A guide to helping your organization embrace accessibilty, by Jennifer Chadwick and Mark Farmer, for the annual #a11yTO conference.

1. Organizational Access
A guide to helping your organization embrace accessibility
October 21, 2021 | Mark Farmer and Jennifer Chadwick
Our presentation
• Give you an awareness of the regulations around accessibility
• Talk about strategies and best practices for both accessibility and compliance

2. • Give you the grounding necessary to help you make solid decisions about those practices.
Digital accessibility
“Digital or web accessibility means that websites and
applications can be perceived, operated and fully
understood, without barriers, by people of all
abilities and disabilities.”
World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)

3. The power to change lives
Social Model of Disability
• Barriers in society are outside the individual, not caused by the individual (Medical Model)
• Social barriers include:
o Environmental – Inaccessible building, language, services and communication
o Attitudes – Prejudice, stereotyping, discrimination
o Organizations – Inflexible procedures and practices
• Attitudes and organizational structures much easier to change than the built environment
• You have the power to stop contributing to social barriers.

4. • Start building a culture of empathy and knowledge.
• Inclusion is true innovation.
Become a leader – moving from:
• Organization causing barriers to “Future Ready”. A leader in technological innovation, inclusion
and diversity.
• Fear of non-compliance; uncertainty to positive, people-centric organization with equipped, skilled
and proactive teams.
• Feeling overwhelmed to Allowing changes to take time. Start today and keep going. It can take 2-4
years to adopt and implement full change.

5. Compliance & accessibility
The two components
Compliance is Tangible: International standards & laws (WCAG, AODA…)
• Web pages: Text, links, images, forms, any interactive elements on desktop & mobile sites
• Web-based applications and software
• PDFs and any documents that can be downloaded
• Video, audio and animated files

6. Accessibility is also Intangible: Real people’s experience
• WCAG is based on learnings from real users – a work in progress (WCAG 1.0, 2.0, 2.1…)
• All user experience is personal and subjective
• Keep five disability types in mind: visual, physical, auditory, cognitive & speech
• Experiences should be based on preferences & needs of persons with disabilities
• Be open to listening, learning & shaping designs on user feedback: engage real people
Four Principles of Accessibility
Dignity: Self- respect and respect of others.
Independence: Do things without help from others.
Integration: Same services, in the same way.
Equal Opportunity: Chances and benefits for all.
Source: AODA

7. The letter of the law
Mark
• Another way to think to think about this is to talk about the difference between the spirit or intent
of regulations, and their letter.
• As I mentioned before, compliance deals with the requirements set out in legislation.
• Those requirements exist to ensure a certain level of accessibility, but there’s much more you can
do to make your communications accessible, which lie outside the letter of regulations.
Leading by example

8. Mark
• You may already be familiar with some of the more well-known online accessibility practices, such
as alternative (“alt”) text, but there are many others.
• At this point I think it would be useful to share some common online accessibility practices, just to
ground our discussion.
• I’m sure these will be familiar to all of you. But they won’t necessarily be familiar to management,
and the C Suite.
• That’s why you can think of these as “ice breakers” or examples, to help decision-makers start
wrapping their head around accessibility.
• The caveat is that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing: it’s important not to leave them with the
impression, that this is all you need to do, to make your communications accessible.
• So I’ll spell these out as if I were talking to that audience. This first example is fairly common:
alternative text, or “alt text” for short.
• This is used to describe a photo online, so that a screen reader (a technology people who are blind
or who have low vision use to navigate websites) can speak a description of the image.
o Note: if you can actually demo JAWS or NVDA with decision-makers, it is awesome and truly
revelatory for them. Especially if it’s at the speed most users have it at.

9. Compliance
Mark
• Those are some examples of accessibility practices. But what does compliance itself look like?
• For anyone who hasn’t dived into AODA, it relies on WCAG – the World Wide Web Consortium’s
guidelines on accessibility.

