Do any of these sound familiar to you?
- Make our website more accessible
- Improve accessibility for users with disabilities
- Enhance user experience for our users
- Reduce barriers to access our content
- Ensure our website is usable by everyone
- Address accessibility issues on our platform
- Make our products more inclusive
These are some examples of accessibility goals I've heard from real product owners along the years.
They are commendable. But problematic.
They lack specificity, cannot be measured and I can't think of any concrete actionable steps that would apply to one but not another. I'd wager they are more likely to make you spend time and money chasing your tail than anything else.
The problem is that vague goals like these can force you to allocate resources to the wrong thing. They lead to inconsistent implementation across teams. And they give you a false sense of accomplishment without meaningful improvements.
But what I think is more important is how these goals can demotivate your team, because they make it impossible to celebrate successes or identify areas needing improvement.
So how do you avoid setting these vague goals? By choosing some that:
- are measurable and actionable
- focus on areas that have the most impact on users with disabilities
- consider both technical compliance and user experience
Without a clear direction on what you need to do exactly and how you can measure progress, your goals are just empty words.