Rethinking Accessibility

A few years ago, I experienced a temporary condition that severely limited my mobility and strength. For over a month, I couldn’t reliably use my legs, my arm strength was compromised, and my grip was too weak to manipulate many objects. I had no idea if this was the new normal for me, a permanent impairment. I knew my strength was there, but I couldn’t access it.

With my mobility taken away, I had very limited ways to get help: namely, my “mobile” devices. I used them to schedule appointments, find doctors and hospitals, and get insurance information. Things I’d assumed were well designed seemed unnecessarily complicated; scrolling became a chore, every cookie banner needed a precise tap, and some tried to get my data while I was trying to get an appointment.

What I experienced temporarily, many people navigate daily.

The Spectrum We All Navigate

When we think about accessibility, we usually picture permanent physical and cognitive impairments. This framing creates an artificial division between “people with disabilities” and “everyone else”.

Disabilities are generally categorized as permanent, temporary, and situational. Almost everyone experiences disability on a situational basis. Think about interacting with an ATM or your mobile device when the sun is shining (reflection creates low visibility), or when you need to lower the brightness of your tablet when reading before bedtime (light sensitivity). Many people also live with temporary or permanent disabilities, even if they don’t call them that: wearing glasses, losing mobility with age, developing hearing problems. Mine was a temporary one.

When an ATM screen is unreadable in the sun, we blame the bank (or the company that designed the machine). When it’s a permanent disability, we tend to locate the problem in the person.

Accessibility isn’t about accommodating “a few” people we think we don’t encounter in our daily lives; it’s about all of us. Of course, this doesn’t mean we should forget that disabled people face the most constant, systemic barriers. Their lived experience and advocacy must drive this work, not be sidelined by it.

Progress Over Perfection

Accessibility is often reduced to a checklist for compliance, or worse, dismissed entirely when “more important” requests come from clients or management. The “human-centered” promise quickly reverts to “profit-centered” when faced with business pressure, where humans become statistics.

I don’t blame any designer or developer for not doing the right thing. I’ve been caught in those same dilemmas and haven’t always succeeded in advocating for users. We’ve all heard it: “How many disabled users do we actually have?” Statistics-based assumptions don’t count people without permanent disabilities. And most people who run into these barriers never report them. I know, because I was one of them.

Perfect accessibility doesn’t exist, and treating it as an all-or-nothing proposition discourages progress. Instead, we should celebrate incremental improvements made with genuine understanding.

Most of us start with small steps toward accessible websites and applications, maybe learning about alt text or checking color contrast on a project. These small efforts matter. When designers and developers bring intentional awareness to even simple improvements, they often notice more opportunities for inclusive design in their next project. We make progress by creating a culture where trying matters more than perfection.

Don’t Wait to Be Excluded

In 2001, at the age of 12, I started designing and coding websites. By 2004, I had learned more about web standards, usability, and accessibility, and started to advocate for them. I gave my first talk in 2008, titled “Web Accessibility and Usability”.

I’ve always cared about accessibility for the same reason I started designing websites: the web is one of the most important inventions of our lifetime because it’s for everyone. The web makes knowledge and communication easy to access, but only if we give accessibility the attention it deserves.

While I’ve always felt empathy and a responsibility to make the web more accessible, I didn’t know how much I didn’t know until those weeks gave me a glimpse of what many people live with. We take so many simple things for granted that it’s hard to imagine living without them every day.

I’d always known I might have a disability one day, but it was a distant possibility until I became one of “the others”. With proper medical care, my strength came back and I never experienced mobility issues again, but for many people it’s permanent.

Taking action is simple, and you don’t need to be an accessibility expert. Don’t aim for perfection, just start with what you can today, and apply what you learn in your work. Even listening to one person who experiences these barriers is worth dozens of books written on accessibility.

The web is for everyone, and we don’t need to wait to experience barriers ourselves to make accessibility a priority.