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Robert Carr

Certified Web Accessibility Professional (CPWA) from the International Association of Accessibility Professionals (IAAP).
10+ years digital accessibility experience.
First full-time accessibility role was at the Canadian Broadcast Corporation (CBC).
Current role: Internal Accessibility Lead at Publicis Sapient.
Previously spoke at A11yTO and the Guelph accessibility conference.

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Publicis Sapient

Publicis Sapient is a digital consulting company that helps businesses succeed online by improving their digital tools and strategies, like websites and mobile apps, to better serve and connect with customers.
We have 20,000+ people in 53 offices around the world.

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Accessibility Center of Excellence (CoE)

The mandate of our CoE is to establish standards for accessible digital processes, experiences, and capabilities at Publicis Sapient and enable our people to create accessible digital experiences and work in accessible ways.
My role is the internal accessibility lead within our Accessibility Centre of Excellence.
A big part of this is helping internal teams build digital tools that are accessible to all our people while also guiding teams on how to accomplish this efficiently.
Today I'm going to tell you how we help drive and track the progress of the accessibility of our internal tools.

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Steps to internal accessibility

Get support from senior leadership.
Dedicate people to this initiative.
Determine organization’s maturity.

Create a prioritized inventory of internal tools.
Assess tools for accessibility.
Share feedback and trainings with teams.

Develop an accessible procurement process.
Create methods for people to report issues.
Continuously monitor and improve.

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Getting started

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Get leadership support

Without leadership support, this is going to be an impossible task.
If teams (people) aren’t told by their bosses that accessibility is a priority, it will be more difficult to convince them.
Leadership drives this effort and provides funding.

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Get dedicated people

Grassroots passion projects will have trouble scaling.
For a big company, this is a time-consuming project.
Everyone has a "day job" that they are already doing.
People will tend to focus on what they were originally tasked to do rather than the “new thing” you're pushing, without focus it is easy for this work to be pushed aside and forgotten.
It is easy to say accessibility is a priority, but if no one is dedicated to it, nothing will ever get done.

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How accessible is your company?

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Align to an organizational maturity model

Accessibility Maturity Model from W3C.

Tool to measure overall accessibility of an organization and discover where focus is needed.

Measured Dimensions:

Communications.
Knowledge and skills.
Support.
ICT Development life cycle.
Personnel.
Procurement.
Culture.

Stages

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How to align to an accessibility maturity model?

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Create a digital tool accessibility inventory

Figure out what your internal tools are (get a list), which consists of all the digital tools that people in your company use to do their jobs, could include the website, intranet, timecards etc.
List all the tools in a excel spreadsheet.
Gather contact information, priority, owners, status, names and descriptions.
Assess the accessibility maturity of the tool and the team that maintains it.

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Prioritize tools for remediation

Measure tools against criteria:

Usage footprint (how many people use this).
Frequency of use (Everyday or only on your first day).

Define associated risk.
Example: Timesheets are used every week by everyone, so it is a high priority, an application used once for a small meeting will be low priority.

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Create a methodology to quickly measure accessibility

Serve as evidence that you need to work on accessibility.
Benchmarking the accessibility of internal tools is a critical starting point.
Tracking accessibility scores over time is a way to measure progress and shows success.
Helps with prioritization and understanding where focused is needed.

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Our methodology - Accessibility Indicators Data (AID) scores

There is no industry standard way to quickly assess the accessibility of a digital experience accurately. We needed to develop our own way, which tests a subset of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines to arrive at an indicative accessibility score in less time.
Quick audit is more practical, full audits would take way to long when you have lots (50+) of tools.
Consists of 22 different tests (most common types of issues and presence of accessibility features).
Range from Focus needed (40 -60%), Easy to improve (60 -85%), and Optimal (85+).
Helps us get a sense of how accessible each of our tools are in a general sense.
Consistent, everyone within the CoE knows how to do it, which makes it easier to scale.

