"Slipping through the cracks": A Duoethnography of Web Accessibility

The web is inaccessible. According to a 2024 review of 1 million websites, 95.9% of home pages online had one or more accessibility failures—and many had over fifty automatically-detected issues [2]. Despite years of work analyzing accessibility failures and paths towards improvement, comparatively little work at ASSETS focuses on the labor of doing web accessibility. Drawing from a duoethnography of working on accessibility, this position paper explores the practical work of accessibility in academic and professional environments and makes concrete recommendations for web accessibility practitioners. We argue that accessibility is not primarily an issue of awareness or an overreliance on compliance: we show that accessibility is much better understood as a complex resource management problem that requires multifaceted and ongoing effort to maintain.