In our organization, we have small working groups for topics people are interested in - both inside their work projects and beyond. One of these groups focuses on (web) accessibility - and while everybody who joins strongly agrees that accessibility is an important topic we need to emphasize in our work, we kept coming back to this: why is this so hard to do this in our day to day projects?

We brainstormed a little to be able to tackle these challenges hands on. These are our (summarized) results:

• Accessibility still doesn't have the priority it needs to be considered on client’s projects and it remains difficult to get stakeholders to buy-in
• A general overhaul of the development process would be needed to establish accessibility from the start
• There seems to be a huge knowledge gap in terms of how disabled people experience digital product and therefor how to empower them and best prioritise accessibility fixes
• Difficulty in identifying the most suitable resources to get started with accessibility in the overwhelming amount of materials available
• Testing process is still not fully defined as we lack professional accessibility testers, training and devices - and, again, the knowledge on which tools are most commonly used and how.

Now that we identified our core challenges, it’s all about getting our hands dirty and tackling them one by one. While of course there is still a lot to do, this is one step closer to making the products we deliver more accessible. Do you face similar issues in your work? How do you go about them?