Forrester: Firms Are Making Digital Accessibility A Global Priority — Yet Challenges Remain

In observance of this year's Global Accessibility Awareness Day, Forrester continues to explore how accessibility is increasingly becoming a priority for firms worldwide - especially as people with disabilities comprise the world's largest minority market, spending close to $2 trillionannually.

Among global design teams, more than a third of companies (36%) have expressed executive-level commitments to create accessible digital experiences. Without formal executive commitments, this number spikes to 48% given employee-driven grassroots efforts to accelerate these experiences.

Still, challenges to widespread accessibility adoption remain. Despite firms recognizing that accessibility is core to comprehensive diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) strategy, many fail to include accessibility as a required skill for designers, developers, and other digital roles in training and hiring. While industries like financial services prioritize accessibility, others like retail still tend to treat it as a check-the-box compliance exercise, Forrester adds.

To help customer experience (CX) and design leaders better serve the needs of the world's disabled population, Forrester analysts are providing real-time strategies and best practices for these professionals to deliver more inclusive, accessible, and user-friendly digital experiences. These are further offered across several reports, including:

Digital Accessibility: Where To Begin And How To Build A Successful Accessibility Practice:

• • Learn what accessibility is; how to convince leaders it is important; and what steps firms should take to begin maturation to digital accessibility.

• • This report answers several questions about how organizations can start their respective accessibility practices, including best practices for training teams on accessibility and top accessibility cost drivers.

Ensure Greater Diversity, Equity, And Inclusion When Designing Inclusive Experiences:

• • To yield innovation, companies should recruit people with disabilitiesto participate in design research - instead of approaching accessibility from a compliance-driven perspective.

• • Firms can learn moreabout best practices for using accessible and more broadly, inclusive, text content in forms, product marketing pages, and any other interactions that make up their customer's experience.

• • Here, best practices are outlined for helping firms attract and retain talent and ensure DEI success by designing experiences for all customers in a target market - factoring in and learning from the full range of human diversity with respect to ability, gender identity, language, race, socioeconomic status, and other characteristics. Further research from Forresterfinds that a key digital CX and design trend in 2022 will be digital teams prioritizing inclusion when creating experiences.

• • Learn whyDEI in design teams matters and discoverbest practices from design leaders committed to creating diverse and inclusive design teams.

To learn more about best practices for choosing an accessibility partner who can assist with short- and long-term accessibility goals, visit here.

If interested in accessing any of these reports and connecting further with a Forrester analyst about global accessibility and inclusion, please reach out to [email protected].

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