Website Accessibility Governance for Large Organizations

The larger your organization is, the more difficult it becomes to maintain consistent accessibility standards across all parts of your website. Regional teams often have different publishing schedules. Each team may have different ideas about how to approach accessibility. This leads to inconsistent practices, especially when ownership of accessibility isn’t clear.

That inconsistency increases the risk of compliance gaps, which can translate to greater risk for your company. On a lived experience level, your users may find fluctuations in accessibility as they navigate your site, particularly if some parts of the site that were accessible in the past regress after an update.

Without centralized governance of accessibility, there’s also a real risk of accessibility debt. Similar to tech debt, poorly governed accessibility is a problem that compounds and becomes more expensive to fix over time.

Making a mindset shift from viewing accessibility as a one-off project to treating it as core to your website can help address this challenge. When your regional teams understand the benefits of accessibility for their teams and the organization as a whole, it becomes easier to rally all stakeholders. Each team that touches the website needs to develop the muscle to consider accessibility with every change they make.

What accessibility governance includes

Accessibility governance touches on multiple interdependent factors that each add up to a cohesive accessibility strategy.

• Policies and standards alignment: The core of an accessibility plan is alignment with the policies and standards required by user expectations and the legal requirements where you do business. This includes things like supporting the WCAG standard and any geographically specific legal requirements.
• Defined roles and accountability: Every good governance plan defines clear roles for each aspect of accessibility. The RACI framework works well here to spell out who is responsible, who is accountable, who needs to be consulted, and which stakeholders just need to be informed about what’s happening.
• Decision rights and escalation paths: Like governing other parts of your business, accessibility needs clear guidelines around who has the authority to make decisions coupled with clear escalation paths when those decisions are up for debate.
• Documentation and audit readiness: A key part of governance is making sure you have the right documentation in place so that when it comes time to do a site audit, you can easily demonstrate what’s been done.
• Third-party / vendor governance: If your company is like many large organizations, you rely on SaaS products and external agencies to execute on your business objectives. You need a procurement policy that explicitly mandates accessibility to guarantee end-to-end compliance.

Accessibility ownership models that work in large organizations

There are a couple of approaches to accessibility governance that tend to play out in large organizations. Some aim for a fully centralized approach where all accessibility decisions are decided and handed down to the organization. This can be challenging to maintain consistency, particularly when individual teams may have competing priorities.

Another approach is using a federated governance model. This establishes ownership of different aspects of governance within teams instead of having a single central team.

In a federated model, there may still be a center of excellence that shares out best practices. This tends to work best when each individual team has a stakeholder who participates in an accessibility council or “champions” program. These stakeholders engage with the center of excellence and take findings back to their own team for day-to-day execution.

Executive sponsorship is often key to getting the buy-in required to execute in a large organization. When a leader communicates accessibility as a priority, it becomes easier to align individual teams.

One core challenge of any governance model is finding the right balance between autonomy for individual teams and maintaining consistency of experience across all touchpoints.

Embedding accessibility into everyday workflows

Governance is easiest when accessibility is embedded in the daily workflows of every part of your organization. The teams most frequently impacting accessibility are your developers, design team, any QA teams, and the content team.

Each role will require different tools and training to properly support accessibility in their specific knowledge domain.

You can help guarantee consistent application of accessibility guidelines by baking in a review and approval process, coupled with quality gates when something fails review. This looks a little different at each stage. 

• Designers may need to check for things like color contrast in Figma files (or wherever they are designing) prior to handing off to your development team.
• Developers may use automated tooling to catch issues in their code changes before they are merged with the production website. 
• The content team can integrate specific accessibility checks directly into the CMS. It’s also feasible to create required fields in the publishing workflow.

Using a CMS like WordPress that makes it easy to design accessibility requirements into templates and your design system dramatically simplifies enforcement. Instead of needing to use reactive checks to find errors after they are live, templating allows you to provide accessibility-ready components to your team for use as they create new pages.

The design system is a great place to define accessibility requirements. It will get you 80% of the way to maintaining an accessible site if the design is already tested for accessibility before handing off to developers to create your website templates.

Measuring, monitoring, and enforcing accessibility standards

Once you have a set of accessibility guidelines in place, you need to measure and monitor your site for conformance to those guidelines. There are a few key processes that can help maintain accessibility standards.

• Periodic audits are a good way to make sure to catch any substantial breakage in accessibility. Audits can be particularly useful during a major release or migration.
• Continuous monitoring tools can be used between audits to catch issues before something becomes significant.
• Analytics tools are helpful for prioritization. Stack ranking fixes based on how frequently pages are visited can be useful, especially when you have a massive backlog of fixes.

Part of the governance process is tracking progress towards compliance over time. When you first run an accessibility audit, you may discover a significant number of issues. You can track against burning those down to help understand how you are decreasing risk and tracking toward compliance over time.

These tracking efforts are also useful for keeping stakeholders and leadership informed of progress. 

How platform choice impacts accessibility governance

The platform you choose plays a significant role in how easy or difficult it is to govern accessibility. When you choose a CMS like WordPress VIP with configurable role-based permissions and workflow controls, it simplifies determining who can make which accessibility changes.

Another key factor of CMS choice is integration with accessibility tooling. The WordPress plugin architecture makes it easy for many accessibility tools to provide both proactive and reactive feedback to improve accessibility.

WordPress VIP also supports governance of multisite and multibrand environments out of the box. By defining roles and workflows across sites, you can simplify governance for a large, diverse set of content. Depending on how your sites are configured, you can push a single accessibility change across hundreds of websites simultaneously.

All of these factors contribute to maintaining long-term accessibility. When your CMS supports role-based access and accountability, you can more easily include all the right team members in implementing fixes. When your CMS supports a diverse set of tools, you can evolve the types of tools you use as your team matures in its accessibility journey. You can focus on delivering guardrails that give your content team freedom to create without violating the core accessibility principles.

Accessibility governance as risk management and trust building

Strong governance is the foundation on which sustainable accessibility is built. By creating a framework around expectations with clear roles and responsibilities, it’s easy to know who is responsible for what. Compliance risk is often the stick used to initiate an accessibility effort, but at the core, accessibility is about improving your website experience for all users.

By laying out clear goals and defining roles and responsibilities, you can operationalize your accessibility initiative with confidence.