Inaccessibility is a disease. Why aren’t we doing more to cure it?

How many developers must know how to develop accessible code before “herd immunity” protects people with disabilities against inaccessibility?

Authors note: Because of Medium’s refusal to address its accessibility issues for both authors and readers, I’ve moved my last three years of blogs to Substack. Please sign up there for notices of all new articles. Also, I will be updating older articles (like this one) and the updates will only be published on Substack. Thank you for your continued readership and support.

In the carbon-based lifeform world, herd immunity is achieved when the majority of a population is immune (either through infection or vaccine) to an infectious disease. This state conveys indirect protection (i.e., the “herd immunity”) to those in the herd who are not immune.

Despite almost 4600 lawsuits filed in the US over the past two years, won *overwhelmingly* by disabled plaintiffs, the internet got more inaccessible as measured by the WebAIM million, which I summarized here. 98.1 % of the top million global websites are not equally usable by people with disabilities. DiamondLA / Joe Devon’s SOAR (State of Accessibility Report) shows a slightly higher rate of accessibility…