Inaccessible digital solutions lead directly to lost revenue and conversions. This occurs not only by excluding disabled users, but also by damaging the overall user experience for non-disabled users.
Addressing these issues provides a clear ROI for businesses, as well as reducing legal risks and improving the overall customer experience.
How inaccessible solutions cost conversions
At least 2.2 billion people across the world have some form of vision impairment, making up 27% of the global population. Of these people, roughly 43 million are blind. As populations get older, especially in Europe and America, these proportions may increase further.
For your business, an inaccessible website immediately excludes all of these users. From a commercial perspective, none of these people even enter your sales funnel, even if they are otherwise perfect prospects for your offering. At a conservative guess, an inaccessible site may be losing 5% of its potential customers before they even begin scrolling.
Of course, accessibility still matters once users enter your conversion pipeline. The harder it is to use your website, the more traffic you’ll bleed from each section of your pipeline. Instead of letting eligible customers convert, an inaccessible platform punishes and frustrates them at every turn, directly harming your bottom line.
The wider user experience
It can be easy to think of accessibility as an issue isolated to disabled users, but this is an over-simplification. Non-disabled users also struggle with inaccessible solutions, because they frequently need to engage with them in non-ideal circumstances. A website’s low colour contrast may be fine when viewing a desktop at home, but what if a user is squinting at my phone screen in the glare of a sunny day? A poorly designed nav-bar won’t normally cause issues, but what if they are holding a shopping bag, and need to navigate with just one hand?
Accessibility remediations will ensure that your website works for all of your customers, all the time. This minimises the number of edge-cases in which otherwise interested users leave your site out of frustration.
Increasing long-term lead acquisition
Accessible solutions can also improve the retention of users on your website over sustained periods. If a user receives a useful and clear experience on your website, they are more likely to return in the future. This is particularly true for those using assistive technology, but every user will appreciate clear navigation, strong colour contrast, and fast loading times.
Even if users cannot make a purchase in the moment, these return sessions will allow them to convert over a longer time horizon, improving the ROI of your website solution.
To make your website more accessible and more productive, reach out to our team at AccessPoint today, we’d love to get started on your project.