Centre for Inclusive Design — Turning Accessibility Into a Four-Times-Bigger Market Case

In 2019, the Sydney-based Centre for Inclusive Design (CfID) partnered with Adobe and Microsoft to commission "The Benefit of Designing for Everyone," an economic-impact report prepared by PwC Australia. The report models how digital products designed around the needs of "edge users" — people experiencing disability, low literacy, poverty or age-related impairment — end up benefiting a far larger group: it cites electric toothbrushes (designed for around 40 million Americans with limited motor function, now used by roughly 120 million) and UK closed captioning (designed for people who are deaf or hard of hearing, now used by an estimated 7.5 million people, about four times the original target audience) as precedents, and estimates that at least 5 million Australians vulnerable to exclusion hold more than AUD 40 billion in combined annual disposable income.
CfID has since applied its co-design methodology to real organisational projects. For National Australia Bank (around 9 million customers), it tested an everyday transaction-account guide with vulnerable customers and co-designed a plain-language replacement. For the New South Wales Department of Customer Service, it audited a new government website against all 50 WCAG 2.1 Level AA success criteria, using both automated tools and manual testing across four browsers and desktop, mobile and tablet devices.
The headline "fourfold reach" and economic-benefit figures (including a modelled AUD 4.5 billion in potential salary-earnings impact and AUD 4 billion in potential retail-revenue growth) come from PwC's economic modelling commissioned by CfID and its industry partners rather than from an independent audit of realised outcomes, so they should be read as a modelled business case rather than measured after-the-fact impact; the bank and government audits, by contrast, describe concrete, verifiable work products.

Read the full analysis: https://centreforinclusivedesign.org.au/