# Accessibility for One Modality Is Not Accessibility ## Claim A feature that serves exactly one assistive-technology modality while remaining unusable to everyone else is not partial accessibility, because the users it excludes were never given a path at all. <!-- atomicity: 1 idea ✓ --> ## Scope & conditions - Holds for affordances meant to serve all users through an accessible path — skip links, status messages, error announcements, navigation landmarks — where serving one modality is a design choice rather than a technical limit. - Breaks where a technique is inherently modality-specific and paired with an equivalent for others: a text alternative for an image is not tokenism, because the sighted path already exists. - Applies with force to remediation done under deadline, where "we added a skip link" reads as progress on a checklist while the tab order it was meant to rescue is still broken. - Does not argue against incremental work. It argues against counting a single-modality affordance as coverage. ## Evidence > [!quote] > The site is technically accessible to one tiny subset of users in this case, in this example, and it's completely useless to everyone else. Kevin Andrews, an IAAP-certified specialist and 20-year screen reader user, demonstrates this live with a skip link that is invisible unless you are running a screen reader. He names the result tokenism rather than partial progress. The same shape shows up in Lucy Collins's finding that a dropdown can pass every automated check and full manual audit and still fail Dragon Naturally Speaking users, because WCAG addresses speech recognition thinly — conformance across the modalities the standard covers well is not conformance across the modalities users actually bring. ## Links - [[3. Resources/Permanent Notes/An Accessible Interface Wrapping Inaccessible Content Relocates the Barrier]] — the same measurement error one level out: there the barrier moves to the linked artifact, here it moves to the users the affordance never reached - [[3. Resources/Permanent Notes/A Passing Automated Accessibility Score Is a Floor Not a Verdict]] — a passing score cannot see this failure, because the affordance it checks for is present - [[3. Resources/Permanent Notes/Disability Inclusion Is a Design-Authority Question]] — because extends; who decides which modality counts as "covered" is an authority question, not a technical one - [[3. Resources/MOCs/Accessibility & Disability Inclusion MOC]] — sits under the verification section: what a present affordance does and does not establish ## Tests / falsifiers - Take a set of sites with skip links and test each with keyboard-only, screen reader, screen magnifier, and speech recognition. If single-modality affordances correlate with equal task completion across all four, the claim weakens. - Audit remediation tickets closed as "accessibility fix" and count how many were verified against more than one assistive technology. A high multi-AT verification rate would suggest the failure is rarer than argued. ## Maintenance - Last tended: 2026-09-08 - Next review: 2026-12-08 ## Source - [[3. Resources/Readwise/Articles/Build for Everyone or Build for No One]] — Kevin Andrews and Elaine Shannon, WordPress Accessibility Day 2025. - [[3. Resources/Readwise/Articles/Real Inclusion How to Run Insightful and Respectful User Testing With Disabled People]] — Lucy Collins on the Dragon dropdown case.