Tab-able Newsletter #1: Should we stop saying yes to audits?

That probably sounds ridiculous.

Audits are one of the most important tools available to accessibility teams. So suggesting we should stop saying yes to them probably sounds like terrible advice. But the more time I spend working with organisations, the more I wonder whether accessibility teams are spending too much time on the wrong things.

We may have the capacity to carry out audits, but do we have the capacity to do that while also focusing on preventing accessibility issues in the first place? Not without a fully resourced team of auditors.

The capacity gap

We spend a lot of time and money finding accessibility issues. But much less attention is given to making sure those issues don’t keep happening in the first place.

Accessibility teams are under increasing pressure to show progress. Leaders want evidence that things are improving. Teams need to understand the risks, and programmes need ways to measure progress over time.

This is why organisations invest so much in activities that produce data. Automated testing is a good example. Organisations can spend tens of thousands, sometimes even hundreds of thousands, of pounds on testing tools because they can check large numbers of pages quickly. But the results still need someone to review them, understand what they mean and decide what needs to happen next.

Finding problems isn’t the same as fixing them

When organisations want to understand their accessibility problems in more detail, they usually turn to an audit.

There’s nothing wrong with that. Audits are an important tool for accessibility specialists. But they don’t always answer the questions organisations are trying to solve.

An audit tells us where issues exist. It doesn’t tell us why they’re there.

If accessibility isn’t being considered throughout design, development, procurement and testing, accessibility debt will build up over time. That’s not a criticism of any organisation. The same thing happens with security, quality and user experience. These areas don’t improve by accident.

In many organisations, a small number of people are responsible for most of this work. They review audits, support projects, answer questions and help delivery teams. Each request might be reasonable on its own, but together they take up a lot of time. This leaves less time to tackle the reasons those problems keep happening.

This is where the capacity gap starts to appear.

As demand grows, specialists spend more time helping organisations understand the problems they already have. This leaves less time to look at why the same problems keep appearing across different products, services and teams.

The difficult part is that all this work is important. Audits matter. Testing matters. Specialist support matters. The question isn’t whether we should be doing these things. It’s whether we’re leaving enough time to prevent problems from happening in the first place.

So, that brings me back to the question I started with.

Should we stop saying yes?

No.

But I do think accessibility leaders need to question whether another audit is always the right next step.

At some point, the problem comes down to time. There are only so many hours in the day. Every hour spent reviewing audit results is an hour that could have been spent improving processes, supporting teams or helping prevent the same problems from happening again.

Most businesses understand what happens when there’s more work than people available to do it. They bring in extra support, change priorities or share the work differently. Accessibility should be treated in the same way.

The aim isn’t to stop measuring accessibility. It’s to make more time to understand why the same problems keep happening. That’s where we have the best chance of stopping them from happening again.

Start with the problem, not the request

The first step is to get to the bottom of what people are actually asking for.

When someone approaches an accessibility team requesting an audit, it’s worth taking the time to understand what’s driving that request. What are they trying to achieve? What decision are they trying to make? What information do they actually need?

They might be asking for an audit because that’s what they understand an accessibility team to provide. That’s hardly surprising. If we’ve spent years positioning ourselves as auditors and accessibility consultants, people will naturally come to us asking for audits.

But the underlying problem might not need one.

Not every request needs a full audit

For example, an organisation might be looking for a way to understand how its accessibility is improving over time. They might want to benchmark their products, identify recurring problems or demonstrate progress to leadership. An audit can provide some of that information, but it isn’t necessarily the most efficient way to get it.

This is where we need to think more creatively about the services we offer.

Rather than treating every request as a full audit, we could offer smaller packages that give organisations the information they need without taking up so much specialist time.

Take benchmarking as an example. If we know that a full WCAG 2.2 AA audit across 55 success criteria takes several days, but the organisation primarily wants a picture of its current accessibility position, perhaps a higher-level review covering a carefully selected 15 success criteria would be more appropriate.

They would still get testing against selected WCAG 2.2 AA success criteria, but with a much smaller scope and less specialist time involved.

The important thing is recognising that not every request needs to become the biggest service we offer.

We need to give organisations better ways to engage with accessibility specialists, particularly when capacity is limited. That means understanding what they’re trying to achieve and being willing to recommend something different from what they initially asked for.

Sometimes the most valuable thing an accessibility team can do isn’t say yes to another audit. It’s help someone work out whether they need one in the first place.