How many disabled folk use this site
The excuse of not needing accessibility just doesn't fly
A common push back I used to hear when arguing for any type of accessibility work on the web was that there wasn’t a big enough audience to support the effort.
This has always been a rubbish excuse and easy to argue against. However, sometimes you can’t just call someone a selfish ableist and do the right thing regardless.
Today I found https://how-many.herokuapp.com/ via Practical Accessibility, which is an excellent tool highlighting how many people likely have accessibility requirements on your website.
This is going to be eye opening for many people, including whoever is trying to argue that accessibility is not a priority.
The site uses statistics gathered from the UK Government’s Digital Services department and applies them to the traffic you estimate your site receives.
Let’s look at how the data looks for us.
tosbourn.com
This very site you are reading gets around 145,000 visits a year.
Popping that number into the site we get;
- 107,300 who need to wear glasses or contact lenses
- 30,450 who have any disability
- 23,200 who are deaf or hard of hearing
- 21,605 whose literacy is below level 1 and so struggle with tasks such as reading a timetable or writing a letter
- 13,050 who are dyslexic
- 6,525 have a colour vision deficiency (6,163 male, 362 female)
- 4,350 who are blind or partially sighted
- 1,450 who are autistic
- 290 British Sign Language (BSL) users
We always try and make any site we create as accessible as we can, but these aren’t small numbers. Especially if you run a website where visits equate to potential sales.
If you don’t already see the instrinsic value in making a web that can be used by all, then maybe seeing some of these big numbers will help! At the very least it might give you some fuel to help advocate for accessibility work in your job.