Are you dreaming of accessibility compliance?
Does the thought of being sued over your website's accessibility keep you awake at night?
Are you afraid of missing out on government contracts worldwide because you’re not meeting minimum web accessibility standards?
Are you looking for a trusted partner to:
sell your executive team on the ROI of accessibility?
triage and fix your team’s long-standing bug backlog?
contact users with accessibility complaints to “pick their brains?”
add personas for disabled users who want to do authentic tasks like find the accessibility statement?
find a speaker to inspire your next all-hands meeting?
certify our work with a stellar accessibility report and a custom certification?
All for a low, fixed price that’ll help you keep doing business as usual?
Practical is not for you.
Nope. Not even a little.
We have been there, you see. We don’t want to be there again. Not for a million bucks.
Practical doesn’t help companies who don’t want to help themselves. That’s impractical, you see. Really bad for the brand. We don’t do the dirty work nobody else wants to, so that your team can go ahead and break it all as soon as our contract is over.
We’ve made enough sandcastles. We’re bricklayers now.
See, here’s your problem.
Web accessibility standards have been around for over 25 years now. They’re old enough to book a rental car! If you’ve managed to dodge learning anything about them up to this point, that’s… a decision, I guess. But web accessibility is all grown up now. And it’s time for you to grow up, too.
Did you pick a web framework without asking what it’s done to enable an accessible final product? Or maybe you rolled your own? Welp, there’s your first problem.
Do your accessibility bugs magically fall below the cut line at the end of every sprint? Let me guess: the ones you do accept get assigned to the greenest and/or surliest engineer, who’ve learned that being the only one who knows anything about the site’s accessibility is a career-limiting move. And you wonder why things aren’t going so hot.
How about the designers? The product managers? The C-suite? Any controls in place to reward progress, and prevent regression?
Yep.
Here’s what you need to know:
Everyone in your organization needs to understand that the organization values disabled users, customers and employees.
Everyone in your organization needs to learn new things about disability, disabled people and their lived experiences, first hand.
Everyone in your organization needs to know the role that they play in the process of making more accessible products.
Everyone in your organization needs to understand that accessible outcomes are an expected part of their job performance—and that of their peers, as well.
Until then, nothing gets better.
It’s bad for your users—all of them—and worse for those who’ll never get to be your users. So it’s bad for you. If you don’t take responsibility for making an inclusive product, no amount of coaxing or browbeating will make any difference. No number of users or dollars will be big enough to get you to do the work. And no team of consultants will save you.
Who we are
In case you’re wondering, Practical is a real company, and we’re fully booked. We are not presently soliciting new clients.
We’ve just been doing this a really, really long time. Long enough to know when our skills are being wasted. And you should know that if you expect this kind of thing from another accessibility consultant, you’re wasting theirs, too.
Published April 1, 2024.
(Still true on April 2, and later.)
