How to show the real impact of accessibility on your users

If you have ever advocated for accessibility, you have probably had the same conversation more than once. You explain that users are being excluded. You share statistics about disability. You point to standards, guidelines and best practice. The response is polite, often supportive and then nothing changes.

These conversations can lead to frustration, fatigue and the sense that accessibility is never prioritised.

This gap between acknowledgement and action is rarely because leaders do not care about accessibility. It is usually caused by a misalignment in how “impact” is defined. Advocates tend to measure impact in terms of people affected, whereas leaders tend to measure impact in terms of organisational outcomes. When these perspectives are disconnected, accessibility struggles to move forward.

This blog is about breaking that cycle. It shows how to move accessibility conversations forward by reframing its impact in ways leaders can act on, so discussions get unstuck and lead to accessibility action. This is especially useful if you’re trying to explain accessibility impact to people who don’t regularly work directly with users or digital delivery.

Why leaders underestimate accessibility impact

Accessibility often stalls because advocates and leaders are talking about impact in fundamentally different ways.

For accessibility advocates, impact is defined by people. How many users are blocked from completing a task. How many people struggle to read, navigate or understand the content. From this perspective, the argument feels complete. If real people are excluded or disadvantaged, that alone is reason enough to fix the problem.

But leaders tend to define impact differently. They are accountable for outcomes like revenue, adoption, risk, cost and delivery confidence. When they hear that “a portion of users can’t access the site,” the question they are silently asking is not whether that matters, but what it means for the organisation:

• How many users are we losing?

• Where does this show up in our metrics?

• What does this cost us today, and what happens if we do nothing?

When those answers are unclear, accessibility impact feels abstract, even when the human case is compelling.

This is where misalignment happens. Advocates focus on users affected, while leaders look for business impact.

Reframing accessibility impact

Reframing accessibility impact does not mean moving away from people. It means connecting human impact to organisational consequences.

Instead of stopping at who is affected, the conversation needs to extend to what happens as a result. What happens to completion rates when users cannot use a form? What happens to trust when customers repeatedly struggle? What happens to acquisition costs when people abandon a journey and never return?

When NPR added transcripts to their podcasts, they saw measurable increases in website traffic, organic search visits and engagement with content. Transcripts are a key accessibility feature to allow hard-of-hearing and deaf users to access audio content, but they also delivered outcomes leaders already care about.

Accessibility barriers do not just exclude users. They create friction that quietly degrades outcomes organisations already track:

• Lower adoption and completion rates

• Reduced loyalty and repeat usage

• Increased support demand

• Higher delivery risk when issues are discovered late

When accessibility impact is framed in terms of lost opportunity, avoidable cost and unnecessary risk, it becomes easier to prioritise. Not because the moral case suddenly improved, but because the organisational case became visible. This reframing is often the missing link that allows leaders to see how accessibility barriers are already shaping product or service performance.

Notably, these impacts already exist, but they are rarely labelled as accessibility issues.

Why accessibility impact is often missed

If accessibility has such broad effects, why does it remain so easy to dismiss?

One reason is that accessibility issues rarely announce themselves as accessibility problems. They appear instead as poor conversion, unexplained drop-off or vague usability complaints. Teams often try to fix these symptoms without addressing the underlying barriers.

Another reason is that many affected users do not identify as disabled. Many accessibility needs sit along a spectrum and are shaped by context, device, environment or fatigue. These users are rarely represented in personas or reporting.

The result is that accessibility barriers quietly distort metrics without being named. Until someone connects these patterns back to accessibility, the impact remains hidden in plain sight.

Uncover accessibility data

Once impact is communicated in business terms, the next step is finding where it already appears. You do not need a large research budget to uncover accessibility impact. Many organisations already have the evidence, it just has not been interpreted through an accessibility lens.

1. Use analytics to identify where accessibility friction is already hurting outcomes. High drop-off rates, abandoned forms and repeated errors are signals that users are struggling to complete tasks. When these patterns appear in critical flows that require reading, input or navigation, they often indicate accessibility barriers quietly breaking journeys that matter to the business.

2. Review support tickets as evidence of preventable cost and frustration. Requests for help, confusion about navigation or repeated complaints about difficulty completing tasks point to barriers users are forced to work around. Even when accessibility is not mentioned, these signals represent avoidable support effort and reduced user confidence.

3. Use surveys and research to reveal effort, not just satisfaction. Responses about difficulty, clarity or effort expose the hidden work users are doing to get through your product or service. This context helps explain drops in satisfaction, retention or trust that numbers alone cannot.

4. Anchor your findings in population data to show scale and likelihood. In New Zealand, 1 in 4 people live with a disability. In Australia, it is 1 in 5. When temporary impairments and situational barriers are included, it becomes statistically unlikely that your user base is unaffected. This reframes accessibility from a niche concern into an expected and measurable source of impact.

Individually, these signals can look minor or unrelated. Together, they tell a consistent story about who is being excluded and what that exclusion is costing the organisation.

How to present your findings to leadership

Having evidence is not the same as being persuasive. Many accessibility champions gather solid data only to find leadership still hesitant to act.

This often happens because evidence is presented as proof that accessibility matters, rather than as insight into what is at risk if nothing changes.

When presenting accessibility impact to leadership, focus on three steps:

Step 1: Start with what is at risk

Begin by clearly articulating the consequences of maintaining the status quo. For example:

• Lost users or reduced conversion in key journeys

• Ongoing support costs driven by avoidable friction

• Delivery risk from accessibility issues discovered late

• Reputational or legal exposure as expectations increase

This frames accessibility not as a new initiative, but as an existing problem with compounding costs.

Step 2: Translate findings into cost, uncertainty and confidence

Accessibility data becomes actionable when it reduces uncertainty for decision-makers. Instead of listing issues, explain what addressing them would change:

• Where costs could be avoided by fixing issues earlier

• How improvements would stabilise key metrics like completion or retention

• How accessibility investment increases confidence in future releases

This positions accessibility work as a way to make outcomes more predictable, not less.

Step 3: Recommend a decision, not buy-in

Rather than asking leaders to “support accessibility,” recommend a clear course of action based on the evidence:

• What should be prioritised first

• What trade-offs are being made

• What success would look like if the decision is approved

This shifts the conversation from persuasion to decision-making. Leaders are not being asked to agree with accessibility as a principle; they are being asked to respond to visible risk and opportunity.

The power of storytelling

Narrative matters here. A short story about one excluded user can make abstract data tangible. Many leaders intellectually understand statistics but only truly grasp the impact when they see how a real person is blocked or slowed down by the current experience. When combined with metrics, stories help decision-makers understand why the numbers matter.

Next steps

The role of an accessibility champion is a translator, not just a persuader. Connecting user experience barriers to business outcomes makes accessibility easier to prioritise and harder to ignore.

To support this, we have created The Accessibility Buy-in Brief. It helps you identify affected user groups, map barriers to outcomes and structure your findings in a way leadership can engage with.

Understanding the real impact of accessibility is the first step toward prioritising improvements and building momentum. Clear evidence gives you a stronger voice, reduces uncertainty and creates a more sustainable path toward meaningful accessibility investment.