The real cost of ignoring screen readers

It is rarely the thing that gets a project approved, and often the thing that decides how it goes. Nobody bills you for neglecting screen readers. The cost shows up somewhere else.

Accessibility work almost always improves the experience for people who have no impairment at all. Anything you cannot measure here, you are deciding by taste, which is fine as long as everyone knows it.

Where the cost lands

• Time spent on work that should not have been necessary
• Enquiries that quietly never arrive
• Test with one and the theory becomes obvious
• Rework, once the problem is finally visible

Correct markup does most of the work. Where this goes wrong is almost never a lack of knowledge. Write the reasoning down alongside the decision, because the reasoning is what changes first.

Making it stick

Announced changes need live regions. The reasoning matters more than the rule, because the rule has exceptions. It is worth deciding this deliberately rather than inheriting whatever the last person set up.

How to tell if yours is fine

The cost of retrofitting accessibility is several times the cost of building it in. Three things worth confirming about screen readers before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Correct markup does most of the work — 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.