The best way to improve the accessibility of your website and work towards compliance is by identifying what you need to fix and then working steadily through the list of issues. When this is fitted around your digital team’s normal sets of responsibilities, it can take a few weeks to months to get through what you need to do, but you’ll be amazed at the steady progress you can make.

Keeping the team motivated

One critical component of driving this kind of steady improvement is to keep your team motivated and focused in driving forward progress. We all work in busy environments with continual distractions; web teams, in particular, often have to drop everything to work on something urgent, so it can be tempting to deprioritise improving accessibility. Here measurement and reporting can become an essential ingredient for ensuring that the work required to improve accessibility actually gets done.

We get continually told by clients that the measurement and reporting capabilities within Sitemorse  have been instrumental in the sustaining of efforts to successfully improve accessibility. For these teams, tracking progress usually falls into four main categories:

• The aggregated score out of 10 for an assessment category that forms part of Sitemorse’s automation, with accessibility being one of the most important categories.
• The Sitemorse PRIVATEINDEX service that benchmarks your site against your competitors or those in your sector and publishes relevant league tables so you can see how you are performing, and the progress you’ve made by climbing the table.
• The number of actions that you are left to carry out, with an indication of the percentage progress you’ve made in reducing the number on the list of actions. These are exposed through our reporting.
• The Sitemorse SMARTVIEW where an individual can quickly check the accessibility of a page from within their web browser. Although this doesn’t track your progress over the weeks, it can confirm that you have made progress on a particular page with multiple issues.

How these measurement and reporting features elements help 

We find these measurement and reporting features help motivate teams for a number of reasons.

1. Measurement helps break down a big task into manageable chunks

   If you have a large website with poor accessibility sometimes it can feel overwhelming when you see what needs to be done. For this reason, some teams feel demotivated before they even start or think they simply do not have the resources to improve accessibility . For this reason, they do not start.

   When you have measurement in place and can see the progress you make from week to week, it effectively means you can break down a very big task into more far manageable chunks. By focusing just on smaller steps, it can really help your team to get started and make realistic progress that does not disrupt their other responsibilities.

2. Reporting on prioritisation provides focus and clarity

   Breaking down the project into smaller steps also allows the team to focus on a priority set of issues that are identified within Sitemorse. This helps teams to keep focused and gives individuals clarity on what they should work on next; this is also supported by Sitemorse’s ability to target relevant fixes to different roles such as your front-end developers and your content owners.

   The ability to have clarity on priority issues means that there is less initial thought and effort required on getting started each week on working on your fixes. Too much initial effort can be a barrier to actually making progress; leveraging the prioritisation in the reporting means everyone can just get on with improving accessibility.

3. Progress is tangible and validated

   Using a platform to Sitemorse allows you to track your progress each week. This is important because not only does this then validate the approach you’re taking and makes it feel like your activity was worth it, but also it means progress is something highly tangible. All too often the changes you make around digital accessibility are not immediately visible but measuring them makes your progress real. With Sitemorse you can measure your progress week by week, but also over time. For example, the INDEX service shows progress over an entire quarter so you can effectively compare “Before” and “After” your project.

4. Progress feels good

   When progress is tangible and with an approach that you know works, it feels good. There are lots of studies about the psychology of motivation, gamification (how to “gamify” work processes to make them more engaging) and even neuroscience that show progress is motivating. We’re not necessarily saying that improving digital accessibility is going to give you a massive shot of dopamine, but essentially when you feel like you’ve achieved something you’re more likely to want to carry on to get that same sense of achievement, week by week.

5. You can celebrate success with management

   One of the great things about Sitemorse is that you can easily share progress with senior management through existing reporting processes or even directly through dashboards within the product. Celebrating success gives your team recognition of an important job done and can even be used in business cases for investment in other digital tools.

Don’t underestimate the power of motivation

Keeping a team motivated is critical to maintaining momentum and focus on a project to improve digital accessibility. Measurement and reporting are key parts of this, so it is always good to consider this component when you start an initiative to improve the accessibility of your website. Good luck and stay motivated!