Accessibility Specialist

As an Accessibility Specialist, you’ll provide support and guidance to other roles about how to create accessible services and how to test them. You will also provide guidance around accessibility legislation and will play a part in advocating for disabled people.

You can read more about the role of an Accessibility Specialist in government on the Government Digital and Data Profession Capability Framework.

Things to consider as an Accessibility Specialist

Legislation

Make sure you have a good understanding of relevant accessibility law. This helps you provide appropriate guidance to digital teams so that they understand what legal requirements they must meet.

Understanding legislation around accessibility will also help you be a better advocate for disabled people.

Communication and training

Knowledge and understanding about digital accessibility is improving all the time. However, the skill levels and experience in your organisation may vary or be very limited.

As an Accessibility Specialist, you will likely play a role in educating your colleagues about accessibility and shaping the culture of your organisation.

Communication

You’ll need to communicate with a range of stakeholders and take part in discussions with multidisciplinary teams. This means that it is important to have an awareness of other job roles in a digital team. Read about the guidance for other job roles in the accessibility manual.

Training

You might need to deliver training to people in your organisation to increase knowledge and understanding about accessibility. You’ll need to produce training material for technical and non-technical people.

It’s important to lead by example when delivering training. Make sure you run sessions that are inclusive and accessible. This means that documents that you provide should be accessible, and in-person, remote or hybrid training sessions support all your colleagues sufficiently.

Providing guidance on running inclusive meetings is currently beyond the scope of this manual. However, AbilityNet has published a useful article on hosting accessible online meetings that will be a good starting point.

Document Accessibility

You should have a good understanding of how to make documents accessible. Documents which are hosted on public sector body websites are required to be accessible by law (with some exceptions).

It is also important that documents shared between colleagues are accessible, whether they’re hosted online or not. You should have a good understanding of how to make Word, PowerPoint and Excel documents accessible, as well as their open-source equivalents.

You should also have a good understanding of how to make PDF (Portable Document Format) documents accessible and how to test them.

In Senior Accessibility Specialist roles, you’re also likely to be delivering training on how to make documents accessible.

WCAG Conformance

Digital teams, and particularly QA testers, will often require support around how to conform to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG).

It’s common for Accessibility Specialists to be asked for advice on whether a particular screen or component meets a specific success criterion in WCAG. Therefore, you should have a good understanding of WCAG and know about common WCAG failures and how to check for them.

Testing tools and methodology

Accessibility Specialists will need to advise digital teams on how to test for accessibility. This guidance may include:

You should also understand different testing methodologies. For example, you may need to provide guidance on:

how to select testing samples,
what content should be in scope for an accessibility audit, and
what’s a suitable range of assistive software to test with.