Accessibility Advocacy Language
5 exercises — Master the vocabulary for making the business case for accessibility: ROI arguments, legal risk, roadmap framing, and responding to stakeholder objections.
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A product manager asks: "Why should we prioritise accessibility now? Our analytics don't show many disabled users."
Which response is the most effective business case argument?
Effective accessibility advocacy combines three business arguments:
1. Market size (the analytics problem):
• ~1.3 billion people globally have some form of disability (WHO)
• Analytics under-count them — users with assistive technologies often block JavaScript, skew session data
• The "disability" label misses situational disability: someone using the app one-handed while commuting
2. Total user benefit (the curb-cut effect):
• Captions benefit: deaf users + non-native speakers + noisy environments + silent commuters
• High contrast benefits: users with low vision + people in bright sunlight
• Keyboard navigation benefits: power users, developers, enterprise users
3. Cost of retrofitting:
• Research shows post-launch accessibility fixes cost 5–10× more than building in during design
• Every sprint that ships inaccessible features adds to the debt
Key vocabulary:
• addressable market — the total potential customers for a product
• curb-cut effect — accessibility features that benefit a broader population than originally intended
• retrofit — adding accessibility to existing code after the fact
• analytics under-counting — when tracking tools miss segments of users who use workarounds
1. Market size (the analytics problem):
• ~1.3 billion people globally have some form of disability (WHO)
• Analytics under-count them — users with assistive technologies often block JavaScript, skew session data
• The "disability" label misses situational disability: someone using the app one-handed while commuting
2. Total user benefit (the curb-cut effect):
• Captions benefit: deaf users + non-native speakers + noisy environments + silent commuters
• High contrast benefits: users with low vision + people in bright sunlight
• Keyboard navigation benefits: power users, developers, enterprise users
3. Cost of retrofitting:
• Research shows post-launch accessibility fixes cost 5–10× more than building in during design
• Every sprint that ships inaccessible features adds to the debt
Key vocabulary:
• addressable market — the total potential customers for a product
• curb-cut effect — accessibility features that benefit a broader population than originally intended
• retrofit — adding accessibility to existing code after the fact
• analytics under-counting — when tracking tools miss segments of users who use workarounds
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