Accessibility Drives Digital Freedom for All

As part of our compliance journey, accessibility is prominent across user experience (UX) and development conversations for new products, features, services, and updates.

 

Mission

In a diverse world, users interact with and experience software differently. To ensure universal digital freedom, Acquia strives to design and develop tools with accessibility at the forefront.

Goals

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Reach

AA compliance for all Acquia products.

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Create

Accessibility first experiences that provide digital freedom for users.

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Promote

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in all of our business practices.

Inclusive Design

At Acquia, we put inclusive design first in creating our products and digital experiences. Designing for inclusion encompasses user diversity — language, gender, age, culture, ability, and other factors like the environment — while designing user-centered products and services.

Considerations to be inclusive:

  • Impairments: Permanent, temporary, and situational
  • Environment: Physical location and surrounding details
  • Assistive tech: Tools to alleviate pain points caused by impairments and environment

Enablement

Building accessible technology for everyone is a natural extension of our corporate culture and inclusion-first mindset.


Drupal and the Acquia DAM have taken steps to ensure accessibility is top of mind through the design process. Checklists, scorecards, and leadership that values compliance has driven this direction.

Dries
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I've come to believe that accessibility is not something you do for a small group of people. Accessibility is about promoting inclusion. When the product you use daily is accessible, it means that we all get to work with a greater number and a greater variety of colleagues. Accessibility benefits everyone.

Dries Buytaert, Founder and CTO Acquia

Our Approach

 

Empathize

Focused on internal education and external informative support of the value of embracing accessible practices.

Deliver

While a large percentage of our accessibility testing is manual, we use a combination of tools — Lighthouse, Siteimprove Accessibility Checker, and axe — to review accessibility. We’ve also incorporated VoiceOver and keyboard accessibility as part of our testing, and we’re looking to incorporate non-visual desktop access (NVDA) for screen reading. 


Measure

Accessibility progress and compliance is regularly measured using various auditing tools, including Google Lighthouse. Our goal is that all Acquia applications will meet accessibility standards and maintain continuous compliance with Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 AA.

Reaching AA compliance

 

Acquia believes that accessibility is not about disability, but inclusion. It's about future-proofing and staying feature-rich as technology becomes more touch-friendly and voice-driven. 

This mindset fuels our commitment to bringing all Acquia products in full compliance with WCAG 2.1 AA standards. We’ll continue to build on our existing accessibility processes and programs to ensure we meet this goal and continue to make our software the best possible experience — for everyone.