Accessibility in legacy services: Why waiting for the redesign is not enough
Product & Delivery
Diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI)
IT Architecture
Accessibility in legacy services is often deprioritised in favour of future redesigns. In this blog, Adam Liptrot, Senior Consultant and Accessibility Specialist at Opencast, explores why that approach falls short, and why making meaningful improvements today is essential for the people who rely on these systems every day.
Introduction
Legacy digital services are often framed as temporary problems. A redesign is coming. A replacement is planned. A transformation will fix everything. But for the people relying on these systems today, particularly for internal systems where using it is part of someone’s job, waiting is not harmless. It prolongs barriers, increases cognitive and physical effort, and quietly excludes users who rely on assistive technologies.
Accessibility in legacy systems is not about achieving perfection. It is about making meaningful improvement where it matters most.
The myth of the “future fix”
In long‑running services, accessibility work is frequently deferred because a redesign is believed to be imminent. In reality, these programmes are often delayed, reshaped, or never delivered at all. Meanwhile, users continue to work with interfaces that do not take into account their access needs and for internal systems often prioritise familiarity over usability. These systems are used daily, at pace, and often under pressure. Even small improvements can significantly reduce friction and fatigue.
Accepting constraints without lowering ambition
Legacy environments come with real constraints. These often include undocumented interaction flows, a heavy dependence on domain knowledge, third‑party libraries with limited accessibility support, bespoke interaction models, and deeply embedded user behaviours built up over many years.
Accessibility work in this context must be pragmatic. That means aiming for what is achievable without destabilising the system, while still adhering to core accessibility principles. Progress is not blocked by constraints but it is shaped by them.
Understanding the landscape first
Teams working on legacy services often know that accessibility issues exist but lack visibility of their scale or severity. Large audit reports can feel overwhelming and difficult to act on.
The first task is not fixing everything, but understanding the landscape. This means identifying what types of issues recur, which users are most affected, and where changes could unlock disproportionate benefit.
This is also where understanding how real-world users navigate the interface adds value. Observing them encounter barriers and then deploy their learned workarounds both feeds into options for remediation and provides valuable evidence for the reason for doing the work.
Why automation alone falls short
Automated testing plays a role, but its value drops sharply in heavily customised systems. These tools surface code‑level issues, not whether a real user can successfully complete a task using a screen reader, magnification, or speech recognition software.
Manual testing using assistive technologies reveals patterns that automation cannot. These include fields without meaningful accessible names, visual‑only relationships between content, keyboard focus being trapped, skipped, or moved unpredictably, and interactions that fail entirely when users rely on speech input or keyboard‑only navigation. In legacy environments, accessibility must be tested where it fails in lived use.
Small fixes with meaningful impact
Some of the most effective accessibility improvements require no visual redesign at all. Making sure inputs are correctly labelled, ensuring dynamic content updates are announced, and managing keyboard focus correctly, can all dramatically improve usability.
Individually, these changes may appear minor. Yet for people relying on assistive technologies, they can be transformational.
When pragmatism means presenting options
Not every issue can be solved incrementally. Some problems are structural and deeply embedded in the way a system was originally built.
In these cases, the goal shifts from immediate remediation to making options visible. This involves clarifying what can be improved with small changes, what would require deeper restructuring, and where additional testing or phased delivery would be required to manage risk. Accessibility work is as much about enabling informed decisions as it is about implementing fixes.
Turning findings into delivery
Accessibility audits only create value if they feed delivery in a practical way. This means grouping issues by theme, component, or dependency rather than producing long flat lists. It means prioritising based on user impact rather than technical severity alone, showing delivery teams how to fix common patterns once rather than repeating work, giving testers clear verification steps, and supporting realistic estimates and planning. Accessibility problems become solvable once they are structured.
Dropping hundreds of tickets into a backlog does not create progress. Structured remediation does.
More than compliance: Improving accessibility in legacy systems often surfaces wider benefits. It can expose long‑standing usability issues, hidden defects, undocumented workflows, performance bottlenecks, and opportunities for simplification. Accessibility becomes a lens through which the overall health of a system is revealed.
Conclusion
Legacy systems do not need to be written off to improve. They need pragmatism, prioritisation, incremental change, and a clear understanding of user impact. Accessibility work does not have to wait for the future to start making a difference. For users relying on these systems today, delayed improvement means prolonged exclusion.
OpenPerspectives is our platform for Opencast people to share their thoughts and perspectives on modern digital delivery. It offers practical insight into user-centred design, engineering excellence, product leadership, data-driven decision making and building expert capabilities, grounded in real-world experience.
