The World Health Organization estimates the number of people with disabilities in the world is more than 1 billion—and everyone experiences temporary or situational disabilities. According to the WebAIM 2022 report on the accessibility of the top million sites, 96.8% of home pages have accessibility failures.
CivicActions recognizes that the digital world is the operational hub for critical human services. By safeguarding and committing to an accessible digital future, we ensure more people can get the help they need, and service-providers can readily engage.
To continue to advance our accessibility maturity, CivicActions has established the following:
- Introduction to Accessibility as part of employee onboarding
- CivicActions Global Accessibility Community of Practice
- Free and Open Source Software Products, such as site-wide accessibility monitoring tools and the OpenACR project.
- Inclusive agile development process
- Accessibility Champions Program
- Annual engagement in events like Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD)
Today, we reaffirm our commitment to digital accessibility with this pledge.
CivicActions hereby pledges to build and maintain digital tools with the following guidelines.
- Our work will be continuously monitored
- Integrate best of breed accessibility testing into our continuous integration processes
- Ensure all developers and designers start using accessibility tools in their editors
- Automated site-wide testing and historical analysis will be used
- Site-wide test scores and improvement targets will be incorporated into agile process
- Manual testing will be done alongside automated testing to catch issues that automated testing cannot evaluate
- Testing with users with disabilities where possible to see that people with lived experience evaluate critical tasks
- Incorporate structured WCAG-EM evaluations into contractual annual reviews with our clients
- Upon onboarding, we will inform our teams, partners, and clients about why accessibility is important and set collective priorities
- We will define and document success for accessibility in Human Centered Design, Customer Experiences and Section 508 compliance, among other priorities
- These agreed-to accessibility priorities will be incorporated into our Project Charters and regularly reviewed by our team
- We will have designated accessibility champions on all projects and work to have IAAP Certified and/or DHS 508 Certified staff
- As a company, CivicActions will set annual goals and report against them publicly on CivicActions.com/accessibility-reports (Future Location)
- Strive for no accessibility errors as much as can be identified through our automated testing process
- Document process for choosing representative sample of pages for reviews
- Detail what testing processes have been set up for each projects and what common code has been shared
Authorized by Henry Poole, CEO May 19, 2022