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What people should know BEFORE writing articles or creating products about accessibility

• Sheri Byrne-Haber writes about getting disabled users involved in your product development early on. It is possible to build a product that is technically accessible but is inefficient and unusable in practice. “You cannot retrofit lived experience”.
• Some products don’t support an intersectionality of disabilities. Sheri gives the example of an accessibility overlay that offered profiles for motion sensitivity, and for vision loss, but not for both at the same time.
• Language is important when it comes to writing about accessibility. Terms that are out of favour include “suffering”, “wheelchair bound”, “high / low functioning”, stigmatizing the individuals being labelled and “conveying nothing about the strengths that individual might possess”.
• Sheri bemoans the use of “headcounts” to make disability inclusion decisions. “How many people is this going to benefit?” is irrelevant; accessibility is a civil right.
• Sheri ends with this: “Accessibility is a program, not a project”. If you work from a checklist, or are working to an end date, that is a warning sign.

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