Companies with immature accessibility practices categorize accessibility and functional defects separately. They typically don’t start fixing accessibility defects until most of the functional defects are completed. This means that, in practice, very few accessibility bugs are fixed prior to release. Instead, assistive technology users have to wait for patches or subsequent updates to get a less buggy experience.
Companies with more mature accessibility practices have one category of defects. P1s are fixed, then P2s, and so on down the line. A defect is a defect. The users who are impacted don’t distinguish between accessibility and functional defects, so why should your organization?
alt “Corporate needs you to find the difference between the pictures” meme. Horizontal split frame with the top frame having one image of text on a piece of paper that says “Accessibility Defect” and another that says “functional defect” along with the text “Corporate needs you to find the differences between this picture and this picture” referring to the two pieces of defect text. The bottom half of the frame is a woman in business dress saying, “They are the same picture.”