Accessibility training is extremely important.
Once you have your personnel – so your employees, your staff, your contractors – once you have them trained in accessibility, it’s going to dramatically lower your costs and then, two, it’s going to enable you to produce much more accessible digital experiences out-of-the-box.
And this will come relatively quickly because accessibility is not that difficult.
What happens is your designers, your developers, your content managers – they will learn the different accessibility considerations, which by the way are not that complicated.
It may seem complex at first but it is not and give these- give your personnel a few months and then over time they will learn how to incorporate accessibility into what they do and it will be it will just be a seamless process.
So training is going to prevent issues from ever even arising.
So you’re not constantly remediating; the issues aren’t even there to begin with.
And the issues that are there they will be much, much fewer than they would be without training.
So there will be less to remediate after the fact.
It will also enable you to conduct internal audits.
Yes, the audits may not be perfect because you’re not- your team’s not in an in-house team of accessibility experts, but you still have the practical ability to find accessibility issues and remediate them.
Also, it’s going to cost lower the cost of accessibility and the reason why is because you won’t constantly need to source this out to an independent third-party expert.
So you may source out at times. So there may be times where you want user testing conducted or audits – and that’s that’s a good thing.
It’s a good idea to have those performed sometimes- to have an audit perform sometimes but you don’t need to constantly have them involved.
So whereas before you would constantly need someone to audit and re-audit and and perform another audit, a third audit, now you won’t need that you will have that training in-house to where it won’t be so necessary.
And you can have them done on an annual basis or once every two years or you could even alternate back and forth.
It will also better you to evaluate vendors when you do need to source for accessibility.
So as it stands your organization may not have much accessibility experience or knowledge in-house but once training- once your personnel have undergone training, then they’re going to be knowledgeable enough to ask the right questions and understand are we getting can we expect the right deliverables and excellent quality of deliverable.
And they’re going to be able to evaluate those deliverables.
So that’s going to help with procurement when you do need it because sometimes you may need procurement.
For example, let’s say you have multiple mobile apps and there are multiple websites that you just you need to source the audits to because that’s really outside of the scope of your team is to be finding all of these accessibility issues on all of these different digital assets that make sense.
Whenever there’s a large volume of work to be performed you might need to source it, but when you do your team is going to be able to better evaluate the vendors and their deliverables.
And so this leads to my next point: there’s less reliance on third parties for accessibility because now your team is trained and they can take care of a lot of the accessibility workload and make that a part of their process so that your company or your organization is creating more digital assets more digital- more accessible digital assets.
