Accessibility of Products and Services to Disabled People

This is a very cut down version of the report which you can read in full here >>>>>

The purple pound

There are an estimated 16 million disabled people in the UK.11 The combined spending power of households with at least one disabled person—known as the purple pound—is worth approximately £274 billion per year to the UK economy.12 During our inquiry we heard that, by failing to consider accessibility from the outset (inclusive design), businesses were underestimating the potential of the purple pound, resulting in lower revenues for them and limiting the choice available to disabled consumers.

Loosing Money

Research has found that most sectors of the economy are losing money each month as a result of being inaccessible to disabled people, with banks or building societies (£935 million), supermarkets (£501 million) and high street shops (£267 million) among the worst performing.15 Vivienne Francis, Chief Social Change Officer at the Royal Institute of Blind People (RNIB), told us that disabled people, particularly those who were blind or partially sighted, “are an afterthought and you can see that playing out across packaging and financial services; in fact, some things [such as bank cards which we consider later], are becoming even less accessible”.

Help Businesses To Understand

Guy - "But will they?"

The Disability Action Plan published in February 2024—which is separate to the National Disability Strategy and outlines what the Government will do for the remainder of this Parliament—includes a commitment to “help businesses to understand the needs and deliver improvements for disabled people”

Downgraded

Several policies in the National Disability Strategy were paused due to the High Court ruling the strategy unlawful in January 2022 (overturned in July 2023) and are yet to be implemented. Two of those policies were specific to improving consumer choice. The first was establishing an Extra Costs Taskforce by summer 2022—bringing together disabled people, regulators and businesses—to understand the extra costs of being disabled. This objective now appears to be downgraded from a firm commitment to something the Government will explore.

A Lack Of Awareness

A 2020 report by the digital agency Inviqa, based on research with over 100 professionals involved in creating digital products and services in the UK, revealed the most common barriers to inclusive design. Those were a lack of clear ownership within the organisation (43% of respondents), not having the right people or skills (16%) and finding it hard to justify the spend (11%). The report also found a lack of awareness and understanding within businesses on the scale of access needs: 73% were unable to identify how many people in the UK had a disability or impairment, while 81% were unaware of the value of the purple pound.

Disability Is Considered At The End

The Inviqa report found that only 31% of companies had considered accessibility when researching customers’ needs, with just 19% factoring it into decisions on what products to build.17Eric Harris, Director of Inclusive Research at the Research Institute for Disabled Consumers, suggested that because most of the population were not registered disabled, businesses did not factor disability into their economic forecasts when bringing a product or service to market. As a result, “disability is considered at the end, not at the start”.

Guy - "Certainly with websites and Digital Apps this is so true. If organisations had information and involved people with lived experiences at the beginning of a project then everybody would benefit".