Reasons to know this material

What brought you to this accessibility workshop? Personal interest or curiosity, career growth potential, or a professional requirement? Whatever your reason, I’m glad you’re here.

Accessibility is the right thing to do. It’s about upholding civil rights for people with disabilities. It’s also a component of quality software. Those are good reasons.

Sometimes companies need convincing about the business side of accessibility (opens in a new tab). There are misconceptions that it is too costly and niche to be worthwhile.

Accessibility does require some additional time. I’ve seen estimates of about 30% when planned for up front in a large enterprise.

But the cost of not including accessibility is way higher. Having to redo everything to meet requirements is very costly and wasteful.

When you put it that way, companies can’t afford not to include accessibility.

Motivation for organizations

Organizations have various reasons for caring about accessibility. It could even be a combination of factors.

Sometimes executive leadership has personal experience with disability (like Satya Nadella (opens in a new tab), CEO of Microsoft) that trickles down into team priorities.

Other times, organizations have legal risk and compliance obligations that bring accessibility to the forefront. Certain lines of business do have requirements for accessibility. This includes software procured by a Federal Government with accessibility laws on the books (like the US, Canada, UK and EU) and for education software, to start.

Market pressure for accessibility

There can also be market pressure to be accessible. From losing business to a more accessible competitor, or from watching a competitor’s experience with lawsuits and courts.

It’s true that many lawsuits for unfortunately seem to not have the best intentions. But it’s also true that barriers to access are real and that negotoations have led to improved digital accessibility.

There is a lot to learn about the legal side of accessibility. I recommend following Lainey Feingold (lflegal.com (opens in a new tab)) and reading up on legal requirements for accessibility in your area.

At the heart of this workshop

My goal in this workshop is to instill these concepts:

• Understanding the core requirements for digital accessibility in the enterprise.
• Tech leads should be able to advise team members how to produce accessible, quality software.