Back in April, the US government delayed its new Title II Part H rule of the ADA. While I had been working with a few partners on projects right before that, a couple of them decided to put off their web accessibility fixes because they “had more time.” Not only was this the trap many cities and universities got into, which caused the DOJ to push back the timeline, it’s also not factual. If you have been looking for a web accessibility consultant but think you can take your time, I’ve got some bad news for you. Your organization cannot afford to ignore or continue to delay your website’s accessibility.

Sure, the government gave you until April 2027 to meet WCAG 2.1 Level AA before they can start fining you. But the government is not who you should be worried about. Courts have still found that private litigation can move forward before the deadline because the ADA still says websites need to be accessible. Part H just gave explicit criteria to meet.

That means private citizens who cannot use your website can and will still win lawsuits against your inaccessible website.

You need to prioritize web accessibility for more than lawsuit protection, though. Meeting WCAG standards ensures your website is usable by everyone – meaning you are not excluding 28.7% of your audience from using it.

In today’s article, we’re breaking down all of the reasons you should put hiring a web accessibility consultant at the top of your list, including its incredible ROI, cross-platform benefits, and conversion optimization.

Before we continue, I just want to reassure you: yes, you can afford to hire someone to help. I know that it feels like leads are down, budgets are tighter, and you feel like you’re spinning your wheels to meet your KPIs.

While you could be chasing the next marketing trend or asking ChatGPT for help, you’re here reading about web accessibility. Why? Because you know that something is missing from all of that noise.

Reaching the real, live human beings who are making purchasing decisions.

I think what gets missed a lot, even in discussions among web professionals, is the people. Your ideal customer needs to be able to use the website, understand how you help them, and take that next step – within a minute. If your website is difficult for some people to use, it’s probably difficult for a lot of people to fully understand.

Web accessibility consultants help you fix those problems. A great consultant goes beyond just making your website “compliant” and instead helps you optimize the entire user journey. Suddenly everything works better. By the end of a web accessibility project, your consultant’s fee could feel minimal compared to the financial benefits you’ll see.

Yes, web accessibility is an investment. But it’s one that has the potential to pay back at 100:1. Seriously.

Right now, it’s likely that your website is difficult to navigate for individuals with disabilities. Considering 28.7% of US adults have a disability, that’s a lot of people you could be excluding from working with you altogether.

I get that this feels like a big number. In fact, it goes up all of the time. Are you really excluding 28.7%? Your website might be usable for some of those individuals, but not everyone.

Let’s take a deeper look at who you’re preventing from using your website without simple improvements.

Those videos that you worked so hard to make and spent a good budget on? 15% of US adults report having some trouble hearing. That means 15% of those watching may not be able to hear all of the great script you worked on. When you don’t include closed captions, subtitles, or a transcript, they can’t benefit from your videos at all.

One of the most common learning disabilities, dyslexia affects 20% of the population. Text-heavy websites can be difficult for them to use, causing frustration and overwhelm. Choose incorrect fonts or make your line height too small, and even a short amount of text can become overwhelming to read.

Web accessibility centers a lot around individuals with vision loss. I’ve literally had clients tell me that they “don’t have customers with vision problems.” While 1 million people in the US have blindness, 5.5% of the country have some sort of difficulty seeing. Low vision, for instance, can make small text difficult to read.

Your color combinations matter. Choose too low of a contrast, and individuals with color blindness cannot read your website. 1 in 12 men and 1 in 200 women are color blind, so this is affecting more of your audience than you probably knew.

Cluttered, flashy, and inconsistently designed websites can cause confusion and issues for people who have ADHD or autism. Around 6% of US adults are diagnosed with ADHD, and that number is on the rise as more adults get screened later in life (I was finally diagnosed at 37). While 2% of adults are diagnosed with autism, because it’s a spectrum, not everyone who suspects they have it goes to get a formal diagnosis.

When I worked for the Scottish Government publisher, my coworker used a special mouse to help her arthritis. She’s not alone. Around 27% of US adults have some form of arthritis. While you may use a traditional mouse and keyboard, not everyone has the same motor skills or abilities. Clicking around a website can be difficult when you have motor issues. Your website needs to be usable by keyboard or other tools, too.

Now, I could easily tell you that improving your web accessibility is going to increase your conversion rates simply because you’ll reach that full 28.7% of people, too. While that is just objectively true, it also helps everyone use your website more easily.

If your website is difficult to understand, navigate, or buy from, people leave. And you don’t have long to convince them either. Studies have shown that 42% of people decide within 10 seconds whether they’ll stay or leave a site. On the flip side, if your website is easy for everyone in multiple situations, on different devices, and with different internet speeds, they’ll stay.

Just think about a few common situations that affect everyone.

Are your customers outside, reading your website in sunny conditions? Your higher color contrast helps them read without having to find a shady spot.

Included captions or transcripts on your videos? They can follow along without the sound on when they’re in a public setting.

Write to a lower reading level and exclude technical jargon? People can skim through your website and still understand exactly what you do and how you help them.

Do you have a design where all design elements are super consistent and clear? Everyone can figure out how to navigate through your website easily, getting to the actual conversion faster.

Making your website easier for a “percentage” of your audience to use actually makes it easier for everyone to convert. Web accessibility truly helps everyone.

In the web accessibility community, we’ve talked for years about how WCAG standards align perfectly with technical SEO.

Let’s talk about why this works. At its core, great web accessibility requires clean, semantic HTML coding. A lot of content management systems and website builders strayed away from that, so the internet actually got worse. People started trying to fix things with aria labels and SEO shortcuts, but the bedrock issue hadn’t changed.

I could go into a long diatribe that this happened because back-end developers who built these systems never learned proper HTML, but that’s a rant for another day. What happened was we were left with a bunch of websites clogging up the internet that became difficult for people to use and search engines to crawl.

But search bots will always love clean, semantic HTML that tells them exactly what’s on the page. AI bots were built similarly to search engines, so they, too, really love this clean HTML.

WCAG standards also require that we use semantic HTML. Sure, you can get away with aria labels, but that’s not fully compliant. Screen readers and other assistive technologies require the semantic code so they know how to communicate back to their user.

The tl;dr version: WCAG-compliant coding aligns perfectly with what search engines and AI bots are looking for.

When we follow those best practices and standards, we’re not only giving ourselves an edge in Google search results, but AI search, too.

And if you don’t believe me, a SEMRush study found that accessible websites saw a 23% increase in traffic. In an age when search is changing, that’s hard to ignore.

All of these improvements to your website net a really huge positive: a 100:1 ROI.

Anyone who’s worked in marketing for more than a year or two can tell you that’s a huge number. Most strategies you feel like you’re doing great to get 2.5:1 or 4:1. Getting 100:1 is almost unheard of.

But it works because of everything you’re doing to improve your website by following WCAG standards. When you hire a web accessibility consultant, they’re helping you reach and convert more of your potential customers. They’re making your website easy to use and easy to find.

Best of all? You’re helping customers who often feel ignored or unseen feel included.

Not quite sure where to start? See where your own website stacks up. Book a web accessibility audit, and we can help your team pinpoint the issues that keep people from using your website, preventing compliance, and probably preventing conversions, too.