What if you're not prepared to take responsibility and accept the consequences of deprioritising accessibility?
Then your only real option is triage. Remember that triage requires two things. Prioritisation and a commitment to fix everything.
Here's what that looks like:
- Define clear criteria for what gets deprioritised.
- Schedule reviews of your deprioritised work. Make it at least quarterly. Monthly is better. Ideally, it follows your release cycle so you can ship them on a schedule.
- Designate someone to own making sure low-priority won't mean abandoned.
- Track what percentage of your "later" items you get done. What gets measured improves.
And if that percentage is close to zero, stop pretending you have a system and start over from step one.
Most accessibility backlogs aren't meant for triage. Items on that list will make you feel organised. But there's no intention of getting anything on there done.
Real triage is honest. It calls out what you're skipping. It says why. And then it builds in accountability for what you've skipped.
That's it.