Every accessibility conversation I've had has always hit a wall initially.
The team size didn't matter. The revenue didn't matter. At some point, someone said "we're too busy," or "we don't have the budget for it" or "we'll revisit this next quarter."
I used to get really frustrated. For all my pleading and trying to get them to see why it matters, I couldn't get past these objections. I had to realise these objections aren't really about accessibility.
They're about inertia. Not malice or ignorance. Just the fact that doing nothing was always easier than doing something. It's what happens when nobody's made accessibility easy or necessary to act on.
When someone pushes back, they're not saying "I don't care about users with disabilities." Most of the time, nobody's made it easy enough to say yes. So they never do.
Doing nothing has always been the path of least resistance.
Looking back, the objections I've heard tend to fall into six categories:
- Time. They don't have time for accessibility.
- Money. This is usually less about money and more about perceived ROI.
- Responsibility. Other people or other teams handle that so they don't have to.
- Priorities. This is the hardest one to push back on, because it's often true. Accessibility genuinely hasn't been made a priority before.
- Authority. It's not their call. This ties in closely with responsibility.
- Relevance. They think their users don't have "special needs" or they're too small a team to worry about it.
Fair enough. But they're all built on a false assumptions.
We'll dismantle each over the next few emails. No jargon. No guilt trips. Just what you need to know to move forward.