Web Accessibility Manager

ITHAKA is seeking a Web Accessibility Manager to lead organizational efforts in the area of web accessibility compliance across multiple products. Our software platform provides access to more than 12 million academic journal articles, books, images, and primary sources to users at over 11,000 colleges, universities, libraries and museums in 170 countries. Our media management solution enables the cataloging, preservation, and sharing of more than 13 million digital assets (and counting). As a member of our product team, you’ll have the opportunity to work and collaborate with a dynamic group who thinks nothing is better than knowing we are having a positive impact on the world. We influence the lives of millions of people every day both in groundbreaking ways and in small ways that mean a lot.
The Role

As a Web Accessibility Manager, you’ll have the influential role across the entire organization championing web accessibility and helping create products to be accessed, understood and used to the greatest extent possible by all people as we work to advance learning and knowledge around the world. You will drive, socialize, administer and continuously support our accessibility strategy and implementation across multiple development teams aspiring to deliver inclusive products for our users.

Reporting to the Director of Digital Product Operations, you will work directly with product managers, designers, and engineers on several agile development teams to ensure the solutions we provide meet the needs of all people who wish to use ITHAKA’s products while also partnering with our participant experience team to ensure effective communication with our constituents. You’ll have oversight over the organization’s accessibility strategy to ensure the diverse needs and abilities of our users are understood, supported, and validated across our various products.
Responsibilities

Develop, drive, socialize, and continuously improve product accessibility strategy across multiple product development teams.

Continuously craft and roll out scalable processes and workflows to support compliance with established standards in an agile development environment.

Manage and execute the organization’s annual audit process for multiple web products.

Create and maintain product Voluntary Program Accessibility Templates (VPATs) for multiple web products.

Creation of annual roadmaps to be shared with ITHAKA’s partners and constituents to address identified accessibility deficiencies, while also performing the needed monitoring of ticket completion across development teams.

Collaborate with ITHAKA’s legal team to ensure contractual agreements are met.

Provide training to staff to ensure they understand the importance of accessibility and ways to incorporate best practices into product delivery.

Be the resident expert of evolving industry guidelines and digital standards and how they impact our product delivery operations. Make certain Product Owners, Engineers, and User Experience team members are continuously aware of requirement updates while also ensuring team members in various roles can effectively apply those standards as a part of product development.

Measure quality and consistency standards through metrics to drive continuous improvement.

Evaluate, select, and implement in collaboration with multiple product teams, accessibility validation tools to further enable speed of feature delivery.

Utilize clearly defined standards, methods, and procedures for inspecting, testing, and evaluating the usability of products with assistive technologies and collaborate with engineers to identify, reproduce, prioritize, and document defects.

Partner with members of our Participant Experience team to ensure proper accessibility representation and communication to customers and partners.

Experience and Skills

Bachelor’s degree in a compliance-related program, computer science, human factors or 5+ years of relevant experience with demonstrable expertise in accessibility (WCAG/508) analysis and strategy definition/adoption.

Deep knowledge of WCAG 2.0, Section 508, and VPATs.

Expert level understanding of principles of accessibility and how to build and test web products that are accessible to users with disabilities in alignment with universal design principles.

Proven ability to identify and put into action creative approaches to accessibility challenges and problems.

Excellent and effective communication skills; ability to interact with and influence stakeholders from all levels of an organization.

Knowledge and use of assistive technologies and testing tools. Examples include Jaws, Dragon, VoiceOver, NVDA and the Deque suite of validation solutions while also adequately demonstrating familiarity with HTML/CSS semantics and tagging.

Able to effectively work with agile design and front-end teams building web and mobile experiences products.

Passion for quality and driving results.

A strong commitment to customer service.

Excellent verbal, written, and interpersonal communication skills.

Demonstrated results operating effectively in a geographically dispersed organization.

Committed to our organizational values of belonging, evidence, speed, teamwork, and trust.

Work for ITHAKA

Our team is passionate about our mission and supporting one another. We enjoy working together to create opportunities for people to learn and grow out in the world, and we bring that same commitment to helping our teammates develop in our careers and our lives. One of our core values is belonging. We embrace differences and believe that the things that make each of us unique are the things that help us see new insights and build better solutions.