The Digital Accessibility podcast interviewed 70 accessibility professionals from a variety of organizations over two years. Here is an AI summary, based on all the transcripts, of the most common takeaways related to managing accessibility in organizations. Comments about each are provided in italics.
✅ Most Referenced Techniques
1. Training and Education
- Mentioned in nearly every summary.
- Includes role-specific training, workshops, mentorship, and capability building. This requires the knowledge and skills to implement. You also need management to authorize time for staff to undertake a formal program.
- Emphasizes the importance of continuous learning and demystifying accessibility for all roles (designers, developers, PMs, etc.). One option is to use a role-based philosophy that breaks accessibility issues along the lines of the work that individual practitioners do. Not everyone has to understand everything.
2. Cross-Functional Collaboration
- Repeatedly highlighted as essential.
- Accessibility is a shared responsibility across departments—design, engineering, QA, legal, procurement, and leadership. Creating a set of skill ratings based on achievements can help with this.
- Encourages holistic integration of accessibility into workflows and decision-making. Of then a11y work is in the silo of each practitioner. Opening this up to be across disciplines helps to improve the work flow.
3. Community Engagement
- Involves engaging with people with disabilities directly. “Nothing About Us Without Us” is a recurring theme. This is something we do not do well. Although it is often discussed, we rarely apply the resources to have people with disabilities review and contribute to design work.
- Often tied to broader inclusive practices (e.g., considering race, gender, and socioeconomic status). We have included a11y in our DEI work. Do we want to do more than that?
4. Leadership Engagement and Advocacy
- Executive sponsorship and internal champions are critical for scaling accessibility.
- Leadership sets the tone for prioritizing accessibility and embedding it into organizational culture. We have top-level support for a11y. The next step is to allocate time and identify what is required of staff so it can be embedded.
5. Inclusive Design and User-Centered Thinking
- Includes usability testing, feedback loops, and co-creation.
- Focuses on creating usable, enjoyable, and equitable experiences—not just meeting compliance. We have the capabilities for this. We haven’t embedded it in our work process for all projects.
🛠️ Frequently Mentioned Supporting Techniques
Automation and Testing: Combining automated tools with manual and user testing. Mphasis has a lot of experience with automated tools. We have tools that we use for manual testing.
Accessibility Champions Programs: Used to scale knowledge and support across teams. We already have people who champion the work like Sandra, Dave, Kristen, Angel. It could be helpful to formalize this and give people credit for it.
Assistive Technology Utilization: Testing with screen readers, Braille displays, etc. We have done work with this in projects. It is an area for us to do more training. We have information about it.
Policy and Standards Development: Internal policies, WCAG, VPATs, and participation in standards bodies. The Foundation Service is a way for us to institute policies. Our own web site is attentive to WCAG an we use it in projects. A VPAT is something we can do for clients and something we can do for our own site. Joe has participated with the W3C working groups. It is something other practitioners can do.
Documentation and Toolkits: Internal guidelines, design systems, and knowledge bases. We have an extensive amount of information. We need to work on better ways to surface it and have it in a form that works for the practitioners.
Continuous Improvement: Accessibility is treated as an iterative, evolving process.
Empathy Building: Storytelling, user testing, and lived experience to foster understanding. We used video storytelling in our early pitch to NASA. Our researchers have quotes and stories that have come out of interactions with people with disabilities.
“The best UX is when people of all abilities can participate in the experience. ” – Joe Welinske
If your organization is interested in broader user experience consulting, talk to Joe about Blink UX. Blink is the world’s leader in evidence-driven design consulting. Joe serves as the Accessibility Director at Blink where we bring accessibility into every project.