Insights Accessibility
Accessibility is structural, not cosmetic
It cannot be retrofitted later. Twelve users over sixty told us more than any audit report has.
What "we will fix it later" means
In practice it means adjusting some contrast values, adding a few aria-labels, and increasing a type size. All of that is cosmetic, it is quick, and the audit score goes up afterwards. Meanwhile the things actually stopping people — a seven-step flow, a critical action hidden behind hover, form errors signalled only by colour — have not been touched at all.
Twelve people, on their own phones
For the Lumen project we tested with twelve patients over sixty, on their own devices, in their own homes. Not in a lab and not on hardware we had prepared, because text size settings, screen brightness and whether someone is wearing reading glasses are all variables, and a lab quietly removes every one of them.
The biggest problem was not contrast
Nine of the twelve stopped at the same place: the booking flow demanded an account before it would show available times. That is not an accessibility issue on any checklist in existence. It also blocked more people than every contrast problem combined. The first accessibility question is always why a step exists, not whether a colour is dark enough.
Make it an acceptance criterion
We moved accessibility out of the checklist and into the specification: 18px minimum type, touch targets no smaller than 48px, every foreground-background pair passing WCAG AA, every primary flow completable by keyboard. Things written into acceptance criteria get built. Things written into a backlog do not. The difference is not technical, it is ordering.
The criteria have to live in the repository
After handover, Lumen built a health-screening booking page without us, and it passed first time, because the criteria and the test scripts were in the repository for anyone to follow. An accessibility standard that exists only in one person head disappears the day that person changes job.
This is not charity
To put it bluntly: Lumen booking completion rose 41%. Not because we did a good deed, but because three in ten people could not use the flow and every one of them was trying to book an appointment. On most projects accessibility is not an ethical question. It is a conversion problem that has been ignored for a long time.