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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:
- Lack of accountability: If no specific team or role is designated to implement, measure and enforce Digital Accessibility, issues are overlooked or deprioritised.
- Superficial efforts: Without trained and experienced specialists, teams may implement Digital Accessibility as an afterthought, relying on the misuse of automated tools rather than deep expertise. (No matter what the marketing blurb of these automated tools says, they only help identify 30% of the issues, and even their reports require someone with expertise to reduce the chance of false positives, wasting the time of our engineers and QAs.)
- Inconsistent implementation: Different teams interpret Digital Accessibility rules and guidelines in conflicting ways, leading to fragmented approaches and short-lasting solutions.
Roads are designed with accessibility features like curb cuts, tactile paving, pedestrian signals, and designated…
