Do digital accessibility metrics matter — and what happens when we don’t have them?

By Lucy Ruck, Technology Taskforce Lead at Business Disability Forum.

That question surfaced again and again on a sunny day in May 2025, when members of the Technology Taskforce gathered at NatWest to share what really mattered to them in digital accessibility. We had so many diverse perspectives in the room, with representatives from PwC, Google, BBC and Government Digital Services to name a few. We covered a vast range of topics, but one theme kept rising to the top: what are we measuring, why should we measure and what should we be measuring next?

Everyone in the room agreed that digital accessibility is critical to business. But showing its value, proving progress, identifying gaps, and making the case for investment is much harder without meaningful data. As Jenny Lay-Flurrie, long-time friend of the Taskforce, often reminds us: “If you don’t know how accessible it is, it probably isn’t.” In a world where data and AI are increasingly driving business processes and decisions, we need to ensure that digital accessibility data is included.

So, we’ve begun capturing the metrics our organisations already use and exploring what else would help us understand accessibility in a more consistent, actionable way. To simplify and focus we grouped metrics into a framework that reflect the distinct parts of the accessibility journey with 3 pillars emerging: People, Process, Product.

People Metrics: tracking employee engagement in digital accessibility

Measuring employee involvement in related activities – and the resulting level of knowledge and expertise – helps foster an inclusive culture focused solely on digital actions and progress, rather than disability disclosure or broader DE&I data. The central focus of people metrics is on behaviours, ongoing learning and the development of a supportive community. These indicators reveal how aware staff members are of best practices and whether the organisation is building the capability and confidence necessary across teams to create accessible digital environments.

Examples of people metrics include:

• Number of unique visitors accessing the accessibility resource,
• Percentage of employees who have completed accessibility training,
• Accessibility Champions successfully onboarded,
• Participation, engagement, and feedback from workshop attendees.

Process Metrics: Embedding accessibility into organisational practices

Knowing how integrated accessibility is within an organisation’s operational workflows, governance structures and everyday working practices provides insight into whether accessibility is genuinely embedded into daily operations, extending from the initial design and development phases through to vendor management and testing.

Monitoring process metrics reflects the organisation’s maturity in integrating accessibility early in product planning, embedding it into development pipelines established within governance policies, preventing accessibility-related defects and ensuring suppliers are held accountable for meeting accessibility standards.

Examples of process metrics include:

• Integration of accessibility into design and planning steps,
• Implementation of automated testing within development pipelines,
• Leakage of accessibility defects into releases,
• Maturity of supplier accessibility requirements.

Product Metrics: Evaluating accessibility of digital outputs and user experiences

Oriented towards evaluating the accessibility of digital outputs and the actual outcomes users experience, product-focused metrics provide a clear indication of how accessible your digital products and services are to users and how they change over time.

This is achieved through various indicators, ranging from established conformance testing and reporting approaches through to leveraging qualitative insights from users themselves. It’s important that these metrics can be applied to a wide range of digital products, including websites, applications, digital content or PDFs, so that activities can be compared across products and teams.

Examples of product metrics include:

• Frequency and outcomes of accessibility conformance testing,
• Tracking and remediation of important accessibility defects,
• Maturity of disabled user research and feedback,
• Tracking and analysis of customer accessibility-related complaints.

Where next?

It was clear from the outset that while progress on digital accessibility can be tracked in many different ways within organisations, identifying common themes helps others to improve what activities they measure and how they do it. Our intention is to expand our People, Process, Product framework into a toolkit that organisations can use to understand what metrics others have found useful, gaps in areas they aren’t measuring and how they could adapt them to suit their needs.

To aid this, we are interested in the metrics that you have found genuinely useful or would love to use. We would love to hear from you. What metrics do you rely on to track digital accessibility progress — and what do you wish you could measure but can’t yet? Whether you’re counting automated scan results, tracking training uptake, or experimenting with something entirely different, drop your thoughts in the comments of this blog on LinkedIn. The more we share what works (and what doesn’t), the faster we all move forward.

Accessibility does not improve by accident; it improves by measurement. If we don’t measure accessibility, we’re only guessing who we’re excluding.