A few years ago, I was working a free-lance contract at a behemoth tech company, getting their email campaigns up to snuff. Word came down from on high that accessibility for any subscriber with challenges was now a must have, so we spent several months with coders and QA to make sure that our work was as friendly as possible to anyone who wanted to interact with it.
What did this entail? Changing templates to accomodate for color blindness. Adjusting copy for homonyms that might throw a screen reader. Consideration of British or American spellings to see if there was anything to be gained from a switch. Widow and orphan line formatting. Modifying default fonts to make sure that challenged eyes weren't at risk. Eliminating multi-column graphic approaches because of the possibility of a mishap. Making sure everything worked on every possible device and platform, including those that had been out of market for years, because if it didn't work for every user, it would ruin the brand for that person. (Somehow, just the behemoth's.)
Mind you, this is just the stuff that I'm remembering right now, years later, because they got out of initial planning sessions. It took months, it cost an undisclosed and probably prohibitive amount, and when the project was done, our stuff was as airtight as anyone's emails, ever.
I then waited to see if anyone would ever notice, comment to us, or if the behemoth would try to capitalize on the investment in some way, possibly with PR. Never happened. Once the templates were adjusted and the new normals were in place, that was that. Project over, call it a day, work on the next thing and make sure everyone's in compliance.
Perfection mattered more -- much more -- to the behemoth than the public.
What actually mattered from the changeover wasn't anything we actually did in the glow up. What actually mattered was making sure to add alt tags to images, which any good email system has been letting you do for decades, and just shows anyone using a screen reader that you cared about their experience. The price of perfection was steep, unjustifiable from an ROI standpoint, limiting to design and UI for the vast majority of users, and sidetracked the project for months.
I'm also sure the behemoth considered it a success, since it scratched a long-term itch, and played to their internal brand police. No one at the behemoth ever questioned the wisdom of the program, had to show its worth on a spreadsheet, or defend headcount reductions for the dev costs.
At least, not right away.
I'm all for accessibility, and glad the behemoth did it. If nothing else, I learned a lot, accessibility issues aren't going away, and the number of people with challenges is a lot higher than most people expect.
But if an ordinary client were to ask me to head up a project?
I'd probably just tell them to code the alt-tags and call it a day.
Because when perfect is the enemy of good, or sensible?
You wind up losing a lot more than you gain.
