No One Actually Wants Accessibility
Every year we find out basic accessibility errors litter the web. Many companies, product managers, designers and engineers say they want to release accessible work, but their choices prove otherwise. Some of that comes down to ableism and the rest tracks back to priorities.
Luke Plant made a similar argument about simplicity in web development. I haven’t been able to get the post out of my head since because I saw a parallel with accessibility.
Plant says in the post:
The same is often true of complexity. The real test is the question “what are you willing to sacrifice to achieve simplicity?” If the answer is “nothing”, then you don’t actually love simplicity at all, it’s your lowest priority.
If you keep pushing accessibility down in the backlog, then you don’t value it. Organizations will always have more to do than they can get done. You can counter this by taking accessibility on in small chunks. Many teams want to do an “accessibility sprint,” but instead I recommend taking on a task or two in each sprint. That means accessibility happens near daily. A team or individual can put constant pressure on it, and soon, the progress becomes apparent.