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Incorporating accessibility into tenders

Accessibility is a niche area and not all designers and developers have accessibility knowledge. Accessibility is a requirement that needs to be incorporated into all tenders; you cannot assume that the suppliers you have chosen will automatically have the accessibility experience required to complete your project in compliance with the W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines.

Building a new site to accessibility conformance

When building a new site there are two ways to ensure that your site is built in compliance with the W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines:

• Hire suppliers with accessibility experience; and
• Complete an audit of the site by an accessibility specialist.

Unless your supplier has specifically hired an accessibility specialist to consult on the project, it is always a good idea to get the site audited by an independent accessibility professional.

Hire suppliers with accessibility experience

When hiring developers or contracting a development company you cannot assume that they have accessibility experience even if they profess to do so. Always ask for examples of previous work and conduct audits of these sites yourself. Check for things like:

• The use of style sheets instead of tables for layout
• Valid HTML
• Heading tags
• ALT attributes on images
• Reading order
• Field labels
• Data tables include headers
• Alternatives to JavaScript
• Whether the site works with style sheets switched off
• Whether the site works with Flash, JavaScript or Java disabled

For more information on how to conduct these tests using automated testing tools see the Accessibility Evaluation tools section on page 153.

Complete an audit of the site by an accessibility specialist

When building a site there are particular stages in the web development lifecycle where accessibility must be included; it should never be left to the end of a build. As a general rule, accessibility specialists should:

• complete an accessibility audit of the initial design;
• train developers in accessibility (where required);
• train content authors in accessibility (where required);
• complete an accessibility audit of the templates of the site;
• complete an accessibility audit of the finished site; and
• complete a final audit of violations found in the accessibility audit of the finished site.

Using the suppliers’ accessibility specialist

Some development companies have accessibility specialists on staff or contract out accessibility to people specialised in the area. If this is the case most of the time you will not need to hire an independent accessibility specialist to complete an audit of the site. However, in this case, there are some things you should do to ensure that the accessibility specialist hired by the development company is giving you unbiased advice:

• Request credentials on the accessibility specialist
• Request that the accessibility specialist reports directly to you
• Include specific accessibility deliverables (such as an accessibility audit on the design) as milestones in the project
• Request that you receive all copies of reports
• Clarify that it is the suppliers’ responsibility to fix all accessibility violations

There are sometimes instances where accessibility needs to be compromised due to other business requirements such as the use of a particular CMS or authoring tool. In these cases it is always important to liaise directly with the particular accessibility specialist to determine the best solution.

Hiring an independent accessibility specialist

When a supplier lacks accessibility experience and has not hired an accessibility specialist to consult on your project it is important to get your site audited by an independent expert. When briefing this accessibility specialist you should clarify:

• The accessibility level required
• Whether the site has any specific audience types (eg. migrants)
• The CMS or authoring tool being used
• The supplier
• The timeframe
• Any complex areas of the site, such as forms, Flash files or PDFs 

When deciding on a particular accessibility specialist you should consider:

• How much the accessibility specialist relies on automated evaluation tools
• How much experience the accessibility specialist has and who exactly will be completing the work
• How the results will be provided. Will a report of findings be presented, or will these also include recommendations? Will the report include all instances of a particular accessibility violation or only examples of particular violations?
• Whether the accessibility specialist will work with the developers to come up with fixes.
• Whether the accessibility specialist will consider workarounds to particular violations that cannot be addressed (eg. a CMS not producing valid code)

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