Accessibility is a commercial position

Accessibility gets filed under risk. Legal exposure, conformance reports, a line in the security questionnaire. All real, all useful for getting budget, and all describing an obligation that mostly does not exist.

Here is what compliance actually forced on our kiosks. ADA is a federal act, it is not prescriptive for digital, and the one thing it mandates is reach, worked out from averaged ergonomic data for wheelchair users. So we built a reach mode that brings the interface down to a seated user. That is the entire list. Contrast, focus order, legible age verification, the way the screen behaves for somebody who cannot see it, none of that was required of us. Every one of those was a choice, and a choice has to be paid for by somebody.

The work was paid for by a theatre company. Samantha Backhouse landed a publicly owned English prospect that made WCAG compliance a condition of the deal, and she landed it in the middle of a turnaround where every uplift competed with everything else for the same money. I had been waiting for a reason to justify the standard. The contract supplied it, and once the standard existed it existed for every customer on the estate rather than only the one that asked for it.

So the argument I make now is not the virtuous one. Accessibility is a position, and positions get bought the way positions always get bought, by somebody walking in with a deal. If you are waiting for a compliance department to force it, you will wait, because compliance will only ever ask you for the reach. The rest is yours to sell.