I’m often asked how an organisation can get started with digital accessibility. There’s much I could share, and perhaps I’ll write more about this in the future, but here are a few thoughts on how organisations should get started based on the ideas I presented at Convert Bristol a few months ago.
I think the main problem many organisations make is in delving straight into something like the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines and making little changes to their work, like adding alternative text to images. While this is commendable and part of a solution, such things do not get to the root of the issue. For organisations, accessibility takes leadership and commitment.
- Adopt the right mindset – Accessibility is a quality of what you create or do. It’s a long term investment rather than a one-off project – a process not a feature. Understand what is expected of your organisation, but also that doing accessibility well comes more from experience, collaboration and thinking about it early than from conformance, certifications or compliance – there’s more on this below. Get educated about what disability and accessibility is really about. Document your progress and outcomes to help with both momentum and compliance.
- Commit – Clearly communicate an ongoing commitment to accessibility to your team. Embed practices and checks into your work now. Publish an accessibility statement that demonstrates your commitment and intent, describes your approach, outlines your current status, and provides contact details.
- Establish sensible goals – What aspects of your work would benefit most from improving accessibility? If you're just getting started, it's important to start with something that you know is achievable, so consider what is realistic. What are the most used or important tasks in your product or service? With one of our clients recently, it’s been more important to improve a public part of their platform that gets more traffic before working on their user systems, or even their home page. For other clients, we’ve started by improving their design system and reusable components rather than working on a page-by-page basis.
- Use what you already have – Accessibility is a team effort, and shared responsibility is key. Highly motivated and engaged team members are particularly valuable in supporting efforts across the rest of the organisation. Identify existing resources in your team and amplify them. By all means, establish accessibility experts across different disciplines, but don’t allow these experts to become the only people doing accessibility work.
- Get support – If you’re not sure what to do, get professional support. Expert advice, support and coaching helps establish accessibility as a practice that lasts, a much more effective strategy than getting stuck in an audit-and-fix cycle to patch up accessibility issues that have built up.
Like many working in accessibility, I’ve felt frustration for many years at a lack of progress and impact. The biggest cause, I believe, is in teams having the wrong mindset when it comes to accessibility. Thinking needs to shift from it being a compliance checkbox to being a cornerstone of an organisation’s culture and a quality of work.
For me, the goal is embodied in the phrase “progress over perfection”, and I have some other words beginning with “P” for you to think about:
- Grant permission to be fallible, to get past the pressure and the size of the task (because it ain’t no quick fix), and to start making progress, whatever that looks like for you.
- Have patience, acknowledging that good things take time, and gaining experience takes time.
- Perseverance – more than having persistence to keep working towards a goal, we must be adaptive and determined despite discouragement or difficulty, and remember that your efforts are important.
- Practice to become more skilled, but remember that people have different learning styles. Continuous effort builds capability. Integrate accessible practices into workflows for lasting benefits.
- Develop proficiency, so that quality becomes embedded; automatic; natural.
I believe that last one – proficiency in digital accessibility – is what has been missing for many years, and it’s likely because of a lack of the other “P” words in that list. A day of accessibility training will not make anybody proficient. You need practice, which can take the other three – permission, patience and perseverance.
Let me know if this resonates with you – I’d love to hear from you.
