People with disabilities control $8 trillion in spending

That figure is enormous and is hard to understand until it is explained in different monetary units.

Sheri Byrne-Haber, CPACC

--

Photo by Alexander Schimmeck on Unsplash

Authors note: Because of Medium’s refusal to address its accessibility issues for both authors and readers, I’ve moved my last three years of blogs to Substack. Please sign up there for notices of all new articles. Also, I will be updating older articles (like this one) and the updates will only be published on Substack. Thank you for your continued readership and support.

I use the figure “$8 trillion” in many of my accessibility training sessions as the value of the global disability purchasing market. Typically, I get one of two responses to this statement:

  1. You made that up, or;
  2. I can’t even fathom how much $8 trillion is.

No, I didn’t make that $8 trillion figure up.

The value of the global disability purchasing market came from a 2016 report called The Global Economics of Disability from a group called Return On Disability. This incredibly detailed 61-page report performed a statistical analysis based on publicly available data to determine market sizes. People with disabilities (by themselves) in the US alone control…

--

--

Sheri Byrne-Haber, CPACC

LinkedIn Top Voice for Social Impact 2022. UX Collective Author of the Year 2020. Disability Inclusion SME. Sr Staff Accessibility Architect @ VMware.