Common questions about accessibility debt

2 minutes read

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.

  1. How do I convince my team that accessibility debt is worth the investment when we're already behind on delivering product features?
  2. What's a realistic timeline for tackling accessibility debt if we don't want to completely halt development?
  3. How do I know if an accessibility issue is actually impacting real users or just something that shows up in automated testing?
  4. Could I just outsource accessibility and hire an accessibility specialist instead of upskilling my existing team?
  5. How do I handle push-back from developers who say accessibility fixes will slow them down?
  6. What's the difference between accessibility debt that needs immediate attention versus stuff that can just wait?
  7. How do I set accessibility goals that my team will actually take seriously?
  8. What do I do when an accessibility audit reveals way more issues than we have budget to fix?
  9. How can I make accessibility part of our sprint planning without it feeling like extra work nobody wants to do?
  10. How do I balance fixing existing accessibility debt with preventing new debt from piling up?
  11. 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).

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