Responding positively to accessibility push back
Everyone has a different role, context, agenda, tasks and objectives, personal experience, knowledge and personality. They see the world in a different way to us.
They’ll often have a different view when it comes to the accessibility of our products, or how we do business. Occasionally that view looks negative to us – especially when we’re advocating for accessibility ourselves.
However, in the majority of cases, when we’re aware of the myriad benefits to the business of having accessible products and processes, our view towards accessibility is positive and we begin look for ways to make it happen. That encourages us to try to bring people along with us.
## Resistance
Almost everyone working in, or advocating for accessibility has found resistance along the way. It can be frustrating. Occasionally it can be baffling.
Because of those many different perspectives, it’s unsurprising there will many different reasons given why accessibility is has low (or zero) priority in any given situation.
What we need are some strong arguments for accessibility to help properly challenge resistance and win the changes that will delight customers, end users and colleagues.
Generic responses
When someone gives us push-back, it’s easy to reach for a few generic responses:
“Accessibility is important!”
“We need to be WCAG compliant!”
“We should want to get accessibility right!”
“It’s in the design!”
“It’s the right thing to do!”
These are all correct, of course. But they’re usually not specific enough to persuade someone with a particular perspective.
Also, perhaps sadly, the moral argument just isn’t enough. Yes, accessibility absolutely is the right thing to do. 100%. And I wish it were enough. But in the world of business, with so many competing objectives and priorities, we need more.
You will hear a lot of different reasons for not doing accessibility. They’re not always bad reasons. Maybe you’ve said some of them yourself at some point. It’s all fine. What we’re interested in is what we do next. How we respond and promote a culture of inclusivity with a strong business built on the back of it. Here are lots of positive responses you can use to challenge the things people say.
Lack of resources and priority
### People say:
“We don’t have the resources for that.”
“It’s not on the roadmap.”
“It’s not a priority.”
“We don’t have time to do accessibility as well as everything else.”
Positive responses:
“Accessibility for people with disabilities is legal requirement, not a feature.”
“Accessibility can be the quality control of what’s already on the roadmap.”
“How do we make time?”
“How do we make it a priority?”
## Not in scope, or too hard
People say:
“Accessibility isn’t in the MVP [Minimum Viable Product].”
“Accessibility isn’t in scope.”
“We’ll have to do accessibility as a separate story.”
“It’s [guess] going to be too hard to make it accessible.”
Positive responses:
“Accessibility should be in every ticket’s acceptance criteria, not an add-on.”
“Good HTML doesn’t necessarily need extra effort.”
“Most fixes are easy.”
“To be a viable product it has to be usable.”
Complacency
People say:
“We’ve gotten away with it for years, why bother now?”
“Our customers haven’t ever complained [as far as I’m aware].”
“We don’t get many support calls about accessibility.”
“Our competitors aren’t any better, so no pressure.”
Positive responses:
“People and businesses with accessibility requirements might already be with our competitors.”
“We don’t always know why customers leave us.”
“End users often suffer in silence.”
“Awareness of accessibility is growing – it will be our advantage, or a competitor’s.”
Legal denial
People say:
“If nobody’s getting sued, does it really matter?”
“I’ve been here 30 years, and we haven’t been sued once [to my knowledge].”
“Have the Legal and Compliance team told us we have to?”
### Positive responses:
“More companies than ever before are getting sued for lack of accessibility.”
“You may not realise it, but that decision would be unlawful discrimination against people with disabilities.”
“Can we document this decision somewhere?”
“Legal and Compliance shouldn’t need to tell us.”
Underestimating the impact
People say:
“It only affects a small number of users.”
“I’m not aware of any colleagues with accessibility needs.”
“It works, that’s the most important thing.”
Positive responses:
“One in five people have a disability.”
“Most disabilities are hidden.”
“Almost everyone has an accessibility need – we’re all quite different.”
“Things that ‘work’ can still be hard or impossible to use.”
It won’t make us money
People say:
“I can’t see how it’ll help increase sales.”
“People already buy it, this won’t help.”
“It won’t make any difference to the bottom line.”
Positive responses:
“If more people can use the product, more can be sold it.”
“It’ll be a higher quality – people will pay more for it.”
“Satisfied customers will happily stay and keep paying us.”
Dismissive shrug
People say:
“I’ve heard of WCAG but I don’t know what it is.”
“I’ve never really bothered learning HTML.”
“Accessibility just isn’t something we do.”
“I’m new to this team, so I don’t know much about it.”
Positive response:
“Great, I’ll help you get started.”
Supporting with practical advice
Having a range of responses we can use to persuade someone join us on this positive journey is fantastic. Even better if we can follow it up and help them board the bus.
Here are a few follow up tasks, recommendations and resources you can share to help them:
- Take some accessibility awareness training
- Slide accessibility requirements into your plans, processes, objectives and values
- Always test with a keyboard and screen reader
- Learn about WCAG and the different success criteria
- Learn how to write and recognise proper HTML
- Speak to people with different accessibility needs.
## Summary
In an ideal world, accessibility will be something every business just does. Not just because it’s the right thing to do, but also because of the many commercial opportunities it provides.
Challenging negative ideas about accessibility is an important leg of the journey, and with positive responses, and a positive attitude, we can change minds and go forward together.
We will get there. We will all reap the benefits.