Organizational Maturity

Teams often begin their accessibility journey with an set of bug reports on specific issues with a website or app. However, establishing a mature accessibility practice for the organization involves many steps that are outside the scope of the development team’s bug reports. It includes:

• Setting up accessible communication pathways for disabled users to report problems
• Incorporating accessibility requirements into user research and product design planning
• Training website editors, social media managers, and document editors to produce accessible websites, social media posts, reports, presentations, and help documentation
• Evaluating recruiting practices, HR procedures, and job descriptions for accessibility accommodations
• Incorporating accessibility training into new hire onboarding procedures
• Adding accessibility considerations to internal software procurement contracts and procedures
• Setting time and materials budgets for these tasks

The W3C Accessibility Maturity Model details these steps and describes how each will look during the four stages of an organization’s accessibility journey: inactive (i.e. not started yet), launch, integrate, and optimize.

Accessibility Independence

It is common for organizations to lean on consulting accessibility specialists until they have reached at least the integration stage on the majority of the action items described in the maturity model.

Anceble can help.

Our goal is to develop your capabilities so that you no longer need us. We aim to turn you into an independent, mature organization with a robust accessibility practice and enough in-house expertise to continue integrating and optimizing on your own. In our experience, it takes dev teams 1-3 years to get up to speed.

Until then, the more closely involved we are, the more we can help.

Timeline from Zero to Independent

The following schedule is a generalization based on our experience with small development teams. A larger team, or one with some basic knowledge of accessibility issues, might follow a slightly different timeline.

1-3 Months:

1. Evaluate accessibility of web interfaces

Evaluate accessibility of web interfaces. Prioritize issues and plan the first round of remediation work.

2. Draft accessibility statement and VPAT/ACR

Draft an initial accessibility statement. In some states, this follows the PDAA format. In Texas, this might include the VADSIR questionnaire.

Create the initial ACR using the latest VPAT template, if needed for web apps.

3. Assess capabilities & assign responsibilities

Assess internal capabilities and assign responsibilities. Name the person who will serve as the accessibility coordinator and plan the reporting workflow for end users.

Anceble can help map accessibility responsibilities to staff roles, evaluate the accessibility of web contact forms or bug trackers, and recommend new communication workflows if needed.

4. Train staff

Hold training sessions for management, document editors, and development team.

Anceble can lead training sessions and hold accessibility office hours or pair programming sessions with the development team.

5. Publish accessibility statement & contact info

Publish accessibility statement and PDAA assessment or VADSIR document, including contact details for the accessibility coordinator and the tentative timeline for remediation of top priority issues.

3-12 months:

6. Remediate issues

Resolve the issues raised during evaluation as determined by priority, difficulty, and capacity in the release schedule.

Anceble can answer questions that arise during development and spot check proposed solutions.

7. Reevaluate

Reevaluate accessibility after the first round of remediation.

Anceble can test updated interfaces, provide new issue lists, and help reprioritize the remaining issues.

8. Publish progress report and roadmap

Update the accessibility statement with details of the progress made on remediating top priority issues and a less tentative roadmap for future work.

Anceble can provide a progress report, draft a status update for the accessibility statement, draft the updated roadmap, and revise the ACR.

9. Integrate testing & QA procedures

Incorporate accessibility testing into IDEs and CI/CD pipelines. Establish acceptance criteria for third-party libraries. Plan how to incorporate framework updates into the development cycle to take advantage of upstream accessibility improvements.

Anceble can recommend lint and e2e tools, evaluate third-party libraries, and help document component states and user stories.

12-36 months:

10. Incorporate accessibility early in design phases

“Shift left”–move accessibility from the end of the development process (user acceptance testing and quality assurance) to the beginning (planning and design). 

Anceble can consult on new design projects to surface accessibility considerations earlier in the process and avoid costly, time consuming remediation after the fact.

Contact us to get started