Insights / Accessibility
September 12, 2026 · 8 min read
Accessibility debt is a procurement problem.
Most public-sector solicitations mention accessibility in a paragraph and describe the homepage in a page. Vendors price the page. The paragraph becomes a finding eighteen months later, usually after someone files it.
If conformance is not a deliverable with a test, it is a wish.
Write the bar where the score is
Name the standard. For public websites we use WCAG 2.2 AA, and we say so in the estimate. “Industry best practices” cannot be tested, and it cannot be compared across proposals. Pair the standard with the journeys that matter: apply, pay, find a school, read an agenda, request a record. A perfect marketing page and a broken form is a failed launch.
Put remediation in a phase you can buy
Inherited PDFs, unlabeled video, and a decade of news posts will not be fixed inside a homepage redesign. Say that. A credible proposal separates new templates, which launch conformant, from the backlog, which is sampled, prioritized, and scheduled. Committees trust the vendor who draws that line more than the vendor who promises the archive by go-live.
Leave rules for the next editor
The site drifts the first time someone pastes from Word. Training, component constraints, and a short publishing checklist belong in the same award as the theme. Otherwise the conformance report describes a site that existed for a week.
Procurement’s job is not to become an accessibility shop. It is to refuse language that cannot be scored, and to fund the test. The design and the build can take it from there.