Accessibility consultants often use eye-popping statistics to stress the importance of their work.
Stop me if you've come across these numbers before:
- 82% of the top 500 e-commerce companies have faced legal action
- 33.2 million small businesses in the United States, and they stand to face 73% of accessibility lawsuits
- 4600 ADA lawsuits filed in 2023, with more likely in 2024
- 1 in 4 people worldwide have a disability
- over 13 trillion dollars in disposable income
These numbers highlight a real issue for sure.
They can also lead to inaction. Deer in the headlights. They just make accessibility seem like an impossible mountain to climb. You figure if everyone is getting sued, why bother?
The bigger the numbers, the larger the problem becomes for any one team to tackle. Accessibility just becomes too overwhelming.
What are the chances you will capture some of those trillions in dollars of revenue?
What are the chances your organisation will face a lawsuit if you're just a fish in an ocean?
So you just ignore accessibility because of the magnitude of it.
The thing is, we usually ignore huge problems we don't think we'll have a chance to tackle. We also ignore any small tiny problems because they're insignificant. We focus on medium-sized issues.
So my question is, how do can we bring accessibility down to earth? How can we use these numbers, or - heck - some other more relatable stats, to turn accessibility into a problem we actually care enough to do something about it?
I used to roll my eyes at these numbers as well. "4600 ADA lawsuits? 1 in 4 people disabled? Yeah, right."
But then I met Emily (not her real name), a blind user struggling to fill in a form on our website. She couldn't complete her online assessment because our drop down widget didn't work with a keyboard at all. She felt frustrated and left out.
It hit me.
This isn't about lawsuits and trillion-dollar markets. It's about Emily getting on with her life.
Next thing I knew, I learned to use a screen reader. It took an afternoon, not months. Emily was proficient with it, I can work with it well enough to find and fix most of the issues. That's good enough.
Suddenly, accessibility isn't that scary and large any more.
My advice? Forget all those scary stats.
Think about the real people using your product. Start with one change.
You won't capture trillion of dollars of "lost" revenue. You won't have a guarantee to avoid a lawsuit. You won't solve accessibility over night.
But today? You could make someone's tomorrow better.
And that's good enough.