Making Accessibility Everyone's Responsibility

Our website accessibility work was making measurable progress, but I could see a problem that technical remediation alone wouldn't solve.

Much of the content published on our website was created outside the web team. Employees regularly produced reports, presentations, meeting materials, forms, and other documents, which often passed through several people before reaching the website.

If accessibility problems were introduced at the beginning of that process, they often became someone else's problem to fix at the end. I wanted to change that—helping employees create accessible materials from the start rather than relying on remediation after publication.

I developed a series of online accessibility courses for staff, beginning with common document and presentation tasks.

Instead of teaching WCAG as an abstract set of technical requirements, I focused on actions employees could apply immediately:

• How do you create a proper heading?
• What makes a table accessible?
• How should you write descriptive links?
• What happens to document structure when you export a PDF?

One exercise used two versions of the same document: an inaccessible example and a corrected version. Employees could compare the structure and see how seemingly small authoring decisions affected accessibility.

I didn't want employees to have to remember an entire course every time they created a document.

I developed supporting materials, including a presentation accessibility checklist covering slide structure, reading order, alternative text, contrast, tables, links, and PDF export.

The approach was simple: teach the principles, demonstrate the process, and provide a reference employees could use independently.

Different departments produce different types of content. An executive assistant preparing board materials has different needs from someone managing website content or developing a spreadsheet.

I used a departmental training matrix to connect training requirements with staff responsibilities and track course development and rollout. This made the program more targeted, rather than assigning identical training to everyone. The curriculum expanded to cover additional digital authoring and publishing workflows.

The program also produced reusable resources—document examples, checklists, and course materials—that could support continuing staff development.

I collaborated with colleagues on incorporating foundational accessibility training into onboarding and recurring content-author workflows.

Employees needed both the skills to create accessible material and clear expectations about their responsibilities.

I developed a phased document accessibility roadmap, and drafted a risk-based approach to prioritizing documents that directly affected access to important public services.

Together, these initiatives laid the groundwork for a more preventive approach to accessibility.

Creating a course is only one part of organizational change.

The more interesting challenge is making accessibility understandable and practical for people whose main responsibility is something else entirely. That requires relevant examples, manageable expectations, and resources that fit existing workflows.