26th of August 2022 was the date that I got my International Association of Accessibility Professionals (IAAP) certification called Web Accessibility Specialist (WAS).
Time flies as I can clearly remember that I was quite nervous while waiting weeks for results. I took certification before recommended years of practical experience and some parts of questions were indeed difficult for me. That’s also the part that I wanted to study more about. So it was also a very good overview of my knowledge holes and where I should invest more of my time into.
After two years I managed to lift internal and external accessibility efforts in our co-owned agency and for our customers. Some times with lots of success and sometimes with problems. Sometimes accessibility needs time to grow on people, especially stakeholders, but also peers. I was happy that internal leadership recognized the importance and need for dedication, but still I had to struggle with some change management.
So I think that IAAP needs to invest some time into providing good change management practical instructions and knowledge base as well. It’s easy to convince people that understand, but it can be really hard to convince all others.
Even in countries that have WCAG a part of legal requirements it’s not easy to get all people onboard. So I really needed to work on that by myself and sometimes, as a front-end developer, it was really not easy. Accessibility is team effort, but this fact is not really know outside of groups of people that practice it. Often I was left alone to implement it and had to go back to designs and change them. That was not easy as well.
With time, at least internally, it was way better, but still not easy. It was really hard with external design agencies where they seemed to hear about WCAG for the first time. But it was even more difficult with people that just wanted to release minimum viable products and fix the problems afterwards.
I really wished IAAP would add the change management to body of knowledge and suggest good sources that would make the practicalities easier for certified people. They are doing something now and I will try to follow up as it’s way better to learn from others than it is from my own mistakes.
I wonder how the WAS certification I took updates with coming WCAG 2.2 and WCAG 3. As I just completed all my required Continuing Accessibility Education Credits (CAECs) it means that next year my WAS will be automatically prolonged for three years. But that will also mean that WCAG 2.2. will be out and I will have to follow up on its official success criteria on my own. Even worse when WCAG 3.0 will be out. I think that most probably WCAG 3.0 will require a special WAS certification as WCAG 2.X and WCAG 3.X will continue to co-exist in the future.
I am happy that I took the certification, but at the same time I am realistic about it’s worth. There are many much more experienced people out there, with and without certifications and this was for my part only an indicator of which parts of WCAG and accessibility I still need to work on.
Time flies, and I’ve learned a lot, but I am still learning each and every day, and I never claim that getting the WAS is the goal. For me it’s more to get the map and a helper that tries to explain the journey to me.
