How to develop an accessibility program for your web agency, including driving revenue, reducing legal risk, increasing conversions, and engagement.
- Six levels of accessibility maturity in organizations, from “Absent” to “Accessibility-driven,” and provides advice on advancing through them.
- Overlay providers are to be avoided, they can cause errors and are often ineffective in fixing accessibility issues.
- The importance of outsourcing accessibility work to experienced partners and gradually shifting to in-house work.
- Revenue generation opportunities from accessibility are discussed, including referral commissions and selling audits to clients.
Slides are available on Google Slides.
Transcript
Hi, and welcome back to the Easy A11y Guide channel. I’m Gen Herres, and in this video, I’ll be talking to you about accessibility program development at your agency, or in short, how to develop an accessibility program for your agency, regardless of where you’re at right now.
How an accessibility program can help your agency. The first one is to reduce the legal risk, to protect your clients, to increase conversions on your client’s websites, and to increase engagement across websites, social media, and email marketing. Because the more people who are able to use and understand your content, the more engaged they can be.
We’re going to talk about what you can do in-house versus what you can outsource and how you can slowly shift outsourced to in-house. We’ll talk about revenue generation for your agency from accessibility. There are lots of opportunities opportunities that you can use to generate revenue for your agency, including right out of the gate.
Then we’ll talk about how to advance your agency from one level of accessibility program to the next. The most common question I get is, how long does it take? To get a program started today, you can get started today.
But to get a fully complete and mature program does take years to implement. Just like fully mature SEO program programs do or advertising programs. It just doesn’t happen overnight. You’re going to start by outsourcing a lot of your accessibility work to a partner. You’ll want to have a partner who’s experienced and knowledgeable.
The Easy A11y Guide has an agency program to help agencies get started, to get recurring revenue from affiliate programs, and to get recurring revenue by outsourcing the work to the Easy A11y Guide to get it fulfilled. There was a great presentation by Nick Croft at the WordPress Accessibility Meetup on the six different levels of accessibility maturity within organizations. We’re going to apply those same six levels here.
Stages of accessibility program development
The first one is absent. That means that accessibility just isn’t part of your agency yet. That’s where basically everyone starts. Then we progress through different phases: limited, emergent, structured, integrated, and finally, accessibility-driven.
Now, not every agency is going to go through all six levels. Some may decide that, You know what? Level 4 or level 5 is sufficient and will continue to keep the rest of it outsourced, whereas other agencies will decide to do all six levels themselves over the years as they develop and increase their abilities in-house.
Stage 1: Absent
The first stage is absent. This means that your organization doesn’t consider accessibility when it does, well, anything. At this phase, you might also be using an overlay provider and not realizing that that’s not helping you at all.
Many of the overlay providers sell to people who just don’t have knowledge. They say, with a line of JavaScript, we’re going to magically fix all your issues. The thing is, most agencies will just trust that, and they never actually check to see if the overlay made anything better. They never run an audit on any of the sites. They just set it and forget it.
Unfortunately, this means that the overlays can actually be causing errors. In fact, in many lawsuits, the overlays have been cited as the causes of problems. In a number of sites that I’ve tested for agencies who are using an overlay, they’ve seen right there on the test that the overlay is actually causing a number of problems. But since they never actually checked. They never knew that this was happening.
At this stage, your internal agency accessibility is at zero. You’re not doing it with any work on new or existing customers, and you don’t have anything within your agency for it.
At this stage, the way to grow revenue for your agency is when you identify a project that is going to need accessibility, you refer it out and get a commission from your accessibility partner, such as the Easy A11y Guide.
How to advance to the next stage. You’ll start by referring accessibility work out, and you’ll start by training your staff and educating yourselves about what accessibility is. That it is an ongoing process, and that it needs to be part of not just your web interactions, but also social media and email marketing campaigns.
You’ll be talking to new clients when they come in about accessibility and finding out if it’s a need or a requirement for the company. Such as those who fall under the Americans with Disabilities Act, Title 2. You’ll also be learning the differences between what automation can do for you with accessibility and what parts manual testing are essential for. You’ll be getting help and training from your accessibility partner.
Stage 2: Limited and growing
Stage two, you’re at limited accessibility, but you’re growing. You are now starting to consider accessibility, and you’re starting to talk to incoming clients about it, but you still aren’t sure what to do most of the time.
This is a great place to be as you have an excellent opportunity for learning. Here, you’re going to be outsourcing most of the parts, but you will start driving revenue for your agency by outsourcing this content. You’re going to start having checklists and processes for your team when they create new content or add content to existing websites.
