An over reliance on WCAG and corporate theatre has drained the impact of accessibility. The way forward is cultural, iterative, and a catalyst for innovation. With over 1 billion people worldwide living with disabilities and a collective disposable income of $8 trillion, this isn’t a side issue. It’s one of the largest markets on earth, and one that companies can’t afford - ethically or commercially - to exclude.
If accessibility were working, the ordinary act of ordering takeout delivery, streaming a movie or checking a bank balance wouldn’t feel like running an impossible obstacle course. But for millions of people, it does.
Someone using a screen reader finds themselves stranded at an unlabeled button. A keyboard user gets trapped in a modal. A CAPTCHA demands a puzzle that can’t be solved. These barriers that block people from completing simple tasks are just daily facts of digital life.
And yet, nobody set out to build a hostile system. The problem is subtler. It lives in the way our industry organises itself: sprint deadlines, legal disclaimers, endless checklists and reports. The problem is the architecture that makes progress more complicated than it should be.
For too long, accessibility has been cast as an impossible ideal. Either perfect, complex and expensive, or pointless. That myth freezes teams, fuels “accessibility theatre,” and buries the point: people. It leaves us with audits instead of inclusion, paperwork instead of progress.
This article makes a different argument. Accessibility isn’t about perfection, or compliance for its own sake. It’s about momentum. It’s about smaller, braver steps that multiply value for everyone. It’s about treating accessibility as a cultural practice - something iterative, continuous, and woven into how we build.
If perfection is the only measure, then fire your clients. Fire your sprint process. Fire your legal team. Fire the mountain of technical debt. None of them will ever let you reach it. But if what you want is a product that actually works for the people who use it, then perfection is the wrong god to serve.
“Accessibility should never be about compliance checklists. It’s about dignity. When something isn’t accessible, it tells me I wasn’t thought about.”
- Liz Jackson, designer and founder of The Disabled List - a disability-led, creative practice organisation.
Somewhere along the way, accessibility was reduced to a matter of paperwork. Compliance reports, WCAG audits, litigation dashboards - all the machinery of “proving” progress, with little to do with lived experience.
It’s easy to see how well-meaning teams get stuck. Agile workflows reward what is shippable, not what is equitable. MVP pressure sidelines anything seen as “extra.” Tech debt lives in the quiet promise to circle back, but the circle rarely closes. Accessibility seldom appears at the start of the design lifecycle because the way teams build leaves no room for it.
Into this environment drops the heavy weight of compliance. Teams fear lawsuits, yet are rarely equipped with strategies to implement accessibility meaningfully. Organisations scramble into “litigation theatre” - audits and dashboards, compliance rituals that create the appearance of progress without the substance.
The irony is that fear of litigation often trumps fear of exclusion. Yet the numbers tell a sharper story: 69% users with access needs will abandon a website that is difficult to use. The real risk isn’t the courtroom. It’s irrelevance.
Perfectionism makes the problem worse. In workplaces where flawless delivery is treated as the only acceptable outcome, accessibility is pushed down the road - to the next sprint, the next release, the next budget cycle. That promise of “later” seldom comes. Perfectionist cultures are closely tied to avoidance, low confidence, and what psychologists call “failure freeze”. It is the same paralysis that sets in when teams postpone inclusion until they feel everything is “just right.”
And so accessibility becomes something to fear. Developers are handed a sixty–page PDF littered with red flags, but no explanation of what to fix first, no training in how to fix it, and no time in their sprint to even try. Leaders talk more about lawsuits than about the people and outcomes. The language of inclusion is buried under the language of liability. Teams, uncertain, under-resourced, and afraid of getting it wrong, perform the rituals of progress without the reality.
This is the theatre of corporate digital accessibility. What gets lost is the point: people.
“Inaccessibility isn’t just an inconvenience. It shuts you out of work, healthcare, friendships - the basics of life everyone else takes for granted.” - Frances Ryan, journalist, author of Crippled, and disability rights activist
Exclusion looks like an employee trying to complete an essential work form, only for the screen reader to fall silent halfway through. After a pause, they laugh and say, “I’ll just call instead.” That moment of weary humour reflects a familiar pattern: the burden of workaround always falls on the person excluded, never on the system that excluded them. And they are far from alone.
For screen reader users, the struggle is a daily reality: unlabeled buttons, broken flows, entire journeys that stop halfway. The experience has become so routine that it is almost expected, and the result is tasks abandoned and people left frustrated and excluded. Mobile platforms aren’t faring better. Researchers studied 10,408 Android apps and found over 77% of apps have at least one image-based button missing a natural-language label. This seemingly small gap wipes out whole user journeys.
The impact is tangible. When Australia rolled out its COVID-19 vaccine eligibility checker in 2021, the site launched with low colour contrast and inaccessible code that screen readers couldn’t parse. Instead of answering a simple, urgent question: can I get vaccinated? People were forced to depend on others for help. A service designed to protect the public left many excluded from it.
