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Christopher Ross

Accessibility isn’t a phase. It’s a precondition.

Statistics Canada counted 8.0 million people, 27 percent of Canadians aged 15 and over, living with one or more disabilities that limit them in their daily activities (Canadian Survey on Disability, 2022, reported 1 December 2023). That figure measures daily life, not website use, and I am not going to stretch it into a web statistic. It is here for scale.

Some share of those 8 million people are the ones trying to book an appointment, file a claim, apply for a job, or read a notice that affects them. When a site shuts them out, the cost does not land on the site. It lands on them, and it lands hardest on the people with the fewest alternatives.

That is why this is a precondition and not a phase. The contestable opposite is the industry norm: ship the site, then add accessibility “in phase 2” if the budget survives. That builds a site that excludes those people from day one and never quite catches up, and retrofitting always costs more than building it right would have, sometimes far more. I have never once seen it go the other way. I won’t work that way. Everything below is the method. The reason is the paragraph above it.

What I do

  • Treat WCAG 2.2 AA as the minimum bar for everything I build. Keyboard navigation, screen-reader compatibility, focus management, contrast verification, alternative text, at the start, not the end.
  • Quote accessibility into the engagement. It’s not an upsell. It’s part of “build.”
  • Test with the tools that catch real issues: axe, WAVE, keyboard-only walkthroughs, NVDA where it matters, not just an automated scan that produces a green thumb and misses the things humans notice.
  • For Ontario clients, treat AODA conformance as the legal floor it actually is. Public-sector and large-private-sector sites have an obligation. I name it.

What I decline

  • “Looks fine with a mouse” sign-offs.
  • Sites where outline: 0 exists without a visible replacement.
  • Placeholder-only form labels.
  • Colour as the only information channel.
  • Auto-play media without a stop mechanism.
  • PDFs delivered without tags. PDFs are part of the site for accessibility purposes.
  • Bolt-on remediation projects where the client doesn’t agree to ongoing standards. Remediation without commitment is a one-time clean of a kitchen that will be filthy again next month.

Why this is the position

Accessible design helps the people it is built for, and it keeps helping past them. Keyboard shortcuts built for screen-reader users serve power users. Captions built for deaf and hard-of-hearing viewers serve anyone in a noisy room, or a quiet one where they cannot turn the sound on.

For edu/gov, accessibility is law. The Accessible Canada Act federally and AODA in Ontario set the floor. So does the ADA and Section 508 in the US. Building inaccessible is building something that will need rebuilding.

For commercial work, accessibility is craft. A senior developer who treats accessibility as optional is a developer who hasn’t internalized what “professional” means.

Beneath the law and the craft is a more basic principle: technology is an equalizer. For people navigating mental, physical, or learning struggles, the web is where some of the hardest doors get unstuck: banking, healthcare forms, school portals, job applications, government services. A site I build that locks them out makes their day worse. A site I build that lets them through makes it better. That’s not a bonus deliverable; that’s the whole point of doing this for a living.

Either way, the answer is the same. WCAG 2.2 AA is the floor.

See also