As an engineering leader, there are many reasons why digital accessibility may suddenly get handed to you as a priority. Your organization might be facing a legal threat. A regulation may have changed. Accessibility issues may have emerged as a sales blocker. Whatever the reason, you’re going to have to figure it out. And you’re likely asking yourself, Where do I start with accessibility when I’ve never owned it before?
You’re going to need a plan, and a lot of information.
In this post, we’ll give you a three-stage, 90-day plan. As a bonus, we’ll also explain why developer upskilling can be your biggest long-term asset.
The first 90 days
- Stage one: Scoping the problem
- Stage two: Tooling and testing
- Stage three: Audits and remediation
*Bonus: The importance of training
The first 90 days
Plan on breaking your first 90 days into three stages. The number of days you spend on each will vary depending on many factors, but the sequence remains the same.
Stage one: Scoping the problem
To successfully scope the challenge ahead, you need context. If you’re at a larger organization, the chances are particularly good that somebody somewhere has accessibility expertise, and some understanding of the company’s current accessibility state. The more information you can gather about what has and hasn’t been done before, the better positioned you’ll be to move your effort forward.
For example, what factors are driving accessibility requirements? Is your company in control of the timeline, or are external legal pressures demanding a specific delivery time? Does your company have any digital accessibility testing tools, and if so, which ones? Has your company conducted accessibility tests before, and if so, what was tested and what were the results? Has your company ever had a digital accessibility audit? When, and what were the results? Have determinations been made about which standards your company currently needs to conform to?
That last question is particularly important, because conformance to an applicable accessibility standard is a key factor in the vast majority of digital accessibility lawsuits—it’s why accessibility testing is so critical. Which brings us to the second stage: tooling and testing.
Stage two: Tooling and testing
Put simply, the work of meeting your company’s digital accessibility requirements involves making inaccessible digital products, services, and experiences accessible. To know whether they’re accessible, you have to test them.
Testing within your browser, with free tools like Deque’s browser extension in Chrome or WebAIM’s WAVE, is a great place to start.
As you advance your approach to testing, you’ll want to consider automated accessibility testing within your broader end-to-end testing strategy. You can look at tools that integrate with your existing test frameworks (such as Playwright, Selenium, or Cypress), AI-powered guided testing, or even MCP connections that enable you to fix issues directly in your IDE.
(Note: If you have native mobile applications, a unique toolset is required, because testing guidelines and strategies for native mobile differ from web, and require special expertise and rule mapping.)
Mainly, the sooner you get started with testing, the sooner you’ll have results to react to. And once you have test results, you can begin to fix your issues. With the right automated tools, your team should be able to solve over 50% of the problems right away.
Make sure to take a systemic approach, avoid accessibility overlay solutions that cause more issues than they solve, and beware of any tools that return high rates of false positives—you’ll burn your team out before you’ve barely gotten started. Some approaches to consider:
- If you use a design system, or pattern or component libraries, you can significantly increase your accessibility score by fixing the following types of issues:
- Color contrast
- Focus, hover, and error state indications
- Visible labels
- Keyboard access
- From there, you can move on to page-level issues for web applications, such as:
- Page structure
- Keyboard-only navigation
- Identify decorative vs. informative images
- Alternative text for images
Stage three: Audits and remediation
Using the right automated tools, you can make an early impact with some comparatively quick fixes. From there, you need to understand how to approach everything else. This is where an expert accessibility audit is vitally important.
Hiring an expert company that specializes in digital accessibility testing and remediation is a smart step at this stage, because modern digital accessibility can be complex. You’ll need to balance both manual and automated testing, and regulatory requirements can differ widely depending on where and how your organization operates—this can impact everything from which standard you need to test to, to which version of a VPAT (Voluntary Product Accessibility Template) and ACR (Accessibility Conformance Report) you need to use to report your status and show your initial efforts are making a difference.
The right digital accessibility partner will deliver fast results, trusted findings, and actionable guidance. At Deque, we cover everything from assessment to prioritization to remediation:
- Assessment. Deque experts assess your digital accessibility, combining automated and manual testing to identify issues.
- Prioritization. Organizations receive a tailored results dashboard to help prioritize the most critical issues.
- Remediation. Developers are empowered with clear guidance, and can also work directly with Deque experts.
The importance of training
Even as you’re moving through your first 90 days, there is a parallel effort you can be mounting: upskilling your teams. This is important, because you’re probably wondering at this point, “Should I hire a dedicated accessibility engineer or distribute ownership across the team?”
The answer depends on many factors, but you should be able to proceed on the assumption that you have what you need with your current teams—provided you give them the right training opportunities.
Training should be an important part of your long-term strategy, because digital accessibility is not a one-and-done project. To ensure your products remain accessible, your development process will need to change, and your team will need to learn new skills.
Development teams that are efficient at shipping accessible products have learned how to code for accessibility by default. If that is not where your team is, you should decide how to get your team there. Some options to consider include:
- Pick one front-end developer and have them work on fixing the accessibility issues, learning the automated test patterns, and the tools you select, and then have them share their learnings with the rest of your team.
- Have a hackathon with an entire product team focused on accessibility, where they fix most of the accessibility issues. It is helpful to hire an expert for this hackathon. This is a big commitment, but it is often the fastest way to upskill a team.
- Help technical and non-technical roles grow their accessibility expertise with self-paced or instructor-led training. From IAAP certification courses to advanced learning paths and guided training, your team can continue to develop as your accessibility initiatives evolve.
Next steps
Digital accessibility is all about progress over perfection. You won’t emerge from your first 90 days with every single issue fixed, and it will take time for you to successfully lead your organization along those additional paths.
The good news is that each bit of progress you achieve makes the next achievement that much easier to reach. And the more progress you make, the more evidence there will be that your team is succeeding.
Here are just some of the changes you can expect to see as teams incorporate accessibility into their development process:
- Designs are explicit about the roles and expected behaviors of components and pages.
- Front-end developers learn accessible code patterns (e.g., proper use of ARIA markup for web applications) and not only ensure that their work passes automated accessibility checks, but they also use techniques that will pass manual audits.
- Any new feature work includes automated tests for accessibility.
- Pull requests include accessibility checks.
- More comprehensive (including interactive) testing is performed before a release is pushed to production.
- Accessibility issues reported in production are tracked as specially tagged tickets and prioritized.
- Each product has a current VPAT or equivalent and an accessibility statement.
After your first 90 days, you won’t have everything solved, and you don’t need to. What you will have is a working understanding of your accessibility landscape, a set of tools and processes your team can build on, and real evidence of progress.
Best of all, the path gets easier as you go, because each issue your team fixes becomes an issue they know how to prevent going forward. Every quality tool you integrate and every efficient process you implement are investments that compound.
Deque can help at all points along the way. From tools and audits to training and strategy, we work with organizations at every stage of the accessibility journey. Reach out today, and let’s get you on the path to long-term digital accessibility success.
