Delivering accessibility in your website project is important. The method you choose can affect how much time and money is spent on providing or improving the accessibility of a website.
- There are three ways to deliver accessibility: outsource it, handle it in-house, or use a hybrid model.
- It takes hundreds to thousands of hours to become proficient in web accessibility, so it’s common to use the hybrid model or outsource to accessibility professionals.
- Checking accessibility early in the process can minimize the total cost and avoid mistakes that are expensive to fix later.
- Review the first few pages for mistakes and test midway through development to ensure no mistakes are replicated throughout the website.
- Bringing in an accessibility consultant early in the process can save time and money by avoiding rework.
Transcript
Welcome back to the Easy A11y Guide channel. I’m Gen Herres, and in this video, I’ll be talking to you about how to deliver accessibility when you work with clients. In the previous videos, I talked about selling accessibility to your maintenance clients and with your new builds and how much to promise. If you missed those, I’ll have them linked in the video description below.
Three ways to deliver accessibility
Now that you’ve sold the accessibility, you need to deliver it. There are three ways to deliver accessibility. Outsource it, handle it in-house, and do a hybrid model. The hybrid approach is the most commonly used one by most web agencies. It takes hundreds to thousands of hours to become proficient in web accessibility. So don’t expect that someone in-house can just pick it up quickly.
Here’s an example. The edX course, Introduction to Web Accessibility takes about 30 hours for someone new to the topic to get through it. Then there’s the Section 508 Training, which covers WCAG 2.0. That takes about 100 hours for someone new to accessibility testing to get through. But you’ve still only covered WCAG 2.0. Haven’t gotten to 2.1 or 2.2. To cover those, you’ll need another 100 plus hours of training and learning time.
Outsource the build to accessibility professionals
Now, if you want to be able to do more than just testing, and you want to be able to actually solve the problems and know what needs to be done to fix them, then you’ll need even more time and training investment. All of this adds up to hundreds, if not thousands of hours of training that goes into most accessibility professionals. This is why it’s very common to use the hybrid model or to just fully outsource the build to accessibility professionals when you need to actually deliver the accessibility.
A consultant can provide a checklist and training for your staff when you’re building out additional pages and content. They can also evaluate the branding guidelines of your client and recommend changes to make things more accessible.
Check accessibility early in the process
You want to make sure that accessibility is checked early and often to minimize the total cost. In some cases, a mistake that wasn’t caught early ended up costing a hundred times more to fix at the very end. That is a mistake you don’t want to make. You definitely want to bring in an accessibility consultant early in the process.
Here’s an example. You want to check at the beginning when you’re picking out the initial colors and fonts for the website to make sure those are going to be accessible. Then, during the design phase, you want to make sure that a design review is done before the client ever sees it. You do not want the client getting attached to an inaccessible design.
Early in the development phase, when you are selecting your theme and plugins, you want to make sure that you are making good choices and configuring them with the correct settings. There are many plugins out there that can be set up accessibly. They can also be set up very inaccessibly. You want to make sure that you are getting all of those settings dialed in at the beginning so that you avoid rework.
Review the first few pages for mistakes
After the first few pages are built, you’ll want to have them reviewed and checked to make sure that you aren’t making any mistakes. Then you’ll want to make sure that it’s tested midway through development to again ensure you’re not replicating mistakes. Of course, at the end, you want to have the whole thing evaluated and your specific tests signed off on a tester.
I’ve had times where clients didn’t bring me in until the end when the site was already done. There ended up being a huge amount of rework because they had made some inaccessible choices early in the process and those had been duplicated out throughout the entire website. It was a huge amount of rework to do, almost to the point that we had to completely rebuild the entire website.
These are not mistakes that you want to make with your clients because this means a huge amount of money lost by your agency due to all of the rework. So make sure that you are bringing in accessibility early and checking it often so that you can save yourself a lot of time and money.
Thanks for watching. I’m Gen Herres from the Easy A11y Guide, where we try to make accessibility easier to implement through done-for-you services, tools, and processes. If you enjoyed this video, please give it a thumbs up. It really helps our channel.
You can subscribe to our channel for more accessibility tips and to be notified when new videos are released. For more information on web accessibility, including services, tutorials, and more, please visit easya11yguide.com. Thank you so much again for watching, and I look forward to seeing you in the next video.