10. • Here’s a screen capture of just one part of those guidelines.
• As you can see, they’re quite technical. They’re not very accessible (pun intended) for people that
don’t swim in this ocean, people like management.
Jenn
• Years of working with code and design has made me a little more familiar with the WCAG success
criteria and they way they are written, but it’s true – they are technical.
It can be intimidating
• The document “Techniques for WCAG 2.0”, which is one document among many for WCAG.
• Luckily the W3C has created a “Quick Reference Guide” version that is easier to follow – more like
an inventory.

11. • In contains links to helpful pages called “Understanding 1.1.1” and “How to Meet 1.1.1” and you
can even filter the WCAG success criteria list by role – design, development, content.
• Bottom line: Your job is to reference WCAG in your accessibility statement and business
requirements documentation. Then – hand it to the practitioners.
Mark
I took the liberty once of printing out these guidelines as a PDF, just to see how long they would be. Any
guesses as to how long that was?
As it turns out, they’re 1,074 pages long in English, almost as long as “War & Peace”. Not exactly Sunday
reading. And that’s just one part of WCAG.
This is why having expert advice is useful. Note that I didn’t say you should hand off responsibility for your
compliance to an expert.
The fact that these regulations are both technical and lengthy is not a reason to not develop in-house
expertise.
• In fact, I would say – for reasons I’ll go into later – that it’s essential to develop that in-house
expertise.
• Doing so may not tell you exactly how to do everything, especially in the short term as you’re
building that expertise.
• But it will allow you to make good decisions, especially when you’re getting advice from an
external expert, and you need to be able to understand and make decisions based on that
advice.

12. • Otherwise you’re placing yourself in their hands, without an ability to critically parse their
advice.
• Developing in-house expertise is an investment. And just like an investment, it takes time and
patience to grow it, but the payoff is worth the wait.
Myth – they’re the same
Accessibility = Compliance
Mark
Now let’s talk about some myths around accessibility and compliance. In any organization, you’re going to
be spending a lot of time busting myths as part of your work educating people about accessibility.
• We’ve already dealt with one of the bigger ones:
• Namely, that accessibility is the same as compliance.
• It’s not, and that’s why it’s so important for your focus to be clear.
• Is your focus to meet regulatory requirements?
• Is it to meet the needs of your users?
• Is it a combination of the two? If so, which is more important?

13. One example in my workplace is our work with Fable Tech Labs. It’s a company that employs people with
disabilities to test your website. You ask them to complete a task, and they hand it to some of their
testers, who try to complete the task, give their feedback and identify any issues they come across.
We’ve used them in the past and discovered thing on our site we can improve. Sometimes, the testers will
reference specific portions of the regulations, WCAG, in their report.
And sometimes they don’t; sometimes they’ll talk more about their experience without reference to
specific regulations.
But even though not everything they do is focused on regulations and compliance, they still provide
valuable information: all of it – both the specific and the general – helps us become more a more
accessible organization.
Jenn
Yes! I heartily agree – Siteimprove is a proud partner of Fable’s testing community to provide both
automated and manual testing to teams we work with, and on a monthly basis I have the pleasure of
working closely with Fable’s testers and see the “aha” moment that comes to digital teams when real
users demonstrate to them both accessibility and usability – not necessarily compliance.

14. Myth – “It’s that Easy”
Mark
Another myth I come across is that accessibility and compliance is simple and / or easy. You just need to
add some alt text to your images, make sure your videos are captioned, throw a few other things into the
mix and - boom! - you’re done.
It’s not that simple. Accessibility involves much more than the obvious, and it applies to many aspects of
your communications beyond images and video.
It applies to:
• Audio
• Website navigation
• Forms on your website
• PDFs
• Word documents

15. • Infographics
…and more.
• It involves the use of plain language and simple instructions
• It applies to mobile devices
…and so on.
This is why I stress the importance of education. As your organization educates itself, it will better
understand the scope of accessibility. That’s not something that happens overnight, but as I’ve mentioned
before, developing that knowledge is a valuable investment.
Myth – “One and Done”
Mark
This next myth is the one I call “One and done”. Neither compliance nor accessibility are a point in time.
Nor is your website.

