There is an overlooked way for companies to improve the visibility of their products and help mitigate risk according to one expert. Investing in digital accessibility—the process of making the user interface of a website, app, or software program compatible with assistive technology used by disabled people—could increase a digital product’s audience between 15%–17%, according to Gartner analyst Brent Stewart.
“Any CFO whose company is generating revenue primarily from digital products will be like, ‘Oh my God, please tell me, how do I do that?’” Stewart told CFO Brew. “It’s an enormous, enormous opportunity that is simply being left on the table by almost every company in the world,” Stewart said.
Around 1.3 billion people around the world have a disability, per the World Health Organization. That’s 16% of the global population, or one in every six people—and a major reason investments in digital accessibility are good business.
While the maintenance and design of digital accessibility features will primarily fall on IT and digital product teams, here’s why it should be on every CFO’s radar, too.
Risk mitigation. For finance leaders, investing in digital accessibility is the ultimate risk mitigator, Stewart explained.
Under the Americans with Disabilities Act, it’s possible for companies, organizations, and individuals to be sued for noncompliance, which has established “an entire industry of law firms” looking for “soft targets out there in websites, apps and software,” Stewart said. These law firms then issue demand or complaint letters to those organizations, he added, while also handing them a “set of fees associated with the assessment.”
“For a CFO, there’s the financial risk that every time a law firm shows up, [and] you have to pay $20,000–$30,000,” Stewart said, in reference to fines. “That could happen one to two times a year, and they’ll keep coming back until you’ve fixed it.”
That might be peanuts for a bigger company, but there’s another risk involved. Once customers get wind that you’re having issues with digital accessibility and not fixing them, that could lead to major brand erosion, and that could be costlier in the long term than any individual fine, Stewart explained.
It could potentially impact hiring, partnerships, and customer engagement, he added. Therefore, he said, he believes brand erosion is significantly more problematic from a financial perspective than just a few lawsuits.
And in general, more executives should focus on the long term resilience of their brands: Researchers from the University of Pennsylvania and Duke University found that when companies take a shortsighted approach to marketing, even powerhouse brands can be diminished—sometimes to the point of no return.
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At the end of the day, investing in digital accessibility is always going to be easier than cleaning up the risks associated with not being inclusive, and it doesn’t take much: “Accessibility is easier than you’ve ever imagined,” Stewart said.
Total addressable market. CFOs should also be concerned about the lost financial opportunity, Stewart said.
Given the staggering percentage of the population with a disability, companies are throwing away money by ignoring their needs, Stewart explained. “If you don’t do this, you have the lost opportunity of selling to 15% or more of the population of literally the planet,” he said.
The annual disposable income of the disability market has been estimated to hover around $13 trillion, according to a 2020 annual report from insights and design firm the Return on Disability Group. There’s a clear benefit to investing in that market: An analysis from consulting firm Forrester found that tech companies in the US and Canada that “commit to accessibility” will bring in somewhere between $10 and $16 billion in additional revenue.
When you add on the percentage of the population with a close connection to a disabled person—and thus a sensitivity and awareness of digital accessibility as a cause—those figures soar even further, Stewart added. “No marketing campaign is ever going to come close to that,” he said.
Reason #1. And at the heart of all of this, it’s also the right thing to do. Stewart said he thinks that one of the biggest barriers to digital inclusion is a simple, fundamental misconception: People think implementing accessibility features is difficult.
“This is not complex technology,” he explained. “You don’t need…a magna cum laude [graduate] from MIT. An average engineer can fix all of these things.”
For companies that choose to invest in digital accessibility, there’s another added benefit: They will strengthen the public conception of the company as an inclusive and equitable brand. As it stands, most people don’t see themselves in the companies they’re engaging with: Data analytics agency Kantar found 88% of people think “not enough brands do a good job” of representing people similar to them and their communities.
“If you are a company that is doing digital accessibility well—or even doing it at all, quite honestly, because it’s so rare that anyone does it—then it’s something that makes you unique,” Stewart said. “It’s something that allows you to stand out from your peers or your competition in your market.”