Why Web Accessibility Matters: The Economic Perspective
A lot of the same arguments crop up whenever the subject of web accessibility arises. It's pretty obvious that appealing to people's sense of ethics/compassion has largely failed, so let's concentrate primarily on the economic arguments:
- Why should I pre-emptively make my site accessible? Let the free market decide.
First of all, the "free market" argument doesn't hold water, since most industrialized nations have some sort of social welfare system, not a true "free market" one where humans are merely commodities. Thus, in a social system, whenever a disabled person has to find alternate accommodation because they were refused it by a private company, the workaround comes out of pockets of the taxpayers anyway, disabled or not. A business owner may think they are saving money by not making a site accessible, but by forcing a disabled person to access their goods/services through alternate adaptive technologies obtained through subsidized social programs, everyone working there, including the business owner, will pay in the long term through their income taxes.
For example, let's say a blind person requires a personal assistant to transcribe information from a website because the website is not screen-reader friendly. This personal assistant may be available through a government-subsidized occupational therapy program. If ten blind people need to do this, that is ten times the cost of the government-subsidized assistant. Ten times the cost transferred to taxpayers because one website decided not to be accessible. A real world example may be found in the American NFB vs. Target lawsuit. The NFB won a class-action lawsuit against the retail chain because Target refused to voluntarily make their site accessible. How much public money was wrapped up in an entirely avoidable lawsuit?
- Why can't disabled people have their own separate system?
Having multiple systems to accomplish the same goal is almost always more expensive than having a universally-designed one. e.g. We are seeing this with public transportation in many cities - making conventional busses wheelchair-accessible is cheaper than implementing both a conventional transit system and subsidizing an additional paratransit system.
- Disabled people don't contribute anything anyway, why should we accommodate them?
By increasing disabled persons' participation in society, we can stimulate the economy through increased tax revenue and consumer spending. And we are not talking small numbers of people here either. Approximately 10-20% of citizens in wealthier nations have some sort of disability and the numbers are higher in less wealthy nations. Nor are we talking small dollar amounts ($3 trillion dollars worldwide). Just because businesses are unaware of or ignore these statistics doesn't mean the numbers aren't there.
Other considerations:
Disabled people aren't demanding absolutely everything on the planet be accessible, despite the accusations. It isn't a "slippery slope" of economic despair when we accommodate disabled people. Accessibility is not about "special treatment", it is about undoing something that was done wrong in the first place. It's like saying the abolishment of slavery is giving "special treatment" to blacks. The real issue here isn't disabled people asking for "special treatment", it's the ones claiming that accessibility is such a huge burden (and usually without any stats to back it up).
Access to the internet may not be a right (imo, debatable), but more and more activities connected to our rights are accessed primarily by the internet. With rare exception, everyone becomes disabled at some point in their lives. Disability isn't merely a special interest group, it's everyone. So web accessibility is a civil rights issue for everyone, whether you agree or not.
Furthermore, as has already been said many times in many ways, the measures to make websites accessible are fairly easy and straightforward if you implement them at the design stage - otherwise ur doin' it wrong!