Best Practices for Compliance

Plan for accessibility—don’t wait for complaints!

Solve problems with staff, not lawyers

Adopt policy and publicize policy
- Setting standard (WCAG 2.0/2.1 Levels A & AA)
Hire/assign responsible staff
- With sufficient authority and budgetary authority
- With sufficient expertise
Training for developers and content creators
Provide experts/resources for developers and content creators

Set procedures for pre-posting reviews of accessibility of new content
Establish responsibility to approve and document exceptions
- ADA
  - Undue burden
  - Fundamental alteration
Establish accountability mechanisms for developers and content creators who post inaccessible material

Audit to identify barriers
Prioritize
- Frequency of customer encounters
- Importance of function
- Severity of the barrier
- Ease of remediation
- BUT: Don’t assume people with disabilities won’t be interested in certain content (Eason v. New York State Board of Elections (S.D.N.Y) example)
Specify
- Schedule for barrier elimination
  - Page by page
  - Barrier type by barrier type
  - Format by format
Assign
- Person(s) responsible for implementation, oversight, progress tracking, reporting
- Resources ($, staff, time)
Track and report progress
Update (every 5 years at least)
Establish and publish interim means for providing alternative access during remediation
- Phone line where trained staff will read web information
- Email address to request accessible versions of documents
- Process for escalating accessibility requests/complaints
- Vendors with deadlines for converting to accessible formats on request

Set schedules and responsibility for periodic audits
- Internal and by qualified vendor
- Automated and manual/user audits

Build Trust and Access Experts
- Invite and welcome feedback – and respond
- Publicize your efforts, plans, and progress
- Hire user testers
- Include people with disabilities in Beta testers

Great policies are only as good as their implementation
- Training
- High level involvement