Building the business case for accessibility
There is no single path to making more inclusive products. The steps you take, goals you make and success you see will depend on your organization and where it is today in terms of accessibility maturity. It will also largely depend on the people and level of support you establish.
One of the biggest parts of any accessibility effort is securing and maintaining buy-in. This might mean you are building a business case for leadership, helping teams expand their knowledge, or even connecting with accessibility advocates to build a champion’s program. We know that accessibility cannot be thought of as a one-off project if you want to see long-term impact, and if you are reading this, there is a high likelihood you already know this, too.
Here are some tactics you can use to connect with the right people, data and strategies to help you continue to grow your accessibility program, secure sponsorship and long-term investment:
Collect data and stories
Understanding the scope of the problem and opportunity is crucial to forming any business case. When it comes to accessibility, one of the best ways to do this is by connecting with users and telling a bigger story with the support of data.
Talk to users with disabilities
The first thing you can do is to talk to users with disabilities and learn more about what impacts them. Uncover their current experiences with your products and services, as well as what motivates them or de-motivates them to support brands and businesses. You’ll not only capture great anecdotes and insights to support your business case, but you’re bound to walk away with tactical feedback that designers and developers can act on to make your products better today.
Understand stakeholder motivations
Leadership is most responsive when you approach them with a thoughtful solution, instead of a problem alone. Consider not only how you will define this need for the business, but also some recommendations on how you should approach solutioning. To do this, making sure you understand the motivations of who you are seeking budget and buy-in from is a critical piece of the puzzle. What are the metrics they care most about? What are their priorities in the next 6-12 months and how will working on accessibility help contribute to that?
Use the right data to support your case
There are many reasons that collecting data around disability and assistive technology use can be problematic. Instead, stay focused on what motivates your stakeholders the most.
If its revenue generation, consider using data that demonstrates the broader market opportunities and spending power of people with disabilities. For example, do they realize that in the US people with disabilities have a spending power of $490 billion in disposable income?
If its product quality and innovation, consider pairing your evidence with examples of existing work. For example, let’s say you’re trying to get support to standardize captions on videos. To normalize this idea, you could present known data from major streaming services. Like how 85% of Netflix users (nearly 200 million people) use captions regularly.
Set your teams up for success
Working on accessibility isn’t any one person’s responsibility. It’s up to every team and individual in an organization to progress and enable change in their own ways. Making sure that your teams have the skills required to do this is critical to the success of any business case.
Align with organization values and goals
Accessibility doesn’t just make products better; it also makes organizations better. Ensure that when you are implementing or pitching learning opportunities, that you put it into context. At the organization level, demonstrate how accessibility aligns with your values and goals. You can show how accessibility can impact revenue or brand loyalty, for example, people with disabilities shop online nearly twice as often as the general population.
Teach to roles and responsibilities
Help people understand what they should do within their roles to promote accessibility. What accessibility knowledge do they need to do their job well? What processes and workflows do they need to reconsider? How can they grow their expertise and even center accessibility in their role?
Leverage insight into what drives teams
Connecting people through an accessibility champions program can help you to broaden your reach and promote shared learning. It also gives you a chance to learn about different team cultures and motivations. Through this process, you’ll also get a sense for who your strongest allies are and be able to more effectively distribute knowledge across teams.
Celebrate your successes
Once you’ve got buy-in, or at the very least, you are seeing the right signals, it’s critical to make sure that there is visibility into the work you are doing, and the broader impact you’re making.
Show progress
Leadership will always be looking for ways to know for certain that your efforts are having a positive impact on the business. Be sure to focus on making sure you can measure progress and share how accessibility maturity is trending in the right direction. Make data points concrete and tied to actual work teams have done or are doing. You can use the data you collect to talk about where your organization was, where you are now, and where you’re going.
Highlight wins and great work
Use data to demonstrate how working on accessibility early has positively impacted your team’s efficiency over time, how you’ve been able to increase project velocity, code stability, or increase usability scores. There are many ways to demonstrate progress! Make sure to have outlets where you are making sure teams know that they’ve accomplished something important. Celebrate that, and don’t forget how far you’ve come.
“For every hour that a UX designer invests into accessibility pre-launch, we save up to four hours in engineering post-launch, not bug fixing accessibility issues.”
– Dirk Ginader, Accessibility UX Engineering Lead at Google
Grow change management skills
Lastly, one of the most effective ways for long-term success is helping accessibility champions grow their change management skills. Change management, communication, and strategy aren’t always part of an accessibility practitioner’s role, but are crucial when it comes to getting leadership, teams and cross-functional stakeholders on board. Accessibility leaders, champions and practitioners don’t have the authority or power to magically make everything accessible. What we do have is the ability to influence and motivate organizations to drive change and ensure a long-lasting impact.
“I’ve come to think of [accessibility] as changing habits at scale.”
– Lori Samuels, Senior Director of Accessibility at NBCUniversal
