Accessibility Program Governance and Remediation
Accessibility governance turns intent into repeatable practice: policy, ownership, standards, procurement, testing, remediation, and monitoring. The exam tests how you prioritize defects, structure remediation, and avoid paper compliance.
Program components
- Adopt a target such as WCAG 2.2 AA and state it in policy and accessibility statements.
- Assign owners for design systems, components, content, and third-party integrations.
- Shift left: acceptance criteria, design reviews, component tests, and CI checks.
- Procurement: request VPAT/ACR and test claims; EN 301 549 for EU public sector; Section 508 in the US.
- Maintain a feedback channel and a public issue process.
Remediation prioritization
Rank by user impact and task criticality, not raw count. Blockers first: keyboard traps, inaccessible authentication, missing form labels, unlabeled dialogs, video without captions on required content. Then high-traffic flows, then systemic component fixes, then cosmetic issues.
Worked example
A checkout page has a keyboard trap in a coupon modal and a decorative image with verbose alt text. Fix the trap first. Reasoning: the trap prevents keyboard and screen reader users from completing a purchase (severity high, frequency high on a critical task). The alt text is a quality issue but does not block the task; batch it with the next component release.
Traps
Treating a VPAT as proof of conformance; one-off audits with no regression testing; fixing pages instead of the design system; remediating PDFs while the source template remains broken; and claiming conformance without evidence or a feedback route.