What is the business value of accessibility?
- Large corporate customers have their own accessibility requirements for software they purchase, so if you want their business you have to be serious about it
- You will have a slightly larger potential user base
- Generates goodwill for the business
- It helps your existing customers and fully abled users as well. Everyone can appreciate sensible keyboard shortcuts, tooltips, voice narration, good color contrast, font size etc.
- It's generally the right thing to do
I run a SAAS product that helps digital agencies scan/monitor/remediate sites for accessibility issues, and unless one of their clients was recently sued I have a pretty low success rate getting them to start a trial.
There could be a lot of other factors at play (I'm terrible at sales, my landing page isn't good enough, etc), but my sense is that it's not something that is on the radar for most small/medium agencies and freelancers.
These are the folks that are building a whole lot of the web, including the local businesses that people using assistive technologies would really like to be able to access easily.
You might have more luck trying to raise awareness among businesses directly. If businesses start asking their agency/developer about accessibility, you'll probably see better uptake rates.
My own experience working in a digital agency was pretty much the same though. If a client was sued or received a demand letter, they came to us asking about accessibility. When we brought it to the client, they often just saw it as us trying to upsell them.
In the end, we just shot for WCAG AA on everything whether the client asked for it or not and built the additional testing into our costs.
A lot of accessibility best-practices also benefit practically all of your users; keyboard navigation, proper contrast, etc. are a net positive to everyone.
I imagine this strategy is what remained after realizing not enough clients want to pay for accessibility.