After years of successful remediations, Blndspt has perfected a proprietary process to ensure success.  What would a remediation process entail?  Keep in mind that remediating a system, in nearly all cases, is a great deal more than software development.  A remediation process can require:

• Review and analysis around urgency and deficiency
• Legal negotiation
• Clear agreement on approximate costs and understanding of cost differences between remediation versus rewrite
• Deep audit review and understanding of timelines and targets (e.g. AA, AAA, WCAG 2.0, 2.1, etc.)
• Software development processes commonly touching every page or view in the system
• Full functional test cycles, as every page generally burdens change
• Accessibility re-certification
• Training on maintaining standard levels of compliance (full culture shifts)
• Accessibility-tool installation and setup
• Periodic re-certification

 “Keep in mind that remediating a system, in nearly all cases, is a great deal more than software development.”

 With all of those steps involved, Blndspt has perfected the process to be executed as painlessly as possible with the least amount of impact to regular activities.  In the majority of cases, Blndspt is also able to work with clients to yield more value in a system change.  Whenever a majority of pages or views are changed in a system, opportunity abounds.  This can include critical long-awaited upgrades to frameworks, design updates, or branding changes.  In the world of software development, there is a sentiment explaining that “you don’t often get opportunities to improve a system during its lifecycle”.  In this case, the inclusion of design or branding changes, or an upgrade to an outdated framework, adds minimal overhead to yield substantially more value to the project.  Typical examples of this added value at minimal added cost include, but are not limited to:

• Branding changes
• Application visual or experience redesign
• AngularJS to Angular upgrades (framework example)
• Complete re-work of front-end applications (e.g a framework migration to new tech, such as native mobile to react native as an example)
• Complete retesting of a system that might not be tested very often for experience

“you don’t often get opportunities to improve a system during its lifecycle”

A Value Add Case Study

At present, Blndspt is working with a large financial institution on system accessibility remediation.  Naturally, internal stakeholders balk at budgets required to remediate an entire system to current ‘parity’.  “You mean I spend x dollars to get the system to where it is now?”   This client found themselves in a position where they have both old frameworks included as well as a current effort to re-brand all of their sites.  As a pure value add, Blndspt is able to add a small factor to the project to upgrade frameworks as well as execute the re-branding while remediating for WCAG compliance.  In this case, we are upgrading Angular 1.x to Angular 7 for the client, as well as executing their full re-brand all while building mobile responsiveness into the application (for WCAG 2.1 compliance).

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These are perfect examples that demonstrate how a remediation project can be an opportunity to add significant value.  Ask yourself, do you think this client would have been able to easily facilitate the re-branding budget to a system running on old frameworks?