Tumblr is a popular social media blogging site with 327 million unique visitors a day.

Their vision statement is:

“To empower creators to make their best work and get it in front of the audience they deserve.”

There are some keywords that can be used to support a business case for accessibility:

• Empower: everyone, disabled and non-disabled, should be empowered by inclusive, user-friendly design; you cannot empower someone if they can't access the product
• Best work: for example, disabled content creators must be able to access a platform that supports them in doing their best work
• The audience they deserve: everyone, disabled and non-disabled, deserves to be able to create and access content

Nike is one of the biggest sportswear brand in the world, with a clear vision statement:

“Bring inspiration and innovation to every athlete in the world. [If you have a body, you are an athlete.]”

There are some keywords that can be used to support a business case for accessibility:

• Inspiration: if a company chooses to exclude people by design, how can they be viewed as inspirational; a key part of inspiring new audiences is to see themselves reflected in a brand
• Innovation: innovative sports clothes and shoes should also support disabled athletes
• If you have a body, you are an athlete: this includes everyone, professional and non-professional athletes, as well as disabled professional and non-professional athletes alike. In other words everyone

Research has shown how various sectors lose money each month by not being accessible. A breakdown can be found below:

The Purple Pound refers to the spending power of disabled households. A disabled household is a household in which at least one of the members has a disability. Organisations are missing out on the business of disabled consumers due to poor accessibility (both physical and digital) and not being disability confident in their customer services approach.

• More than 1 in 5 potential UK consumers have a disability.
• Businesses lose approximately £2 billion a month by ignoring the needs of disabled people
• 73% of potential disabled customers experience barriers on more than a quarter of websites they visited
• Taking averages per head, the online spending power of disabled people is estimated at over £16 billion
• Estimates show that the 4.3 million disabled online shoppers, who click away from inaccessible websites, have a combined spending power of £11.75 billion in the UK
• The number of disabled people is increasing: From 11.9 million (2014) to 13.3 million (2020)
• 75% of disabled people and their families have walked away from a UK business because of poor accessibility or customer service
• Nearly 1 in 5 working adults have a disability
• The spending power of disabled people and their household continues to increase and is currently (2020) estimated to be worth £274 billion per year to UK business

Research has shown how various sectors lose money each month by not being accessible, for example:

• High Street Shops: £267 million
• Restaurants/Pubs/Clubs: £163 million
• Supermarkets: £501 million
• Energy Companies: £44 million
• Phone/Internet Providers: £49 million
• Transport Providers: £42 million
• Banks or Building Societies: £935 million

You can learn a lot from looking at a competitor's online presence. For example, look for an Accessibility Conformance Statement on their website, blog posts or articles about accessibility initiatives they may be doing, accessibility help and support pages, and frequently asked questions.

You can also do some accessibility checks yourself of some pages. The W3C Easy Checks are a set of 10 basic accessibility tests put together by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI). Their goal is to provide people new to accessibility with a simple way to assess the accessibility of web content.

Find out more about testing sites for accessibility with the TetraLogical Quick accessibility tests video series.

White papers, annual reports, webinars, and published research are a good way of understanding what the current accessibility insights and trends are. These will change year-on-year, but a useful one to reference is The State of Digital Accessibility 2022 Survey Report from Level Access. This is an annual report on accessibility programmes and trends in the USA, but is relevant to all countries and covers all industries.

The UK Government does annual Accessibility monitoring of public sector websites and mobile apps, which is useful if you work in local or central UK government.

Many companies have an Equality, Diversity and Inclusion policy (EDI) which states the company's commitment to ensuring an equitable, diverse, and inclusive workplace. EDI policies cover people from all backgrounds including people with disabilities, a range of ages, race, gender, sexual orientation, religion, education, socioeconomic status, and geographical location.

If your company doesn't have a formal one, read more about them in this guide by The CIPD to Equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI) in the workplace.

Some companies have an accessibility policy which is an internal document that describes the company's strategy and roadmap for implementing accessibility. This could be for its digital products such as websites and mobile applications, as well as built environment such as the workplace and stores.

An Accessibility Conformance Report (ACR) is a document that formally summarises the extent to which an information and communications technology (ICT) product or service conforms to an agreed set of international accessibility guidelines and standards. These are updated annually and may be published on your company website.

Read more in Introduction to Accessibility Conformance Reports

If your goal is to upskill teams, and you are looking to secure budget for training, you could put in a business case for self-led training and accessibility training programmes.

Self-led training supports continuous accessibility skills development for your teams helping them make accessibility part of everything they do. Self-led training also helps you train teams at scale and keeps knowledge within the organisation even when people leave.

Accessibility training programmes help give your teams advanced training, so they not only know how to design, build, and test accessible products but also understand how to embed accessibility into process.

It may be that rolling out an accessibility programme across all your products at once isn't possible.

In this case, you might want to invest in making one product accessible. From there you can learn what works and what needs changing, then build out processes throughout the rest of the organisation with a goal of eventually creating an accessibility programme.

Perhaps your goal is to make sustainable accessibility an integral part of your business and reduce reliance on consultancy support which can be costly over time.