Digital Accessibility for Product Management
What is digital accessibility and how does it relate to your software?
What must your team do differently and what’s the best step forward? These questions can be overwhelming for many people unfamiliar with accessibility and trying to understand how they should approach things. Fortunately, Level Access knows how to support Product leaders and help them build accessibility into their roadmaps or operations in seamless and non-disruptive ways.
What Should Product Leaders Know?
Software Doesn’t Work for Everyone
Technology should work for and be accessible to all users. But people with disabilities are running into barriers every day when they visit sites and use applications—whether its due to honest oversight or a lack of training and awareness. These barriers prevent them from critical aspects of everyday digital life, including banking, healthcare, and more. Accessibility allows all people to live their lives more fully and independently.
You can also learn more here about the rising tide of litigation and how accessibility is increasingly a critical factor in procurement across industries.
Accessibility Makes Products Better
Many accessibility best practices overlap with common best practices for design and development which will improve your UX, for example:
- Good color contrast for easily readable elements
- Semantic structure, intuitive layouts, and clear communication of information
- Smooth navigation with clear visual indicators and controls
- Better support for keyboard controls and navigation
Accessibility ensures your technology is easily perceivable, operable, understandable, and robust – and who doesn’t want those principles to describe their software?
Your Roadmap Could Be At Stake
Organizations that wait to act on accessibility risk lawsuits or customer demands over accessibility – and this type of unplanned rush to patch issues and retrofit can disrupt product roadmaps and future plans. Taking a proactive and phased approach can drive better results and more efficiency, so you won’t have to put your plans on hold.
The Greatest Unlock:
Accessibility Success for Digital Products in 2022 and Beyond
We want to equip your Product team with what they need to start making a difference when it comes to digital accessibility. In this free webinar you will:
- Hear from featured guest Gina Bhawalkar, Principal Analyst at Forrester Research, who’ll share some of the recent trends in product accessibility.
- Examine lessons learned from her research combined with the work we’re doing with clients moving toward sustainable accessibility success
- Get a high-level walkthrough of the mechanics of implementing a product accessibility lifecycle.
Grow Your Market Share
Train your developers and designers (and anyone else who touches your product) to ensure accessible design for your products and communications so you can meet requirements and stand out from the crowd.
Section 508 and Compliance
If your business sells technology to the federal government or to its contractors, then it must be accessible under Section 508 and you’ll need a conformance report showing so. Even if you don’t sell to either of these segments, you’ll still need to comply with the ADA or other industry-specific laws (learn more here). Reaching this goal before your peers do can give your organization a demonstrable edge over competitors.
Clear Procurement Hurdles with a VPAT
For B2B companies, inaccessibility or lack of accessibility documentation (read about the VPAT) can make the difference for important deals and contracts. Companies are quickly maturing their own accessibility efforts and turning the focus to vendors and third-parties to ensure they don’t increase their risk by using the wrong technology.
In a recent survey of the tech industry, the majority of respondents had taken action recently with accessibility programs between 2 and 3 years old and 53% of technology organizations now prioritize buying a product or solution because of its accessibility. Being proactive pays – don’t let deals stall while you start from the beginning to reach compliance!
How to Drive Continuing Compliance and Long-Term Success
Regular Audits from Experts
- Our experts can perform comprehensive auditing services to manually review your product for all potential issues while providing you with important guidance and an actionable roadmap.
- Audits also include use case testing with assistive technology to ensure functionally usable experiences for real-world users.
Optimize Your Development
- Move your efforts upstream and test for accessibility issues at all applicable stages, just like you do for other bugs.
- Use SDKs to add accessibility to your test automation framework and your CI/CD practices, perform unit tests, develop scripts for user journeys, and more.
Upskill Your Team
- Level Access offers on-demand digital courses and live training with hands-on exercises so your team will understand how to integrate accessibility into their daily practices and workflow.
- Our training helps ensure that your digital creations are easy to use and create great experiences for people with disabilities.
Manage It All Centrally
- Facilitate all aspects of your digital accessibility efforts efficiently with an effective management platform for easy reporting and analysis.
- Standardize testing tools, reports, learning resources, and methodology for all teams across the organization.
