I've spent a good part of my time at RedTurtle working on accessibility in Volto. Along the way I talked to a lot of people who run or develop companies built on Plone and Volto, and I kept hearing the same thing. I want to put it on the table.
Companies invest in accessibility. They just invest in their own theme.
There's budget to make the client's site compliant (fast, contained, billable) and no budget to make Volto itself stronger. I understand why: it's faster and cheaper. I don't agree with it, but I understand it, for the business, this isn't negotiable. A painful reality.
Here's the thing, the work is being done, and I'll talk about what I know and understand, Europe and Brazil. In Europe, accessibility has been law since 2025, pretty fresh, so every company shipping on Volto already has, or at least should have, compliant products. In Brazil, probably the largest Plone and Volto community in the world, public-sector accessibility has been mandatory since 2004 (don't be fooled by that number, having a law is one thing and applying it is another), with a shared government model (eMAG) behind it, and most of the big government portals there run on our stack.
The budget existed. The law made it non-negotiable. The work happened.
It just happened in the theme. Every single time.
Hundreds of individual themes are compliant, and the core isn't.
So, we've ended up with dozens of companies delivering genuinely excellent, accessible, compliant products, sitting on a shared base that quietly got left behind. Each company thinks it's saving money by solving accessibility in its own theme. Collectively, we let the foundation we all stand on fall out of date while the real work stays inside private repositories.
There's also an upside people keep missing. Brian Davis (@Fosten) made this point to me, and it stuck: accessibility isn't only a cost or a legal box to tick. Better machine readability means better search ranking. Accessible products are simply better products, for the user, and for the business.
Let me be honest about the cost, because I'm not here to preach. At RedTurtle we invested well beyond what was planned (and I’m very, very thankful to RT!). For months the work barely moved, merge requests sitting open, getting maintained, never reviewed. The budget was high and justifying it wasn't easy. It still isn't.
The planning was all wrong because of the new "world", nobody knew what would happen and how much time would be needed. So, things that now I know I need a day or two to get done, were set as 1h or worse.
Then something changed. A handful of collaborators, few, but genuinely committed, showed up after lots of personal outreach, all over the place. In about five months we landed close to 50 approved PRs. Not because there was suddenly more money, but because the chain finally moved: fast, interested, together. That's the whole point. This is open source. Without collaboration there's no progress.
But… The companies and single individuals carrying it alone are reaching the limit of what they can justify by themselves.
I'm not pointing fingers. That's absolutely the opposite of my main goal here. Nobody owes anybody anything here. I'm asking us to rethink how this work happens. The accessibility skill is already in the community, it's proven, it ships every day. The only thing missing is letting a fraction of it flow back to the base we all share.
I not asking anything but good sense.
Your theme without Volto core is nothing
A11y isn't a law to be fulfilled
The web only works when it works for everyone. If something isn't working for a person who has a disability, your product isn't working properly.
Accessibility already works across the community. Let's just point a little of it back at Volto.
None of the progress I mentioned was mine alone. It came from a handful of people who chose to contribute when it would have been easier not to (@wesleybl , @stevepiercy , @pnicolli , @davisagli and many others) and from RedTurtle (@stemrc ) backing this well past the comfortable point. Thank you.