The Financial Benefits of Web Accessibility
Web accessibility is often seen as the socially acceptable ‘Right Thing To Do’ but for any company with one eye on it’s bank balance, this is unlikely to be sufficient reason to invest in a site re-design. Ok - so there’s also the potential for litigation under the UK Disability Discrimination Act but, given that no cases have, as yet, been publically prosecuted, the over-riding corporate attitude seems to be “Let’s see what happens”.
If the bigger businesses are going to embrace web accessibility, they’ll need to see clear financial benefits and good returns on their investments. Legal and General’s recent re-design experience may just provide the first solid example of real business benefits.
The Legal and General site was recently re-designed, using third party testers, with a view to increasing it’s overall accessibility levels following some concern about the old site’s potential for litigation under the DDA. According to Bruce Lawson’s PAS 78 executive summary, the following ‘indirect’ benefits were noted post re-design:
- A 30% increase in natural search-engine traffic
- A significant improvement in Google rankings for all target keywords
- 75% reduction in time for pages to load
- Cross browser-compatibility increased (not a single complaint since the redesign)
- Site now accessible to mobile devices
- Time to manage content reduced from average of five days to 0.5 days per job
- 95% increase in visitors getting a life insurance quote
- 90% increase in Life insurance sales online
- Savings of £200K annually on site maintenance
- 100% return on investment in less than 12 months.
Clear evidence from a competitive company that increasing overall web accessibility can result in significant business and financial benefits.