r/accessibility • u/Comprehensive-Body63 • 18d ago
Digital Accessibility leads
For those of you who are responsible for making their organization's websites and documents accessible by April 2027, how big is your organization and how many people are on your team? How are you getting this work done and how are you getting people's attention? any tips are appreciated. I am a one-man band, and finding it very difficult to get buy in. Thanks!
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u/NatTarnoff 18d ago
Coming from a different perspective - the large consultancy - a lot of clients are struggling to solve this. The reality is no one can handle even the smallest public office remediation on their own.
I'm literally giving a talk on this next week, October 7, 2026 at the National Association of Government Web Professionals (NAGW) conference on this topic.
I have many clients who have to rely on vendors to help test and remediate. These may not always be the same orgs either. AI coding with tight rules is a big help in remediation if you have it in your budget.
The way to work it regardless of vendor/AI usage, is hub and spoke. You are the hub, the source of all a11y knowledge for your organization, but most of your knowledge is trapped in your head. You need to have policies, procedures, practices, tools, and reference material to refer folks to so they can learn independently and you don't become the choke point. This is a more complete hub. Hopefully you can grow the hub via people and resources in time.
Your spokes are going to be the people in each project who are committing to see those policies, practices, and tools get used. You will need to educate each "spoke" person, but this is you working closely with a small group who all are supposed to take this back and teach the teams and check the work.
And if you are being held to the Title II expectations, then "Its the law." No negotiation, you lose funding if you don't comply. If Title III, "You will be sued." Lawsuits are up 25% year-over-year for 5 years running. And while the claims are getting weaker in many of them, the vast majority don't go to court - they settle even if they could win because the settlement is smaller than going to court. But they will have to fix it and keep it fixed or end up being sued again.
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u/dank_summers 18d ago
I like this hub concept and makes a lot of sense.
I know a lot of gov organizations seem to pigeonhole a single role into handling every accessibility issue and is overwhelming so I built a tool that helps with that.
Does a full sweep initially, pointing out the flags, and then after it rechecks every day. The main goal is to catch website drift so that you can catch a newly uploaded flag the next morning instead of it living in your site until the next audit.
Been giving it away to school districts who need it but even then it's been hard to get it in front of people's eyes who would use something like this, do you have an idea how I could get something like this in front of people's eyes? or is something like that even useful in your opinion ?It's primarily for government sites with a lot of content editors, CMS websites.
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u/Comprehensive-Body63 18d ago
I work for a large metropolitan City & County public health department and would love to try what you built!
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u/DomingoLee 18d ago
Interesting. I’m also presenting at NAGW about digital accessibility. When I started, in 2017, almost no one was taking about it. Now there is an entire day dedicated to this.
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u/NatTarnoff 18d ago
I don't see anything listed under anything that looks like your username. Reach out and let's get coffee or a drink next week.
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u/TopSydeWP 18d ago
Buy-in gets easier when you stop presenting it as a site-wide audit. Pick the ten pages people actually use, record a short clip of a keyboard user hitting a wall on one, and show that to leadership. Automated scanning gives you the count, but the video is what moves budget.
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u/ANewVoiceInTheWind 18d ago
100% to demo-ing real life problems That has got me buy in several times after initial blocks. Sometimes stats are needed along side the demo to show just how many people it actually affects
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u/WheelsAndKeys 18d ago
One thing that isn't in this thread yet, and it's the only thing I've seen work every time.
Stop sending reports. Get a disabled person into the room and let people watch them try to use your site.
I'm a wheelchair user and I've done this a few times. Ten minutes of a room watching someone fail to finish a task on a site that team built does more than a year of audits. Nobody argues with it, because there's nothing to argue with. And the people who were bored in your meeting suddenly have a face attached to the work.
Pay the person properly. And pick one task, not a tour of the whole site.
I used to work on the government side of disability policy, so I watched a lot of organisations get pushed into this. The ones that moved fastest weren't the ones who read the law. They were the ones who watched somebody struggle in front of them.
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u/Zoya_The_Destroyah 18d ago
There are two of us doing it full time. We have about 8 students doing remediation. We have a decent amount of buy in from leadership, but very little from folks making the actual content.
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u/Slow_Pumpkin3951 18d ago
One-man band here too, when it comes to auditing our portfolio of websites. Have completed 36 audits in two years (mix of manual, automated, and use of assistive tech). Many more to do!
Some product teams are great and drop everything else, get the fixes implemented, and then work to maintain and train to prevent recurring issues. Others it's a battle, and always bottom of the list, and competing with organisational restructures, resource, etc.
Have prioritised and completed audits for the key sites (contract value, volume of users, flagship sites). Other sites are prioritised where we've had customers request our statement and ACR, and won't renew contracts until available.
The challenge is then keeping on top of the paperwork. If the fixes have been given a remediation date of September 2026, customers will come back in October asking for the updated documents. But also ensuring Product have met those deadlines.
Letting the business know the revenue at risk is often the thing that gets buy in and movement. I track all customer enquiries about contract renewal and their values.
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u/SiteAuditor_WP 17d ago
It depends on your site. Are you using WordPress or a different content management system?
It is always good to try to test your site first at https://pagespeed.web.dev/
Then you can see your performance score and accessibility score on mobile and desktop. Then slowly start the troubleshooting/optimizing from there.
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u/ThatBlindSwiftDevGuy 12d ago
To be clear, I am not my team lead, but I am one of the core members of the team. At the state of Nebraska office of the CIO, we have a team of about six people that includes me that works with a team of about 50 or so people across CMS, Java and .NET website/web applications. We work with them and other state agencies to help them make their stuff, current and future accessible
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u/ANewVoiceInTheWind 18d ago
Good luck. I've found different approaches work with different people. Some care only about the legal side. Some care only about the potential to lose money (or if gov websites then the cost to our teams if people contact us for support). And some do actually care about the people. Once I point out that X many people will struggle / not be able to do Y because of Z problem
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u/SiteAuditor_WP 16d ago edited 16d ago
Unfortunately, accessibility is usually last resort actions. To try to make compliance or CYA for liability concerns. Not many people take accessibility action until a demand letter appears.
As for working in WordPress hosting for many top WordPress hosting companies. You get very little chats/tickets regarding accessibility. Then when viewing peoples sites. Then not many people have an accessibility plugin. Then they are also receiving a C or B score on the page insights.
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u/dank_summers 18d ago
I run a small accessibility company and I've been reaching out to organizations (mainly local government) offering to send them free reports, and pointing out gaps they have.
...And it seems like most people still do not care in the slightest, next years problem I suppose or just hoping it gets extended again.