I’ve very limited experience with creating a business case but in my role as a product manager at a telecom company I did have the opportunity to learn from experts. It felt amazing when these experts could use the available data to predict the future. Some of them still missed about 10%, most often due to too optimistic predictions.
Some of them knew the market so well, and also had the correct numbers, that their predictions were almost the same as results. Impressive. I will always respect all of them for their skills. I did not do so well, was way too optimistic and it was also very difficult to sell a product that was totally new to sales and support as well. Will not go into the details here but let’s just agree that making solid and realistic business cases is hard.
Why I am writing about it? Why do I think this is relevant? Well if I just think of a company that sells their products or services online, then I have to think about the people that try to predict the sales – probably by using a business case of sort. And I would like to think that they have access to way better quality of data – potential customers. Especially businesses that invested in online advertising and know how to use targeted ads. It’s way easier for them to predict the future sales, compared to a classical off-line business. But I still think that they are missing the unknown factor if they do not consider accessibility of their online lead / sales generators.
Search engines and targeted ad providers don’t have information about all potential customers
It’s practically impossible to track users of assistive technologies online. There are some limited possibilities, for example tracking keyboard only users and those who zoom in or maybe use custom fonts or custom style-sheets, but I wouldn’t build my business case around it. It doesn’t include all possible users, for example screen-reader users, voice-assistant users, users that use zoom software and so on.
The situation is a bit different on native mobile applications, I’ve seen that there it is possible to track more, but if we talk about web – we can’t really be sure how much users of assistive technologies come to our site. That’s a good thing in my opinion, as it’s not so easy to discriminate, target or track assistive technology users. But on the other side – it’s also more difficult to base business case on facts and have data to support it. I still believe that it’s a good thing, as it should be way more important to respect privacy.
Search engines and targeted ad providers can therefore never know if a user is using assistive technology and site owners are therefore unable to target or exclude them. So when making business case they should check the official statistics and make some predictions about it. On the other hand it is not smart to come to general conclusions like – “we sell bicycles, so we don’t have users that are blind” – as the world is way more complex than this. What if user is buying a gift for somebody else, for example?
In my opinion should business cases lean on official statistics in the targeted audience and demographics. But that is only one part of the solution – making our products accessible will not only enable us to sell more but it will potentially also prevent “churn” – customers stopping doing business with us. So I really believe that making things accessible will not only gain new customers, but also keep existing (that is sometimes even better).
Accessible solutions work better for everybody
I really believe that accessible solutions almost always mean that everybody benefit from it. Making things simpler to use, simpler to see, semantic to search engines and people alike, using well established visual and non-visual patterns, improving not just the accessibility but also usability will for sure benefit everyone, not just people with disabilities.
Accessibility tries to set some baseline smart defaults that help everybody, not just people with disabilities but also people that may be in difficult temporary situations, so that’s another argument for doing it systematically and continuously.
This is for sure also one of the reasons why we will soon have to make things more accessible in European Union – with coming European Accessibility Act and with Web Accessibility Directive for public sector already in place.
I hope other countries will follow the example and make sure we all get a more accessible web (and documents and mobile applications) in the next couple of years.
Please check also official WAI business case (opens in new window).
