Impact Of Accessibility For The Abled And The Differently Abled

Accessibility for digital content has been discussed for the last several years. Many countries have regulations to ensure that there is equal opportunity for those with special needs and make sure that all digital content is accessible.

World wide web consortium has published WCAG (web content accessibility guidelines) to ensure that all digital content is accessible. There are three levels of guidelines; meet minimum requirements: Level A, meet most of the requirements of those with special needs: Level AA and provide comprehensive accessibility standard: Level AAA.

While WCAG 2.0/2.1 has been the most followed guideline, WCAG 3.0 guidelines are being developed which provides testable statements to each granular requirement. WCAG 2.0 guidelines are being interpreted differently by different people and this problem will be fixed by WCAG 3.0 as they provide testable scenarios and success criteria outcomes.

While there are over 60 parameters to be tested for reaching level AA standard, most of the requirements can be summarized as below:

Provide an alternate method to

those who are visually challenged by ensuring that

• screen readers can read on-screen content in a logical way,
• provide descriptions to images and videos that can be read out
• provide audio narratives

those who are hearing impaired by ensuring that

• all audio content is provided in the form of transcript or subtitles

those who have psychomotor challenges, or cognitive disorder or colour blindness, by ensuring that

• there are alternative ways to navigate through the content using Keyboards OR a mouse pointer and not necessarily having to use both
• provide clear instructions and navigation structure
• ensure that screen animations do not have high blink rates or other elements that are distractive for those who are sensitive
• there is sufficient colour contrast between text and background, etc.

?The challenge faced by most organizations is the fact that there is an additional cost involved in implementing accessibility. However, the risk of not implementing accessibility is high as users are filing suits against large organizations for not providing accessible content. Looking at the financial risk and the market goodwill, the cost of implementing accessibility is far lower than the risks involved.

There are also two other factors to consider:

In 2018, the magazine?Disability ?focused on the market potential that exists – The total disposable income for U.S. adults with disabilities is about $490 billion, which is comparable to other significant market segments, such as African Americans ($501 billion) and Hispanics ($582 billion). This opens opportunities for a new segment and can provide additional revenue.

More importantly, accessible content is now used by those who do not have special needs. For example, students are downloading audio tracks provided along with books (for meeting accessibility requirements) and using them to listen to those books while they are traveling. This opens a whole new world of users who want to use accessible content.

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