This post’s title is unpleasant, but it’s important to acknowledge the reality of the human condition and limitations in technologies. Even purpose-built assistive tech. Broadly, when someone says something is “accessible” that’s a hopeful statement that is based on some best efforts. Of course, there are bad actors who assert…

Adrian Roselli is a web developer, accessibility advocate, and expert in web standards. Readers can learn about web accessibility, inclusive design, and best practices for building accessible websites and applications. With articles, tutorials, and presentations, Adrian Roselli shares  insights and techniques for creating digital experiences that are usable and accessible to everyone.

Adrian Roselli

Accessibility is fundamentally about people, not just technical compliance. WCAG conformance (even at AAA level) doesn't guarantee universal accessibility due to varying user needs, contexts, technologies, and abilities. Rather than claiming something is universally accessible, practitioners should specify what accessibility features are implemented. The goal is continuous improvement to serve more people, acknowledging that perfect accessibility for everyone is unattainable given human diversity and technological limitations.

You Can’t Make Something Accessible to Everyone

It WAS about people. Now that governments are enforcing it and companies are getting sued, it’s about technical compliance.

Over the last 20 years, I’ve watched the accessibility space implode.
Back then, the only people responsible for accessibility were the developers of screen-readers and other similar 3rd party technologies. They were properly incentivized (paid directly by the handicapped for the value they produced) to provide an exemplary service, and handle all the edge cases that those individuals needed them to handle.
Now, through government (and peer) pressure the perceived responsibility has shifted, and most web devs on the planet spend an outsized amount of their time producing a technically-compliant but inferior accessibility UX, usually by fundamentally damaging of the UX of the actual product. And they do this for a mostly imaginary cadre of their users. The incentives could not be more misaligned.

That’s obvious and it’s good to be mentioned. Humans are really too complex with all kinds of needs and limitations for software to account for all of it.

IMO, “accessibility” comes from the combination of how an application presents its content to the world and a user/disability specific tool that maps the apps content to meet a particular disability (or combination of disabilities).
A path to insanity (and crap UX) is trying to combine the two, or have an app’s presentation attempt to anticipate a particular disability adaptation.
In a perfect world, an app would present itself as a collection of elements with specific abstract properties (ex. a “text like” display element, or “clickable” action control) so that an accessibility tool would have the best chance of mapping all that to a particular user. Basically, something like the “semantic web” idea.
The above is, of course, never going to happen because it’s fundamentally incompatible with “move fast and break things”.
So, disabled individuals will always be second-class citizens in the tech world.
:-(