Dear Boss,

Our team strives to build the highest quality web experiences for our customers. Each of us brings a different background of knowledge and skills that combine to help us meet this goal.

However, one missing piece for our team is a shared context and understanding of web accessibility.

When a web app is inaccessible, it means that not every user is able to complete their primary task. By excluding people with disabilities, we aren’t serving them as customers–in fact, we are impinging on their civil rights to access. This can also mean loss of revenue. For example, if a store’s checkout process can’t be completed without using a mouse then the shopper can’t make a purchase.

Worse than lost revenue is the possibility of a lawsuit. Companies like Target, Dunkin Donuts, and Dominos pizza have all been sued over inaccessible websites. This article about the business case for accessibility is an interesting read that makes some great points: https://www.w3.org/WAI/business-case/

In order to ensure our web app is usable for every visitor we have, our team needs to level set our knowledge of accessibility testing and development.

That’s why we are asking for you to invest in licenses to https://testingaccessibility.com

Testing Accessibility is a series of accessibility-focused workshops that start before any code is written and move all the way through deployment. The instructor, Marcy Sutton, produced this material based on her years of consulting and developing in-house at organizations of all sizes and teaching workshops to hundreds of developers.

By working through Testing Accessibility as a team, we will build a common understanding of how to test and fix issues in our existing application as well as build new functionality correctly from the start. This investment in our team and its processes will pay dividends for the company.

If you’d like to support our knowledge and skills as developers and testers, please visit the Testing Accessibility site to read more and purchase a team license for us: https://testingaccessibility.com/buy

Looking forward to learning!

-The Team