Go beyond compliance

We tend to focus on meeting WCAG criteria at the beginning of our journeys, but that shouldn't be our end goal. Accessibility is more than compliance; it affects all aspects of life. You can lead with empathy by incorporating accessibility into every aspect of your business, from internal emails to marketing campaigns.

• Host lunch-and-learns about accessible meetings and communications.
• Send employees to learn and network at accessibility conferences.
• Become a vendor or sponsor disability-focused events.
• Host hack-a-thons to build components that are easy to use with assistive technology.
• Encourage teams to speak up about ideas for improving user experiences.

Amplify disabled voices

As we’ve mentioned before, society tends to want to hide disability, but we want to highlight disabled experiences and improve them. There are a lot of ways to amplify disabled voices within your business. You can start by ensuring your disabled employees and end users feel seen, heard, and respected.

• Normalize accommodations by offering common ones to all employees by default.
• Create an Employee Resource Group (ERG) for disabled employees.
• Get first-hand feedback on your products from disabled users.
• Seek out disabled experts in your field and learn from them.

Including disabled voices means actively seeking feedback and prioritizing improvements to the usability of your products or services. Accessibility should be part of every stage, from the first brainstorming session to the final product release to future enhancements. When usability and accessibility are put first, everyone benefits.

For example, making a website fully responsive improves the usability for smaller devices as well as assistive software. Many people with low vision use assistive technology to zoom in on small sections of content, effectively changing the viewport size to that of a smaller screen. Responsive designs easily adapt to various viewport sizes, increasing the overall usability.

Design beautiful, accessible products

While many designers may initially see accessibility as a barrier to creating beautiful designs, we like to think of it as a challenge. We understand that it can be frustrating to suddenly have so many new rules to adhere to.

• Color choices must meet contrast minimums.
• Interactive components must be keyboard compatible.
• Video backgrounds must have pause controls.

It can be overwhelming at first, but our experts can help. Our Accessibility Advisors can meet with your design team at any part of the product lifecycle. Do your designers already have a mock-up for a new project? Our advisors offer design reviews and consultations to help your teams incorporate accessibility into new designs before they reach development teams. This can save time and resources by diagnosing potentially inaccessible interactions before they have been built.

Maybe your team is still in the brainstorming phase. We also offer accessible experience design services to help UX designers map out accessible user flows before the first mock-up is designed. If a wireframe has already been designed, our experience designers can evaluate it for potential accessibility barriers and prescribe solutions. As time goes on, you may find your teams learning and growing to a point where they only need occasional assistance with complex design components.