How to grow in your accessibility practice
No matter how matures your accessibility practice may be, there is always room to grow. In Part 3 of this series, Beginning Your Accessibility Journey, we learned how to set a baseline before creating an accessibility roadmap. Now that we know where we are, we need to figure out where we’re going and how to get there.
What is an Accessibility Roadmap?
Imagine you’re planning a road trip with several stops along the way. You want to take the best route to each stop, but you also want to keep the overall route from start to finish in mind as you plan detours. You can choose to take things slowly, enjoying scenic routes between stops, or you can choose to take the most direct route, rarely straying from the path to your destination.
We know this is a mountain we’ll have to climb slowly, but we genuinely want all our employees and clients to have positive user experiences while interacting with us and each other. We learned in the last article that Synergis is young in terms of our accessibility maturity. This means we’ll need to make a lot of changes before we reach the peak of our mountain.
Get your priorities straight
Typically, after an evaluation, teams are given a list of accessibility issues. If the list is short and/or easily fixed, the level of effort is considered low. However, if the list is long and/or difficult to complete, the level of effort is going to be much higher. Once the level of effort is known, teams can create a budget and timeline before finally assigning whatever resources are needed to complete the work.
It’s easy to say, “We want to get accessible,” but what does accessibility look like for your business? Ask questions about every aspect of your business, from online client interactions to employee payroll software to sales pitches.
- Do we need accessible product documentation?
- Do we need an accessible help desk or portal?
- Do we need accessible merchandise to give out at conferences?
- Do we need accessible employee training software?
Start small and gain momentum
Let’s say your end goal is to give customers accessible online shopping experiences. To do this, you will need an accessible website for customers to browse and buy your products. That process alone may take a year or more, so we recommend breaking it up into smaller, more manageable projects.
Maybe there are a lot of accessibility barriers related to the checkout process of your existing website. The first stop on your roadmap could be to improve the accessibility of the checkout process, which aids customers and potentially brings in more revenue. Meanwhile, research and ideas for an improved checkout process can be documented and later used to design a new user experience that puts accessibility first.
Once you know your accessibility goals, you can move from what your goals are to how you can reach them.
- Who will fix accessibility issues found in your audit?
- Do employees need training to learn how to fix the issues?
- How will you implement accessibility in new designs and processes?
Accessibility education for all
Accessibility is necessary in every aspect of business, so why isn’t accessibility training given to every employee? Training programs can be added as your business progresses on its accessibility journey. Bringing back the earlier example, if your first goal is to improve the checkout process of your retail site, your design and development teams will need to understand enough about accessibility to make improvements to the existing process.
When the first group of employees gets the training they need, they will begin noticing accessibility barriers, and you should encourage them to share any barriers they find and ideas they have for improvements. Employees may start asking about live captioning in meetings or mention that the payroll portal is difficult to use with a keyboard. These ideas will shape the development of your accessibility training over time.
Your accessibility maturity will guide your priorities
Your accessibility practice should be customized to meet the needs of your business, employees, and customers. Let’s look at both ends of the spectrum to see how much maturity affects education
The Beginner
A business just beginning to learn about accessibility may focus on training teams to recognize accessibility barriers and research how to resolve them. The topics to focus on may include the following:
- Accessibility in the workplace
- Testing keyboard accessibility in digital products
- Navigating WCAG documentation
Expert
A more mature accessibility practice may focus on specialized topics such as the following:
- Creating accessible PDFs
- Picture-in-picture sign language translation
- Creating custom ARIA components
Synergis is here to help
If you’re unsure about the right education plan for your business, we’re here to help. Synergis can walk you through each step of the journey and help design a specialized training program for your business. Maybe you just need guidance in choosing existing training programs to use. We can help educate your teams on how to evaluate product accessibility before buying and/or using third-party products.
It's time to hit the road
With a roadmap, proper training and educational resources, your business will be on the road to accessibility in no time. Your teams will be able to prioritize solutions to existing accessibility barriers, research new ways to increase accessibility, and hopefully get involved in the accessibility community. In the final article of this series, we’ll talk about working with the accessibility community to create the most accessible user experiences for your clients, customers, employees, students… everyone.
Trisha Koger
tkoger@synergishr.com
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