Growing Accessibility Conversations

I started this year on a new path at Knowbility — to help people and organizations create accessible content and apps. But what was exciting and helped motivate me more were two things:

1. WebAIM’s Accessibility Analysis of One Million Page Homepages. With over 97% of sites having WCAG failure of some kind, it’s a stinging indictment on our industry. There’s a lot of work to be done — that means outreach and education, helping other developers incorporate accessibility into their workflows, coding pull requests with accessibility fixes, making certain components for design systems are accessible and much more.
2. The Supreme Court of the United States rejecting Domino’s appeal. The Supreme Court leaves the Ninth Circuit federal appeals court’s ruling, which means that people with disabilities who have trouble with sites or apps that are not accessible can bring claims under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). This result means that organizations can’t kick the proverbial can down the road for making their apps and products accessible.

In regards to the One Million Pages, I noticed that web designers and developers outside of accessibility circles discussing accessibility with a sustained focus I hadn’t witnessed before.

And I would have conversations with people outside web design and development altogether about accessibility due to this court case alone. Companies and organizations were watching it very closely.

This added increased awareness from both WebAIM’s report and the Domino’s appeal has helped fuel the discussion, making it easier to keep the conversation going to make digital accessible to all.