From the course: Practical Accessibility for Designers

Why should you prioritize accessibility?

From the course: Practical Accessibility for Designers

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Why should you prioritize accessibility?

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- [Instructor] Making your website accessible is just the right thing to do. But if that's not convincing enough, not applying accessibility can hurt your profits, or worse, get you sued. Whatever drives you, let's break down why accessibility is so essential in today's world. It's the right thing. Have you ever been somewhere where you can't read the native language, making it really hard to figure out where you are or what to do? Even ordering a meal at a restaurant can be intimidating. That's what lack of access feels like. Tim Berners-Lee states that access by everyone regardless of disability is an essential aspect of the internet. Not thinking about accessibility is deliberately or unwittingly deciding to exclude huge sways of the population from access to your website. You could get sued. The Americans with Disabilities Act, the ADA, is very clear about the rights of people with disabilities. There are fines or you could be shutdown if proved to be in breach. You're leaving money on the table. Disability can be temporary, situational or permanent. So when you exclude disabled people, you could be limiting severely the people that can use your product. Let's have a look at what that actually means. In designing a mobile application, for example, if I decide that being able to accomplish the main goals with one hand isn't important, then one might think that I'm only excluding the 26,000 people that are registered to have one hand in the U.S. But what about the people that have things like sprains, repetitive strain injury or have broken their wrists? What about parents with newborn babies who conduct almost all their activities with one hand because they're carrying their child? Suddenly, you could find yourself ignoring 21 million people in the U.S. that have an inability to use a mobile phone with two hands. That's a lot of people to miss out on. So the next time a stakeholder asks why they should bother with accessibility, you can offer up any of the answers I've shared with you, or better yet, all of them.

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