MVP and Accessibility
Accessibility should be part of your Minimum Viable Product (MVP). Remember this if you read nothing else of this blog post.
It isn't an MVP without accessibility - it's just an MP, a Minimum Product. It's not viable...
Accessibility should be part of your Minimum Viable Product (MVP). Remember this if you read nothing else of this blog post.
A key premise behind the idea of MVP is that you produce an actual product [...] that you can offer to customers and observe their actual behavior with the product or service. Seeing what people actually do with respect to a product is much more reliable than asking people what they would do.
An MVP isn't just the smallest amount of functionality
The Agile Alliance also wrote on their page that:
Teams use the term MVP, but don’t fully understand its intended use or meaning. Often this lack of understanding manifests in believing that an MVP is the smallest amount of functionality they can deliver, without the additional criteria of being sufficient to learn about the business viability of the product.
Ultimately, your product will have to be accessible, for a bunch of reasons, including commercial, legal, and it's just the right thing to do.
You're getting neither the right nor the full picture about your product if you test an idea without testing it with disabled people.
In other words, you won't get sufficient information about the viability of the product if you aren't including disabled people in the test. And you can't include disabled people in the test if your MVP isn't at the very least WCAG conformant!
Implementing accessibility at MVP stage isn't a waste of time - it's quite the opposite
Your teams may think that spending the time to implement accessibility in the MVP is a waste of time. The reality is that if you do not invest in accessibility from the start, you'll end up with a product that doesn't work well for disabled people.
And I guarantee you that it will cost you a LOT more time, money, energy, and all around resources trying to retrofit accessibility into a product than it would have taken to do a bit of accessibility thinking and implementation at the MVP stage.
Accessibility is not a feature
Accessibility isn't a feature to toggle on or off. It is no more a feature than security of performance are features.
Sure, you can sell your product as being accessible, and from that perspective it's a feature. But it shouldn't be an add-on.
Wrapping up!
I can only repeat - if you don't make your MVP accessible, it's not an MVP!