Over the past few weeks, we've been exploring how we can prioritise accessibility as a core value through building team accountability for accessibility debt.
Building team accountability is crucial when addressing accessibility debt because accessibility is a shared responsibility that requires consistent effort across the entire team. Without accountability, you get the classic "it's someone else's problem" mentality. You're letting accessibility debt pile up until you're left scrambling to implement last-minute fixes. These fixes are both costly and likely to introduce new bugs.
When everyone, from designers to developers to testers to product owners, takes ownership of accessibility as part of their core role, you'll catch issues earlier and reduce the amount of rework. Accessibility just becomes a natural part of every decision rather than an afterthought that comes back to bite you later.
For the past five weeks, we tackled how to build team accountability. You can go back and read through each of the tactics in case you missed any:
- Assign clear roles
- Set measurable goals
- Add accessibility to the Definition of Done
- Do regular audits
- Train your staff
Enjoy!