Determining What Needs to Be Done

It may sound straightforward, but the first thing to do before beginning to work on your digital accessibility is find out what work needs to be done. This includes figuring out what digital assets you have that need to be accessible, and understanding how much effort it will take to get there.

Asking Questions

The first step to determine what needs to be done is to ask key questions, and get answers from relevant stakeholders both inside and outside your organization. You can do this in a variety of ways, including through stakeholder interviews, surveys, or group brainstorming sessions. Ultimately, you need to know the following information.

• What is driving your digital accessibility initiative? Why are you doing this?
• Is there a deadline for compliance? Either internally imposed or delegated from the courts?
• Is there a budget designated for accessibility? How will resources be allocated to the project?
• What accessibility regulations or standards do you need to comply with?
• Which of your digital assets need to be made accessible? 
• Are any parts of your digital assets outsourced or managed by contractors?
• What is your internal web/application development and testing process?

Initial Assessment

The first thing that many organizations do to address accessibility is to get a comprehensive initial assessment of their digital offerings. There are many companies (and some nonprofits) that provide accessibility auditing as a service, and multiple ways that they can do it. 

Generally, the organization will conduct an automated scan of your website and applications, using a tool that can be proprietary or free. Then, a trained auditor or developer will review the automated scan results to ensure that no false positives were registered and that the whole scope of work was audited. Following that, a proper accessibility audit will conclude with manual quality assurance, via representative people with disabilities using their respective assistive technologies to check the websites and apps, and make sure there are no hidden barriers that the automated scan did not catch. The results of all of these tests will be compiled into one or multiple reports, and shared with your organization to begin remediating the issues.

After the initial assessment of an expert accessibility audit, you will have an idea of how much work needs to be done to become compliant, and you will have a detailed roadmap to do it.