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Giving a damn about accessibility

A useful resource for advocates, created by accessibility professional Sheri Byrne-Haber in partnership with UX Collective.

The handbook (PDF – 13.3 MB) is beautifully illustrated throughout its 49 pages, and covers the different ‘people challenges’ you will face as an accessibility advocate, and how to overcome them:

• People who are allergic to change. There’s little you can do about these.
• People who want to see the “business case” for accessibility. Their request is irrelevant: people with disabilities should not need to produce a business case to get an organisation to do the right thing.
• People who want to see detailed proof for every accessibility recommendation. Your first step should be to prove that WCAG applies to the inaccessible product.
• People who prioritise the creation of inaccessible new features over making old features accessible. Classic example: the Twitter ‘audio tweet’ “fiasco” (which I covered in dai11y 28/08/2020).
• People who believe “it only impacts a small number of users”. Sheri equates this attitude to “the moral equivalent of pickpocketing”: supporting an environment where inaccessible tools are generated.
• People who don’t believe that disabled people are part of the target demographic of their product. This is a “circular logical fallacy” as if people are excluded from using your product, they’ll never start to become your customer.
• People who brought you accessibility overlays. I’ve covered overlays a fair bit already.

The second half of the handbook is more broad. I’ve picked out some highlights:

“[Organisations should] reward employees for releasing accessible software, not just making their deadlines with whatever they hurl over the fence”.

“Perfectionism is a bad approach to accessibility”. Every moment you wait for ‘perfect’ increases the length of time people have to continue using an inaccessible product. “Your first attempt at making anything accessible will be awful – but even awful is better than 98% of what other people are doing”.

Accessibility is not a ‘project’: it requires ongoing commitment, best done in a continuous process improvement feedback loop.

Sheri praises design systems for building in accessibility that spreads throughout the software. And she recommends implementing an accessibility ‘release gate’, which sets the expectation from the beginning that only accessible software will be released.

“Good accessibility professionals speak at accessibility events. Great accessibility professionals speak at design events”. Talk accessibility at an a11y event and you’re preaching to the choir; talk accessibility at a design event and you’re preaching to a lot of “non-believers”.

This was a quick skim, but the whole handbook is worth a read, and doesn’t take as long as you’d think!

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