Given the large and growing segment of people with disabilities, businesses stand to benefit with increased opportunities through new global markets and an expanded, highly qualified talent pool.

Access to Larger Markets

Designing with access in mind has the potential to significantly increase the size of markets and revenues for American companies. This consumer segment is already large and will grow at an expanding rate. Worldwide, there are an estimated 500 to 700 million people with disabilities.²⁰

Offering UD products, services and systems will give American firms a competitive advantage in tapping large global markets. Consumer products designed to assist the world’s 500 to 700 million people with disabilities can also greatly benefit other even larger groups of consumers. For example, over 1.6 billion people around the world cannot read, but most of them can hear and speak, thereby creating a very large market for technologies that enable communication through text-to-speech synthesis. In fact, if only 10 percent of the market were tapped, it would amount to 160 million people.

Consumer products that permit voice input and simultaneously produce voice output are equally valuable to people who have difficulty typing, people who cannot see a digital display and people who can both type and see, but cannot read or write. This example demonstrates the potential for a broader, larger market. Commercial product designs that incorporate the principles of UD will increase the number of potential customers who can use a product.

Diversity and Access to Talent

Deploying AT in the workplace will improve national productivity by enabling a company to increase the pool of candidates, thereby ensuring recruitment of the most talented minds. Today, great numbers of people with disabilities are earning college degrees. A new study by the American Council on Education reports a significant increase in the number of college students with disabilities over the last 10 years.

Among the 1.6 million full-time freshmen enrolled at 3,100 institutions of higher education in the United States in 1998 — the most recent figures available — some 154,520, or 9.4 percent, had some kind of disability.²¹ In 1978, by contrast, less than three percent of freshmen reported having a disability. We should also point out the likelihood of under reporting of disabilities for various reasons.

Companies will benefit from tapping into the talent pool of people with disabilities and need to do so to bring greater numbers of qualified people into the workplace. Growing numbers of American companies are forming public private partnerships to encourage the hiring of disabled workers and to ensure that employees with disabilities get the technology they need to be productive. AT breaks down the barriers that prevent people with disabilities from finding productive and fulfilling employment.