Ever been in a weekly "progress update" meeting where everyone dutifully reports how they:
- are still working on the accessibility audit,
- are waiting for design feedback,
- are waiting for someone to review the code pull requests (PRs),
- need to schedule user testing, or
- research what tools to use?
I have. These things usually take at least 30 minutes and nothing ever gets decided or moves forward. They're just round-robin status updates where everyone recites their to-do list without making any decisions or explaining why it's the same list from last week. These meetings masquerade as "progress monitoring," but are just absolute time wasters.
The same action items get repeated week after week, while real accessibility barriers remain unfixed. This is because teams confuse talking about work with actually doing it. Action items then live forever because nobody takes time to actually solve them.
When you look at it, accessibility starts to feel like something that should be "tracked" rather than "worked on." An underlying cause of this is that we get scared out of making any decisions because we lack perfect information. So we end up just gathering data and researching tools instead of acting on what we already know.
I have nothing against monitoring, but without action all that happens is that accessibility debt keeps growing. Users continue to hit barriers. And team frustration mounts as meetings multiply but problems persist.
The only way to end the cycle is to replace status meetings with working sessions. At the very least, set aside time in each meeting for actual problem-solving and involve only those people directly concerned with the issues.
Even worse than endless monitoring? Having meetings where half the room is lost in technical jargon while the other half is bored senseless of repeated basic explanations.
We'll talk about that next time.