My workplace are trying to implement and talk more about accessibility. We even have regular catchups with those in the business interested in making our products and services more accessible.
We currently do not have an accessibility strategy in place and looking to create one.
I am currently going through the web and reading accessibility strategies already out there.
I am looking for advice on what makes a good accessibility strategy and what to include in it?
We are also currently in the process of setting up an accessibility strategy.
Currently there is a mix between ideas from management as well as grass roots initiatives. There is an accessibility strategist at the individual contributor level and accessibility leads in Test. Top-down and bottom-up approaches didn’t really work with out constellation. The best results happened with a middle-out approach. We are convincing lower and middle management of the importance of accessibility. It’s easier to reach them, have personal connections with than upper management. They then talk to their teams and hopefully also to their managers.
I don’t think there is this one great accessibility strategy. A lot depends on the people working on it, the company culture, upper management support, …
We tried to look at a lot of examples and find a fit for us. At axe-con there are usually quite a few people presenting how they built up accessibility at their company.
Hello Shiv, firstly it depends on whether you mean a company accessibility strategy or an accessibility testing strategy. Those two documents would contain very different things at a higher and lower level.
It is important that companies have a public accessibility policy in place. W3.org has a great page on policies with examples through the link below. Developing Organizational Policies on Web Accessibility | Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) | W3C
Very briefly as examples a company policy on accessibility would include who is responsible, a roadmap laying out what has and is being done about accessibility. Whereas a testing policy might include areas of testing such as conformance to WCAG guidelines or a list of areas such as keyboard access, colour contrast testing using X tool etc.
A good book is Agile Accessibility Handbook by Dylan Barrell which has loads in it including policy, advocating and automation.
Whatever you do, don’t let anyone suggest overlays as a solution
Good luck and its great to hear this is being considered.
Find what works for you and your company. Is there a budget or are you looking for free tools, are you aiming for a specific standard or strting out by making small improvements etc.
Here are some mistakes that I have made along the way:
The metrics are always changing so what may be an error one month is not an error the next
Not all tools measure against the WCAG guidelines (Lighthouse is a classic example)
Not all pages in your site will have the same result so use your analytics to prioritse those pages visited the most
Raise these issues as bugs so that you can track them as they are technically a ‘bug’ to some users
Note, this can be quite manually intensive but the initial time investment should see you through, so don’t let that put you off.
Hope this helps - message me if you want further info.
I suggest you understand the W3C accessibility guidelines by reading through the definitions, requirements and advice. You can then look to appoint accessibility champions in different teams to support the wider business. Also, write best practice guidance and set up talks from 3rd party companies or even the champions themselves. Finally, a RACI to clearly show who and what teams are responsible for accessibility acceptance during a project start to end. This will put pressure on people to take responsibility and be accountable.
Hi @shivangi.parekh
Having into consideration that making a web fully or highly accessible is a considerable task, that does not mean that you cannot start making it as accessible as possible, and take it from there.
Something you company can introduce as start point is automated accessibility tests, that use some engines like axe-core or code_sniffer (to name a couple). These tests are fairly simple to implement (or not) depending on the tool or test framework you use, but with not that much effort you can have your sites checked out.
The automated tools are not perfect, and will never flag you all the accessibility issues (for example tools based in axe-core usually catch an average or 55-57% of accessibility issues -or at least this is what axe-core claims-).
So to make your page really accessible, you will need manual testing. Manual accessibility tests by specialists in the area are expensive and laborious (though necessary to make it right), but if you have your site let’s say 50% accessible after fixing all the issues flagged by an automated tool, at least that is a good start point.
