Website accessibility and the economic downturn
8 October 2008
Speech to the Law Society of Scotland’s Nothing But The Net conference by PWS Director Ted Page, 7 October 2008.
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Thank you for giving me this opportunity to speak to you today. I'm going to talk about website accessibility and why I believe that there has never been a better time to address this issue. I will touch briefly on recent developments on the regulatory side of things. But I want to focus principally on the many business benefits of accessible websites and why exploiting these makes more sense than ever before – not despite – but because of the current economic climate.
I will say a little about the law as it currently stands and about proposed new legislation in the form of the Equality Bill which is now in progress through Parliament. I will also touch briefly on recent legal developments in the US.
I will also look at the results of a recent survey conducted by PWS showing that, to date, most professional services firms (over 84%) are failing to comply with the the Disability Discrimination Act (DDA) with respect to their websites.
But the main point of my talk today is that there are substantial business benefits associated with having an accessible website. I will show that:
- The costs of fixing website accessibility problems are, in many cases, moderate or low.
- There are substantial opportunities to capture new business through making websites accessible.
- Failure to exploit the potential business benefits could be all the more costly in an economic downturn where there are, historically, significant opportunities to increase market share. I will look at evidence from previous recessions that strongly supports this argument.
So, in short, there are two strands to this talk today: the ‘stick’ of regulatory compliance and the ‘carrot’ of the business benefits, although, naturally, there is overlap between the two.
The stick
On the regulatory side, by law all websites must be made accessible.
There is also a new Equality Bill in progress that seeks to further strengthen the law and its enforcement. As part of this process, according to a policy paper published by the Government Equalities Office in June of this year, the Equalities and Human Rights Commission is to undertake an equality audit of the professional services sector, possibly starting this year.1 This proposed audit was also reported in the Law Society of England and Wales' weekly Gazette in February of this year where it was described (and welcomed) as a "wake-up call to the profession".2
You may also be aware that recently the US retailing giant Target settled for US$6 million3 after being sued for having an inaccessible website. This is by far the largest settlement of its kind to date.
Events both here and in the US, from a regulatory point of view, do indicate that things are moving in the right direction. However, with the relevant part of the DDA having been in force for nine years now, it’s not easy to make the case for urgent action to fix all the broken and inaccessible websites on the strength of the legal requirements alone.
The business benefits
Which I why I want to focus on the business benefits.
Amongst the most important benefits of accessible websites are (and I will look at all of these in more detail later on):
- The ability to reach 10 million disabled people in the UK, with estimated annual spending power of £80 billion.
- The ability to reach the growing numbers of people accessing the internet and purchasing goods and services using mobile devices.
- Reaching the wider market through Google and other search engines.
- Access to public sector procurement contracts worth £160 billion per year.
- Reduced costs – both the initial costs of building websites and of their ongoing maintenance.
Why now?
It might be tempting to think that in the current economic climate website accessibility isn't a priority.
Well, in fact, there's a great deal of evidence to suggest that making your website accessible should have high priority in a downturn.
Recessions as opportunities
Websites are an important part of any organisation's marketing effort and it is important to get them right in order to avoid cutting yourself off from potential business opportunities. This is true in any economic climate.
But as we will see, the saying that "When the going get's tough, the tough get marketing" has more than a grain of truth in it. And as accessible websites can open up substantial new market opportunities, there has never been a better time to address the issue.
Effective marketing strategy in a recession
One of the most robust pieces of evidence to support this argument is a study published by McKinsey in 2002. The study was based on data collected from approximately 1,000 firms in the US between 1982 and 1999, a period which, of course, included the recession of 1990 to 1991.
The report showed that one of the most significant differences between the most and least profitable firms over the economic cycle was with respect to their spending on marketing and advertising during the recession period. Far from battening down the hatches when the economy turned down, the best performers actually increased spending in these areas, not just relative to their competitors but also compared to their own spending in better economic times.
The recession of 2000-2001
There have been many similar studies that have come to broadly the same conclusions. For example, in 2005 the International Journal of Research in Marketing published a report based on a survey of 154 senior marketing executives following the 2000 to 2001 recession.4 Its findings closely mirrored those of the McKinsey report.
