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Accessibility Industry Update: September 2024

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Welcome back to the monthly QualityLogic accessibility industry update. This month, we’re sharing the latest developments and insights from the world of digital accessibility in August 2024.

As always, let us know if you think we’ve missed something, or share the link with your colleagues or partners who may benefit from some or all of this information. You can also sign up to receive these accessibility updates via email.

Conferences

Web Accessibility in Mind Conference

WebAIM (Web Accessibility in Mind), the folks behind the popular WAVE evaluation tool, held a short online conference at the end of August, featuring talks from some of the most recognized speakers in the industry. At the time of writing (the first of September) these sessions haven’t yet been posted for viewing on-demand, though they are expected to drop in a matter of days. When they do become available, it will be on conference.webaim.org. In the meantime, you can take a look at the session lineup.

Inclusive Design 24 (#id24) Returns on September 12

Inclusive Design 24 is an annual online conference that requires no registration and aims to bring the community together for a day of talks to share knowledge and information. This is one you won’t want to miss, and a great low-stress way to get involved in discussions that appeal to you (even with a busy schedule). You can check out their homepage to get more information and find the YouTube playlist.

Axe-con 2025

It’s almost that time again! Deque has announced that they will be holding their free, fifth annual virtual accessibility conference (axe-con) from February 25 to the 27th of next year. Interested in attending? You can now register for the event. Want to present? There’s a call for speakers, which will run until October 11, 2024. Don’t know about Axe-con? We’ll be providing more information as the event draws closer, but you can always check out the landing page.

Rethinking Defect Prioritization

Recently, there’s been a lot of talk among accessibility practitioners about how we determine which issues need to be fixed, and when, throughout the course of an audit.

The conventional approach is to prioritize minimizing or eliminating “blockers” before a product is shipped. However, this isn’t really an answer… It raises further questions. “What is a blocker exactly?” and “For what users?” We have to establish clear criteria and draw a line in the sand somewhere.

From a compliance standpoint, the answer lies in adhering to the standards set by regional laws and regulations, more often than not the web content accessibility guidelines (WCAG). You then decide on a conformance level (A, AA, or AAA). Level A is usually seen as insufficient, while some AAA success criteria can be downright impossible to achieve in certain cases. This leaves level AA, which is seen as striking a good balance between the three, and what the vast majority of laws and organizations invariably opt for.

But how were these conformance levels originally determined? If nearly everyone goes with level AA, what’s even the point? Why aren’t these levels more practical or precise? There have been some fragmented conversations about this over the years, particularly among the W3C’s accessibility guidelines working group and within organizations dipping their feet into accessibility for the first time. A lengthy but insightful GitHub discussion (started back in June) lead to an intriguing blog post that’s been circulating recently, suggesting that WCAG’s A and AA distinction is mostly academic.

Setting conformance levels aside for a second, let’s revisit the original question from a slightly different angle. Suppose that you are a small company (perhaps a startup or family business). You don’t have the time or budget for a comprehensive accessibility audit, but you know that you need to do as much as possible to ensure that potential customers aren’t being excluded. In this case, you’ll have to accept that you won’t achieve perfection and prioritize addressing the failures that would completely stop people from using your site, followed by those causing the most inconvenience to the greatest number of users.

At larger enterprises, CIOs and CTOs often approach regulation from a risk management perspective, similar to how they handle security: by addressing the highest-impact items first. In contrast, accessibility is often treated as a civil rights issue, where the goal is to check all the boxes. Is it possible that the reluctance to implement accessibility could in part be due to this difference in perspective? Anyone with a background in network security will reluctantly admit that there is no such thing as being “unhackable”, so the logical course of action is to tackle the highest impact items first, instead of trying to check all the boxes.

This was the topic of a podcast if you’re interested in learning more: Should We Think About Accessibility Differently? Privacy and Security Comparisons – Equal Entry.

Informative Reads

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