Captain’s Log: Posting a List of Your Accessibility Efforts

Posting an accessibility log of your ongoing efforts to make your site more accessible is one of the best things you can do to demonstrate your good faith and prove that you take accessibility seriously.

Logging on

From the very beginning of man's maritime endeavors, ship's captains have kept records of their days spent at sea: where they've gone, what they've done, who they've met, and anything else they think might be of value to themselves or others who read them. We still have ships' logs from centuries ago, and people still glean useful information from them. Long after the timber from the ships has rotted, the captains' logs have provided useful information to interested parties.

On your journeys as the captain of your website, trying to navigate the waters of accessibility, you should also establish an accessibility log, and keep it up to date. This will serve you as a record of how far you've come in the accessibility of your site, but the benefits will extend far beyond just you.

Why Log?

The parties that will likely be interested in your record of accessibility-enhancing changes to your site will likely be visitors with disabilities, and those who love them. In Swimming with the Fish, we pointed out that by assuring your disabled visitors that you care about their experience, you'll become the one they turn to if they find accessibility issues in your site, rather than turning to the lawyers to file suits to bring you into compliance.

It's true that a well-written and engaging accessibility statement can have this effect, or at least nudge your disabled visitors in your direction. The statement is really just one piece of evidence that you care, though. To fully have the desired effect, you need as much evidence as possible.

In addition to your fair-sounding assertions that you care about accessibility, you'll need some quantifiable proof that you're backing up your words with deeds. You'll need to show that you've been working on it, which is what displaying an accessibility log of your accessibility efforts does. Displaying the log takes you from being a business that talks the talk to one that demonstrably walks the walk.

Pointing out in your Captain's Log that you've got your sea legs -- that you do walk the walk -- can be as impactful as walking it in the first place. As Forbes says, "disabled people can be loyal customers to businesses that are notably accessible ... and that treat them as valued customers rather than an annoyance." Notice Forbes's focus on being "notably accessible". The best way to drive this point home, particularly to visitors with disabilities that may only need a single assistive device, is to keep an accessibility log of your efforts to make the experience better for users of all assistive devices.

What do I put in my log?

Your ship's accessibility log doesn't need to be complicated, or take a lot of time to update. Indeed, as with most of the content in your site, you should shoot for each entry to be short, sweet, and to the point. You should state what you did and the desired effect that had, calling out which use of assistive technology it hopefully benefitted.

As with any logbook entry, it's a good idea to include the date you did the work. The regularity of the work may do more than anything to prove that you're sincere about caring about accessibility. This is particularly true if you're still in the aspirational phase of your accessibility journey.

If you know your site has many problems--more than you have the bandwidth to fix immediately and all at once--you can help your visitors know of your good intentions in your accessibility statement, and then back up those intentions with an active and frequently-updated log of accessibility work.

What should the log look like?

There's no set format for what your log should look like. It's not like your high school English class where Mrs. T.S. marked you down for not formatting your Works Cited page correctly. Instead, it's more like a resume where you can make it look as pleasing and inviting as you'd like.

Inviting is what you're going for with your accessibility log, because this is something you're mainly offering your visitors with disabilities, and the interested people who love them. While the audience is a little limited, the goal is a deep one: connection. You could throw an impersonal list up there, and just the fact that you did it will impress. Spend a little more time on design, though, and you'll connect with them that much better.

Automate your accessibility log

As we've pointed out in several posts (Big Picture 1, Training in on the Retention Track, Three Key Indicators That You Need E-Commerce Integration) automating your job is a great idea to make sure that it gets done. You may not be able to automate the log fully so that you don't need to touch it yourself at all, but maybe you can integrate the creation of your log entries along with your accessibility efforts in the first place.

This is one of the main things we like about our partner, Accessible Web. Accessible Web's web accessibility checker scans all the pages on your site to establish an overall accessibility score for your site, lists out all the site's issues in terms of both impact on the score and on users, and lets you add the issues you want to work on to a remediation list. Then, almost automatically, it asks to add to the accessibility log as you mark those issues off. Adding to the log is just part of the process of fixing the accessibility of the site.

Log frequently

You should have a process to follow if you get a website accessibility request, like from your accessibility statement's contact information or form. We hope your process is that you respond directly to the person who made the request within a matter of hours, and then fix the accessibility issues brought up within a matter of days, or at least request your web dev agency right away so they can fix it in a matter of days.

The last step of that process should be ensuring that the documentation of work performed gets added to the log. As Meryl Evans, accessibility advocate, says, “accessibility is about progress over perfection,” and documenting that progress is an important step. Meryl also says that another important step as you make progress is to celebrate that progress. Adding to the accessibility log should feel like a kind of celebration.

It's not that you want to be tooting your own horn, or buffing your fingernails on your shirt, but you've got to say what you did or maybe nobody will notice. And improving the accessibility of your site is a wonderful, positive step that deserves to be recognized.

In fact, if it were up to me, you'd put facebook share and like buttons right on each entry where interested visitors would congratulate you on your efforts right there in the Ship's log. Let's make this feel like a celebration, shall we? Huzzah! Huzzah! Huzzah! (click to celebrate)

Logging off

I began this post pointing out that many historical ship's logs outlasted the ships themselves by sometimes hundreds of years. I'm not proposing that your accessibility log will be the most durable part of your website, but just consider for a moment if it were. If your accessibility log was all someone had of your website in ten or fifteen years, wouldn't you be glad you'd filled up your log with all manner of small but significant changes to your site that made it work better for your visitors who came to you on assistive devices? Wouldn't that say more about your business than anything else you said about the kind of company you have?