Accessible Procurement Is Where Digital Accessibility Begins
- David Langdon
- 5 days ago
- 6 min read
Updated: 2 hours ago
Accessible procurement is where digital accessibility begins because many of the barriers people encounter in a digital service were already present when the technology was selected. By the time an inaccessible platform reaches employees or customers, the organisation may be tied to a contract, dependent on integrations and facing a remediation project that is expensive, slow and disruptive.
Accessibility is often treated as a quality check near the end of implementation. A team buys a system, configures it, launches it and then discovers that keyboard users cannot complete an important task, screen-reader labels are missing, colour contrast is inadequate or time limits cannot be adjusted. The problem appears to be in the interface, but the decision that made it difficult to fix may have occurred months earlier in procurement.
This is why accessible procurement deserves more attention. It moves accessibility upstream, where requirements can influence the shortlist, evidence can be examined and obligations can be built into the commercial relationship. It does not guarantee a perfect product. It does make it much harder for accessibility to become somebody else’s problem after the contract is signed.
Accessible procurement is a design decision
Procurement is sometimes described as an administrative gateway between a business need and a supplier. In practice, it is a design decision. The evaluation criteria determine which qualities matter, the contract determines which promises carry weight, and the implementation plan determines whose experience will be tested. If accessibility is absent from those decisions, it is unlikely to appear reliably by accident.
A generic question such as “Is your product accessible?” rarely produces useful insight. Most suppliers will answer positively, but the word accessible can cover anything from an intention to improve through to independently tested conformance. A better process identifies the critical journeys people must complete, the standards that are relevant and the evidence needed to support a supplier’s claims.
That means translating inclusion into practical requirements. Can the product be operated without a mouse? Do controls have meaningful names? Can users enlarge text without losing content or function? Are captions and transcripts supported? Can time limits be extended? Does the mobile experience work with assistive technology? These questions make accessibility part of the product decision rather than a broad statement of values.
Digital accessibility starts before implementation
The Australian Government’s Digital Inclusion Standard says accessibility should be considered across service design and delivery, including prior to procurement and as a service evolves. Its guidance also recommends including accessibility requirements in procurement so vendors adhere to relevant standards when developing digital components. Although the standard has a particular government context, the principle is useful for any organisation: inclusion is easier to sustain when it is built into the lifecycle.
For web content and web-based applications, the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines provide internationally recognised, testable criteria. WCAG 2.2 covers a wide range of needs and is designed to make content more accessible across devices. It is an important reference point, but a procurement team should still connect technical criteria to the real tasks that employees, customers and members of the public need to perform.
A platform can present a polished conformance statement and still create friction in a specific workflow. Configuration choices, third-party plug-ins, uploaded documents, authentication steps and integrations can all change the experience. Procurement therefore needs to consider both the product as supplied and the service that will exist after it is configured inside the organisation.
A conformance claim is not the same as evidence
Supplier accessibility statements are useful starting points, not final proof. Ask what version of WCAG was assessed, which conformance level was targeted, what parts of the product were included, when testing occurred and whether the assessment was independent. A detailed report should identify known gaps rather than presenting accessibility as a simple pass or fail.
Evidence becomes stronger when it is connected to the proposed use. Give suppliers realistic scenarios and ask them to complete important journeys using only a keyboard, at high zoom and with commonly used assistive technology. Where a barrier appears, explore its consequence, available workaround, remediation plan and expected timing.
This is not about setting traps for suppliers. Mature vendors usually understand that complex products can contain accessibility issues. The more useful distinction is between a supplier that can explain, prioritise and resolve those issues and one that cannot provide reliable evidence. Transparency is often a better indicator of future partnership than an unsupported claim of complete compliance.
People with disability need a role in evaluation
Technical testing is essential, but it does not replace lived experience. Standards tell teams what to examine; people reveal how design decisions combine in practice. An interaction may technically pass a criterion yet remain confusing, exhausting or unnecessarily slow. Conversely, a documented limitation may have a workable path when the surrounding process has been designed with flexibility and choice.
Involving people with disability should be planned, paid and purposeful. Participants need enough context to test meaningful scenarios, and their feedback must influence the decision rather than being collected after the preferred supplier has effectively been chosen. Internal accessibility specialists, employee networks and external testers can each contribute different perspectives.
