Seventy percent. That’s how many people can benefit from accessibility features in digital products. But here’s the kicker—less than twenty percent even know those features exist.
That gap isn’t a charity problem. It’s a business problem. And the biggest companies in tech just told us exactly how they’re closing it.
Welcome to Digital Dailies. I’m Matt Dho. Today we’re breaking down a CES panel that put Verizon, Salesforce, IBM, Microsoft, and Sony in the same room to talk about something most companies still treat as a checkbox. The session was moderated by Lauren Sallata, Chief Growth Officer at Jakala North America. The central question that emerged: what happens when accessibility stops being a compliance exercise and starts driving product strategy? Spoiler: it’s not a checkbox anymore. It’s becoming the product itself.
Here’s the shift.
For years, accessibility was an afterthought. You built the product, then you asked legal if it was compliant. Maybe you bolted on some features at the end. Maybe you didn’t.
Fred Moultz, Verizon’s Chief Accessibility Officer, put it simply: “We finally have a seat at the table now. We’re part of all the conversations for new products and services. You’re not doing it as an afterthought at the end.”
That’s the before and after. Before: accessibility teams reviewed finished products. After: they’re in the room when the product is being designed.
Sony’s Mike Najak went further. His team doesn’t just meet regulations—they build for what he calls “co-creators with all abilities.” And they’ve got receipts. Working with the Braille Institute and hearing loss advocacy groups, Sony developed accessible kiosks for people who are visually impaired. By 2024, they’d deployed them to 924 Best Buy locations across the United States.
That’s not compliance. That’s product development driven by disability communities.
The throughline from Mike’s team: accessibility drives profit. That’s the sequence—profit enables purpose.
Now let’s talk about how you actually operationalize this.
Catherine Nichols, Salesforce’s first Chief Accessibility Officer, shared something that should change how every company thinks about funding. Like Jenny at Microsoft, Catherine came up through employee resource groups before taking the CAO role—another proof point that internal talent pipelines matter.
Salesforce runs a centralized accommodations fund. All assistive tech, translators, job coaches, accessibility tools—paid from a general fund, not individual department budgets.
Here’s why that matters: when accommodation costs hit a single team’s P&L, managers start doing math. Should I hire this person if it costs my budget an extra forty thousand? The centralized fund removes that friction. The cost of inclusion doesn’t land on the person making the hiring decision.
That’s operational design that actually works.
IBM’s approach is different but equally tactical. Will, from IBM’s accessibility team, used an analogy that stuck with me: “It’s like trying to add blueberries to the muffin after. You got to bring blueberries in at the beginning.”
You cannot retrofit accessibility. You have to shift left—build it into the design phase, not the testing phase. As Catherine put it at Salesforce: they embed accessibility experts in product teams not as compliance checkers, but as innovation drivers.
And here’s where it gets interesting. IBM built their entire design system—called Carbon—into an AI-accessible format using something called MCP. Now their AI tools can push accessibility best practices directly to designers and developers, even if those people don’t have deep accessibility experience.
The goal: reduce the cognitive load on individual contributors. Make accessible design the default output, not the extra step.
The panel turned to a harder question: what happens when AI scales inaccessibility? Microsoft’s Jenny Lay-Flurrie didn’t flinch.
AI is being trained on the internet. And the internet is mostly inaccessible.
Her numbers: about two to four percent of the world’s websites meet accessibility standards. That means ninety-six percent do not. And that’s the training data for the AI models we’re all deploying.
Jenny put it bluntly: “We have this really crux moment right now where we’ve got a new era of technology that could repeat the mistakes of the past, or it could completely blow the doors off.”
Both paths are open. The question is which one we build.
The optimistic case: AI can auto-generate alt text for images, summarize meetings for people with cognitive differences, reduce noise in interfaces for neurodiverse users. Salesforce built exactly this into Slack—channel recaps, document summaries, simplified layouts that cut cognitive overload. Microsoft’s Copilot now offers real-time captions and sign language interpretation in Teams. IBM’s Carbon design system pushes accessibility patterns directly to developers through AI tooling.
The cautious case: if we train AI on inaccessible data, we’ll automate inaccessibility at scale. The same biases, the same exclusions, just faster.
This is where Lauren steered the panel toward the business case—because this isn’t charity.
Jenny cited a study Microsoft did with Forrester. In 2003, they found 57 percent of people could benefit from accessibility features. They just re-ran that study. The number is now seventy percent.
Seventy percent of your users. Seventy percent of your customers. And most of them don’t know the features exist.
That’s not a compliance gap. That’s a discoverability problem. And it’s a revenue opportunity for whoever solves it.
The panel made another point worth hearing: some of the most-used features in consumer tech came directly from disability innovation.
Pinch and zoom? Developed by and for blind and low vision users.
Closed captions? Fifty percent of Netflix viewers in the US use them—most of them aren’t deaf.
One-handed gamers? Four hundred million globally. These aren’t edge cases—they’re markets.
When you design for the margins, you often end up designing for everyone.
So what do you do with this?
Jenny’s advice was the simplest and probably the most powerful: “In every room, ask—is this accessible? And if you hear ‘of course it is,’ that’s probably a no.”
If you’re in product: embed accessibility expertise in your teams from day one. Not as auditors. As builders.
If you’re in finance: look at how accommodation costs are structured. If they hit individual department budgets, you’re creating friction that slows inclusion.
If you’re in AI: audit your training data. If it’s mostly web content, it’s mostly inaccessible. Your models will inherit that.
And if you’re building anything—software, hardware, experiences—remember Will’s blueberry muffin. You can’t add accessibility after the product is baked.
Jenny Lay-Flurrie has been at Microsoft for twenty-one years. She joined the disability employee resource group, built it up, chaired it for ten years, and ended up leading global accessibility. Her path is the template: empower your disabled talent, give them room to lead, and follow their ideas—because the best innovations often come from people solving problems they actually live with.
That’s the unlock from CES—and credit to Lauren Sallata for pulling these voices together. Accessibility isn’t a cost center. It’s not a legal requirement you tolerate. It’s a design philosophy that makes products better for everyone—and a business opportunity most companies are still leaving on the table. Remember the blueberry muffin: you can’t add it after the bake. Start now.
Seventy percent can benefit. Less than twenty percent know. That gap is yours to close—or your competitor’s to capture.
