It’s January. You’re mapping out the year, setting your goals, and making your plans. And somewhere on your to-do list, maybe buried under “update portfolio”, and “improve client onboarding” is accessibility.
You know it matters. You’ve probably said, “this is the year we get serious about it” before. Maybe even last January.
The problem isn’t a lack of intention, it’s a lack of structure.
Accessibility gets added to the list, then quietly ignored because there’s always something more urgent. A client deadline, a site launch, a fire to put out, and before you know it, it’s December and you’re making the same New Year’s resolution again.
This year, let’s try something different.
Instead of treating accessibility as a massive project you’ll tackle “when things slow down” (they won’t), think of it as building muscle. You don’t get stronger by going to the gym once a year for twelve hours. You get stronger by showing up consistently and doing a little more each time.
So here is a quarter-by-quarter framework to help you build accessibility into how your agency works without burning out your team or blowing up your processes.
Q1: Make Accessibility Visible
You can’t improve it if you’re not tracking it.
The first quarter is about awareness. Because you can’t improve it if you’re not tracking it.
Audit what you’re already doing. Look at your last few projects. Where did accessibility show up in your process and where was it missing entirely? Be honest. This isn’t about judgment, it’s about establishing a baseline.
Research what you don’t know yet. Identify the gaps in your team’s knowledge and start gathering resources, including articles, videos, and courses, so you’re ready for getting your team up to speed with the accessibility knowledge they’ll need.
Set up a basic testing workflow. Pick one or two tools that your team can start using. Run automated scans on projects before launch. Have developers do a quick keyboard navigation check before committing code. Nothing elaborate, just enough to start catching obvious issues.
Why start here? Because you’re not trying to fix everything yet. You’re building awareness, both on your team and with your clients.. You’re making accessibility something your team thinks about, talks about, and starts to notice. That foundation matters more than you might think.
Q2: Build It Into Your Process
Once accessibility is visible, you can start making it systematic.
Add checkpoints to design reviews. Before designs go to development, ask: Is there sufficient color contrast? Are form fields labeled? Are we relying on color alone to convey information? These questions don’t add hours to your timeline. But they do help you start to build a habit.
When accessibility is baked into your starting point, every project gets easier.
Create accessible patterns you can reuse. Build a component library or design system or starter theme that’s accessible by default, buttons that work with keyboards, forms that have proper labels, navigation that works for screen readers. When accessibility is baked into your starting point, every project gets easier.
Train your team on the basics. This doesn’t mean sending everyone to a week-long certification program. A lunch and learn, a shared resource library, or even just watching a few accessibility testing videos together can make a real difference. The goal is getting everyone to a baseline understanding of accessibility, whether they’re a designer, a developer, a project manager, a copywriter, or a social media manager.
In Q2 you start shifting from “we should think about accessibility” to “accessibility is a part of how we work.” That’s a big change and it may take the full quarter to make it stick.
Q3: Talk About It With Clients
By mid year, you’ve got the foundation down and you’re building some momentum. Now it’s time to bring clients into the conversation.
Update your client facing language. How do you explain accessibility’s value without getting preachy or technical? Focus on what matters to clients: reaching more users, reducing legal risk, building a better product. Once you’ve got that down, update your proposals, contracts, and website to reflect that you build with accessibility in mind. You don’t need to promise WCAG AAA compliance on every project. Just make it visible that this is something you care about and consider.
Create case studies and examples. Document the accessibility work that you’ve done. Show before and after improvements with metrics. Accessible sites outperform inaccessible sites for performance, conversion, and SEO. Concrete examples are more persuasive than abstract arguments about doing the right thing.
Start proactive conversations. Don’t wait for clients to bring up accessibility or worse, wait until they get a demand letter. Bring it up in the initial sales calls. Make it part of the proposal. Mention it during the project kickoff. Bring it up in your weekly or monthly checkins. Position yourself as the professional who thinks ahead.
You’re not just the agency that builds websites. You’re the agency that builds websites that work for everyone.
Now in Q3, you’re shifting how clients see you. You’re not just the agency that builds websites. You’re the agency that builds websites that work for everyone, and that is a competitive advantage.
Q4: Refine and Scale
The final quarter of the year is all about sustainability. You’ve built the muscle, and now you need to make sure you keep it.
Review what worked and what didn’t. Which parts of your new process stuck? Which ones got dropped when things got busy? Be honest about what’s realistic for your team and adjust accordingly.
Document your wins. Track the accessibility improvements you’ve made this year. How many issues did you catch and fix? Which clients saw measurable improvements? This isn’t just for marketing purposes. It’s proof to you and your team that the work matters.
Set up monitoring for existing sites. Websites change constantly. Content gets added, plugins get updated, and things break. Ongoing monitoring catches regressions before they become problems. It’s also a natural way to stay connected with clients after launch and to build an ongoing renewable income stream.
Accessibility isn’t a project with an end date. It’s an ongoing practice. And Q4 is about making sure that what you’ve built is sustainable, something that will carry you into the next year without having to start again from scratch.
You Don’t Need To Be an Expert
Here’s what I want you to take away from this. You don’t need to become an accessibility specialist to make real progress and make a real difference.
You don’t need to memorize WCAG or know every ARIA pattern. You don’t need to be able to debug complex screen reader interactions. You just need to care enough to start and to keep showing up.
Small consistent actions compound over time.
Small consistent actions compound over time. Fix the alt text on this project, make sure you have form labels on the next one, train one team member this quarter and have a conversation with a client next quarter.
A year from now you’ll look back and realize how far you’ve come. Not because you did everything perfectly but because you kept going.
I wrote about this last May. Accessibility isn’t about perfection, it’s about progress. That’s still true. The agencies that succeed with accessibility aren’t the ones who try to fix everything at once. They’re the ones who take the time to build it into how they work one step at a time.
You Don’t Have To Do This Alone
This framework gives you the structure, but structure alone doesn’t always get you through the hard parts, the moments when you’re not sure if you’re doing it right, when a client pushes back and when your team has questions that you can’t answer.
That’s why we built AAArdvark Circle.
Circle is our community for agencies and freelancers who want to add accessibility to their services. You get practical guidance, live sessions, a community of peers who are figuring this out alongside you, and direct access to our team when you’re stuck.
If you read this and thought, “yes, I want to do this but I need help” – that’s exactly what Circle is for.
