Integrate Accessibility (A11y) into your business

Accessibility with Agile Methodology

A business’s focus is to be profitable and convert as many visitors into customers – giving priority to UX, targeted campaigns through SEO strategy etc, but accessibility gets put on the back burner.

We want as many people on our web site as possible, however we’re missing out on many potential customers if not working towards an accessible website.

Accessibility isn’t an easy task, but the more people aware and involved in this process at the start of every project will result in an accessible approach for the business, working in an agile way, allowing you to discuss, apply and repeat tasks to fix accessibility issues.

Accessibility is seen as a small fix here and there to help a core vitals score, or an after thought to tick a box, but integrating it into every project from the is the ideal goal.

The Accessibility challenge

How do you plan and build accessibility into every project without affecting your resources and the bottom line? Here’s some initial points that I think would be a good thought process of working towards fixing accessible issues across the teams in an Agile way.

Communicate the why’s
Show people why this is just as important, if not more than other parts of your business. If people don’t understand why you’re doing it, this won’t motivate or encourage or move towards an agile and accessible approach.

Introduce accessibility into regular weekly meetings
Gain some momentum with the topic by setting a slot aside to discuss what it is, and who it will benefit. Remember we’re not doing this for a score in Google but strengthening our people focus and people equality through all our products.

Educate each department
each department should have some initial training into accessibility for their role to be effective within your organisation.

All hands for each project
for each project, from the very outset of a project idea, you need to involve the designers, developers, content marketers – basically every team.

Bring accessibility into your very next project.
Give attention to accessibility in your next project from the outset. Begin with the designers planning contrasting colours, font sizes etc

Run your first project with Agile Accessibility
Plan and implement your first design, testing, content, and development strategy, then have small catch ups for any iterations that need making. Breaking down the whole project into manageable smaller tasks is something that will help each department apply, then fix each accessible issue.

Summary

Using your resources in this way, gives the best structure to an all hands involvement whilst fixing accessibility problems and giving every visitor the best chance to experience your website.

Accessibility