The title should be “Check accessibility statements…” but as those are still so rare I decided to use the “Look for …”. As a website owner we are responsible for all parts of it. Third party parts as well. So even if we make our part and deliver accessibility end-to-end, from design, code and content, we may still cause barriers for some users if we use third party tools, widgets, integrations that are not accessible.
Recently, I had to audit a public sector website and stumbled upon a popular third party widget that they are using to get end-user’s feedback. Just after few seconds in the developer tools it was obvious that it is not conforming to WCAG. Auditing third party widgets like that is usually out of scope but I needed to quickly check the situation, so that I can inform the customer.
Some still treat accessibility as an improvement or feature
I will not name the company, because they are certainly not alone, but let me just say that their tools are used to capture user feedback and behavior and they are the leader in their segment. I would bet that their budgets are measured in millions when we know that their revenue is above twenty millions annually. As I was not able to find any information about accessibility on their page, I decided to ask them directly – “Is your product conforming to WCAG 2.1 on level A and AA”.
After some work days I received an honest email from their support about non-conformance and “has begun working on accessibility”. I appreciate that they are at least honest about it, but the other part of their mail kind of bothered me;
We keep track of suggestions like these from our users and WCAG compliance has been requested before so I’ve gone ahead and upvoted this request. Every quarter, our Product team reviews these requests to help them prioritize what to build next – but as I mentioned, we are definitely aware of this one, and working on it!
quote from companies support about their plans with WCAG compliance.
This quote is evidence of their lack of understanding. Product team is treating accessibility as an improvement or feature they need to prioritize instead of integrate it and make accessibility improvements pro-actively.
Answers like that, besides the fact that they are not open about their accessibility efforts on their public website, are in my opinion direct proof that they will most probably stay non-conformant to WCAG. This also means that more and more customers that rely on tools like that will stay away from them. Their revenues may rise for some more years but I don’t see their business sustainable on the long run.
Accessibility legislation is slowly but surely demanding more accessible websites and if we can’t use some tools because they are not accessible it really means that they will fade away.
Treating accessibility as an improvement or a feature is fundamentally wrong. Companies that are still thinking about accessibility as a back-log item that needs to be prioritized are on a wrong path that will probably make their product extinct.
If, or better said when, accessible alternatives arise – offering same or even better functionalities – they will loose their market shares. Powered by accessibility awareness and legislation they will probably disappear from the market or at least loose a giant share if they will not be able to make their products conforming. And with such strategy they will probably never get there.
Accessibility is not an improvement, nor a feature. It has to be integrated end-to-end.
