True story.
In 2010, I went to an accessibility conference in Oakland.
I had an emphatic conversation over lunch with some folx at my table about how important it was to embed accessibility into every part of an organization because it wasn’t enough to get something accessible, you had to create an environment that supported keeping it accessible.
A woman overheard me and privately told me the story of a large company where she was a contractor. The company received many accessibility complaints.
Rather than doing a comprehensive audit, fixing bugs, and embedding accessibility into their future processes, they picked their top 100 pages (by traffic) and remediated those. They didn’t bother analyzing what pages people with disabilities were most likely to access, which might have been low traffic.
It was a shockingly haphazard effort. After spending tens of thousands of dollars remediating those pages, the pages were back to being completely inaccessible in less than 18 months.
The accessibility uproar continued, and the disability community continued to rightly demand accessibility improvements. The company claimed they had received the message, remediated the entire site, and created an accessibility statement.
A couple of years later, they rolled out a new site that was completely inaccessible. Although their process changes ensured the primary site was accessible, they didn’t bother applying them to any new site. This was because they viewed accessibility as a project that only applied to their primary site, not a program that should be adopted throughout the company.
Don’t be this company.
Alt: When organizations do not bake accessibility reviews into its entire management process for both code and content, remediated digital properties are all but guaranteed to backslide into inaccessibility.