For people using assistive technology, even basic tasks can become a two to three times longer ordeal, not due to their abilities, but because the path was not designed with them in mind. In empirical trials, people using a screen-reader spent more than double the time interacting with visualisations compared to non-screen reader users.
“Inaccessibility is a form of violence. It tells disabled people our presence is an afterthought.” - Alice Wong, activist, writer, and founder of the Disability Visibility Project
Researchers use the term “digital trauma” to describe the cumulative toll of exclusion; the harm that builds when you are blocked, delayed, or repeatedly shown that a system was never designed with you in mind. People with disabilities are over 50% more likely to face barriers to accessing online services and across the top one million home pages, 95% were not WCAG 2 compliant - there was an average of 51 accessibility failures per page (Scope, 2023; WebAIM, 2025). Over time, those failures add up. Advocates and scholars classify them as a form of psychological harm, a kind of digital exclusion that leaves lasting emotional marks (Community Commons, 2023)
Accessibility isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s a catalyst for good design. The adjustments that help people with access needs often end up making products stronger, more usable, and more resilient for all of us.
Keyboard shortcuts and clear feedback support users with motor impairments while also giving power users faster ways to work. High contrast and consistent hierarchy aid neurodiverse users and improve readability for anyone outdoors in glare. Simplified flows reduce barriers for people with disabilities and, at the same time, make everyday tasks easier for busy parents, older adults, and distracted commuters.
The data is unambiguous. A 2024 Deque study found that inclusive design improved success rates across all user groups, not just those with disabilities. Amazon reported that $1.4 trillion was lost because of bad UX and called good UX the ‘secret weapon for growth’ (.
The commercial case is just as clear. Companies that lead on disability inclusion outperform their peers with 1.6 times more revenue, 2.6 times more net income, and 2 times more economic profit compared to others (Accenture, 2023).
Accessibility doesn’t just expand reach. It expands return.
Some of the most striking innovations of the past decade began as accessibility projects. In Japan, OriHime robots have reimagined what a workplace can be. Friendly robot baristas greet and serve customers, but these machines aren’t autonomous. Instead, they’re piloted by people working from home. One barista, Michio Imai, lives in Hiroshima, hundreds of kilometres from his café. Through the robot’s cameras, microphone, and speakers, he takes orders and chats with customers. “I want to give something back to the community by working,” he says. Another barista controls a robot entirely through eye movements. This provides employment and community presence for workers, a great experience for customers, and connection for both.
At MIT’s AgeLab, researchers build prototypes like wearable suits that mimic aspects of ageing, giving designers a way to anticipate challenges and engineer safer products. Even tools we now take for granted (text messaging, predictive text, the touchscreen and more) can be traced back to accessibility research.
“Disability is an opportunity for innovation. If you want to build something that works for disabled people, you’ll end up building something that works better for everyone.” - Haben Girma, disability rights advocate and the first Deafblind graduate of Harvard Law School.
Forrester estimates that for every $1 invested in User Experience, companies see a $100 return. Innovation pays - often faster and bigger than leaders expect. Globally, countries like India, Brazil, and Kenya are treating accessibility as infrastructure - embedding it into procurement, policy, and public platforms. They’re building for scale, resilience, and return.
We have spent years perfecting the performance of accessibility: the audits, the dashboards, the careful language of risk. It looks like motion from far away. Up close, people are still locked out. The most honest thing we can say is this: progress won’t come from a better script. It will come from a different habit.
Treat accessibility as craft, not ceremony. The unit of progress isn’t a slide deck or a severity count; it’s a barrier removed, a task completed without strain, a minute of someone’s life given back. WCAG is the floor, not the ceiling. Once the foundations hold - keyboard works, screen readers move, core flows are navigable - widen the circle. Put real, diverse users in the loop and listen. That’s where the product gets interesting. That’s where you find the ideas that guidelines can’t teach you.
The industry’s old reflex is to promise we’ll come back later. Replace the promise with a practice. One fix per sprint. One usability session with people who’ve been excluded. One team ritual that makes inclusion visible. Small, repeatable moves that compound into competence, and then into culture.
Accessibility isn’t a niche, and it isn’t an afterthought. It’s a way of building that makes products sturdier, kinder, and more useful for everyone who touches them. The theatre ends when the work begins.
So start where you are. Pick the flow that matters most and make it usable for more people this week. Ship the improvement. Tell the story of the time saved, the task completed, the friction gone. Then do it again.
Smaller, braver steps. That’s how we build our way out.
In the next article, we’ll share a practical framework - the R.E.A.L. model - for how teams can move from accessibility theatre to real, sustainable progress. If this piece was about diagnosing the problem, the next one is about building our way out. Stay tuned.