Bookmark: "Accessibility is systemic"

Sebastian Greger

Bookmarked:

Jeremy Keith making the case for promoting accessibility on a system level:

Imagine someone who’s an expert at accessibility: they know all the details of WCAG and ARIA. Now put that person into an organisation that doesn’t prioritise accessibility. They’re going to have a hard time and they probably won’t be able to be very effective despite all their skills.

Now imagine an organisation that priorities inclusivity. Even if their staff don’t (yet) have the skills and knowledge of an accessibility expert, just having the processes and priorities in place from the start will make it easier for everyone to contribute to a more accessible experience.

I particularly enjoy the semantic dissection of the terms “accessibility” vs. “inclusive design”:

To use that cliché of the double diamond, maybe inclusive design is about “building the right thing” and accessibility is about “building the thing right.”

Or to put it another way, maybe accessibility is about outputs, whereas inclusive design is about inputs. You need both, but maybe we put too much emphasis on the outputs and not enough emphasis on the inputs.

This is such a great way to put this. Inclusive design is so much more than WCAG criteria or implementation details. And indeed the only way to get there is to bake it deeply into the systems of production.