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THE CHALLENGES OF DIGITAL ACCESSIBILITY

Bringing disabilities and other impairments into the picture

Today, a lot of websites and interfaces are designed without consideration for the disabled and their user experience. Yet information technology is a real integration lever for this demographic, as it often provides them with extra independence. An accessible website or mobile application will necessarily be easier to use for valid persons.

Depending on the type of disability, the most commonly identified web usability issues differ - please find on the opposite page (or above, or below) a table summarizing these obstacles.

1. Reaching the senior market

An accessible interface usually proves to be more intuitive and comfortable for its users – which of course include non-disabled people – than its non-accessible competitors. It can be accessed and used by everyone, including the hundreds of millions people worldwide with temporary or permanent disabilities.

It is also better suited to any physical degeneration – from mere sight or hearing fatigue to more serious, incapacitating diseases – which senior citizens may experience.

Senior citizens (people over 55 years old) currently represent 127.4 million people in Europe. A solid 13% of the US population is above 65 years old, 85% of which suffer from vision problems. And of course, as its population ages, web business is in transition.

Senior citizens, who hold about 70% of the wealth in Europe and whose overwhelming majority demands accessible websites, represent a key market for web companies.

2. Strengthening your brand image

At a time when organizations seek to maximize their brand’s image, the implementation of accessibility is an important way to highlight your civic responsibility to your shareholders, employees and the general public.

Certification is a strategic way to further reinforce your brand image and communicate this responsibility.

3. Promoting sustainable development

An accessible interface is also a more readable interface, and provides a potentially higher level of readability (with magnifying effects and speech features, for example) than books and papers. With more readability comes less unnecessary printing.

Accessibility also returns the human factor - the individual - where it deserves to be, which is back at the centre of any digital project.

Sustainable development seems to emerge as a groundswell, and for large companies, digital accessibility is part of that evolution. For example, over two-thirds of the top 250 listed French companies have initiated a general movement towards sustainable development and social responsibility.

4. Improving your ESG

The state of their extra financial rating (also known as ESG rating) is a growing concern for listed companies. One of the main concerns of the rating agencies’ criteria is that communication with stakeholders needs to be: Transparent - Accessible

The company’s general attitude as an employer is also considered. Adapting your intranet and online recruitment platform to all disabilities will naturally allow you to employ more people with disabilities. This will increase diversity in your workforce, cultivates a healthier, more tolerant working environment, and will also dramatically improve your ESG rating.

5. Improving your natural SEO

Digital accessibility facilitates access to content for all users, including search engines (insofar as search engines are considered “users”).

Of course, web accessibility alone does not guarantee a good rank in search engines. But, it will remove all barriers to indexing and visibility, and offer semantically correct - and therefore naturally optimized - text content.

6. Maximizing your website’s performance

You know all too well that your website’s performance depends a great deal on its compatibility with both current version and older version browsers. Also, its usability on other devices (smartphones, tablets, interactive kiosks, PDAs etc.) is becoming increasingly crucial.

The central issue in making your website accessible is ensuring it completely complies with existing web accessibility standards and mobile accessibility guidelines. The verification of this compliance is an opportunity to judge the usability of your website. It’s worth noting that responsive web design can also be accessible.

7. Reducing maintenance costs

A guideline of digital accessibility is to maintain a strict separation between content and presentation, which yields two major advantages: less time will be required for development, and more flexibility is offered by cascading style sheets.

Today it is possible to change the entire look of a site in a few minutes by simply changing the style sheet associated with it. This is impossible in anachronistic websites where the content and container are the same thing!