The results of the newly-released Click-Away Pound 2019 survey show that UK retailers lose out on £17 billion by ignoring the online needs of shoppers with disabilities.
Click-Away Pound is a research survey conducted by Freeney Williams designed to explore the online shopping experience of people with disabilities in the UK and the cost to business of ignoring shoppers who are disabled.
Key Survey Results
- Online spending power of people with access needs in the UK is £24.8 billion
- The number of internet users with a disability has passed 10 million
- 70% of people with access needs will click away from an inaccessible
- The click-away pound in the UK in 2019 now stands at £17.1 billion
- 75% of users with access needs feel accessibility is more important than the price
- 83% of users with access needs limit their shopping to sites they know are barrier-free
- Only 8% of users with access needs contacted the site owner about barriers they experience
To accommodate people with differing abilities your website must be accessible. Making your website accessible allows people with their own supporting technology to use your website effectively or makes it easier for businesses to provide assistive technology to support everyone.
In February 2019, WebAIM conducted an accessibility evaluation of the home pages for the top 1,000,000 websites. The study discovered that 97.8% of homepages failed to comply with Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), which are the globally accepted guidelines to follow for web accessibility.
This means the homepages of these websites aren’t accessible for some people with disabilities. Leading to people clicking away from inaccessible websites and spending their money elsewhere online.
How can you support people online?
If you want to make your website accessible to attract a wider audience and claim your portion of the Click Away pound, the Recite Me assistive toolbar is a great resource to allow everyone to explore your products and services barrier-free.
Recite Me is a cloud-based accessibility and language support toolbar that provides a wide range of features to give a user full control over the customisation of the website to suit their needs. These features include screen reader, styling options, reading aids and a translation tool with over 100 languages, including 35 text to speech voices.
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 rich insights into your customers’ buying behaviour.
1000’s of organisations already use Recite Me to make their websites more accessible for online visitors. To find out more or to book a demo please contact the team.
