What's a realistic timeline for tackling accessibility debt if we don't want to completely halt development?
Honestly? It depends on how deep you're buried and how complex your product and processes already are.
For most medium-sized products with substantial accessibility debt, you're looking at 6-12 months to make meaningful progress. I'm not talking about fixing everything. Just getting to a point where you're not actively excluding users and your legal risk is manageable.
I'd start with a quick audit to understand the scope. I wouldn't lose much time on this, especially if you've never done an audit before.
Categorise all the issues you find into three buckets:
- Critical. These block users completely from doing what they need to do.
- Important. These issues create barriers, but you have workarounds.
- Nice-to-haves. Solving these would improve experience.
Focus on critical issues first.
Aim to fix 60-70% of critical issues in the first three months. This gives you quick wins and reduces your biggest risks.
Then tackle important issues over the next 3-9 months whilst building prevention into your process.
Obviously, the key is to run this in parallel with feature development. Don't stop everything to fix accessibility. I've yet to meet a leadership team that would tolerate a complete feature freeze for months. Not to mention that working exclusively on fixing bugs feels like punishment rather than progress.
Instead, try to dedicate 10-20% of each sprint to accessibility work. It's sustainable and keeps your roadmap moving.
Don't try to boil the ocean. Set realistic milestones, celebrate progress and build momentum. If you try to fix everything at once, you'll burn out and abandon the effort entirely.