How to identify a Toxic Accessibility Culture, and what you can do about it
A broken organizational culture makes everything disability-related harder, from implementing accessibility projects to getting critical support to move the disability / accessibility needle forward
Urban dictionary defines “Dumpster Fire” as:
1. A complete disaster.
2. Something very difficult that nobody wants to deal with.
In an immature organization, accessibility can unfortunately be both. Please interpret the below as the collection of my 15 years of experience working exclusively with people with disabilities, several decades of being a person with a disability, and the parent of someone who has a different disability than I do. I am not casting aspersions on my current or previous employers.
General organizational “toxic culture” signs include things like product silos, focus on managerial hierarchy and titles, rumor mills, and fear of speaking up publicly. Those have a bad impact on all business functions. However, there are several signs specific to accessibility where even if the organizational culture is generally good, the accessibility culture may be bad or toxic.
