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How many people with disabilities use our site?

Hidde Devries writes the one article that you’ll want to direct people to whenever they ask that question.

Implicitly, the person who asked that question is trying to find the return on investment. Hidde asks “what will we do with that data? What if it is a very low percentage? Whatever it is, equal access is still the right thing to aim for, a human right that is required by law”. He quotes:

When we work on making our devices accessible by the blind, I don’t consider the bloody ROI. When I think about doing the right thing, I don’t think about an ROI. If that’s a hard line for you, then you should get out of the stock.

Apple CEO Tim Cook

Hidde points out too that even if we could get an accurate number – and we can’t, due to the user’s privacy being more important than our analytics – it doesn’t show the market potential. It doesn’t show how many disabled users have turned to competitors because they couldn’t access your site.

Finally, making accessibility improvements will often benefit more people than just the intended audience. Think of a ‘dark mode’, which many people like to set, not just those who want to avoid headaches etc.

In short, Hidde’s standard answer to this question is this:

We can’t measure assistive technology usage for (good) privacy reasons, our analytics won’t show customers that went to a more accessible competitor, and accessibility benefits everyone.

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