At Equalize Digital, we collaborate with many other agencies and developers working to build more accessibility into their practices. They frequently ask us two versions of the same question: “How can I get my boss to prioritize accessibility?” or “How can I convince my clients to invest in accessibility?”
No matter how the question is worded, it asks the same thing. How can we make website accessibility seem important enough for people to want to spend time and money on it?
Arguments for Prioritizing Accessibility
There are several arguments for why organizations should prioritize and invest in accessibility frequently cited by accessibility professionals. If you’ve attended a talk I’ve given, you likely heard me list the following arguments for accessibility.
Legal Compliance
In many countries around the world, laws require websites to be accessible. Some laws require only public sector (government) websites to be accessible. But, increasingly, laws worldwide also require business and nonprofit websites to be accessible to people with disabilities.
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Examples of laws that require website accessibility include:
- Section 508 (U.S.A.)
- Americans with Disabilities Act (U.S.A.)
- Unruh Civil Rights Act (California, U.S.A.)
- Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act (Ontario, Canada)
- Accessibility for Manitobans Act (Manitoba, Canada)
- European Accessibility Act (E.U.)
- Public Sector Bodies (Websites and Mobile Applications) Accessibility Regulations (U.K.)
These are just a few examples of the 80+ website accessibility laws worldwide. Failure to comply with these regulations can result in legal action and financial penalties. Either in the form of government fines or lawsuit settlements.
Broader Audience Reach
Many accessibility remediation efforts overlap with search engine optimization (SEO) efforts. Google and other search engines require semantic HTML and quality code to understand what websites are about. Improving accessibility on websites can help them to rank better in search engines, thus bringing more traffic to the site.
Beyond bringing more traffic in general, making a website accessible broadens the customer group who can use it. People with disabilities make up a significant portion of the global population (1 in 6 people). By making your website accessible, you ensure this group can engage with your products, services, and content.
When people with disabilities can use your website, it can lead to increased conversions. They develop loyalty and regularly return to interact with your organization.
Enhanced User Experience
Improving accessibility often leads to a better overall user experience for all visitors, not just people with disabilities. Accessible websites typically have cleaner layouts and clearer navigation. They may have faster load times due to reduced use of animations and JavaScript. There may be more clearly defined paths or journeys leading users to take the actions you want them to take.
These all translate to a better user experience for everyone, including you and me. It can contribute to increased conversions overall.
Ethical and Moral Imperatives
Ensuring website accessibility is a matter of social responsibility and ethical obligation.
Everyone should have equal access to information, products, and services, regardless of their abilities. All people should be able to live a happy and healthy life.
If we want ourselves, our children, or our grandmother to be able to access a website, we should want everyone to be able to access it. Website accessibility is just the right thing to do.
Live Corporate Values
By prioritizing accessibility, organizations demonstrate their commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives. In today’s business culture, corporations create values and meaningful mission statements. Having an accessible website is a way organizations can live the values they’ve put on paper (or on the wall).
Any organization that says it values DEI or the community but doesn’t have an accessible website is not living that value. Prioritizing accessibility on the web and investing in digital accessibility is one way that organizations can practice what they preach.
Create a Positive Brand Image
In line with living corporate values, prioritizing accessibility can also help organizations build a positive brand image in the public. Consumers increasingly expect businesses to prioritize inclusivity and diversity. By investing in accessibility, organizations show that they value all customers and stakeholders.
Creating advertisements or social media posts that showcase the organization’s efforts to prioritize accessibility can improve or grow it’s reputation among target customers.
Reduced Costs
Accessibility may require some upfront investment, but in the long run, investing in website accessibility can reduce businesses’ costs.
Remember ordering a pizza in the 90s? On a Friday night, the pizza place had to employ someone whose sole job was to answer the phone and take orders. If you didn’t call at the right moment, you got a busy signal or were placed on hold. With an accessible website or mobile app, customers can self-serve on the web. This means businesses can reduce staffing costs and can take orders faster.
Prioritizing accessibility at the outset of a new website project also reduces costs down the line if the organization receives a complaint. It’s much easier to prioritize accessibility in design and content creation before a developer writes a single line of code. If you wait until later in the project or after a complaint is received, fixing the problem will be a lot more expensive.
What actually works?
That’s a big list of arguments for investing in and prioritizing website accessibility. If you’re trying to convince your boss or a client to invest in accessibility, I’m not suggesting you hand them this list.
If you did, it wouldn’t work. Why not?
Even with irrefutable data and emotional appeals, it can be really hard to change another person’s mind.
Mastering the Art of Persuasion, HBR IdeaCast
There’s an episode of the Harvard Business Review IdeaCast podcast with Wharton professor Jonah Berger that I highly recommend listening to—so much so that I’m embedding it here.
Read the transcript on the HBR website.
In this podcast episode, Berger shares his framework for persuasion. He gives examples of five different types of objections people have to new ideas and how to get around them.
Know Your Audience
As Berger describes, different people have different objections; people also have different motivations.
If you’re going to convince your boss or a client to invest in accessibility, you need to know what makes them tick. What are their priorities? What KPIs (key performance indicators) are they being judged on?
What motivates everyone to prioritize accessibility very different depending upon their role, the challenges they’re currently facing, and what they want to achieve in the next 6 or 12 months. For example, here’s what motivated some of our recent audit and remediation customers to start working with us:
- A higher education institution that needs mandated accessibility remediation following an agreement with the U.S. federal government.
- A large publisher with revenue from affiliate links wanted to improve user experience, time on site, SEO, and funnel more clicks to affiliate links.
- A nonprofit that got a grant that requires Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) compliance.
Each of these organizations had very different reasons for prioritizing accessibility. Several of the decision-makers at the same organization had differing reasons as well.
If you know what motivates your boss or client, you’ll be best able to persuade them that web accessibility should come first. If you don’t know what motivates them, start by asking lots of questions.
If you ask enough questions, people will literally tell you how to convince them to follow your recommendation. Then, you can follow up with the data or emotional appeals that will work best for them.
What’s Worked for Us
If I looked at a chart of our customers, the number one reason organizations are investing in accessibility would be risk mitigation and legal concerns.
Some organizations are proactively addressing accessibility before they have received a complaint. They see the writing on the wall: accessibility laws are more common around the world. They want to get ahead of it.
They may worry that failing to address accessibility issues will expose their organization to reputational damage or negative publicity. But most often, they’re concerned about the cost of not making a website accessible—either in fines, legal fees, or having to redo design and dev work after the fact.
I wish I could say that social good or SEO benefits sell accessibility. What we see most often, though, is that legal compliance drives decisions to prioritize accessibility.
Additional Resources
If you’re looking to build a business case for accessibility in your organization or need convincing links to send out to clients, check out these resources:
- Selling Your Clients on Accessibility webinar recording: WordPress Accessibility Meetup presentation from Ryan Bracey of Second Melody.
- The Business Case for Digital Accessibility: W3C resource that includes some case studies for the more data-minded.
- Defect Prevention: Reducing Costs and Enhancing Quality: IBM reported the cost to fix an error in the design phase was up to 100x less than after the product was released.
- ADA Title III Disability Access Updates: 2023 Hot Issues and Litigation Trends webinar recording: Lawfirm, Seyfarth, reports accessibility lawsuits were up 12% in 2023 over 2022.
- A Hidden Market: The Purchasing Power of Working-Age Adults With Disabilities [PDF]: In 2018 (at the time of this report), people with disabilities had $490 billion in annual purchasing power.
Want to focus more on accessibility, but are you having trouble getting people on board? Contact us! We’d be happy to help you pitch the idea and join your team.