That way you will start to create good content going forward that is accessible. At this stage, you’re going start talking to your customers during discovery, branding, and design, and starting to get accessibility incorporated into those. You’re going to have your agency partner help you with those steps.
You’ll also be training your staff. You’ll be working on your internal procedures to update them to include accessibility. You’re going to focus on when you generate new content for websites, social media, and email, and try to make sure that you’re putting accessibility into those.
How you’re going to drive revenue within your agency at this stage. You’ll be getting referral commissions for referred work that you’ve referred out to your accessibility partner. You will be including accessibility in your branding and design with your partner to verify that you’re getting it right.
You’ll start selling audits to your clients. How you’re going to advance from stage two to the next stage. You’re going to refer out a bit of the testing, remediation, building, and monitoring work. But you can start selling this to your clients and start driving the revenue within your organization, which also helps to motivate you to include more accessibility going forward.
You’ll start to add accessibility statements to your websites, and you’ll start to learn the basics of performing manual testing. You’ll also start to educate your existing clients, and you’ll start to identify which clients fall under specific laws, which clients you’re spending advertising on, and which clients have e-commerce stores, especially those generating more than one million in revenue per year.
The reality is a lot of these lawyers who are targeting websites for lawsuits can look up how much you’re spending on ads. There’s a lot of different tools, and you probably regularly use them to profile new clients. Well, law offices also have access to those same tools and can use them to profile people for targeting and lawsuit.
You’ll start to create accessible color palettes for your clients so that you have those ready to go on new content for the website, email marketing, and social media.
You’ll be making sure that you include alt text on your images, and you’ll be learning about keyboard testing. You’ll also be getting help and training from your accessibility partner, and you’ll be building out your checklist, and you’ll be enforcing that no content is going to go out to the public unless it has gone through the checklist and been verified. You’ll be performing quick audits on your key clients, especially those that you identified as ADA Title 2, e-commerce, and those with marketing ad spend.
Stage 3: Emergent and growing
Stage three is emergent. At this point, you’re going to be considering accessibility in your workflows. You’re going to have it in some of your processes. You will have some parts that are being handled internally, and you’ll start to bring more parts internal. And you’ll have some stuff that is still outsourced. You’ll have solid checklists and processes for your team on adding new content.
What are you doing internally at your agency for stage three? When you’re talking about your customers, you’re going to be bringing it up during discovery, branding, design, and development. You’ll also start bringing it up for new clients who may need remediation. And you’ll start talking to your existing clients who need remediation.
Within your agency, you’re going to have it incorporated a little bit into everything. Your staff is going to be learning. You’re going to be evaluating your tools and making sure that they are producing accessible outputs for you.
You’ll be going into your procedures and making sure that the accessibility that you’ve put in is actually working, and you’ll be updating those procedures and evolving them as you go forward. You’ll be making sure that it’s included in new content on websites, social media, and email.
Revenue for your agency in stage three. You’re going to be selling accessibility in your branding, design, and development, and your partner is going to be verifying that you’re actually achieving that accessibility as you go. You’ll be continuing to sell audits to your clients, and you’ll be selling remediation and monitoring packages with most of the fulfillment by your partner.
How to advance from stage three. You’re going to refine and follow your checklist and enforce that no content is getting published without going through the verification checklist. You’ll be adding accessibility into all of your agency processes. It goes everywhere. You’re no longer going to be bringing in new clients to your agency without some accessibility consideration.
You’re going to be talking to all new clients about it, and at least the minimum is going to be put into everyone’s package. You’ll be offering remediation and ongoing monitoring packages to clients with your agency partner handling some or all of the fulfillment.
Typically, what will happen is you start by having your agency partner do all of the fulfillment, and then you bring some of it in-house and still have them verify certain parts. Of course, you’ll have your accessibility partner checking work for you at key stages in development.
Stage 4: Structured and committed
Stage four is when you’re structured and committed to keeping accessibility as part of all of your processes. You now have staff who are informed about it and you’re including it everywhere. You’ve brought more parts to be internal to your agency, but you’re still outsourcing some of it when needed. You have remediation and monitoring packages as part of your standard offerings.
How you are driving revenue at stage four. You’re selling accessibility with all of your new work, at least a certain baseline. You may not be selling the same level of accessibility to everyone, and you can use different price points to anchor high and then sell a lower priced package to more price averse clients.
You’re selling regular audits to your clients, and you’re selling remediation and monitoring packages on a regular basis with your agency accessibility, doing a decent amount of the fulfillment. You’re now starting to have half or even more than half of the accessibility work all done in-house.
You’re making sure that you have accessibility with the discovery, branding, design, design, development, QA, monitoring, and remediation packages. You’re making sure that your staff, your tools, your procedures, and all new content that you’re generating is including accessibility.
