Accessibility KPIs help teams measure their current performance and track progress toward inclusion. Often they also reveal a deeper challenge: accessibility debt.
This debt accumulates when you postpone accessibility fixes in favour of new features. Or you choose temporary workarounds over permanent solutions. We all do it and sometimes we even find some weird justification for it. But accessibility debt doesn't care about your weird justification. It just keeps pilling up.
KPIs serve as a compass for measuring success. Tracking accessibility debt provides crucial insight into the hidden costs and risks that could undermine those same metrics. Understanding both is essential. One shows you where you are, while the other reveals what's holding you back from where you need to be.
So I thought I'd explore accessibility debt from the point of view of a product owner in the next few Thursday emails.
By the end of the series, you should be able to:
- understand how accessibility debt affects business metrics
- measure and communicate accessibility debt to stakeholders
- apply a framework for making informed decisions about fixes vs. new features
- create team ownership of accessibility
We'll talk about things like:
- The basics of accessibility debt
- Business impact
- Measuring your current accessibility debt
- Making smart trade-offs
- Building team accountability
I'm very excited to get started down this path! A lot of the KPI emails have been building the ground work for a framework on how to deal with accessibility debt. Let's see where this takes us. As usual, I haven't mapped everything out and I'm quite curious myself to explore.