In the insurance industry, documents represent the vital communications between the insurer and the insured, yet, for those who are blind or partially sighted, reading and understanding documents is difficult or impossible without the help of a sighted person or an assistive device. This may be especially true of websites and related digital communications channels, which are primarily visual media and often problematic for the 15% to 20% of the U.S. population that is blind or partially sighted, a number that is expected to increase with the aging baby boomer population. Given that they have global spending power of $6 trillion, according to the World Wide Web Consortium’s report “The Business Case for Digital Accessibility,” addressing this market is a business strategy well worth pursuing.
The U.S., Canada and other jurisdictions have enacted laws requiring documents, including those posted on websites, to be made accessible to those with visual impairments. Some of the most prominent legislation includes the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) of 1990 and the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, Sections 504 and 508 in the U.S., as well as the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act (AODA) in Canada. Over recent years, there has been a 400% increase in demand letters to businesses and an annual 37% increase in Department of Justice (DOJ) lawsuits related to website accessibility.
In October 2019, the U.S. Supreme Court sustained a lower court’s decision in a case brought by a blind individual who claimed discrimination when he was unable to order a pizza via the internet because he couldn’t read the restaurant’s website. Though the ruling was announced only a few months ago, it set a loud and clear precedent for the increasing number of lawsuits related to the accessibility of internet-based communications and transactions. If such a ruling can take place over something like eating pizza, imagine what we have to be concerned about in the insurance industry with its ever-growing body of regulations?
See also: The Best Boost to Customer Experience
Privacy is also an important issue. When customers access sensitive personal information, such as their health records or policy documents, they should not have to ask someone they know to read a document to them or have a call center representative offer to read it over the phone. All customers want the ability to conduct their own affairs. Making your organization’s documents accessible shows respect for your customers’ privacy and desire for independence.
Options for making documents accessible
To truly meet the individual needs of visually impaired customers, employees and others, insurers may need the ability to produce documents in a variety of accessible formats, such as Braille, large print, e-text or audio formats made available online or produced on a CD. Most organizations work with a third-party provider for printed documents, using specialized software for creation of large print or Braille formats and mailing them to customers.
Accessible PDF and Accessible HTML are growing in popularity for making communications compliant and can be accessed through a website or web portal.
Developing a new website or reworking an existing one to make it accessible requires special knowledge and skills that can go beyond those of some website designers, possibly necessitating training or the use of consultants. For example, designers must familiarize themselves with the specific applicable industry standards. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has established the primary international standard for accessibility on the web, called the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). WCAG 2.0, published in 2008, provides comprehensive guidelines regarding how to make a website accessible, including the documents accessed through it. The guidelines include four principles of web content accessibility: It must be perceivable, operable, understandable and robust.
The public-facing static documents that reside on your website will also need to be made into accessible formats. The initial conversion can be outsourced to organizations that can provide a fast and cost-effective migration. Tools and training can be employed to keep updated documents accessible as they are updated.
Transactional documents that are individually created and contain personal information can be set up manually with accessibility components when the document is created in its source composition software, as long as the software supports adding accessibility features. While this will normally make the document immediately accessible when output to a digital format such as Accessible PDF or HTML, it also has drawbacks in terms of the time and employee training required to do it, as well as increased storage costs. Making transactional documents accessible from the outset is challenging because few customer communications management (CCM) document composition software solutions can include accessibility components within documents and create WCAG-compliant documents.
See also: How to Improve the Customer Journey
Because of these challenges, an automated, post-document-composition method of achieving document accessibility is often preferable. This approach makes it possible to enable content to be properly “tagged” for accessibility no matter what system was used to compose the document. When the conversion is executed during retrieval from the archive, it also significantly reduces the cost of archiving the large files that are created with accessible documents, because documents don’t need to be stored in their accessible form. Automation also avoids the delays involved if documents are made accessible only upon request.
Those companies understanding the ramifications of expensive fines and damaging publicity have been at the forefront of making their websites and digital documents accessible to all. They also understand that taking an aggressive approach to accessibility is more likely to gain and keep loyal customers within the growing population with vision loss. Individuals with or without vision loss will select the insurers they interact with based on how easy it is to work with them. Supporting this growing market is an investment in the future of your company.
