Incentivising web accessibility via a lottery-style contest

Summary: A high percentage of top websites have accessibility issues, preventing those with disabilities from accessing content. A non-profit can incentivize improvements through a lottery-style contest rewarding fixed sites, fostering long-term accessibility awareness and enhancements.

96.3% of the internet's top one million websites have accessibility issues. As a result, people with a wide variety of disabilities (from visual impairment to ADHD and dsylexia) are unable to access the content on the internet. Making websites accessible isn't hard (especially not with all the AI tools out there now); it's just not something most people bother about because the proportion of people who have such disabilities is relatively small. In other words, they just don't have a strong enough incentive to do it. And without an incentive, fixing accessibility issues will rarely make it to the top of the priority list.

I want to fix this incentive structure. One great approach seems to be to create a non-profit that regularly runs a lottery-style contest. First, the non-profit fundraises a pool of a few thousand dollars from donors and advertisers. Then, it declares an invitation-only accessibility contest. The non-profit identifies many relatively-popular websites that have major accessibility issues (either manually or via some software) and sends them an invite to this contest. If they accept the invite, they're given detailed instructions. Basically, they would need to fix their accessibility issues within a set period of time (a month perhaps). Of all the website owners who fixed their issues, you would randomly pick one or two and give the entire pool of money to them.

Why might this work? Fixing the accessibility issues costs the company very little but right now there is no incentive. When they see a potential upside of thousands of dollars, I think they are more likely to put it up their priority list.

The NGO can run this contest several times each year. Each iteration, thousands of websites are made accessible. And importantly, once a website has been made accessible, it will probably stay like that for several years and its development team would've learnt how to include accessibility best practices in their work. This has the potential to benefit thousands of individuals with disabilities, for a long time.

Source of Idea:

I was initially inspired to think of a solution to the accessibility problem by this eye-opening ted talk from Clive Loseby.

Then recently, a friend told me about a similar-spirited project he was doing in his university. He invited 40+ clubs at his university to compete; the requirement was simple: they needed to include alt-text and captions on all their social media posts over the next months; of the clubs that did this properly, he would randomly award one $400 (which he received from a grant). I thought it was absolutely brilliant and something that could be scaled a lot more.

Skills Needed to Execute This Idea:

Non-Profit ManagementFundraising StrategiesWeb Accessibility StandardsProject CoordinationSoftware DevelopmentCommunity EngagementMarketing and PromotionData AnalysisEvent PlanningLegal ComplianceGrant WritingTechnical WritingStakeholder CommunicationUser Experience Design

Categories:Raising AwarenessWeb DevelopmentAccessibilityNon-profit

Hours To Execute (basic)

300 hours to execute minimal version ()

Hours to Execute (full)

500 hours to execute full idea ()

Estd No of Collaborators

1-10 Collaborators ()

Financial Potential

$1M–10M Potential ()

Impact Breadth

Affects 10M-100M people ()

Impact Depth

Substantial Impact ()

Impact Positivity

Probably Helpful ()

Impact Duration

Impacts Lasts 3-10 Years ()

Uniqueness

Moderately Unique ()

Implementability

Moderately Difficult to Implement ()

Plausibility

Reasonably Sound ()

Replicability

Easy to Replicate ()

Market Timing

Good Timing ()

Project Type

Other

Project idea submitted by u/itgetsbetter.