Strategically grow your accessibility program
Meet your business goals with industry leading tools, services, and training.
Evolving your accessibility program, expanding impact, and building momentum
Your accessibility program ensures that every digital product, service, and experience is accessible to people with disabilities. To succeed, you need to:
- Establish policies that define accessibility goals for your organization
- Implement testing tools that enable teams to fix accessibility issues early
- Offer training to build accessibility knowledge across teams
- Implement measurement and governance processes to track compliance
Expanding your program means scaling the impact, reach, and sustainability of your efforts and advancing from foundational practices to long-term program sustainability.
Choosing Deque for digital accessibility gets you access to the tools, training, and services you need to optimize your approach, backed by unrivaled expertise and industry leadership.
The stages of accessibility program evolution
Foundational
Foundational
Addressing specific accessibility issues or projects with point-in-time solutions.
Repeatable
Repeatable
Building repeatable accessibility processes, education, and shared standards across teams.
Integrated
Integrated
Integrating accessibility into development and QA workflows with automated tools and governance.
Scalable
Scalable
Embedding accessibility into culture, processes, and systems for sustainable programs.
Overcoming barriers to program growth
Reactive processes
Endless audits and reactive fixes are ineffective and costly. Instead, you can proactively embed accessibility into the start of your workflows, saving time and money and limiting risk.
Knowledge gaps
A lack of access to reliable accessibility expertise increases your risk and undermines your ability to build accessibly. With the right resources in place, you can educate your teams and drive impact.
Team silos
Without cross-functional alignment, it’s difficult to build momentum and achieve measurable impact. Spreading awareness and breaking down silos makes accessibility a shared goal.
Limited buy-in
To overcome leadership resistance, you need to build a business case for continued investment in your program. Tracking progress and demonstrating value helps you secure stakeholder buy-in.
Turn challenges into opportunities
Build a sustainable digital accessibility program with Deque
Catch issues before production
Identify accessibility issues early in design, development, and QA to avoid costly rework that comes with having to fix issues after a release. Integrate tools to automate accessibility testing in your CI/CD pipelines, IDEs, browsers, and native apps.
Equip teams with the right resources
Give teams education and tools tailored to their workflows so accessibility becomes part of daily work. Train teams to self-serve, freeing experts to focus on more complex issues, while creating a culture where accessibility is embedded into systems, language, and processes.
Demonstrate continuous impact
Measure trends, progress, and impact of accessibility initiatives over time. Use insights to prioritize actions and make the case for continued investment. Unify testing, reporting, and governance with an integrated platform to boost collaboration and communication.
Get the tools, services, and training you need to advance your program
Tools
Add accessibility testing tools seamlessly into your tech stack so you can find and fix issues as early as possible in the SDLC.
Services
Get access to industry-leading services, strategy, training, consulting and expertise.
Training
Upskill your team with tailored accessibility learning, including expert-led courses, coaching, and in-depth resources.
Work with our strategic consultants to create your playbook for accessibility transformation
Save time and money by shifting accessibility testing earlier
Addressing accessibility earlier and incorporating it into your design and development processes enables your team to identify and resolve issues more quickly, minimize costly rework, expedite release timelines, and deliver better user experiences. This approach, referred to as “shifting left,” is essential for building momentum, demonstrating ROI, and achieving long-term success.
"What I like most about working with Deque is their collaboration, professionalism, and perhaps most importantly, their patience throughout every engagement. This is what keeps me coming back.”
Ian Lyons
Software Engineer, Blend Labs
"We love Deque! It’s been a phenomenal journey. Our customers are extremely happy. We even won a couple of deals because we had an accessibility-compliant product.”
Senthilnathan Shanmugam
Senior Manager of Design at Freshworks
Additional resources
I’ve received the results of my accessibility audit. Now what?
Learn how to keep the momentum going after an accessibility audit.
Scaling an Accessibility Program Efficiently
See how accessibility applies to key areas of your organization and how to strategically grow your program.
Axe-con
Join professionals of all experience levels as we rally to advance digital accessibility programs everywhere at Axe-con.
Frequently asked questions
How do I build a business case to continue investment in my accessibility program?
To build a business care for accessibility you can focus on a few things:
- Demonstrate legal impact by showing how accessibility lowers risk of costly lawsuits and fines.
- Demonstrate financial impact by showing how you can increase efficiency in a way that saves money and increases ROI.
- Demonstrate reputational impact by showing how accessibility enhances brand reputation, drives customer loyalty, and improves UX.
What are the next steps after an audit?
After an audit, your next steps should focus on turning insights into action.
Start by reviewing and prioritizing the findings to understand which issues have the greatest impact on users and compliance. From there, build a clear remediation plan—assign owners, set timelines, and track progress to ensure fixes are made efficiently. It’s also critical to empower your developers with the right tools and training so they can catch and fix accessibility issues early, before code reaches production. Finally, integrate accessibility testing into your design, development, and CI/CD workflows, and continue monitoring over time to maintain compliance and prevent regressions. This approach turns your audit results into lasting accessibility improvements.
What does a sustainable accessibility program consist of?
A sustainable accessibility program combines the right tools, processes, and people to make accessibility part of everyday work. This means using accessibility testing tools throughout the software development lifecycle to catch issues early and monitor progress over time. It also includes training and resources that empower teams across the organization to embed accessibility into their workflows and self-serve for common issues, freeing experts to focus on complex challenges. Lastly, a sustainable program reflects ongoing investment from an organization to integrate accessibility into company policies, culture, systems, and processes, ensuring it remains a core part of how the organization operates and evolves.
