Website Accessibility and Buying Power of Persons with Disabilities
Written on October 21, 2011
This blog post is part of a series of posts discussing the Business Case for Accessibility. In order to get a full view of the Business Case for Accessibility, I encourage you to read all posts in this series, links to which can be found at the bottom of this post.
Numerous statistics are often cited by accessibility advocates which present large numbers for the rate of disability, particularly in the United States. I’ve seen numbers ranging from 49,000,000 to 54,000,000 for the number of people having a disability in the US. This equates to about 20% of the US population. Clearly this is a large number one should not ignore. Accessibility advocates imply that by creating an accessible website, you can capture a greater market share from a demographic with strong buying power.
- Does it increase income? That seems to be the implication. The argument here is that this is a large population that can be captured, provided a site is accessible. What’s a bit difficult to track down are data on income on a per-site basis by persons with disabilities.
- Does save money? No.
- Does it mitigate risk? Sort of. [...]