Samsung U.K. and OnePoll have just released the results of a major survey. A study conducted with 1,000 adults in the U.K. with visible and invisible disabilities showed that more than two thirds of those surveyed felt excluded due to accessibility issues.
The new study has just been announced and shows that just over half of the respondents “don’t think companies have an understanding of which accessibility features are important for consumers with disabilities.”
Samsung points out that brands may be missing out here as the spending power of disabled people and their households, which I learn is called the purple pound, comes to around $348 billion (£274 billion), it’s claimed, across the 16 million disabled people in the U.K.
Katharina Mayer is the Head of LifeStyle Lab Europe at Samsung and of the report she said, “This research has highlighted the huge opportunity for brands to better understand the accessibility needs of consumers to provide greater access for people with disabilities in the U.K. Companies are rarely able to test their ideas with diverse people with different needs, but this is a must.”
That’s all very well, but what should come next? Mayer say, “It’s time to re-write this narrative. When designers consider varied needs from the beginning, they don’t just serve people with disabilities – they create solutions that benefit everyone and that is the approach we take to inclusive design at Samsung.”
This has led to the company coming up with enhanced design principles, in something called Project INKlusion.
There are four new principles which Samsung describes as: “Stay Curious – create joy through play, learning and growing, Challenge Assumptions – deconstruct the ‘normal’, Celebrate Diversity – represent real life and Be the Change–create with, not for.”
Designing for everyone is such an obvious thing that it hardly needs stating, you might think, but that’s clearly not the case. The report says that four-fifths of those surveyed struggled with websites not optimized for accessibility with badly design checkout processes, a lack of text descriptions for images and poor navigation, for instance.
Samsung says it is committed to increasing accessibility, and all its TV screens and mobile screens have accessible voice and caption tools. Its wearables have vision accessibility features and the company talks of its hearing enhancements, voice feedback and Braille labels on smart appliances.
The company says the top tech innovations for people with disabilities are virtual assistants, smart home gadgets and wearables. So, we can expect to hear more from Alexa, Siri and Bixby in the future.
