Mission Impossible - Accessibility Job Roles

Around 18 months ago, I wrote a blog post called "stop trying to recruit unicorns with acorns".

Unfortunately, I think things are getting worse, not better. I still consistently see job adverts full of red flags. In this post, I'll break down a real job advert and point out the things that concern me, in the hope it will help you to avoid taking on an accessibility role which is an impossible task, and likely detrimental to your health!

Yesterday I read an advert for a UX Accessibility Specialist at JD Sports.

It's likely if you're reading this a few months after it was published, the advert will no longer be available, but you should hopefully still be able to view the job advert in the internet archives.

Disclaimer

This post is intended as a professional critique of a publicly available job advertisement. It is written in good faith, with the aim of helping accessibility professionals make informed decisions and encouraging better hiring practices across the industry.

All opinions expressed are my own. The analysis is based on publicly accessible information and reflects my interpretation of the job advert at the time of writing. No individuals are targeted, and no confidential or proprietary information is disclosed.

Red flag 1: The role is a knee-jerk reaction to a deadline

The following paragraph highlights the role is a clear reaction to the looming European Accessibility Act deadline. They see this as a short term fix and there is no guarantee of employment once you help them achieve their goal:

"6-month FTC, with a strong possibility of transitioning into a permanent role. This role is critical to supporting our immediate need to achieve compliance with the European Accessibility Act (EAA)…"

This paragraph basically translates to, "We did nothing to prepare for the deadline of the EAA, which is in 2 weeks time, and we need you to fix 25 years of failings in 6 months and then you can leave."

Realistically, you'll probably need 30 to 90 days just to onboard to an organisation of this size, let alone find, connect with and talk with all of the key stakeholders.

Short contracts aren't always bad if that's what it will take to deliver the work. But here, where it's more than 6 months worth of work, the lack of security and the lure of an extension could be viewed as a way to make sure you overwork and overdeliver!

The 6 month contract is also an indicator that the organisation has not, and likely will not, be investing in the people and resources required to do accessibility properly. It appears that they're not taking this seriously. It's a proverbial "sticky plaster".

Red flag 2: The work is not scoped properly

Strategy work

There are 2 key paragraphs which highlight the scope of the required strategy.

If we look at the first paragraph, as follows:

"…while also laying the foundation for a robust, scalable global accessibility strategy across all digital touchpoints."

Robust. Scalable. Global. All digital touchpoints. This is huge. This will require an in-depth knowledge of the organisation, its users, its stakeholders, goals, strategies, policies, processes and technologies.

Now, if we look at the second paragraph, the scope increases further:

"…a baseline accessibility strategy that supports long-term global compliance and inclusive design practices across all JD Sports digital brands and associated brand fascias."

It states the strategy includes inclusive design practices, which means doing accessibility beyond just compliance. The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) are well known for falling short when it comes to supporting people who are neurodivergent or have cognitive impairments. Inclusive design principles often fill these gaps. Which is great, but it's a lot more work!

"All associated brand facias" means other brands under the JD umbrella. So that you can appreciate the scale of this, JD brand facias include:

• Size?
• Footpatrol
• Finish Line
• Livestock
• JD Gyms
• DTLR
• Shoe Palace
• Sizeer
• Sport Zone
• Sprinter
• Go Outdoors
• Blacks
• Millets
• Tiso
• Ultimate Outdoors
• Fishing Republic
• Naylors

All of these organisations are their own entities, with their own organisational structures, employees, websites and platforms.

Imagine trying to understand each of these global organisations, their stakeholders and users in each country, their goals, strategies, policies, processes and technologies. Now imagine getting all of these people to understand, buy-in, sign-off, sponsor and champion your strategy.

We're talking years of research, workshops and rapport building. It's certainly not something you can knock-out on your own in 6 months, especially when juggling all of the other responsibilities of this role at the same time. Or, if you want to have any kind of work-life balance!

It's clear JD does not understand what is required to create and roll-out an accessibility strategy of this scale, which again is probably an indication of a lack of interest in accessibility up until this point.

