Applications, products, and technologies developed at U-M are required to meet digital accessibility standards and provide equitable access for people with disabilities.
If you design interfaces, develop products, or manage teams who create IT, you have a responsibility to support digital accessibility.
Best Practices
Agile Approaches
Iterative development and strong communication lead to better accessibility outcomes. Agile approaches can drive accessibility when accessibility is part of your Minimum Viable Product, or MVP.
Check accessibility of small parts of your product, as they are built, to support ongoing learning and iterative improvement. Checking accessibility only at the end of a project will result in technical debt, project delays, and missed opportunities for learning.
Accessible Frameworks
Development frameworks designed with accessibility in mind will give you usable components that are already built to work with assistive technologies and meet accessibility standards. You get accessibility benefits for free because the framework is accessible.
Learn how to evaluate and choose an accessible framework.
Learning Mindset
Accessibility is not a checklist. Accessible development will be more interesting, motivating, and enjoyable for a product team if it is viewed as an opportunity to learn, rather than just a list of requirements to be met before a product can go live.
Find an accessibility review strategy that will work for you team.
Strategies for Action
Development teams that successfully incorporate accessibility use similar key strategies:
- Review designs before development
- Designers and UX folks can annotate wireframes to support accessible development as the project moves forward (Annotating Wireframes video)
- Choose accessible frameworks
- An accessible front end framework will reduce the work needed to achieve an accessible product
- Iterate and test
- Perform quick non-technical reviews of interface components that will be reused throughout the product (such as menus, form elements, buttons) as they are built
- Include functional accessibility testing into standard QA practices
- Escalate if needed
- Consult the risk assessment documentation to determine risk level and contact the ITS accessibility team for review if the project is high risk
- Provide information about the testing and best practices you have already implemented, which may be required before the review
- Document barriers
- If your product has accessibility issues at launch, log the issues to be addressed by the team, document the issues for users, and share information with the accessibility team to help central support
- Repeat as needed
- Use these actions during updates and changes as needed
- For major versions, incorporate a regression accessibility test