Fear is a Poor Motivator for Accessibility
Posted on November 18, 2018
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This is a post about what happens when organizations work on accessibility only because they are afraid of being sued. Six years ago Jared Smith wrote about bad motivators for access. He wrote that the best motivators are to reward, enlighten, and inspire. The worst motivators are guilt and punishment. Today in the United States the fear of lawsuits is driving too many access efforts. Lawsuits can be important tools to protect rights. But they can also be used for the wrong reasons. Those lawsuits can hurt disabled people needing to use the law when the lack of access creates true barriers to technology and information.
For a recent keynote delivered at the third annual ICT Accessibility Testing Symposium I included the slide pictured with this post. If social media is any indication, it was far and away the most popular slide in my talk.
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The slide image was developed by Jared Smith of the accessibility consultancy WebAIM and is titled “WebAIM’s Hierarchy for Motivating Accessibility Change.” It consists of an upward-pointing triangle with colored stripes and text associated with each stripe. Bottom to top [...]