How you advance from stage four. You make sure that you’re offering your remediation and ongoing monitoring packages with in-house testing and manual testing by external testers. You may even start to bring some of those testers to in-house or hire your own.
You’re not taking on new clients who don’t care about accessibility. You’re educating new clients and making sure that they are signing off and getting on board with accessibility on their websites. You just don’t want to deal with people who are intentionally excluding a whole portion of the demographic.
You’re very confident in your accessibility selling, and you’re making sure to include it with all your projects, and your team is knowledgeable and may even start to have received some certifications.
Stage 5: Integrated and committed
Stage five, integrated accessibility and committed to increasing it. Now, some agencies stop at stage four and choose to keep a bit of their accessibility outsourced. That’s okay.
But plenty of agencies move on to stage five and may even move all the way on to stage six. It just depends on what your priorities for your agency are and how much you want to keep outsourced versus how much you want to do in-house. It also can come down to budget and costs. Sometimes it is just easier to not have those people as actual full-time staff.
In stage five, you have accessibility as part of your systems. Your staff is just doing it by habit. It is just ingrained into them as part of what they do every day. You are confident that your system is producing accessible outputs, and you have most of it internal, including internal verification.
And occasionally, you have some outsourced verification on your internal monitoring, just to check in and make sure everything is going as expected. Your internal agency accessibility is pretty high at stage five. You are incorporating it into all of your processes, into all of the phases of your project, and you are fulfilling a lot of that in-house with just a little bit of external verification.
You now have a well-trained staff, and you’re making sure that all new staff go through a full accessibility onboarding to ensure that they start producing accessible outputs. You’ve verified that your tools work, you regularly test your tools, and you really trust that they are producing the results that you need. You’ve nailed down your processes and procedures, and you’re making sure that all of the new content that you’re creating, regardless of the platform, web, social media, or email, is being produced accessibly.
You’re driving revenue for your agency in stage five. You’re selling accessibility in all of your new work. The actual costs of accessibility when they’re being done, have decreased significantly.
This is a lot like SEO. The first time you did SEO, it was probably very costly. You had to do a ton of research, a ton of learning, a ton of tool discovery. It was just very expensive. But as you did more and more SEO, over time, it became significantly less expensive. You learned a lot more, you had much more refined processes, you had weeded out any poor tools and replaced them with better tools. And quite frankly, it now doesn’t cost nearly as much as it used to to fulfill SEO.
The same is true of accessibility. Over time, it will start to cost less. It costs the most the first couple of projects, and then pretty quickly starts to cost less as everything gets ironed out. When you work with a partner to help you with your accessibility, that curve can go pretty steeply downwards so that accessibility is not costing an arm and a leg.
You’re selling accessibility audits with all of your onboarding of new clients because you want to make sure that all of your clients have at least a decent level of accessibility. You’re selling remediation and monitoring delivering packages to your clients, and your agency will be doing most of the fulfillment.
To advance on to the next stage, you’ll make sure that all of your new staff is onboarded with accessibility and, quite possibly, tested on accessibility before they start producing new work.
Your staff will be regularly participating in accessibility discussions, and they will be lifetime learners. All experts out there who are real experts are lifetime learners. You’ll be completing most of the accessibility via internal processes. You’ll have a lot of knowledge on your staff about assistive technology and how it’s used.
You’ll start to really understand how people with disabilities interact and use different types of technology and what different development or design decisions impact those people. You will have regular testers as part of your processes who have disabilities. And you’ll be very knowledgeable on designing, building, testing, monitoring, and remediating accessibility problems across websites.
Stage 6: A11y Driven
The final stage is accessibility-driven. Every part of your processes and procedures starts with accessibility. Everything is designed with accessibility at the beginning and verified regularly. And your staff is well-trained and everything receives testing before sign-off.
Not every organization will get to this point, and that’s okay. It’s okay to forever outsource certain parts of it. Many organizations continuously outsource certain parts of research or certain parts of copywriting. It’s okay to outsource things, but you do need to have a bit of understanding to understand that those outsourced pieces are being fulfilled properly.
In stage six, you will have everything fulfilled within your agency. Everything for your customer work and everything within your agency will be accessibility first and accessibility driven.
Recap
To recap, we’ve discussed the different levels of accessibility, what is included at your agency, what you can do what you can in-house and what you can outsource.
We’ve discussed how to generate revenue from accessibility for your agency during each of the different stages. We’ve discussed how to advance your agency from one stage to the next.
Accessibility doesn’t need to be scary for your agency. It, in fact, is a great source of revenue, and it’s a great way to increase conversions and legal protection for your customers.
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.