Product leaders: accessibility isn’t optional. Actually, it’s a legal requirement. And whether you’re rapidly building something new or nudging a legacy codebase forward, chances are accessibility doesn’t have the priority it deserves from your organization. What’s more, you know you have a ton of work to do. So you take a deep sigh, stare at your roadmap, and try to figure out where to wedge in a big block for accessibility. But I’m here to tell you…stop.
The jar of rocks and sand
If you’re not familiar, the jar of rocks and sand is a common prioritization analogy. In this metaphor, the jar represents what you want to fill: whether it’s your life, your time, or in this case, your roadmap. The rocks are your biggest priorities…the things you must focus on to ensure they get completed. Next are pebbles, your minor priorities that are not quite as large but still important. And last is the sand, the smallest things you need to fit in that are less critical but still important. The lesson is to focus on the rocks and work your way down to ensure you fill your jar to the brim.
Rocks are things to be done
We think of roadmaps as a collection of items to complete. We plan, scope, add target dates, and commit them to stakeholders. Our goal is to ship. We need to give accessibility the proper priority, so it must be a rock, right? Don’t we need to report to stakeholders when accessibility, like our other rocks, is done? With this line of thinking, any good, well-intentioned Product Manager will drop a big rock for accessibility in their roadmap jar and feel good about it.
Accessibility is never “done”
But accessibility is not a project to complete. It’s not a thing to be “done.” Accessibility is a way of building products. It’s a best practice and a muscle for an organization to develop, something that becomes instinctual. It requires a human touch, even if we train our AI agents to follow WCAG. When we frame accessibility as a roadmap rock, we fail on two fronts. First, we set improper expectations with stakeholders that this is a thing that we’ll complete and then move on. Second, we rob the organization of the valuable reps it needs to practice building software the right way. We may complete a big accessibility remediation rock, but the organization will go right back to shipping inaccessible experiences until…we have to plan another roadmap rock for more accessibility remediation.
Accessibility is the sand, not a rock
We need to flip our thinking when it comes to roadmap planning for accessibility. You still need to plan within constraints, hence your roadmap jar, but accessibility items should be the sand that fills the gaps between rocks and pebbles in your roadmap. This doesn’t mean accessibility is any less important. It’s quite the opposite. Through continuous and distributed work, accessibility will get more attention from your organization. To track progress, you need to pair this work with a remediation plan to keep teams moving. This gives your teams opportunities to develop muscle memory for building accessible products. Trust me, if designers and engineers need to spend several quarters remediating accessibility issues, they’ll take the steps to avoid creating them in the first place.
Someone has to build the sandbox
The biggest challenge with any accessibility initiative is finding a champion. If you’re reading this, it’s probably you! The hardest part is just getting started. Take an inventory of the accessibility barriers in your product. Group related items, order them by severity, and turn them into a remediation backlog. Distribute that backlog to your teams, and ask them to complete at least one accessibility item per sprint. Chances are you have a lot of work to do, and that’s ok! Start small and you’ll make a big impact quickly.
Plan with sand
When planning, it’s easy to think we’re doing the right thing by dropping a giant accessibility rock in the middle of our roadmap. It’s easy to point to, it demonstrates we care, and in some cases it might help with legal pressure.* But resist the temptation. Make accessibility a company initiative, something to commit to as a way of building and not something to complete. Don’t commit to a rock, commit to plan with sand.
*This should not be considered official legal advice on accessibility initiatives. Always consult legal counsel.
