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

Since 2019 the Sydney nonprofit Centre for Inclusive Design (CfID) has worked with corporate partners including Adobe and Microsoft to make an economic case for designing digital products around 'edge users' — people with disability, low literacy, or age-related impairment — and has since applied its co-design methodology inside real organisations.

To quantify the wider commercial benefit of inclusive design and to translate that case into concrete product and service changes at partner organisations.

CfID commissioned PwC Australia to model the economic case in 'The Benefit of Designing for Everyone' (2019), citing precedents such as electric toothbrushes and UK closed captioning where accessibility-driven designs reached far larger audiences than originally intended. It then audited and co-designed a plain-language transaction-account guide with National Australia Bank customers, and separately audited a new NSW Department of Customer Service website against all 50 WCAG 2.1 Level AA success criteria across four browsers and multiple device types.

PwC's modelling estimated that at least 5 million Australians vulnerable to exclusion hold more than AUD 40 billion in combined annual disposable income, and that inclusive design could unlock a modelled AUD 4.5 billion in potential salary-earnings impact and AUD 4 billion in potential retail-revenue growth; it also cites toothbrush and captioning precedents reaching roughly four times their original target users. The NAB and NSW government engagements produced concrete audit and co-design deliverables rather than modelled projections.

The headline economic figures come from commissioned modelling of potential impact rather than an independent measurement of realised outcomes, so they should be read as a business case rather than proven results; the bank and government audits are the more verifiable, if narrower, evidence of applied practice.