Many agencies want to improve their accessibility practices but struggle to determine their next steps. I’ve developed the Agency Accessibility Guidebook to help organizations move beyond random accessibility efforts and implement a structured approach to improvement.
Key aspects of the guidebook include:
- The framework evaluates five key areas of your agency including employee buy-in, sales processes, content delivery, audit procedures, and digital communications.
- Each area receives a rating from Stage 1 (absent) to Stage 5 (integrated), helping you identify your current position and plan improvements.
- The guidebook provides a systematic approach to progress through stages, recommending that agencies aim to reach Stage 3 across all areas before advancing further.
- You’ll find resources for manual testing, accessibility training, and automated monitoring to support your journey.
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Transcript
Is your agency stuck in the situation of wanting to do more with accessibility but not having any idea what to do next? If so, this is the video for you.
I’m Gen Herres from the Easy A11y Guide. I regularly got the question, what should I do next? How do I move my agency forward? How do I deliver this stuff? Oftentimes, agencies don’t even know where they are currently at for accessibility, let alone what step to take next. I’ve been there.
When I got started with accessibility, there were so many options of what I could look at. Now, there’s even more options available, but so many different things to look at. What do you focus on next? Maybe you’re joining me after watching my Recipes for Accessibility Talk, or maybe you’ve been following Accessibility for several years and want to get serious about it now.
This is the guidebook for you. It’s the Agency Accessibility Guidebook, and it is how you get your agency unstuck. Whether you are a small agency of just one person wearing a lot of different hats, or you’re a larger agency with many different employees and/or contractors. It doesn’t really matter what size agency you are.
Your first step needs to be to determine where your agency is at and then to determine how to move forward. The goal is to stop the random acts of accessibility that so many people are undertaking and have a straightforward plan to move forward.
To do this, we’re going to look at five key areas of your agency. Employee buy-in and internal agency setup, sales, legal and contracts, content and delivery of websites, audits, remediations, evaluation and monitoring, and finally, email and social media.
For each of these key areas, we want to determine where you are at or what stage you are at of your accessibility journey. You could be at stage one, absent, which basically means you’re not doing much of anything, or at least nothing organized. Or it could be at stage five, integrated and committed. Likely, if you’re watching this video, you’re probably not at stage. That means that accessibility is a core value of your agency, and it is deeply integrated into your processes.
To get started, we need to find your baseline. The first thing we do in the guidebook is we go through each of the different areas, you read the prompts, and you determine which one best fits you at this moment.
For many agencies, that’s going to be either stage one or stage two. You go through all five key areas and you mark which stage you are currently at. There are no wrong answers here. It’s just finding where you’re at.
Once you’ve determined where you’re at, you’re going to go through the list in order, starting with employees, Then sales, then content, then audits, then email. Go through that list in order. Your goal is to move each of those to stage three, what you want to do to move between stages.
Let’s say we’re looking at our employee or contractor buy-in, and we want to move that to stage three. At stage three, your employees know about laws and different levels of accessibility, and they understand how those levels are tied into project goals.
To move to stage three, you need to accomplish this. You need to get the training for your employees about the laws that’s going to involve a bit of education for them. You need to learn the different levels of accessibility, and each employee needs to understand how that ties to their job and also how that ties to the end project goals.
Once you’ve gotten your first area to stage three, you’re going to align the rest of your agency at stage three. Then you’re going to move on to stage four. Again, starting at the top and moving our employee buy-in and internal agency set up to stage four. Then moving through and getting each of our other key areas to stage 4.
Once we’ve done that, we want to step back and determine which of our areas we want to keep at stage 4 and which we want to move to stage 5. Typically, I recommend that you move your employee buy-in and your sales and legal stuff to stage 5.
The others, you can keep at stage 4 if that is better for your agency. That means that you will continue to outsource some of the work to others, and that’s perfectly okay. Plenty of agencies outsource bits and pieces of their work because that is the most practical thing to do.
And since everyone always asks me, Okay, while I’m improving my agency, who do I call? Obviously, if I’m only at stage one for something, I can’t fulfill a finished accessible product. So who do I call?
I’ve included in the guidebook, places where you can get help for manual testing, courses on accessibility, and automated monitoring. So now the ball is in your court. It’s time to go read the Agency Accessibility Guidebook and stop your random acts of accessibility.
Set aside 20 to 30 minutes in your schedule. Go to your calendar right now and block it out.
Go through the guidebook and know what step is next. If you have an agency with many different employees, I highly recommend that you go ahead and distribute the guidebook internally to these people so that they can also understand what is going on and how you’re going to be moving forward. If you don’t have the guidebook already, the link is in the video description. So go ahead and grab it.