1. Introduction
Every day digital tasks, from navigating websites, completing forms, banking, to shopping online, are meant to be quick and seamless. Yet for people who are blind or have low vision, these same interactions often present barriers that can slow progress, create frustration, or even block access altogether.
Imagine it: you’re rushing through the airport, suitcase in hand, a little too late for comfort after a long ride, only to discover that the self-service kiosk lacks accessibility features, making it impossible to check in. You’re forced to stand helplessly in line at the ticket counter, watching the minutes tick by, hoping your turn comes before your flight leaves. For many blind and low vision travelers, this isn’t a rare inconvenience; it’s one of many accessibility hurdles they navigate in their daily lives. Every inaccessible touchpoint is a missed opportunity for independent action.
Many brands approach accessibility with the best intentions. They opt to roll out screen reader fixes, add captions, and train customer-facing teams. Yet, these efforts still fall short because of gaps hidden in plain sight: a website that’s compliant but difficult to use with AT, social posts without alt text, and self-service kiosks that aren’t accessible. Together, these gaps create a fractured experience that frustrates customers and risks undermining growth. For many blind and low vision customers, these gaps aren’t a rare inconvenience or consequence of bad design; it’s one of the many accessibility hurdles they must navigate in their daily lives. Every inaccessible website or application is another missed opportunity to act independently.
For businesses, these barriers aren’t just a customer service failure; they’re lost revenue, damaged brand loyalty, and missed opportunities. By ignoring accessibility, businesses turn away willing customers and limit their growth, leaving both inclusion and profit on the table. In contrast, when accessibility is treated as a core brand value, not a bolt-on fix, it becomes a differentiator that drives growth, retention, and trust.
Consider the success of UK-based grocery retailer Tesco. After recognizing that blind and low-vision customers were struggling to navigate its website, Tesco made accessibility a priority. Partnering with the Royal National Institute of Blind People (RNIB), they redesigned the experience so every customer could shop with ease. The result? A 350% increase in online sales, higher customer satisfaction, and a stronger brand reputation.
Tesco’s success serves as proof that accessibility isn’t just the right thing to do; it’s a powerful driver of growth.
2. What are the Barriers to Digital Accessibility?
The reality is, developing or purchasing assistive technologies can be costly, and many organizations lack the in-house expertise to manage integration and provide adequate staff training. Without a dedicated staff or consultancy to assist with the rollout, accessibility can become an add-on as opposed to being integrated into products and workflows.
Accessibility in the Workplace
In an employment setting, fragmented or ad hoc deployments can undermine accessibility efforts. When organizations purchase one-off licenses for AT, such as screen readers, magnifiers, or integrated solutions, employees find themselves working with inconsistent tools and versions. This creates inefficiencies, compatibility issues, and barriers to collaboration. A better approach mirrors how enterprises manage core software like Microsoft or Adobe: deploy consistent, enterprise-wide solutions with essential customization (e.g., adjustable font sizes, keyboard navigation). The result is uniform access, streamlined support, and simpler updates.
Organizations have a legal obligation to provide accessible systems and services. But meeting the letter of the law is only the beginning. Even organizations committed to inclusion often face an “accessibility paradox”: balancing speed and profitability with the time and investment required to hire, equip, and retain employees with disabilities. Without a cohesive plan, opportunities for productivity and innovation are lost, and employee retention suffers. These gaps translate into missed opportunities for productivity, innovation, and long-term retention, while also reinforcing the broader economic cost of disability exclusion, estimated by the International Labour Organization at 1–7% of GDP.
Challenges with Public-Facing Technology
Outside the workplace, accessibility gaps are especially visible in public-facing digital experiences. Websites, ATMs, kiosks, and other self-service platforms are essential daily tools, yet they often fail to provide seamless usability for blind and low-vision users. A TPGi survey found that 58% of blind and low-vision respondents had negative experiences at restaurants due to inaccessible websites, kiosks, and payment systems. For brands, these experiences highlight the systemic barriers that shape customer perception and loyalty.
