Accessibility as a Competitiveness Engine for Europe

Europe faces major challenges to its competitiveness, including low productivity growth, labour shortages, demographic decline and technological gaps. While these issues dominate economic discussions, a significant opportunity often remains overlooked: accessibility. Around 90 million people in the European Union live with disabilities, and this number is expected to increase as the population ages. Yet employment rates among people with disabilities remain far below the EU average, leaving a substantial pool of talent, skills and purchasing power underutilized.

Accessibility is not only a social or legal issue; it is also an economic strategy. By making products, services, buildings and digital platforms accessible, businesses can reach a wider audience, including people with disabilities, older adults, individuals with temporary limitations and consumers who simply benefit from better design. Rather than serving a niche market, accessibility expands markets and improves experiences for everyone.

For many organizations, accessibility is still perceived as a compliance requirement or an additional cost. In reality, it should be viewed as an investment in quality, innovation and growth. Barriers that exclude people with disabilities often create difficulties for all users. Removing those barriers improves usability, customer satisfaction, brand reputation and commercial performance. Accessibility therefore contributes directly to competitiveness and business success.

The European Accessibility Act, which entered into application in June 2025, reflects this changing perspective. It establishes common accessibility requirements for products and services such as e-commerce, banking, smartphones, computers, ticketing systems, self-service terminals and e-books. By harmonising standards across the single market, the legislation reduces fragmentation, lowers compliance costs and enables companies to scale accessible solutions more efficiently across Europe.

Accessibility is not simply a matter of rights or compliance — it is a proven tool for driving innovation and strengthening Europe’s long-term competitiveness.

Accessibility should also be understood as a quality standard. Many features originally developed for people with disabilities have become mainstream benefits. Captions, for example, were introduced to support deaf and hard-of-hearing users but are now widely used by all audiences. Likewise, clear navigation, readable content, intuitive interfaces, effective color contrast and logical information structures are not special accommodations. They are characteristics of products and services that simply work better.

Research consistently shows that accessible digital design can increase web traffic, improve conversion rates, reduce cart abandonment and generate strong returns on investment. Conversely, poor accessibility often reflects wider usability failures. Many websites still contain basic barriers such as inadequate color contrast, missing labels or inaccessible forms, creating friction for all users and limiting overall performance.

Accessibility is also economically efficient. When incorporated from the beginning of a project, costs remain relatively low. Retrofitting products, websites or services after launch is often far more expensive and less effective. For this reason, accessibility should be built into design and development processes from the outset rather than treated as an afterthought.

Accessibility also reduces the environmental and economic cost of artificial intelligence.

For decades, digital accessibility has been defended on three main grounds: it is a fundamental right, it is a legal obligation, and it opens access to a large and often underserved market. All three arguments remain valid. However, the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) introduces a fourth dimension that is increasingly relevant for Europe’s competitiveness: efficiency.

Accessibility is fundamentally about making information understandable. Accessible websites and documents clearly identify headings, buttons, form fields, images, languages and relationships between pieces of content through structured, semantic coding. These features were originally designed to support people using assistive technologies, but they provide an additional and increasingly important benefit: they help AI systems understand content more efficiently.

AI relies on context and structure to interpret information. When digital content is properly labeled and organized, AI systems can process it directly. When that information is missing, the system must infer meaning, perform additional processing and consume more computational resources. In practice, inaccessible content requires more machine work, increasing electricity consumption, water usage in data centers, processing costs and response times.

Recent research modeling the interaction between AI systems and digital content found that accessible versions of the same webpages, documents, and online transactions can reduce AI processing work by between 70 percent and 99 percent, depending on the use case. The same reductions apply to electricity consumption, water usage, and associated carbon emissions because these factors are directly linked to computational effort.

The implications are significant. At scale, organizations receiving millions of AI-powered queries each year could reduce operational costs while simultaneously lowering energy consumption and environmental impact. Accessibility therefore becomes not only a tool for inclusion and usability, but also a practical mechanism for improving the efficiency and sustainability of AI systems.

This emerging reality is particularly relevant in Europe. For the first time, European legislation is advancing along two complementary paths: requiring digital products and services to be accessible while also increasing transparency and accountability regarding the energy and water consumption of data centers. Accessibility contributes to both objectives through the same technical measures.

When incorporated from the beginning of a project, accessibility costs remain relatively low. Retrofitting later is far more expensive.

Demographic trends further reinforce its importance. Europe’s growing silver economy, driven by consumers aged 50 and over, represents one of the continent’s largest and fastest-growing markets. These consumers increasingly demand products and services that are simple, safe and intuitive to use. Tourism provides another example, as accessible destinations attract more visitors, encourage longer stays, foster customer loyalty and generate greater spending while improving experiences for all travelers.

Accessibility is also becoming increasingly relevant in the age of AI. The same features that make digital content accessible to people, such as structured information, semantic coding, alternative text and properly tagged documents, also make it easier for AI systems to process information accurately. Accessible content improves data quality, reduces inefficiencies and helps AI systems perform more reliably, making accessibility an enabler of innovation rather than a constraint.

Achieving these benefits, however, requires more than legislation. Organizations need knowledge, skills and implementation capacity. This is the role of AccessibleEU, the European Accessibility Resource Centre. Through training, technical guidance, knowledge-sharing and collaboration, AccessibleEU helps businesses, public administrations and professionals translate accessibility requirements into practical solutions and build expertize across Europe. By creating a common knowledge base and sharing best practices, it helps ensure that accessibility is implemented consistently across sectors and countries.

Spain’s ONCE Social Group provides a compelling example of accessibility as an economic asset. Through ONCE, Fundación ONCE and ILUNION, the organization has demonstrated that inclusion and business success can reinforce one another. Today, it is the fourth-largest employer in Spain and the world’s largest employer of people with disabilities, showing how accessibility can unlock talent, improve productivity, stimulate innovation, and expand markets while generating social and economic value.

The conclusion is clear: Europe should treat accessibility as both competitiveness infrastructure and a quality standard. Alongside digital transformation, skills development, energy policy and the single market, accessibility should become a central element of economic strategy. Properly understood, it is not simply a matter of rights or compliance but a proven tool for improving products, driving innovation, expanding markets, increasing employment and strengthening Europe’s long-term competitiveness. Accessibility is no longer the social dimension of economic policy; it is increasingly one of Europe’s most powerful and underappreciated engines for growth, resilience and prosperity.

Barriers that exclude people with disabilities often create difficulties for all users. Removing them improves usability for everyone.

Jesús Hernández Galán

Director of accessibility and innovation, Fundación ONCE

Disclaimer

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The advertisement relates to EU accessibility and competitiveness policy and advocates for accessibility to become a central element of Europe’s economic, digital and innovation strategy.

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