If the calories from late-night snacks immediately appeared as body fat, you'd immediately cut down on midnight munchies.
If the environmental impact of plastics showed up as a growing pile in your own living room, you'd reconsider your choices instantly.
If time wasted on mindless social media scrolling materialised as physical clutter around you, you'd change your habits overnight.
Here's the thing.
We're remarkably skilled at overlooking the future consequences. That's a problem for future us. So we ignore them now. Our future selves will hate us.
The truth about web accessibility is brutally simple. We build most products as if disability didn't exist. We look at what we build through our narrow lens of ability, ignoring everyone who isn't like us. Sadly, that's billions of others.
When you think about it, some of the effects of neglecting accessibility become visible only much later after we release the product.
These aren't just an inconvenient. A button without proper colour contrast, a form without clear labelling or an image without alt text aren't just design oversights.
We'd do much better if we were able to visualise the effects from the future right now, in the present. If we just followed the rule, if it hurts, you'll fix it.
Here are three ideas to bring future consequences into the present.
- Run accessibility audits often.
- Use screen readers to test your product.
- Invite users with diverse abilities to test as well.
Make the invisible visible before it becomes a silent failure. Your future self will thank you for it.