I have repeated it a lot here, but I still fill I have to emphasize this even more – when accessibility is a part of the initial product kick-off we all save time and money!
Starting with inclusive design, defining names, roles, states, descriptions in the design phase, helping to proactively declare important (interactive) parts that will work across devices is the best recipe for a truly accessible digital products.
And by building-in accessibility features from the start we can also make sure our customers get a decent and useful documentation about it at the same time. This is also an important aspect of digital production – especially in countries that are having an active policy for compliance checking of some kind. It will also be more assuring for customer – to have some kind of accessibility documentation in their hands after developers move on to other projects. And at the same time – we all know how difficult can sometimes be to get back on a project that was deleted from our minds, so good documentation can also benefit the developers and designers.
Style guide with emphasis on accessibility can be a base for good proactive accessibility and a good documentation at the same time. Developers and designers working together, pro-actively thinking on accessibility are also adding to lower costs on the end.
note to myself, and to all of us, actually
At the same time we should not forget that the producers of technical solutions can not solely bear the answer as almost all digital products are dynamic in their nature and therefore require constant re-evaluations, especially for new content but also for old parts of it – for example checking that links still work and so on.
Being proactive has additional benefits too – for example knowledge sharing that can be spread from provider to customer too. This is an added value too, that can help customers support their accessibility efforts on the longer run too. It is in a way the same benefit as with mobile first – when thinking mobile first you are almost forced to find good solutions than improve usability and overall user experience also for larger screens (or just being zoomed-in screens as well).
To conclude – start soon, start wide and make sure to be proactive, ask all the questions, maybe even define task lists and check lists so that you can always support the accessibility from the start on.
