What to Look for When Hiring for Digital Accessibility Roles

24 August 2022

Are you looking to hire for digital accessibility roles? If you don’t have accessibility expertise, do you know how to hire for accessibility roles? If so, then you’re in the same boat as many other organisations.

Accessibility jobs are increasing across industries, with companies looking for ways to make their products and services more beneficial for people who have disabilities. The number of accessibility jobs is increasing due to disability litigation, efforts to diversify and create an inclusive environment, and more.

We’ve put together some information to help you know what to look for when hiring for digital accessibility roles. Let’s get started!

Why is Accessibility Important?

There are several reasons that accessibility is important. For one thing, there’s the ethical reason. It’s essential to make sure everyone has the ability to access digital products. It’s the right thing to do.

Then, there are legal reasons to consider becoming more accessible. Many countries are making it a legal requirement to be accessible. Then there’s also the risk of being sued for violation of human rights when products and services are not accessible.

Next, people with disabilities create a large market around the world. They make up about 15% of the population and have the money to spend on products and services geared towards their disabilities.

What about innovation? Many organisations are now looking to create diverse and inclusive teams that lead design to improve digital products for this market. In addition, accessible products and services are user-friendly for almost everyone. And accessible products tend to be more robust and useful.

Finally, inclusive businesses create a more loyal customer base and attract more positive press coverage.

Now that you know why accessibility is essential, do you know what roles your staff needs?

What Digital Accessibility Roles Do You Need to Fill?

If you’re not sure which accessibility roles you need to fill, then ask yourself the following questions:

What roles are essential to hire for?
Which role should you start with?
Where can you find candidates who know about accessibility?
How do you evaluate their skills and knowledge when hiring?

You can choose to increase your company’s digital accessibility in these ways:

Hire specialists in digital accessibility or an accessibility consulting company
Upskill existing digital team members on accessibility
Identify accessibility champions at the executive level

Each of these roles is essential when hiring for digital accessibility roles.

What is an Accessibility Specialist?

An accessibility specialist is an employee who understands how to create accessible digital assets, including websites, apps, and documents. These individuals may be certified as a Web Accessibility Specialist through the International Association of Accessibility Professionals (IAAP), have plenty of work experience, and have lived with a person who has a disability and/or used assistive technology.

An Accessibility Specialist has a deep understanding of how to make digital products and documents more accessible. This is a role that’s best for a company under 50 people. However, for a larger organisation, you may want to consider hiring an executive accessibility champion before hiring a specialist.

Upskilling Your Team on Accessibility

Another option is to upskill your existing team on accessibility through training. This method works to ensure accessibility is decentralised and everyone in the organisation develops their accessibility skills. Upskilling the team means accessibility is more integrated into each project and process.

Upskilling requires providing accessibility training to the entire digital team and new hires. It’s essential to ensure the training and onboarding programs help the team learn about different approaches to accessibility. These approaches can be used by researchers, designers, writers, and everyone on the team. The goal is to create improved consistency across the team.

Executive Champion for Accessibility

An executive champion for accessibility also makes for a more effective accessibility program. They can bring accessibility considerations into all conversations, including budgeting, planning, and more. Their importance to a project is that they can enable accessibility from the very beginning. It’s much harder to add accessibility after the fact. Instead, an executive champion for accessibility can ensure the design is seamless and easily integrates accessibility throughout the project’s design.

Working in this manner can cut the time and finances needed to design accessibility products. It can also have a positive effect on the overall accessible design.

An executive champion is usually best for a digital team with 50 or more individuals. It’s usually better to hire an executive champion before the budget can be determined and an accessibility specialist can be hired.

Hiring an Accessibility Consulting Company

There are times when it may be a better choice to hire an accessibility consulting company. For instance, if your company has a team of over 100 employees, then an accessibility consulting company may be the smarter choice.

An accessibility consulting team can help create a strategy, offer training and coaching, and recommend accessibility tools and processes that your team can use.

