Later.
Damn, I hate that word. I use it a lot myself and it's always because it seems I have no choice. In fact, we started throwing it around so much that it lost its meaning.
A lot of the times, from my experience, later is just noise. It sounds like a plan and acts like a "no."
So why do we use it?
Lack of resources, lack of knowledge, lack of time. Take your pick.
Later is how we fall into the triage trap. We think we're honestly prioritising the most important accessibility issues, but triage is more than putting some things in the current sprint and most things in the backlog.
Triage requires two things. Prioritisation and a commitment to fix everything. Most teams only do the first part. The second part will come. Eventually. You guessed it...later!
But later never comes. The commitment to fix everything requires that you have a timeline not a backlog. If you can't answer "when will this get done?" you're not doing triage.
Here's translation guide for various things you think mean "later."
- "We'll address that in Q3" means "We have no plan and Q3 is far enough away that you'll forget"
- "Let's put that in the backlog" means "Let's put that on a list where things go to die"
- "After we ship the redesign" roughly translates to "After we ship the redesign and six other things that will also take priority"
- "It's on our roadmap" translates to "We wrote it down somewhere public to make someone stop asking"
- "When we have more resources" definitely means "Never, because we will never have enough resources"
There are more variations to these, but you get the picture.
So here's a three-question yes or no quiz for you to tell if you're bullshitting yourself:
- Do you have anyone assigned to work on the low priority issues when the time comes?
- Have you reserved budget or capacity for this work?
- If someone quit tomorrow, would this work still happen?
If you answer no to any of these, you're dreaming.
Now be honest with yourself!
What percentage of your "later" accessibility issues have you ever actually done?