Building a Compliance Project Plan

Upon completing an initial accessibility assessment, sharing a public accessibility statement/policy, and identifying and upskilling the teams responsible for executing on accessibility, your next step is to create a comprehensive compliance plan, complete with objectives, deliverables, timelines, and budgets. The details of your plan will have to be flexible, but having everything written down and shared internally draws a baseline that you can compare your future efforts against.

Objectives

The first thing in your detailed accessibility compliance plan should be the overall objective of the plan. What is your end goal? Do you want to reach a certain accessibility standard within a certain timeframe? What barriers to access are you specifically trying to remove? Who are you doing this for? The more detailed your objectives, the easier they will be to understand and measure against.

Deliverables

Once you have the general objectives of your accessibility plan, you have to break down the work involved into distinct blocks, with associated deliverables. Those deliverables should be laid out clearly and concisely, with specific qualified and quantified end results.

For example, you can break up the project into website remediation, application remediation, and content remediation, and then attach specific deliverables to those three workstreams. The deliverables could be reaching a specific % of accessibility, or fixing all of the access issues on a specific portion of the workstream (eg. homepage).

Timelines

Along with the deliverables described above, you should have associated time frames - the estimated amount of time each deliverable should take, with expected dates of completion for each. This will help you keep the project on track, and ensure you hit your goals laid out in the public facing accessibility policy and statement.

Budgets

The last thing you need to consider in setting up an accessibility compliance project plan is how to budget for it. Different aspects of the project will be completed by different teams, and accessibility may be associated with other concurrent projects in various areas. Figuring out resource allocation and establishing budget goals will ensure that you don’t overspend or underplan for the project, which could take place over multiple years.