An effective web accessibility strategy doesn’t happen overnight. It’s a long-term framework that weaves accessibility into everything from leadership and company culture to ideation and design, coding and content creation, and purchasing and maintenance.
A short-term fix might help meet immediate legal requirements, but only a long-term accessibility strategy ensures continuous improvement, compliance, and better user engagement over time. - Accessibility Strategy Development: Implementing Long-term Accessibility, Pivotal Accessibility
Whether you’re a VP or CIO or work in design, development, or content creation, here are the basics for a sustainable web accessibility strategy. Not all strategies are the same; you may need to customize yours to better fit your organization.
Inventory Your Assets
The very first thing you want to do is inventory all your digital assets. Your webpages, apps, PDFs, videos, audio, images…anything that can be accessed via your website.
Next, review those assets for those that need to be updated or may need to be archived, either online or taken offline completely. This will help ensure your remediation efforts are focused on up-to-date assets that remain relevant to your organization.
By regularly inventorying your digital assets, you not only maintain a well-structured, efficient content management strategy but also ultimately enhance user experience, accessibility, and website performance.
Conduct an Accessibility Audit
Use a combination of automated tools, like DubBot, manual testing, and assistive technologies to identify current accessibility issues. Remember. It’s not automated vs. manual testing. It's automated AND manual testing. Both forms of testing are required to ensure your website meets the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG).
Goals & Benchmarks
Outline your goals, not just accessibility compliance levels. This is an opportunity for you to address broader objectives, such as usability and customer satisfaction. Framing accessibility as both a legal and business advantage helps secure leadership buy-in across departments.
You will want to determine what accessibility standards your organization will comply with. For example, WCAG 2.2, Section 508 standards, EN 301 549 Accessibility Requirements, and / or the European Accessibility Act. This information will also be included in your remediation plan as well as your accessibility policy and statement.
At the same time, you will need to decide on and assign stakeholder responsibilities across design, development, content teams, and project management. One responsibility that should be a non-negotiable is accessibility training for all stakeholders.
Establish a Remediation Plan
A robust remediation plan begins by prioritizing accessibility issues. Start by focusing on the low-hanging fruit. The issues that are easy to spot and easy to remediate. (See the University of Minnesota’s 7 Core Skills.)
Tackling these quick wins first delivers fast, tangible results while building momentum and confidence across your teams, creating a positive tone for ongoing accessibility work. Remediations like adding alt text, using proper heading structures, or improving color contrast can remove significant barriers for users, require minimal effort from your teams, and immediately enhance accessibility for everyone. Early wins also help build buy-in across departments, showing that accessibility improvements don’t have to be overwhelming to make a real impact.
Next, address issues based on the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) level your organization adheres to, focusing on those that have the most significant impact on users’ ability to navigate to and access information and complete key tasks:
- Critical - Results in blocked content for people with disabilities and will definitely prevent them from accessing fundamental features or content. This type of issue puts your organization at risk. Prioritize fixing as soon as possible, within the week if possible. Remediation should be a top priority. Should be infrequent.
- Serious - Results in serious barriers for people with disabilities and will partially prevent them from accessing fundamental features or content. People relying on assistive technologies will experience significant frustration as a result. Issues falling under this category are major problems, and remediation should be a priority. Should be very common.
- Moderate - Results in some barriers for people with disabilities, but will not prevent them from accessing fundamental features or content. Prioritize fixing in this release if there are no higher-priority issues. Will get in the way of compliance if not fixed. Should be fairly common.
- Minor - Considered to be a nuisance or an annoyance bug. Prioritize fixing if the fix only takes a few minutes and the developer is working on the same screen/feature at the same time. Otherwise, the issue should not be prioritized. Will still get in the way of compliance if not fixed. Should be very infrequent.
Courtesy of Deque
Once priorities are clear, create a realistic timeline to resolve the identified issues and maintain steady, measurable progress.
Finally, assign specific responsibilities across your teams so accessibility improvements become an integrated, ongoing part of your workflow rather than a one-time project, building on the Accessibility Shift Left model.
Training & Policies
Invest in skill-building for designers, developers, and content creators so accessibility becomes second nature.
For example, designers should be well-versed in things like inclusive design principles, ensuring proper color contrast, and thoughtful typography choices that enhance readability for all users. Developers should write clean, semantic HTML, JavaScript, and CSS; appropriately use ARIA roles; and ensure website components meet accessibility standards. Content creators should become skilled at writing clear, easy-to-understand content, adding well-formed, descriptive alternative text for images, and using proper document structure. Finally, QA testers need to be comfortable testing with screen readers and other assistive technologies to ensure a seamless experience for every user.
It's also critical that department managers and upper management participate in accessibility training. It sends a powerful message that accessibility starts at the top. When employees see management actively learning and participating, it helps to normalize accessibility as a core company value. Their participation can provide cultural and practical benefits across the organization:
- When decision-makers understand accessibility, they can embed it early in planning, budgeting, and project timelines, leading a cultural Shift Left. That top-down buy-in helps everyone see accessibility as a shared responsibility, not just a developer problem.
- Proactive accessibility leadership leads to more efficient product development, fewer costly reworks, stronger compliance, and broader customer engagement. Accessibility has a direct impact on your organization’s brand.
Give your web accessibility strategy a solid foundation by creating a clear accessibility policy framework. The most critical policies to develop are:
- Website accessibility policy (internal).
- Website accessibility statement (public-facing).
- Information Communication Technology (ICT) purchasing policies.
Make sure your third-party vendors meet accessibility standards before integrating them. Work with your procurement team to ensure all Information and Communication Technology (ICT) procurement proposals and contracts include language requiring vendors to provide a current Accessibility Conformance Report.
Protip: Accessibility Maturity Models can help inform your policies and vision for accessibility.
Continuous Monitoring
Continuous accessibility monitoring is the ongoing process of kicking off regularly scheduled automated and manual testing, and utilizing user feedback loops to detect new accessibility issues arising from content, feature, or code changes.
Continuous accessibility monitoring and your website accessibility strategy are closely connected, as monitoring serves as the ongoing enforcement mechanism for the strategy. While your strategy sets the goals, priorities, and processes for making your site accessible, continuous monitoring ensures that these goals are consistently met over time, catching new issues before they become problems.
Why a Website Accessibility Strategy is Essential?
A solid, sustainable website accessibility strategy goes beyond temporary fixes and checklists, embedding accessibility early in the process to prevent issues before they arise. It emphasizes team skill-building, ensuring they can manage content efficiently while maintaining accessibility and usability. Coupled with robust remediation practices, the strategy helps build organizational buy-in. It can foster an inclusive company culture, creating a long-term framework your organization can rely on to keep your website welcoming, compliant, functional, and inclusive for everyone.
Resources
- Website Accessibility Strategy
- The WebAIM Strategic Accessibility Framework
- The Ultimate Web Accessibility Strategy: 6 Best Practices
- Accessibility Strategy Development: Implementing Long-term Accessibility
A human author creates the DubBlog posts. The AI tools Gemini and ChatGPT are sometimes used to brainstorm subject ideas, generate blog post outlines, and rephrase certain portions of the content. Our marketing team carefully reviews all final drafts for accuracy and authenticity. The opinions and perspectives expressed remain the sole responsibility of the human author.
