I’m currently at the CSUN Assistive Technology Conference, which is always an inspiring experience if you work in the world of accessibility. I’ve been coming to this conference for many years; and it always inspires and refreshes me. This particular trip, I found myself wondering why, exactly, that was so?

On reflection, my inspiration comes from a recognition that I’m part of a large group of people who are all wrestling with the same frustrations and challenges that I am. Sharing stories with the people around me shows that these problems are universal. People who are struggling to make their organization embrace accessibility, or who are constantly finding the same simple issues, or who can’t find leadership buy-in… we’re all facing similar challenges.

The details may vary, but even great success stories have years of too-slow progress behind them.

If I look at WordPress, I won’t deny that there are constant frustrations in trying to move accessibility forward on the platform. Creating consistent accessibility systems has always eluded us. But that doesn’t mean we haven’t ultimately been pretty successful. At current count, there are 95 accessibility improvements expected to ship in WordPress 6.8, and that number will probably go up a bit more in the next few days.

At the WordPress scale, every individual fix has a broad knock-on impact, and that’s a success story, despite any ongoing frustrations.

This turned me to thinking a bit about what I’m doing with The Accessibility Show on WP Builds. There’s a part of me that looks at what I’m doing: picking a handful of sites and talking about what they’ve done wrong, and worries that I’m just bashing people for their hard work.

But the reality is gentler, I think. I’m trying to expose the fact that accessibility only happens with a great deal of intention, and we’re all constantly struggling with that. It’s not an excuse for web inaccessibility; but it is an explanation.

Even this conference is not without accessibility and inclusion problems. And while I’m critical of those, I also recognize that organizations that are about accessibility can’t just solve all of these problems magically. Money always plays a role; technology poses limits; the number of physical spaces that can host 4000 people and be fully accessible to everybody is not huge…

(Still, they should really be able to offer gluten-free lunches as an option. That doesn’t seem like a stretch…)

I can’t leave this without saying one other thing that has come up over and over during the conference: Accessibility is resistance. If you can’t do anything else about our current government collapse, believe that, and use your talents to make the web better.