The money objection lands a bit differently than the time objection.

Time is personal. Time is finite and you can never get it back once you've spent it. Money on the other hand is political. It's not finite. And, most importantly, you can make more of it.

I never talk to someone who spends their own money on accessibility. So they have no reason to really be protective of their wallet. Which begs the question, what are they protecting?

My guess is they don't want to look like they're making a bad call about where to invest someone else's money.

Whose money?

Whoever has to justify the spend. A founder. A CFO. A head of product sitting between a good idea and a finite budget. And that's worth noting, because that person is usually the furthest removed from the users who need an accessible product the most.

Nevertheless, the money conversation is a much harder conversation to have.

Accessibility has this bad rep and it's because it gets framed as a cost. It's something you spend money on, not something that makes you money. And when "fix accessibility" is sitting on a list next to "acquire more customers" or "ship the next feature that will acquire more customers," accessibility loses that fight almost every time.

That's when I pull out the big guns. I turn the conversation towards Return on Investment (ROI). The standard arguments are all valid:

• You're opening your product up to a larger market
• You're reducing legal risk
• Accessible products tend to perform better in search
• A lot of accessibility improvements make the experience better for everyone

All true and fine. And all completely boring.

None of it actually answers the question the person across the table from me is asking. They're not asking "is accessibility good?" They know it's good. They're asking "what do I get back for the money I put in?" And a list of vague benefits doesn't answer that.

So I flip the script entirely.

Let's forget ROI for a second. Instead of asking what you get back from investing in accessibility, ask what it's costing you right now to ignore it.

Because it's not nothing. It is costing something.

Retrofitting a product is significantly more expensive than building it right the first time. Every sprint you ship without thinking about accessibility is technical debt you'll pay back later. This cost of rework is tangible and can be easily proven by looking at customer support tickets and the number of times QA has to throw back issues to dev because the tests don't pass.

The money objection assumes that spending nothing is the safe option.

It isn't. It's just the option where the costs are visible a little bit later.

When someone tells me they don't have the budget for accessibility, I've stopped trying to convince them it's worth investing in. Instead I ask them what they think it's costing them to leave it as is.

That's usually a question they haven't been asked before.

And that also tends to land differently.