ROI of Accessibility

Greg Williams, Deque Systems

Link to Session

4 main business cases (eCommerce case study):

• Increasing market share
• Controlling operational costs
• Managing risk profile
• Aligning digital presence with company core values

Increasing market share

• after-tax income for working-age people with disabilities in the US: $490 billion
• 20 million (35% of all people with disabilities) are US working age adults, age 16-64
• If you're not accessible and your competitor is, you lose that market share
• Vision, Hearing, Ambulatory, and Cognitive are most common disabilities
• Inaccessible e-commerce retailers losing out on $6.9B annually

Controlling operational costs

• "Click-in" payment costs much lower than call-in, mail-in, and walk-in (brick & mortar). Pushing to digital channel cuts costs - up to $14m. Can't push disabled customers to digital if experience is inaccessible.
• Blind users call company's customer service department 1x/week on average because of website inaccessibility. They call multiple times even when they have abandoned the transaction. Save time & $ on customer service calls.

Risk management

• approx 10k ADA lawsuits per year. CA, NY, and FL are where lawsuits are most prevalent
• potential cost of complaints: blended rate of $120/hr when you consider support personnel, compliance/regulatory personnel, product management, devs, QA, testing, etc
• calculating proactive vs reactive fix loss, assuming 100 complaints annually, upwards of $1m per year cost for "reactive" fixes
• lawsuits: blended rate of $225/hr assuming company leadership, legal council, external SMEs, etc are involved
• DOJ could levy fine of $96,834 for first action while still requiring website to become accessible

Alignment with core values

• If mission or motto is to be inclusive, customer-centric, etc, are you really meeting that mission if you don't include a11y in priorities?
• Customers increasingly want to purchase from companies that share their view
• Consumers who have a negative or positive experience re: a11y tend to share with family and friends