Your 90-Day Accessibility Turnaround Plan

You're behind on accessibility. Maybe a new executive joined and asked uncomfortable questions. Maybe a demand letter arrived. Maybe an upcoming regulation finally made the risk feel real. Whatever triggered it, you need to show visible progress fast—without the luxury of a multi-year transformation budget.

Here's the good news: 90 days is enough time to make meaningful progress on your accessibility roadmap if you focus your efforts strategically. This accessibility action plan isn't about achieving perfection—it's about demonstrating real movement, reducing your highest risks, and establishing processes that prevent you from falling further behind.

The WebAIM Million study finds that 96% of home pages have detectable WCAG failures. You're not alone in having accessibility debt. The difference between organizations that stay stuck and those that improve is whether they have a structured plan to address it.

Days 1–30: Discovery and Triage

The first month is about understanding what you're dealing with and making smart decisions about where to focus.

Audit What You Have

Before you can fix problems, you need to find them. Start with automated scanning to establish a baseline across your digital properties.

Conduct manual review of your top 5-10 user journeys. Automated tools miss context-dependent issues. Have someone navigate your checkout flow, signup process, and key conversion paths using only a keyboard. Try your login flow with a screen reader. The WebAIM screen reader user survey provides context on what real assistive technology users encounter.

Document what you find. Create a simple inventory: which properties were scanned, how many issues were found, which are critical vs. minor, and which user journeys have the most barriers.

Risk Assessment and Prioritization

Not all accessibility issues carry equal weight. Prioritize based on the intersection of three factors:

Traffic and business criticality. Issues on your homepage, checkout, and signup flows affect more users and more revenue than issues in your terms of service page. Focus on paths that drive business outcomes.

User impact severity. A missing skip link is an inconvenience. A checkout form that can't be submitted with a keyboard is a complete blocker. Prioritize blockers over annoyances.

Create a simple matrix scoring each major issue or flow on these dimensions. Your highest-priority items are where high traffic, high legal risk, and high user impact converge.

Governance Basics

Accessibility work fails without clear ownership. During the first 30 days, establish:

An accessibility lead or owner. This doesn't have to be a full-time role initially, but someone needs to be accountable for progress. They'll coordinate across teams, track metrics, and report to leadership.

An executive sponsor. Accessibility initiatives that lack executive support stall when they compete with feature work. Identify someone at the director level or above who will advocate for resources.

Champions in key teams. Identify one person in engineering, design, and product who will be the go-to for accessibility questions on their team. They don't need to be experts yet—just willing to learn and advocate.

Days 31–60: Targeted Remediation Sprints

With discovery complete and priorities set, the second month is about fixing the most impactful issues while embedding accessibility into your development process.

Focus on High-Impact Flows

Based on your prioritization, concentrate remediation efforts on the flows that matter most:

Checkout and payment flows. Any barrier here directly blocks revenue. Fix form labels, error handling, keyboard navigation, and focus management. The Baymard Institute's checkout usability research shows that accessibility improvements here benefit all users through reduced friction.

Onboarding and login. Users who can't create accounts or sign in can't become customers. Address CAPTCHA alternatives, password field accessibility, and MFA flows.

Core product functionality. Whatever your product does, the primary value proposition needs to be accessible. If you're a dashboard tool, the dashboard needs to work. If you're an ecommerce site, product browsing and filtering need to work.

Support and contact channels. Users who encounter barriers need a way to get help. Ensure your help center, contact forms, and support chat are accessible.

Embed Accessibility in Sprints

Don't treat accessibility as a separate workstream—integrate it into normal development:

Add accessibility acceptance criteria to user stories. Every new feature should include criteria like "can be operated with keyboard only" and "works with screen readers." The BBC's accessibility guidelines for developers provide excellent examples of practical acceptance criteria.

Include accessibility checks in pull request reviews. Before code merges, reviewers should verify basic accessibility: semantic HTML, keyboard operability, focus management, and alt text.

Add automated accessibility checks to CI/CD. Catch regressions before they ship. TestParty integrates directly into deployment pipelines to fail builds that introduce new accessibility violations.

