Accessibility First

Prioritize the accessibility of your products to ensure equal educational opportunities for all students, regardless of their disabilities or limitations.

Why: Today, approximately 15% of the world's population experience some form of disability, and these individuals often face significant barriers in accessing education. Public institutions have a responsibility to deliver an inclusive education. Hence, your product will be under high scrutiny. It's important to understand that making your edtech product accessible is not about catering to a small subset of users with disabilities, but about promoting inclusivity and equality in education for all. Beyond the moral imperative and business sense, legal obligations like the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and the European Accessibility Act (Directive (EU) 2019/882) mandate certain accessibility standards. Non-compliance could lead to legal ramifications and negative publicity. Moreover, an accessible product often translates into a better user experience for everyone, not just those with disabilities, which could enhance customer satisfaction, loyalty, and word-of-mouth marketing.

Maturity levels

  1. None: Pretending you’re compliant while you’re not (similar to “greenwashing”). You can get away with this for a while, but it will be revealed eventually through audits or automated testing and hurt your reputation in the long term. A better alternative is to be honest about non-compliance and implement junior level (still easy and cheap) while pledging to meet Medior level at respective milestone.

  2. Junior: When doing first hires, set out to select on developers and designers with a11y experience and pick up the cheap wins (like semantic HTML5 for SPA’s) along the way to avoid double work later down the line. Publicly commit to the next maturity level when you reach your next maturity milestone. Schedule accessibility on your roadmap to allocate developer capacity later down the line.

  3. Medior: At least 10 essential WCAG 2.1 success criteria fully covered on the critical path of your student's user journeys.

  4. Senior: Full WCAG 2.2 compliance on critical user path, yearly re-audit, all branches of product development trained, a11y-first in all new work.

Related standards & regulations

  • W3C WCAG 2.0

  • W3C WCAG 2.1

  • W3C WCAG 2.2

  • U.S. Revised Section 508, and thus, by precedent, complies with known legal interpretations of the Americans With Disabilities Act (ADA) as it applies to online products

  • California ABA 343

  • EN 301 549 (2018) and (2019)

  • UK’s Public Sector Bodies (Websites and Mobile Applications) Accessibility Regulations 2018 (PSBAR), and possible post-Brexit engagement with aspects of the European Accessibility Act

  • Australia’s DDA (Disability Discrimination Act, 1992)

  • anticipated regulations related to the Government of Canada’s Accessible Canada Act

  • Ontario’s AODA

  • Existing and anticipated regulations in other Canadian provinces, such as the Accessibility for Manitobans Act (AMA), Nova Scotia Accessibility Act (2017), and British Columbia Accessibility Act (Bill M 219, 2018)

  • Israel’s Equal Rights for Persons with Disabilities Standard (IS) 5568

  • Korea’s KWCAG (all versions)

  • Norway’s UU Section 14

  • Japan’s JIS X 8341-3, JIS X 3241-3

  • New Zealand’s NZG WS 2.0

  • PDF/UA (ISO 14289-1:2012)