What are the most effective ways to educate clients on web content accessibility?

The most impactful way is to start with the user experience. Not many people relish the thought of becoming an accessibility expert. When you start talking about tags, aria, and alt-text, you can lose a lot of people who are new to accessibility. However, if you start by showing them what a good and bad user experience is, you will get their attention. Most people have never heard a screen reader try to fumble through an inaccessible website or document. But the moment they do it is hard to ignore the problem. Once you have explained the user experience, then you can start to talk about why it happens, what the typical barriers are and small steps that make the largest impact on fixing them.

"Show not tell" and involving users with disabilities may "open the eyes" of stakeholders that will soon understand that it's not only good for people with disabilities but for all people. Explain also that there are a lot of invisible disabilities and people with disabilities that don't even think they have a disability or don't identify as people with disabilities. Sometimes we need to be reminded that disabilities are not only permanent but also situational and temporary. The older we are the more important accessibility is for all of us as we also have, unfortunately, more chances to be disabled. And we also need to understand that environment and products disable people when they are not made accessible.

I would stick with just a few basic WCAG principles. In fact I would even shy away from citing the success criteria at first. Talk about Color Contrast by saying "Things need to be dark enough to read for everyone" and then give a few examples like light grey text versus darker text. Introducing the standards in an approachable way allows the listener to ease into the heavy lifting like Success Criteria 1.4.11 Non-text Contrast without overwhelming them.

WCAG can seem scary to people as it's a standard written in difficult language. So a good simplification is an excellent starting point, so that people can learn the WCAG, it's techniques and failures step by step and not give up at the beginning. Most of "low hanging fruits" (easily fixed accessibility issues) have also easy fixes and are easy to explain.

One thing I have found helpful when talking about WCAG to organisations is talk numbers. When you don't make your product and service accessible, you are ignoring 16% of the world population.(WHO) Secondly I recently had an interesting learning experience. When questioning WCAG in your organization, you have to consider temporary disability. For eg: A person with a baby multitasking or someone with a fracture. The person will definitely leave your site, if they don't get navigated within the first few seconds of landing on your website.

Educating clients on web content accessibility is vital, we can empower the user with some disability, ensures inclusion, reaching a broader audience and enriching user interactions. Highlight benefits like improved user experience, engagement, conversion rates, SEO advantages, likewise show the ethical aspects and the importance nowadays such as building trust, credibility, and goodwill.

Nada é mais convincente do que você mostrar para uma pessoa como determinada ação pode ser benéfica para ela mesma. Logo, apresente número e dados, sobre como satisfazer com qualidade as necessidades e vontades do cliente podem gerar mais conversão e uma rede totalmente orgânica de promotores para a sua marca. Além do mais, use temas em alta, como ESG, por exemplo, que discute temas como sustentabilidade social. Tornar conteúdos mais acessíveis conversa diretamente com esse tema, e pode ser mais um ponto que vai chamar uma atenção positiva para sua empresa.

Tools are great, but a firm understanding of the WCAG principles and accessibility barriers is paramount. Tools help us get there faster, but we must have a good understanding; otherwise, we are overly dependent on tools that do not take context into consideration as well as other cognitive aspects of accessibility.

Don't be mislead by the tools. Tools stating 100/100 Accessibility may communicate website is accessible when it's really inaccessible as the tools only find obvious failures in code. Tools are great for large scale checks, just as an indicator where we will probably find more errors if we check manually.

"Nothing about us withouth us" - if we don't include the users we risk to make wrong choices, especially when we are at the start of our accessibility knowledge journey. Involving users provide us with their insights that often make changes to the products, so that they can use them or use them more efficiently. The sooner we invite the users the better (more cost effective). But we must first have the knowledge of the basics. It is not efficient if users discover basic accessibility issues that could easily be prevented. And don't underappreciate time and efforts of the users that you will invite. They need to be payed fairly!

Accessibility is not a project that has an end date. It is a process that needs to be constant and present in all phases. It needs management support, it needs HR support, it needs procurement support, it needs design, development, content and testing support. It needs quality assurance support. It needs to be embraced by sales and customer support. Actually every role involved needs to do it's part if we want the end product and whole customer journey to be accessible.

One of the most useful tactics I've found for educating people on web accessibility is to work through some examples. Everyone loves a good makeover story, and it gives people a chance to apply the principles and discuss ideas with their peers. It also helps them see how they can apply accessibility to their own work.

Create immersive experiences like virtual reality demos showcasing the challenges faced by users with disabilities, allowing clients to experience firsthand impact of inaccessible design and leverage storytelling to convey the impact of accessible design on users lives. Engage clients through interactive accessibility hackathons, fostering a collaborative and hands-on approach to learning. Integrate AI-powered chatbots that guide clients through accessible design principles in real-time, providing instant assistance and customized insights. Embrace a forward-thinking mindset. This dynamic and innovative approach can captivate clients and leave a lasting impression on the significance of web content accessibility.

Remember that the levels of accessibility for A, AA and AAA are not good, better, best. They are levels based on audience. Not every criteria has a AAA level. And not every AAA level is beneficial for every user. These levels help define how many barriers we are trying to overcome and each have their own considerations when it comes to design and implementation.