Communicate Early Wins

Progress without visibility doesn't build momentum. Share wins internally:

Before/after examples. Show specific improvements: "Previously, keyboard users couldn't reach the checkout button. Now they can." Screenshots and short videos make impact tangible.

Metrics that matter. Track issues found vs. fixed, coverage of scanned pages, and reduction in critical issues. Present these in terms leadership understands—risk reduction and customer experience improvement.

User feedback when available. If you receive accessibility-related support tickets or feedback, share when issues are resolved. Real user impact resonates more than abstract compliance scores.

Days 61–90: Lock in Processes and Visibility

The final month transitions from reactive remediation to sustainable practice. The goal is ensuring you don't slide backward.

Policies and Standards

Document what you've learned so teams can maintain consistency:

Coding patterns and component guidelines. If you fixed your modal dialogs to properly trap focus, document that pattern so future modals follow it. The W3C's ARIA Authoring Practices Guide provides battle-tested patterns.

Design system accessibility requirements. Work with your design team to establish accessible defaults: minimum contrast ratios, touch target sizes, focus state styling. Accessible design systems prevent issues at the source.

Testing requirements and processes. Define what accessibility testing is required before features ship. Specify when manual testing with assistive technologies is needed vs. when automated checks suffice.

Dashboards and Reporting

Establish ongoing visibility into accessibility status:

Core KPIs to track:

• Number of pages/flows scanned
• Critical issues open vs. resolved
• New issues introduced vs. prevented
• Coverage of key user journeys

Reporting cadence. Decide how often accessibility metrics are reviewed. Monthly is typically sufficient for leadership updates; weekly may be needed for active remediation phases.

Executive-friendly formats. Leadership doesn't need to understand WCAG criterion numbers. Report in terms of risk (high/medium/low), progress (issues fixed this period), and coverage (percentage of properties monitored).

Long-Term Roadmap

Ninety days gets you out of crisis mode. Sustained improvement requires planning beyond:

Identify remaining debt. You won't fix everything in 90 days. Document what remains, prioritized by the same risk framework you used initially.

Plan for continuous improvement. Allocate ongoing capacity—whether that's a percentage of each sprint, dedicated accessibility sprints quarterly, or a standing team. Microsoft's accessibility evolution demonstrates how sustained investment compounds over years.

Set milestones. Define what "good" looks like at 6 months, 12 months, and beyond. Tie milestones to business outcomes where possible: "Zero critical accessibility issues in checkout by Q3."

Where TestParty Fits in the 90 Days

TestParty accelerates each phase of your accessibility turnaround:

Days 1-30: Scanning and prioritization. TestParty's automated scanning quickly establishes your baseline across domains, identifying issues and helping prioritize by severity and location. Our platform catches the issues automation can find so your team focuses on what requires human judgment.

Days 31-60: Automated remediation during sprints. Unlike tools that only report problems, TestParty provides code-level fixes. When our scans identify an issue, we show you exactly how to fix it—and can often fix it automatically. This dramatically accelerates remediation velocity.

Days 61-90 and beyond: Ongoing monitoring and reporting. TestParty dashboards provide the KPIs and executive reporting you need for sustained visibility. Continuous monitoring catches regressions as soon as they're introduced, preventing backsliding.

Conclusion: From Panic to Program

Ninety days won't make you perfectly accessible—but it will meaningfully reduce risk, improve user experience, and establish the foundation for sustained progress. The accessibility action plan outlined here has worked for organizations ranging from startups to enterprises.

The key insights:

• Focus beats breadth. Fixing your checkout flow completely is better than partially fixing twenty pages.
• Process prevents recurrence. Embedding accessibility in development workflows stops you from digging a deeper hole.
• Visibility sustains momentum. Leadership support depends on demonstrated progress.

You can move from "we have a problem" to "we have a program" in 90 days. The accessibility roadmap is achievable. Start today.

Want an expert 90-day plan tailored to your stack? Book a working session with TestParty and we'll help you prioritize and accelerate your turnaround.

Related Articles:

• Automated Accessibility Remediation: Everything You Need to Know
• Building Accessibility Checks Into Modern CI/CD Workflows