LinguaInclusa

Where Accessibility and Localization Meet

Disability Facts and Figures

Disability can be hard to advocate for without quantifiable data. In order to further educate your stakeholders, here are some facts and figures you can use at your disposal.

Relevant Figures

  • According to the World Health Organization (WHO), there are currently 1.3 billion people worldwide who experience or live with a significant disability.
    • This equates to about 1 in 6 people or 15% of the entire population.
  • Specific statistics per country can be found at the following link: https://unstats.un.org/unsd/demographic-social/sconcerns/disability/statistics/#!/countries
  • Globally, more than 2.5 billion people need one or more assistive products.
    • Assistive products can be defined as: hearing aids, wheelchairs, communication aids, spectacles, prostheses, pill organizers and memory aids
  • More than 70% of websites pose some form of “critical accessibility blockers” that prevent people with disabilities from viewing content.
    • The result for e-commerce companies equates to about a USD$ 6.9 billion loss in revenue.
    • A separate survey found that 98% of 1 million popular websites fail to meet legal accessibility requirements.
  •  In two separate studies by the UK and the US, it was found that:
    • Working-age Americans with disabilities have about USD$490 billion in disposable income and about USD$21 billion in discretionary income.
    • Families with at least one member with disabilities in the UK had a total spending power of GBP£249 billion.

Additionally, my own survey found that around 91.7% of future and current localization professionals found accessibility to be a “need-to-have” feature. 66.6% of respondents could not correctly identify the proportion of the population that was disabled (either by over- or under-estimating). Only 58.3% recognized that there were over 90 countries requiring legal protections of the disabled.

When presented with processes that overlap in localization and accessibility, there were 10 out of 12 responses that recognized all processes to be necessary to both issues.

Text posing the question "Which of the following would you consider integral to successful localization or part of the localization process", a check box list displays the following options: "Subtitling/Dubbing for media assets Building Dynamic UI (i.e: no hard coded strings, container sizes that account for text expansion/contraction) Choosing specific colors/themes for your product/service/brand Choosing specific fonts to support your text User Testing Performing checks on source assets (making sure the material is not offensive, can be understood in other locales) Ensuring legibility of content especially text-based content (Can the user view our product?) Ensuring there are text alternatives where appropriate (using a play button instead of the word "play", adding alternative text to media assets) Making sure there is support for keyboard shortcuts or alternative ways to interact with the material All of the above"
Question posed about localization/accessibility processes, the questions only differed by replacing the word “localization” and “accessibility”

It should be noted that the survey size was only 12 and does not fully represent all localization professionals; however, many of the contributors to this website also agreed that they are fundamentally aiming to provide the same purpose: to make content accessible by the largest number of people.

Facts

  • A study conducted by the WHO found that structural factors, namely cultural and societal factors, contribute towards health inequities for people with disabilities.
    • These were listed as ableism and stigmatism.
    • Removal of this barriers could possibly aid in greater equity for people with disabilities.
  • Serious fines and sanctions can be imposed for NOT having an accessible website, product, content, and/or service.
  • Many accessibility features can aid in the localization process.
    • These include but are not limited to:
      • Dynamic UI
      • Subtitles
      • Refusal to hard-code strings
      • Intentional color choices

Conclusion

Based on available data, it can be said that accessibility and localization not only go hand-in-hand but also allows for greater revenue draws and a wider audience. Before going to your stakeholder, it’s important to do research on your locales as well as legal ramifications that can spawn from non-compliance to accessibility requirements. And most importantly, make sure that you talk to your users, especially those with disabilities. They can provide more crucial feedback than any number or factoid on a webpage can.