Audit work

The following paragraph outlines the scope of the audit work you'll need to do:

Lead efforts to ensure all JD Sports digital platforms meet the requirements of the European Accessibility Act (EAA), EN 301 549, and WCAG 2.1/2.2. Including initial audit and subsequent Accessibility Action Plan needed for compliance.

So, even if we forget about all that global strategy work, and we forget about all of the brand facias and focus purely on JD Sports for now, it still has dozens of platforms like websites, iOS apps, Android apps, tills and kiosks. And, there are additional apps like JD Status for loyalty rewards, which still falls directly under the JD Sports banner.

Their main website has multiple languages on multiple domains, and even if you excluded the likes of Canada and just focus purely on the European ones to narrow the scope for the EAA, from what I could find, they still have:

• Belgian
• Bulgarian
• Danish
• Dutch
• English
• French
• Greek
• German
• Italian
• Polish
• Portuguese
• Spanish

Each user interface will likely have its own accessibility issues, and each of these languages would require their own accessibility audit to make sure the language is properly represented and it's not missed in things like text descriptions, which is a common place to find language failures.

For example, at a quick glance, the "menu" hamburger icon on the JD Sports website is hard coded in English, on all languages. Without a lang attribute with the correct language value, this would fail WCAG 3.1.2 Language of Parts.

This next paragraph of the advert explains what additional work you need to do surrounding an audit:

"Remediation and Documentation: Identify and document accessibility issues, collaborate with design and development teams to implement fixes, and maintain detailed audit logs and compliance reports."

So, on-top of doing audits for all those platforms, identifying accessibility issues in various codebases and building a global strategy across a dozen enterprise level organisations, you're also required to write remediation documentation, work with teams to implement fixes, and maintain detailed audit logs and compliance reports.

To do this you'll need to be consistently reviewing and retesting code changes, and documenting these changes in an audit log. You could possibly do this on a single team, depending on its size, but not on every team at the same time, on top of doing all the other work in the job advert.

Training

As if you don't have enough work to be getting on with, you also have to design, plan and deliver training and workshops, as outlined in the following paragraph:

"Deliver training sessions and workshops to promote accessibility awareness and best practices across teams."

Even if we forget about training courses or programmes that you might be able to get people to do asynchronously, workshops by their very nature, are synchronous! You run activities in real-time with a group of people, so your ability to scale this activity when you're the only person with any accessibility knowledge is not feasible.

Say you run an accessibility awareness workshop, you're probably looking at a half-day session, not including prep-time. If you run a "best practices" workshop, on its own, you probably need a full-day. But, for the purposes of showing a best-case scenario, let's assume you're incredible at what you do and you can run both of these things as a single one-day workshop.

JD Sports data from the Financial Times shows they have around 60,000 employees. Not all of these will be working on creating digital content, so even if we low-ball the figures and assume 2% of those are people building websites and mobile apps, creating digital marketing content, or adding products to online stores via a content management system, that's still 1,200 people.

When it comes to running a workshop, 30 people is a large group. So, let's imagine you somehow managed to cram all of the material into a single one-day workshop, and you run it with large groups of 30 people, 5 days per week. To get through our low-balled figure of 1,200 people, it would still be 2 months! That's potentially 33% of your entire employment contract, and that's not including any coordination, scheduling, prep-time, write-up time, iteration time or specific actions that come from the workshops themselves.

Oh! and remember, this is also not including all of the time you'll be spending doing all of the auditing, reporting, strategy and documentation work.

Culture change

The following paragraph suggests there is also a desire to look at culture change and "pushing accessibility left":

"Design Collaboration: Partner with UX/UI designers to ensure accessibility is embedded in wireframes, prototypes, and design systems from the outset"

Don't get me wrong, pushing accessibility left is great, but is often one of the hardest parts of doing any kind of accessibility work. Culture change is only possible once people are aware of accessibility, understand their responsibilities for it, and buy into it as a core principle.

To do this, you have to do a lot of ground work. You can't start here if the organisation already has processes or policies which are not accessible. For example, if teams are mandated to use an inaccessible design system, they can have all the will in the world, but their wireframes and prototypes will always be inaccessible.

