Who is digital accessibility for?

According to last US census results, about 19% of the United States population identifies as having a disability. That works out to roughly 57 million individual people. Thinking of these numbers in a different way, there are more people with disabilities than populations of New York and California combined. If you consider a global audience, you are talking about 15% of the world’s population according to the World Health Organization (WHO). That is over one billion people worldwide!

Of course 19% is a huge number of people who could benefit from an accessible website or app right from the start, but keep in mind, the official numbers do not even include people that either do not identify as having a disability or those populations that could benefit from accessible websites and apps, such as the aging population — so the number of people needing accessibility in reality is closer to 32% if you just consider those two groups. And of course, that number will continue to grow as people live longer and technology becomes even more prevalent and important to our daily lives.