Accessibility is a commercial position

A kiosk that someone in a wheelchair can't reach is refusing a customer. Six years of designing self-service ordering made this concrete for me in a way no audit checklist ever did: every accessibility failure on a transactional surface is a person who couldn't give you money.

The industry still files accessibility under risk. Legal exposure, ADA suits, WCAG conformance reports. All real, all useful for getting budget, and all missing the point. The point is the till.

When we made alcohol age verification legible, contrast ratios honest and focus order sane on a kiosk, completed orders went up for everyone. Not because disabled customers are a rounding error of goodwill, but because the same clarity that admits a screen reader admits a tired person, a drunk person, a person holding a child, and a person using the kiosk for the first time in a language they half know. Design for the edge and the middle gets better. That one's old wisdom. The newer observation is that procurement teams have started asking about it, which means accessibility is now a sales asset before the first guest ever touches the screen.

So I've stopped arguing for accessibility as virtue. I argue for it as positioning: the platform that everyone can use beats the platform that most people can use, in every market where the difference is measurable. Virtue is a nice side effect.