Quantifying benefits-Financial Factors

Here is what I had  sent to the list on Oct 23 for your consideration. 
Quantifying Benefits:
Measuring impact on revenues, customer / audience reach, goodwill
It will be very helpful to track website statistics that reveal :
- number of hits  on account of improved "searchability" of the website, 
- average time a visitor remains on the site 
- number of pages he / she visits
- number of  transactions successfully  completed over the website,
- number of cusstomers prefering to    access support related content on the website, and
- number of customers returning to the website to access content / conduct transactions.
The above indicators are likely to  register a change over time.
 Surveys and customer feedback too will be useful in  estimating the increased number of computer access technology users / people with disabilities  / senior citizens that the website is attracting on account of improved  website accessibility. The increased diversity of the user population might be quite visible in some cases (for e.g.  program registrants, job applicants, etc). Admittedly, this number may not be   very  accurate when the user of the website chooses not to reveal  such information. Therefore, in some cases it may not be easy to isolate and precisely quantify the  impact of an  accessible website on  the revenues, audience reach, market share and goodwill.

Sailesh Panchang
Senior Accessibility Engineer 
Deque Systems,11180  Sunrise Valley Drive, 
4th Floor, Reston VA 20191
Tel: 703-225-0380 Extension 105 
E-mail: sailesh.panchang@deque.com
Fax: 703-225-0387
* Look up <http://www.deque.com> *