In this study, entitled Turning adversity into advantage … , the authors also found that firms that increased marketing and advertising in the contraction phase of the business cycle performed better than those that stuck to the ‘traditional’ line that the appropriate response was to slash costs.
The message here is that firms that treat recessions as opportunities rather than threats tend to outperform their more conservative counterparts.
As Doug van Dorsten, an analyst at US investment bank Thomas Weisel Partners, pointed out:
"It is historically true in any industry, the easiest time for a company to gain market share is during downturns." 5
In sum, there is a great deal of evidence that there are opportunities inherent in any recession for firms willing to seek them out. And as we will see, an accessible website is a great way to exploit those opportunities.
Compliance
There are obviously many areas of law relating to websites, from data protection to intellectual property to advertising standards and so on. And most sites remain within the law most of the time. However, the Disability Discrimination Act is a notable exception: numerous studies have shown that the overwhelming majority of websites (of all types and in all sectors) fail to comply with the requirements of the Act.
DDA requirements
For background, Part 3 of the DDA6 covers the provision of goods and services, including websites, to the general public.
Under the Act, discrimination includes:
- Failure to provide a service to a disabled person that you are willing to provide to the general public.
- Providing a service that is of a lower standard on account of an individual's disability.
The importance of standards
Disabled people often access online content using a variety of devices such as screen readers, refreshable Braille displays or screen magnifiers. If websites are not built and, importantly, maintained to recognised standards, such as the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG)7, the de facto world standard, these devices either don't work, or if they do, the user's ability to make sense of the content will be compromised.
Actual performance
As most sites don't comply with the accessibility guidelines:
- Most are providing a lower quality of service to disabled people.
- In the worst cases, they are failing to provide any service at all.
PWS survey
But how does the legal sector compare with websites in general? Our study, carried out earlier this year, found that the professional services sector, perhaps somewhat surprisingly, fared no better than websites in general.8 We looked at the websites of just over 1,500 law firms, barristers’ chambers and accountants. The main findings were that:
- Over 84% failed to meet any level of accessibility as defined by WCAG.
- Fewer than 3% were maintained to a standard which, according to WCAG would: "remove significant barriers to accessing web documents".
Common problems – easy fixes
I will highlight a few of the problems that we identified in the survey in order to illustrate that often the most serious of these, from an accessibility point of view, are amongst the easiest to fix.
Missing or inappropriate ‘alt text’
By far the most common fault was that of images being added to pages without appropriate text alternatives (or ‘alt text’). This is certainly one of the most serious accessibility problems of all, but it's also one that is very easily fixed. Many web editing programmes, including content management systems, can easily be set up to require website editors to add alt text to images. Or it can just be added manually – it's simply a question of acquiring the habit.
‘Fixability’ rating
I’m going to give alt text a ‘fixability rating’. My fixability rating for alt text is:
- Technical difficulty
- — low
- Cost
- — negligible
- Impact on accessibility
- — high
I will look at the implications of this in a little more detail in a moment.
Poor JavaScript
The second most common fault we found was inaccessible JavaScript coding. In the worst cases this caused entire navigation systems to vanish when JavaScript was disabled. Estimates vary, but upwards of 5% of your site visitors are likely to have JavaScript disabled or otherwise unavailable. This kind of old-fashioned, inaccessible JavaScript will also impede, although not stop entirely, Google indexing your site properly.
Solutions will vary from situation to situation but just to give one example, a licence for a fully accessible JavaScript dropdown menu can be purchased for a one-off payment of just US$40.9 In addition, there are now entire JavaScript libraries available, either free or at low cost, that will cater for practically any requirement. Used with care they need cause no accessibility problems.10
Fixability rating
Therefore, my fixability rating for JavaScript is:
- Technical difficulty
- — moderate to low
- Cost
- — low
- Impact on accessibility
- — high
Potential for WCAG Level 1 compliance
So, if just these two low-cost and technically quite straightforward issues (that is, alt text and inaccessible JavaScript), were to be addressed, compliance rates would increase significantly. My estimate is that rates of compliance at Level 1 (the lowest level of accessibility as defined by WCAG), would rise from the current 15% or so to between 40 and 50%.
