As I've been writing the series on accessibility debt, tons of questions kept racking my brain. But those emails were already getting longer than I expected. So I kept a running tally of common questions I desperately wanted to answer. A few of you wrote in with your own questions and now I have a hefty list to go through.
Here are the most common ones you've sent in and some of my own as well.
- How do I convince my team that accessibility debt is worth the investment when we're already behind on delivering product features?
- What's a realistic timeline for tackling accessibility debt if we don't want to completely halt development?
- How do I know if an accessibility issue is actually impacting real users or just something that shows up in automated testing?
- Could I just outsource accessibility and hire an accessibility specialist instead of upskilling my existing team?
- How do I handle push-back from developers who say accessibility fixes will slow them down?
- What's the difference between accessibility debt that needs immediate attention versus stuff that can just wait?
- How do I set accessibility goals that my team will actually take seriously?
- What do I do when an accessibility audit reveals way more issues than we have budget to fix?
- How can I make accessibility part of our sprint planning without it feeling like extra work nobody wants to do?
- How do I balance fixing existing accessibility debt with preventing new debt from piling up?
- What's the best way to handle accessibility requirements when working with external vendors or third-party tools?
I'll go through them in the following emails, in some random order I'll make up on the spot (means I'll just pick one I fancy answering that day).