Conscious quitting

That time I decided, produce a fraudulent VPAT report on your own time

I joined a Software as a Service (SaaS) business-to-business (B2B) company for a Frontend role, which specifically focused on WCAG and meeting accessibility standards. They had a major client who warned that they would cancel their subscription unless the company made necessary improvements.

Unfortunately, the company’s product was in a poor state. They had cut corners wherever possible. The norm was for sales teams to design features in PowerPoint, which were then directly implemented by backend development. As a result, their product only worked on desktop and Chrome, with no support for other browsers, mobile devices, or accessibility.

User testing, design, frontend development, quality assurance (QA), and accessibility were all skipped. I found myself interested in what organisational forces allowed this to happen. I had a theory that as a B2B product, the company didn’t consider the end-user as a stakeholder. So even if the user experience was terrible — the user had no power to cancel.

Consequently, the product’s user experience required extensive training just to use basic functionality. There was excessive use of acronyms, hidden screens, and inconsistent UI. Although the product itself performed complex automation, the frontend was horrendous.

The codebase lacked documentation and was a mixture of conflicting technologies. Despite committing to Angular a few years ago, they struggled to hire, leading to a decision to switch to React. Additionally, there was also a .NET part of the product.

Unsurprisingly, development velocity had stalled, and there was a belief that changing the technology stack without proper design would miraculously solve all issues. I tried to explain, this is not how it works but was ignored.

Falsifying a Voluntary Product Accessibility Template (VPAT) report

Regarding accessibility, things were as bad as they could be. The company had falsified a VPAT report, which is a voluntary legal document that assesses a product’s accessibility.

I had long suspected that companies falsify these reports, but now I had first-hand experience of how it happens from the inside. They simply copied and pasted a report from Atlassian and had a Product Manager fabricate the details. It was completely nonsensical.

“We only have to pretend to show we partially support — that’s it” was the feedback from a Product Manager. The confidence to discriminate so comfortably was difficult to witness, I often wonder if there would be such a response should the disabled community be swapped from another demographic.

Ultimately the company wanted the request to make their software accessible to disappear. Furthermore, they believed their client wouldn’t cancel since no other product on the market could match their capabilities, giving them leverage. The company showed a complete lack of concern, and I became increasingly bewildered as to why they hired me.

I escalated my concerns up the chain until I spoke to a Vice President (VP). I calmly and clearly explained that this VPAT report was fraudulent. Unfortunately, this resulted in me being shouted at and told “let me worry about the risk appetite,” which is corporate speak for “we know we’re committing fraud but I believe we can get away with it.”

I was also warned that I should “reconsider my future at the company” if I continue to highlight this issue.

Consciously quit

So, I did — I quit.

I pondered this choice for about a week before finally deciding to leave. Working for a company that is actively hostile to accessibility was never going to be a good fit for me. Life is too short to work in an environment where someone thinks it’s acceptable to shout at you for naming the reality of company’s choices.