Did you know that accessibility goes far beyond screen readers?
Did you know that digital accessibility goes far beyond screen readers? It affects people using keyboards, voice control, captions, mobile devices, or simplified layouts. These include employees, customers, and leaders alike. When accessibility works well, it improves clarity and usability. It rarely feels like a special feature. It simply feels like good design.
Why this keeps happening
Accessibility is often explained too narrowly. It gets reduced to one tool or one group. Leadership conversations reinforce this by delegating it to specialists. As a result, broader needs stay out of sight. Decisions focus on visible features, not on how people actually interact.
What this signals
This narrow framing normalizes partial inclusion. Many barriers remain unnamed because they do not match the usual mental picture of disability. Accessibility becomes something added late, rather than a lens applied early. Silence fills the gap where shared understanding should exist.
Why this matters to leaders
When accessibility is misunderstood, leaders underestimate its reach and value. They miss signals about usability, resilience, and design quality. This limits decision-making and weakens outcomes. The issue is not awareness alone. It is how broadly leaders define who accessibility is for.
Where leaders encounter this
This often appears in design reviews, feature prioritization, and usability discussions. Accessibility gets sidelined when decisions focus on appearance or functionality without considering diverse ways people interact.
Closing reflection
Accessibility is not about edge cases. It is about everyday interactions.
Who might benefit from your digital design choices in ways you are not currently seeing?
Take the Inclusive Leadership Self-Assessment Test
If you’re curious to see where your organization sits on the Digital Accessibility Maturity Model – and what that means for your next leadership decisions – you can take a short, leadership-focused survey to find out.
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About Denis Boudreau
Denis Boudreau is a consultant, trainer, and speaker specializing in digital accessibility and disability inclusion. He works with organizational leaders who want to equip their teams with the skills to create accessible websites and digital products – so no one is left behind. A Certified Professional in Web Accessibility (CPWA), Denis has trained thousands of web professionals over the past 20+ years and delivered hundreds of workshops in both English and French. He has helped leading brands like Netflix, Salesforce, and Victoria’s Secret embed accessibility into their digital strategies, empowering them to meet legal obligations, improve user experience, and connect with more people, more effectively.