Member-only story
Pivoting to fully remote accessibility testing
Five months into the pandemic w/ no finish line in sight, temporary changes must be reassessed and made permanent to improve productivity.
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.
We are now five months into the pandemic. That is enough lived experience to have determined that:
- This isn’t ending any time soon.
- The initial elation about work from home has transitioned in many departments to ennui, increased meeting overhead, and more extended hours combined with plummeting productivity.
Most accessibility managers have at least some work from home experience with some of their team members. People with disabilities are more likely to have requested part-time or full-time WFH as a reasonable accommodation. However, those were individuals who wanted to WFH and, more importantly, emotionally invested in WFH. Also, these WFH choices were usually executed with a fair amount of planning and could be reversed if they didn’t work out. Now everyone is WFH whether they want to be or not. To make that even more complicated, with the economic situation still uncertain, asking for additional resources to make up for the almost universal productivity drop is mostly a non-starter.
More importantly, many high-tech companies are signaling that they will allow employees individually to determine whether they want to continue working from home even when the pandemic is over. That makes sense, given that everyone’s personal situation is different. One thing is clear — managers may have limited to no say in that choice in the future.
Temporary, stop-gap measures implemented at the beginning of the pandemic are starting to show cracks. What should the well-intentioned accessibility manager do?
