How to Build In-House Digital Accessibility Leadership within Your University Department or Government Agency Part 1

Have you been thinking about how your digital accessibility can be led in-house? Today, Global Accessibility Awareness Day, (or, really, any day) is a great day to start. That’s why we’ve created this guide.

If you work in digital communications at a mission-driven organization, you’re likely familiar with accessibility requirements. These are standards, most often in relation to Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG,) intended to ensure a product or service is usable by everyone, including people with disabilities. They often encompass design principles, technical standards, and legal mandates. You may have even partnered with an agency like ours that specializes in helping institutions create accessible digital products. We’ve built a multi-disciplinary accessibility practice at Kalamuna and based on that experience, along with our work with clients, this two-part post series offers some direction on how you can create your own internal working group to advise on accessibility and ensure that your organization follows best practices.

In this first part, we examine the benefits of self-governance, and how to get started.

A. Why create a dedicated in-house accessibility working group? What should they do?

An in-house working group, committee, or task force (as you choose to name it) plays a crucial role in ensuring that all digital content, services, and technologies are usable by everyone, including people with disabilities by institutionalizing accessibility as part of your organization’s culture. The capabilities your group develops may vary depending on your goals, resources, types of digital interfaces, and compliance requirements. A university’s group might help faculty create accessible course content; a nonprofit’s might ensure their donation platform and outreach campaigns are inclusive; and a government agency’s might ensure that citizens with disabilities can access services, forms, and information online without barriers.

While Kalamuna regularly helps institutions accomplish these goals, sustaining existing outcomes and creating new, accessible content is infinitely easier when an organization champions and promotes them from within. Accessibility guidelines are guideposts that point the way, but it takes resolve and commitment to create a culture of accessibility and execute on guidelines. Here are some common responsibilities for an in-house digital accessibility group:

1. Learn and apply standards

If your in-house team is going to ensure that your organization follows best practices around accessibility, they will need to understand relevant standards and best practices. Exact Legal requirements vary based on the industry and type of work your organization does, but most commercial and governmental activities are governed by national laws such as the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), Section 508, or the Accessible Canada Act (ACA). Many industries will have codified best practices for accessibility, such as the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) that provides guidelines for building websites in an accessible manner. We recommend targeting WCAG 2.1 AA as your baseline, and 2.2 if you can.

2. Train and educate

Centralizing knowledge is a start, but socializing that knowledge and weaving it into the cultural fabric of your organization is important to institute accessibility practices across different work streams. It isn’t necessary to memorize or indoctrinate your organization on the minutiae of every standard, as these will continue to evolve, but rather the principles that guide them. Your in-house group should be motivated to see staff, faculty, or employees trained on accessible content creation (e.g., PDFs, Word documents, website content). You can do this by providing access to workshops and onboarding resources for designers, developers, content creators, and other stakeholders created by you or others. Foundational knowledge can be collected and shared in documents, wikis, or intranets, and promoted via internal newsletters for folks in the broader organization to access. More mature organizations require internal training before a user can post content to their website, and may go as far as requiring key roles to ultimately complete the Certified Professional in Accessibility Core Competencies (CPACC) course from the International Association of Accessibility Professionals. Pragmatically, the key is to start small and learn as you go.

3. Offer technical support & consulting

While your group can socialize accessibility practices within your organization, it can also act as a backstop resource for staff. Many large universities we work with like Berkeley or government entities like the Smithsonian have one or more internal accessibility professionals who are required to review websites, apps, or internal tools for accessibility compliance before they are made publicly available. They sometimes assist with remediation of inaccessible content (e.g., captioning videos, fixing code) and offer accessibility consultations for digital projects from planning to launch, though more often than not are advisory in nature so as to promote a learn-by-doing culture with content producers. Kalamuna is a small and nimble agency compared to many of our clients, yet our accessibility practice group members can help project teams determine the best way to implement things on an ad-hoc basis via our #learn-a11y slack channel. An #org-a11y-practice channel helps us stay abreast of industry trends and coordinate our activation. If you work in a large institution, your own in-house team will find its own ways to standardize how it offers support and consulting to cross-functional teams. 

