Accessibility Strategy
A modular strategy to achieve and maintain ADA compliance as scale.
Overview
Tasked with ensuring ADA compliance for Advanced Process Solutions’ software, I designed a unique, modular strategy that delivered compliance across all deployed systems within three years. This approach became the foundation for Fidelity Financial's accessibility standards across all products in the APS business unit.
I’ve adapted this proven three-step modular, customizable, and scalable method to bring legacy enterprise systems into ADA compliance since 2019. It has been proven to be effective as well as flexible enough to accommodate the needs of Fidelity Investments, NetApp inc., and Spot by NetApp.
This method is broken down into three modules that can be implemented as a whole, simultaneously utilizing multiple teams or individually per module as resources or bandwidth dictate.
Module 1: Visual
Requiring the least amount of resources and making the most impact, module 1 targets the UI only. Depending on the size of the application or website, this can be achieved with a single dedicated designer or small team. Module 1 focuses on ensuring style guides and UI designs are compliant with WCAG guidelines and include but are not limited to:
Text size and color contrast ratios
Image, video and motion implementation
Alt text included with all images
Transcripts provided with any videos
Accessibility checklist and annotation are included with all UI designs on hand-off.
Module 2: Structural
Module 2 can further be separated into two phases if required due to limited developer bandwidth.
Phase 1:
Developers use semantic, ADA compliant structure. Since semantic, logical page structure is a best practice anyway, many teams already have addresses this phase.
Phase 2:
Developers become familiar with and include additional ADA compliant tags such as alt, sr-only and aria where appropriate.
DOM element focus order is sequential and logical (as provided by Module 1 above.)
Module 3: Procedural
This module often requires the most effort, organization and buy-in to implement based on the multi-team requirements and if very specific to the company structure. This module includes but is not limited to the following:
Compliance testing with WAV
Task analysis using assistive technologies
QA linting for compliant code
Testing success included in Jira requirements