PDF accessibility
Another issue that is close to my heart is that of PDF accessibility. Many professional services firms make extensive use of PDFs on their websites. Although PDF accessibility used to be a big problem, these days, due to significant improvements in a number of technologies, it is relatively straightforward to make almost all PDF content fully accessible.
Nevertheless, we found that:
- Just under 30% of all the sites surveyed contained PDFs (452 sites).
- Only 4 of these had included any accessibility features in their PDFs.
Fixability rating
My fixability rating for PDF is:
- Technical difficulty
- — moderate to low
- Cost
- — low with potentially rapid return on investment (ROI)
- Impact on accessibility
- — high
Why high ROI ?
The reason that return on investment could be rapid is that organisations that produce large numbers of PDFs will find that they can save a great deal of authoring and editing time once they have adopted accessible PDF production techniques. Additional benefits include smaller document sizes and hence faster downloads and lower bandwidth consumption, and better search engine rankings. The cost is a day's training.11
Again the following is an estimate, but if every site fixed its PDFs, alt text and JavaScript, rates of compliance with the accessibility guidelines at Level 1 could reach around 70%.
Framesets
We also found that over 4% of the surveyed sites were built using framesets – a form of HTML coding that was well past its sell by date by the turn of the century. In addition to poor accessibility, frameset-based sites rank poorly in search engines and cannot be viewed at all in many mobile devices including the ubiquitous Blackberry. As time goes on there will be fewer and fewer browsers that will display framesets at all, never mind properly.
Case study
As an example of the difference a frameset can make, a few years ago I managed the website of one of the larger City law firms. I had inherited a frameset-based site which was getting around 60,000 page views per month. The frameset went at the earliest opportunity, and the numbers of visitors and page views rose dramatically, more or less over night. Having tracked the web statistics closely, I can say with some confidence that most of the gains of the following 5 months (which saw an increase in site traffic of more than 100% ) came from the removal of the frameset.
Tracking ROI
I can't give you precise statistics on the ROI of getting rid of this site's frameset: it can be quite difficult to track the sources of instructions in a large firm. However, I did learn of several instructions that came directly from Google searches that would not previously have returned anything useful. One in particular stands out – it was a transport sector instruction from Belgium which was worth over £80,000. The development work to remove the frameset cost a few hundred pounds.
Fixability rating
My fixability rating for the removal of a frameset is:
- Technical difficulty
- — moderate
- Cost
- — moderate
- Impact on accessibility
- — moderate to high
Now, if we were to fix all the points listed above (that is, alt text, inaccessible JavaScript, PDFs and framesets) rates of compliance with the accessibility guidelines at Level 1 could reach around 75%.
And the important point to note is that we're still nowhere near the difficult stuff!
Other accessibility problems identified
Briefly, other common problems that we identified included:
- inaccessible forms (which are everywhere)
- poor typography
- poor colour contrast
- tables used for page layouts
I'm not going to go into any more detail here other than to say that the technical difficulty, cost and impact on accessibility of correcting these problems will vary from site to site. Some might be relatively easy to fix. Some may be unreasonably difficult and expensive to fix without a complete site redesign. But it's worth noting that there is absolutely no reason for any of the above problems to be built into any new website.
Complete lockouts
Before moving on I should just mention that the survey also uncovered three sites that were 100% accessibility lock-outs. One of these was a London barristers' chambers' site which was constructed entirely from pictures of text, thereby locking out all non-sighted visitors (including Google) as well as creating problems for other users.
Flash
The other two sites (and a further two have emerged since the survey) were built entirely with Flash. In recent years Adobe has made great advances in making Flash potentially accessible. However, if done badly, as it was in these cases, some disabled users as well as search engines will be excluded completely.
Flash is a great technology, particularly with respect to the video and graphic design possibilities it offers, and we are undoubtedly going to see more and more of it over the next few years. But it must be used with care. Despite the fact that it might look wonderful, much harm can be done. It will pay you to tread carefully when commissioning Flash content. Never a truer word spoken than "All that glisters is not gold".12
Fixability rating
The fixability rating for this category has to be high everything – technical difficulty, cost and impact on accessibility. In all these cases the only realistic solution is to scrap the whole thing and start again. Fortunately it's only the tiny minority of sites that have such serious problems.