However, if you choose to hire a consulting company, avoid hiring one that offers a quick fix. Quick fixes usually don’t address the issues in the design or build that lead to more accessibility. It’s also good to be somewhat sceptical of companies that solely focus on accessibility auditing. An audit can be beneficial; however, your team won’t know how to fix the issues found without the right support and guidance. Accessibility issues could even become worse without the right direction.

Concluding Thoughts

There are many ways that can be used to increase your team’s capacity and knowledge of accessibility. It’s essential to begin putting together an accessibility team within your business. Making products and services accessible isn’t only to meet legal requirements – it’s also to do the right thing, by making your business products and services accessible to everyone.

More blogs...

WEB DEVELOPMENT
20 July 2023

Honey Monster

WEB DEVELOPMENT
17 July 2023

Transforming Luxury Automotive Conversions Online: Apache Automotive Website Launch

WEB DEVELOPMENT
8 March 2023

Happy International Women’s day – Ada Lovelace

WEB DEVELOPMENT
20 January 2023

Pragmatic Web Development Training

WEB DEVELOPMENT
16 January 2023

How a simple idea of automating a simple task changed the course of my life forever.

WEB DEVELOPMENT
30 September 2022

Sustainable Web Design: How to Reduce Your Site’s Carbon Footprint

WEB DEVELOPMENT
28 September 2022

The Best Browsers for Web Developers

WEB DEVELOPMENT
26 September 2022

The Best Craft CMS Plugins for Your Site

WEB DEVELOPMENT
23 September 2022

6 Free Websites to Learn Coding

WEB DEVELOPMENT
21 September 2022

Elements That Help Landing Pages Convert

WEB DEVELOPMENT
19 September 2022

Simple Ways to Improve Your Website’s CX

WEB DEVELOPMENT
16 September 2022

How to Integrate AI Into Your Toolset

WEB DEVELOPMENT
14 September 2022

Five Ways to Lower Your Site’s Carbon Footprint

WEB DEVELOPMENT
12 September 2022

How to Improve PageSpeed Insights Score & SEO

WEB DEVELOPMENT
9 September 2022

How to Tell When Your Website Needs a Redesign

WEB DEVELOPMENT
7 September 2022

How to Use Modern Image Formats – AVIF & WebP

WEB DEVELOPMENT
5 September 2022

Skills to Look for in a Web Developer

WEB DEVELOPMENT
2 September 2022

9 Signs It’s Time for a New Website

WEB DEVELOPMENT
31 August 2022

Tips for Choosing the Best Website Hosting Provider

WEB DEVELOPMENT
29 August 2022

9 Common Misconceptions About WordPress

WEB DEVELOPMENT
26 August 2022

Maintaining a Large Application

WEB DEVELOPMENT
22 August 2022

Programming Languages for Mobile Apps

WEB DEVELOPMENT
19 August 2022

Why Laravel is One of the Best PHP Frameworks

WEB DEVELOPMENT
17 August 2022

Why You Should Choose React Native

WEB DEVELOPMENT
15 August 2022

The Advantages of Symfony Framework

WEB DEVELOPMENT
12 August 2022

What You Need to Know about Headless CMS

WEB DEVELOPMENT
10 August 2022

The Differences Between WooCommerce and Magento

WEB DEVELOPMENT
8 August 2022

Free Things You Need to Do After Launching an Ecommerce Website

WEB DEVELOPMENT
5 August 2022

What is Elasticsearch?

WEB DEVELOPMENT
3 August 2022

Mapping User Journeys

WEB DEVELOPMENT
1 August 2022

Performing a Website Migration

WEB DEVELOPMENT
29 July 2022

The Psychology of Web Design & Influencing Consumer Choices

WEB DEVELOPMENT
27 July 2022

The Ultimate Guide to WebGL

WEB DEVELOPMENT
25 July 2022

How SSL Can Protect Your eCommerce Transactions

WEB DEVELOPMENT
22 July 2022

Benefits of Making a Website a PWA

WEB DEVELOPMENT
20 July 2022

Ways to Use AI in Your eCommerce Business

WEB DEVELOPMENT
18 July 2022

DevOps: Important for Mobile Application Development

WEB DEVELOPMENT
15 July 2022

CRO Techniques that Will Boost Your ROI

WEB DEVELOPMENT
13 July 2022

Trends in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning in 2022

WEB DEVELOPMENT
25 May 2022

From Kitchens to QA – My Experience Moving from the Hospitality Industry into the Tech Sector

WEB DEVELOPMENT
18 May 2021

Magento – Is It Still Worth It?

