From the course: Making a Case for Accessibility in Your Organization
Product development lifecycle
From the course: Making a Case for Accessibility in Your Organization
Product development lifecycle
- Accessible products create more inclusive experiences for everyone. Here are some consideration to integrate digital accessibility throughout the product development lifecycle. First, address accessibility throughout the product development process from kickoff to implementation and beyond. Unlike the more traditional create, break and fix approach, consider the shift left approach. This means that you are essentially shifting the timeline to begin the accessibility process earlier. You are testing and integrating accessibility earlier in the development lifecycle. Second, provide teams with accessibility training. Managers, engineers, designers and developers should be familiar with accessible product design. If the team lacks accessibility knowledge or experiences, consider implementing required training. Create a baseline of knowledge and from there, build in more role specific accessibility training that focuses on design and development. Third, include accessibility as a success criterion for each phase of development. Move your product's accessibility features from the should have to the must have column in product checklists. This applies during the design, budgeting, training, development and testing phases. Ensure everyone understands that a project cannot move forward to the next phase unless the accessibility goals have been met and accessibility issues found during testing have been addressed and remediated. Fourth, continue to monitor accessibility after a product is released. With digital technology, any product updates can render them suddenly unusable for people with disabilities so prepare your customer service teams to receive feedback on accessibility issues or consider a support team specifically for people with disabilities such as Microsoft's Disability Answer Desk to help track, respond to or resolve requests regarding product accessibility. I know this might sound like a lot but these are just a few of the ways you and your team can incorporate accessibility into the product development lifecycle. When building accessible products becomes part of the culture at your company then you can build inclusive products and services for everyone.
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