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.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Claims the paper makes
Claims other papers make about this one
Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?
44-63% of practitioners report little to no knowledge of accessibility standards or laws.
“For instance, 44-63% of practitioners report little to no knowledge of accessibility standards or laws [42].”
From Proceedings of the 37th Australian Conference on Human-Computer Interaction (2025) · cites this paper as [42]
Typical barriers include fragmented standards and guidelines like WCAG, complex language, and a lack of accessible, pedagogically aligned tools.
“Typical barriers include fragmented standards and guidelines like WCAG, complex language, and a lack of accessible, pedagogically aligned tools [5, 26, 42].”
From Proceedings of the 37th Australian Conference on Human-Computer Interaction (2025) · cites this paper as [42]
Accessibility is still underrepresented in many curricula, and even when it is addressed, it is rarely taught in an applied, example-based way.
“Accessibility is still underrepresented in many curricula, and even when it is addressed, it is rarely taught in an applied, example-based way [17, 38, 40, 42, 48, 52, 56].”
From Proceedings of the 37th Australian Conference on Human-Computer Interaction (2025) · cites this paper as [42]
Practitioners struggle to identify which requirements are relevant to their projects and how to apply them effectively.
“Practitioners struggle to identify which requirements are relevant to their projects and how to apply them effectively [5, 42].”
From Proceedings of the 37th Australian Conference on Human-Computer Interaction (2025) · cites this paper as [42]
The observed disconnect between clarity and perceived relevance aligns with findings from professional contexts, where the importance of accessibility measures is often underestimated when guidelines are not linked to practical examples or user needs.
“The observed disconnect between clarity and perceived relevance also aligns with findings from professional contexts, where the importance of accessibility measures is often underestimated when guidelines are not linked to practical examples or user needs [37, 42].”
From Proceedings of the 37th Australian Conference on Human-Computer Interaction (2025) · cites this paper as [42]
Accessibility is often underrepresented in design education.
“Regarding students' prior knowledge, our findings support research showing that accessibility is often underrepresented in design education [17, 36, 38, 40, 42, 48, 52, 56].”
From Proceedings of the 37th Australian Conference on Human-Computer Interaction (2025) · cites this paper as [42]
Manual accessibility evaluation and remediation are time-consuming, resource-intensive, and often fail to produce fully accessible websites.
“Moreover, manual accessibility evaluation and remediation are time-consuming, resource-intensive, and often fail to produce fully accessible websites [59].”
From A Multi-Agent Framework for Accessible Web Code Generation (2026) · cites this paper as [59]
The citation lists haven’t been fetched yet
References 21 · Cited by 96
- Authors
- Patel, R., Breton, P., Baker, C. M., El-Glaly, Y. N., & Shinohara, K.
- Affiliations
- Rochester Institute of Technology (US)
- Creighton University (US)
- Rochester Institute of Technology & Port Said University, Rochester, NY, USA
- Venue
- Extended Abstracts of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
- Publisher
- ACM
- Published
- 2020-04-25
- Pages
- 1-9
- OpenAlex
- W3031088952
- Cited by
- 96
- References
- 21
- Citations by year
- 2026: 15 · 2025: 19 · 2024: 17 · 2023: 15 · 2022: 16 · 2021: 14
- FWCI
- 15.19
- Type
- conference paper
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Locations
- CHI Conference Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI EA) (publishedVersion)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Human Factors and Ergonomics › Digital Accessibility for Disabilities
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Human-Computer Interaction › Usability and User Interface Design
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Information Systems › Software Engineering Techniques and Practices
- Keywords
- software accessibility, technology professionals, accessibility education, accessibility tools, accessibility resources, software development lifecycle, project schedule
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
