Re: Disability statistics

At 11:27 PM -0500 12/14/01, Access Systems wrote:
>I think there is a business case possible.  in fact I found that in the
>Baltimore Metro Area using only minimum SS payments as the per person
>income, which is low balling because some will be making more $$$
>and using that number and census data it was figured that there would be
>over 7million dollars per month of disposable income by these persons.
>How much do you (the business) want of that??

How much would it cost to get it?

That's the business case.  Business is all about spending your money
in the way that generates the most money.  If it will cost me $1M to
advertise to blind people, and $25,000 to make an accessible web site,
and there are only 20% of blind people online, then it may make sense
to spend $1M to advertise to non-blind people who are online in greater
numbers, and who constitute a greater percentage of the population.

Business case statistics of "how much money are available" do not help
the cause of accessibility, because from a purely business standpoint,
unless you are going to be a business which caters in large part to the
needs of the disabled, it's probably not worth the cost to meet those
needs.

If it were _true_ that meeting the needs of disabled people is the
way to riches, don't you think we'd see it online and offline?  The
reason companies currently support accessibility is because someone
made a moral (or PR, or government-driven) decision to do the right
thing, not because there's billions of dollars to be made targetting
people with disabilities.

This is why I think that the business case argument is the weakest
possible argument we can make, and why I think that efforts in that
direction -- to convince someone that we know more about how their
business should operate than they do -- are always going to be wasted.

(A better business case is "hey, web design companies! if you write
accessible HTML you might get government contracts easier!" -- but
that is a 508 business case, not a general web accessibility business
case.)

--Kynn

-- 
Kynn Bartlett <kynn@idyllmtn.com>                 http://kynn.com
Chief Technologist, Idyll Mountain            http://idyllmtn.com
Web Accessibility Expert-for-hire          http://kynn.com/resume
January Web Accessibility eCourse           http://kynn.com/+d201

Received on Saturday, 15 December 2001 14:24:55 UTC