Fundamentals: Accessibility Awareness for Leadership

What is digital accessibility?

Digital accessibility is about ensuring that the digital world offers equal access for everyone. For many years there have been regulations around access for people with disabilities in physical spaces. With more of our day-to-day activities occurring online, regulations are needed for the digital world to offer equal access.

Disabilities can affect vision, hearing, cognition and motor skills, or be an intersection of multiple disabilities. Different assistive technology is available to help support people with disabilities. Assistive technology can be something as common as a computer keyboard, or it can be more specific like screen reader software or switch devices. The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) specify standards and techniques to ensure that assistive technology can be used when navigating the web. Not everyone with a disability uses assistive technology, so it is imperative that content is as clear and usable as possible in the first place.

26% of individuals over 18 in Massachusetts have some kind of disability, and all of us will experience a disability in our lifetime, whether it is situational, temporary, or permanent. That means that many of the constituents accessing digital content created by the Commonwealth have a disability, and may be using assistive technology to do so. To ensure that all of our constituents can access what they need, we need to make sure our content is accessible.

Learn more about disabilities and assistive technology

Regulations and Title II

In April 2024, the Department of Justice published a final ruling to update regulations for Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act. Title II states:

Public entities must ensure that web content and mobile apps that entity makes available directly, through contract or licensing or other arrangements are accessible based on WCAG 2.1 A and AA standards. Public entities with a total population of 50,000 or more must adhere to this by April 26, 2027. Public entities with a population of less than 50,000 have until April of 2028.

Learn more about Title II

In July of 2021 Massachusetts introduced the Enterprise IT Accessibility Policy, which is to ensure that Massachusetts information technology (IT) solutions are usable by people with disabilities, as required by state and federal law. This includes both Commonwealth employees and members of the general public.

Strategy

To meet compliance, it is important to build an organization wide strategy. Accessibility is a journey, and a universal participation approach. You will not be able to reach compliance if the task of accessibility is assigned to a single team. That team will become a bottleneck for content remediation if they are constantly receiving new content that is inaccessible. It is very important to make all employees that create digital content aware of this compliance, and allow time for them to train on making accessible versions of the content they are responsible for in their roles.

Inventory

It is recommended to create an inventory of your digital content, and put it into a maturity model, so you can show what content has been made accessible, what you are working on, and what is in the backlog. This will help you to be transparent about where you are in the journey of making your digital content accessible, and for you to be able to track your progress. This inventory will include content such as the following, but this is not an exhaustive list:

• Web pages and intranet pages
• Content Management Systems and Learning Management Systems
• External and internal documents
• Templates
• Learning materials
• Social media accounts
• Multimedia
• Enterprise software
• Department specific tools

Download this Digital Asset Inventory Template to help you get started.

Exceptions

There are a few exceptions, such as for archived content, in Title II. You can review the ADA Summary of Exceptions to find out if any of your content may be eligible. Be sure to confer with your internal stakeholders and legal counsel.

Expectations for content

All digital content needs to be made accessible. Start with your most important and popular resources and priorities those. All public entities have a mountain of existing content that will have to be worked through, but it is most important that your constituents can access, participate in, and apply for services provided by your organization.

Prioritize making new content accessible, and prevent the generation of new inaccessible content. Baking accessibility into the beginning of design and development reduces violations and saves considerable time. When learning to apply accessible practices to making content, it may take more time to develop as you learn, but it is less than the extra time and work to fix or redo something that was made without accessibility in mind.

Office Documents

Office applications contain an accessibility checker that looks for common accessibility errors, such as missing alt-text on images, redundant items, and reading order of PowerPoint slides. This should be run on all documents, and issues should be resolved. Automatic checkers like this one will not catch all potential issues, but will be a great start to getting your documents more accessible.

Learn more about accessible Word documents Learn more about accessible PowerPoint documents

PDFs

PDFs must be created from an accessible source document from a tool such as Microsoft Word or Adobe InDesign to reduce accessibility errors in the PDF. All PDFs must be checked for accessibility after export. If the document is complex and contains forms or infographics, it will need remediation in Adobe Acrobat Pro. Alternatively, forms and infographics can be created on the web in a more accessible fashion and can still be made printable.

