Accessibility Project MinMaxing

Accessibility Excellence vs Compliance any% Speedruns

Compliance for me is an any% (read: any percent) speedrun.

Look, they can be super creative, and I dare you to say anything bad about my favorite category of speedruns: Stardew Valley Mayo%, where the goal is to drink a jar of mayonnaise as fast as possible, which is - to the delight of the community - possible since the 1.6 update.

What can speedrunning teach us about accessibility?

Now hear me out, I know you didn’t sign up for “what XYZ taught me about business” style LinkedIn posts, but please stick with me while I take a wild turn to write what I can only describe as unserious Linkedin shitposting. I promise I have a point I want to get across:

Speedrunning is just lean management. What the hell do I mean by that?

• You have dependencies: Certain items, perks, or options aren’t available until specific stages of the game. Often locked behind other stages of progression.

• You have limited resources to start with: In Stardew Valley, you start off with 15 parsnip seeds or 15 hay if you pick the Meadowlands Farm, where you start with a coop and 2 chicks, the only right choice if you are serious about your Mayo% run.

• That leads me to the next point: You can strategically pick your starting point to position yourself in the best way possible before starting the timer. Similarly, you would staff your team with the required roles before kicking off the project.

Accessibility as a Perfection Run

A “perfection run” on the other hand, means treating accessibility like a product instead of a project. Do you know how long it takes to reach what the gaming community considers True Perfection in a game as extensive as Stardew Valley? I couldn’t tell you, because my main save file has around 263 hours of playtime over 4 years and is still nowhere near perfection. According to the leaderboards on SpeedRun.com, it’s at least 30 hours. But only 3 runs have been submitted in this category.

Note from the research: The current world record sits at about 1 day and 5 hours of uninterruped play time. As of the writing of this, I see a run pending for approval by the man, the myth, the legend: TheHaboo with just below 16 hours. I occasionally watch his streams and although I know he is unmatched in Stardew Valley speedruns, below 16 hours is still incredible.

Stardew Valley has sold 41 million copies across platforms, and only 3 individuals have completed and submitted verifiable, unseeded, and glitchless True Perfection runs. Without context, that sounds like a lot of nerdy gibberish, so let me translate:

• verifiable = a recording of the playthrough has been submitted to SpeedRun.com and approved by the moderators.

• unseeded = the save file you play in isn’t predetermined by a seed code that generates a world with specific events set to occur at specific times or items spawn at predetermined locations.

• glitchless = no exploits were used, no glitching into restricted areas before they are unlocked

• True Perfection = no pay-to-win functionalities were used to shortcut the way to perfection. True Perfection means you played the entire game as intended.

If we translate that into Web Accessibility compliance terms, it would sound something like this:

• verifiable = an independent entity has reviewed and approved your website or app as accessible

• unseeded = You didn’t pick and choose your features and functionalities to fulfill only requirements that you feel confident you can fulfill.

• glitchless = your website or app works as intended

• True Perfection = You fulfill all applicable requirements, such as WCAG 2.2, Design for All principles, EN 301549, etc.

See? I told you I had a point!

Accessibility MinMaxing

But good speedrunners have 2 more important qualities I don’t see as often in project managers: 1. the humility to admit when a run is unsalvageable and 2. the readiness to start again from scratch.

In real life, we fall into the sunk cost fallacy too often. Definitely more often than we are ready to admit to ourselves. Most people don’t know when to quit because they have already invested too many resources to admit defeat and start over.

In reality, the cost factor is undeniable: You can’t just trash your whole project because you didn’t factor in resources for accessibility up until it came to testing, then hired an external accessibility specialist who listed out all your issues and now your developers are asking you what the difference between ARIA-alert and ARIA-polite is.

The Cost of Accessibility Tech Debt

On average, amending accessibility bugs in the testing phase costs 29 times as much compared to allocating the resources to baking accessibility into the initial development stage. Imagine this: Coding a button as

<button class="favorite styled" type="button">Add to favorites</button>

Takes how long? A minute? (If you’re thinking really hard about the copy.)

Let’s compare with the alternative:

<div role="button" tabindex="0" onclick="alert('Button clicked!')" onkeydown="if(event.key === 'Enter' || event.key === ' ') { alert('Button clicked!'); }">
   Click me 
</div>  

With all due respect (very little): What is this? Asking for a friend, the friend being every browser’s Accessibility API.

Let’s say this is the code you’re starting with.

1. First, you need to test it to find the issues: automated testing tools, screen reader software, keyboard navigation check, etc.

2. In half of the cases, this button didn’t work. Now, we have to document the what, how, why, and when of it. That’s a lot of bug reports.

3. Those items are in the backlog now. Cool, but unfortunately, we can’t just chuck them all at the dev team at once. Time to allocate resources.

4. This is the tricky part: If your team didn’t know about accessibility before staging, how long will it take them to fix it now?

The button may be a dramatic example, but it illustrates the problem well: The cost of accessibility tech debt is not in the code but in the knowledge gap between finding the issue and fixing it.

It costs less time to look up ‘accessible components [insert your favorite framework here] stackoverflow’ than testing, finding, documenting, branching, and re-deploying the changes.

Excellence vs MinMaxing

Compliance any% speedruns might get you across the finish line short-term, but compliance is as far from universal access as Mayo% is from Perfection.

If you want to build something lasting that works well too, you need to treat accessibility as a part of your core strategy, not a one-off side quest. The earlier you plan, the less tech debt you accumulate. The better you prep, the smoother the run.

Maybe the current state has to be reviewed and adapted, or maybe it just belongs in the bin. The only real fail state is pretending you’ve already won.