Why Software is Not Accessible: Technology Professionals' Perspectives and Challenges

Abstract

We present a survey (77 responses) and 10 follow-up interviews investigating how technology professionals include accessibility in design and development and what challenges they face. We asked technology professionals what they learned about accessibility in school, what resources they used, if any, and what tools they needed. We found that formal education inadequately prepared them to handle accessibility challenges across the software development lifecycle. Other reasons include inadequate accessibility tools and resources, and not accounting retroactive changes in project timelines. This work attempts to provide updates to the current state of software accessibility by comparing results to previous research works.