I often hear the phrase, "Do your magic," expressed with a dismissive tone of voice. Also, they act exasperated and seem to discount the detailed background and applied knowledge needed to fulfill their requests (given the complexity of their designs). Thinking they already know what accessibility is, they present "research" using outdated and flawed sources. They do not point to the law, authoritative agency guidelines, or to the ISO standard.

The following examples illustrate what an opinion based on limited experience sounds like to those who work with accessibility implementation.

Example 1: "Well, waiting on you programmers to magically create a web page is a bottleneck. I have a quick solution, just put everything we need into a document and save it as a web page file type. Just post that, why don't you?"

Example 2: "Why do you programmers waste so much time working with these databases and magically creating what you call, front end code, when you can just use an out-of-the-box database program and release it as an app to our customers?"

You would not direct those questions to the website or database programming staff, would you?

For the same reason, you are best served not approaching accessibility implementation with attitudes similar to the examples above.

Reference the article (select the image to the left) by Nick Heiner at the U.S. Digital Service, called, Mythbuster's Guide to Accessibility.

#Accessibility