The Lack of Disabled Peoples' Experiences in Web Accessibility is Concerning

If you've ever done frontend work around accessibility, odds are the following are true

• You are abled
• You never met an affected disabled person in the course of the work
• You never learned if your changes actually helped disabled users

You may have closed a ticket, or remediated a finding from an auditor, but any learning from real disabled peoples' experiences likely didn't happen.

We all mostly assume this status quo is fine. That as long as the VPAT (Voluntary Product Accessibility Template) or the ACR (Accessibility Conformance Report) look good to customers, there's nothing else to worry about.

Note that this mindset would be bizarre when applied to any other measurement of a product's functionality (e.g. the revenue it generates). Having someone come in yearly to disclose to you how much money your product is or isn't making would be unacceptable on several grounds. Yet we accept it for accessibility.

It's easy to say teams should do more. Teams should involve disabled people at every phase of the SDLC. Companies should hire more inclusively. But this seldom happens as it's hard on multiple socio-organizational angles.

There need to be more ways to draw from real disabled user experiences when creating on the web. Not just for large corporations with deep pockets, but small businesses too.

Until something changes, the practice of accessibility will always remain concerning.