People often look at web accessibility as best implemented from the ground up. But the reality of product development rarely affords you such luxury. Building a new product from scratch is pretty rare. More often than not, you're usually adding features and making changes to existing products.
This poses a unique challenge, because you rarely, if ever, get the opportunity to integrate accessibility properly from the get-go. So how can we integrate accessibility into existing products when we don't have the luxury of a fresh start?
Here are 5 strategies I use.
- Education and training. I start here because I want to know what the team knows, and doesn't know, about accessibility and best practices.
- Refactoring opportunities. I look for already planned code refactoring and push for bundling in accessibility fixes and improvements while we're at it.
- Performance optimisations. Performance is often touted as a must-have and it's much easier to justify that than accessibility improvements (at least to start with). So why not highlight how accessibility improvements often lead to better overall performance.
- User testing. Whenever I see user testing sessions planned, I ask if we can add just one more user to the mix. The justification is simple. When we involve users with disabilities in testing, we validate improvements and identify any remaining issues.
- Prioritisation. I like to focus on high-impact, low-effort changes first to build momentum. As that gets going, I can more easily justify allocating budgets specifically for web accessibility.
I should mention how critical it is throughout that we create and maintain accessibility guidelines for the product. We constantly write and adapt documentation so that we spread accessibility knowledge across the team, help new team members with on-boarding and have a record of the rationale behind accessibility decisions.
This also makes it easier to demonstrate commitment to accessibility to stakeholders, clients and management.
Not having a plan and not having shifted all the way left is okay. It's expected in most cases. The product is not accessible. Okay.
When you have a mountain of technical debt and inaccessible code, the best you can do is clean up and leave things better than you found them. Don't shy away from doing the small things. Small things lead to bigger things. You have to trust that clarity will emerge and that eventually you'll see positive feedback from users with disabilities.
You just can't expect to start there.