Who This Actually Helps

The numbers

Roughly one in five people in Canada aged fifteen and over report a disability, and the proportion rises sharply with age.

For a business whose customers are mostly over fifty, that figure is considerably higher than one in five.

Most of those disabilities are invisible: pain, mobility, mental health, hearing, and vision that is reduced rather than absent.

Which means the assumption that this concerns some small identifiable group of other people is wrong at the level of arithmetic, before any argument about it begins.

Permanent, temporary and situational

A framing worth carrying, because it explains why these changes help so broadly.

Somebody may have one arm permanently, a broken wrist temporarily, or a baby in one arm situationally.

All three benefit from a site usable with one hand.

Somebody may be deaf, have an ear infection, or be in a noisy workshop. All three benefit from captions.

Somebody may have low vision, be recovering from eye surgery, or be reading in bright sunlight. All three benefit from proper contrast.

Which means the group affected by any given change is far larger than the group defined by permanent disability.

What ageing does

The largest single factor for most small businesses and the least discussed.

Reading vision declines from around forty for nearly everybody. Hearing declines gradually. Fine motor precision reduces.

None of that is usually described as disability, and all of it produces the same requirements: larger text, better contrast, bigger targets, captions.

For a trade whose customers are homeowners over fifty, the accessible version of the site is simply the version their actual customers can use.

That is not a moral argument at all. It is simply a description of who the customers are.

The curb cut effect

• Dropped kerbs for wheelchairs, used by prams, trolleys and delivery drivers.
• Captions for deaf viewers, used by everybody watching silently.
• Voice interfaces for people who cannot type, used by everybody driving.
• Larger tap targets, used by everybody on a moving bus.
• Plain language, used by everybody in a hurry.

The pattern is consistent enough to have acquired a name: a change made for one specific group reliably turns out to benefit a much larger one.

Which is why accessibility work rarely trades off against general usability, and frequently improves it.

A worked example

A business that improved contrast and text size after an older customer mentioned struggling with the site.

The intent was to help that one category of visitor.

What happened over the following months was a general improvement in form completion, across all visitors, which they had not anticipated.

On investigation the likeliest explanation was mobile visitors outdoors, where the previous grey text had been genuinely hard to read regardless of anybody's vision.

The change made for a minority had improved the experience for the majority, because the majority had been experiencing a milder version of the same problem.

That pattern recurs often enough to be worth expecting rather than being surprised by.

The legal position, briefly

Worth knowing about and not the reason to act.

Federal legislation covers federally regulated organisations, and several provinces have their own accessibility legislation with obligations that vary by organisation size and sector.

Requirements differ considerably depending on where you operate and what you do, and they have been expanding rather than contracting.

Which means the specific obligations for any particular business are a question for somebody who can look at that business, rather than something to conclude from a general article.

The practical position for a small business: the work described here is worth doing on its own merits, and it also happens to move you towards whatever obligations apply.

The people you never hear from

The reason this is invisible from inside a business.

Somebody who cannot use your contact form does not phone to tell you. They use a competitor and you never learn that they visited.

Which means the feedback loop that corrects most business problems does not operate here at all.

The occasional person who does say something, usually apologetically, is representing a much larger group who said nothing.

Which is why the single customer who mentions struggling with a site is worth taking seriously as a signal rather than treating as an individual case.

It is also why testing is necessary. Nothing else will tell you.

The counter-case

Where to be honest about limits.

Full conformance to a standard is a substantial undertaking, and a small business doing everything at once will do none of it.

Some things are genuinely expensive: full audio description, remediating a large archive of documents, or rebuilding a custom application.

And a business with two enquiries a week has more urgent problems than a heading structure.

The proportionate position is doing the cheap things that remove actual barriers, which is most of the benefit, and treating the rest as a direction rather than a project.

What it costs against what it returns

Worth being plain, since the business case is frequently overstated in both directions.

The basic work is genuinely cheap: contrast, text size, tap targets, labels, headings, captions and link text are hours rather than weeks.

The return is not a measurable revenue uplift you will see in a report, and anybody promising one is guessing.

What you get is that a proportion of visitors who would have left can complete what they came for, plus a site that works better for everybody else in poor conditions.

For what it costs, that is a perfectly reasonable trade, and it does not need a spurious percentage attached to justify doing it.

What not to do

Two responses that produce the appearance of action and very little else.

An accessibility statement on a site that has not been tested, describing a commitment rather than a state, which is a claim you cannot support.

And an overlay widget offering to make a site accessible automatically, which addresses a narrow subset, occasionally interferes with the assistive technology people already use, and leaves the underlying problems in place.

Neither replaces fixing the contrast, the labels and the targets, which is the work that actually removes barriers.

Where to start

1. Contrast and text size, which affect the most people.
2. Tap targets, particularly the phone number.
3. Form labels and errors.
4. Keyboard access to anything transactional.
5. Captions on any video.
6. Everything else, gradually.

The first three are an afternoon of work on most sites, and between them they remove the majority of the barriers people actually encounter.

How to find them on your own site is covered in testing your own site in ten minutes.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.