The Future of Digital Accessibility is Agile

Whether you have a disability or not should in no way impact your ability to engage with the wealth of digital content, products, and services that are interwoven into our day-to-day lives. In today’s digital-first world, every person deserves equal access to online information. 

Civil rights legislation like the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) is generally interpreted as obligating organizations to meet certain digital accessibility requirements. That legal compliance, however, is mere table stakes. Leading companies seek to transcend compliance and deliver truly accessible experiences; experiences that align with their values of diversity, equity, and inclusion.  

Only some succeed. 

For more than two decades, I’ve helped a wide range of organizations—from local governments to corporate juggernauts—start and scale digital accessibility programs. Across thousands of clients, I’ve witnessed thousands of challenges. The most common challenges are born out of process. The teams are willing to put forward the hard work to make, and keep, their products usable for all. When that effort occurs in siloed, one-off projects, though, it’s doomed to failure. Only when accessibility is incorporated into existing, typically agile, development processes is success sustainable. To achieve lasting results, materially reduce cost, and effectively manage risk, organizations must adopt an agile approach to accessibility.  

As a tech entrepreneur, the agile methodology is close to my heart. There’s a reason it’s the industry standard for product development. By tackling bite-sized projects in short sprints, and consistently iterating based on user feedback, teams can swiftly deliver products that meet users’ needs. But in many agile organizations, accessibility is treated as an afterthought—or, worse, as a discrete project. Consequently, teams end up in a never-ending cycle of auditing and reactive remediation that’s expensive, inefficient, and ineffective. It’s almost as terrible as the waterfall development process. Almost. 

It’s no surprise that organizations find themselves in this frustrating position. Digital accessibility is still relatively unfamiliar for many people. Demonstrable compliance with the ADA, as it relates to digital systems, is complex. Teams are inclined to ignore accessibility until it becomes a screaming priority. The result is a disrupted roadmap and a lot of expensive remediation. It’s reactive. It's painful. 

Applying the fundamental principles of the agile methodology to digital accessibility moves us from reactive to proactive. In our agile accessibility model, accessibility concerns are incorporated into each step of the digital experience lifecycle, beginning with ideation and design. We address accessibility requirements at the point in the development process when they can be addressed most cost-effectively. We avoid remediating errors after products are live, and instead catch issues early, when it's cheapest. We adopt an ongoing and iterative approach to functional testing, focusing on high-priority user flows and UX components. We reduce reliance on one-off audits of entire digital properties that chiefly serve to build a massive backlog of issues your team doesn’t have the time to address. 

Agile Accessibility offers an efficient, sustainable, and cost-effective alternative to the status quo. At Level Access, we believe it's the only way to create accessible digital systems for the future. To help organizations better understand and execute this agile approach to accessibility, and build sustainable programs, we’ll be releasing a body of educational work over the next few months. This will include customer perspectives, how-to articles, and role-specific guides.  

Wherever you are on your accessibility journey, it’s time to start tackling accessibility the right way—with an agile approach. Your teams—and, more importantly, your customers—will thank you.

Learn how to put agile accessibility into practice in this recent blog from the Level Access team.