Accessibility standards are in place to ensure that developers have included accessibility from the onset of their projects. Otherwise millions of people with disabilities are not able to access information or services online. Post-pandemic, more and more organisations will expect their consumers to do their business online. If accessibility is only an afterthought, persons with disabilities will continue to face sometimes insurmountable challenges.
A recent audit of the top US banks' websites showed that none of the banks were fully compliant with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), regarded as the international standard for web accessibility.The audit found that many of the sites examined had hundreds of technical accessibility errors in addition to readability problems. In addition, online content is often hard to understand, particularly for those with cognitive difficulties and low literacy.