A standard is not a practice
Declaring WCAG 2.1 AA is easy and, on its own, nearly meaningless. It tells a designer nothing about whether the brand’s teal on white clears the threshold, and it tells a writer nothing about whether their alt text is doing any work. A standard becomes real when the people bound by it can tell, without asking, whether they have met it.
The work
Contrast-compliance matrices for the full brand palette. Every foreground-background pair in the department’s colors, tested and scored, so the answer to “can I use this combination” is a lookup rather than a debate. Some combinations the brand had been using for years did not pass. Better to find that in a matrix than in a complaint.
Screen reader verification across VoiceOver, TalkBack, and NVDA. Three readers because they behave differently, and content that reads cleanly in one can be incoherent in another. Testing in only the one on your own machine tells you about your machine.
A phased staff rollout. Accessibility requirements delivered all at once, to everyone, get treated as an obstacle. Phased, with the reasoning attached, they get treated as the job.
The framing that works
Not compliance. The department’s audience includes families navigating early childhood services under real pressure — people for whom an unreadable page is not an inconvenience but a closed door. That argument moves people. The regulation, by itself, mostly does not.
What happened: TODO — palette combinations retired, staff trained, or issues caught before publication.
More work on this page, and more about me over here.