Can People Within Your Organization Resolve the Accessibility Problems?

Before hiring a consultant, it may be prudent to ask whether your accessibility problems can be solved using existing staff. If the answers to the following questions are negative, then a consultant may indeed be required.

Existing In-house Skills

Does your staff have the training and the confidence needed to solve your accessibility problems? If they are confident, what is their confidence founded upon...a gut feeling or on past experience with this type of problem?

Do you know which department(s) should be working on the accessibility problems? Resolution of accessibility issues often involves multiple departments, e.g., the design department, the QA department, the human factors department, etc. If the staff in a given department are keen to see the disability problems solved by another department, that may be a good indication that the necessary skills are lacking in-house.

Do you have an "ADA Compliance Department/Officer?" This person (or persons) may be responsible for ensuring that ramps are provided to your buildings and that your bathrooms are accessible. Very often there is a tendency to push all disability-related problems in that direction. While it may be useful to get input or opinions from people in these roles, you should ask yourself questions about a skills mismatch, such as: "This is an industrial design problem...is my ADA compliance officer a qualified industrial designer?"

If the problem is critical and will likely involve high costs, what are the risks that insufficient staff skills will jeopardize the successful outcome of the project?

Training / Education

Will training be able to bridge the gap between existing staff skills and those skills necessary to solve the accessibility problems? What are the time considerations and costs of training? What courses are available? (Note: ITTATC maintains a list of web-based courses and training events.)

There are resources available (books, websites, courses) that can help your staff learn enough to solve the accessibility problems, but how long will it take for novices to become experts?

Hire New Staff?

Should someone be hired to work on the problem full time? How will they be found? What qualifications and experience should they have? How long will it take to get them up to speed? How long will it take for them to have an impact?

Time Lag

Could accessibility be derailed within your organization while the existing staff members are learning how to solve your problems? Buy-in that was obtained at the beginning of the process may become diluted if there is significant time lag between the problem definition and the acquisition of in-house skills to solve the problem.