Accessibility Roadmap Development

Accessibility Strategy for Organizations Just Starting: ➤ Begin with 3 simple accessibility actions each week. ➤ Ensure 1 of them involves feedback from people with disabilities—whether it's testing a product, evaluating a service, or reviewing communications. ➤ Engage with people from the disability community every day—whether online or within your team—listen, learn, and ask for honest feedback. Once you start building momentum: ➤ Scale up to 5-7 actions weekly. ➤ Make 3 or more of them proactive accessibility improvements—like adding captions, improving site navigation, or hosting accessible events. ➤ Keep community engagement and accessibility-related discussions ongoing, just like you’d maintain customer relations or team communication. That’s really all you need to start building an inclusive culture. Remember: Don’t overcomplicate it. Accessibility is a commitment. It’s about making sure everyone can engage fully—your customers, your employees, and your stakeholders. Keep it simple, keep it human, keep it accessible.

Accessibility case study: Spotify When we talk about accessibility leaders in the Nordics, most people think of IKEA. But there’s another name worth celebrating: Spotify. ✨ A few highlights: ▷ Accessible by default: their design system, Encore, has an “Encore x Accessibility” track. Many components come with accessibility built-in, and for edge cases, designers get clear, practical guidance. In other words: devs don’t need to reinvent the wheel — accessibility is baked in. ▷ Guidelines that scale: Spotify even shares their Accessibility Guidelines for Developers openly. They’re structured into “quick wins,” “medium-term wins,” and “intensive wins.” It’s a roadmap teams can actually use, not just a wish list. ▷ Research that listens: when they redesigned Your Library, they didn’t just crunch numbers. They combined quant data (how people use the app) with qual feedback (interviews, beta testing) to understand the “why” behind the struggles. That balance is rare, and it shows in the end product. ▷ Nothing about us without us: Spotify partnered with Fable, a community of people with disabilities, to test their products and shape their upcoming Accessibility Plan. Over 100 people with lived experience gave feedback across vision, hearing, mobility, cognition, and speech. That’s accessibility grounded in reality, not theory. 🚀 Why does this stand out compared to others? Lots of companies are still at the stage of “raising awareness” or “appointing an accessibility officer.” Spotify is already embedding accessibility into the tools, workflows, and research methods that shape their everyday product decisions. That’s the shift: from side project to core practice. ⚠️ Gaps & real-world limits: ▷ Scale + legacy product complexity: large platforms must balance many priorities; rolling out accessibility universally across all surfaces (mobile apps, web players, embedded widgets, third-party integrations) takes time. Public work shows progress but also ongoing work. ▷ Content ecosystem challenges: user-generated content (podcasts, artist uploads, social clips) creates variability — captioning and metadata quality depend heavily on creators and tooling. This is an industry-wide gap, not unique to Spotify. 🔎Lessons for companies: ▷ Start with people, not checklists. Invest in user research with people who actually use assistive tech; let the data drive product choices. ▷ Make accessibility social inside the company. Run regular meetups, internal talks, and learning series so the knowledge spreads beyond a single team. ▷ Partner early with specialists & communities. External partners bring lived experience, accelerate learning, and reduce the risk of misguided solutions. ▷ Plan for content & ecosystem complexity. Where creators supply content, invest in creator tools (easy captioning, templates) and moderation/quality flows. ▷ Measure & be transparent. Track accessibility metrics and be honest about scope and remaining work — transparency builds trust.

