Yesterday, I realised I hadn't updated my accessibility statement since mid-2024. That's almost two years ago.
So I started to wonder if two years was too much.
The problem is there's no hard rule that sets a schedule for how often the accessibility statement should be updated. Most guidelines just say "regularly," which is utterly useless.
So here's my honest answer. Update it when something changes in your product. When you fixed an issue, when you found a new one, after you ran an audit. It just may be that nothing changed in six months. That's probably fine. No need to update it then.
Most products have regular release schedules, so that's a good touch point to update the statement as well. Lots of products release several times a day and updating the accessibility statement several times a day is not feasible. Do it on a schedule you set, maybe with every major product update.
If nothing's changed in two years, that may raise an eyebrow. Like it did when I saw my own website's statement is stale. But then I thought, wait a minute, a personal blog isn't the same as an e-commerce store processing thousands of orders a week. The stakes are completely different. and so is the rate of change.
My website barely changes. Yes, I publish new content daily, but the core structure is still the same as it was two years ago. I didn't break anything and I didn't add anything, so there's not much to update.
But an e-commerce site is a different beast. New products, new flows, new features get added constantly. Anything could easily break accessibility and stay broken for months if nobody's watching. Maybe more frequent updates make sense.
This got me thinking that the trigger isn't the calendar, but change. How much and how often is your website changing? That's your answer.
Tomorrow I want to talk about what happens when someone contacts you about accessibility. Because most accessibility statements have a contact email. And most of them lead nowhere.