Accessibility at Aon

What is Accessibility?

When talking about digital accessibility, it's helpful to group disabilities into the following three categories: physical, cognitive and temporary. The following examples are not exhaustive, but can help you understand the scope of disability.  

Temporary disabilities

Broken arm

May limit your ability to use a keyboard

A loud or quiet space

May make it challenging to listen to audio content

Being a non-native speaker of the language at hand

May make it challenging to listen to audio content

A poor internet connection

May result in your device being unable to load images

Digital Design System

Like usability, accessibility is not a singular effort. Rather, it is a lens through which user needs are understood and addressed. The digital design system follows many of the W3C guidelines described in WCAG 2.1, and we are engaged in ongoing efforts to continually make it more accessible.

Below are a few things we do to ensure it meets the needs of Aon's diverse users:

• Touch points for interactive elements such as buttons are 44px, making them easy to tap on mobile devices.
• High contrast color combinations ensure readability
• Interactive elements are clearly identifiable.
• Important information is conveyed using multiple indicators: color, text, shape, etc.
• Information hierarchy is clearly structured.
• Clear feedback is given when users complete a task.

Accessibility and Aon

Expands our market share

In addition to expanding our market share, many of Aon’s existing clients require that products be accessible.

Scope of Impact

• Globally, 15.6% of people ages 18 and up have a disability (source: The World Bank and the WHO)
• 19% or 57 million people in America have a physical or cognitive disability. (source: US Census)
• 22% or 14.1 million people in the UK have a disability. (source: Family Resources Survey 2019/20)
• 6.34% or 82.96 million people in China have a disability (source: International Labour Organization)
• Many of Aon's clients require that our products be accessible.

Spending

• Americans with disabilities represent more than $200 billion in discretionary spending. (source: US Department of Labor)
• In the U.K., £249 billion of spending power is held by disabled people and their households (source: Purple)
• In China, the employment rate for people with disabilities reached 80% in 2007 (source: International Labour Organization)

Internet Access

• In the U.K., 71% of disabled internet users have a disability that impacts the way they use the internet (source: The Click-Away Pound Report 2019)
• Those with disabilities have greater difficulty in completing insurance applications, learning about benefits, and getting reimbursed for claims (The World Bank and The Who)

Engages a diverse workforce

• Creating an accessible workplace gives us access to a larger talent pool of roughly 10.7 million Americans. (source: Accenture)
• People with disabilities take less time off and have higher retention rates than their non-disabled counterparts. (source: The Chicago Lighthouse)
• Companies that prioritize disability inclusion have 28% higher revenue, 30% higher profit margins and 2x the net income than their peers. (source: Accenture)

Drives technology forward

• Accessibility improves the user experience for everyone.
• When you account for users on extreme ends of the spectrum, you catch everyone in the middle as well.
• It promotes best practices in design, development, and content.
• Accessibility is good for search engine optimization (SEO), increasing visibility on search engine page results.
• Many of Aon's clients score highly for workplace disability inclusion. (source: Disability Equality Index)

Assistive Technologies

• The basics…terminology definitions, an overview of what users need to know for what we’ll refer to later on in the system
• Browser default features/things that are affected by them
• OS features/things that are affected by them
• General info on screen readers; Similarities & differences between them
• How audiences leverage these different technologies

Accessibility & Color

Color is an important tool for adding meaning to design. However, colors are not seen uniformly by everyone.

Color blindness is a condition that affects up to 8% of males and 0.5% of females, making it a fairly common condition that we want to take into consideration when applying color to designs.

Types of color blindness

• Red-green
  Difficulty distinguishing between reds, greens, browns and oranges.
• Blue-yellow
  Difficulty distinguishing between blue and yellow, violet and red and blue and green. To these people, the world appears as generally red, pink, black, white, gray and turquoise.
• Total
  Can see no color at all. Sight consists of different shades of grey.

Designing with color

Ensuring that colors have a large enough distinction from one another optimizes designs for users across the vision spectrum, including those with color blindness and low vision, as well as users with no visual impairments.

Providing high contrast allows all users to more quickly recognize differences in color and thereby meaning, which may improve overall user experience, including when making decisions by comparing dissimilar items. As such, designs should strive to reach a 3:1 contrast ratio between colors used in the same visual. This is the minimum requirement for AA Contrast.

EXAMPLES