InklusivComm™
Did You Know?

According to the U.S. Department of Labor, Americans aged 50 years and older are estimated to control over $1.7 trillion annually in discretionary spending power, and have a net worth of over $17 trillion. Would you agree that paying attention to expectations and needs of those who are getting older makes perfect business sense?

American economists estimate that if organizations committed to hiring just 1% of employees with disabilities, on a larger scale, these companies could help boost the American gross domestic product (GDP) by up to $25 billion a year. Isn’t that incentive enough to start tapping into the diverse pool of untapped talents?

Roger Hochschild, CEO of Discover Financial Services, claims that leveraging diversity, equity and inclusion helps the business create innovative products, a stronger workforce, and better partnerships. Don’t you think your brand stands to gain from a diverse workforce, that can approach challenges from a variety of angles and standpoints?

According to Julie Sweet, CEO of Accenture, research reveals that leading disability inclusive companies stand to gain as much as 28% higher revenue, double the net income, and 30% higher economic profit margins than their peers. As an organization, are you actively doing everything that you can to hire a truly diverse and inclusive workforce?

According to data shared in 2021 by Kantar’s Global Inclusion Imperative, 65% of consumers worldwide say that when given the choice, they will prefer to do business with organizations that promote diversity, equity and inclusion as part of their message and brand. Don’t you think it’s in your brand’s best interest to actively begin demonstrating a commitment to inclusion?

In 2021, the Pew Research Center reported that 46% of young American adults (aged 18 to 29) already knew of at least one person who was transgender or went by gender-neutral pronouns. This percentage was up from 32% in 2018. As your brand is trying to connect with the next generation of young professional, are you adapting your language and mindset to recognize and acknowledge non-binary identities?

Research conducted by the Nielsen Norman Group indicates that, on average, every one of us loses about 8% of our ability to use the web efficiently, for every decade that we add to our lives, over the age of 25. This means that by the time we’ve reached the age of 65, most of us will have lost, on average, about 32% of that ability. If you care about truly connecting with all of your audience, how might that impact the way you design your content?

According Statista, 25% of internet users worldwide were aged 45 or older as of 2021. This means that a quarter of all internet traffic around the world comes from audience members that are somewhere on a spectrum of hearing, vision and cognitive decline, as they slowly age into their senior years. Are you considering their declining senses, as you design and create the assets you use in your materials and presentations?

As it turns out, colourblind audience members are not the only ones who struggle with colour perception! Research shows that retina cells progressively lose sensitivity with age, causing colours to become less bright and contrasts, less noticeable. In particular, blue colours can easily appear faded or “washed out”. Are you mindful of how the colours you use in your materials are perceived by ageing members in your audience?

According to InvisibleDisabilities.org, an American non-profit association dedicated to raising awareness that invisible illnesses, pains, and disabilities are very real, states that about 74% of disabilities are, in fact, unnoticeable to the naked eye, which explains why the majority of us don’t realize how prevalent disabilities truly are in society. As an organization marketing to the “average target audience”, does that raise any red flags for you?

According to findings from the 2017 Canadian Survey on Disability, an estimated 20% of working-age Canadians self-identify as having one or more disabilities that affect how they perceive, understand, and interact with the world around them. That’s more than one out of every five people in the “Great White North”. How many of those people do you think are your customers, or could be?

People with disabilities represent at least 17% of the global population, and form the largest minority group worldwide. With 80% of disabilities being acquired later in life, and a global population that is definitely not getting any younger, it’s clear that disabilities will be on the rise for years to come. Is your business even acknowledging that the market is slowly shifting towards an obvious need for more inclusion?

A 2021 study of the world’s top million websites conducted by WebAIM found that 97.4 percent of them failed at least some web basic accessibility guidelines, such as offering highly contrasted text so those with visual impairments can read it, providing alternative text for images so screen readers can explain what is being displayed, and labelling forms so visitors know what information to provide when filling them out.

What about the accessibility of your websites?

In 2021, an average of eleven lawsuits were filed every day in U.S. courts over website inaccessibility, and 412 of the top 500 internet retailers (more than 82%) have been party to at least one lawsuit over the last four years alleging that their websites discriminate against users with disabilities.

Was your organization targeted by such a lawsuit, or do you happen to know of one that was?

According to the Center for Retail Research, a firm based in Norwich, England that provides research and analysis about the retail industry, the coronavirus pandemic has accelerated a longer-term trend toward accessing all sorts of services online. Today, one in five dollars is spent online, which is more than twice the proportion of only a decade ago.

What might that online shift might look like for a significant proportion of the population who have disabilities?

