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"Yeah, but people with disabilities are not our target market."
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Disability is a spectrum, not a binary. A disability can be permanent, temporary, or contextual.
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"Yeah, but it's too difficult to do."
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It gets easier with practice, like most new things.
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Part of our job is continuous learning and improvement. For example, we’ve learned responsive web design.
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Plain old semantic HTML gives you lots of a11y for free.
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"Yeah, but we don't have time to do it."
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Do small bits at first: five minute piggybacks on top of other things.
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Make a choice to replace one small bit of existing work with an a11y tasks, as an experiment.
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It’s not doing more work, it’s doing the same work differently.
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"Yeah, but we don't have support to do it."
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Get buy-in with a small, high-value, example.
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Set up a tiny test for people to do, so they can see the problem, feel it.
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Talk about how it gives us more, happier, customers, and what metrics that increases.
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"Yeah, but it's boring."
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It’s an exciting challenge, working within stronger constraints. It requires more creativity to find good solutions.
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It’s being a superhero to our users. In the best case scenario, we take something from can’t use to can use. In the worst case, we make it easier to use for everyone.
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"Yeah, but it's not important."
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Tim Berners-Lee, W3C Director and inventor of the World Wide Web, said “The power of the Web is in its universality. Access by everyone regardless of disability is an essential aspect.” That sounds important!
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It’s part of professional, high quality, work. Work we can be really proud of.
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The W3C’s Priority of Constituencies says “In case of conflict, consider users over authors over implementors over specifiers over theoretical purity”. Our users are more important than our our own.
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"Yeah, but it's limiting"
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The accessible version of something doesn’t have to be the only version. We need to provide keyboard support, but that doesn’t mean only keyboard support: of course we should support mouse (and touch) too!
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"Yeah, but it's only realistic / practical / possible on small projects."
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Yes, remediation on large projects is difficult and costly. The way to approach this is to shift left and address problems earlier, when they’re cheaper to fix.
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“It doesn't have to be perfect. Just a little bit better than yesterday.” - Leonie Watson
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"Yeah, but [FAANG](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Tech) does it this (inaccessible) way"
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We are not FAANG. Our problems are different problems and of a very different scale to theirs.
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How sure are we about how that decision was made, tested, and usability tested?
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What if this is a chance for us to do something better than them?
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"Yeah, but it doesn't look pretty"
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Every choice is a trade-off. Do we want it to look pretty for some people? Or do we want everyone to be able to (Perceive) it?
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Is there a different solution that is accesssible and also pretty?
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