大象传媒

Taking a punt on accessibility

• By Paul Crichton
• 2 Nov 06, 04:51 PM

How would you like to lose 拢1,000 a year? OK, maybe that isn't the best way of putting it.

Instead, why don't you imagine you run a multi-million pound online gambling business ... one that's just been outlawed? Now, how would you like to get access to 1.9 million potential customers? Expanding into new areas, whilst your competitors are still coming to terms with a suddenly and dramatically emaciated market after , has to be a smart move. Yet I'm not aware of it being on the agenda at yesterday's big .

To explain the figures, according to statistics published on , websites like partypoker.com and 888.com have around a million UK users gambling a billion pounds a year. That's a thousand quid each! And it is estimated that around 1.9 million adults in the UK are visually impaired. If a potential market of that size doesn't make a compelling business case for making a website accessible, I don't know what is. And that's just in the UK, never mind Europe.

This week

So you might expect the race to be on to secure new markets. Which of the big players holds the winning hand? Well, it's a dead heat, with all of them in joint last place. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying it will be easy to make online poker games accessible to everyone. But with that sort of pot to be won, there is a good incentive for someone to do it.

Does anyone know of an accessible poker website game out there?

It would be remiss of me just to look at the gambling websites. Once they hook you, and you've spent a thousand pounds, what are your chances of getting help to escape your new found betting addiction? Gamblers Anonymous is no great shakes either. It's largely text-based, but don't let that fool you - the proliferation of 'click here' links makes it all a bit of a lottery as to where you end up in navigating the website.

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