Lessons from AODA and the roadmap to 2035
I want to begin this post on a very positive note and say that I believe the next decade will be a truly historic era for digital accessibility. While the work of accessibility is never “done,” I think we’re going to see numbers unlike anything we’ve achieved previously. Will 100% of all digital accessibility barriers be removed? Of course not. Accessibility is too elusive for that and constantly evolving, as is our understanding of the diversity of disability itself. Technology, too, is changing and evolving at incredible speeds. But I do believe we’ll have the right synergy between regulation, technology, and good old-fashioned human spirit to get closer than we ever have before to making digital equality a reality for all.
Why am I thinking about the next decade and looking ahead to 2035?
AODA and my introduction to digital accessibility
Because we just passed January 1, 2025. That was the original deadline set by the government of Ontario to fully implement the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act (AODA), which passed in 2005 with an ambitious 20-year plan to significantly improve accessibility for Ontarians with disabilities. Unfortunately, as has been widely reported, AODA has fallen well short of its goals.
This news hit me hard, as AODA was actually my introduction to digital accessibility. There I was, working at a Fortune 40 company, when my boss said to me, “You need to fix all of these WCAG issues in about eight months so we can report a compliant website to Ontario on January 1, 2014.” That effort required me to disrupt an entire organization and call in every favor and IOU I had coming to me. We had to spend a large amount of money on solutions and involve over 250 people in tackling the challenges of getting compliant. But hey, believe it or not, by December 31, 2013, we had fixed the very last issue that required fixing and were able to present a completely accessible presence (at least per WCAG 2.0 Level A, which was the relevant standard at the time) to our customers in Ontario, as well as those in the rest of Canada and the United States who used the same content. Bravo!
The impact of disruption on digital accessibility
Thinking back on that moment now, I still feel proud. But it’s also hard not to feel some confusion and disappointment because the truth is, the world is not where we thought it would be now. The WebAIM Million’s 2024 report on the accessibility of the world’s top 1,000,000 home pages showed that 95% of 1,000,000 selected web home pages have WCAG 2 failures, adding up to an average of 56.8 issues per page.
What gives? Why isn’t Ontario where they thought they’d be by 2025, and why isn’t the rest of the world there either?
I think a lot of it has to do with … disruption!
Let me explain.
Planning for disruption
When I’m helping an organization plan for and implement its accessibility program, I will often include a “risk session.” This means that we get everyone on the project together to think about the risks we face in trying to achieve our program goals. We brainstorm and collect as much information as possible. Then, as a group, we categorize, correlate, and rank the risks to make sense of them and decide which ones need proactive mitigation. Invariably, the risks with a high probability of occurrence and a high-to-critical degree of impact have to do with the unexpected.
Unexpected organizational change can come in many forms. Perhaps the resident accessibility champion leaves the company. Or, maybe budgets for a new year get cut back. Sometimes, the challenge is more abstract—you’re just not winning over hearts and minds, or momentum is stalling out. The common thread here is disruption—quite literally, expected operations are disrupted by unforeseen change.
When we consider digital accessibility plans here at Deque, the unexpected and unplanned are primary considerations as we think about how to build and maintain a sustainable program. This approach is one of the many things that sets us apart. We are wholly committed to the long-term success of each and every one of our customers.
The next decade of digital accessibility
As I said at the beginning of this post, we are entering an incredible new era for digital accessibility. Never before has the world had access to the tools, training, knowledge, experience, and technology we’re using and developing right now. Never before have we been so capable of achieving such high levels of efficacy, efficiency, and sustainability as we are today and going forward.
It’s funny. You’d think that reflecting on the past decade in the context of AODA’s struggles would have me feeling pretty down. Instead, the opposite is the case. I’m energized. Deque and our strategic consulting practice are uniquely positioned to help your organization manage disruption and achieve digital accessibility milestones with the world’s leading tools, training, and services.
Over the next decade, I firmly believe that we can get to a point where those WebAIM reports are polarity-reversed, with 95% of pages having no digital accessibility issues at all. That’s the 2035 I’m looking forward to and planning on.
Who’s with me?
