I think we need a serious shift in how we think about and approach accessibility in web development.
Let me preface this by saying that I'm no expert, and I'm sure there are—at the very least—questionable accessibility decisions on this very site. But I've worked with awesome people who care a great deal about this topic and I've worked on projects where accessibility was taken extremely seriously by people who've made it their life's work.
These are some sentiments that I think are core to a fundamental issue with how accessibility is treated. I know the following statements aren't true of all people and teams, but I think they're widespread enough to use as a basis to rebut:
- Accessibility is seen as frontend development task
- Accessibility is treated as a mechanical process of checking off criteria
- Accessibility is about fixing edge-cases
What I think is the issue at the core of these is that accessibility is treated as a very non-human topic, and by extension the people using assistive technologies are othered. It reduces how they must use the web to something very mechanical and assumes they can't enjoy the fullness of the experience of websites the way the "rest of us" do.
Let me throw out this idea: UX and accessibility are interchangeable. It's not that one is a subset of the other. They are truly equivalent ideas. If we break them down how they're traditionally used, we think of UX as how a website works and accessibility as how to make a website work for people with needs different from "the norm".
What this does is assume a few things. It assumes there's a "normal, regular" type of person that views websites—they have fairly unimpaired vision, agile enough motor skills to control a mouse, they have average or above average reaction and comprehension times, they aren't colorblind or have impaired hearing (etc etc etc). We spend all of our time and energy creating beautiful and fun experiences for these users. We stress about color choices, transitions and animations, font selection…no detail is too small.
But then there's the other type of person, who does fit into one (or more) of the categories listed above. They may or may not use assistive technologies, like screenreader or switch controls, to navigate and understand a website. We have a tendency to treat these people robotically. We tend to assume they don't need to enjoy our websites with the same delight that we expect the first group of people to experience.