A few years back, when I was living in Germany, I visited a startup in Dusseldorf. They had everything you'd expect from a hip up-and-coming tech startup.
A few people were slouched on a couch in a corner, playing on a PlayStation. A few were gathered around the screen, cheering. To the side of the large open space area was a ping pong table with two playing and shouting while a few waited their turns. Clusters of people were hovering around an espresso machine.
And in the center of it all, hanging on the large wall like a shrine, was a massive screen. Numbers ticking up and down. Retention. Churn. Session duration. Daily active users. Everyone kept glancing at it. Some people just...stood there watching it. Waiting for it to do something different, I guess.
I left there in awe of the amazing atmosphere. I still remember it to this day. What I wouldn't have given to work there! But I was young and didn't know any better. These guys were spending their time playing games and watching the score on the large display.
But the score isn't the game. It's just the scoreboard.
Tools like Lighthouse or axe will hand you a number. 43, 72, 85, 94, 100. That number has a way of becoming the entire conversation. People cheer when it goes up and panic when it dips. They run audits the week before a launch and breathe a sigh of relief when they hit a threshold someone decided was "good enough."
The first issue with this is that accessibility scores measure what's easy to measure, not necessarily what matters.
The second, and arguably more important, issue is that the more you watch the score, the worse you play. That's because the score distracts you from the only thing that can change it.
Those that don't fall for this trap don't obsess over the score. They're the ones asking what now? They bring in users with disabilities to test the product before they ship. They build accessibility into design reviews before writing a single line of code.
They treat accessibility less like a score and more like a craft.
They know the score will follow what they're doing to affect it.
But if the score is the thing you're watching, you might as well go and cheer the people playing ping pong.