ROI of Accessibility
How do you measure the Return on Investment of accessibility work? As a product leader, I know this question cannot be avoided. But as a human being, it feels like something to overcome.
I care a lot about accessibility. I’ve noticed that the kind of people I want to work with care about it too.
I’m not an expert. Before you read my basic ideas about this, there are plenty of experts out there for you to talk to, including many with relevant experience living with disabilities. You should listen to them.
I’ve linked to some of the accessibility folks I follow on Twitter at the bottom of this post. And please make sure you’re listening to what your disabled users are saying.
Accessibility is the law, and failure to comply can come with steep costs including fines and lawsuits. But Product Managers are often trained to measure impact by counting affected customers, and that can be challenging when we don’t know how many disabled customers we have.
A good place to start is to make sure that disabled users are represented on your customer council. Go to your Support or Voice of Customer teams and ask them if any customers have self-identified as disabled. Contact them and invite them to be on your customer council.
Another suggestion I came across is to simply ask users of adaptive tech to self-identify in your UI. Put in a checkbox for “I use a screen reader” and a little text to explain that you use the information to understand how many customers use adaptive tech.
BUT FIRST go and ask your disabled customer council about your self-identification checkbox. See, it’s already working!
We needn’t limit ourselves to vision impairments. What other disabilities or adaptive technology could impact your customer experience?
Now that you’re identifying adaptive tech users you can easily measure their conversion, retention, NPS, etc.
And through that you may learn some valuable information about the ROI of your accessibility investment.
Or will you?
I remember hearing an executive talk about the “ROI of Diversity” and how it was better for business to have a more diverse workplace because…something something business reasons.
The heart was in the right place, but the beat was a little off.
Diversity, equity, and inclusiveness are good for business because they’re the right thing to do. No math is required. Without DEI we cannot have a just society.
We live according to these values because it makes us better human beings, not because of the quantifiable ROI.
DEI goals are getting high priority in many workplaces. Accessibility fits right in there!
It’s the work we must do in order to help make this the world we want to live in.
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