Product owners hate accessibility work.
It's expensive. It blocks feature development. The business case feels fuzzy. I've heard all these excuses.
I used to try and shove accessibility down their throats. It never worked. They don't want it. And I can't change what they want.
But I can help them get what they do want. Helping them get what they actually want is way easier than convincing them to care about accessibility compliance.
So what do they want?
Revenue. User growth. Lower support costs. Faster development cycles.
Great. Accessibility helps with all this.
So let's flip the conversation.
No more "Can we prioritise WCAG compliance?" That gets me nowhere. But when I ask "What's blocking your conversion goals?" their ears prick up and they have lots to say. And we can have a conversation. We can dig into the data.
Somewhere in the conversation, we can naturally have a chat about how accessible sites see higher conversion rates. Because accessibility also improves user experience. The navigation is clearer. The text is more readable. Simpler forms help everyone complete tasks faster.
So maybe I frame accessibility as user experience optimisation.
Somewhere in the conversation, we'll naturally touch on the dev process. How it's slow (yeah, I've never heard anyone say it's fast enough!) and how we can make it faster, better. They mention how right after a release, they get support tickets with bugs they didn't notice during development. Product owners couldn't give two shits about semantic HTML. But they care about having more streamlined releases with fewer bugs and fewer support tickets.
So maybe I frame accessibility as a way to increase developer velocity.
I can't change what product owners want. But I can show them that accessibility gets them what they already want. And I can help them get it.