4. Perform accessibility testing

New and existing public content should always meet your organization’s compliance requirements. This may require conducting manual and/or automated audits of digital products; facilitating user testing with people with disabilities to evaluate real-world usability; and providing reports with prioritized issues and recommendations for relevant staff. Qualified members of your accessibility practice may take on this work, or ensure that the responsibility for doing so has been delegated to professionals.

5. Establish best practices

Assuring accessibility is more than a series of one-off fixes is especially important over the long term. Whenever you identify and resolve an accessibility issue with something that your organization has created, you should try to prevent it from happening again. Review your internal processes, determine best practices for your organization to follow to produce reliably-excellent results, and document it. Not only will improving your processes lead to a better experience for your users and customers, preventing problems is usually far less expensive than fixing them after the fact.

6. Monitor and report over the long-term

Your group can troubleshoot or evaluate products on a one-off basis, but to maintain digital accessibility over the long-term, it’s good to position its members as overseers of your organization’s years-long progress. To gain this perspective, they might set up systems to monitor accessibility over time, flag regressions, and otherwise track progress. They may also produce compliance reports and dashboards for leadership and regulatory requirements. A content governance platform like Acquia Optimize, Site Improve, or Equalify can help achieve these goals.

B. How do you build support for an accessibility practice?

1. Get buy-in from the top

It is hard for anyone working on accessibility to significantly impact the activities or processes of their organization without support from the leadership. While some organizations already have a passion and desire for accessibility at their highest levels, others may require some convincing about the importance of accessibility, through a strategic mix of persuasion, alignment with organizational priorities, and evidence of need. No matter what your leadership and administrative structure, you’ll want to do a few things to make a compelling case:

2. Tie it to mission and values

For universities, highlight the commitment to equal access to education. For government agencies, stress the public duty to serve all constituents, regardless of ability, per Section 508, ADA, and AODA compliance.

3. Address legal and risk concerns

Reference relevant laws (ADA, Section 504/508, ACA, AODA). You may bolster the power of these laws by sharing examples of lawsuits or Office for Civil Rights (OCR) investigations at peer institutions. Show how proactive accessibility reduces legal risk and protects the organization. A few of our clients have come to us after they’ve been sued for accessibility issues — who wants to be in that position?

4. Make the business case

Obviously, universities and government agencies all use budgets to prioritize efforts, so it behooves you to convince leadership of the financial benefits of creating an in-house accessibility group. Explain how accessible design improves usability for everyone, not just people with disabilities, and that this increases your applicant pool, membership, donor base, number of taxpayers’ access, or other relevant metrics. Show how accessible services reduce help desk strain, increase engagement, and improve public perception. Overall, you want to position the digital accessibility group as a cost-saving, risk-mitigating, and value-enhancing initiative.

5. Propose a realistic, scalable plan

Start with a pilot program or small task force to prove value. You may propose a phased approach: policy development, training, audits, then scaling up. Be clear about resources needed: staffing, tools, training, time.

6. Identify allies and champions

Successfully lobbying leadership means getting alignment from groups in your ecosystem. To do this, you might partner with existing departments: IT, disability services, HR, legal, or communications. Try leveraging support from faculty, staff, or users who’ve experienced accessibility barriers. You may even use quotes or testimonials from students, donors, or community members.

7. Offer models and benchmarks

No leader, no matter if they work in education or a government department, wants to feel that they are behind the curve. To convince them that an in-house accessibility group is a benefit, show what peer institutions or agencies are doing. Present success stories where accessibility groups made measurable improvements.

Get started now (or let us help!)

Creating an in-house digital accessibility practice team isn’t just a compliance measure — it’s a strategic investment in creating a center for digital excellence. For universities and government agencies, this team can serve as a catalyst for cultural change, empowering staff across roles to build more accessible, user-friendly digital environments. 
Look out for Part 2 of this series, in which we share insights on using institutional support to form your accessibility practice, including how to empower a champion, choose groups to join, create a charter, work cross-functionally, and more.
And of course, if you need help making your digital products accessible but it’s not the right time to build your team, you can always get in touch with us. 😁