We have spent years learning to spot greenwashing. A company announces net zero targets while quietly expanding its carbon footprint. A product gets a green logo and recyclable packaging, but the supply chain remains unchanged. The commitments are visible. The action is not. We have developed a collective instinct for the gap.

Disability inclusion has its own version. The Business Disability Forum calls it purple washing. And the gap looks remarkably familiar.

Last year, I visited the website of a well-known organisation. Their accessibility statement was thorough. Commitments to WCAG compliance. A named contact for accessibility queries. A published roadmap. All the right words in all the right places.

Then I looked at their social media. Images posted without alt text. Videos with no captions. Instagram graphics that were nothing but decorative images of text, completely invisible to a screen reader. I am blind. I use a screen reader every day. The organisation’s public face, the place where they are loudest and most visible, was the place where disabled people were most thoroughly shut out.

That gap, between the statement on the website and the reality of the content being published, has a name. And it is no different in kind from a company printing sustainability credentials on a product manufactured in conditions that would not survive scrutiny.

What the research says

The Business Disability Forum (BDF) published a discussion paper and podcast as part of its Disability Today series, exploring whether disability inclusion in business is genuine or simply good branding. The paper introduces two distinct problems: purple washing, where businesses publicly claim a commitment to disability inclusion without backing it up through their practices, and purple hushing, where organisations quietly do good work but never talk about it, meaning disabled people cannot find the employers and services that actually work for them.

Purple hushing has a sustainability parallel too. Some organisations doing genuine environmental work stay quiet, worried about being accused of greenwashing if they say anything before they have reached perfection. The result is that the loudest voices in the room are not always the most credible ones, and the people who need to find the right services or employers cannot tell who deserves to be found.

Both cause harm. The numbers are hard to argue with. Disability-inclusive organisations achieve 28% higher revenue on average, according to Accenture’s 2023 research. More than three in four job seekers prefer companies with a diverse workforce. The Purple Pound, the spending power of disabled people and their families in the UK, sits at £274 billion. The business case for disability inclusion is as robust as the business case for sustainability. The difference is that we have spent far longer holding organisations accountable on the environmental side.

“We need to look at it in the sense of disability being used to boost a business’ reputation when other elements of the business are not so positive. And we also need to look at purple washing in the sense of commitments made but not backed up by reality on the ground. As disabled people, we know that our experiences can be very different from what people have promised.”

Peter Torres Fremlin, Author of the Disability Debrief and Disability Employment Consultant

What this means in practice

With greenwashing, the scrutiny eventually caught up. Regulators stepped in. Reporting standards tightened. Organisations could no longer place a green logo on a product and consider the job done. The accountability infrastructure grew to match the ambition of the commitments being made.

Disability inclusion is not there yet. An accessibility statement is not accessibility, in the same way that a sustainability page is not a sustainable business. It is a starting point. The test is whether the commitment survives contact with the people actually producing content, running social channels, writing emails, and building products.

Purple washing often has nothing to do with bad intent. It happens when the policy lives in one part of the organisation and the practice lives somewhere else entirely, with no connection between them. The social media team posts what they have always posted. Nobody has told them that an image with no alt text excludes a significant portion of their audience. Nobody has connected the accessibility statement on the website to the daily decisions being made in the content calendar.

What changes

Birgit Neu, former Global Head of Diversity and Inclusion at HSBC, puts it plainly in the BDF podcast: organisations need year-round basics in place, policies, practices, training, employee resource groups, community engagement, all reinforced by leadership commitment at every level. Not a campaign. Not a month. A culture.

Sustainability taught us that the organisations making real progress are the ones that embedded environmental thinking into procurement, operations, product design, and reporting, not just communications. Disability inclusion requires the same approach. The accessibility statement and the social media feed need to belong to the same organisation. That means training for content teams. It means someone checking that captions are on before a video goes out. It means alt text being a requirement, not an afterthought.

The statement is not the finish line. It is the starting gun.

If your accessibility statement says one thing and your content does another, disabled people will notice. We always do. And increasingly, like the scrutiny that reshaped how we talk about sustainability, the accountability is coming.

Source: Disability Inclusion in Business: Is It Just Purple Washing?, Business Disability Forum, published September 2024.