Our Journey to Accessibility at Adobe Workfront

What is accessibility? Why is it important?

Accessibility is the act of making your app usable for everyone. You want to make sure people can use it with a mouse, keyboard, or assistive technology, like a screen reader, and make sure things are visible to people who may have color blindness or low vision.

Accessibility is more of an organizational challenge than it is a technical one. It doesn’t mean accessibility is necessarily easy, but it’s hard to get things moving to help people with disabilities. It’s an organizational challenge and some of the difficulties include answering:

• Why should you make your app accessible?
• How do you get buy-in from upper management?
• Where do you start when remediating your app?
• Who’s going to do the actual work?
• How do you get buy-in from the rest of the engineering organization?
• How do you make accessibility a sustainable practice?

Why should you make your app accessible?

There are financial, legal, and moral reasons. Speaking financially, an accessible product is a sellable product. If you are a tech or SaaS company, when different businesses are evaluating your products, accessibility is one of the things they evalue for. So by not making your product accessible, you’re losing out on potential deals, customers, and buyers.

From a legal standpoint, you may be contractually obligated to have an accessible app. In several cases, with Adobe Workfront, some of their clients have very specific language and details of certain standards that needed to be complied with in order to uphold a contract. If you’re in government or any sort of company that has a public facing good or services, in the US at least, you are legally obligated to provide an accessibility website. You’re legally required to allow all people of abilities and disabilities to interact with your product and use your good and services.

Lastly, there are moral reasons. This should be the strongest motivator. You might have specific target audiences for your products or apps, but that shouldn’t be dictated by ability or disability. Especially at Workfront, if that’s the future of work and remote work, who’s that for? Is that for just able-bodied people only? No, it’s for everyone. It’s just the right thing to do.

How do you get buy-in from upper management?

The key is to speak their language. It’s great if you’re motivated by simply doing the right thing, but it may be cynical to say businesses are a little more cold-hearted than that. You have to consider the financial cost and benefits. If you’re talking to a CFO, a VP of sales, or Marketing Director, speak their language and put it in terms of business terms. You might need to remind them that they’re losing deals by not having an accessible product or that you are contractually obligated to meet certain accessibility standards. When you can start to put this into business language, it’s a lot easier to get buy-in.

Where do you start when making your app more accessible?

There are two main challenges. The first is remediating existing content. The second is to ensure that new content is built with accessibility in mind.

When you’re remediating your app, you can try to focus on the violation types. Or you might focus on pages or workflows. Workflows are probably the best approaches as users on your app don’t just visit your page for fun, but to accomplish some tasks. With a product like Workfront, being a project management and work management tool, someone might want to create a new project or assign themselves to a task. So you want to make sure people can actually accomplish the tasks and goals they want with the tool. Workfront’s approach was to focus on pages, each of which contains several workflows. They wanted to take a data approach to see which pages, out of the 100+ pages, to remediate first.