Including Accessibility in Your Definition of Done

How do you ensure accessibility isn’t skipped or missed? Make it a requirement that’s documented in tickets, stories, issues, etc. This means that team members in various roles need to be on board: PMs, design, development, QA and more.

Including accessibility as acceptance criteria can help to surface it at a good time: before something has shipped.

It’s way more costly to fix accessibility after the fact. So if you can address it during requirements gathering and build it into your implementations from the beginning (with reminders in tickets), you will be more consistent at it.

Make it an actual requirement

It’s one thing to list “WCAG 2.2 AA” in lists and docs that teams may or may not see. It’s another to uphold accessibility as a requirement in design, development, code reviews, and QA. There’s some accountability that needs to happen as well. Accessibility isn’t going to get done on its own most of the time: it has to be part of an agreed-upon process and checked repeatedly.

Create a repeatable manual and automated testing process

Teams first have to know that accessibility is a requirement and then know how to test it! Checklists are a starting point. But having a repeatable, shareable process for accessibility testing will be a lot more impactful than none.

This advice has mostly been geared at companies without accessibility teams in house. But even if you do have that expertise at your company, do what you can to connect everything together and help their work be more successful. You could help drive adoption of pre-existing accessibility training, requirements, and other resources within your own team.

Include accessibility in performance reviews (and interviews)

We discussed inclusive hiring and centering disability. For one last plug for accessibility in the workplace: include it as data in performance reviews. How did people perform when it came to producing accessible work? Can you provide constructive feedback on your peers or upward reviews on areas for improvement?

On the flip side, if you’re involved with interviewing with or for a company: ask about accessibility in the day to day. How is it represented (or not) in their process? Would accessibility factor into performance and metrics on a broad scale, tying back to how the work gets done on a smaller scale?