Requirements Gathering

While auditing for legal minimum levels of accessibility can produce quantitative data about how accessible your content is, there are other options. If your press is exempt from legislation, or your values and mission includes a fuller consideration of a research community's requirements that may go beyond legal minimum, you will want to inform your accessibility planning through other means. Meaningful requirements gathering activities, detailed below, can produce qualitative data that can ensure the plans are fully in line with your user's needs.

Inclusion, not accessibility

Accessibility is not quite the same thing as full inclusion, whereas accessibility focuses on compliance to standards, legislation and making individual requests, inclusion is more person and community focused, pro-active (rather than reactive) and has a focus on usability for everyone. Instead of asking what you need to do to achieve compliance, you can ask what you need to do to maximise usability for all of your readers which will include some accessibility goals. 

Accessibility requests

An important mechanism for achieving accessibility is your process for handling one off requests from individual users. Within your accessibility statement it is often a legal requirement to have some way of contacting you to make these type of requests, which can include providing a different format, or something the specific user requires that is beyond the legal minimums e.g. enhanced levels of contrast. Best practice is to have a named person and email address, and to have some agreed service level of responding within a certain time period and giving a full response. The content of these requests are a useful source of information about what your readership's accessibility requirements are.

End user testing

See our guidance on End user testing from print disabled people