It's getting quite cold in the Netherlands. And this week I started up the chimney. As much as I go on about standard operating procedures (SOPs), you wouldn't be surprised to learn I have one for starting a fire.
I go outside with a basket and pick up a few logs and some kindling to bring indoors. I set down the basket to the left side of the chimney. I then open up the chimney exhaust all the way so that the smoke goes upwards. I forgot to do that once and the living room quickly got dark with smoke.
I then place the kindling in the chimney and light it. As it catches fire, I add a small log and wait. Once that's clearly lit, I can add another bigger log.
From time to time, I throw another log on the fire.
But I wasn't the one doing the fire this time. I had friends over. I was in charge of the snacks and drinks. They were in charge of starting the fire.
And they just could not get it going properly.
When they called me over, I immediately saw the problem. Too many big logs on the fire.
You see, the fire burns out when the size of the logs is too big and there's not enough kindling. But if you add enough kindling to get the fire going and just enough logs from time to time to make it bigger, you'll have no problem having a nice fire that crackles all through the night.
Accessibility also needs kindling.
I've seen too many try to tackle the big stuff first. They want to redo their entire design system. They want to rewrite their documentation. They want to fix every WCAG violation at once. They want to sort out processes. It's all backwards.
All these are massive logs that smother progress.
I like to start small. It's usually fixing one form label. Or adding alt text to homepage images. These are all quick wins that keep the fire going.
Bit by bit, I build up momentum. And I can add slightly bigger pieces. Maybe it's the entire checkout flow. Or maybe it's redoing a component pattern that's clearly wrong. Then I go from there. I keep feeding the fire with work that's just challenging enough to matter, but not so overwhelming that it snuffs out enthusiasm.
Accessibility projects stall under the weight of enormous tasks. And that's when teams lose faith. The fire goes out. And getting it started again is the hardest part.