Today (12/11/2019) is Purple Tuesday, an international call to action to celebrate the spending power of people with disabilities and their families (aka the purple pound).
Organised by Purple, a disability organisation committed to bringing together business and people with disabilities, Purple Tuesday is all about changing the customer experience for people with disabilities.
A huge, relatively untapped market
According to Purple Tuesday, the global consumer spending power of people with disabilities and their families, known as the Purple Pound, is a massive £2.25 trillion.
But fewer than 10% of businesses have a targeted plan to access this disability market.
This mismatch between supply and demand shows the commercial opportunities available for organisations.
And it also sadly underlines the lack of accessibility for people with disabilities, when it comes to spending their money.
Purple Tuesday aims to make any business or organisation that interacts with customers or clients who are disabled more aware of the opportunities and challenges that exist. It also aims to inspire these businesses and organisations to make changes to improve the customer experience for people with disabilities.
Digital accessibility is as important as physical accessibility
Purple Tuesday rightly highlights the need to make both physical and online customer experiences accessible for people with disabilities. Click-Away Pound is a research survey that explores the online shopping experience of people with disabilities and examines the cost to business of ignoring shoppers who are disabled.
The findings of The Click-Away Pound Survey in 2016 showed how important it is for UK retailers to change their approach to customers with disabilities and improve the digital accessibility of websites and apps.
According to the results:
- 71% of customers with disabilities who have access needs will click away from a website that they find difficult to use.
- Those customers who click away have an estimated spending power of £11.75 billion in the UK alone, around 10% of the total UK online spend in 2016.
- 82% of customers with access needs would spend more if websites were more accessible
Will the 2019 survey results show a big improvement, a mixed picture or a backward step?
It’s an exciting piece of research that’s worth keeping a close eye on!
Making websites more accessible with assistive technology
If you know you need to make your website work better to claim your slice of the Purple Pound, the Recite Me assistive toolbar is a great resource to add to any website to make it more accessible for people with disabilities.
Recite Me is a cloud-based assistive technology toolbar that offers web visitors a range of features to customise your website and its web content, so that they can consume it in ways that work best for them.
For example, 285 million people worldwide have a visual impairment, and Recite Me has a screen reader that helps website visitors to perceive and understand your digital content by reading website text aloud.
It also allows people to change the way a website looks. Users are able to customise the website’s colour scheme as well as the text font style, size, colour, and spacing. This is a great aid for the roughly one in ten people in the world who have dyslexia.
Ultimately, Recite Me can help you improve your website’s conversion rate optimization by increasing the number of enquiries and sales through your website.
The use and impact of the Recite Me toolbar can be effectively measured by showing successful sales and other rich insights into your customers’ buying behaviour.
