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Accessibility is more than compliance – it’s a strategic advantage. Involving people with disabilities early in design uncovers usability insights, sparks innovation, and improves products for everyone. From reducing costly remediation to enhancing AI inclusivity, embedding accessibility across the product lifecycle drives better experiences, customer loyalty, and long-term business growth.
In today’s digital economy, accessibility compliance is often looked at as a checklist to meet regulation rather than a source of competitive strength. Yet forward-thinking enterprises are discovering that accessibility is far more than a legal obligation. It’s a growth strategy that enhances user experience and strengthens brand equity.
As digital transformation accelerates and new standards like the European Accessibility Act (EAA) set new expectations, organisations that embrace this as an opportunity for innovation are going to outpace those that see it as an obligation. Accessible products and services don’t just reach wider audiences; they perform better for everyone. They are easier to use and have more intuitive qualities that drive customer loyalty and long-term business resilience.
Ultimately, aligning accessibility with commercial goals can turn inclusion into a genuine business advantage.
The cost of leaving accessibility to the end
When accessibility is integrated into the product development process, it becomes a natural outcome of good design. But most organisations still don’t include people with disabilities early in research and design. Instead, they wait until the end of the lifecycle, where issues are significantly more expensive and time-consuming to fix. Industry studies show it can cost up to 100x more to remediate an issue after development than to address it during design. And even with these late efforts, over 97% of websites still ship with basic accessibility errors.
Why? Because accessibility issues don’t always originate in development, they originate upstream. In fact, 67% of accessibility issues begin in the design stage, long before a single line of code is written. When teams don’t involve people with disabilities at the start, they inevitably end up in a remediation loop: identify issues, fix them late, ship, repeat. This cycle drains resources, slows down roadmaps, and frustrates both users and teams.
Treat inclusion as innovation
When teams design with people with disabilities, not just for them, they uncover insights that strengthen usability, spark creativity, and lead to more desirable products. This isn’t a niche effort. People with disabilities influence more than $13 trillion in global spending power, a number that continues to rise as populations age.
But the value of accessibility goes far beyond serving a single market. The curb-cut effect has shown us repeatedly that when we design for the margins, we unlock innovations that benefit everyone. Features like captions, dark mode, speech to text were all born from accessibility. Ignoring accessibility doesn’t just overlook a massive audience; it overlooks opportunities to create better products for all users.
Embed accessibility across the product lifecycle
If accessibility challenges originate upstream, then the solution must start there too. The most effective organisations don’t wait for compliance checks at the end of development – they build accessibility into every stage of the product lifecycle. This is not only more efficient; it leads to better, faster product decisions.
A practical starting point is shifting from retrofitting to co-creating. Bringing people with disabilities into research, concept testing, and early design reviews helps teams identify usability barriers before they become expensive defects. This early input often reveals structural issues: navigation patterns, interaction models, information hierarchy, that are inefficient to address through late-stage tweaks.
Embedding accessibility doesn’t require reinventing how teams work. It requires integrating new perspectives into the workflows product teams already use: in discovery: Uncover user needs of people who rely on assistive technology, in design: Gather iterative feedback on wireframes and prototypes, in development: Combine user insights with automated tests and in QA: Evaluate whether people can actually complete key tasks – not just pass a checklist.
The EAA doesn’t just require products and services to be accessible today, it requires organisations to integrate accessibility into their design and delivery processes. Accessibility has to be baked into how things are made and maintained. These early, continuous insights reduce rework, accelerate delivery, and increase the likelihood that products will ship both compliant on paper and usable for everyone.
Why leverage lived experience in the AI era
As organisations race to integrate AI into their products, many hope these technologies will make user experiences smarter and more personalised. But AI doesn’t follow instructions – it learns from data. And that data reflects the perspectives and limitations of the teams that create it.
In the push to move quickly, many companies skip validation with people with disabilities, assuming AI will “just work.” Instead, AI often amplifies existing biases, produces inaccessible outputs, or introduces new usability barriers. Rather than improving experiences, it can make them less inclusive – especially for people who rely on assistive technology.
Lived experience is the safeguard. When people with disabilities are involved throughout the AI development lifecycle – research, training data, evaluation, and testing – they surface usability gaps that automated tools can’t detect. This ensures AI-powered experiences don’t just pass technical checks but actually work for real-world users.
Automation has its place, but it can’t replace human insight. AI can scale testing; people can confirm whether those patterns make sense. In an era defined by speed, it’s lived experience that keeps products usable, ethical, and aligned with the needs of the full market.
Greater accessibility, more opportunity
In a highly competitive digital marketplace, even small accessibility improvements can unlock meaningful business outcomes. And the risk of getting it wrong is real: Fable’s research shows that Screen reader users rate digital products as hard to use more than twice as often as the general population and that 65% of assistive technology users would switch service providers for a more accessible experience.
When products across a category feel similar, usability becomes a decisive factor, one that directly influences customer loyalty and market share.
Accessibility isn’t just an obligation; it’s a competitive advantage waiting to be claimed.
About the Author
Patsnap, TouchBistro, Quantum Workplace, and Achievers, driving global expansion, revenue growth, and capital raising. At Fable, he leads the mission to make accessibility a human-centered, strategic advantage.
