Even if you have nothing to do with Europe you probably want to extend your reach to it’s market. Perhaps not right now, but probably somewhere in the future. As a leader of your organization you probably have worked a lot on vision, strategy and goals. As a leader you empower people to follow them, for the common successes. Please consider the positive benefits of reaching more users with investing into accessibility.
Chances are (more than 96% actually), that your products and services are not accessible. Leaders often delegate things, but I hope I can convince you to embrace European Accessibility Act (EAA) as an important opportunity. It goes beyond technical checklists and quality assurance, it requires you to be proactive or risk to fail. Dear leader, it is up to you to set the accessibility into the core of your business, because it requires change management, it requires vision adjustments, and it indeed requires culture change if you want to succeed.
Accessibility should be the default. It must be the default, but it takes understanding and knowledge to embrace this fact. Perhaps EAA can be used as a motivator, if nothing else…
As a leader you should recognize the cost of delegating it before understanding it’s impact. It may seem as an additional, compliance cost at first. Another legislation that needs to have it’s check boxes checked. Another certification that needs your organization to look better on paper than it probably is in reality.
But please stop. It is not enough to just delegate it and throw money at it. Sure, it can perhaps work out, if people will understand their impact better than you when you delegate them the task. If you want to succeed, on a strategic level, you need to lead before you delegate.
Setting an example is important, especially for leaders. Change management requires leaders to be involved, to revise the visions and strategies and to improve the culture. Please be aware that accessibility goes beyond technical conformance to standards and guidelines. If you will dedicate some of your valuable time to check what European Accessibility Act is all about, you will find references to Design for All is at it’s core. A standard EN 17161:2019 officially titled Design for All – Accessibility following a Design for All approach in products, goods and services – Extending the range of users. You may immediately delegate your product management or design leads or chief operating officers to find more out about it, but please understand that it is once again misleading in its name.
Design for All is not only for designers, it is extremely relevant for leaders as well
Design is such a broad term, I get it. It really covers a lot and can also quickly be pushed to people that are supposed to be designers. I guess that EN 17161:2019 standard should improve it’s title (“Design for All – Accessibility following a Design for All approach in products, goods and services – Extending the range of users”) to reflect the fact that it is not a standard for designers, but much more than that.
It should be more obvious that EN 17161, Design for All, is highly focusing on the organizational aspects, processes and policies as well.
I guess that leaders are quite familiar with similar standards, like for example ISO 9001:2015 (quality management systems), and I suspect that leaders invested some time to get into the details of it and improve their organizations.
With Design for All it is the same, but perhaps it’s even more important to embrace the opportunities it offers to leaders. Understanding the top-to-bottom possibilities for embracing accessibility will make you a better leader and it will make your organization better as well. Leading with example, empowering vision upgraded with Design for All and accessibility will improve your business, even if you are far from Europe and it’s European Accessibility Act (or Web Accessibility Directive).
Start now as it takes time. Be open about it. Lead!
Commit to, and support Design for All, continuous improvement and trainings, and next time somebody finds your products or services, and discovers that you integrated accessibility, they will for sure have it easier to spend the money on them.
