Excuses Don't Help

Excuses Just Make Life Harder For Everyone

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In my experience, when problems arise it is often a natural reaction to try to just find a quick workaround for the problem and then move on.? The problem stays unresolved, with the often-unshared workaround.? I have also often seen that highly technical or experienced users of assistive technology are more likely to create workarounds for problems rather than advocate for fixing them since their personal workaround may be easier in the short term than getting the wheels turning to actually make the fixes needed.? All of this is normal, but it is also unhelpful.

In the accessibility testing and remediation world this natural reaction to problems can be destructive and almost toxic.? Often testers do not receive welcoming open-armed response when they share test results with developers or managers who only see the issues found as more work.? When some testers let things slide because they figured out some way to overcome a problem that just throws gas on the excuses fire for not fixing things.

When testing to the accessibility standards, most accessibility advocates forcefully claim they should be considered the floor for accessibility, not the end, yet often assistive technology users will let these floors have holes in them?? I don’t get it.? Of course, there are instances of technical standards failures in testing that don’t create significant real-world accessibility challenges, but then again just doing the right thing is almost never the wrong thing to do so as Fire Marshal Bill used to say, “fix it”!