The Accessibility Budget Debate: Why ‘Later’ Costs More

Every quarter, accessibility often gets the same answer: “It’s on the roadmap.”

It is a familiar response in budget conversations across procurement, finance, customer experience and technology teams. Accessibility is often treated as something that can wait until the roadmap clears, the next planning cycle arrives, or a compliance deadline forces the issue. But delaying accessibility does not make the cost disappear. It simply pushes that cost into the future, where it usually becomes larger, harder to manage and more commercially damaging.

The real question is no longer whether accessibility deserves a budget, but instead how much organizations are already paying by leaving it until later.

Contents

• Why The ‘Later’ Assumption Is Broken
• What ‘Later’ Actually Costs
• The Budget Conversation Needs to Change
• What Action Looks Like Now

Why The ‘Later’ Assumption Is Broken

Here’s what the ‘later’ argument used to look like: accessibility was nice to have, regulatory exposure was manageable, and the blind and low vision community was too small to move the needle on revenue. That logic is falling apart fast.

With global legislation such as the European Accessibility Act (EAA), Americans With Disabilities Act (ADA) in the US and others, the pressure on brands to demonstrate genuine accessibility (not just a screen-reader-compatible website) is intensifying. 

But even before legal risk, let’s talk about the market itself. 

There are 340 million people who are blind or have low-vision in the world today, and that number is heading toward 900 million by 2050.

This is a demographic that has largely been ignored by mainstream customer experience design and one that has spending power. The brands that show up now will earn loyalty that is extraordinarily difficult to displace.

What ‘Later’ Actually Costs

Think about what inaccessible customer service actually means in practice. A blind person tries to set up a new piece of technology. They can’t read the on-screen instructions. They call your contact centre (if they can navigate the IVR at all), and the agent has no way to see what they’re dealing with. The call takes three times longer than it should. The customer hangs up frustrated and tells their circle of family and friends about it…

Word spreads.

That last part matters more than people realize.

The blind and low vision community is vocal. They share experiences (good and bad) with an intensity that other consumer groups generally don’t match. A brand that genuinely serves them well becomes an advocate story that spreads. A brand that fails them becomes a caution that also spreads.

Then there’s the operational math. We know from our work with Be My Eyes partners that when customer accessibility is built in with the right tools for agents to literally see through the customer’s phone camera, handling times drop by 50 to 70 percent. Customer satisfaction scores land at above 90 percent. Agent satisfaction sits at 93 percent. These are all operational outcomes that any customer experience leader should want on their scorecard.

And then there’s the retrofitting problem. So many businesses spend enormous sums trying to bolt accessibility onto systems and processes that were never designed with it in mind. The technology bills, retraining costs and legal settlements consistently dwarf what a considered, proactive investment would have cost.

Every year you wait, that gap widens.

The Budget Conversation Needs to Change

All too often, accessibility spending gets parked in compliance budgets or CSR initiatives. It sits in a corner of the P&L that most revenue leaders don’t own and don’t really engage with. That’s the wrong framing entirely.

Accessibility is a customer experience investment. It belongs in the same conversation as your CX technology stack, your service centre transformation, and your AI-driven support tools. When you reframe it that way, the ROI argument becomes much easier to make.

There’s also a multiplier effect that I think gets consistently undervalued. When you earn the trust of a blind or low vision customer, you’re not just winning one person. You’re winning their extended network, who often help with purchases and decisions – the loyalty ripple is real and measurable.

And increasingly, accessibility isn’t optional in enterprise procurement. ESG reporting requirements, government contracting criteria, and financial services obligations — the B2B case for being a genuinely accessible brand is growing right alongside the consumer one. If you’re selling to large organizations, their procurement teams are starting to ask about this, and those that aren’t will be soon.

What Action Looks Like Now

People imagine a 12-month transformation programme with a seven-figure price tag but that’s not how this has to work.

The reality is that you can get started in weeks with our Customer Accessibility Suite. It includes:

Service Connect: Enables customers to connect directly with a live service agent through a one-way video, two-way audio call. The agent can see through the customer’s smartphone camera or Smart glasses (such as Meta AI glasses), allowing them to understand the issue immediately and guide the customer in real time.

Service Stream: Extends visual support into standard customer service calls, helping organizations assist blind and low vision customers more effectively within existing support workflows. During a phone call, agents can send a secure link that enables real-time visual context through the customer’s smartphone camera, allowing them to see the issue directly and guide the customer to a faster resolution.

Service AI: Provides a highly advanced, accessible AI agent for customers who want immediate assistance without necessarily speaking with a real person. Customers can upload photos, ask questions, and receive clear responses quickly and automatically from the AI agent. If needed, the interaction can be escalated seamlessly to a live agent, with any previous AI-chat session passed through to the live agent to provide context.

The companies already doing this, including Sky, Microsoft and Sony, didn’t wait for the perfect moment or the perfect budget cycle. They made a decision that this community deserved to be properly served, and they found that the commercial case made itself once they got started.

The internal conversation we’d encourage every revenue leader to have is to stop framing accessibility as a cost and start framing it as a customer acquisition and retention strategy for a fast-growing, underserved demographic. Because that’s exactly what it is.

Ready to act? Book a demo of the Be My Eyes Customer Accessibility Suite.