In my experience, a fundamental disconnect exists between accessibility and the investing world when it comes to a statement that is blasted all over every investment web site when you are about to invest. You will read the statement that you should carefully read the prospectus before making any investment. Good luck with that as in my experience these documents are rarely, if ever, properly tagged for accessibility.
As just one example, typically deep within the multipage documents are tables of the individual investments the mutual fund or ETF holds. Yet the tables in every prospectus I’ve tried to read, more than 50 in the last few weeks, from at least 20 different companies, fail to tag tables properly.
This is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to accessibility of these documents. Should we talk about the charts and graphs in the same documents?
The Securities and Exchange Commission should mandate that to sell securities in the U.S. at least, all investment materials need to be WCAG 2.1/2.2 AA conformant and give the industry one year to comply. If legislation is needed to make such a mandate enforceable, then congress should craft and enact such.
Given the number of employers who include 401K programs as part of employment, every company who offers this to employees should be holding the investing world accountable today for this.
If anyone knows of an investment company or ETF or mutual fund provider who actually does these documents correctly today, I’d love to hear about it.
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