3 reasons to treat accessibility as an investment, not a cost
Building in accessibility can expand your audience, boost SEO rankings and reduce ADA legal risk -- saving money compared to costly retrofits later.
Building accessibility into an application from the beginning can save web developers money.
For one, broadening your audience by being inclusive of adaptive users can be a competitive advantage. Also, Google and other search engines give SEO preference to accessible sites in their rankings. Finally, doing so protects you from future lawsuits.
Although it can be costly upfront, accessibility is a worthwhile investment in the long run, as it helps prevent the negative consequences of legal action and limited audience exposure.
3 reasons to invest in accessibility from the beginning
There are many reasons to develop with accessibility in mind, but these three are the most important.
1. It's the law
The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) requires that a company's application or website must be accessible to all users. Furthermore, if your company wants to provide electronic services to federal agencies, it must comply with Section 508 standards.
Beyond the financial cost of losing or breaking contracts due to noncompliance, the cost of fines and lawsuits for not complying with the ADA -- including fees and settlements -- can range from several thousand to millions of dollars in lost revenue. That doesn't even account for the increased cost of retrofitting accessibility into your application, which is always more expensive than doing it proactively.
2. Reach the most customers possible
One of the biggest movements in web development following the debut of the smartphone was responsive web design. The basic concept is that an application should be device-agnostic. It should be functional and intuitive regardless of whether a user is on a computer, tablet or phone.
The goal is to reach people where they are and convert them into customers, regardless of how they find you. Making your site functional on adaptive devices such as screen readers, visible to users who are colorblind, or accessible to users relying on alternative interaction methods -- such as keyboard navigation -- is a natural extension of this concept and a potential competitive advantage.
There is also the idea that "we are all just temporarily abled." Through the natural process of aging or accidents, we will experience difficulty with color contrast, text size or other issues that someone with a permanent or temporary disability might face. Building inclusive applications is empathetic, which can help with branding and reach as users share their positive experience on your site.
Higher search engine rankings
While SEO is more akin to hypothesis than fact, Google and other search engines have stressed that making sites easier for them to crawl benefits your ranking. One way to do this is by building with semantic HTML -- using headers and tags correctly, using alt text for images, and making forms navigable with keyboard interaction as well as being clearly labeled.
Think of the Googlebot as an adaptive user. By semantically structuring your markup, you make it easier for both the bot and adaptive devices to understand.
How do you build accessibility into your development process?
Axe Platform is a widely used accessibility tool that offers both a free and a paid browser plugin, enabling developers to identify issues in real time during manual testing. It also offers a variety of other tools and services, such as scripts you can run against your application during automated testing, which generate reports that can then become part of your natural feature implementation and bug fixing.
Many of the frameworks you're already using have built-in features to support accessibility, as long as you follow the provided documentation. Bootstrap, one of the most widely used component libraries, is one example. If you use a JavaScript library on top of Bootstrap to build functional components, there are both React and Angular Bootstrap libraries as well that can be accessed by default.
The goal of most, if not all, applications is to reach as many users as possible. Inclusivity, through accessibility and device agnosticism, helps immensely. Adding enhanced SEO and other accessibility features can generate positive word of mouth and organic reach, and help avoid costly lawsuits. Consider delays in new feature implementation if you must spend time on a costly retrofit of existing functionality to bring it into compliance due to a settlement.
Build accessibility from the beginning to work on new features while adding tickets to address issues in existing components.
Eric Rocha is a professional and freelance front-end web developer with over 15 years of experience. He writes extensively on his own site as well as contributing to Informa TechTarget.
