Accessibility isn't charity, it's money you leave on the table

Every time I bring up accessibility in a meeting, I see the same face. The client nods, mumbles something about it being "a good thing," and mentally files the topic in the same drawer as a donation to the local kindergarten. Something nice, something they should do, but not now, not this quarter, once sales pick up. It's the most expensive thinking error I see in businesses, because accessibility was almost never a cost. It was revenue you never billed for.

Let's start with the number that stings. Every year, WebAIM scans the million most visited home pages on the web. In its February 2026 analysis, a full 95.9% of pages had automatically detectable WCAG 2 failures. And note this: the number went up from 94.8% in 2025, reversing six straight years of small improvements. The average was 56.1 errors per page. These aren't esoteric edge cases. This is the web we build every day.

Exactly who can't buy from you

When I say you're leaving money on the table, I mean it literally. According to World Health Organization estimates, roughly one in six people lives with some form of significant disability. Not all of them are blind or in wheelchairs. It's also your mother with presbyopia who can't read grey text on a lighter grey background. It's the person with a tremor for whom your dropdown menu is an impossible obstacle. It's someone on a slow train connection whose images don't load, so all they get is the alt text, which isn't there.

Now connect that to what WebAIM actually finds. Six error types account for 96% of all problems, and they're mundane: low-contrast text (83.9% of pages), images with no alt text (53.1%), form fields with no label (51%), empty links (46.3%). Let's translate "form field with no label" into sales language: it's a checkout that some people can't complete. That's not ethics. That's an abandoned cart you designed yourself.

The stuff you get for free is the best part

Here's why it bothers me when accessibility is sold as a sacrifice. Almost every WCAG practice is simultaneously an SEO practice, and that's no accident. The semantic HTML a screen reader needs to know what's a heading and what's a button is the same HTML Google's crawler needs to understand your page structure. The alt text that describes an image to a blind user is the same text that ranks in Google Images. A clear, descriptive link instead of "click here" helps both the human and the search engine at once.

The same goes for conversions. Good contrast, readable font sizes, buttons big enough for a thumb, a form that clearly shows where the error is, all of it improves the experience for absolutely everyone, not just people with disabilities. When you optimise for your hardest user, you've made it easier for all of them. On one project in the tourism sector we redesigned a booking form primarily for accessibility reasons, adding real labels and clear error messages. It turned out we'd also fixed the completion rate on desktop, because it emerged that users with no disability at all had been losing patience in the exact same spots.

And now the part agencies keep quiet about

Until June 2025, accessibility in the private sector was a matter of goodwill. Not anymore. The European Accessibility Act, Directive (EU) 2019/882, became enforceable on 28 June 2025. In Croatia it was transposed through the Act on Accessibility Requirements for Products and Services (NN 89/2025), in force from the same date.

What does that mean in practice? The law obliges a broad range of providers of digital B2C products and services: e-commerce, banking, e-books, electronic communications providers, transport services. Microenterprises providing services are largely exempt, but the moment you run a serious e-commerce operation, chances are high you're in scope. Non-compliance carries penalties and inspection, and on top of that comes reputational risk and the possibility of complaints.

What annoys me most as a practitioner is that most agencies still don't mention this to clients. They ship the site, take the money, and let the client find out about the obligation when a complaint or an inspector arrives. That's not just unprofessional. It's exposing the client to legal and financial risk over something that could have been handled at the design stage, at almost no extra cost.

Where to start if you're not sure you're covered

You don't need an expensive certification right away. You need an honest audit. Run a free tool like WAVE or axe on your key pages: home page, category pages, checkout. Start with that famous six: contrast, alt text, form labels, empty links and buttons, document language. Fixing just those six categories solves the lion's share of the problem because, remember, they account for 96% of all detectable errors.

Don't fall for "accessibility overlay" widgets, those floating little figures that promise compliance in one line of script. They don't work, they've been the subject of lawsuits more than once, and they give you a false sense of security while the real problems stay in the code.

The point is simple. Accessibility is the only investment I know of that simultaneously expands your market, lifts your SEO, improves your conversions, and takes legal risk off your plate. If that still sounds like charity, you're not looking at the numbers.

Related:

• Core Web Vitals Aren't an SEO Trick. They're Your Revenue
• We Stopped Chasing Design Trends. Here's Why Your Site Wins

If you're not sure whether you're in scope for the EAA or where your site is leaking, we run an audit that tells you both the legal risk and the missed conversions, in the same place. Contact us and we'll show you where the money is leaking.