Here at Evinced, we are often asked how to build a successful digital accessibility program.
While every company has a different path to success, we thought it might help to offer a clear, yet flexible, vision of what a strong accessibility program looks like.
Think of this blog post like a sketch: sharp enough to give you structure and direction, but open enough to adapt to your company’s size, culture, and current process.
From this perspective, what does a good accessibility program actually look like?
For starters, it isn’t built to react to problems; it’s designed to prevent them. The end goal for an accessibility manager isn’t to find bugs and get them fixed, it’s to help their teams build accessible websites and mobile applications from the very start.
Eight hallmarks of a great accessibility program
Let’s look at the hallmarks of a program that really works.
1. Easy to adopt
No arcane tools or lengthy specialized training – your program needs to be as frictionless as possible. Just like the best camera is the one in your pocket, the best accessibility tools are the ones your team can and will actually use.
2. Budget-friendly
To get implemented, your program needs to fit your existing budget now. Your organization could opt to increase the investment once your program is showing progress, but you have to begin where you are.
3. Consistent and efficient
The program needs to do some accessibility good. It should help your team catch meaningful issues, ideally early on in development. It should be consistent, with tools or processes that catch bugs regardless of who runs them. And, it can’t add noise like false positives or unclear errors that make developers lose trust in the tools and, ultimately, want to stop following the program you’ve designed.
4. Timely
Simply put: it can’t gum up the release cycle. A good program fits into your existing release cycle, and doesn’t slow it down. The surest way to shoot an accessibility program in the foot is to make a whole engineering team wait – and wait – for your manual review or bombard them with too many bugs at once. Be thoughtful about how you report issues and make sure there’s a manageable flow.
5. Measurable
Your progress matters, not just for end-user experience, which is critical, but also for internal adoption and executive buy-in. The program you build should be set up so you can leverage your progress to make a solid case for more resources and to evangelize accessibility across your organization, as one of our customers noted here.
6. Smart
Your program should generate an action plan that respects engineering resources and gets the most bang for the buck, i.e., the most results per engineering hour. We often suggest that organizations focus on critical issues first. They’ll have the biggest impact when fixed, they have the most aggravation for end users, and they have the highest legal risk for the company. Plus, critical issues can often be traced to a relatively small number of inaccessible coding or design practices. Prioritizing and resolving those will provide quick wins for your team.
7. Collaborative
Everyone in your organization should have a clear understanding of how they contribute to this effort. Establish who owns accessibility at each stage of the product life cycle across design, development, QA, and leadership. Remember, accessibility is everyone’s job!
8. Communicated
Decide how feedback is tracked and implemented, and how accessibility performance gets reported. Momentum should be built by leveraging initial successes. Inside an organization, making meaningful improvements is infectious (in a good way).
The key to keep in mind is that you’re building an engine that keeps accessibility from becoming a one-time audit and instead evolves into a living part of your organization’s product culture.
A well-managed program runs smoothly, doesn’t slow your development process, and builds credibility over time. It turns accessibility from a checklist into a business asset, from an obligation to a strength.
Now that we’ve completed this vision exercise, we’ll turn to a specific plan. Stay tuned!