Organizational Governance and Management
Introduction:
To support ongoing accessibility efforts, organizations need a clear way to manage, guide, and uphold accessibility standards and best practices. Too often, accessibility is addressed only after problems are discovered, with fixes added later to existing products and services.
Establishing accessibility governance helps shift that pattern. Instead of reacting to issues, organizations can build accessibility into their processes from the start. This approach reduces the cost and legal risk of last-minute fixes and helps build broader awareness of accessibility across the organization.
This section looks at how organizations can establish and maintain effective accessibility governance and management.
In This Section:
European Agency for Special Needs and Inclusive Education (EASNIE) Guidelines
W3C Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) Recommendations
Business Disability Forum Accessibility Maturity Model
Capability Maturity Model
Management Champions
Integration Management
Web Development Process
Scope Management
Time Management
Cost Management
Quality Management
Human Resource Management
Communication Management
Risk Management
Procurement Management
Stakeholder Management
European Agency for Special Needs and Inclusive Education (EASNIE) Guidelines
EASNIE logo
The European Agency for Special Needs and Inclusive Education supports disability inclusion in education across Europe. Among its resources are free guidelines designed specifically for organizations that want to ensure the information they produce is accessible.
The guidelines offer seven broad recommendations:
Include an accessibility statement in the organization's long-term strategy.
Develop a strategy or plan for implementing accessible information.
Make someone responsible for implementing the plan and provide them with the necessary resources.
Plan incrementally, being ambitious but realistic.
Embed accessibility into information production and dissemination processes.
Provide information, education, and training on accessibility for all staff.
When outsourcing content production, make sure accessibility requirements are addressed and verified.
The guidelines also include an organizational implementation model with three stages:
Policy
Develop a long-term strategy that recognizes all aspects of disability.
Publish an accessibility statement committing to accessible services and information.
Develop a procurement policy that covers accessibility compliance for products and services, including those used for information production and dissemination.
Plan
Develop an information accessibility plan that is detailed and ambitious, but realistic and covers small steps.
Ensure the person or team responsible has the authority and resources to carry it out.
Practice
Conduct a pilot of the guidelines.
Provide awareness training for all staff on how accessibility applies to information.
Provide training for content specialists on tools to make information accessible.
Produce style guides and templates.
Update work processes to embed information accessibility.
Create information using the style guides and templates.
Give external providers the guidelines and requirements for compliance.
Conduct accessibility testing before releasing any services or publishing any information.
W3C Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) Recommendations
W3C WAI logo
The W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) Web Accessibility Initiative has published guidance on planning and managing web accessibility within an organization. The framework applies both to individual projects and to organization-wide accessibility programs, and is built around four phases.
Initiate
Build understanding of accessibility and generate organizational support.
Learn the basics.
Explore the current environment.
Set objectives.
Develop a business case.
Raise awareness.
Gather support.
Plan
Establish clear goals and create an environment that supports accessibility.
Create an accessibility policy.
Assign responsibilities.
Determine budget and resources.
Review the environment.
Review websites.
Establish a monitoring framework.
Engage with stakeholders.
Implement
Ensure staff are trained, tools are in place, and accessibility is built into processes throughout.
Build skills and expertise.
Integrate goals into policies.
Assign tasks and support delivery.
Evaluate early and regularly.
Prioritize issues.
Track and communicate progress.
Sustain
Maintain momentum through regular review and reporting.
Monitor websites.
Engage with stakeholders.
Track standards and legislation.
Adapt to new technologies.
Incorporate user feedback.
Business Disability Forum Accessibility Maturity Model
The Business Disability Forum developed the Accessibility Maturity Model as a self-assessment tool to help organizations benchmark and plan their accessibility progress. It is based on the Accessible Technology Charter, which outlines ten commitments to good ICT accessibility practice covering areas such as executive leadership, inclusive design, workplace adjustments, procurement, staff training, and continuous improvement.
