Purpose: Ensure all digital content and technology meet Section 508 standards, making them accessible to individuals with disabilities and compliant with federal regulations.
Steps to take:
- Resource Alignment: Gather the individuals already involved in compliance related activities. Determine and outline any types of resources needed for conducting audits, training, and testing. Develop proposals to help allocate project funding and request additional investments to better support individuals already doing the work.
- Establish Systematic Documentation Process: Develop a documentation procedure for technical and programmatic layers. Maintain records of compliance efforts and improvements.
- Policy Communication and Reinforcement: Publicize and reinforce existing policies. Communicate that it is each employee’s responsibility to understand policies and to follow them. Hold management accountable for non-compliance.
- Establish guidelines: Create accessibility standards that are catered to most widely used systems and platforms and best practices for content creators and developers.
- Identify your priority assets: Focus on high-traffic and critical systems first.
- Conduct accessibility audit: Evaluate current websites, applications, and documents to identify compliance gaps using open source tools. Utilize automation to highlight areas that need deeper consideration.
- Train staff: Provide accessibility training for designers, developers, and content teams
- Implement testing: Integrate automated and manual accessibility testing into development workflows
- Remediate issues: Fix identified accessibility barriers in existing content and systems.
- Monitor compliance: Set up ongoing testing and reporting processes, utilizing automated testing and providing a quick view of compliance health.
Budget & Resource Constraints:
- Limited budget: Prioritize free, low-cost tools (Accessibility Insights for Web, WAVE, axe DevTools) and focus on high-impact fixes first.
- Staff capacity and knowledge sharing: Leverage existing team members with phased training rather than hiring specialists immediately. Develop a train the trainer program for technical leads and group supervisors to support their teams.
- Timeline: Implement in phases over 6-12 months to spread costs and workload
- Vendor support: Negotiate accessibility requirements into existing vendor contracts to minimize additional costs