How to get started

Kicking off an accessibility journey, or ramping up existing efforts, can be daunting and difficult. And different for every business depending on their structure, standards, ways of working, culture, and approach to change.  

There are, however, several important steps that apply to most successful accessibility programmes, which we’d like to share with you. We’d love to talk more about these with you. 

Our 8-step process

On our Partner Accessibility Hub, we share further insights, but here’s a summarised version:

1. Understand the basics – learn what accessibility is, who benefits from it, and start looking into how to make your products accessible 
2. Raise awareness – put it on the agenda at meetings so it’s regularly discussed, and test your products with disabled users, sharing your findings 
3. Get leadership buy-in – take the business case to leadership, focussing on the benefits of accessibility that will mean the most to them 
4. Make it someone’s job – accessibility is everyone’s responsibility, but creating a role to lead the programme will be a game changer 
5. Provide guidelines – as well as the main Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), provide teams with simplified guides relevant to your own products, like our Backpack set 
6. Review existing content – get an expert to carry out an accessibility audit of your products, then start fixing the “low hanging fruit”, ideally testing with real users too 
7. Build into processes – help all product development teams understand the part they play and to consider accessibility in what they do 
8. Embed into your culture – this takes some time, but by doing all of the above, you’ll get there! 

Technically how we do it 

Making a product digitally accessible can be complex and challenging, but if you break it down into these five areas, it feels much less daunting and very achievable: 

1. Design – Use good colour contrast, large font size, clean layout, controlled motion, consistent navigation, and accessible interactions 
2. Content – Write copy in plain language, use clear and unique links and Calls to Action (CTAs), and write good alternative (ALT) text for images and hidden labels 
3. Keyboard only – When only using a keyboard, have a clear focus indicator, move in the correct order, and make all interactive elements reachable 
4. Screen readers – Make it work with a screen reader by using semantic HTML, meaningful focus order, heading tags, image descriptions (ALT text) and labels 
5. Magnification – Allow zoom up to 400% (or 200% text increase) without losing content or functionality 

For more information, visit our Partner Accessibility Hub