As a dev, I'm always looking for shortcuts.
Could I do this faster? How can I automate this? I've copy-pasted the code twice already. Time to make an abstraction.
We all have shortcuts in life and at work.
Some of them aren't even lazy hacks.
Some are real time-saving ways to do our job faster without sacrificing quality. These are shortcuts so obvious that not taking them would be a mistake. Over time, these shortcuts become the path. The standard way things are done.
But some shortcuts are anything but smart.
We skip accessibility all the time. We tell ourselves we'll add it later. We say not all of our users need it. We ship without alt text, without keyboard navigation, without proper semantic HTML. It's just a temporary shortcut, we tell ourselves.
But these accessibility shortcuts have become the way for too many teams. Not because anyone decided to exclude accessibility, but because the shortcut got normalised. It became the default. The way things are done. And now we have a web where most sites fail basic accessibility standards, where "we'll add it later" became "we never added it after all."
All shortcuts save time, but some also exclude people.
So here's my question for you.
When does a shortcut stop being a shortcut and become the way?
And more importantly, which of your shortcuts are worth keeping and which ones are you taking at someone else's expense?