a11y-contracting

Building Accessibility Best Practices into Contracting

View the Project on GitHub mgifford/a11y-contracting

Accessibility Contracting Best Practices

Building Accessibility Best Practices into Contracting

Most RFPs that talk about accessibility include something like:

We require that all purchases be accessible according to the Web Accessibility Initiative 
(WAI) Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 AA.

or

All content, interfaces, and navigation elements to be used for this project must be 
compliant with Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 AA. 
Compliance means that a person with a disability can percieve, operate and understand the 
interface the same as a person without a disability.

Concerns

Don’t include in RFP

10 Steps for Accessible IT Procurement

Based roughly on Smart Practices for Addressing Accessibility in Vendor Contracts

  1. Set up an internal Accessibility Policy
  2. List goals (like WCAG 2.1 AA), your internal policy as well as any government regulations you must comply with
  3. Ask for details on how the vendor will meet accessibility goals. Make sure these do not rely exclusively on automated tests
  4. Make sure that your RFP is accessible and that the proposals are also created in an accessible format
  5. Clients should have people knowledgeable about accessibility as part of the procurement process and should be asking questions about the process to demonstrate that this is important
  6. Not all products have a VPAT. Most VPATs are mostly marketing. If a VPAT is produced by a recognized 3rd party, it can provide some useful insights. It is the client’s responsibility to ensure that they understand it, so ask questions
  7. Make sure that you have understanding about the contract. There are other examples here of what you might want to consider
  8. Do an independent evaluation. If you are hiring a firm to build a customized solution, make sure you test it before it is launched. The vendor should know this will happen.
  9. See that you have processes in place to escalate accessibility problems when they come up. There will be new barriers identified as people start using the technology, make sure there are processes in place to deal with them quickly.
  10. Set up a monitoring agreement with a 3rd party to see that you get informed of new issues when they come up

5 simple steps for clients to evaluate vendors

  1. Evaluate the vendor’s site with something like to see basic errors https://wave.webaim.org
  2. Ask about their experience working with web accessibility?
  3. Determine how accessibility fits as part of their QA process?
  4. Ask when they address accessibility in their development process?
  5. Learn about training opportunities for your staff?

Questions for the Procurer (Client):

Internal expertise

In section listing the various questions that Vendors need to respond to, include:

Product

Process

Experience

Government

North America

Europe

Education

Business / NGO / Other