I bought a house two years back and had the crazy idea at the time that I'd do a lot of the manual work of getting it into shape myself. Nevermind that was a terrible idea for lots of reasons, including that I'd never done that before.
What I'd like to highlight is how impatient I was to see "done." I had picked the wall colours before doing the ground work. My walls still had rough patches and dimples in them, but I started rolling that sweet fresh coat of paint right over the living room walls. I figured the paint would hide imperfections.
It didn’t. In fact, the moment the light hit that wet paint, every single flaw was magnified. I’d spent all that time on the aesthetics without fixing the foundation.
You might think you know where I'm going with this. Accessibility-first, blabla. Not really. I won't bore you with the more of the same. I think it's a given that if you treat accessibility as that final coat of paint without any of the foundation, you're setting yourself up for failure.
The real challenge for me isn't just how we make things accessible, but where the motivation to do it comes from.
I've only seen organisations approach this from one of two lenses. Either top-down or bottom-up.
Top-down relies on the weight of someone with authority to drive change. Bottom-up is a grassroots movement, fueled by the empathy of the product team.
Both approaches have their strengths and their flaws.
I'll explore each in turn in the next emails.
But let me first end with this. I'm pretty sure we need both to succeed. And we have to understand how these two interact if we want more than a "compliant" product that fails in real life.