I heard someone call accessibility issues "side effects" just last week.
It sounds so innocent, doesn't it? Like these problems just happened to us.
Drug companies don't call nausea or drowsiness "side effects" because they're surprised by them. They know these effects will happen to some people. They study them, document them and put them on the label. The "side" bit just means they're not the main thing that pill is trying to achieve.
But there are no "side" effects. They're all effects. Side effects are effects we knew about and didn't want. If you don't want them, then you're aware of them. So why didn't you plan for them?
Think about these examples:
- When your dropdown menu can't be navigated with a keyboard, that's not a side effect. That's a predictable outcome of building something that only works with a mouse and never testing it with anything else.
- When your colour scheme becomes unreadable for people with colour blindness, that wasn't an accident. You knew different people see colours differently.
- When screen readers can't make sense of your layout, it's because you built it without considering how content gets parsed by assistive technology.
The word "side effect" lets us off the hook. It frames these issues as unexpected consequences rather than foreseeable outcomes we chose to ignore.
What if we stopped saying "this broke accessibility" and started saying "this was never accessible?"
The planning gap isn't about what happened to us. It's about what we made happen through our choices.
It's the difference between "this happened to us" and "we made this happen."