Of everything we've talked about so far, this frustrates me the most.
I've heard quite a few variations. They say their users don't have "special needs," whatever that means, or they're too small to even consider accessibility. I've even heard the young and tech-savvy audience argument.
These all boil down to the fact that they don't think they have users with disabilities. And since they consider accessibility as only dealing with users with disabilities, they don't think accessibility is relevant to them.
It's a load of crap. It reveals the most about how little people actually know their users, while being completely convinced that they do.
To them, it sounds like user research. It sounds like they're super close to their users. It sounds like they're making a data-driven decision.
They're not. I consider this objection an assumption about users they never bothered to test and instead dressed it up as insight.
Real user research will surface different needs from different users. The fact that it didn't is a gap in the research, not evidence that the needs don't exist. And the absence of complaints isn't evidence of accessibility either.
It's a closed loop. An inaccessible product produces data that justifies its own inaccessibility.
First and foremost, we're not designing for disabled users, but for variation and differences in how we all use products and the web. Everyone exists on a spectrum of ability that shifts constantly depending on context, environment, age or health. When we're designing for the extremes of that spectrum, we're making the product better for everyone in the middle.
Secondly, if you think you're too small, consider this. Your competitor with a large customer base can absorb the loss of users it never knew it had. Your small product can't. Every user counts more at small scale, not less. If anything, accessibility matters more when you're small.
Even the most niche product has users with situational disabilities. Someone using it in bright sunlight can't see low contrast text. Someone with a broken arm can't use a mouse to move around. Someone with a migraine can't handle a cluttered interface. None of them would describe themselves as having "special needs."
That being said, I still need to answer their objection of relevance.
The conventional answer is to throw statistics at them. 1 in 5 people have a disability. Trillions of dollars in disposable income. All valid, all boring. None of it connects to anything they specifically care about.
So I like to ask them about their user research directly. How do they currently test with users? I'm not telling them their research is wrong. I just want to highlight the probable gaps and then they can draw their own conclusion.
And then I ask them, how would they know if someone didn't buy their product because it was not accessible to them? And I shut up. Silence usually follows and it's good to let them sit in it uncomfortably.
That silence is doing more work than any statistic could. It's the moment they realise they don't really have an answer.
And that's exactly where the conversation needs to go.