Editor’s note: Global Accessibility Awareness Day is May 21 so this piece is timely. But this conversation opened my eyes into several opportunities that, quite frankly, I had never considered before. Viz:
1 in 4 shoppers are disabled; accessibility barriers silently erode conversion, particularly among disabled shoppers. Today, disabled Americans control an estimated $490 billion in disposable income, and globally, disabled purchasing power is an estimated $8 trillion.
One of the stranger things happening in digital commerce right now is that brands will spend millions optimizing acquisition funnels, personalization engines, AI-driven recommendations, loyalty mechanics, and “frictionless” customer journeys while simultaneously making parts of their experience unusable for actual human beings.
Not unusable in some abstract or ideological sense. Functionally unusable.
I was discussing this recently with Imogen Wethered, CEO at EnableAll on an episode of Customerland and one idea kept resurfacing throughout the conversation: accessibility failures are often invisible to the organizations creating them.
That invisibility matters.
Most companies still think about accessibility through the lens of compliance, legal exposure, or corporate responsibility. Which is understandable because that’s largely how the topic has been framed for years. Accessibility sits off to the side somewhere between governance and risk management – important, certainly, but rarely treated as central to growth strategy, customer experience performance, or revenue optimization.
But the more I thought about the conversation, the more it became obvious that this framing misses the real issue.
Accessibility failures are often customer experience failures in their most practical form.
A customer lands on your website and cannot properly navigate the menu using a keyboard. A screen reader fails to interpret product information correctly. A checkout flow breaks under accessibility settings. Contrast makes content difficult to read. Motion triggers dizziness or disorientation. Captions are missing. Interactive elements don’t identify themselves properly. Somewhere along the way, the experience quietly stops working for the person trying to use it.
And then the customer disappears.
What makes this especially problematic is that most digital organizations are remarkably good at measuring visible friction while remaining surprisingly blind to invisible friction. Modern marketing stacks can tell you which ad drove the click, which email improved open rates, which landing page variant lifted conversion, and which cohort generated stronger retention behavior. Entire teams exist to optimize tiny percentages of measurable performance.
But accessibility breakdowns often vanish into the system disguised as ordinary abandonment.
The customer doesn’t submit a ticket explaining that your navigation structure failed screen-reader interpretation. They don’t announce that the form fields couldn’t be tabbed through correctly. They simply leave. The analytics platform records another incomplete session. Marketing continues buying traffic. CRM continues nurturing leads. Loyalty teams continue discussing engagement metrics. Meanwhile, some portion of the customer base is repeatedly colliding with barriers the organization cannot clearly see because the measurement systems were never designed to detect them.
That’s why accessibility increasingly feels less like a compliance issue and more like a form of operational blindness.
There’s also a persistent misconception that accessibility affects a relatively small subset of users. That framing feels badly outdated. Roughly one in four American adults lives with some form of disability, but even that statistic understates the broader reality that human capability is fluid. People age into accessibility needs. Vision changes. Mobility changes. Cognitive load changes. Temporary injuries create limitations. Exhaustion changes how people interact with interfaces. Bright sunlight changes readability. A broken wrist suddenly makes keyboard navigation important.
In other words, accessibility is not some edge condition sitting outside the customer base. It exists throughout the customer base – including among people who may have been loyal customers for years before the experience became difficult for them to use.
That’s part of what makes the economics here so interesting. Brands spend enormous amounts of money trying to acquire and retain customers while potentially losing existing customers through forms of friction they barely monitor. And because accessibility issues often manifest quietly, the losses rarely show up as a clean line item anyone can point to. There is no obvious “accessibility abandonment” metric sitting inside most dashboards. There’s just softer conversion performance, weaker retention, incomplete participation, and customers who gradually disengage.
The timing of all this is especially fascinating given the market’s current obsession with AI-driven customer experiences.
There’s a strange disconnect right now. Companies are racing toward conversational commerce, agentic shopping systems, predictive interfaces, AI-powered support, autonomous recommendation engines, and increasingly sophisticated automation layers while large portions of the digital experience still break under relatively basic accessibility conditions. The industry is trying to build the penthouse while parts of the foundation remain inaccessible.
And speed has a tendency to expose weaknesses rather than conceal them.
If the underlying experience already contains structural usability problems, AI often amplifies them. A conversational interface that fails accessibility standards is still exclusionary – just more technologically sophisticated. An AI-driven support system that cannot properly accommodate different interaction needs doesn’t build trust. It creates another barrier between the organization and the customer.
That trust dimension feels important because so much of modern commerce now exists primarily through digital interaction. Retail, banking, healthcare, travel, government services, loyalty ecosystems – increasingly, the interface isthe experience. Which means inaccessible systems are no longer just frustrating. They can become mechanisms that quietly exclude people from participation altogether.
The operational challenge, of course, is that accessibility is genuinely difficult to manage at scale. Responsibility becomes fragmented across teams. Designers own certain decisions. Developers own others. Content teams influence structure and readability. Product teams prioritize feature velocity. Legal monitors compliance exposure. Marketing worries about SEO and conversion. Everybody touches the problem, which often means nobody fully owns it.
And modern enterprise ecosystems only complicate things further. Most digital experiences now sit atop sprawling stacks of CMS layers, third-party integrations, personalization engines, embedded media systems, retail media components, AI tooling, and constantly evolving front-end frameworks. Accessibility regressions can emerge almost anywhere in the stack.
Which is why simplistic “one-click accessibility fix” narratives tend to make technical leaders uneasy. They know there is no magical overlay that solves deep structural usability issues. At the same time, waiting for some mythical future rebuild isn’t realistic either. Most organizations are carrying years of accumulated complexity and technical debt.
What emerged from the conversation with Imogen Wethered wasn’t really a fantasy of perfection. It was a much more practical view of accessibility as continuous improvement: layered remediation, usability testing with real humans, better instrumentation, adaptive controls, governance processes, and a broader recognition that accessibility is deeply connected to customer experience quality rather than somehow separate from it.
And honestly, that may be the healthiest way to think about the issue.
Because the companies that eventually get this right probably won’t treat accessibility as performative branding or compliance theater. It will simply become part of how they think about usability, participation, retention, and customer trust. Part of how they design systems. Part of how they evaluate friction. Part of how they think about customer lifetime value and long-term engagement.
One of the things I appreciated most about the conversation with Imogen was that it avoided the usual moral grandstanding that often surrounds this topic. The discussion kept circling back to participation, usability, trust, and business performance. Which is probably where the accessibility conversation should have been living all along.
Because inaccessible systems don’t merely frustrate people.
They quietly remove people from participation – often without the organization ever realizing it’s happening.
