2016 — we met a foundation supporting people with disabilities. On the home page: video, autoplay audio, several flashing elements at once. Impressive — unless you live with photosensitive epilepsy. A year later, a Swiss crowdfunding site for athletes with limited keyboard use: donating still assumed a fully able right hand.
Both organisations existed for disabled people. Neither had checked whether their own front door was wide enough.
Until 2025, WCAG often felt optional for private companies. Requirements hit parts of the public sector hardest; everyone else filed accessibility statements as PDFs — sometimes PDFs screen readers could not open. We have seen it.
From June 2025 the European Accessibility Act reaches much of the private sector too. We still want to talk less about penalties — and more about what you are quietly trading away.
You are excluding more people than you think
Blind and low-vision users lean on screen readers. So does the driver who listens to the page through the car speaker. So does the user who forgot their glasses. So does anyone squinting at a phone in harsh sunlight.
People with motor impairments navigate by keyboard. So does the laptop user without a mouse. So does the developer who never lifts their hands from the keyboard. So does anyone with a wrist in a cast for three weeks.
People with epilepsy cannot stare at strobing UI. So cannot anyone trying to read in peace at 11 p.m. after a long day — flashy hero banners are nobody’s friend.
An interface that survives an accessibility audit tends to be faster, cleaner, and easier to understand for **everyone** — not for “15% of the market”, but for the whole funnel.
What accessibility quietly fixes “for free”
This is the paragraph nobody puts first in the business case. It should be.
Conversion barriers and operational drag
Straight talk
Companies already pay for UX audits, A/B tests, heatmaps, session replays — all to learn why shoppers never finish the purchase.
An accessibility audit surfaces many of the same failure modes. Often **faster**. Often **cheaper**. With a punch list of fixes instead of a backlog of vague hypotheses.
Stop treating accessibility as a rival to UX research. Treat it as **engineering hygiene**. Accessibility barriers are often the most brutal usability defects — while A/B tests argue about button colour, an audit catches the structural faults that **physically block** interaction.
Ignoring accessibility is voluntarily walking away from roughly 15% of purchasing power in the EU — on the order of hundreds of billions of euros.
Not because regulators move fast. Enforcement is uneven. What hurts sooner is something else.
A user who cannot finish a form does not file a bug. They **leave**. A user who cannot read pricing on a phone in sunlight does not email support. They **leave**. A user who cannot tab through checkout does not leave a note that “accessibility failed”. They **leave**.
Those exits do not arrive tagged “accessibility” in analytics. They show up as bounce rate and abandoned carts. Marketing blames the campaign; sales blames price; nobody checks whether the “add to cart” button ever showed a keyboard focus ring.
Wojtek Kutyła — Web Accessibility. Wprowadzenie do dostępności cyfrowej (Polish). Nobody paid us for this shout-out.
Wojtek has written for years in a grounded, non-markety voice. His book is the first Polish title that explains WCAG so a CTO, product owner, or manager — not only a developer — can see why it matters. If you are rebuilding a product or staffing a new team, it is a sane place to start (even if your delivery language is English — the mental model transfers).
Is your interface locking out users you never see?
We run digital accessibility audits and WCAG implementations. The bill is smallest when accessibility lands during a redesign or greenfield build — if you are there, ask early.
More in our offer: accessibility testing, remediation reports.
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Send a short note (site, product, redesign stage) — we will reply with a suggested next step. You can also write to connect@atypical.pl.