The wider business benefits
In discussing the sorts of accessibility problems that our survey uncovered we have not only looked at the relatively low costs of fixing many of these, but have also begun to touch on some of the positive business benefits of doing so.
I would now like to look in more detail at these.
Wider market reach
Perhaps one of the most important business benefits of having an accessible website is the potential for wider market reach. According to the Department for Work and Pensions there are 10 million disabled people in the UK with annual spending power estimated at £80 billion.13 And with an ever-aging population these numbers are set to grow significantly.
There are also increasing numbers of people accessing the web via mobile devices which are not designed to cope with the poor coding typical of inaccessible websites. Worldwide the numbers of these users overtook the numbers accessing the web via desktop computers early in 2007. Although it may be some time before this is true in the UK, it is very much the way the wind is blowing.
Maintaining an inaccessible website, therefore, risks partially or wholly shutting out these two large and growing markets.
‘The big blind billionaire’
And then of course there is Google, and access to potentially large numbers of clients and business opportunities.
It is in no way controversial to state that an accessible website is a Google-friendly one. When Google comes to index your web content it navigates in much the same way that a blind person using a screen reader does. If you put obstacles in the way there's a good chance the content won't get found. It is for good reason that Google has been dubbed the ‘big blind billionaire’. Shut it out at your peril.
Public sector procurement
Another important reason is that it is likely to become much harder for organisations to benefit from public sector procurement contracts if they don't meet certain equality criteria, including maintaining an accessible website. This market is worth £160 billion per year and 30% of British companies are direct beneficiaries. Public sector organisations already have a duty to consider the impact on equality of their spending. But the government, through the Equality Bill, is seeking to bring further pressure to bear through procurement, much as municipal, state and Federal authorities already do in the US.
Other benefits
There are numerous other business benefits associated with accessible websites. Briefly, a few of them are:
- Future proofing – standards compliant sites will continue to work for many years to come. But just as nobody expects modern websites to work in Netscape Navigator 4 or Internet Explorer 4 anymore, nobody will expect today's inaccessible websites to work in the browsers of the future.
- There is also the side benefit of improved usability for all – numerous usability studies have shown that accessible sites are easier for everyone to use.
- And lastly there is the increasingly important
issue of corporate social responsibility –
there is growing awareness of the importance of
firms demonstrating their corporate social responsibility
credentials to a number of groups including:
- shareholders
- investors
- customers
- the media
- existing and prospective employees
There has been some vigorous debate in the media recently on a range of legal sector specific diversity issues. I won't go into details here but suffice it to say that this is clearly an issue that is now firmly on the agenda and here to stay.
Legal & General case study
Despite wide acceptance of the idea that accessible websites are good for business, quantitative evidence is still quite scarce. A notable exception is that of Legal & General which launched a new accessible site in 2005. Just a few of the reported benefits were:
- An increase of 90% in sales of online life insurance.
- Maintenance costs reduced by 66%, saving £200,000 per year.
- 100% ROI within 12 months.
As I mentioned, formal studies of the kind that Legal & General carried out are still surprisingly rare. However, there is a mountain of anecdotal evidence that is entirely consistent with Legal & General’s findings.
Conclusion
So, where will the impetus for change come from? Will it be the stick of regulatory reform or will it be carrot of the business benefits? Much depends on the effectiveness of the newly established Equalities Commission in enforcing the relevant legislation. Perhaps we will also see a case come before the courts such as the recent Target.com case in the US.
However, much will also depend on the ability of the web development community and others to communicate the wider business benefits of website accessibility to corporate decision makers.
This is especially important now. Accessibility provides opportunities for firms to exploit the web – probably the most efficient marketing tool yet invented – in order to ensure that they emerge from the current economic downturn in as good shape as possible.
Ted Page Director PWS
PWS web services
For further information on any issue raised in this article or on any aspect of our accessibility services please contact us on 01932 355 222 or 07918 952 874.
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