How Could Bank and Credit Union Website Managers Benefit from Target.com's Six Million Dollar Oversight?

By Jason Sherrill
Posted on Feb 4, 2009

Reading about the recent $6,000,000.00 settlement between Target Corporation, owners of Target.com retail e-commerce site, and the National Federation for the Blind (NFB) over the lack of website accessibility at Target.com for disabled people reminded me of an important topic that the banking industry seems to have largely missed. The Target settlement has stirred some high profile players like Amazon.com and RadioShack.com to consider their own website’s accessibility, both to stave off lawsuits and to capitalize on the lucrative revenue potential this 50 million¹ people strong group of customers represents.

While our clients don’t often ask about accessibility, we’ve been promoting the benefits since as early as 2001 when we published our first article about making sites accessible for elderly and handicap users, and then again in 2002 with our tips for designing banking websites for blind users. Now with loose legal precedent to pave the way for lawsuits, it is now vitally important for banks, credit unions, lending companies and other financial services companies to consider not only the financial & goodwill benefit of better serving disabled users online, but also the litigation risk of not doing so.

So why are so few credit union and bank websites not accessible?

Most people assume accessibility is a synonym for costly. While each site is different, upgrading an existing website to today’s accessibility best standards can range anywhere from a few thousand dollars to, for extremely large sites, millions. Sites that already adhere to strict XHTML, CSS and W3C standards without significant use of rich media will generally cost less to upgrade than media rich, non-conforming sites. On the other hand, planning for accessibility during the software design (aka, architecture design) process of a new site can help to achieve accessibility with perhaps a 10% to 30% increase in overall site development costs, which includes accessibility testing. For most bank and credit union websites, that amount of additional investment is immaterial.

Alright, so if cost isn’t the issue, what is?

Frankly, I believe the main reason why most bank and credit union websites are not designed for accessibility is because, (1) most web development professionals are largely unaware of the need and, (2) most credit union & bank decision makers don’t know to make accessibility a requirement when planning their online business channels. If you are in charge of your credit union’s or bank’s online channel, now you know to ask; likewise, if you’re a web development professional, make sure you’re aware of the need, get appropriate training and educate our clients.

Numerous resources exist online to aide software architects, web designers and other stakeholders, but the W3C section on accessibility is a good place to start.

1 - "FastStats A to Z" National Center for Health Statistics. Online. 17 Dec. 2008. Available: http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/disable.htm