Accessibility Law of Headlines

Betteridge’s law of headlines states that any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no. For at least the digital accessibility landscape, I would like to amend it, fork it, whatever it:

Any headline that asserts a thing is accessible is wrong.

Yes, that is a very broad assertion, kind of like the one that inspired it. And yes, it is not a true law.

Instead of calling out specific articles / posts / outlets / authors here, I’ll point to other stuff I’ve written. These posts either explain the functional limits of “accessibility” or they go into more detail about selected claims:

• You Can’t Make Something Accessible to Everyone, 2 December 2025
• Things to Do Before Asking “Is This Accessible?”, 11 August 2024
• AT Is More Than Screen Readers, 4 August 2024
• Don’t Use Web•dev for Accessibility Info, 9 July 2024
• Baseline Does Not Really Cover Baseline Support, 16 December 2023
• CSS-only Widgets Are Inaccessible, 25 March 2023
• Your Accessibility Claims Are Wrong, 14 November 2022
• Still Guessing on Accessibility, 31 January 2013

While some authors are well-intentioned, just as often they are marketing chaff from a corporate entity trying to separate you from your money in the guise of helping users. It turns out I’ve also got plenty of examples of those:

• #ARTY Could Get You Sued, 14 July 2025
• #Accesstive Will Get You Sued, 8 July 2025
• Do Not Publish Your Designs on the Web with Figma Sites…, specifically the 23 May 2025 update because Figma deleted its post.
• My Request to Google on Accessibility, 22 May 2025
• Be Wary of Accessibility Guarantees from Anyone, 2 March 2025
• #AudioEye Will Get You Sued, 26 February 2023
• Accessibility ‘Gaps’ in MVPs, 5 November 2022
• Overlays Underwhelm at WordPress A11y Day, 3 November 2022
• #FACILiti Will Get You Sued, 9 March 2022
• #UserWay Will Get You Sued, 13 September 2021
• #accessiBe Will Get You Sued, 29 June 2020
• I Don’t Care What Google or Apple or Whoever Did, 24 March 2020
• A Model for WordPress Accessibility, 27 May 2019
• Lessons from Gutenberg, 10 December 2018
• Be Wary of Accessibility Guarantees from Vendors, 28 March 2016
• Be Wary of Add-on Accessibility, 8 November 2015

I suppose you could acronymify this law, which means you might get more traction adjusting it to Accessibility Law of Headlines, Amirite? just so you can say “ALOHA!” on calls. Nobody wants that, which makes it extra fun.