We've covered a lot of ground.

Time. Money. Responsibility. Authority. Priorities. Relevance. Six objections, six different ways of saying the same thing. Not yet, not us and certainly not now.

I'll be honest with you. I didn't always know how to have these conversations.

For a long time I got it wrong. I probably still do a lot of the time and I have to stop myself. I'd walk into a meeting armed with statistics and moral arguments and a genuine belief that if I just explained it clearly enough, they'd get it. They'd see everything from my point of view. They must, right? No, no they don't. And when they didn't, I'd leave frustrated and convinced that the people I was talking to simply didn't care.

It took me an embarrassingly long time to realise the problem wasn't them. It was me. I was having the wrong conversations entirely.

I was answering questions nobody was asking. I was making the case for why accessibility matters when the person across the table was quietly wondering how much of their time it would take. I was talking about the right thing to do when they were thinking about their roadmap. I was threatening legal risk when they were protecting a decision they'd already made.

I wasn't listening. I was just waiting for my turn to make the argument again, only louder.

The objections were signals. Every single one of them was telling me something about what the person in front of me actually needed to hear and I was too busy talking to notice.

None of these objections are about accessibility.

Time was about scope. Money was about ROI anxiety. Responsibility was about process. Authority was about deference dressed up as professionalism. Priorities were hiding a strategy that was never really strategy. Relevance was an assumption about users that nobody had ever bothered to test.

Once I stopped trying to argue against them and started trying to understand what was hiding inside them, I managed to change the conversations.

Not always immediately and not always successfully. I've sat in meetings where I asked the right question and got nothing back. I've watched accessibility get bumped again and again despite my best efforts. Somehow, I was still losing.

It still happens. I won't pretend otherwise.

But here's what I know now.

Most products aren't inaccessible because people decided against accessibility. Nobody decided anything and that's mostly why accessibility was never considered. The barrier was never really money or time or priorities. It was a conversation that hadn't happened yet.

Statistics or morality don't start that conversation. Sometimes all it takes is a good question. Good questions don't convince anyone of anything. But the right question might cause them to convince themselves.

That's the closest thing to a reliable move I've found in years of having these conversations.

The reality is that the process is slower than I'd like and messier than it looks on paper. But it does happen.