The Purple Pound: Why Stand Accessibility Is a Visitor Numbers Question, Not Just a Compliance One

UK disabled consumers and their households represent an estimated £274 billion a year in spending power, a figure usually discussed in the context of retail and hospitality but rarely mentioned on an exhibition floor. More than one in five potential UK consumers has a disability, and the research behind that figure includes a harder number still: 75% of disabled people and their families say they’ve walked away from a UK business altogether because of poor accessibility or poor service. A stand that’s hard to approach isn’t just missing a courtesy, it’s quietly losing visitors who had every intention of stopping.

The barrier is usually small and avoidable

Most of what makes a stand inaccessible isn’t structural, it’s a handful of small decisions made without anyone in the room thinking to check. A counter set at a height that assumes every visitor is standing. An aisle through the stand just wide enough for one person walking straight through, not someone navigating it with a wheelchair or a guide dog. Product demos that only run as a video with no captions, so anyone who’s Deaf or hard of hearing gets a silent clip and nothing else. None of these cost anything extra to get right if they’re part of the brief from the start, and all of them cost a visitor if they’re not.

Lighting and noise matter just as much, and get far less attention. A stand built around flashing lights, a looping audio track and a constant screen of movement reads as energetic to the team that designed it and overwhelming to a neurodivergent visitor or anyone sensitive to sensory overload. A calmer stand with a genuinely quiet corner isn’t a compromise on impact, it’s the difference between a visitor stopping for two minutes and a visitor walking straight past.

What this means for a brief

None of this needs a specialist consultant or a big redesign. It needs a handful of questions in the brief before the stand is built: is there a clear, wide path through it, are counters and demos usable at different heights, is there a captioned or printed version of anything that only plays as video, and is there somewhere on the stand that isn’t competing with flashing lights or constant noise. It’s the same instinct behind building a stand around a handful of deliberate choices rather than trying to do everything at once, a stand that works for more visitors usually works better for all of them.

Stand Between introduces exhibitors to contractors who treat accessibility as part of the design brief rather than an afterthought raised once the floor plan is already fixed. If a stand is being planned and nobody’s asked who it might be harder to approach, get in touch with Stand Between before the layout is locked in.