Doing the numbers: Digital accessibility and shifting left

Here’s the good news: Every day, more and more organizations are becoming aware of digital accessibility and beginning to practice it at their companies. They understand why digital accessibility matters and how it positively impacts their business.

This awareness is driving meaningful change, companies are working to make their content more accessible, and they’re doing so for all the right reasons. Accessible experiences are better experiences—for everyone. Accessibility is better for your users and your business: larger markets, better brand reputation, and less legal risk.

Here’s the problem: Companies are coming to digital accessibility late. They’re having to reactively fix content that was not accessible when it was first built. That’s costly.

At the same time, they often still haven’t implemented strategies and processes to ensure that everything new being created is accessible from the start. Which means they risk staying trapped in a break-fix cycle. At best, it’s one step up, one step back. And that’s even more costly.

So, what’s the answer?

Goodbye break-fix, hello shift left

As we all know, you can’t change the past. If it wasn’t accessible when it was built, you will have to fix it. However, there are more efficient and effective ways to remediate your existing content, and that’s one meaningful way you can start saving money and time right away.

The most important thing you can do for your organization is bid goodbye to the reactive break-fix mode and say hello to shifting left.

Shifting left means addressing accessibility issues much earlier in the development lifecycle. When content is accessible from the start, you don’t have to fix it later.

Shifting left can feel like a significant transformation because it requires cross-functional alignment and represents a change in mindset as much as process. But it’s a transformation that will have tremendous real-world impact—including financially!

Doing the numbers

My colleagues and I have helped countless organizations shift left that were practicing accessibility in a reactive manner when we first met them.

When we analyze cost and impact, the numbers usually start out looking pretty overwhelming. We’ve found that overall investment in digital content creation requires about a 15% investment increase in accessibility work. For a $500,000 project, that’s $75,000. As we see it, that’s way too much for anything that is not a core content function!

When we get into shift-left principles and how to move testing and remediation into the very early stages of content development, we immediately see a big difference.

Analyzing again with those principles and processes in place, we see accessibility investment decreasing to 5% or less. For that $500,000 project, the accessibility costs would decrease from $75,000 to $25,000—and potentially even less, depending on the implementation.

We recently conducted this kind of analysis for a new client. We projected that enabling their design, development, and quality assurance teams to do accessibility testing and remediation using automation and software in their respective phases would save them an immense amount of time and money—nearly $22k in testing and over $252k in remediation!

That’s just one recent example. I see similar scenarios almost every time I talk to a new prospective client.

Modeling, predicting, succeeding

Each time I analyze a different customer situation, I am amazed by the potential efficiencies and savings I can forecast and how close my models come to the actual realized savings measured by the customer after implementation.

When we complete implementation for our customers, the actual realized and measured return on investment has consistently been in the range of +/- 5% of our initial estimates. This has held true for over a decade of working with organizations all across the globe.

So, how have we become so good at projecting the fiscal and time benefits of our Deque solution? One word: experience.

For myself, I’ve modeled hundreds of content production teams across all sizes and manner of companies, and each new situation offers a unique insight into the challenge of producing accessible digital content and experiences. The truth is that the challenge itself keeps evolving. We continue to expand our understanding of disability. New technologies emerge. Regulations change, and new laws are passed.

Despite all that change, however, certain fundamentals remain constant.

I learned these fundamentals during my early days of helping build Information Technology Service Management practices for a Fortune 20 company, and I still rely on them today. The basic principle at work here is the notion of defect capture, and the supporting processes of incident, problem, and configuration management.

Defect capture

Understanding and analyzing defect capture is essential for predicting costs. From a metrics standpoint, here are just some of the things you can track:

• Net daily number of accessibility defects: How many new issues are introduced each day?
• Amount of time to correct a defect from JIRA: What is your remediation response time?
• Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF): How often do serious defects make it into production?
• Mean Time to Repair (MTTR): How long does it take to correct serious defects in production?

These numbers matter because they can likely be significantly improved upon using automated tools such as Deque’s axe DevTools browser extension:

• Every defect identified and fixed in development costs an average of $350 less than finding and fixing it during QA.
• Every defect identified and fixed in QA costs an average of $450 less than fixing in production
• Allowing a defect to get into production can cost up to $800 or more to fix.

Incident, problem, and configuration management

To improve and accelerate how defects get fixed once they’ve been identified, we can draw on the Information Technology Information Library (ITIL) methodology for managing IT services and support and apply an “Incident, Problem, and Configuration Management” process.

Incident management

Incident Management covers the act of recovering from the defect, or fixing it so that the Software Development LifeCycle can continue. Many of the tasks we are familiar with happen during the incident phase:

• testing to identify the defect
• logging the defect into a defect management system
• conducting triage to determine priority, impact, and resolution time
• fixing the defect, validating the fix works, and conducting regression testing to ensure nothing else was broken
• closing out the defect

We do these at speed and then continue, saving time and money as we go.

Problem management

Taking it one step further, we then move to problem management, a less rushed set of processes that includes identifying the root cause of the defect and updating whatever needs to change to ensure the defect doesn’t happen again. Think of this as a “root cause” fix. Examples might include:

• updating your design library to correct an issue in a reusable component
• providing additional training on design or development
• updating a palette schedule to account for color contrast needs

Whatever the root cause-changes may be, it is important to ensure this work gets done so that you can continue to build efficiency and quality into your overall content development process.

Configuration management

This is the process of capturing all the information about your code, components, frameworks, and libraries. The goal is to ensure you know who owns, is accountable for, and is responsible for the accessibility of the various content inventories. Effective configuration management is crucial for keeping defects out of production. Unfortunately, in most organizations, this process is overlooked. When I ask about an organization’s digital inventory, I’m often told, “We don’t know the full extent.” This kind of “wild west” environment usually means that too many people can push content into production—including outside vendors—and it’s almost guaranteed to create new defects.

Conclusion

A full complement of methodologies, processes, and tools exists today that you can use to elevate your accessibility practice and reach peak efficiency. By combining existing IT practices with the world’s leading accessibility automation software from Deque, you can save hundreds of thousands of dollars in time and effort.

This isn’t just speculation; we’ve done it time and time again with organizations around the world.

It takes a bit of work and organizational change to implement the processes and tools to reach this ultimate efficiency level. However, this work will be paid back exponentially through improvements in your content’s accessibility and usability—at a dramatically reduced price.

The solutions are out there. All you have to do is come and get them!