One in Four of Your Customers

Set the law aside for a minute. The simplest case for accessibility isn't legal at all. It's that a large group of people with money to spend can't finish what they came to your site to do, and they leave without you ever knowing they were there.

The numbers

Start globally. The World Health Organization now estimates that 1.3 billion people, about 16 percent of the world's population or roughly one in six, live with a significant disability. The 15 percent figure you'll still see quoted all over the internet is from its 2011 World Report and has been superseded. Then bring it home, because home is where your customers are. Statistics Canada's 2022 Canadian Survey on Disability found that 27 percent of Canadians aged 15 and over have one or more disabilities. That's roughly one in four. In Ontario it's 28 percent. Whichever number applies to your market, it is not a rounding error.

And that group isn't poor. People with disabilities earn, spend, travel and book things, and so do the friends and family who shop alongside them and notice when a business treats them as an afterthought. You'll find enormous global spending power figures quoted in this space. We're not going to repeat them, because the ones in circulation are estimates that get passed around without a source attached. The Statistics Canada number carries the argument on its own: one in four Canadian adults.

The part your analytics won't tell you

Here's the trap. You can't see the customers accessibility loses you. When someone can't complete your checkout with a keyboard, or your booking form fails silently for their screen reader, they don't file a complaint. They don't email. They just give up and go to a competitor whose site worked. In your analytics that looks like a bounce or an abandoned cart, indistinguishable from someone who simply changed their mind. The loss is invisible, which is exactly why it's easy to ignore and expensive to keep ignoring.

The aging angle

It's also not a static group. Vision, hearing, dexterity, and memory all change as people get older, and your customer base is aging along with everyone else. Accessibility isn't only about people who identify as disabled today. It's about the much larger group who benefit from bigger text, clearer contrast, and simpler navigation, which is nearly everyone eventually.

Compliance gives you a deadline. But the business case is what makes accessibility worth doing well rather than just barely. You're not spending to avoid a fine. You're removing the barriers between a large, real, spending audience and the thing you're trying to sell them.