Tips for Building Institutional Knowledge

In an organization, accessibility will be the most successful when more than one person or team puts effort into it. We can help each other, our companies, and our products by bringing our minds and perspectives to the table and increasing institutional knowledge (opens in a new tab).

Accessibility specialist(s) work very hard to make change and get people to care, with many different approaches: training, audits, hands-on engineering, and more. But it often feels like boiling the ocean when your hard work can be undone with a pull request or leadership decision.

It is essential that organizations increase institutional knowledge of accessibility and spread ideas and accountability around. That way, if a key team member moves on, there won’t be an unrecoverable void of knowledge or skills.

Make a culture of accessibility

Rather than isolating the responsibility of accessibility to a limited number of individuals, it needs to be a broader effort. There needs to be a culture around it, like a design culture or testing culture. Teams would benefit from adopting an accessibility culture, a civil rights culture.

Here are some tips for increasing cultural awareness of accessibility in an organization:

• Conduct testing with people with disabilities, and share the recordings. Nothing hits quite the same as watching someone struggle to use your product. Fable (opens in a new tab) is one company that does this.
• Put an Accessibility Statement (opens in a new tab) on your website and share feedback with teams.
• Include accessibility documentation in easy-to-find places, such as testing tips and user keyboard shortcuts.
• Schedule lunch & learns or similar presentations. Even recorded ones on the internet could make great sessions!
• In office? Hang accessibility tips in the bathroom stalls.
• Talk about accessibility in planning, design, and code reviews.
• Make everyone responsible for it, not only the accessibility team (or lone specialist).
• Take care in terms of burnout. It’s unfortunately common in accessibility. Find sustainable improvements you can make that bring joy and job satisfaction.

These are all suggestions...your mileage will vary in the wide range of scenarios and contexts we find ourselves in. I want to underscore that you can only do so much as an individual for accessibility.

This stuff matters because we can make a difference for and with people with disabilities in tech. But we also have to balance many priorities. Do your best and try to push the limits when you get an opportunity.