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Gregor Albrecht for FINN

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How do you establish an accessibility-focused developer culture at your company?

At FINN, we’ve experienced enormous growth in the last 18 months. We’ve hired numerous talented people, we’ve built a large number of new features, and we've put a growing-every-day number of sustainable car subscriptions on German and US roads.

In this process, we could have focused more on accessibility (a11y) than we've done so far. Now that we have more talent to focus on this aspect of our products, everyone is eager to improve our a11y. So we're wondering: How do you establish an accessibility-focused developer culture at your company?

Oldest comments (7)

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georgewl profile image
George WL • Edited

One thing that helped was showing evidence of the benefits using stats and figures

Another was the fact that good accessibility is factored into placement in most search engines, as an accessible website is also easier for a search engine to crawl, which when we informed marketing about this, suddenly accessibility became a huge priority.

Sometimes the easiest way to get the developers to focus on thing is to get pressure from higher-up folks, and giving evidence of the benefits is one way to do so.

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gregoralbrecht profile image
Gregor Albrecht

Thanks @georgewl! Totally agree that providing evidence is crucial here. I think I will work on this. Do you have any specific resources about the benefits that you could reference?

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georgewl profile image
George WL

webaim.org/blog/web-accessibility-...

Web AIM are one of the forefront of web accessibility, most known for their accessibility testing tool WAVE (Web Accessibility Visual Evaluation tool).

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michaeltharrington profile image
Michael Tharrington
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horrorofpartybeach profile image
Emma

Thanks so much for mentioning my post @michaeltharrington :) I hope it's useful and I'm planning a follow up to dive a bit deeper when I get a chance!

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michaeltharrington profile image
Michael Tharrington

Oh no doubt! Props for writing this one and I'm looking forward to a future deep dive into it. 🙌

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gregoralbrecht profile image
Gregor Albrecht

Thanks for linking that article @michaeltharrington! Accessibility should really be everyone's concern, I definitely agree