The blind and low-vision community has the same right to enjoy everyday experiences as their sighted peers, but too often accessibility is bolted on after the fact instead of being integrated early into digital systems. When organizations leave gaps in everyday digital experiences, they also create an expectations gap: while 93% of website users with disabilities expect brands to prioritize accessibility, only 27% believe companies are taking meaningful action. The disconnect between customer expectations and lived experiences is where brands have an opportunity to differentiate themselves, build loyalty, and serve a broader audience.
The Ongoing Challenge
As businesses become more aware of the gaps in digital accessibility, many are still discovering just how much work lies ahead. Even with dedicated roles and teams overseeing accessibility efforts, 31% of organizations lack processes to stop the release of inaccessible features, highlighting that awareness doesn’t always guarantee action. This highlights the need for not just legal frameworks and policies, but enterprise-wide governance models that enforce accessibility at every stage of product and service development.
3. How does Accessibility Impact Brand Loyalty?
For modern businesses, their digital experiences define the brand, and every interaction is an opportunity to foster trust and loyalty. But in trying to meet broad customer expectations, it’s easy to overlook the needs of smaller customer communities—such as the blind and low vision community—whose experiences are just as vital to their success.
Everyday Barriers Shape Experiences
As a blind or low-vision user, simple everyday tasks can range from frustrating to nearly impossible. Imagine encountering an error message that a screen reader can’t interpret a website because the underlying code isn’t readable by AT. Or navigating an app where critical visual cues, such as color changes or pop-up alerts, go unnoticed because they aren’t paired with text descriptions or audio prompts. At a kiosk or self-service terminal, the challenge can be even greater. If the touchscreen interface is designed only for sighted users, with no AT delivery software or tactile alternatives, the interaction stops before it starts.
Accessibility Gaps Lead to Missed Engagement
When blind and low vision customers face accessibility hurdles, it can create friction and frustration, increasing the risk of them abandoning a product or service altogether. Data from McKinsey shows that blind internet users abandon roughly two-thirds of their e-commerce interactions due to inaccessibility, forcing them to seek out more accessible alternatives. The pattern is similar offline.. In a survey of 632 blind and low-vision restaurant-goers, 84% said accessibility significantly or moderately affects their willingness to return, with 92% saying they’d be likely or very likely to return to a restaurant that provides an accessible experience.
Abandoned digital interactions and barriers to in-person service can have a lasting impact on brand perception and loyalty. While many North American brands struggled with customer experiences in 2025, customer-obsessed organizations in 2024 achieved 51% higher retention—evidence that investing in experience pays off.
Accessibility as a Loyalty Driver
Accessible digital experiences directly correlate with customer loyalty and advocacy. Data shows that 84% of respondents have a more favorable impression of companies that are inclusive of people with disabilities, and 80% say they’d do more business with those companies. Digital experiences shape nearly every aspect of daily life. Yet for many blind and low vision users, more must be done to enable full, independent participation. Closing this accessibility gap will be challenging for many businesses, but the rewards, from brand lift to measurable performance gains, are immense.
4. What If Accessibility Were Your Biggest Brand Differentiator?
Often, what brands see as their biggest differentiator reflects how they view themselves, whether that’s a market-leading solution, a revolutionary new product, or reliable performance. Yet one powerful differentiator is still too often overlooked: accessibility. Accessibility isn’t a checkbox—it’s a trust signal that compounds into retention, advocacy, and durable growth.
Market Expansion Opportunities
With an estimated disposable income of $1.3 trillion in the US alone, people with disabilities represent a significant and growing global market. That’s a massive opportunity for organizations to create digital experiences that truly work for people with disabilities. Serving them well expands reach and strengthens brand equity.
