Do it properly now
Posted 30th May 2026 in Accessibility
I had the privilege to be among some great speakers at this year’s Access:Given conference; there were so many excellent insights, but one has really stuck with me.
In the early afternoon panel discussion, Nathan Rowland was talking about building inaccessible products when he dropped this gem:
There is nothing more permanent than a temporary solution.
I love this! I caught up with Nathan afterwards and he said it was something his grandfather used to say about woodworking. It goes back to that job-half-done idea, but makes it an even scarier prospect.
We design and build digital products for other people to use, and other people might (will!) use our products in ways we didn’t expect. Accessibility is partly about anticipating this unknown.
If we ship a subpar feature or update to our product, what’s the likelihood of going back to put it right?
Other priorities creep in, team members change, and that temporarily inaccessible work is forgotten. It gets built on top of. And the longer it sits there, the more expensive and awkward it is to fix.
That doesn’t mean everything has to be perfect; it just means accessibility can’t be treated as something we’ll tidy up later.