Next time you’re sitting down with your team to discuss developing a new product or service, you ought to start with a discussion about inclusivity – more specifically, the inclusion of disability. The world’s largest minority. You see, people with disabilities are often ignored in the design process and by doing so, your business is leaving money on the table. A lot of it.
Forbes magazine recently said that over $16 billion a year will move to companies in the USA that prioritise inclusivity. A similar, though admittedly smaller, shift is likely to take place in Australia. So, let’s take a look at the potential ROI of becoming more inclusive and how to go about it.
- It’s time to talk to your people and share what they’ve been missing. That means educating them about inclusion and more importantly, accessibility. Ripley Training in the UK estimates that this can increase ROI, by itself, by up to 50 per cent. The more accessible a product is, the more people that can use it, the more people that will buy it. If you need a framework for this, check out IBM’s or Microsoft’s, they’re available online for free and they’re a great starting place for any team.
- Build in more testing for greater levels of productivity and efficiency. This means bringing in people with disabilities and working with them to do the testing. You want to get both qualitative and quantitative feedback. Are the products really accessible? How do they feel about them? How often would they really use them? And if you want a financial incentive for this – compliance with accessibility is a legal requirement and your business faces hefty fines for failing to get it right. That’s hidden ROI but ROI all the same.
- Create a team for accessibility with the organisation. Accessibility should be everyone’s responsibility, not just a special team. But having a special team allows you to build up the kind of specialist knowledge that can be used to help get everyone else educated and up to speed. It’s better to build this kind of team in-house because it’s way cheaper than hiring consultants and in our experience, the ROI on the team is always many times the costs of that team. It also ensures that communication happens in the most effective way inside the business – and that means they don’t miss anything important connected with inclusion and accessibility.
- Learn to make your money work harder for you. There is no doubt that it takes time to make money. You need to think about your investment in accessibility as something long-term. It will make your business more profitable over time, legal compliance will make the company more attractive to potential buyers, customers will become more loyal, and your employees will become more productive. Set an accessibility budget and put it with the product roadmap and look at the entire cycle. Make sure you have targets and goals for accessibility and that people are being held accountable for them. That’s exactly what you should already be doing for any product, so there’s no need to learn new skills to manage the financial commitments to inclusion.
With so much potential gain on the table when it comes to accessibility and inclusion, it ought to be a no-brainer for companies to get behind internal initiatives to ensure that people with disabilities are properly catered for when designing products and services.
It’s also worth remembering that if you don’t take care of this stuff as you start and progress a design, you may be looking at a very large cost to put it right when the product goes to market and isn’t accessible or inclusive.
