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It's vital to embed accessibility considerations in every step of the planning process, from crafting business cases and briefs to outlining project scopes.

By integrating accessibility into the pre-discovery phase, we acknowledge its importance and set the project up for later success. Other benefits include recognising the market potential of inclusive products, catering to a broader audience, and adhering to legal requirements.

You can incorporate accessibility into the pre-discovery phase by:

• talking to the people who will be impacted by your project, so you know what they need
• highlighting accessibility requirements in your briefings to executives alongside cyber and privacy
• including accessibility in your business cases and early procurement activities, like your approach to market
• budgeting for accessibility testing and remediation or sourcing expertise from your agency
• ensuring your project planning includes regular accessibility checks
• planning your consultations and user testing to include people with a wide range of abilities, ages and needs, including people from CALD (Culturally and Linguistically Diverse) backgrounds.

You can use or adapt the following example text to set clear accessibility requirements in business cases, project plans and briefings:

Clearly defining accessibility goals and metrics ensures that they are prioritised throughout the development lifecycle. Additionally, budgeting for accessibility features demonstrates a commitment to inclusivity and avoids potential retrofitting costs later-on.

Accessibility is everyone's responsibility within the team. All team members, including developers, content writers, and designers, need to understand how to avoid creating unintentional accessibility issues. Product and delivery managers should also understand accessibility to ensure it is considered from the beginning and integrated into the product or service.

Even when you're just talking about ideas and developing concepts, think about whether your thoughts align with the NSW delivery process, adhere to user research methods and meet the NSW Design Standards.

Buying a digital product or service

If you are choosing to buy a product, rather than build it yourself, make sure you include accessibility requirements into your procurement. Visit buy for more information on accessible procurement.

Make sure you follow the NSW Government Delivery Manual. This will support you to understand the needs of all your users at every stage.

Add accessibility as an acceptance criterion for each new feature.

Join the Australian Cross Government Service Design Community for across government support.

These additional resources can help develop a clearer understanding of the customer need behind inclusive design:

• Making your service accessible: GOV.UK's accessibility in government service manual explores the problems you’re facing and trying to solve
• Web accessibility perspectives videos: explore the impact and benefits for everyone
• User profiles of users with disabilities: understand how accessibility affects individual users.

Continue to review your design against the NSW Design System and NSW Branding standards. This will help you meet the needs of all your users.

Add accessibility testing into each development sprint or quality assurance check.

This is the time to start thinking about your accessibility audit as this can take time to arrange and receive. You may have someone in your department with the necessary skills and auditing experience to do this. If not, you will need to appoint an external accessibility specialist. Ask your auditor to spend a couple of days during alpha reviewing your designs and prototypes. This helps identify potential accessibility problems.

Improve what you’re designing by running research sessions with users with disability, people from different backgrounds.

During beta, it's best to continue to test for accessibility, and to engage with an external testing supplier. Running a combination of manual and automated tests each time, you develop a new feature means you can sort out issues that could be costly to fix at a later stage.

Prioritise issues against other development concerns. Think about whether an error is critical, less critical, or minor. Critical issues will cause serious problems for most users of assistive technology. Less critical issues may cause increased frustration for certain users. Minor issues will cause frustration for a small number of users.

User testing sessions with people with disability help you check what you’re building is accessible.

• It’s important to carry on testing for accessibility and researching your service once it’s live.
• Check that all new features meet government accessibility requirements.
• Continue doing research with people with disability.

If you make significant upgrades to your service, it's best to get another accessibility audit. This way you can be sure you still meet government accessibility requirements.