Derek Featherstone

The founder of Simply Accessible explains the biggest website accessibility misconceptions

net: You’ve spent decades working to improve web accessibility. Are we making progress?

DF: Here’s the bottom line. The industry has made loads of progress in terms of techniques and infrastructure for making things accessible from a development/engineering perspective – making things programmatically accessible. There’s a huge area that is lacking, though: the design and user experience component of accessibility. I’m sure many people don’t agree with me. They’ll say that ‘building things right meets the technical requirements of accessibility and the rest is usability’. Your users would disagree: if it is technically correct, but can’t be easily used, what was the point in the first place? Then you’ll hear this response: “Well, if it isn’t easy to use it’s probably a usability issue that affects everyone, so it’s not an accessibility issue.”