When done right, accessibility produces no visible result. Cool, but there's a serious downside to this.
It's damn near impossible to justify investing in accessibility to anyone holding a budget or a roadmap.
Conventional wisdom says to make the business case and highlight the cost of lawsuits, the size of the disabled population and losing brand reputation. But everyone's heard that already and they're not moved by it anymore.
So what actually works?
Here's a simple to understand three-layer approach that just might.
Layer 1: Make the invisible, visible.
Stop reporting on what you fixed already and start recording what was broken before you fixed it. Record a short demo of the broken flow. That's worth more than any audit report.
That before/after clip that anyone can watch in 30 seconds and immediately get is priceless.
Time to implement: an afternoon.
Layer 2: Attach it to something people already care about.
Find the one metric that already gets reported upward. Among the things I've seen matter are task completion rate, drop-off rate and support ticket volume. Accessibility problems bleed into all of these but nobody's making the connection. If you can draw the line between a missing form label and a support ticket that didn't need to exist, you'll highlight a number that was already being watched, that you moved.
Time to implement: a month.
Layer 3: Build a paper trail that compounds.
Most accessibility work disappears into the void because there's no institutional memory of it. It's up to you to create that. You can start a lightweight log (not a full audit!). Just a running record of what you caught early versus what made it to production. Bonus points if you can figure out how long it took to fix the ones that made it to production.
Over time this becomes evidence of what it costs to skip accessibility at the start. And you'll show the cost difference between catching it in design versus fixing it after launch. That's a number that I've always seen surprise people.
Time to implement: over three months.
Trust me, accessibility matters. That's one weak selling point, if you ask me. But if you can make the good work you've been doing visible enough that skipping it becomes the thing that's hard to justify, now that's hard to ignore in planning meetings.