The Business Accessibility Action Plan

Results Of Accessibility Best Practices

• boost business by increasing your share of the market.
• enhance your brand reputation.
• drive innovation.
• prevent possible litigation.
• set you apart as a leader in your industry.

Strategic Planning

At the organizational level, building an inclusive culture means establishing leadership, developing internal accessibility policies and practices throughout the organization, and equipping your teams for success. To build a culture of accessibility, you need leadership in all the key divisions and departments of your organization. Your accessibility leaders do not have to be accessibility experts, but they do have to be aware of the work involved and what they are accountable for. An accessibility strategy driven by fear of lawsuits or compliance reviews may deliver short term results. But accessibility is about people (disabled people who you want to participate in your organization as employees and customers, and the entire organization full of people who you want to encourage to contribute to) and benefit from an inclusive environment. Accessibility is more than just training, as it also needs to be a necessary business decision. While it is fine to start with some training and invite key business stakeholders to attend, once those stakeholders have enough of a sense of what accessibility is all about, it is time to talk about how accessibility can be incorporated into business processes.

• Appoint senior leaders as Accessibility and Diversity champions to Demonstrate leadership and authority. Most people have no issue with the concept of supporting disabled staff and customers. However many have issues making changes to organisational processes and standards without being clear about what the organisation itself wants.
• Sustainable growth requires a strategy of investment and commitment of resources, both time and money.
• Create a clear public statement that expresses the organization commitment to accessibility and community partnerships. Influence from the highest level directly conveys the message to all, and gives staff the impetus to proactively find out more and take action.
• Establish a methodology to evaluate genuine progress and measurements.
• Start by defining the purpose of the product and its target audiences.
• Research the ways different people use web technologies and summarise them in personas.
• Work out the things people will use the product for, and separate them into core and non-core goals, so you can prioritise the work.
• Decide what level of accessibility conformance (WCAG A, AA, or AAA) is desirable.
• Ensure the technology tools chosen (for both employees and customers) will deliver to the desired level of accessibility.
• Use a defined product accessibility policy as a brief for internal teams, or when contracting external suppliers, so it is known what is expected.
• Help designers and developers use the best accessibility guidelines to create the product, and use a range of tests during the creation to check that it is usable by its target audiences.
• Let users know of any product deficiencies via the web site accessibility statement and provide some way for user feedback.

Key Business Goals

The first step is in understanding your organization business values and go to market goals. The accessibility culture must be baked into the organization fabric.

• Reach new markets
• Maximise employee engagement and productivity
• Provision high quality products and services
• Improve supply chain management
• Build partner and community relations
• Minimise risk of legal action

Success Factors

A business case is a necessary tool for organizations when planning for success. Product design requires justification for dedicating financial and human resources. When accessibility is part of strategic planning, businesses are better equipped for success in our connected world of commerce and civic engagement. However, it is difficult to understand things that you haven’t measured. So, to measure your level of business success, you need to evaluate your business goals, your business values and your business targets.

Web accessibility is a public relations opportunity to increase your organization’s positive image, which can increase website use. When you make your content accessible to people with disabilities, you also Improved usability for all people, and you will improve the organization public image. Search Engine Optimization also benefits, as 21 of the 50 Mobile Web Best Practices overlap with the WCAG accessibility guidelines. That is, search engines cannot see the content in your images, cannot hear your audio and video content, cannot access information presented in some technologies, etc.
Build A Solid Foundation for SEO With Web Accessibility Requirements (new window)

Social Factors

• Essential for diversity and Equal Opportunity
• Essential to close the Digital divide
• Essential to demonstrate corporate social responsibility (CSR)

Financial Factors

• Increases potential use by more people, and expands potential market share
• Increases findability with search engine optimization (SEO)
• Increases potential use in more situations
• Increases usability
• Increases positive image
• Decreases potential for high legal expenses
• Decreases cost of alternative format materials
• Decreases cost of translating
• Decreases personnel costs

Technical Factors

• Reduce Site Development and Maintenance Time
• Reduce Bandwidth Use and Server Load
• Enable Content on Different Configurations
• Better Prepared for Advanced Web Technologies
• Have High Quality Websites

Legal and Policy Factors

• Risk of significant legal costs
• Risk of negative impact on the organization’s reputation
• Risk of lost consumers, and market sectors

