Dave Rupert wrote a post about how to handle being accessibility-shamed that’s been making the rounds. It’s got some really solid advice for how to handle criticism (of any kind), so if you haven’t read it, I definitely recommend it.
If you’ve been publicly shamed for anything, what matters most is how you respond next. You can double-down on defensiveness and self-preservation (the wrong answer) or you can approach it with a growth mindset and funnel that energy in a positive direction.
It’s like my sifu used to say, “the difference between a mistake and a fuck-up is that you learn from a mistake.”
But in addition to Dave’s great advice for responding to criticism, I found another message in this post: we also need to do better when we offer criticism of accessibility problems. Dave offers several examples of how he’s responded effectively to accessibility-shaming, but these stories also serve as examples of how easy it would be for a person being accessibility-shamed to give up or become antagonistic towards accessibility.
Dave demonstrates a lot of empathy for the people doing the shaming; which is important when you’re trying to accept criticism—especially harsh criticism—with grace instead of getting defensive. And while I agree that disabled people who are personally affected by these issues don’t owe us anything, I’m not as willing to excuse the reactions of accessibility advocates.
Could those critics have been nicer? Sure, that would have bruised my ego less. But disabled people and accessibility advocates don’t owe it to me or to anyone to be nice.
Out of the whole post, these three sentences just didn’t sit quite right with me because I don’t think this is just about bruised egos. It’s not that I don’t understand the frustration of repeating yourself over and over and making little headway, it’s that I think if the goal is to improve accessibility on the web we all need to be compassionate when receiving and giving criticism. When a person feels attacked they will instinctively become defensive, so following Dave’s advice requires us to have the wherewithal to tamp down our defensiveness. Shaming people who may well have made an honest mistake is more likely to make enemies and scare people off than it is to make the web more accessible. It’s a form of gate-keeping, albeit less overt than statements like “CSS isn’t a real programming language.” It can have the effect of chasing people out of the field by making them feel unwelcome. Even if they’re not the ones being publicly shamed, seeing someone taken to task for an honest mistake that you might also have made is pretty discouraging.
If you are personally struggling with an inaccessible website, I think Dave’s right: you have every right to be upset and don’t owe the web developer anything. It’s unreasonable to expect that on top of struggling with the website, that you can also extend some compassion to the person who’s job it was to make this website work for you in the first place. But I think if you’re an advocate who is not struggling with the issue you’re pointing out, you are doing yourself and the community a disservice by publicly shaming someone.
Dave talks about his experience being shamed when he first launched The A11Y Project. He launched the project in response to his own ignorance about accessibility and the difficulty he had finding resources on web accessibility. He was trying to help. But some members of the accessibility community apparently greeted this effort with derision, using an honest mistake as evidence to undermine the credibility of the project. Fortunately for everyone, Dave approached this criticism with grace and used it as an opportunity to learn and improve. Imagine if he had instead taken the project offline and given up on accessibility. Not only might the accessibility community have lost a developer and an advocate, the community would have killed off a useful resource before it even had the chance to get started. That would have been a real shame. Hell, it could have turned him into a “Joker-style Batman villain” who was actively hostile toward accessibility. If you care about accessibility, this is the opposite of what you wanted.
Dave’s advice for taking criticism and how to respond to public shaming for an accessibility mistake is good advice. The best way to diffuse a situation like that is not to dig in and get defensive, but instead to accept the criticism gracefully and try to remedy the situation as best you can. Take a breath, remind yourself that you are not your work, and try to find something to learn from the experience so that next time you’ll be better. But if we want the web to be more accessible; if we want more people to know about, and care about accessibility, I think we need to show that same humility when we offer criticism. Accessibility-shaming is counterproductive.