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Starting a new accessibility remediation project?
Marie Kondo’ing the project first will get you to your goal faster.
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.
Yay, you finally convinced someone to prioritize remediating an inaccessible website.
What could possibly go wrong? </snark>
There are approaches and prioritization that will make your end goal of an accessible website easier and cheaper.
1. Consider a do-over
Do you want to fix what is there, or are you better off building something new and accessible from scratch? The answer depends on a couple of things:
A. How extensive is the necessary remediation?
B. Was the site scheduled for an update anyway?
If the answer to “A” is “tons” and the answer to B was “yes” or “maybe,” even “hadn’t thought about that, sounds like a good idea,” then you might want to consider starting over. Then you can make accessibility part of the MVP of a website or mobile app redesign, rather than trying to jam accessibility retroactively into the old design.
This is *especially* true if the remediation requires adding responsive support so that magnification works correctly. Start over. It’s usually much easier, believe me. It’s very, very hard to put responsive breakpoints into a design that was created without them in mind.
In addition to the “what is easier,” question, there may be tax benefits to rebuilding. Fixing bugs is generally considered an operating cost because it’s a “repair,” building something new may be capitalizable. Check with your accountant, don’t trust me. I know enough about accounting to be dangerous, nothing more.
