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Better for revenue, talent retention, and competitive advantage, so why wouldn’t you do it?
Every day, businesses are producing more content across different teams beyond marketing. But if that content isn’t accessible, it’s not reaching everyone. Accessibility ensures that all users, including people with disabilities, can fully engage with what you offer.
With the European Accessibility Act (EAA) set to take effect in June 2025, the pressure is on. But meeting legal standards is only part of the story. Accessibility is also a proven driver of revenue, reputation, and retention.
Hi, I’m Holly. I work with teams to improve media accessibility for everyone—using AI to check and fix things like captions, transcripts, and audio descriptions. That’s what we do at scale.
Accessibility is more than a legal requirement. It’s a smart business strategy.
Accessibility Increases Revenue, Reach, and Reputation
The global disability market is estimated at $13 trillion. That’s more than China’s GDP. If your products, services, or media aren’t accessible, you’re excluding 1.3 billion people and the opportunity that comes with serving them. According to Accenture Research, this is what you could be missing out on:
- 28% higher revenue
- 30% higher profit margins
- 2x the net income of their peers
When accessibility is overlooked, so is opportunity.
In the UK, this is often referred to as the Purple Pound: the collective spending power of disabled consumers and their families.
- Businesses lose an estimated £2 billion a month by ignoring accessibility needs WeArePurple
- The online spending power of disabled consumers exceeds £16 billion WeArePurple
- 75% of disabled customers have walked away from a business due to poor accessibility or service AbilityNet
These figures make one thing clear: accessible products and media don’t just reach more people, they earn more trust, loyalty, and revenue.
Accessible Content Delivers Business Results
These results often go beyond what teams initially expect. Yes, it helps people with disabilities engage with your content, but it also drives measurable gains in SEO, conversion, and user engagement across the board. Here are some metrics that can directly influenced by accessibility:
- Higher Conversion Rates: Forrester found that improving user experience can increase conversion rates by up to 200%.(Forester)
- Increased Revenue: A Liveclicker study showed that adding transcripts to video content led to an average 16% increase in revenue.
- Stronger Brand Reputation: 70% of Gen Z consumers prefer brands that prioritise inclusion and diversity, including accessibility features like subtitles, transcripts, and WCAG-compliant design.
(Forbes) - Broader Engagement: 80% of users prefer captions and subtitles, even if they aren’t Deaf or hard of hearing, especially in mobile or sound-off environments. (Forbes)
- Improved Readability: Simple improvements like high colour contrast help everyone, not just users with low vision, focus on key information. (UserWay)
- Better SEO Performance and Structure: Adding transcripts to video content makes it easier for search engines to crawl and index your pages, improving visibility in search results. (Verbit) Likewise, using proper HTML structure, like semantic tags and clear heading hierarchies helps both people and search engines to understand your content more effectively. (DEV.to)
Accessibility Supports Talent Retention and Team Performance
Many organisations underestimate how much accessibility influences culture, trust, and long-term employee retention. Accenture’s Disability Inclusion report showed:
- 76% of disabled employees choose not to disclose their condition due to fear of bias or lack of support.
- When workplaces are inclusive, 90% of employees report higher levels of trust and engagement.
- Inclusive companies see up to 4x better retention among disabled talent.
By creating accessible work environments, you will also see improvements in your team performance:
- Better outcomes. Deloitte found Inclusive companies are 8x more likely to achieve better outcomes and 6x more likely to be innovative and agile.
- Innovation improvement: Companies like Microsoft and SAP found that neurodivergent teams often outperform innovation and problem-solving. (Harvard Business Review)
- Diverse hiring pools. WCAG-compliant careers pages and inclusive hiring practices attract wider, more qualified candidate pools. (Recruitics)
Accessibility Offers a Competitive Edge in Procurement
As digital responsibility becomes a priority in procurement, accessibility is now part of the decision-making equation.
- 71% of procurement leaders say they’re more likely to select vendors that prioritise sustainability and inclusion, including digital accessibility (Accenture).
- Across the EU, accessibility is now a standard scoring criterion in many public tenders.
- Buyers increasingly prefer agencies and platforms that prioritise web accessibility and build with WCAG 2.1 standards in mind from day one.
Digital responsibility is part of due diligence. If your tools, content, or services aren’t accessible, you may be disqualified before price even enters the conversation.
Accessibility Is a Smart AI Investment with Real Business Returns
AI budgets are growing fast—and accessibility is one of the most strategic ways to put that budget to work. This includes adopting tools like a video accessibility checker to meet growing content demands without adding headcount.
For businesses under pressure to reduce costs, meet compliance standards, and win enterprise contracts, investing in AI-driven accessibility tools checks all the boxes:
- It lowers operational overhead
- It automates compliance tasks that used to require expensive manual input
- It helps meet the requirements of procurement teams prioritising digital responsibility
A recent Gartner report found:
- 79% of corporate strategists view AI as critical to long-term success
- Nearly 75% of enterprise buyers have set aside budgets specifically to evaluate or adopt AI-powered tools for internal operations and customer experience.
Accessibility is firmly on that list, and it is a practical way for your business to tap into those budgets.
AI Accessibility Tools: The Smart Way to Scale Compliance
AI is reshaping how teams meet WCAG standards and EAA requirements. At Subly, we help generate descriptive transcripts, captions, and audio descriptions at scale, thus automating video accessibility. We’ve seen just how powerful these tools can be at ensuring compliance and meeting all the relevant standards. AI tools are:
- More Accurate: AI finds issues that humans miss and reduces legal risk.
- More Consistent: Every asset is evaluated to the same high standard, without reviewer bias.
- More Scalable: Thousands of videos, documents, or webpages can be reviewed and fixed automatically.
- Faster: Content teams can publish accessible content 2 to 3 times faster.
- Cheaper: Operational costs are reduced by up to 3.5x compared to manual review processes.
- More Actionable: AI highlights and helps fix issues, streamlining accessibility compliance and improving time-to-market.
This includes tools like an automated video accessibility checker, AI-generated captions and subtitles, and software that detects missing descriptive transcripts and audio descriptions.
Closing Words: The Longer You Wait, the More Your Risk
Not embracing AI, as well as accessibility and inclusion standard becomes a liability with every passing day. When accessibility is pushed to “Q4” or treated as a checklist item, companies lose ground fast. Missed deals, brand damage, and legal exposure become harder to recover from as others move ahead.
As SaaStr’s Jason Lemkin put it in The Deadly AI Slow Roll:
“Teams that delay are already losing deals, market share and momentum... It may not seem fatal at first, but by the time you figure it out, the winners will have already run far ahead.”
That warning applies just as much to AI-powered accessibility. Companies using tools like video accessibility checkers, automated subtitles, audio description generators, and descriptive transcript solutions are already shipping faster, reaching wider audiences, and winning bigger contracts.
The earlier you act, the more advantage you gain.
