Creating an accessibility go-to-market strategy through heart, harmony, & hunger
- Date:
- October - November 2022
- Skillset:
- Project Management, Triaging issues, Documentation, Digital Strategy
- NDA Disclosure:
- For legal reasons I am not able to show project details. Images are representational only.
I started with one main goal: bring change in how Insight markets accessibility
Insight’s Digital Innovation team helps companies implement digital solutions from discovery to delivery. During 2019 select individuals from the team came together to improve Insight’s stake in accessibility. My role in this go-to-market plan involved ideation, creation of a delivery deck, documentation for bid strategy, and triage.
The Problem:
Accessibility, as an integrated and offered solution, was lacking.
The Plan:
A go-to-market strategy for Insight would be launched as a way for Insight LLC to start taking on accessibility-specific projects. This would start with team education and would end with a client bid.
Discovery and ideation
Heart for user (and client) experience
Most of our team knew how to integrate accessibility into the design and development process, but we didn’t have a formal audit methodology.
Source: The first week consisted of research:
- Who is the client and what are their needs? (some of this was provided in the bid brief)
- What are some common audit practices and patterns?
- How can we stand out?
That final question of standing out became the main focus. We sought to answer the “okay, now what?” that can follow introducing anyone to new concepts and when teams are faced with hundreds of new backlog accessibility tasks.
Strategy prioritization
Harmony of WCAG guidelines to actionable tasks
An audit considers the compliance of a product and the data as the results, but now that you have a long list of issues what do you do?
The A11y team held a few ideation sessions which resulted in a system that could:
- quantify issue complexity and severity
- identify specific teams and individuals who could offer valuable remediation experience for a variety of issues
- bridge the info-gap between the user with disabilities and stakeholders that still struggle to see accessibility as beneficial outside of lawsuit prevention
- give realistic expectations of audit results, delivery, and remediation planning without first seeing a single visual for the product involved in the bid
Validating the requirements
Hunger for continued improvement
We ran a practice audit of Insight’s website. The purpose was to practice and present a real plan for changes that should and could be implemented internally. The practice audit included:
- establishing a scope
- creating a t-shirt sizing approach to ranking issue severity and complexity
- presenting the results to a sampling of sales team managers and development managers
We had to be ready with not just a usability answer, but be able to point out specific guidelines as reference to back up our recommendations. We needed to highlight the assistive technology along with user impact. We aimed to be approachable and specific in discussing the remediation timeline.
Our hunger for hands-on knowledge did not stop with audit and delivery practice. Our team consulted with the sales team. We discussed how the team can prioritize accessibility when seeking to win clients and projects. The goal was to sell accessibility as a new pillar in all our offerings rather than an optional service.
Key takeaways and project outcomes:
Insight didn’t win this bid but did prove to internal Insight team members and managers the need for improvements within each department. Initiatives were shortly implemented to encourage team members to get certified and engage in training. This directly led to the Accessibility track of new teammate onboarding.
This was a swim-before-you-walk type experience. It was messy and chaotic, but I loved it! I look back now and can identify the plan’s weaknesses. I have actively taken those lessons into my future work.
Since the go-to-market project, Insight continues to improve how it markets accessibility. The company has made marked efforts in treating accessibility as an ongoing goal for digital products and people.