The Inclusion Baseline

• Define the standards and conformance guidelines for digital communications.
  W3C: WCAG-AA standard is the globally accepted best practice (new window)
  UsableNet: 5 Steps to Creating an Accessibility Clause For Vendor Contracts (new window)
• Define Accessibility law requirements for which digital communications must comply. This is generally governed by legislation through various level of government; Such as
  The Ontario AODA standards (new window)
  The U.S. Section508 standards (new window)
• Define evaluation tasks. This can be performed by automated evaluation tools for functional testing, and end-user focus groups for usability testing.
• Define a baseline of web technologies. The goal is to make digital communications accessible to as many people as possible, but by defining a baseline of user agents (browsers, screen readers, media players, Etc), and system platforms (Windows, iOS, Android, mobile devices, Etc), will identify the scope of expectations.
• Define testing methodology. The evaluation results will depend upon the tools used, level of expertese, and user involvement.
• Define test procedures. Testing digital communications across hardware devices, software applications, levels of user experience, and developer expertese, will require standard Persona scripts, assessing specific web pages, and assessing specific dynamic functions.
• Define the report style. Generating an accessibility evaluation report can be challenging and difficult for others to understand. Depending upon the report audience, consider documents and videos that comply with accessibility standards, with remediation recommendations.
  Programmer-focused website accessibility evaluations: Proceedings of the 7th international ACM SIGACCESS conference on Computers and accessibility (new window)
• Define the delivery process. To meet expectations the accessibility evaluation results must be delivered in a format and in a way it can be understood and acted upon. Consider Executive summaries, management implementation overviews, and developer coding techniques.
  W3C: Template for Accessibility Evaluation Reports (new window)

The Employee Accessibility Strategies

Many disabled employees face deeply frustrating challenges in the day-to-day working lives. Showing these to senior managers is often a powerful way of bringing home both how easy it is to inadvertently present barriers to customers and staff, and how these barriers can have a very substantial negative effect.

Actions To Consider

• Create easy and effective employee feedback mechanisms to continuously improve processes.
• Periodic surveys of entire workforce.
• Dedicated surveys of disability network.
• Ask employees with disabilities to assist you in the development and testing of products and services.
• Reasonable adjustments and accommodations workplace assessment process.
• Recruitment, training, and career development processes.
• Disability network focus groups. Include disabled employees in a Business Resource Group (BRG) to help guide business go to market strategies.
• Disability Confidence Training. Allow the disabled employees Diversity Group to share experiences through webinars, videos, and lunch and learn sessions.
• NSITE: A Vision for Talent – Your Talent Management Solution (new window)
• CCRW: Canadian Council on Rehabilitation and Work (new window)

The Customer Accessibility Strategies

The power of listening and acting on customer feedback in order to improve the customers’ experience, including those who are disabled or older. By listening, learning and acting, organisations can effectively understand the needs of their customers and create an open dialogue that will help to ensure that customers’ needs and feedback are acted upon. The outcome is that organisations become better at designing and delivering inclusive and accessible products, services and distribution channels. Disabled and/or elderly customers feel valued, welcomed, anticipated and accommodated when using your accessible products and services.

Which of the following customer advertising would you prefer for your business?
When it comes to accessibility, Apple continues to lead in awareness and innovation (new window) or Supreme Court hands victory to blind man who sued Domino’s over site accessibility (new window)

Actions To Consider

• Customer surveys.
• Online customer suggestion box and feedback form
• Public commitment / external statement of intent.
• User testing of products and services.
• Complaints investigations & root cause analysis.
• On-going engagement with key external charity partners.
• Social media channels.
• Incorporate demographics about people with disabilities into your sales and marketing databases.
• Hire persons with disabilities to better inform your accessibility efforts and attract this customer base.
• Inform your sales and marketing staff that most persons with disabilities do not conform to stereotypes, but rather possess buying power plus a desire to grow and learn as consumers and citizens.
• Identify where technological and service innovations will enhance access by customers with disabilities and in doing so look for ways to adapt those innovations for the convenience of all customers.
• Council of Ontario Universities (COU): Understanding the AODA and the Accessibility Standards for Customer Service (new window)

The Diversity Maturity Model

In 2008 the Business Disability Forum (new window) launched The Technology Taskforce, a Partner initiative which brings together some of the world’s largest procurers and suppliers of Information Communication Technologies (ICT). The Technology Taskforce enables accessibility technologies to maximizes talent management, productivity, new product development, customer access and brand reputation. A self-assessment Accessibility Maturity Model (AMM) tool will enable your organization to identify and plan key policies for accessible and usable technologies.

The Smart City Digital Inclusion Maturity Model

The Smart City Digital Inclusion Maturity Model (new window) is a tool to help cities worldwide assess and benchmark their level of digital inclusion and Information Communications Technology (ICT) accessibility. The Maturity Model helps clearly evaluate progress towards achieving ICT accessibility and digital inclusion across a broad range of functions that are important to all cities, like procurement, training, and standards, etc. It defines key performance indicators and metrics to support advancing accessibility and digital inclusion. It lays out 5 distinct levels of maturity for digital inclusion and accessibility progress across multiple dimensions that are important to all Smart Cities, i.e. technology, data, culture, strategy, and governance. The Smart City Digital Inclusion Maturity Model supports the development of roadmaps and strategies to grow and mature a city’s commitment to and capabilities on digital inclusion.

The Open Organization Maturity Model

The Open Organization Maturity Model (new window) is a framework for helping your organization to become more transparent, inclusive, adaptable, collaborative, and communal. Openness is becoming increasingly central to the ways groups and teams of all sizes are working together to achieve shared goals. Today, the most forward-thinking organizations are embracing openness as a necessary orientation toward success.