Organizations assess their progress against each commitment on a scale of one to five:
Level 1: Informal - No documentation or process in place
Level 2: Defined - Documented but not yet acted on, or completed only once
Level 3: Repeatable - Process established and followed consistently
Level 4: Managed - Process monitored and improved; business as usual
Level 5: Best Practice - Innovating, improving, and sharing with others
Capability Maturity Model
The Capability Maturity Model was originally built by Carnegie Mellon University as a way to measure process maturity in software development. The IAAP CPACC Body of Knowledge adapts it as a tool for gauging how mature an organization’s approach to ICT accessibility is.
The five maturity levels, as adapted for ICT accessibility, are:
Level 1: Initial
Capability is ad hoc and unpredictable. The organization typically does not provide a stable environment for developing and maintaining accessible products, services, and information.
Level 2: Repeatable
Policies are in place for managing projects and procedures for ICT accessibility. Processes can be characterized as:
Practiced
Documented
Enforced
Trained
Measured
Able to improve
Level 3: Defined
Standard processes for developing and maintaining ICT accessibility across the organization are documented and integrated into a coherent whole. Processes are updated as appropriate to help staff perform more effectively.
Level 4: Managed
The organization sets quantitative quality goals for products and processes. Processes include well-defined and consistent measurements.
Level 5: Optimizing
The entire organization is focused on continuous process improvement. Weaknesses are identified and addressed proactively, with the goal of preventing defects. Best practices are identified and shared throughout the organization.
Management Champions
One effective way to launch and sustain an accessibility program is to appoint accessibility champions from key areas across the organization. These are people with a deep understanding of accessibility who can assess the level of accessibility within their area of responsibility and lead efforts to improve it.
Champions serve as advocates and role models during the accessibility adoption process. They engage their teams, build awareness and skills, and promote accessibility as a shared value rather than a compliance checkbox. Specifically, champions help to:
Build a vision and align implementation strategies across the organization.
Sustain ongoing commitment and collaboration.
Support the integration of accessibility into organizational processes, distinguishing it from one-off accessibility projects.
Lead the adoption of an accessibility maturity model.
A woman giving a presentation to coworkers in an office
Integration Management
Accessibility is often thought of as a purely technical challenge, but that framing misses the bigger picture. Accessibility is fundamentally a process management challenge. To be effective, it needs to be permanently embedded into how an organization designs, develops, and tests its products and services. It is a program, not a one-time project.
two coworkers pointing to a laptop screen while discussing something
It Takes a Team
Integrating accessibility into an organization starts with having people specifically responsible for it. That means a team with a clear mandate: setting goals, selecting standards and tools, and establishing accessibility policies across the organization. The team should have a managerial leader to keep things on track, and members who represent different departments and have a genuine interest in making accessibility work.
It Requires Expertise
Accessibility requires real expertise, particularly in technical areas like web accessibility. Some ways organizations build and maintain that expertise include hiring experienced accessibility professionals, outsourcing to specialists while building internal knowledge over time, providing ongoing training, making accessibility part of the onboarding process for new hires, and including people with disabilities on the team.
It Requires Executive Support
None of this works without commitment from leadership. An executive champion for accessibility does more than empower the team. They signal to the entire organization that accessibility is a priority, not an afterthought.
Web Development Process
While this section focuses on web development, the same principles apply to the development of consumer and industrial products, architecture, transportation systems, and other areas where accessibility matters.
The web development process can be summarized in three stages: Plan, Create, Test. In practice these stages cycle continuously. In an agile workflow, the cycle might repeat every two weeks for smaller tasks, with longer cycles for larger ones. Accessibility needs to be considered at every stage, not just at the end.
three coworkers collaborating on computers
Step 1: Plan
Whether the scope is a full site redesign or a single new feature, accessibility needs to be part of the plan from the start. Planning tasks include research, setting requirements, and designing the information architecture and user experience. Key considerations include keyboard accessibility for sighted users, screen reader compatibility for blind users, zoom and color customization for low vision users, colorblindness-friendly design, and captions and transcripts for deaf and deafblind users. Roles typically involved include the executive team, product owners, business analysts, UX and UI teams, the accessibility lead, and legal and QA leads.
