Adopting Digital Accessibility
Ensuring that your organization is digitally accessible to all is more important than ever before, but getting started on your accessibility journey can seem overwhelming. As the digital accessibility of investor relations websites potentially impacts potential investors, Q4 and eSSENTIAL Accessibility offer this short checklist to help you get started.
How can your organization begin creating an accessible digital strategy and ensure your technology is a positive experience for everyone?
- Think about critical user paths.
Consider the digital experience from start to finish for a person with disabilities on your site. Ensure they can access everything they need barrier-free. - Divide and conquer
Work with both your design and development teams on the most common issues such as visual, audio, text, etc. - Strategize content structure
Ensure the content is structured correctly for digital accessibility, with headings and paragraphs that work independently from the visual aspects of your site. - Consider developing an accessibility statement and, critically, a communications process.
Create a public statement about your commitment to digital accessibility and the current state of your progress towards it. - Evaluate your current state and prioritize your fixes.
Perform automated and manual evaluations to understand how your site impacts people’s experiences. Work on the most critical steps. Be cautionary of company overlays, which promise to put a single line of JavaScript on your site and erase all of your digital accessibility issues. These services are entirely automated and therefore cannot provide comprehensive coverage. In fact, you risk delivering results that degrade the experience for people with disabilities and create security issues. See overlayfactsheet.com for more information. - Consider working with an experienced partner.
An implementation manager can run diagnostic scans and proactively work with you to meet requirements. Remember, foresight and proactive scanning of elements on your website during the build process pay dividends when launching or relaunching the website for all users.
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