Accessibility Consulting is Broken
Accessibility Consulting is Broken
I want to bring your attention to something: Accessibility consulting is broken.
This is a screenshot from a Twitter poll I ran September 21, 2023. Poll question was "Poll for anyone who's bought an accessibility audit: How long, after the audit, did it take your internal team to fix all (or most) of the issues discovered in the audit. The results were:
- 0-30 days: 10.9%
- 31-60 days: 8.7%
- 61-90 days: 8.7%
- 91_ days: 71.7%
Why? Accessibility Audits Suck!
I've been doing this a long time. I've seen two major mistakes play out time and time again. This post will talk about one of them: Buying audits.
The first problem with audits is that they never result in real change. In fact, more often they simply cost your company a lot of money and the company doesn't take any action to resolve the issues that were identified.
The second problem with audits is that most of them suck. This is due to 1 of 3 reasons:
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The tester doesn't know what they're doing. This happens a lot, and it is happening with more frequency. The litigation pace in the US is such that there's a lot of work to go around and a lot of companies are hiring people who are either not qualified in accessibility or not qualified in development. The end result is that either the test results are inaccurate or the recommendations are bad.
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The company's deliverable is filled with boilerplate. Lots of places that do audits need to try to overcome the first issue, so they do as much using boilerplate guidance as they can. I'm a huge fan of efficiency, and I use a lot of boilerplate content myself, but I always ensure that the actual recommendations directly speak to how to resolve the specific issue.
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The deliverable is often just "representative", meaning it doesn't give you a full list of every issue, but rather simply examples of issues. This is a symptom of the entire concept of audits. Thoroughly testing an entire system and cataloging every single issue would be prohibitively time consuming and costly, and its what makes audits (on their own) a bad idea.
Audits on their own are useful in only very few circumstances, such as in legal cases, to inform a VPAT ACR, or to try to get budget for future accessibility work. But if you're not in one of those situations, then audits are a bad investment.
Before buying an audit, ask yourself: What do I really want to accomplish? If you want a system that's accessible, if you want future work to be accessible, if you want to grow accessibility program maturity in your company, then an audit is not what you want.
To find out what you want, contact me and I can guide you through the process.
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