Part three of my trilogy of posts on “why is accessibility important?” is now available to read. I’m happy with the way I closed it off, and even happier I took the time to rewrite my initial draft (partly why it’s been a month since part two).

I’d like to share with y’all something that generally doesn’t get saved. I held onto it this time because I knew the revised direction was going to take a different turn. Here’s my unlisted first draft of part 3:

[Draft “Why is accessibility important?” - Part 3](https://medium.com/@belwerks/draft-why-is-accessibility-important-part-3-9a0549c02b53)

You can read my passion in there, as it is laid on thickly enough to have gained sentience and start chewing on the scenery all by itself. You can probably also read a heavy tone of “if you don’t care, you should just go fuck yourself.” That’s basically how Carlos Perez, my intrepid Director of Design at HealthHub and fellow Medium writer, more-or-less put it. It’s a fair (possibly even generous) assessment, and I’m happy he was caring enough to read it over and deliver that feedback. He also gave me more helpful ideas, in case you were wondering, including keeping my intended audience in focus, and offering methods for that audience to help their peers and collegues care about accessibility as well.

Without further ado, here’s the reworked part 3:

“Why is accessibility important?” - Part 3

You can see the change in direction take place basically after the first paragraph. In fact, that first bit is essentially all that survived the first draft. I’m happy with this version and, importantly, it leaves the “Assuming ability” section from the draft free to be explored in a subsequent piece as it’s own argument for compliance as a lesser to considerate, purposeful design.

One fun element of the direction change (namely the focus on how to help your team learn to care), is that I wound up digging up an older version of belwerks.com on the WayBack Machine to find some posts about lunch and learn talks back at ecentricarts. I may wind up doing some throwback posts from older written material that I’ve put together over the years. It’s been long enough that I’ve been working in web that it isn’t totally self-serving, right?