoes. Walking in their shoes generates empathy. Empathy helps you think about the website from the person who's going to use it, not your perspective.
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Right? So the other thing is that it supports echo and usability. Now, that alone should be enough of a business case, right? So I mean, imagine like, like limiting your site so it's not findable or limiting your site so users stumble and can't get through your site. I mean, you just wouldn't you wouldn't argue against that, right? So accessibility needs to be the third pillar in our optimization strategies that that that is part of the the the launch strategy of any product.
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Now accessibility also helps support internationalization and mobile friendly content which are also, you know, critical to SEO and usability and responsive web design, as I mentioned, now makes accessibility easier because you've got HTML5 and CSS3. And then of course, the heavy use of ARIA, which is the accessible rich Internet application, you know, formatting that language that Google has put out.
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So ARIA is is kind of a standard as well with especially web application accessibility. And the the other thing I think that's key to the business case is that that accessibility just leads to bad PR, you know, it kind of gives your company a bad reputation in, in Norway where there, you know, it's illegal to have an inaccessible website. It's a form of discrimination. The the airline SAS
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versus Norwegian Airlines. So SAS was was cited by the government for having a, you know, their booking engine on their website. You couldn't you can use it if you're a blind user. For example and Norwegian Airlines was like is like perfect. It's like it's a beautiful example and stuff. So there is this kind of like people are thinking, oh, SAS is like, you know, just hates its users or just is completely,
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you know, insulting to its to its users with disabilities. And so there's a little bit of bad PR that was going on with those two airlines. And there's actually a a supermarket in Norway that is working with disabled users, with the disabled community to improve the online shopping for its website, for purchasing, you know, online. And and they're promoting that as part of their kind of goodwill.
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So they're using that that reverse you know, the good PR as a way to promote the fact that they're doing inclusive design and that their their web strategy is is inclusive and higher in accessibility.
The Takeaway
Accessibility is often one of the first things to be cut from designs, given that the gains to be had from creating accessible designs seem small compared with the cost of delaying a launch or redesigning a product. Here, we have argued that skimping on accessibility is short-sighted and that there are important reasons for placing such emphasis on designing for accessibility. The most obvious is the moral reason – you should create accessible designs to ensure that everyone has equal access. The second reason that many of us think of when we consider accessibility, is the legal one. Many countries have laws stating that you must design with accessibility in mind and not doing so leaves you vulnerable to lawsuits. The final reason that’s sometimes overlooked is that accessibility is actually good for business. Creating accessible designs means that you expand your user base, and it’s also good for SEO and usability.
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