Why digital Accessibility has failed
The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
After 15 years in the field of digital accessibility, I have to admit that we have essentially failed. While government websites are sometimes more, sometimes less accessible - BTW it is sometimes unbelievable how bad many municipal websites still are today, not only in terms of accessibility, the topic has not yet reached the private sector. And no law will essentially change that. Yes, some more people are thinking about it now. But even the well-intentioned are miserable. An example is Comdirect/Commerzbank - my bank. I know that there is definitely someone who is making an effort to anchor the topic there. But ar they making a very important submenu keyboard accessible? No. Does they have a contact point for this? No. Have they actually gotten better in recent years? No.
The mountain is getting bigger
Instead of getting smaller, the mountain of things that need to be made accessible is getting bigger. There are more and more PDFs, eGovernment applications, native apps and of course the countless normal websites.
Unfortunately, it has to be said that the same things are done wrong over and over again. You do it wrong once only to do it a little better afterwards instead of doing it right from the start. We have to deal with micro-optimizations instead of looking at how we can also improve the user experience for disabled people. We have to deal with unambitious people from development and design. And with even less ambitious decision-makers.
We should actually be ten years ahead from where we are now, but many innovations in accessibility have not arrived. These include, for example, patterns for the design of user interfaces, test automation, standardization of components and automation of corrections in design and development.
In a way, we can be happy that the private sector has largely ignored the issue so far. If we seriously test all websites, apps and documents the way we would today and make them accessible with today's human power, we won't be done in 2124. And unfortunately we can't stop the way the world goes. So when we're done, we can start all over again because 1. a lot has changed in the meantime and 2. there's always more being added than what's gone. It's like de-bureaucratization, which in the end meant even more bureaucracy.
The accessibility scene is responsible
I'm not going to stand on a stage at a fuck-up night tomorrow and talk about how we failed. For the simple reason that we have learned nothing from our failure and even don't want to admit it to ourselves. Instead, we start again every morning by mucking out the Augenias stable or rolling the rock up the mountain.
We are building even more complex rules - because the old ones worked so well, we're adding a few more. We test diligently manually, after all, this is our main source of income and reason for existence. We micro-optimize PDFs that probably no one will use. We are dogmatic with our insistence 100% conformity and thereby offend people who put in a lot of effort. We blame incompetent people in design and development because they don't know all the compliance conditions and exceptions by heart. With our processes such as the development of guidelines, we are running behind technical developments instead of sticking to them and the gap is getting bigger and bigger. We say that the guidelines are not rules, but insist on compliance with them in a dictatorial and petty manner. We cite Apple and Microsoft as positive examples - two of the richest companies in the world. We measure the local chip shop and the billion-dollar corporation with the same standards.
At the same time, there are hardly any disabled experts in the scene - disabled people are only good as guinea pigs.
There are two typical behaviors that can not only be observed in this scene:
- Your own behavior is rationalized. This means that no matter how you behave, you can explain why exactly this behavior is right, even if it isn't. Then you look for reasons that justify it, which of course you always find.
- Related to this is the defensive reflex against any criticism. You can criticize everyone to your heart's content, but please not us. 1. We are working for a good cause and 2. Everything would be fine if everyone listened to us. It implicitly resonates that you yourself are one of the few enlightened people and everyone else is more or less ignorant. For example, my criticism that there are hardly any disabled people present as experts in the scene - this can be easily proven empirically - is completely ignored. Likewise, the lectures and panels are not made up of equal numbers of women and men, even though more women than men work in accessibility.
In other words, we keep doing the same shit over and over again instead of stopping and admitting that we've been going in the wrong direction for the last few decades. At least I am not aware of any considerations that would like to rethink the entire topic.
The solution must come from outside
I fear that the old accessibility experts are not able to solve the problems described. In a way, we have made ourselves comfortable in the swearing corner while we diligently collect our customers' money. We complain about the overlay providers, about unreasonable potential customers and about our competitors. As Homer Simpson once said, "It's easy to blame ourselves. But it's even easier to blame others."
Unfortunately, the solution has to come from outside: through young people who open the windows and bring in new energy, who think differently about problems and solutions.
It is always very difficult for the “incumbent” generation to implement fundamental changes. A lot of time has passed from the realization that doctors should wash their hands to the point where most people did it. In the scene itself, however, I don't see any great pressure to change, either intrinsically or extrinsically. We are not working to make ourselves unnecessary - we are working to make ourselves indispensable.
In my opinion, Nielsen is right when he sees the future in automatic adaptation. At least for complex offers such as applications or complex forms, I don't see how we can achieve a status with all conceivable sets of rules and patterns that also works for people who are not very tech-savvy and are not familiar with assistive technology. Let's be honest: at the moment the WCAG or the EN 301549 are a nice attempt to make it good for people who are perfectly able to use their screen reader or voice control and digital interfaces in general. Other people such as the visually impaired with high zoom, neuro-diverse and many other groups have little to no coverage. So we primarily reach those who would probably still be able to cope with 50 percent accessibility. We miss those for whom 100 percent accessibility would not be enough - the overwhelming majority. At the moment, digital accessibility is still a project for the elite disabled, we ignore the rest.