You have to fix the common libraries and components first, build capabilities within teams, and build trust and rapport. Which usually means spending time with them and helping them to solve their own nuanced problems. You often have to teach skills and ways-of-working, like how to annotate designs for accessibility, how to include accessibility in definitions of ready and done, and how to recruit and run research sessions that include people with disabilities.

Red flag 3: A mismatch in required qualifications and experience

If we look at the required qualifications, preferred qualifications, skills and experience, it makes no sense. I've stripped out the preferred qualifications and some which aren't relevant, so it's clearer what I'm talking about:

Required Qualifications:

• Strong knowledge of WCAG 2.1/2.2, EN 301 549, and EAA requirements.
• Familiarity with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript from an accessibility perspective.

Skills and Experience:

• In-depth knowledge of the European Accessibility Act (EAA) and WCAG 2.1/2.2
• Familiarity with EN 301 549 standards and assistive technologies (e.g., screen readers)
• Ability to create and implement accessibility strategies across web and mobile platforms

You're required to have "strong knowledge of EN 301 549" and have "familiary with EN 301 549". You're also required to have "strong knowledge of EAA, WCAG 2.1 and 2.2" and have "in-depth knowledge of EAA, WCAG 2.1 and 2.2." So, do you need familiarity, strong knowledge, or in-depth knowledge? It's not clear to me.

Next, you are only required to have "familiarity with HTML, CSS and JavaScript" and "knowledge of mobile and native applications", yet as part of the role you are expected to create detailed documentation on accessibility issues and fixes on multiple platforms, help teams to remediate issues, and create and implement accessibility strategies across both web and mobile platforms.

If you don't have a strong understanding of the technologies you're testing, you're not going to be able to document fixes or help teams remediate. You can find issues, and you can retest and see if they're fixed, but nobody is going to support you, buy into your strategy or collaborate with you if you cannot speak the same language.

Red flag 4: No salary on the listing

This one is always a massive red flag. If you're not prepared to show people what you're prepared to pay them, it's usually an indication you're not prepared to pay them what they're worth!

To meet the expectations and deliver all of the work in this job advert, you probably need a team of about 10 experienced people, working on this full-time for around 3-5 years.

JD Sports last month reported an annual revenue of £11,458 billion and a profit of £923 million. For a company of this size, this work should be in a request for proposal going out to tender, or multiple job roles to build a multi-disciplinary team and embed accessibility into the organisation from within, not a job advert for a single employee with a 6 month contract, likely at working or junior level.

Conclusion

This job advert is a bin fire, not a career opportunity. It highlights a lack of awareness or interest in accessibility until it's too late. It has all the hallmarks of an organisation that has ignored accessibility until it's hand has been forced to do something, 2 weeks before the first deadline of the EAA hits.

It doesn't read like a serious attempt to embed accessibility. It reads more like a desperate scramble to paper over years of neglect. The intent does not look like one driven by core values, or a sudden shift in ethics, but by an organisation that's simply been handed an accessibility hand grenade, by looming legislation.

Accessibility deserves more than a six-month panic hire. It needs cultural investment, structural change, and long-term commitment. The scope of this role could easily overwhelm a team of people let alone a sole employee. There's no salary transparency, no genuine support, and no indication that accessibility is understood as a sustainable, strategic priority. Its clear JD Sports aren't looking to build capability, they're looking for a silver bullet! Worse still, they're asking you to take the shot, blindfolded.

So, if you're someone with accessibility expertise reading this and feeling tempted, pause! Ask yourself whether you're being set up to succeed, or set up to be the scapegoat when this work inevitably implodes and failure arrives!

Accessibility work is vital, but it should never come at the cost of your wellbeing. You're likely not a unicorn. You're not magic, infallible or immortal. And, if you are, you still shouldn't be asked to fix several decades worth of organisational apathy in 6 months with no indication of what they're prepared to pay you.

If you want to read more on this topic, check out my blog post stop trying to recruit unicorns with acorns, or Defining a strategy for accessibility.

Thanks!

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