Digital Accessibility Expert

About the role

The State of Connecticut is seeking a Digital Accessibility Expert to help assess, strategize, and implement a11y and usability improvements for digital products and services. Key responsibilities include auditing and testing digital assets, supporting cross-functional teams, and promoting a11y best practices.

Responsibilities

• Conduct testing and implement improvements to digital products, services, and processes to ensure the State is meeting the highest standards of accessibility compliance
• Audit current State systems, internal processes, and customer-facing assets to find accessibility issues, and create prioritization models and project plans for addressing
• Evaluate new vendor products for compliance with accessibility standards, and help improve the State procurement process for technology and digital services
• Document current levels of State compliance, rank the compliance level against standardized benchmarks, and create reports that identify State gaps and violations by platform, service, process, asset type, and customer journey touchpoints
• Support accessibility initiatives that foster environments where everyone can thrive, including employees, along the full range of neurodiversity
• Collaborate with internal and external partners to identify needs and incorporate best practice policies for accessibility
• Work with Legal and Legislative teams to align accessibility guidance with State regulatory policies
• Provide compliance guidance for the creation of visual media assets, and assist in the creation of these assets as assigned
• Conduct and execute routine usability and accessibility checks for state websites and online assets
• Integrate testing policies for meeting State accessibility standards on all product and service development, including development from external vendors
• Support internal and external-facing engagements to help advocate for digital accessibility
• Develop and implement ongoing accessibility program activities and share-outs for business stakeholders and vendors to support the State’s evangelization of inclusionary design
• Establish and maintain effective relationships across IT teams, business teams, legal teams, legislators, and vendors
• Contribute content on accessibility standards for current State guidebooks on Design, Research, Content, Development, Data, and Technology to consistently improve enterprise standards
• Stay on top of the latest advances in WCAG, ADA, and Section 508 regulations and best practices, and create plans/processes for efficient optimization of State accessibility standards

Requirements

• 5+ years of experience assessing and improving digital materials and services (websites, digital interfaces, online transaction flows, PDFs, etc.) to comply with regulatory accessibility standards (WCAG, ADA, Section 508)
• Specifically WCAG 2.2 AA
• 5+ years of testing experience, conducting QA activities on systems and products: analyzing needs, testing process flows, planning service improvements, assessing test data, and implementing accessibility solutions
• 2+ years of product or project owner experience, working collaboratively with teams to improve products and services using digital accessibility technologies, policies, and best practices
• 2+ years of experience with language translation efforts, including the oversight and maintenance of accessibility standards around translation services – both machine and manual.
• Strong expertise in auditing systems and products to find accessibility issues, providing guidance for mitigating issues, and improving accessibility knowledge and practices within internal teams
• Expertise in assistive technology tools such as JAWS, NVADA, Dragon, Fusion, deque, Wave, ZoomText. Also experience with built-in device features such as speech-to-text, text-to-speech, magnifiers, onscreen keyboards, eye glaze tech, and alternative mice/keyboards
• Strong understanding of responsive web design principles, techniques, and frameworks
• Experience assessing and mitigating accessibility issues on internal business processes, including case management and data collection processes
• Experience creating or contributing to the development of an accessibility policy for a business or institution
• Demonstrated experience establishing governance standards and processes to support efficient maintenance of accessibility efforts
• Creative out-of-the box thinking to provide solution-oriented guidance for optimizing services, using the latest digital accessibility techniques and tools
• Experience as a mentor or coach for product teams to promote accessibility-focused development within an agile system
• Strong interpersonal and communication skills, including the ability to clearly present ideas and recommendations as well as receive and address challenges to your guidance
• Proficient with KPI and success metric development, along with the ability to communicate the impact of accessibility efforts to stakeholders
• Strong ability to create and maintain documentation and best practice methodologies across multiple systems and functional areas
• Able to explain technical issues to non-technical stakeholders and communicate their implication on systems, processes, projects, and services.
• Able to facilitate discussions and solutions

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree is required
• A total of 5 years of experience working in the domain of accessibility optimization, with 2 years of highly relevant professional experience in Accessibility and Inclusion-based policy compliance
• 2+ years of experience in assessing, testing, and optimizing digital assets for accessibility needs, including websites, visual media, communication tools, online applications, documents, and video conferencing tools
• Experience with software like eVinced, Axe, and WebAIM
• Strong written and oral communication skills, and responsiveness to leadership and stakeholder requests
• Experience with project management software, along with project processes and best practices
• Ability to work both independently and collaboratively to advance accessibility standards in the UX, content, research, development, and technology spaces
• Ability to set rigid practices for accessibility optimization solutions, while maintaining flexibility for ad-hoc needs
• Strong proficiency with MS Suite (Word, Excel, PowerPoint), Microsoft Teams, Outlook, and Zoom