Nine capabilities of a high-performing accessibility initiative
Trust your team and focus on developing your capabilities. Organizational culture that is high-trust and emphasizes information flow is predictive of organizational performance in technology.
Overall, the outcome an organization wants is the building and maintaining of an inclusive culture across the organization that prioritizes and incorporates users with disabilities into all phases. They also should have a generative, performance-oriented organization that betters their accessibility outcomes incrementally. We can always get better! From this culture, the software products created will pass all success criteria as defined by the organization, because someone will be looking out for this success on each step of the software development lifecycle.
There are many approaches and maturity levels to running a successful accessibility initiative–however if you are just starting out (and many accessibility initiatives start out with one person carrying the torch), the following are organizational capabilities that will predict a high-performance software organization that creates an inclusive culture and accessible products:
Build an inclusive product culture by implementing Inclusive Design which incorporates feedback into all phases of user research and design process from users of underrepresented groups such as those with temporary, situational, and not legally recognized disabilities.
Provide guidelines for accessibility compliance that allow product stakeholders to make informed, inclusive decisions throughout the software development lifecycle. Educate engineering, design, and product on accessibility standards and tooling in office hours, workshops, and self-guided learning.
Lead discussion on requirements for upcoming features and annotate design deliverables as a Definition of Ready
Severe non-compliant defects are reviewed and prioritized in our product backlogs according to their priority.
Audits of automated and manually-tested user journeys occur regularly. Findings are publicly published.
Publicly recognize product accessibility as a value we have
All products adopt an implemented design system with accessible patterns
Provide and promote usage of assistive technology tools used by people with disabilities
Product and quality assurance engineers run tests that prevent accessibility-related regressions
You don’t have to have all these capabilities mature in the first year, but some part of each one being present will serve your organization well and allow one to iterate and build a more inclusive culture in the long run.
Why capabilities?
I read Accelerate: The Science of Lean Software and DevOps: Building and Scaling High Performing Technology Organizations which critiques maturity models as having a checklist of things to do and a destination to end at and not an organizational drive for ever-increasing excellence. Many accessibility programs can take much from devops (developer operations) learnings which in short de-silos product engineering from operations engineering. Don’t get me wrong–maturity models are great for knowing what the next step is–especially at the beginning, but every organization is different and finding a way to bootstrap an initiative from the grassroots will serve you well in addition to executive mandate.
After all if you are in a software company and want to make the products you create accessible, you will need to find a way to measure accessible software delivery―and what drives it.
“If an organization builds a culture that states “this is who we are and we build accessible products” then everyone will be on the look out for ways to include all their prospective users and not just pass a test.”
Thankfully we have a somewhat objective criteria to measure product accessibility with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), but accessibility leaders cannot be everywhere, nor implement, nor evaluate every feature to ensure not only that WCAG success criteria are met, but that an inclusive approach has been taken with the intent of making the software accessible. Remember, passing all WCAG success criteria doesn’t mean that the product makes sense or is easily usable.
If an organization builds a culture that states “this is who we are and we build accessible products” then everyone will be on the look out for ways to include all their prospective users and not just “pass a test.”
If you had to narrow down your accessibility initiative to a few key capabilities, what would they be?
