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Re: WCAG - Fail or not to - Static text tab-focusable in tables

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From: Steve Green
Date: Jan 4, 2021 2:15AM

Mallory, it sounds like your experience of the accessibility market is entirely different from mine. Your statement "clients who are so awful qua accessibility that even a WCAG audit improves them" applies to every client we have ever had.

We have worked for many hundreds of clients and not one of them was anywhere near WCAG AA conformant when they first came to us. In most cases, merely achieving AA conformance was extraordinarily difficult and very few actually got there even after many rounds of fixing and retesting - there are almost always some things that can't be fixed.

If your clients are organisations who already exceed AA and want to get even better, then I would love to know where you find them. In nearly 20 years, I have never encountered a client like that.

I would also add a qualifier to your final statement. Developing a WCAG AA-conformant website is not rocket surgery if you know what you are doing. However, competently testing an existing badly designed website and making the necessary recommendations for changes *is* rocket surgery. Anyone can do it badly, but it's insanely difficult to do well, given the appalling state of most of the websites we are asked to work on. The really scary thing is that despite being appalling, most of them are better than those that are doing nothing about accessibility.

Steve