Why accessibility hasn’t worked for 25 years?
Let me just clarify before the onslaught, I'm not saying the standards failed. The World Wide Web Consortium has done and is doing an outstanding job. WCAG is solid.
The failure is how accessibility has been framed and implemented. For years, accessibility has been positioned as:
- compliance - legal risk - something to “pass” - nice to have
So businesses do the minimum to avoid exposure. Not because they don’t care but because there’s no incentive beyond punishment.
Despite sincere effort from accessibility professionals, we still see:
- underfunded teams - inconsistent outcomes - a widening gap between industry and accessibility practice
How many more years are we prepared to wait for this to change?
Now add what’s coming:
- cognitive accessibility (~20% of the population) - ESG moving to board-level accountability - WCAG 3.0 shifting toward outcomes and cognitive accessibiltiy - the evolving European Accessibility Act
This is no longer a practitioner problem. It’s a board-level one.
That’s the gap COGAI exists to address by reframing accessibility as governance, risk, value, and responsibility at the top.
Because until accessibility is owned at executive level, we’ll still be having this conversation in another 25 years.