Friday posts never do very well in terms of engagement, so I’m going to wish everyone an early happy Groundhog Day.
In the movie Groundhog Day, Bill Murray played a character who woke up every day on February 2 and repeated that day, indefinitely.
In honor of Groundhog Day, I give you, the “accessibility groundhogs,” that is, companies that are sued over and over for inaccessibility.
In 2023, 25% of the more than 2600 accessibility lawsuits were filed against companies that had been sued previously.
Why is this?
In effect, these companies took the message of the first lawsuit and turned accessibility into a project, rather than a program
– They paid off the plaintiff, the plaintiff’s lawyers and their own lawyers
– The fixed the things the plaintiff complained about
– They paid an external organization to do a full audit and if the public is really lucky, fixed those defects too
Here’s what they didn’t do:
They didn’t improve the accessibility maturity of their organization to keep those newfound accessibility
gains from vanishing.
– They didn’t do training for their designers, developers and QA teams
– They didn’t put accessibility in their MVP
– They didn’t include disability in their personas
– They didn’t include people with disabilities with lived experience in their research.
– They didn’t incorporate assistive technology used into their customer support
– They didn’t improve the physical accessibility of their conferences
– They didn’t improve the recruiting, accommodations, or benefits for disabled employees
– They didn’t create a disability-focused ERG to increase disability visibility.
And finally, the most important item
– They didn’t create an organization where it was psychologically safe for someone to raise a red flag over any of these issues.
Don’t be Bill Murray. If you are involved in an accessibility effort as a result of litigation or threatened litigation, your organizafion needs to take accessibility seriously for the future, not just to make the current complainant to go away. Make sure you let your organization know that they can be sued again and again and again, unless they change the organization to make it more mature.
Alt: Bill Murray from Groundhog Day reporting from Punxsutawney Phil’s den saying “It’s another accessibility lawsuit, again ?!?!?!”