21% of all lawsuit cases in 2019 were about companies being sued at least for the 2nd time, demonstrating that unless you act fast, there is a very high likelihood that your organization will receive another complaint before you can even recover from the previous one. Data shows that companies with multiple brands, websites and apps are most targeted.

Are you doing everything you can to mitigate risks?

Over 66% of the Internet Top 500 retailers have now been named in an ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act) web or app accessibility case since 2017, with over 40% of those retailers having had to deal with more than one lawsuit. Large retailers were top targets in 2019, with close to 1,350 lawsuits.

If you operate in that industry or collaborate with brands that do, are you paying attention?

In 2019, another 2,890 lawsuits were again filed against American organizations on the basis of their inaccessible content. Interestingly enough, 21% of those lawsuits were against organizations that were sued in previous years, proving without a doubt that a first offense did not protect businesses from subsequent brand damage.

Are you doing everything you should be doing to protect your brand?

In 2018 alone, a total of 2,314 lawsuits were filed against American organizations on the basis of their content not being inclusive of people with disabilities. That was a jaw-dropping 181% increase over the number of lawsuits filed in 2017. Overnight, thousands of businesses found out the hard way that digital accessibility was indeed, a very serious requirement.

Could it be that your brand is currently at risk?

A lot of people tend to think of people with disabilities as a rather negligible part of the customer base, but these people constitute, by far, the nation’s largest minority group, both in the digital and physical spaces. It is also the only minority group that any one of us can become a member of at any given time.

Does it make good business sense for your brand to ignore that demographic?

The Accessibility for Manitobans Act and the Nova Scotia Accessibility Act don’t require organizations to submit accessibility reports, but still require organizations to create plans that describe their progress in identifying, removing, and preventing accessibility barriers. Furthermore, these plans must also outline how organizations intend to continue to notice and remove barriers in the future.

If you do business in these provinces, where is your plan?

In the future, the Canadian government will coordinate federal and provincial accessibility laws to ensure even more consistency. In the wake of this effort, the Ontario government will be expected toalign its accessibility law, the AODA, with the laws of other provinces and the country. Clearly, mandatory accessibility requirements are not going away.

Is your brand on top of the techniques required to communicate more inclusively with all of your audience?

Many separate accessibility standards development processes exist in Canada. Ontario, Manitoba, and Nova Scotia all have laws that mandate creation of provincial accessibility standards. In addition, the Accessible Canada Act mandates accessibility standards that apply to organizations under federal jurisdiction.

As a brand, is digital accessibility on your radar?

Under the Accessible Canada Act (ACA), organizations must create accessibility plans that outline future barrier identification, removal, and prevention. Although these plans need not include records of removing barriers in the past, organizations must also create progress reports that show how they are implementing these plans.

As an organization, are you leveraging these progress reports as public records of the steps your brand has taken to comply?

Designing content for your perceived average users is a flawed concept that potentially leaves a large portion of your audience behind. Indeed, most people have jagged profiles with characteristics that will prevent them from perfectly fitting the mold. By designing for extremes and stress cases such as disabilities and other potential barriers, your brand can ensure that all of your audience is implicitly included.

Do you rely on everyone fitting that perfect mold of yours?

The Accessible Canada Act (ACA) builds on the Canadian Human Rights Act and focuses on the prohibition of discrimination based on disability. Adopted in the summer of 2019, this law applies to the Federal government as well as all federally regulated organizations and agencies. These include sectors such as transportation, banking, mining, borders, information, and communication technologies.

Does ACA apply to your business?

Research shows that people with disabilities have friends and loved ones who can be influenced when deciding which businesses to solicit, based on how inclusive brands are to those they care about. According to Rich Donovan, author of the book “Unleash Different”, the disability market, which is made up of people with disabilities and those who care about them represents over 53% of the population.

Can your business afford to ignore this growing market?

According to Statistics Canada, one in seven Ontarians self-report as having one disability. Collectively, they represent about 1.8 million people in the province. As the population ages, this proportion will rise to one in five people by 2036, or 20% of the population. Within 20 years, the income of Ontarians with disabilities and seniors is expected to represent 40% of the total income of Ontarians, or $536 billion CAD.

Can your business afford to say “no” to that many people?

According to Statistics Canada, about 48% of Canadian adults have literacy skills that fall below high school level, which regularly affects their ability to optimally function in society. Of those, 17% function at the lowest literacy level, where individuals may struggle with simple things like reading the newspaper or understanding dosage instructions on a medicine bottle.

Have you paid attention to the words you use to communicate with your audience lately?

When our inclusion strategy doesn’t consider disabilities, aging, marginalization caused by our use of technology, and cultural differences in our digital communication or during live, in-person, or virtual events, we can easily shut out up to 40% of our audience without even realizing it!

Can you imagine how many potential clients that might represent?