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.

Photo by Alexander Schimmeck on Unsplash

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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…