As a business owner, it’s is vital to constantly have your website accessibility monitored and updated. Accessibility on the web is a vast topic that is continually improving on a daily basis. Here are some statistics.
A Look At Statistics
- Over a billion people are estimated to live with one or more disabilities, including blindness, deafness, and a variety of others. This is about 15% of the world’s overall population.
- One in four U.S. adults, over 61 million Americans, have a disability that impacts major life activities.
- About 217 million people worldwide have moderate to severe vision impairment, which is expected to triple from 36 million to 115 million by 2050. In addition, 826 million people live with a near-vision impairment.
- The average person with a disability can expect to spend eight years, or 11.5% of their life, actively managing their disability.
- Approximately 40% of adults aged 65 and above have one or more disabilities. By 2035, there will be 78 million adults in this age range or approximately 20% of the U.S. population.
Not All Users Using Accessibility Features Are Disabled
The numbers of users with disabilities are staggering, but disabled people are not the only users utilizing accessibility features on the internet. Users who are temporarily disabled (e.g. broken hand), users who find these features to be convenient, and many other users use various accessibility features to better use websites.
A Look Into The Legal Aspects Of Web Accessibility
You can be taken to court for not following ADA standards. Customers that visit websites will notice if they follow ADA standards or not. This can be very costly to you or your business, legally and financially. Also, this could heavily impact your brand’s reputation and turn away customers.
How Disabled Users Interact With Websites
Screen readers, browser settings, text-to-speech, voice recognition, and various others are all tools for people with disabilities to interact, manipulate, and understand websites. Although these tools are pretty advanced, these tools don’t always fully understand your website or its structure. This can seriously impact the experience of your users and ultimately make them leave your website for a competitor.
How To Solve These Issues
It’s best to contact your web professional to determine what needs to be done to your website to make it ADA compliant. This is a very involved task that can get fairly complicated. Once you are compliant, you should try and get feedback from your users to find out how to make the experience better overall.
Here at Gigafeed we provide top-notch services to our customers and design the experience to be as easy as possible. We believe users shouldn’t have to deal with any accessibility issues on websites we create. Please contact us to get a free estimate.