Step 2: Create
This is where the building and writing happens. People creating content and components need clear accessibility requirements from the planning stage. Front end code should be tested early with automated tools, manual testing, and screen reader testing. Text content needs alt text, proper heading hierarchy, logical reading order, and accessible table markup. Multimedia needs captions for deaf users, audio descriptions for blind users, and transcripts for deafblind users.
Step 3: Test
Testing is where the QA and accessibility teams verify that requirements have been met. This includes automated testing, manual testing, screen reader testing, and where possible, testing with actual users with disabilities. Defects should be logged with enough detail to reproduce and resolve them.
Scope Management
Accessibility is an ongoing need, but that does not mean every effort should be open-ended. Defining clear goals and milestones helps teams stay focused, maintain momentum, and know when a given phase of work is complete.
Most accessibility work falls into one of four categories:
Innovation
Innovation means inventing new accessibility technologies or techniques. This is the least common category. Most of the time the solutions already exist and the work is identifying and implementing the right ones. When a genuinely new problem arises, start with a clear problem statement or user story that describes who needs what and why. For example: “As a person with limited grip strength, I want to be able to pour milk into a bowl so that I can eat breakfast independently.” That kind of clarity keeps the work focused on the actual need rather than a solution in search of a problem.
New Design
New design means building accessibility into something new from the start, whether that is a new product, a new component, or new content. This is the most effective approach. Involving an accessibility expert early in the design phase, in writing requirements, and in quality assurance is far less costly than addressing problems after the fact.
Retrofitting
Retrofitting means fixing accessibility problems in an existing product or design. This is harder and more expensive than building in accessibility from the start, but often unavoidable. Before diving in, it is worth asking whether retrofitting makes more sense than starting fresh. The answer depends on how recent the existing design is, how severe the accessibility problems are, and what other priorities are in play. When retrofitting, the basic steps are to create an inventory of everything that needs assessment, evaluate the items in that inventory, and prioritize fixes based on impact.
Maintenance
Maintenance means monitoring an existing product over time to ensure new changes do not introduce accessibility regressions. If accessibility problems are appearing regularly with new updates, that is a signal to revisit the overall development process rather than treating each issue as a one-off fix.
Time Management
Managers often want to know how much extra time accessibility will add to a project. The honest answer is that it depends, but the more important point is that when accessibility is built into the process from the start, it stops being “extra” altogether. It becomes the way things are done.
For organizations just getting started, some additional time investment is realistic. In a best-case scenario with an experienced team and good processes, accessibility might add only 1% to 5% to overall development time. In a worst-case scenario, with an inexperienced team, a poor process, and badly inaccessible existing content that needs to be rebuilt from the ground up, it can double or triple development time.
The factors that most affect how long accessibility work takes include how experienced the team is, how mature the accessibility process is, whether the work involves a new design or retrofitting an old one, how much interactivity and multimedia the product contains, and whether automated testing tools are part of the workflow.
Having a dedicated Accessibility Lead or Coordinator helps significantly. This person can manage the process, provide technical expertise, and ensure accessibility is considered at every stage from requirements through QA. Building a shared library of pre-tested accessible components is another effective way to reduce time across projects.
The real goal is to make accessibility business as usual, not something that gets bolted on at the end or revisited only occasionally. Once that culture is in place, the question of how much accessibility costs largely answers itself.
Cost Management
Accessibility costs are closely tied to time. In most cases, the primary cost of accessibility work is simply the staff time required to do it well. That said, there are two additional cost categories worth planning for.
Third-Party Consultants
It sometimes makes sense to bring in external accessibility specialists, particularly when a project needs expertise the internal team does not yet have. Services might include evaluating existing content, training the team, working alongside developers, fixing inaccessible content, or advising on process strategy. Costs vary widely depending on the scope and type of engagement.
