This content originally appeared on TPGi and was authored by TPGi
It’s never too late to start an accessibility program. The important thing is that you’re taking the first step. As we explained in part one of the “Guide to Creating a Successful Digital Accessibility Program,” a digital accessibility program helps your organization move accessibility practices to the forefront of everything you do.
A strong accessibility program is a smart investment for any business, regardless of business size, maturity, or industry. It expands audience reach, ensures legal compliance, enhances usability for all users, and builds trust.
Every digital accessibility strategy has the same goal — make sure people with disabilities can independently access and interact with your digital content. Yet, to be effective, your approach should align with your organization’s unique needs.
Here are some steps to start with:
1. Understand Your Current State
To create an effective program to help you advance digital accessibility, you need to know where you are right now. You may already know accessibility gaps exist, but a structured review of your digital assets will provide a clearer picture. If you don’t have an inventory of your digital assets, now is the time to create one.
Start with an accessibility review:
- Automated tools can quickly scan your digital assets and highlight common accessibility issues.
- Manual testing is essential to catch barriers that automation cannot detect. Since manual testing takes time and expertise, focus on high-priority assets first, like your main website.
However, assessing digital accessibility is only part of the process. You also need to evaluate your organization’s readiness to advance accessibility. Consider these key questions:
- Organizational culture: Do you have leadership support for accessibility? Is accessibility recognized in your organization as an opportunity to improve products or services or seen more as a legal risk to avoid?
- Governance: Do you have an organizational accessibility policy? Do you have an agreed standard for digital accessibility? If so, how is this implemented?
- Knowledge and skills: What is the organization’s level of awareness and skills? Do you rely on a few subject matter experts or champions for accessibility knowledge? If so, what’s their role, and how influential are they?
- Processes and practices: Is accessibility addressed in processes and practices for building digital assets and creating digital content like documents, social media posts, and multimedia? If these processes and practices are defined, how well are they followed across your organization?
- Involvement of people with disabilities: How involved are disabled people in efforts to build your digital resources? How visible are people with disabilities in your organization and in the definitions of customers or users of the digital resources you create?
- Vendor relationships: How is accessibility managed in relationships with vendors who provide you with technology products and services?
It may be challenging to find answers to all these questions without help, and the chances are that if you don’t know the answers, the organizational structure to advance accessibility deliberately isn’t yet in place. That’s okay — it helps you understand where you are now, where you need to go, and what steps to take next.
2. Build a Digital Accessibility Program
A digital accessibility program is an organized effort to build long-term accessibility capacity. Its success depends on the support and authority it has within your organization.
The more support and authority, the more the program can achieve. With more limited resources and influence, a program will need to focus on areas where it has the most chance of success — but even a limited focus can help demonstrate that the program brings value to the organization, attracting more support.
Here are some areas of action a digital accessibility program can focus on. Some actions may be more readily achievable, depending on your support.
Support Remediation of Existing Resources
Once you’ve identified accessibility issues, take a prioritized approach to fixing them. Consider:
- Impact on users – How does the barrier affect people with disabilities?
- Effort to fix – Is it a simple or complex issue?
- Longevity of the resource – Will this digital asset be around for a while?
Prioritization helps focus resources on meaningful improvements without spreading efforts too thin.
Implement Accessibility Training
Building accessibility knowledge and skills in your organization guarantees that more people know how to create accessible digital assets. This doesn’t mean teaching everyone how to code. Effective training should be role-based, giving each team the knowledge they need.
Establish an Accessibility Policy and Standard
A formal accessibility policy signals that accessibility is a shared vision and an expectation of your organization rather than a grassroots effort. Creating an accessibility policy when one doesn’t exist is a team effort. Depending on the organizational process, it may take some time to identify people in leadership positions who would sponsor and guide efforts.
Along with a policy, define a technical standard to align digital accessibility efforts towards a common goal and measure progress across the organization. Adopting the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) Version 2.2 Level AA helps synchronize your efforts with national and international best practices.
Once a policy and standard are in place, communicate them widely and provide resources to help with successful implementation.
Integrate Accessibility into Digital Workflows
Beyond fixing existing content, you must also embed accessibility into the development of new digital resources as well. This includes:
- Considering accessibility in design from the start.
- Integrating accessibility into development and QA processes.
- Involving people with disabilities in user research and usability testing.
Create and Monitor Communication Channels
Provide a way for people to report accessibility barriers with your digital resources, such as a dedicated email address. Identify someone who can manage reports of accessibility barriers in your digital products.
This role has two key responsibilities:
- To communicate to users affected by digital accessibility barriers and
- To ensure that people responsible for the reported barriers know of them and can take steps to address them.
Manage Accessibility Risk in Third-Party Products and Services
If your organization relies on third-party solutions for your digital assets, you are responsible for managing the accessibility risk associated with these solutions. Identify ways to ensure that accessibility influences decisions to use or procure third-party technologies and services.
Be proactive by:
- Communicating accessibility expectations to vendors.
- Evaluating potential barriers in candidate products.
- Creating a mitigation plan for solutions with accessibility issues.
3. Invest in the Right Accessibility Testing Tools
Accessibility tools can make or break your digital accessibility program. These technologies can make testing easier, faster, and more accurate. For example, TPGi offers solutions to support your accessibility efforts, including:
- ARC Toolkit — A browser extension that scans web pages for accessibility issues and highlights areas needing manual review.
- Colour Contrast Analyser — A tool that checks color contrast ratios to ensure readability for users with low vision.
- JAWS Inspect — A tool that simulates how the JAWS screen reader interprets content, helping teams identify usability issues for screen reader users.
More advanced tools, such as TPGi’s ARC Platform, can really power up an accessibility program. This powerful solution can regularly scan digital assets for accessibility and then generate data that allows you to inspect performance over time and identify where action is most needed. The ARC Platform also provides a vast KnowledgeBase that can help in all aspects of implementing the digital accessibility program.
Ready to Launch Your Digital Accessibility Program?
Making your digital resources more accessible helps improve the user experience for everyone but requires deliberate attention and shared commitment.
Establishing a system to automate and integrate accessibility testing into your organization helps make the process sustainable, supports building organizational capacity to meet accessibility goals, allowing you to measure progress over time and take action to address areas of concern. That is the actual value of a digital accessibility program.
Unlock your path to digital accessibility with TPGi as a Service (TaaS). Our expert team provides advanced technology, tailored guidance, and strategic planning to conform with and go beyond accessibility standards to create usable and inclusive digital experiences. Contact us to speak with an expert and start your journey!
The post Guide to Creating a Successful Digital Accessibility Program — Part 2: Getting Started appeared first on TPGi.
This content originally appeared on TPGi and was authored by TPGi
TPGi | Sciencx (2025-03-19T10:00:45+00:00) Guide to Creating a Successful Digital Accessibility Program — Part 2: Getting Started. Retrieved from https://www.scien.cx/2025/03/19/guide-to-creating-a-successful-digital-accessibility-program-part-2-getting-started/
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