No small group can represent every disability or every way of using technology. The aim is not to ask a few participants to certify a product for everyone. It is to combine standards-based assessment, assistive-technology testing and diverse user insight so the organisation sees risks that a conventional feature comparison would miss.
Contracts must carry accessibility beyond selection
Even a well-evaluated product will change. Vendors release updates, organisations add integrations and teams configure new workflows. Accessibility therefore needs to remain visible after selection. If it appears only in the tender response, it can disappear as soon as delivery pressures increase.
Contracts can define accessibility acceptance criteria, the evidence required before launch, timeframes for fixing priority barriers and responsibilities when third-party components are involved. They can also require suppliers to notify the organisation when updates may affect accessibility and to maintain an accessible channel for reporting problems.
Commercial terms should be proportionate to the product and risk, but they need to be specific enough to guide action. A broad promise to follow best practice is difficult to test or enforce. Clear obligations give procurement, project, legal and operational teams a shared basis for deciding whether the delivered experience is ready.
What an accessible procurement process should include
An effective process does not need to become a separate bureaucracy. Accessibility can be integrated into the same stages already used to understand needs, compare suppliers, manage risk and accept delivery. The key is to ask better questions early enough for the answers to influence the decision.
Define the critical journeys. Identify the tasks people must be able to complete and the consequences if they cannot. This keeps accessibility connected to service outcomes.
Set relevant requirements. Reference appropriate standards and describe functional needs, including keyboard access, screen-reader compatibility, magnification, captions, alternatives and flexible timing.
Request usable evidence. Ask for recent test results, the assessment scope and method, known limitations, remediation plans and the product roadmap.
Test before commitment. Evaluate representative journeys with accessibility expertise and people with disability before the commercial decision becomes difficult to change.
Write accessibility into delivery. Include acceptance criteria, responsibilities, reporting pathways, remediation timeframes and expectations for future releases in the contract.
Teams should scale the depth of evaluation to the importance and reach of the technology. A public service platform, core employee system or high-volume customer channel warrants greater scrutiny than a low-risk internal tool. The principle remains the same: the cost of discovering a barrier should be considered before the organisation commits to owning it.
Retrofitting transfers the cost to everyone
When accessibility is discovered late, the immediate impact falls on the person who cannot use the system. They may need to disclose a disability, request an adjustment, depend on a colleague or use a slower manual process. What looks like a technical defect becomes additional labour and reduced independence.
The organisation also absorbs the consequences. Teams create workarounds, support staff handle avoidable enquiries, projects pause for remediation and leaders manage reputational or compliance risk. Sometimes the inaccessible component cannot be changed without replacing the product, so a short procurement shortcut becomes a long operational constraint.
Accessible procurement does not remove every later cost, but it changes where effort is invested. Time spent specifying needs, examining evidence and testing journeys is deliberate work that improves the purchase. Time spent recovering from a barrier after launch is unplanned work that often delivers less choice at greater expense.
Buying better changes the market
Procurement choices send a signal. When organisations consistently ask for evidence, include accessibility in scoring and hold suppliers to delivery commitments, vendors have a commercial reason to invest. When accessibility is described as desirable but carries no weight in selection, suppliers learn that it can be deferred.
This matters beyond any single contract. Better demand encourages better product roadmaps, stronger testing practices and more transparent reporting. It also makes accessibility part of mainstream product quality rather than a specialist feature for a small group of users.
The most useful shift is simple: stop asking how to make an inaccessible purchase work and start asking whether the organisation should buy the barrier in the first place. Accessible procurement makes that question possible while there is still time, leverage and choice. That is where digital accessibility begins.
References
Australian Government, Digital Transformation Agency. (2024). Digital Inclusion Standard. https://www.digital.gov.au/policy/digital-experience/digital-inclusion-standard
Australian Government, Digital Transformation Agency. (2024). Criterion 4 – Make it accessible. https://www.digital.gov.au/policy/digital-experience/digital-inclusion-standard/dis-criterion-4-make-it-accessible
World Wide Web Consortium. (2024). Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.2. https://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG22/
World Wide Web Consortium. (2023). What’s New in WCAG 2.2. https://www.w3.org/WAI/standards-guidelines/wcag/new-in-22/
