The compliance framing loses
Presented as a legal obligation, accessibility becomes a checklist someone runs before launch and nobody funds afterwards. Presented as the set of decisions that determine whether a visitor can read your text and finish your form, it competes for attention on the same terms as everything else.
The overlap with conversion is almost total
Sufficient contrast, labelled fields, sensible tab order, real error messages, and text that survives being enlarged are accessibility requirements and usability requirements simultaneously. Every one of them removes a reason someone abandons the form where you lose them.
Nobody abandons a form because it was accessible. Plenty abandon one because it wasn’t.
It is also a search requirement
Semantic headings, meaningful link text, and alt attributes are how assistive technology navigates a page — and how crawlers and models parse it. A page structured for a screen reader is already structured for the passage-level retrieval AI search performs.
The failures that cost the most
Text over images with poor contrast, controls that only respond to a mouse, forms whose errors are conveyed by colour alone, and motion that can’t be turned off. These are common, cheap to fix, and each one excludes a share of your traffic outright.
Distinctive doesn’t mean inaccessible
A strong visual identity has to survive contrast ratios and reduced-motion preferences. Where a device fails those tests it is a defect with a rationale, not boldness — the constraint that makes a distinctive brand system survivable.
Test with a keyboard, once
Put the mouse down and try to complete your primary action using only the keyboard. This takes two minutes, requires no tooling, and finds more real problems than most automated audits.