16. As soon as you change something, on your site or your communications, it may no longer be accessible or
compliant.
• Your website is like a garden that way. That’s the metaphor I use:
• It’s constantly changing
• Weeds pop up as often as flowers do
• It requires constant attention
• And if you turn your back on it, you can’t expect it to thrive.
Accessibility and compliance are both processes: they require an ongoing commitment. If you’re serious
about the practice, you’ll discover things that need your attention every day.
It’s critical to recognize that the process of making your communications accessible doesn’t end after an
audit, a round of remediation work, a site redesign, or what-have-you.
That’s tremendously valuable: thinking that moves you away from thinking about accessibility as a
project, and toward accessibility as a practice.
If I were to leave you with one takeaway from this section, it’s to not to diminish the responsibility to
meet regulations, but to acknowledge that it’s not realistic to treat that responsibility as something like a
project that you would expect to complete and walk away from, even for a period of time.
Accessibility and compliance are much more than that.

17. Myth – “Checked and completed”
Mark
That segues into another myth: the checkbox. Meeting accessibility regulations is not as easy or as simple
as ticking boxes in a checklist. Compliance is not as simple as following a set of instructions: instead,
you’re interpreting regulations.
• There is no acid test for compliance: it’s not an empirical process. You need to use your
knowledge and judgment in pursuing it.
• Guidelines such as WCAG contain recommendations, best practices, success criteria and so
on, with varying degrees of detail and objectivity.
• But they’re not structured as a checklist you can tick to guarantee 100% compliance.
Sometimes after I explain that to people, the question that comes up is, “Well, why don’t we just get an
expert in? They’ll have the answers.”

18. Experts are valuable resources, especially in auditing and education.
However, even if you employ the services of an expert to help you, each one of them will often have a
different interpretation of the guidelines and how they apply to your communications, to a greater or
lesser extent.
• That’s why the metaphor I like to use around this is kind of a legalistic one.
• Suppose you were to ask three different lawyers for a legal opinion. Most of the time, I think
you probably wouldn’t end up with three identical opinions. You’d most likely end up with
three opinions, all differing to a greater or lesser extent, depending on the lawyers’ expertise,
background, point of view, etc.
• Does that mean that two of those opinions are wrong and one is right? I’m no lawyer, but I’d
say no: it doesn’t mean one has to be right and two have to be wrong, just that they’re
different. And you need to use your – remember this part? – knowledge and judgment to
interpret an opinion or (especially with what we’re talking about today) an evaluation, to
decide what you’re going to do with that information, and to come up with a plan to take
action, based on it.
Myth – “Only 1% of the population is affected”
Jenn
• 15-20% of the world’s population has some form of disability.
• 1 in 7 Canadians and growing (aging population, more diagnoses of cognitive neuro-diversity).

19. • 2.9 million Canadians have identified as having a disability. What about those who did not disclose?
Myth – “This has no impact on our brand”
“Leaders”: Organizations that lead in the successful adoption of web accessibility and inclusive products,
services and internal processes.
“Learners”: Conversely, these are some organizations had lawsuits filed against them which led to
company-wide change in practices.

20. What to do: build an understanding
Mark
So if you understand and agree with us that accessibility is not a box to tick, how should you approach it?
I think – to use a phrase my boss shared with me once – you should “bring everyone along for the ride.”
People need to understand a few key points, to get on board with accessibility:
1. Why are we doing this?
2. Why is this important, to me, my unit and the organization?
3. What am I expected to do?
4. What’s going to change for me and my work?
5. How do I get help?
If people don’t understand the answers to those questions, they’re not going to “come along for the ride”.

