Building accessibility skills across your team

I recently worked with an e-commerce client on a monthly accessibility audit. Each month, I would deliver a report of issues found, categorized by status: identified, fix implemented, and resolved.

A few issues kept lingering. Month after month, the same items, same “identified” status. Never moving forward.

I assumed they were low priority. But when I dug in, the real reason was simpler: their in-house developer knew something was wrong, recognized it needed fixing, but wasn’t sure how to implement the right solution. So he froze and didn’t ask for help.

When I finally sat down with him and walked through the fixes, he had great questions. By the end of our call, he understood exactly what to do and why. He felt confident. Those lagging issues were resolved within a week.

The tools were there. The audit process was working. But no one had made sure he had the knowledge to act on what the reports were surfacing.

You can have all the right tools, but if your team doesn’t know what to do with the information those tools surface, nothing improves.

Here are some ideas that will help:

• Make training stick by connecting it to real work. Most training workshops fail because people forget the material if they don’t use it immediately. When you pair training with implementation, the material becomes “stickier.”
• Build internal champions instead of hiring specialists. You need accessibility knowledge distributed across your team, not concentrated in one person who becomes a bottleneck. Identify interested people and give them deeper training for their discipline.
• Create accountability without creating gatekeepers. Everyone should know enough to build with accessibility best practices. Champions help when someone gets stuck, but they shouldn’t be reviewing every piece of work.
• Measure skill growth, not just workshop attendance. Track how many accessibility issues get caught in code review versus QA. Track how many inaccessible mockups make it to development. Metrics like these tell you if people are actually applying what they learned.

Developing your team’s accessibility skills happens gradually, with targeted learning connected to actual work.