Maintaining Digital Accessibility Compliance
Accessibility is an ongoing journey. Here are eight tips to help your organization streamline the process, create policies and procedures, and make being accessible a regular part of doing business.
1. Get an audit once a year.
Have a qualified third-party expert in digital accessibility validate the system. Many of these experts have people with disabilities on staff.
Go deeper:
2. Monitor the lifecycle.
Monitor the accessibility of systems in development and production. Accessibility issues have a tendency to sneak into your code much like any other bug.
Go deeper:
- Monitor during your DevOps with SDKs for accessibility testing
- Track your live web assets with continuous monitoring for common issues
3. Train your team.
Deploy training on digital accessibility requirements into development and content teams. The most successful organizations tell us that they consider accessibility to be part of everyone’s job.
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4. Provide software.
Provide tools to validate accessibility in the content creation and code development process. The best tools are the ones that your content creators and developers want to use, so shop around for the right fit for your team. (Even if it isn’t us.)
Go deeper:
- A comprehensive platform for managing accessibility
- Tools for integrating accessibility tests across your development operations
- Continuous monitoring and insights for web properties
5. Support your authors and developers.
Provide expert support to your team as they are implementing and maintaining accessibility. Having a partnership with a digital accessibility firm lets you tap in to expertise when you need it.
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6. Set a formal policy.
Provide a structured and consistently applied set of digital accessibility policies and practices.
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7. Collect user feedback on issues.
Have (an accessible) method of collecting user feedback on digital accessibility issues.
A simple way to do this is to have a dedicated email address for accessibility concerns that is monitored daily.
8. Provide support to people with disabilities.
Ensure there is a method of supporting users with disabilities in their access of your system.
In an ideal world, every customer support representative would be trained in accessibility. But in reality, as long as at least one person per shift is trained, they can correctly document the problem and help find a solution.