WEB DEVELOPMENT
18 May 2021

5 of The Most Common WordPress Errors

WEB DEVELOPMENT
14 May 2021

Top reasons to use Magento 2 for Ecommerce Development

WEB DEVELOPMENT
14 May 2021

10 Benefits Of Outsourcing Software Development Services

WEB DEVELOPMENT
14 May 2021

WordPress for Enterprise – Is it Good Enough?

WEB DEVELOPMENT
11 May 2021

What’s the Difference Between a Web Developer & a Web Designer?

WEB DEVELOPMENT
7 May 2021

Signs Your Web Hosting is Causing Your Site Problems

WEB DEVELOPMENT
11 March 2021

Choosing Between Magento & Shopify – Which is Right for Your Business?

WEB DEVELOPMENT
20 January 2021

What is Agile Software Development?

WEB DEVELOPMENT
4 January 2021

5 Advantages of Continuous Integration

WEB DEVELOPMENT
4 January 2021

What is Continuous Development?

WEB DEVELOPMENT
4 January 2021

AWS vs Azure vs Google Cloud. What is the Best Cloud Platform for Enterprise?

WEB DEVELOPMENT
27 November 2020

What You Need to Know about the .NET Framework

WEB DEVELOPMENT
27 November 2020

What is CRO?

WEB DEVELOPMENT
27 November 2020

What is React Native?

WEB DEVELOPMENT
27 November 2020

PHP vs .NET – How to choose the right one.

WEB DEVELOPMENT
12 November 2020

Which is Best for Your Site: Umbraco or WordPress?

WEB DEVELOPMENT
12 November 2020

10 Top Reasons to Choose OpenCart

WEB DEVELOPMENT
12 November 2020

Top Reasons to Use React.JS

WEB DEVELOPMENT
12 November 2020

Is Magento or OpenCart the Right eCommerce Platform for Your Business?

WEB DEVELOPMENT
18 July 2020

Why Hire a White Label Web Development Agency?

WEB DEVELOPMENT
16 March 2020

Why Magento Should Be Upgraded to Magento 2

WEB DEVELOPMENT
5 March 2020

LMS Security Features That Should Be Demanded

WEB DEVELOPMENT
31 January 2020

7 Ways Business Websites Go Wrong

WEB DEVELOPMENT
31 January 2020

8 Things to Never Skip in Website Design

WEB DEVELOPMENT
31 January 2020

5 Ways to Make Websites Accessible

WEB DEVELOPMENT
22 January 2020

Java or Kotlin: Which Should You Choose?

WEB DEVELOPMENT
19 January 2020

Sitecore SEO: Our Evaluation of this Enterprise Platform

WEB DEVELOPMENT
19 January 2020

Optimising Your WordPress Website’s Performance

WEB DEVELOPMENT
19 January 2020

Should You Make Your WordPress Website Multilingual?

WEB DEVELOPMENT
5 January 2020

Reasons Why Your SME Needs a Customer App

WEB DEVELOPMENT
5 January 2020

The Right Direction of Mobile UX

WEB DEVELOPMENT
5 January 2020

Protecting Your WordPress Website Against Ransomware

WEB DEVELOPMENT
5 January 2020

Key Features of Umbraco 8

WEB DEVELOPMENT
18 December 2019

Why WordPress is the Best CMS for Your Enterprise Website

WEB DEVELOPMENT
18 December 2019

The Benefits of a WordPress Support Retainer

WEB DEVELOPMENT
18 December 2019