Software and Assistive Technologies
Some accessibility testing tools are free, but enterprise-level scanning and reporting tools carry licensing costs. Organizations may also need to budget for assistive technology licenses, such as screen readers, to support both testing and any employees who use them.
Quality Management
Good accessibility QA starts in the planning phase, not at the end of development. The clearer the accessibility requirements written upfront, the clearer the tests will be, and the better the chance of catching issues before the product ships.
Team of developers discussing programming code on computer screen
User Stories
User stories are a useful way to capture accessibility requirements in terms of real user needs. They can be written into design requirements early and reused across projects, since the accessibility needs of users with disabilities remain consistent even when implementation details change. A couple of examples:
“As a blind screen reader user navigating a form with the tab key, I want my screen reader to announce the label of each input field so I know what it is for.”
“As a low vision user who has difficulty reading low-contrast text, I want text to meet WCAG AA contrast requirements so I can read it clearly.”
Acceptance Criteria
Acceptance criteria give developers a clear definition of done. For the examples above, acceptable outcomes might include programmatically associated labels on form inputs, and text that passes WCAG AA contrast ratios as verified by an automated testing tool.
Bug Reports
QA team members need to write specific, reproducible bug reports that explain accessibility defects clearly enough for developers who may not have deep accessibility knowledge.
Evaluating Early and Often
The W3C recommends evaluating accessibility early and continuously throughout the design and development process. It is easier and less costly to catch issues early than to fix them after the fact. This means performing formative evaluations during design, summative evaluations at key milestones, and continuous evaluations any time new content is added or code is updated. Designing with a “born accessible” mindset from the outset, and maintaining a library of reusable pre-tested accessible components, reduces the burden of evaluation over time.
Testing with Users with Disabilities
One of the most effective QA investments is involving people with disabilities in testing. Testers who are expert screen reader users or who have other disabilities will identify real-world barriers that automated tools and non-disabled testers will miss, and their presence on the team builds broader accessibility awareness across the whole organization.
Human Resource Management
Recruiting and Integrating Employees with Disabilities
Hiring people with disabilities is one of the most effective ways to bring genuine accessibility expertise into an organization. People with disabilities are the true experts on what it means to navigate the world with a disability, and their perspective is difficult to replicate through training alone.
In many countries, discriminating against people with disabilities in hiring is illegal. In practice, however, soft discrimination remains common. Candidates with disabilities are sometimes passed over due to assumptions about cost or inconvenience, even when those concerns are unfounded and the reasons given are something else entirely. Building a more inclusive workforce requires actively challenging that thinking.
Practical steps for more inclusive recruiting involve incorporating a disability inclusion statement in job postings and on recruitment pages, posting openings on disability-focused job boards, promoting the organization at disability-focused job fairs, and ensuring that the recruitment website and all postings are themselves accessible. Facilities should be accessible to applicants and employees, and reasonable accommodations including assistive technologies should be available.
Two workers in safety gear operate industrial machinery in a factory; one uses a wheelchair while both review controls at a console.
Recruiting Accessibility Talent
When hiring for roles that require accessibility expertise, be specific about what that means. Depending on the position, relevant skills might include proficiency in CSS, HTML, and JavaScript, experience with accessibility evaluation tools and keyboard testing, the ability to use and test with screen reader software, experience remediating documents and presentations, and knowledge of standards such as WCAG 2.1 and PDF/UA. Requiring or preferring candidates with a CPACC certification is another way to signal that commitment.
Good places to post accessibility-specific roles include the IAAP Career Center, the a11yjobs Digital Accessibility Job Board, and relevant professional groups and mailing lists.
Keep in mind that accessibility is a deep field, and even experienced candidates may have gaps. That is acceptable as long as the person has the capacity to grow and the organization provides the time and resources to support that growth.
