When accessibility testing is worth the effort

It comes up on almost every project, usually later than it should. Accessibility testing is not free, and pretending otherwise leads to bad decisions.

The cost of retrofitting accessibility is several times the cost of building it in. Budget a little time for it every quarter and it never becomes a project of its own.

When it is worth it

Automated tools catch perhaps a third of real issues. The teams that handle this well are rarely the ones with the biggest budgets. Anything you cannot measure here, you are deciding by taste, which is fine as long as everyone knows it.

When it is not

If nothing downstream depends on it and nobody is complaining, it can wait. This is the sort of thing that compounds, quietly, in both directions.

How to decide

Testing with disabled users finds what nothing else does. None of that requires a large budget, only a decision and someone to own it. The failure mode is not doing it wrong, it is doing it once and assuming it stays done.

What this looks like day to day

Accessibility work almost always improves the experience for people who have no impairment at all. Three things worth confirming about accessibility testing before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Testing with disabled users finds what nothing else does — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

Worth checking on your own setup before it becomes someone else's problem to fix.