I place the start of my career in accessibility to some time in 2008. Sure, I had done accessibility stuff before then, but I always saw me as a front-end developer with an interest in accessibility, not an outright person whose main focus was accessibility. I chose this profession because I believe in a web for all, a discrimination-free environment where everyone can be themselves, unburdened from the constraints of the physical world.

Of course, I knew that getting there would be a struggle. Too many people don’t care about disabled people until they experience disability themselves. But I hoped it would get easier over time. Technology advances, browsers got better, we front-end devs got many more tools to make websites beautiful and accessible.

I joined W3C/WAI in 2013 because I imagined I could change the world there. A little. Your work has a much better impact when you conduct it at such a pivotal place in our community. For the first few years I had a blast and contributed to wonderful projects, like the Web Accessibility Tutorials, the WCAG Quick Reference update for WCAG 2.1, and the redesign of the WAI website. Despite the frustration around the bureaucracy, the impact was worth it. The accessibility tutorials alone got many millions of hits during the years, and I still get appreciation for the Quickref when I mention my involvement in it. That said, I never felt that I had done enough.

The WebAIM million in aggregate only shows an improvement of 1.5% of home pages where no WCAG error can be automatically found between 2019 and 2023. While that sounds like almost no progress, 15,000 home pages have been fixed over that time. That’s not shabby at all!

And if you go even deeper into the data, there is even more hope to be found. Missing alternative texts: down 9.8%. Empty links: down 8%. Missing form input labels: down 6.9%. Missing document language: down 14.5%.¹

This is great progress. The WebAIM million shows us that it is difficult to make websites 100% compliant, but it also shows us that progress is made. We have to see that progress for what it is – good trends in the right directions.

I have seen the main WebAIM million number (“96.3% of home pages had detected WCAG 2 failures!”² ) quoted in relation to the need of overlays to make accessibility work.

For those who are not aware, accessibility person Mike Paciello has joined AudioEye, a company that is, among other things, known for using SLAPP suits to silence critical professionals. And where we had a fairly unified front against overlay technologies, some accessibility leaders started to schmooze up to them: “Maybe Mike can turn the ship around!” – “This is perhaps a sign of them changing!”

I don’t see this happening. There hasn’t been a public apology for the deceptive marketing, there has been no moves that inspire trust that this happens. Fool me once, shame on me. Sue acclaimed professionals, shame on you.

But it shows that the old marketing trick, to find a popular testimonial in the community you want to market to, works.

The fact is: Apart for determining if a website meets WCAG 2.2 AA, for example, meeting WCAG 2.2 AA is not that important. Removing the barriers that prevent people from using a site is much more critical. Some bad color contrast in the footer? Almost irrelevant. Social media icons without alternative text? Annoying but hardly preventing users from reading the actual site.

Seeing people aligning themselves with a person they trust and have trusted over the years is understandable. So is having the hope that they can turn the ship around. I understand that.

I understand that because I imagined being able to have a bigger impact at WAI. I hoped that we could be more agile, provide developers with better, more frequently updated information. I hoped to have an impact that made it more effective. And while I think I did a little, at the end that hope burned me out. Expecting a single person to fix an organization or company will eventually lead to disappointment.

The truth is that I’m still burned out from this experience. And I think it’s common among accessibility professionals. We believe in a better world, we believe in a world that is accessible by default. Most of us believe in a world where we don’t need automatic tools that fix issues that could have been easily prevented in the first place. And most of us believe that real accessibility is also much more than just fixing programming errors.

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I'm a web accessibility professional who cares deeply about inclusion and an open web for everyone. I work with Axess Lab as an accessibility specialist. Previously, I worked with Knowbility, the World Wide Web Consortium, and Aktion Mensch. In this blog I publish my own thoughts and research about the web industry.

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I still have hope in the community, in the honest community, that wants to make the world a better place. In those who think teaching people how to make better decisions when creating websites is more important than giving them an half-assed way to paint over the cracks.

But I have lost hope in so many people I’ve considered accessibility leaders over the years. It used to be that my biggest criticism was that they were too timid to actually tackle the issues at hand. And I think that this contributed to the situation we are in now. Where even people who should know better try to find the magic wand that solves accessibility.

To be honest, I struggle with where to go from here. With more money, the industry has become incredibly toxic, far from the collaborative environment I experienced 15 years ago. If there is a quick buck to be made, it is made, often to the disadvantage of disabled people. I’m sad that this is happening because I had hoped that we would be better than that. Maybe we can turn it around.