The Planning, Evaluation, Repair and Maintenance Process
Monitoring and Maintaining Accessibility

Overview

Web accessibility is not an event that happens once and then it's over. It is an ongoing process. Maintaining an accessible web site involves:

• Keeping accessibility knowledge and skills up-to-date
• Instituting habits and protocols that facilitate accessibility at all stages of the design process
• Periodically checking content for accessibility errors

Every organization needs to find methods that work best within that organization. For some organizations this means creating a formal policy and set of procedures. Other organizations are able to maintain an accessible web presence with a more informal approach. In all cases, developers must acquire and maintain expertise in the nuances of accessible web design.

Knowledge and Skills

Keeping accessibility knowledge and skills up-to-date is perhaps the most important part of a comprehensive plan to maintain and monitor the accessibility of web content. If the developers don't know how to make accessible content in the first place, or if they don't maintain those skills, the site is pretty much guaranteed to contain accessibility barriers. Knowledgeable, skilled people are the key to maintaining a solidly accessible web presence.

The necessary knowledge and skills can come from reading books on the subject, from subscribing to email or web-based discussion groups, from professional training, and from experimentation with assistive technologies such as screen readers, screen enlargers, and adaptive keyboards. It doesn't really matter how developers learn about accessibility, as long as they learn it.

Habits and Protocols

One way to ensure that developers gain and keep the skills they need is to implement web accessibility competency requirements for hiring and/or for posting content to the organization's web server. The organization could provide training materials and services and require that developers pass an accessibility test every three years, or something along those lines. This kind of approach would be similar to the requirements that are already in place for some organizations to train and test their employees in issues of sexual harassment prevention, drivers training, handling food, or proper accounting procedures. These types of training requirements are often built into the organization's system, through the human relations department or some other entity.

Most of these requirements also stem from legal concerns about harassment, injury liability, fraud, and so on. Web accessibility also has a legal component. Individuals with disabilities have been known to bring lawsuits against businesses or organizations that either refuse service or provide inadequate services. Internet-based materials are not immune to lawsuits. Perhaps the fear of litigation is the wrong reason to engage in accessible web design, but it is a practical reason.

Habits and protocols can also be useful for the design process itself. Perhaps an organization could establish the protocol of checking every page in WAVE, WebXACT or Cynthia Says before allowing it to go live. Perhaps the organization designates one person, or one team of people, to be the accessibility gurus for that organization. All content would have to pass through their hands before receiving approval to go live. This guru or team of gurus would also need to be involved in the planning stages of the design, and should be consulted periodically during the development stages.

It doesn't matter much which habits and protocols an organization adopts, as long as it adopts something. It's usually best if these practices become regular routines, whether the organization decides to adopt them as formal policy or not.

Monitoring Services

In some cases it make sense to contract with a third party to perform periodic accessibility evaluations of the organization's web content. Universities, corporations, government organizations, and other large entities can easily lose control of their vast Internet-based resources. Accessibility monitoring services can send reports to webmasters with specific information about pages that fail accessibility standards. Such services can offer at least a degree of peace of mind to organizations. However, a strong caution is in order. Not all accessibility monitoring services are high quality. Some simply use basic software packages that anyone can purchase at a relatively low cost. Reports based on these software solutions are limited in scope and accuracy. Investigate monitoring services carefully before choosing one, and ensure that they will go beyond the automated feedback of software tools.

Random Check-ups

It is a good idea to randomly pick pages on the web site for quick, informal accessibility evaluations. Oftentimes little mistakes creep into the pages accidentally. Even the web sites of accessibility experts have been known to violate basic principles of accessibility from time to time by virtue of the fact that we are all human, and prone to commit errors, whether we want to or not. If the page was designed with accessibility in mind in the first place, it will probably be easy to fix these kinds of errors.