So now that your site meets accessibility standards, there's nothing left to do, right? Wrong. The standards for digital accessibility are constantly changing as technology advances.
To maintain your ADA-compliant status and keep your customers and clients happy, you need to make consistent improvements. With 16% of the world’s population, or about 1.3 billion people, living with a disability, the work must continue.
Statistics on Internet Usage by People with Disabilities
According to the Pew Research Center:
- 75% of Americans with disabilities report using the internet daily.
- 62% of U.S. adults with a disability say they own a desktop or laptop computer, compared with 81% of those without a disability.
- 72% of U.S. adults with a disability say they own a smartphone, compared with 88% of those without a disability.
“Since the number of people experiencing some form of disability is expected to grow, organizations can expect more guidelines, legislation, and incentives to accommodate all users. Otherwise, their competitors will,” says one HubSpot article.
Organizations Falling Short in Web Accessibility
WCAG, the international standard for how to make web content more accessible to people with disabilities, is constantly evolving. WCAG 3 is currently an incomplete draft that will be released as an official standard in the coming years.
Even with these adaptations, organizations continue to fall short.
- In a 2021 survey, only 52.6% of web accessibility practitioners indicated that their organization's web products were accessible, a decline from 63.1% in 2018.
- Approximately 42% of people with disabilities think that web content accessibility has not changed over the previous year.
- In a study of the homepages for the top 1,000,000 websites, more than 51 million distinct accessibility errors were detected, with an average of 51.4 errors per home page.
Not to mention the number of lawsuits that come from these issues. Lawsuits aren’t just costly; they can also cause irreversible damage to your company’s reputation.
- A whopping 2,387 website accessibility lawsuits were filed.
- Consumer goods, services, and retail companies were targeted the most.
- New York had more than 69% of all the cases filed nationwide.
- There was a 143% increase in companies that received multiple lawsuits year-over-year.
These alarming statistics provide even more reason to keep improving. With so many organizations getting it wrong, you want to make sure yours is getting it right. But how?
Catch Accessibility.com's 3-part series on Design, Develop, and Deploy for Accessibility on demand here to learn key strategies from subject-matter experts on best practices for ensuring accessible digital content.
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