The Open Accessibility Strategic Planning Model '10 Steps to Creating Custom Accessibility Roadmaps'

Considering what your accessibility goals are, and forming a plan or roadmap to achieve them, is an important part of accessibility work. Our strategic planning model features 10 steps split into 4 sections to help you devise a plan that works for your small press. The model featuring the information on this page is available to download in spreadsheet format from: The Open Book Futures Accessibility Tools, but in addition to this, there is some extra guidance and resource links available here within Copim Compass.

A Preparation

1. Accountability: Appoint a person to co-ordinate accessibility, who could be a dedicated accessibility professional or someone who has a wider portfolio of work that includes accessibility too. However, it's also important to remember that some accessibility work will be completed by almost everyone at an organisation.

2. Training: Plan technical digital accessibility training and support the identified staff to develop skills. 

3. Identify Objectives: Once relevant staff have been identified and trained, some organisational accessibility objectives can be devised through requirements gathering exercises. Any organisation should aim to meet legal minimum requirements, but it's possible to be exempt from that (this requires work to evidence), and you may decide to go beyond in some areas if it fits with your organisational values. Also, your readership might already have made accessibility requests you haven't been able to meet yet, or you could survey your end users to capture this 'reader voice' in terms of accessibility requirements. Finally, it's possible there are some community or discipline specific considerations to include as well.

B Analysis and Auditing

4. Baseline Auditing: Audit the current accessibility of all aspects of the organisation, including the frontlist and backlist book files, the website functionality and the backend submission platform. You could complete this yourself using self auditing, or employ an external auditor. You could also look at assessing current organisational knowledge, attitudes towards and motivations for engaging with accessibility work.

5. Available and Required Capacity and Budget: Improving accessibility requires dedicated time and money, and a full consideration of where this can be diverted to accessibility goals will help with planning. It is likely that you will have some idea of how long book production tasks take, and how much extra work accessibility improvements will add to that, but it could be that you will need to understand more about the relative simplicity or complexity of individual accessibility requirements (like ALT text, or checking colour contrast).

C Implementation

6. Documentation: Capturing the results of identifying objectives, auditing, and analysing resources might happen across a range of documentation that could include: an accessibility policy, roadmaps, strategic plans, updated author guidelines, or other documentation.

7. Plan Work: We recommend that frontlist and backlist/remediation are considered separately, and separate plans for the website including the backend submission process. 

8. Public Statements: Publish accessibility statements and roadmaps on the organisation's website, and include VPATs and public policies if that is decided on.

D Improvements and Benchmarking

9. Improvements: Incorporate planned accessibility improvements into workflows and complete the plan.

10. Benchmark Auditing: Audit the accessibility and organisational knowledge at regular intervals within the plan to showcase improvements. 

More advice on creating accessibility roadmaps: 

UK Government Digital Service: https://www.gov.uk/service-manual/agile-delivery/developing-a-roadmap

US Section 508: https://www.section508.gov/manage/playbooks/technology-accessibility-playbook-intro/play03/