I recently read Turn the Ship Around! by L. David Marquet. This guys was a US Navy submarine commander who wrote about ditching leader-follower models in favour of giving crew members ownership of their work.
One passage in particular stood out to me.
Like every other submarine we would have weekly "tickler" meetings where the department chiefs and department heads would sit in the wardroom for an hour or more going through the binder page by page. Of course, none of this activity actually resulted in getting any of the work done; it simply allowed us to catalogue what we were supposed to do and what we were delinquent on. It sucked up a lot of time, valuable supervisory time.
This was how everyone did it, always had.
There is no requirement to maintain a tickler, only a requirement to get the work done.
Binders and weekly meetings to track work. Binders that nobody reads and meetings that just catalogue problems. Everyone did it because that's how it had always been done.
Sounds an awful lot like what most of us do every week, doesn't it?
Meetings to track the work, leaving not enough time to complete it. Somehow, tracking the work became more important than doing it.
Why?
As far as I can tell, product owners love a tidy backlog. They make sure every WCAG failure gets logged, labelled, prioritised and reviewed in the next refinement session. It feels super productive.
The problem is that I've never seen accessibility get fixed in backlogs. That's where it usually goes to die. Tickets there age, lose context and slowly become someone else's problem.
The requirement isn't to maintain a list. And I don't think any of us started with that. But slowly, somehow, the list became more important than building something everyone can use.
I have a crazy idea.
Get rid of the backlog. No, don't replace it with another central list.
Instead, give people control and ownership of their work. This makes them responsible for what they ship.
When you own accessibility from the start, you end up building better products. And it sure beats the hell out of constantly auditing and logging your way to compliance.