Workforce Development and Training
Most existing team members, whether developers, designers, testers, or managers, will not come in with strong accessibility knowledge. Not everyone needs to become an expert, but everyone should understand the basics. Investing in ongoing professional development benefits the organization and the people it serves.
Communication Management
General Awareness
Accessibility awareness needs to extend across the entire organization, not just to the people doing technical implementation. When accessibility is treated as a shared expectation rather than a specialist concern, it is far more likely to be considered consistently at every stage of a project.
Involving the Accessibility Lead
The Accessibility Lead needs enough organizational authority to influence decisions at a high level. Many decisions that seem unrelated to accessibility can have real accessibility implications, and those implications are easy to miss if the right person is not at the table.
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Risk Management
Assessing Legal Liability
Legal risk around accessibility varies by country and industry. Universities, financial institutions, government entities, and transportation providers are generally held to a higher standard than other industries and face greater legal exposure for non-compliance. The legal team should assess both the legal and financial risks of failing to meet accessibility requirements.
A young professional woman seated at a desk, analyzing graphs and charts
Prioritizing Risks
Not all accessibility gaps carry the same risk. Part of risk management is identifying which parts of a product or service present the biggest barriers and therefore the greatest legal exposure. A bank, for example, might prioritize accessible customer login and basic account functions before addressing loan applications or promotional content.
Public Relations
Fighting a disability access lawsuit publicly is rarely a good look. Organizations can get ahead of reputational risk by demonstrating a genuine commitment to accessibility. Publishing an accessibility statement is one way to do this. Providing clear feedback channels so that employees and users can report accessibility issues is another. Acting on that feedback visibly and consistently signals that accessibility is a real priority, not just a policy document.
Internal Accountability
Program and project managers need to hold team members accountable for their respective roles in the accessibility process. Accessibility does not improve on its own. Everyone needs to play their part.
Procurement Management
Buy Accessible Products
When purchasing products and tools for your organization, accessibility needs to be part of the evaluation criteria. If employees with disabilities cannot use the tools the organization provides, you are limiting their ability to contribute effectively and potentially creating legal exposure.
A smiling man holding a tablet in a warehouse, standing in front of many boxes ready to be shipped
Verifying Accessibility Claims
A vendor who understands accessibility and makes specific claims about it is a better starting point than one who does not. But claims alone are not enough. Ask for a trial or sample, have a trusted accessibility expert evaluate the product, and compare it against competing options. After completing a review, share the findings with the vendor. You may learn something new, or the vendor may receive feedback they can act on.
VPATs
In the United States, vendors can publish a Voluntary Product Accessibility Template (VPAT) explaining how their product performs against Section 508 guidelines. VPATs are a useful reference point but have real limitations. There is no third-party verification, and vendors can make claims that do not hold up under scrutiny. Treat a VPAT as one factor among several, not as sufficient proof of accessibility on its own.
Accessibility in Contracts
Any contract that will produce content or a product should include an accessibility clause. Make sure contractors understand that accessibility is a requirement and that the outcome will be evaluated by an accessibility expert. Verify that the contractor has the expertise to meet those requirements, or that they will work with someone who does.
Leveraging Purchasing Power
When organizations decline to purchase inaccessible products, vendors notice. Purchasing decisions send a clear signal about what matters, and over time that pressure encourages vendors to prioritize accessibility in their products.
Stakeholder Management
A core part of any program or project manager’s role is managing expectations across stakeholder groups. That means listening to their concerns, understanding their priorities, and keeping them informed throughout the process. Every situation will involve a different mix of stakeholders.
At a minimum, stakeholders typically include the design, development, and testing team, and the clients or users the product serves, including people with disabilities. In more complex situations, such as when legal action is involved, stakeholders may also include lawyers, advocacy groups, and government officials or bodies.
Identifying all relevant stakeholders early and keeping them appropriately informed throughout the process is a straightforward habit that prevents a lot of problems down the line.
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