This week, a major retailer cut 1,800 corporate jobs, including many who managed the company’s digital accessibility efforts. It raises an unsettling question: are they carving out cost savings … or carving a path to future risk?
Digital accessibility isn’t a seasonal project or a compliance checkbox. Like performance or cybersecurity, it demands constant care, iteration, and attention. Expecting a skeleton crew to “keep the lights on” rarely ends well, especially when those lights guide millions of customers through your digital doors.
What’s especially haunting? This particular retailer has been here before. Nearly twenty years ago, their inaction on accessibility sparked one of the most famous digital inclusion lawsuits in history, costing them over $6 million and reshaping how an entire industry thought about online access.
Now, we’re seeing déjà vu across the corporate landscape. As companies slash accessibility teams in the name of short-term savings, they may be quietly creating a new wave of exclusion, and the reputational, legal, and ethical fallout that comes with it.
The lesson from history is clear: digital accessibility neglect always comes back to haunt.
Only time will tell who’s learned that lesson. Happy Halloween.