What Are the Benefits of Accessibility?

There are some substantial benefits of accessible web design and development:

• It makes good business sense: Building accessible web sites can actually increase revenue for a business by ensuring that no one is excluded from its web site. There are some well-documented case studies that outline the business benefits of accessibility, such as the ones experienced by the following companies:
  • Legal & General Group: Doubled visitor numbers, cut maintenance costs by two-thirds, and increased natural search traffic by 50 percent.
  • Tesco: Spent 35 thousand GBP to build its web site, and had 13 million GBP per year in resultant revenue.
• CNET: Experienced a 30 percent increase in traffic from Google after it started providing transcripts. “We saw a significant increase in SEO referrals when we launched an HTML version of our site, the major component of which was our transcripts,” said Justin Eckhouse of CNET. (W3C Business Case Examples, 2009)