Sixty-one million American adults live with a disability. That’s 26% of the U.S. population. Most websites, mobile apps, and digital assets having accessibility issues—so this large group of people is often struggling to access the content they need, and most likely, that includes what they need to interact with your association. These difficulties could hinder engagement, enrollment, and donations.

As I stated in my “Making Digital Content Accessible & Inclusive” session during this year’s ASAE Annual Meeting & Exposition in Cleveland, whether your association is approaching digital accessibility for ethical reasons, market share, as a way to reduce operational costs, to address the cost of inaction, or to be conformant with laws and regulations, the best thing to do is just start. We all need to aspire for the intersectionality of inclusivity, accessibility, and usability to ensure digital properties and assets are accessible to all users.

When done well and at the right time, digital accessibility benefits everyone. This is called the curb cut effect. The ramps that are built into sidewalks—also called curb cuts—not only benefit the wheelchair user, they also help stroller-pushers, skateboarders, and people pulling luggage.

Similarly, digital accessibility considerations in websites improve usability for all users. It takes every role, at every level, across your entire organization working in concert to ensure digital accessibility conformance. Until that happens, your organization will continue to be reactive to it. And that is the most expensive model. To reduce time, effort, and organizational costs, your association needs to be proactive about accessibility.

In my session, (find the slides in the conference app), I presented information about current regulations, different frameworks organizations can use to transition to a proactive model, and resources that associations can begin to use right away.

Here are initial steps that could help you get started:

• Define who is responsible for, and define how they contribute to, digital accessibility
• Set up guidance on how and where accessibility requirements are documented—for example, who should be documenting the requirements related to Name / Role / Value and where should the developer be looking for that information
• Ensure your design systems and reusable components are accessible
• Enable your teams with awareness labs and education—in the session slides, there are many examples of free materials you could share that will drive awareness
• Use quality reviews and agile retrospectives to learn why accessibility defects happened and solve them to root cause so that you don’t make those same mistakes in the future
• Educate, equip, enable—the best way to enable your teams to support digital accessibility is to educate them and equip them with the tools and processes they need to ensure they are building things accessibly

People with disabilities and their family members represent 73% of consumers. That’s 3.4 billion people with an annual disposable income of $12.6 trillion. Everything that can be done to reduce user friction should be done—it ensures that you are reaching the broadest segment of your market as you possibly can.

As ASAE matures their response to digital accessibility and accessibility inclusion, continue to watch this space as we bring you more content about our journey, share practical and useful information for your organization and leaders, as well as spotlight member programs and their progress to conformance.