How to make organizations aware of an accessibility issue

Companies are more likely to take care of its squeaky wheel customers. This is how you can squeak. How loud you squeak (and who joins you in squeaking) is up to you.

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.

You’ve found an accessibility problem, in a website or app from someone we are going to refer to below as “OffendingCompany”.

• Maybe you have vision loss and rely on a screen reader or magnification, which failed to work properly.
• Maybe you can’t use a mouse, and have to use a keyboard (or keyboard simulator) to navigate through a system
• Maybe you work in accessibility and have a habit of using assistive technology when you are out shopping.

Typically the next step is you exhaust your patience trying to report the issue through standard customer service channels. To someone far away. Who might not care. Sometimes people in customer support know what accessibility is, many times they don’t. Sometimes you get an acknowledgement of your report, most of the time you don’t. Rarely does the problem get fixed. If it does get fixed, it’s even more rare that you, the original reporter and person inconvenienced by the bug are notified the accessibility issue has been fixed.

What now?

The hero / heroine of this particular story doesn’t give up, they try one of the approaches below.

Collaborative approaches

I usually start with a collaborative approach before I ratchet up the volume of the message. I want to give OffendingCompany every opportunity to acknowledge that:

1. Accessibility is important
2. They’ve made a mistake
3. They are going to fix the mistake