As year-end approaches, many companies are reluctant to start major projects and make major financial commitments. But does that mean your digital accessibility program should grind to a halt until the New Year and new funding?
We have identified 6 ways that you can keep digital access moving across different areas of your organisation in the lead up to the summer break. Each one costs no more than $5,000 and can be implemented quickly and easily, and tackle common issues that impact on many organisations.
- Upskilling your web team allows you to fix any web accessibility problems quickly and in-house. Our first action is to sign up two of your web developers to the Professional Certificate in Web Accessibility. This is the only university-accredited web accessibility certificate for web professionals. The next online course starts in February, but you can register now to secure a place and get them thinking about which priority issues they need to tackle. Upskilling only costs $2,400 each.
- To ensure that the rest of the online team don’t miss out, you can start by pointing them to the massive range of professional accessibility resources on the Access iQ website. Many of these resources are free to use, providing practical solutions for developers and digital content specialists.
- If you want to give your content authors, designers and developers instant accessibility resources, where the issues, solutions and key information for WCAG 2.0 have been categorised and outlined specifically for their roles, our professional accessibility guides will save days of searching. A 12-month subscription to an individual guide starts at just over $300 and there are volume discounts for up to 10 users.
- Not sure how you should prioritise your digital accessibility efforts? A Digital Accessibility Maturity Assessment (DAMA) is a great starting point to give you a roadmap. It can be completed in a day and you receive a comprehensive report benchmarking your organisation and practical recommendations on how to get started in different areas. A well-spent $3,500 can give you the base for next year’s plan and provide some easy wins to demonstrate progress and commitment this year. If you are a member of our accessibility partner Australian Network on Disability, you can use membership hours for the DAMA.
- Document accessibility is the most common digital accessibility issue that organisations face, yet making documents accessible in programs like Word and then converting them into accessible PDFs for distribution can be relatively simple. We can show you how in our one day practical creating accessible content course. We can customise it to cover other needs, such as InDesign, Excel, PowerPoint, images and maps, if you need it. Getting ten staff trained in accessible content is $5,000.
- Sometimes you have a number of small accessibility issues that need fixing. Whether it’s a checklist, an urgent need to make a document accessible, advice on how to deal with an archive of content or a specific website accessibility issue, our specialist experts can help you with our hourly consulting service.
Another key benefit of getting some quick advances on your digital accessibility strategy is that it helps build the case for your overall strategy and tackling the bigger projects in the New Year.
For more information on Media Access Australia’s digital accessibility services covering website and mobile app audits, accessibility compliance consulting and more, you can request a quote or call us on (02) 9212 6242.