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From Platitudes to Action
Stop saying that “Digital Accessibility is everyone’s responsibility” now!
Please stop saying that “Accessibility is Everyone’s Responsibility” now! Although this might have come from a well-intentioned place, it is a platitude. And platitudes, with all their sugar coating and sparkling fairy dust, are deviously dangerous.
This same platitude is delaying fulfilling one of the web’s most fundamental goals: providing everyone with free access to education, job opportunities, health services, banking, shopping and entertainment. It is blocking opportunities for innovation.
While we can all agree that Digital Accessibility should be a shared goal, saying it is everyone’s responsibility leads to the diffusion of this same responsibility. It undermines the critical role of specialists and structured accountability.
Let’s look at road and environmental regulations to argue this case. We don’t go around saying that road safety is everyone’s responsibility and expect no life-threatening violations to occur. We don’t go around hoping to find a solution to Climate Change by trusting every householder to recycle their rubbish, select only natural energy sources, and use public transport.
When we frame something as everyone’s responsibility, it often becomes no one’s real responsibility, and it leads to:
