Crowdsourcing for Accessibility

While we’re anticipating the Section 508 refresh, many government digital media teams are facing the task of incorporating WCAG 2.0 standards (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) in their projects despite having limited staff resources and budget constraints.

We can use creative solutions, such as crowdsourcing, to overcome those challenges and make our works accessible. Our teams can call on the public to share their time and skills at events or in projects where they’ll work with others to solve accessibility problems in design, development, content, etc. Whether teams choose to host a hackathon or produce an ongoing project, we can take cues from Knowbility’s OpenAIR rally or Project: Possibility’s software projects, both of which successfully use crowdsourcing to produce innovative, accessible solutions.

Perhaps your team needs to create an app or an accessible responsive design, or to improve the accessibility of your website—there are almost no limits to the impact crowdsourcing can have on accessibility. Our community can even take this further by posting a project on Challenge.gov to get help with any common accessibility issues that government digital media teams encounter.

Crowdsourcing and challenges can be practical tools for creating ground-breaking, accessible fixes to common problems. The solutions can enable citizens to accomplish everyday tasks and live ordinary lives that they might not be able to do otherwise.