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Measuring the Hidden Costs of Exclusion
In a recent post, we talked about the fact that as a professional communicator, you might be leaving some serious money on the table when you fail to pay attention to inclusion principles when sharing your thoughts and ideas with your audience. Let’s go one step further today, and analyze just how much money we might be talking about.
If you’ve been following our conversation, you’re probably starting to realize that a lack of inclusion can quickly lead to lost opportunities and sales, hurt feelings, resentment, and negative reviews from a significant portion of your audience. If you ignore or dismiss audience members who have disabilities, are getting older, or are potentially marginalized by the way that you use technology, you consequently leave out a considerable portion of your potential customer base that controls billions of dollars annually. That just can’t be good for business.
We know that between 20% of working-age Canadians self-identify as having one or more disabilities and that over 19% of Canadian seniors will also experience age-related sensory issues. What this means is that at any given time, you can expect close to 40% of your audience to be at risk of facing a variety of accessibility challenges. Avoiding or mitigating those issues will require you to put in the extra work to meet their needs and expectations. Ignoring these…
