Imagine you are paying your water bill.
It is a Tuesday afternoon. You are at your kitchen table. The bill is due. You have done this before, dozens of times, the way most of us do without thinking about it.
Now imagine you cannot see the screen.
You are using a screen reader, the way millions of Americans do every day. It walks you down through the page, announcing each link as you go. You know this site. You have paid this bill before.
Then you find that the city has redesigned the site. The pay button is now an unlabeled icon, and your screen reader can only call it “button.” The amount due is rendered as an image with no alt text, so you cannot hear what you owe. The session times out twice while you try to find a path through.
You do not get angry. You have been here before. You have built workarounds in your head for sites that should have worked the first time. You are patient because you have learned to be.
You finally give up and call the city’s billing line. A clerk takes your payment over the phone in about four minutes. The clerk is kind. The transaction gets done. And the city, which had built the new website to reduce call volume, just took a phone payment that cost them substantially more to process than the click would have.
This is the part of accessibility that the compliance conversation tends to skip. There is a person on the other end of every page, and they are trying. Trying to pay a water bill. Renew a permit. Read a school board agenda. Look up clinic hours. The mundane, civic, daily stuff that everyone else does without thinking.
What I have seen, again and again, in the work I do with organizations:
When a site works for them, they remember. They come back. They tell the people in their life.
When a site does not, they leave quietly. They call. They go without. They route around you in ways your analytics will never show, because the failed visit looks like every other bounce.
The barriers are rarely exotic. An unlabeled button. A form field that the screen reader cannot announce. A pop-up that traps the cursor. Dynamic content that changes without warning. Things a thirty-minute manual review would have caught, missed because no one ever sat down and listened to the page the way she has to.
The compliance deadline moved last quarter. She is still at the kitchen table.
A note on scale, since this is the question that comes up next.
She is not an edge case. According to the CDC’s most recent Disability and Health Data System, more than 1 in 4 American adults, around 70 million people, report a functional disability. Among adults 65 and older, the figure is 43.9%. Vision, hearing, mobility, cognition. This is a substantial portion of every audience your organization is trying to reach.
The market is large and underserved. A peer-reviewed study by the American Institutes for Research found that working-age adults with disabilities in the U.S. hold roughly $490 billion in disposable income, comparable to the African American and Hispanic market segments. Discretionary income for this group exceeds those two combined. The numbers have been on the table for almost a decade. They just don’t get cited in the rooms where budgets get set.
And the trend is getting worse, not better. The 2026 WebAIM Million report, the largest annual study of web accessibility, analyzed the top one million home pages and found that 95.9% had detectable WCAG failures, up from 94.8% in 2025. The average page now contains 56.1 distinct accessibility errors, a 10.1% increase year over year. After six years of small improvements, the trend reversed. The web is becoming less accessible, not more.
The deadline moved. The need did not.
If your organization is working through what Title II actually means for the people you serve, I am happy to talk through it. This is what I do, and even more, it is what I care about. Reach out anytime.
Next week: the three things I check first when I open a new site.
Sources: CDC Disability and Health Data System (2024 update of 2022 BRFSS); Yin, Shaewitz, Overton, and Smith, A Hidden Market: The Purchasing Power of People With Disabilities, American Institutes for Research (2018); WebAIM Million 2026 report.