21. In the absence of that kind of consensus understanding, if you were to wield executive authority, you
shouldn’t expect results. People need to accompany you on this trip.
So how do you build an understanding and consensus about the importance of accessibility and
compliance?
Resources
Jenn
Here are some really helpful resources to get you and your team started. Watch people with diverse
abilities using the web and mobile:
Web Accessibility Perspective Videos
Build personas & User Stories for each disability type (the “intangible”):
WAI Diverse Abilities and Barriers
WAI Web User Stories
Familiarize your team with the WCAG Quick Access Reference Guide, or use this simple translation of the
guidelines called “WUCAG” (the “tangible”):
“WUCAG” Checklist
Plotting a course
Mark

22. I think there are three key aspects to making all this happen: enacting, ensuring and monitoring
compliance.
• Enacting puts the wheels in motion: it’s the people and processes that work to make your
communications compliant
• Ensuring speaks to responsibility: it identifies how you know you’re compliant
• Monitoring makes sure the wheels keep turning, and feeds into “ensuring”. It keeps you on
track.
Your organization may choose to assign responsibility for these aspects of compliance to a person, people,
a unit, or what-have-you.
In practice, however, accessibility needs to be everyone’s responsibility: that might sound a bit grandiose,
or even like a slogan, but it’s not. In reality, it’s rarely possible for a single person or group to be
responsible for something so large and all-encompassing.
If you have a strict governance regime for your communications, it might be feasible to delegate
responsibility to an individual or a team.
Realistically, in your organization you’re more likely to have a lot of people touching your online
communications, and probably have loose governance at best.
Either way, it’s important not to position a person or group of people as the gatekeepers or the
“Accessibility Police.”
Then accessibility becomes something people in the organization see as an onerous requirement, an
imposition, not a best practice.

23. That’s why an education component is such a big part of this. Education can start with something as
simple as lunch & learns, where someone in the organization – or, again, an outside resource – can come
in and help people understand what’s involved.
Whether you have a governance or a consensus model, there are a few things you’re going to want to
remember:
• You’re going to do yourself a favour by having a business champion for this. It’s rare for results
to happen at an organizational level without someone in a position of authority making that
change a priority, and helping “push from behind”, so to speak. Accessibility can be a
significant shift in thinking and practices for an organization and its people, and change
doesn’t happen on its own
I think ideally you’d want a working group composed of people from the various parts of your
organization that are responsible for producing communications, if at all possible
• I recognize that it may or may not be practical or possible in every organization
• Not all organizations have a formal governance structure around these sorts of things
• That’s why consensus usually ends up being essential.
Conduct the “ARRM” team exercise
Jenn

24. A really powerful and effective team exercise you can do is the Accessibility Roles & Responsibilities
Mapping (ARRM) exercise to identify ownership over your accessibility efforts. For more information, see
the W3C ARRM Wiki Page.
Below is the Role-based Decision Tree that provides teams with steps to walk through when they have an
issue to fix – in the code, the design or content, or it may be a question about who – at a high level – owns
the accessibility of PDFs in your organization?
1. Is this checkpoint driven by Business or non-functional requirements (related to ensuring
accessibility is completed, etc.)?
2. Is this checkpoint about Visual Design? (not Content Authoring or UX Design)
3. Is this checkpoint about Content Authoring? (not UX Design)
4. Is this checkpoint about User Experience Design?
5. Is this checkpoint about Implementation? (Development)
6. Is this checkpoint about Testing?
7. IF NONE OF THE ABOVE, then it becomes a Management concern
8. Bonus: Now that you have your solutions, document them and share them. Don’t lose sight of the
learnings. Keep things consistent and make less work for the team.

25. The road ahead
Mark
This is why I think building a roadmap is essential. For any ongoing process, you really need that kind of
plan to meet any kind of regulation.
Jenn
We have spoken about how accessibility isn't achieved just through conformance with WCAG. However,
we have to start somewhere with regulation. Your strategy will not be successful without declaring a
compliance standard within an organization - a measurement by which to identify and validate the
accessibility of your product or service. But as an organization you have to put your stake in the sand, or
else it will never be supported or realized. Is it WCAG 2.0, 2.1, 2.2?
Mark
Some key questions to consider as you craft a roadmap to meet whatever standard you to decide to
pursue:

26. • How will you assess where you’re currently at? Will that be through:
• An external consultant?
• If so, will that person help you develop skills internally and hand off some of their
knowledge?
• Will it be an in-house expert?
• If so, does that person have adequate training? Will they need more? How will you
source that?
• Are you looking for that internal resource to be certified? Is that important to you,
to demonstrate due diligence or for another reason?
• Will you rely on software or automation?
• If so, how will you balance that with a human component, knowing you can’t fully
automate this process: there will need to be a human component.
Remediation is another question.
• You’ll want to identify the issues that need correction, in a systematic fashion, and track
completion. This could be through:
• A software dashboard
• Or it could be as simple as a spreadsheet
• Or any other way you like.