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Access the accessibility maturity of teams

Accessing the maturity involves assessing:

Knowledge (training /best practices)
Commitments to improving.
Life cycles (have a plan/know how to fix problems before the arise).
Awareness of guidelines and requirements.

Access 3^rd party tools:

People focused on accessibility.
Report issues.
VPAT (Voluntary Product Accessibility Template).
Accessibility Statements.

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Connecting and moving forward

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Connect with teams

Connect with someone at the top at first.
Later connect with the people who will be doing the work.
For the best results, make connections with someone from design, dev and QA.
Ensure you keep up with the people who want to help.
Especially important with a global team.

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Team connection process.

Every team will be different, some are willing to work with you, others will take extra effort.
General process, do a spot check on the tool, connect with the team to share findings, suggest trainings, ask for commitments, work with team to improve accessibility and processes.
As teams become more self-sufficient, move on to next team.

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Learning: Connecting with teams can be complicated

Connecting with the wrong people will waste your time.
Some teams will string you along.
Sometimes we need help from leadership.
Sometimes it takes a long time to make any progress.
Sometimes replying to an email may connect you with the right people.
Patience is key.

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Create an intake process

Need a way to centrally keep track of new tools that people are developing and or procuring.
Create process where the accessibility team is introduced as early as possible.

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Accessibility costs 37.5x as much if you wait till production

https://www.deque.com/blog/auditing-design-systems-for-accessibility/

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Create capability-specific accessibility trainings

Basic trainings including; intro to accessibility, screen readers, QA, design, mobile, copywriting, development, unit testing, etc.
We do all our trainings live once a quarter, and they are always available on-demand.
Created additional trainings for our internal needs: Social media and accessibility for everyone (presentations, emails etc.)
Part of promotion requirements, encourage teams and team management.

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Some teams will need more help

Work with teams as much as possible, sometimes this is a couple hours, other times it lasts for months.
When possible, we ask teams to invest in an accessibility specialist, who will have more time to dedicate to the team and project.
This usually has the biggest influence on the team’s overall success.

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Commitment is critical

Always aim to get a team to commit to making their tools and products accessible.
Ask for a deadline for when the highest priority issues will be fixed. Then lower priority issues etc., accessibility happens in stages.
Ask for a deadline for when no more inaccessible content will be released (offer to audit the release process).
Hold teams accountable to these commitments by having regular meetings where progress is reported and shared.
Share successes with leadership.

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Rinse and repeat.

Success with one team, leads to connecting with another team and starting over again.
Learn from your mistakes and use previous successes as evidence for new teams going forward.
Keep checking on teams to ensure they are continuing with their efforts.
Some teams commit, but then don’t do anything, so keep pushing for progress.

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Procurement

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The need for accessible procurement

Most companies don’t develop all their tools in-house and instead rely on vendors to create tools.
You will need a way to choose the best vendors.
Developed a procurement process, ensure that vendors are accessible from the start.
Talked about this extensively at A11yTO.

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High-level steps to implement accessible procurement

Add accessibility at the policy level.
Always include requirements in Request For (RFx)’s.
Create a procurement process

Provide questionnaire to be completed.
Request a Voluntary Product Accessibility Template (VPAT).

Create ongoing trainings for procurement team and vendors (so they understand what we expect).
Evaluate feedback from vendors.
Make decisions based on various factors including accessibility.
Include accessibility requirements in the contract.

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Give people a way to report accessibility barriers in their work

People reach out to me when they find issues, but we made the process more accessible.
Created a way to log accessibility specific issues in the support system.
Provide an external email address for reporting accessibility concerns.
Having a Team/Channel on Microsoft Teams (or Slack etc.)

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Continuously improve

Continue to connect with teams and ensure progress.
Keep track of current state of accessibility via benchmarking and report it to leadership.
Continue to track teams progress in spreadsheet.
Get started early with new teams or projects, shift-left as much as possible.
Continue to encourage training and connecting with dedicated people.
Don’t give up.

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