Accessibility is not a choice, it's our responsibility. New accessibility requirements in the US are making it even more urgent for teams to educate themselves about what they can do to meet the needs of people with disabilities. → WCAG Guidelines should be familiar to modern product teams, so what's new about these requirements? → Accessibility audits on older sites might reveal an iceberg of issues. When do teams need to be ready to meet the updated guidelines? → The internet is a big place. Do these new requirements apply to everyone or are they focused on specific websites and services? 📚 I spent some time digging around ADA.gov to learn what these new requirements mean for designers and product teams. Take the deep dive yourself when you have a chance: https://lnkd.in/gxCuvX6V 1️⃣ What: ADA Title II states that all state and local government websites need to meet the WCAG 2.1 Level A or AA accessibility guidelines. The new law will make sure that all public services are accessible to people with disabilities, including all programs, and activities offered online and through mobile apps. 2️⃣ When: It turns out the timeline for implementation is flexible based on the size of the local populations served. Jurisdictions with populations over 50K have two years while those with less than 50K have three years, with everyone needing to be compliant by 2027. 3️⃣ Who: It turns out that within state and local government, this includes not only municipal bodies such as state and local city departments but also entities like public schools, museums, and libraries. The last big note is that third-party software vendors and contractors who serve these entities are also on the hook (that probably means you too!) 💎 As much as that might sound daunting, there are things you can start doing right now to get prepared: → Run an accessibility audit. You don’t know how much work you have to do until you take a look and see what’s really going on. A simple tool you can use to get a quick sense of things is the WAVE tool from WebAIM. This tool allows you to get a page-by-page snapshot of common accessibility issues. https://wave.webaim.org/ → Educate yourself and your team. The contents of an accessibility audit won’t make much sense until you level up your team to be able to process the severity of the issues you have and allow your team to think strategically about what to prioritize. A simple class that I encourage for newcomers is a free class from Google on Udacity. https://lnkd.in/gdCFJ2-C → Get expert advice from a consultant. Exygy has spent years developing our thoughtful process toward accessibility, which includes bringing in people with lived experience to provide their insights and expertise. We balance these partnerships with technical expertise to help you create a strategic roadmap. Get in touch and let’s get to work! https://lnkd.in/gvUwmWVr #accessibility #a11y

Mallarie finally got her handicapped placard and she was over the moon. Her school denied her physical therapy for 3 years even though she struggles to walk, and getting the placard felt like a basic win we should not have had to fight for. That small win exposed how broken daily access really is. → Half the “accessible” spots are blocked or too narrow. → People park in handicapped spaces like the sign is a suggestion instead of the law. → Many buildings have one accessible space for an entire facility and it sits nowhere near the entrance. I have advocated for accessibility in theory for years. Living it every day is a different game with real stakes and real fatigue. Here is the food industry connection that keeps me up at night. Many food plants are not truly ADA compliant end to end. Many plants were built before 1990 when ADA became law, and we have had 35 years to retrofit. Instead, I keep seeing the same failures. → No elevators or platform lifts to production floors and mezzanines. → Parking lots optimized for trucks and forklifts, not for people who use canes, walkers, or wheelchairs. → Workstations, restrooms, and break rooms that ignore basic accessible design. → Doorways, thresholds, and stair-only routes that cut off talent from entire areas. We obsess over HACCP, FDA rules, and audit scores, and we let accessibility slide. We can engineer sterile environments and trace contamination back to a single valve, so we can engineer access. Start fixing it now. → Do a full route audit with a wheelchair and document every barrier from parking to production to break rooms. → Add lifts or platform elevators to multi-level areas and make every critical zone reachable without stairs. → Re-stripe lots with compliant access aisles and place accessible spaces at each staffed entrance. → Install automatic doors and low-force hardware, and remove high thresholds that stop wheels and walkers. → Build adjustable workstations for seated and standing work, with clear floor space and reachable controls. → Assign one accountable leader with budget and publish quarterly progress for employees to see. This is about safety, dignity, and the talent we say we want to hire. We are losing skilled people because a staircase blocks the job. That is wrong and it also hurts the business. Time to do better.

If you’re doing agile right, you’re prioritizing accessibility. Agile development methodologies are all about putting users’ needs first. And accessibility is critical for meeting the needs of every user. Still, many developers who champion agile don’t address accessibility. Often, they worry that digital accessibility will mean moving more slowly or compromising innovation. But if you’re doing accessibility right, it doesn’t have to. In an agile approach to accessibility, developers proactively consider every user’s needs while building. They collaborate with designers, product managers, and testers to embed accessibility throughout the SDLC. They eliminate the need for time-consuming, reactive fixes and focus on making new experiences accessible by default. Level Access’ new resource, Agile Accessibility in Development: The Ultimate Playbook, is a comprehensive, actionable roadmap for adopting this approach across your development function. This guide covers: • Tips for driving efficiency in issue remediation • Tools and methods for checking for accessibility in every phase of the build process • How to effectively collaborate with designers to eliminate issues before they’re written into code • How to manage a shift to agile accessibility Check out the complete resource here: https://lnkd.in/eYsF9UUX