Customers today expect more from their digital interactions than just speed and security. Just as organizations optimize page load times, data protection, and personalization, accessibility should be treated as an equally important pillar of the digital experience. In the end, customers turn to brands they trust to provide hassle-free digital interactions. When brands provide inclusive digital experiences that work well for users, they build trust, strengthen brand loyalty, and create a flywheel of positive sentiment.
Accessibility is a Brand Protection Strategy
Meeting accessibility standards not only ensures compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), it also helps organizations avoid legal disputes that can have both financial and reputational impacts. For example, in 2015, Target reached a $6 million settlement related to website accessibility, underscoring how proactively addressing accessibility can help protect both brand trust and the bottom line. In addition to ADA compliance, organizations can look to well-established frameworks such as WCAG, Section 508, and EN 301 549, which provide clear technical guidance for creating inclusive digital products and services. While these standards aren’t universally mandated, they are often used as benchmarks in legal contexts, procurement requirements, and industry best practices. Proactively embracing accessibility not only mitigates risk, but also demonstrates leadership, builds trust, and signals long-term thinking.
Accessibility Enhances Discoverability
The internet is massive. There are billions of websites, all competing for customer attention. Businesses want their brand to stand out in a sea of competition and noise. Accessibility may feel like an invisible feature, but it’s actually a key differentiating factor in discoverability.
An accessible website—with clean, semantic code that can be read by screen readers and other AT—can directly improve your organization’s ability to rank well in a highly competitive SEO landscape. A 2025 study analyzing 10,000 websites found that accessible websites, incorporating features like proper alt text and keyboard navigation, ranked higher in search engine results. These improvements, such as descriptive alt text, logical headings, and intuitive navigation, make it easier for human users and search engines to understand. The same changes improve discoverability, reduce bounce rates, and expand reach, all signals search engines reward.
Additional analysis by the same organization showed an average 12% increase in overall organic traffic after implementing accessibility solutions, with 66.1% of domains experiencing up to a 50% rise in monthly traffic thanks to improved accessibility.
From Compliance to Leadership
Leaders embed accessibility into strategy, roadmaps, and procurement, turning inclusion into a competitive habit, not a one-time project. By doing so, organizations can open their doors to millions of underserved customers and position themselves as market leaders.
5. Turn Accessibility Into a Competitive Advantage with Vispero
Technology opens the door to self-reliance. Brands that deliver accessible, reliable digital experiences empower people to engage on their terms, without barriers or delays. The path to accessibility is challenging, but the good news is there’s no need to walk it alone.
Vispero helps organizations break down barriers and deliver enhanced digital experiences. Our mission is to create a world where every website, device, and piece of content works seamlessly for blind and low vision users. With decades of experience in both assistive technology and enterprise accessibility implementation, we design scalable solutions that work for every user, across every interaction.
We bring together brands that are leaders in digital accessibility and assistive technology, including TPGi’s Accessibility Managed Services and JAWS for Kiosk, and Freedom Scientific’s JAWS® for Windows screen reader. We’ve partnered with thousands of organizations across corporate, government, education, and healthcare to create digital experiences that empower users.
| Barrier |
How We Solve It |
Incompatible Code
Assistive tech can’t read or interpret your site. |
💻Accessible by Design
Build semantic, standards-based code that works flawlessly with AT. |
Limited Access Vision Impaired Users
Content is locked behind visuals. |
💡Multi-Modal Access
Deliver content through speech, braille, and other adaptive outputs. |
Exclusion at Self-Service Points
Kiosks aren’t usable for everyone. |
📝Inclusive Interfaces
Add speech output, tactile input, and AT integration to kiosks. |
Lack of Accessibility Expertise
Barriers go unidentified or unresolved. |
✅ Expert Guidance
Accessibility consultants assess, fix, and future-proof your digital touchpoints. |
Whether you lead a business, integrate technology, or set strategy, Vispero helps you operationalize accessibility, delivering measurable outcomes at scale.
