Inaccessible design is invisible revenue loss

Most organisations come to EAA compliance through enforcement risk: a regulator, a fine ceiling, a deadline they’ve missed. That’s a legitimate concern. But it frames accessibility as a cost to be managed rather than a problem worth solving.

There is a second argument, and for some organisations it is the more compelling one: inaccessible digital products are losing revenue that organisations cannot see, because the data they collect only captures the users who got through.

The Barómetro de Accesibilidad Web 2025, a major post-EAA compliance study of 204 private-sector websites, makes the scale of this concrete.

These are not fringe cases. For a disabled user, the odds of hitting a barrier are substantial. And the revenue consequence is direct: a booking that does not happen, an account that is not opened, a transaction that does not complete.

The measurement gap

Organisations measure conversion rates carefully. They track drop-off at checkout, cart abandonment, bounce rate. What those metrics cannot capture is the users who encountered a barrier before they reached any of those measurement points.

A user who cannot complete a booking because the date picker is inaccessible to their screen reader does not appear in the abandonment data. They are simply absent. There is no record of the attempted journey, no signal that the revenue was lost, no prompt to investigate. The data shows only the people who got through.

The size of the market

Disabled users represent a significant share of the potential customer base. Estimates range from 15% to over 20% of the population depending on how disability is defined and measured. That range reflects genuine complexity: disability includes people with visual, hearing, motor, and cognitive impairments, many of whom use assistive technology to interact with digital products. It also includes situational impairments — a broken arm, bright sunlight, a noisy environment — that affect any user temporarily.

Whatever the precise figure, this is not a niche. It is a share of potential revenue that most organisations are not measuring because they cannot see the people who did not complete the journey.

The compliance case and the commercial case are the same problem

Organisations that approach EAA compliance as a legal obligation tend to do the minimum required. They fix the most visible barriers, produce a statement, and move on. The accessibility work is treated as a project with an end date.

Organisations that approach accessibility as a commercial problem tend to build differently. They test user journeys with real users, including people with disabilities. They identify where transactions fail. They measure what changes when barriers are removed. The compliance work and the commercial improvement are the same activity, because the barriers that exclude disabled users are the same barriers that create friction for everyone.

For financial services organisations, the stakes are particularly acute. The Barómetro data shows 32% of financial services sites failing at the technical level — in the most heavily regulated sector in Europe. The gap between regulatory sophistication and accessibility performance in that sector is where enforcement exposure and revenue loss intersect.