Don't make me feel bad
Talking about how stakeholders get in their feelings when discussing accessibility
I was just thinking about how people can get very defensive when you bring up accessibility issues that need to be addressed and how it differs depending on your audience.
Individual contributors
In my experience they take it best. Whether it's designers or developers, typically they just want to learn and do better. Usually less defensiveness. Sometimes low confidence about whether or not they are "allowed" to just fix it.
Product owners, or people that control the direction of the feature/product
This is where it usually gets messier. In this case, your stakeholder has to choose whether or not the work you just outlined will actually get done.
I think people tend to get defensive here because they're forced to reflect on the thing you just said, which they will boil down to "There are some customers we should or should not care about", and how that makes them feel as a person. They'll sometimes try to bargain their way out of it or convince you the issue is not "that bad". They don't want to feel bad about their decision and you're making them feel bad.
Tips?
I'm not as gentle as I used to be when talking about accessibility, but I do expect this as a very human reaction. Do I have any good tips to avoid this? Not really (sorry), other than to expect it and redirect the conversation.
As a rule, I generally avoid conversations that involve "percentages of customers" or "x amount of people have a disability". I find it insulting to talk about customers in that way regarding something like disabilities. It feels disrespectful to sum a group of people down to a percentage in order for someone to feel better about not fixing something.
Also, so many accessibility violations are the result of poor design and development practices. Sometimes it's more productive to start there than with the folks that get immediately defensive. An engineer can get better at when to (or not to) use ARIA. But convincing someone to change potentially their world view? In a Wednesday afternoon meeting when I'm out of coffee and I'm pouring through backlog tickets? Yikes.
Sometimes people are best left to work through their feelings on their own, and you'll just have to find a different route. Especially in today's climate, I have less bandwidth to gentle parent people about accessibility.