Learn more about accessible PDFs

Communications: Email, newsletters and social media

Typical email templates use tables for formatting, which can cause problems for keyboard navigation and screen readers. When possible, use HTML to develop accessible email templates or use simple templates that allow resizing and reflow for different email applications and window widths. Social media posts should use the extent of the tools available from that platform to add accessible content like alt text and captions. Historic posts made before the compliance date are not required to be remediated.

Learn more about accessible social media

Content Management Systems (CMS) and Learning Management Systems (LMS)

Websites that are made with a CMS or LMS often have built-in accessibility checkers, or have plugins that can be used to check accessibility. These will all vary depending on your system. These automatic checkers do not check for all violations, and can only catch a portion of the errors on your pages, but are a great start at identifying some of the largest barriers for assistive technology. Following are some examples of options for different Content Management and Learning Management Systems. We have not worked with all of these tools and are not endorsing any specific plugins. We recommend searching the web for your management system and "accessibility checker," to see what options are available to you. Some may be built in to the system, or free or paid plugins you can add on to your system.

Video

Videos have specific needs such as closed captions and transcripts, and in most cases will also need Audio Descriptions (AD). American Sign Language (ASL) interpretation is recommended for critical materials. For scripted videos, planning ahead can minimize the need for post-production AD. Including ASL interpreters in videos of live events can minimize the need for hiring a service to provide video assets for you to edit in after the fact.

Learn more about accessible video

Web design and development

Designers of custom web pages and interactions should develop knowledge of accessible design, and have designs reviewed regularly by peers. Developers should use automated browser plugins to test accessibility, such as WAVE (a tool for scanning an entire web page) or ANDI (a tool for targeting specific elements and inspecting them for accessibility). Automated testing cannot find all violations, so it will be imperative that developers perform manual tests, and learn to develop with accessible patterns.

Browse developer training

Procurement

Digital services and applications provided by vendors are required to be WCAG 2.1 AA compliant. Accessibility language should be included in your contractual agreements. Vendors will be expected to provide an Accessibility Conformance Report (ACR). If there are any areas on the report that state that accessibility is unsupported or partially supported, that vendor should provide a roadmap for resolution.

Find procurement guidance

What can I do as a leader?

As a team leader, here are some steps you can take to get your team and your team's content ready for compliance.

• Include accessibility in planning, project reviews and in the definition of done
• Add accessibility milestones to project plans
• Monitor and report regularly on accessibility progress
• Identify accessibility roles in governance structures
• Make time for staff or faculty awareness and training
• Include resources for audits and remediation in budgeting
• Celebrate and spotlight accessibility successes
• Require accessibility documentation for purchases and procurement
• Make accessibility a core requirement, not a retrofit

What resources are available for my team?

Below you will links to training guides, checklists, tools and documentation to help you on your accessibility journey.

Self-paced guides

We have many helpful pages like this one, that each focus on different accessibility topics based on the different types of digital content your teams build.

Browse the training library

Instructor-led trainings

If your team requires a specific training that is not available in our regular webinars, reach out to us and we can setup a custom solution for your team.

Browse the live training calendar

Document accessibility testing

Our document accessibility checklists and decision tree help you determine if it will save you time and effort to convert your document into a webpage, and what steps to take to ensure many different document formats are accessible.

Browse document checklists Document decision tree

Web development testing

For developers, we always recommend running automated testing before manual testing. This will catch around 30% of the accessibility errors on a page. There are still some things that cannot be checked automatically, but the following tools are a great start.

WAVE - This free browser plugin from WebAIM will report critical issues and secondary alerts that will need a manual check. To learn more about how to use WAVE, check out WebAIM's Web Accessibility Evaluation Guide.

ANDI - This free bookmarklet from SSA.gov is a great tool for testing specific sections of your page and finding out what content is being communicated to assistive technology.

Web testing checklists - Our checklists will walk you through manual testing steps to identify issues that may not be caught by automatic checkers.

Procurement guidance

Procurement of accessible products and services - Find guidance on planning for accessibility during procurement, a vendor questionnaire, information on Accessibility Conformance Reports (ACR), and the Commonwealth's contract language and vendor obligations.

ITS82 Accessibility services vendors - The Commonwealth's Statewide IT Accessibility Services Contract for the State and Municipalities to identify vendors for audits and remediation.

Continue learning

An introduction to digital accessibility