AccessiBe – Ways to Ensure Web Accessibility Upfront

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Accessibility is not a one-time achievement to make but a continuous journey. If you plan to consider accessibility and invest money and time into making your website accessible, you need to have a master plan. Along with making your website compliant, it is important to devise your maintenance master plan upfront to align your work practice around the concept of accessibility and device the policies, resources, tools, training, and experts. Here, we will discuss some tips to master plan your accessibility compliance upfront and execute it the right way.

Accessibility master planning – AccessiBe

Here are some tips from AccessiBe experts to plan your continuous accessibility compliance.

Accessibility statement – You need not have to wait until your website is fully perfect in terms of accessibility to tell others about it. A good accessibility statement can convey your commitment toward accessibility. The statement should reflect the accessibility goals of the organization, hurdles, and long-term plans to assure accessibility assistance.
Automate accessibility testing – Manual testing is always better, but a major challenge in that mode in terms of accessibility is the scale. In dynamic and complex websites in which the code and content may change rapidly, auditing manually at each release cycle may be challenging. Automation is the key to expediting accessibility testing in continuous development and continuous deployment environments.
Perform screen reader and assistive devices compliance verification – You may already be testing your site changes for responsiveness and other WCAG elements. Similarly, it is also essential to ensure compliance with assistive devices such as screen readers, magnifiers, and other assistive technologies which people with disabilities use.
Train your entire team on accessibility – As we discussed, accessibility is a continuous as well as a team effort. Everyone from the designers, developers, testers, and decision-makers should be knowledgeable about the technical and legal aspects of accessibility to keep the project on track.
Conduct timely audits/user testing – Once you achieve accessibility, make sure that you run an audit from time to time to ensure continued compliance. This can be performed with accessibility experts or user testing by expert users from the disability community. An audit summary to be made by the stakeholders will put light on the website’s current state in terms of accessibility and the suggestions to ensure compliance.
Be diligent about the third-party integrations – With the above steps, you can ensure accessibility compliance of your website, but one should be diligent about the challenge of integrating the third-party services. For this, you need to first explore all the third-party integrations on your website, like chats and payments, etc. Check their policies to identify what level of compliance they assure. If they are not competent, you have to ask them to ensure compliance or think of replacements.

So, accessibility is an ongoing journey that you need to plan and execute well. AccessiBe offers complete web accessibility solutions starting from compliance audits to ADA compliance assurance to all types of clients.