Skills & Training

The "Skills & Training" criteria of the plan ensure your organization hires people with accessibility skills and trains current employees on skills related to accessibility. It is a good idea to identify who in your organization needs training and what kind is needed for their role. It is recommended that all employees take basic digital accessibility training.

These criteria work in tandem with the Governance criteria since having skilled roles in place is essential to successfully operationalize accessibility.

Assessing Training and Skills

Meeting people where they are is important when providing accessibility training since not everyone needs to know everything about accessibility. 

1. A great first step is to conduct an employee skills assessment to understand the gaps in knowledge as it relates to accessibility, then identify what type of accessibility training is needed. Consider creating an Accessibility Related Roles Assessment form that is unique for your agency (like this great example from CDPS).

Here are some examples of roles and skills:

1. • Training for general staff on digital accessibility fundamentals

   • Training for designers and usability specialists on how to incorporate the needs of people with disabilities into information architecture,  visual design, and usability testing

   • Training for developers on how to create accessible applications and digital forms 

   • Training for website authors and digital content creators on how to create accessible websites, eLearning courses, recorded and live videos, digital forms and documents

     • Training Pathway: Websites (Doc)

     • Training Pathway: Communicators (Doc)

     • State Website Roles and Responsibilities (Doc)

   • Training for project and product managers on how to address accessibility in development life cycles, agile processes, and product management

   • Training for testers on how to test for WCAG conformance

   • Training for service desk personnel on how to troubleshoot reported accessibility issues.

2. Develop an Accessibility Training Plan to define who should receive training and when training must be mandatory. Identify when and how you will make new training available and how you will track and enforce participation.

3. Develop and publish a training calendar and communicate training offerings to agency management and employees.

4. Pursue “train the trainer” options to increase scalability within your agency. Train the Trainer allows you to start training a few people within your organization and then have those trained individuals train others.

5. Make space for employees to take the necessary training/professional development and track employees who take training. Consider a recognition model to encourage training and skill building. This can also be advantageous to your employees' professional development and resume building.

6. Include accessibility skills in job descriptions (including, but not limited to web developer, web designer, content creator, graphic designer, instructional designer, communication director/manager/coordinator, software developer, user experience designer, human resources, project manager, business analyst, admin, etc.).

7. Request employee feedback on training to gauge effectiveness.

8. Revisit your accessibility checklist to ensure all phases (launch, integrate and optimize) within the “skills” tab have been assigned to specific people (not just a communications person) accounted for, and accomplished.

9. Outline specifically how your executive director/sponsor can help, and what they need to know about accessibility in order to help build awareness and desire.

It's important to build on the awareness that accessibility is a responsibility that everyone within an agency needs to share - this isn’t one person’s job (or in some cases, an add-on to one’s existing job).

Visit the Training section for statewide accessibility training resources. Contact TAP for more information about training at OIT_accessibility@state.co.us