One critical component of a successful Accessibility Program is having a documented procurement policy for procuring and deploying accessible and usable digital technology into production. This does not only save time and money by reducing the risks of deploying digital technology employees or customers cannot use, it also saves time and money by having everybody follow a reproducible policy and procedure for procuring and deploying accessible and usable digital technology. Having and following a documented accessibility procurement policy will help your customers or employees use digital technology, including software you procure equitably, independently without barriers for their success.
Procuring accessible and usable digital technology will also help you meet the requirements for some of the new regulations for digital accessibility and assisting people with disabilities such as the European Accessibility Act (EAA), the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) , the Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD), Americans with Disabilities Act Title II and other regulations and laws.
A Few Points to Assist
- Document any accessibility requirements you require from your vendors in the Statement of Work (SOW), purchase order and contracts.
- After you have requested and examined the Accessibility Conformance Reports (ACR) from your prospective vendors which helps you select the digital technology and accessibility that meets your needs. Then after you purchase the digital technology it is required you perform automated and manual accessibility evaluations in your own environment before you deploy it into production to your customers or employees. This step is to be sure there are no accessibility issues you did not expect from looking at the ACR. This is because some digital technology is complicated and even though the vendor performed an accessibility evaluation when creating the Accessibility Conformance Report when you deploy the digital technology in your own infrastructure or in your software someone may have accidentally introduced accessibility issues that may not have been there in the vendor’s infrastructure.
- Performing your own manual accessibility and usability evaluations in your own infrastructure is also critical since some usability issues will not show up in the Accessibility Conformance Report since ACRs only state how the technology conforms to technical accessibility criteria and not usability success. Therefore, if a user is not able to use the digital technology due to a non-intuitive or usable interface design it is not accessible and that will not show up in the ACR.
- Procuring and rolling out accessible digital technology into production is less costly and time-consuming when planned in the early stages instead of finding out later you procured inaccessible digital technology and roll that out to your customers or employees causing them to experience accessibility barriers. This causes expensive retro fitting for accessibility when the technology is live or worse yet having to procure a different technology because accessibility is not possible in the technology you purchased.
- If you develop digital technology including software and you procure parts of the digital technology you will be embedding in your software or have vendors develop part or all of the software for you, these procurement practices should also be leveraged.
- When performing the accessibility manual evaluations use people with a broad range of disabilities. This includes those who use different types of assistive technology to be sure you are covering the majority of the possibilities of the people that will be using the digital technology you procured.
- Manual accessibility evaluations should be performed on a variety of operating systems and if the digital technology is web-based use a variety of web browsers.
Learn more about this topic in the Accessible Technology Procurement Toolkit - Disability:IN
I hope this blog post provides some guidance to help you procure and deploy accessible and inclusive digital technology and introduces you to some of the critical benefits of doing so. Does anybody else have any examples of the benefits of procuring accessible and inclusive digital technology? Are there any other new laws and regulations I did not cover? Can you provide any examples of where procuring accessible and inclusive digital technology increased revenue and customer loyalty?
If you have any comments or feedback, I would appreciate it if you could please send an email to Bill Tipton since unfortunately the comments are closed to my blog site.
Bill Tipton
Contributing Author,
Global Dialogue Center
http://www.globaldialoguecenter.com/
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