VPAT

Spend enough time in digital accessibility spaces and you’re likely to hear mantras like “Accessibility is everyone’s responsibility.” This is true, but any project manager recognizes that making everyone responsible for an outcome is another way of making sure that no one is accountable.

Logins are critical to the digital world. We need them to keep the bad guys out of our stuff. This includes everything from our email, bank, social media, and e-commerce accounts. And that necessarily creates barriers, which can sometimes present accessibility issues. UX, engineering, and security professionals designing login systems have the difficult task of balancing ease of use with safeguards to keep bad actors out. Following accessibility principles and best practices, including new success criteria for accessible authentication in the brand new WCAG 2.2 release, can ensure that login systems don’t lock out people with disabilities.

Accessibility is similar to security, SEO, and other such areas that require some routine maintenance and vigilance. In other words, your level of accessibility can decay without some discipline to maintain it at the required level.

So you’ve just learned about accessibility. Now what? The good news is that it’s never too late and there are steps you can take to make an immediate impact. But what should you do first?

When you work in digital accessibility, you hear a lot of things from customers, designers, developers, and agencies that just aren’t correct. Most are genuine misconceptions, but that doesn’t mean they’re harmless. At best, organizations can end up overspending on accessibility. But they also let organizations psych themselves out of pursuing greater accessibility out of fear that it will be too expensive or too difficult. And at worst, orgs might think they are accessibility conformant but are actually increasing their legal risk while missing out on the business benefits of digital accessibility.