It's that time of year, full of clichés, reflection, and timely content to remind you it's that time of year in case you forget. As the year winds down, it offers an opportunity to look at the things in your control and ask yourself how they went. Chief among them, hopefully, will be accessibility. More likely than not, most companies won't actually specifically and deliberately analyze their accessibility efforts over the past year, but your company can — not as a feel-good exercise, but as an honest assessment of how accessibility fared alongside other important priorities.
Like any audit or self-evaluation, analyzing your 2020 accessibility performance is only as worthwhile as what you do with the information. If you are looking for ways to figure out whether your company hit an accessibility home run or whiffed, hopefully some of these suggestions and resources can help.
- Review customer complaints. It takes time and energy to file formal complaints or provide feedback to a company, so if you have any accessibility-related customer complaints, start by reviewing them and completely understanding their root cause. If you don't have complaints in this area, remember that no complaints probably doesn't mean no accessibility issues.
- Test accessibility awareness. Realizing that everyone can impact accessibility, even with zero tech knowledge, why not find out how well people know the basics? From the C-suite to project managers, everyone plays a role. A formal benchmark or informal gut-check from one year to the next can help reveal whether the knowledge base is growing or falling flat.
- If you haven't, get a full accessibility audit. The first items on this list assume that you've taken steps to assess the accessibility of your site in the first place. If you haven't remediated your website to be accessible by default, it isn't accessible on its own so you'll have a pretty good idea how accessible it was this year.
To get started on your road to accessibility compliance, check out our Compliance Roadmap. You can learn more with guides and checklists, get a free scan, order self-paced training, or request a full TruAccessTM Audit when you're ready.
As always, you can contact us for a free 30-minute consultation.
