Real talk: Who gets ignored

2 minutes read

Someone tabs through your form and gets trapped. They can't move forward and they can't go back. They just tab in a circle. They're pretty stuck.

And your response is "it's a minor bug that affects only a few users."

This is what really gets me. The language we use to dismiss this.

It's an "edge case." That's "low priority." Every euphemism is just another way of saying the same thing. Users with disabilities don't matter enough to fix it right.

You think it only affects a small percentage. But that small percentage is 1.3 billion people and growing.

You want to address it in the next sprint. But the backlog is just a graveyard where issues go to hopefully die.

And when you say it works for the average user, think again. There is no average user. Most users can see your colour-coded error messages. Most users can click that tiny button. Most users can hear your audio captcha. But what about the ones who can't?

Stop hiding behind severity labels!

This isn't about technical complexity or resource allocation. It's about who you're willing to exclude. Every time you mark an accessibility issue as "minor," you're making a choice about whose experience matters.

You either fix it properly or you own the fact that you're okay with discrimination. There's no middle ground here.

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