In the rush to ship features and meet quarterly KPIs, digital accessibility often gets pushed to the "Phase 2" graveyard. But for managers, treating accessibility as a checkbox or a post-launch afterthought isn’t just a technical debt it’s a business risk.
If you’re leading a product, design, or engineering team, you might be falling into these common traps. Here is how to identify them and, more importantly, how to fix them.
5 Most Common Digital Accessibility Traps
Trap 1: The "Overlay" Quick Fix
Many managers, pressured by legal compliance deadlines, turn to AI-powered accessibility overlays. These tools promise to make a site compliant with one line of code.
The Reality: Overlays often make the experience worse for screen reader users by interfering with their existing assistive technology. They don’t fix the underlying source code.
The Fix: Invest in root-cause remediation. Ensure your developers are writing semantic HTML from the start. It takes more time upfront but prevents long-term technical debt and legal vulnerabilities.
Trap 2: Treating Accessibility as an "Engineering Problem"
It is common to see managers hand off accessibility tickets solely to the dev team. If the design isn't accessible, the code can only do so much.
The Reality: Accessibility starts at the wireframe stage. When designers fail to account for color contrast, focus states, or heading hierarchies, developers have to "hack" solutions that are rarely elegant or fully functional.
The Fix: Build accessibility into the very beginning of your project lifecycle. For practical advice on cleaner implementations, see this guide on why less ARIA often leads to more accessibility and learn how to avoid common pitfalls by exploring these top 15 questions on PDF accessibility.
Trap 3: Ignoring Non-HTML Content
Managers often focus 100% on the website interface while forgetting the library of resources they offer: whitepapers, invoices, and user manuals.
The Reality: A perfectly accessible website is still a failure if the "Download Guide" button leads to a PDF that a screen reader cannot parse.
The Fix: Audit your document workflow. If your team lacks the bandwidth to fix thousands of legacy files, consider partnering with experts. You can find specialized help by reviewing this list of the top 10 PDF accessibility remediation companies to ensure your documents are as inclusive as your UI.
Trap 4: Relying Solely on Automated Testing
Automated tools are great for catching low-hanging fruit (like missing alt text), but they only catch about 30-40% of accessibility issues.
The Reality: An automated tool can tell you if an image has an alt attribute, but it can’t tell you if the description actually makes sense in context. It can't tell you if the keyboard navigation flow is logical for a human user.
The Fix: Build manual testing into your Sprint cycles. Encourage your QA team to use screen readers (like NVDA or VoiceOver) and navigate your product using only a keyboard once a week.
Trap 5: The "No Disabled Users" Assumption
Perhaps the most dangerous trap is the belief that "our target audience doesn't have disabilities."
The Reality: 1 in 4 adults in the US lives with a disability. Furthermore, accessibility features benefit everyone—from the person using captions in a noisy airport to the person with a temporary wrist injury using voice commands.
The Fix: Use inclusive personas in your product discovery sessions. When you design for the margins, you end up making a better product for the masses.
Final Thoughts
Accessibility isn’t a project with a finish line; it’s a practice. As a manager, your job isn't to be an expert in ARIA labels, but to provide the resources, time, and cultural backing your team needs to build products everyone can use.
Want to learn more? Explore relevant posts and join the community here: Dev.to Accessibility
Author Bio:
Briana Collins is part of the Content Marketing team at DocumentA11y, a leading pdf accessibility remediation and document accessibility service provider's focused on helping organizations make their digital documents accessible and compliant with global standards like WCAG and Section 508. She creates solution driven content that connects with professionals seeking ways to improve document accessibility.
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