27. This allows you to track progress for yourself and your organization.
And, as mentioned, you’ll want to develop internal resources as part of this process.
Even if you wanted to, you can’t rely on experts continuously, unless you have very deep pockets.
Decision-making and governance
Mark
So like I said, it’s easier to map out accessibility if you have a governance structure for decision-making in
place around your website.
Many organizations don’t have this. Or maybe they do, but it’s informal.
If you can integrate accessibility into governance, you’re starting from a position of strength.
But even if you don’t have that kind of governance, you can still succeed. Part of that is building a shared
vision.

28. If you can make people to understand why this is important – and answer some of those “why” and
“how” questions I talked about in a previous slide – you can succeed.
If you want to dive deeper into how to persuade people, I can recommend some resources. A great place
to start is Dr. Robert Cialdini’s book, Influence: the Art of Persuasion.
And there are others. You can contact me if you’re interested in discovering some of those other
resources.
Governance: Roles & Responsibilities
Jenn

29. Nothing will get done without enforcement. People will forget, neglect accessibility work and lose steam.
You must ensure that inclusive design practices are not de-scoped from projects – they are baked into
each project requirement and the process and workflow itself. Do not allow a project to be released
without accessibility.
Stop the bleeding.
Governance: Leaders & Project Managers
• Stop the bleeding. Stop adding barriers. Enforce and add check gates to stop adding new digital
properties that are not accessible.
• Start: Review and enforce adherence with your accessibility statement.
• Start by taking an inventory of your digital properties. Assess your current websites & documents
using automated and manual testing methods that adopt your standard.
• Start to prioritize based on lifecycle, risk and currency.
• Start investing by allocating funds and dedicated resources for accessibility.
Governance: Leaders & Project Managers
• Continue to implement new practices, responsibilities and testing methods into current workflow.
• Continue to assign tasks and responsibilities to key stakeholders & practitioners (design,
development, content authors, QA).

30. • Continue to train the trainer and conduct role-based training as frequently as possible.
• Continue to demand accessible procurement and accessibility as part of your onboarding.
• Continue to set targets and deadlines and review your measurements and progress.
Supporting the organization
Mark
Building in-house expertise can take many forms:
• For example, training with external resources, some of which I’ll mention in the next slide
• Free webinars that vendors – such as Siteimprove – produce
• The world wide web consortium has a number of free tutorials you can access online
• And there are online classes with various vendors and educational institutions.
Jenn

31. Education is critical to achieving that "intangible" component of accessibility - the end user experience.
All roles must think and act, design, code and deliver accessible products with people's needs in mind. If
people in the organization don't care, or are still uneducated, they won't change their actions or
behaviour.
More Resources
Mark
The World Wide Web Consortium is another obvious place to start for tools and resources, given that
we’ve mentioned them so many times in our presentation.
And it’s the easiest URL in the world to remember: w3.org.
There are also some great organizations out there I’ve worked with. Specifically:
Siteimprove, which Jennifer is with. Their dashboard is a great help.
David MacDonald at CanAdapt Solutions in Ottawa is also a great expert resource we’ve used in the past
for both auditing and education.

32. Fable is the organization I mentioned earlier that employs people with disabilities to audit communication
channels.
There are also many free Chrome extensions you can use to analyze your website. I can recommend
some, so please feel free to contact me if you’re interested.
These are often a great way to dip your toes into auditing, because they’re free and relatively easy to use.
Thank you
And with that, we’d like to thank you for joining us today. Don’t hesitate to contact us if you have any
questions.
Jennifer
• linkedin.com/in/309creative
• twitter.com/jennjchadwick

33. Mark
• linkedin.com/in/markfarmer64
• twitter.com/markus64