Pivoting to fully remote accessibility testing
Five months into the pandemic w/ no finish line in sight, temporary changes must be reassessed and made permanent to improve productivity.
We are now five months into the pandemic. That is enough lived experience to have determined that:
This isn’t ending any time soon.
The initial elation about working from home has transitioned in many departments to ennui, increased meeting overhead, and more extended hours combined with plummeting productivity.
Most accessibility managers have at least some work-from-home experience with some of their team members. People with disabilities are more likely to have requested part-time or full-time WFH as a reasonable accommodation. However, those were individuals who wanted to WFH and, more importantly, emotionally invested in WFH. Also, these WFH choices were usually executed with a fair amount of planning and could be reversed if they didn’t work out. Now everyone is WFH whether they want to be or not. To make that even more complicated, with the economic situation still uncertain, asking for additional resources to make up for the almost universal productivity drop is mostly a non-starter.