Affecting Digital Accessibility Change through Scalable Procurement Workflows

Though working with limited resources, our IT accessibility team of one built a strategy that prioritized longer-term, higher-level impacts, generating a resource-rich workflow based on risk and impact for accessible technology procurement at Portland State University. A tight-knit project team of campus stakeholders began by connecting directly with exemplars of accessibility best-practices across the higher education community. This provided the scaffolding for generating a functional procurement process expeditiously. To ensure the process was sustainable, the project team applied risk management strategies to the new accessibility procurement workflows, scaling efforts to increase alongside expected user impact. In less than a year, we were piloting our process and identifying areas of growth in managing both expectations and timeliness. Through a deep collaboration with our IT security team, we were able to merge existing security assessment with IT accessibility assessment to create a unified process that was more efficient for us and for our clients. By conducting the security and accessibility reviews in parallel, we shortened the overall time for contract review and established our new standard: the IT Risk and Accessibility Review (ITRAR). This presentation will detail our accessibility change efforts in technology procurement, and the lessons we learned while generating associated workflows and resources.