The document discusses lessons learned from case studies of organizations procuring digital products and services. It emphasizes that accessibility must be a priority throughout the procurement process, from initial requirements through vendor selection and ongoing assessment. Key lessons include having clear accessibility standards, evaluating vendors' compliance, ensuring internal alignment, and fostering collaborative relationships between organizations and vendors to support mutual accessibility goals. An overarching message is that process and communication are critical to achieve accessible procurement.
1. Accessible procurement: stories from the
trenches
CSUN Assistive Technology Conference 2021
Sarah Pulis
Director
sarahtp
March 2021
May-Fei Lee
Digital Accessibility Consultant
may-fei-lee
20. Take-aways
• Organisations have the power to create positive
change
• Vendors need to make it as easy as possible for
organisations to make informed decisions
• A collaborative relationship brings the most
benefits for everyone
• Process, process, process
I’m Sarah, director and cofounder of Intopia, twitter handle
I’m May-Fei, Digital Accessibility Consultant at Intopia.
Intro to us/our work.
Before we start, we want to acknowledge that language used to talk about disability is personal and individual. Today, we will be using the language that is used by the Australian Human Rights Commission and is inline with general recommendation from disability organisations on behalf of the their communities in Australia .
When we talk about accessible procurement, what we are ultimately talking about is including accessibility as a requirement when you buy a product. To me, this is all about organisations being able to make an informed decision about the purchase of a product with the ultimate outcome of having or choosing a vendor or product who can deliver an accessible product. There are many touchpoints during the process, including accessibility requirements in your proposals or tender documents, assessing a vendor or a vendor’s product on their ability to deliver on those requirements, accessibility requirement in contracts and the ultimate delivery of an accessible product. We’ll touch on these aspects in our case studies.
There are also a number of accessibility procurement standards such as Section 508 (US) and EN 301 549 (EU, Aus) to only name a few, but also specific accessibility standards such as WCAG 2. The case studies and lessons learnt that we want to share today aren’t specific to any particularly standards and can be applied no matter what standards or region you are in. So we won’t bore you with lots of indepth details about the different standards, but drop us a line if you want more information about that.
Include a penalty clause
Ensure all parts of the project team are on board
Financial institution
When they started talking to us, product had already been chosen.
Organisation already used product in other areas of the business, so already had an existing contract that didn’t include accessibility.
Knew accessibility was important but hadn’t assessed the product’s level of accessibility before deciding to use it for this project.
We performed accessibility review against WCAG as well as usability testing with people with disability.
Central government digital agency introduced accessible procurements standards as standard into relevant panel contracts
This would be applicable to all government agencies buying software and hardware products
Agency understood that the accessibility requirement would be new or not well understood by vendors and agencies alike.
Conducted information session with vendors and agencies to increase awareness and understanding of requirements
Ran specialised workshop for agency procurement teams about when to consider accessibility in the procurement process and what they were trying to achieve with the vendors. Had representation from a leading vendor, international expert who had been involved with the development of the standard and local expert.
Also too a staged approach to a hard enforcement of the accessibility requirements in acknowledgement that if they required vendors to meet this by requirement at 100% that they were likely to have vendor right it off as too hard and not progressively improve their accessibility.
* Accessibility is not the only driver but vendors are recognising that accessibility is a requirement and a driver.