Protect our Land, Ascend with Us!

Ascension LLC is seeking an Accessibility & QA Lead to serve as the authoritative expert responsible for ensuring that the City of Lancaster’s new public-facing website meets or exceeds WCAG accessibility standards and delivers a high-quality, defect-free user experience across devices, browsers, and assistive technologies.

This role is critical to the success of the overall website replacement effort. The Accessibility & QA Lead acts as both a compliance guardian and quality advocate, embedding accessibility and quality assurance practices throughout design, development, content migration, and pre-launch validation phases.

The ideal candidate is a detail-oriented accessibility professional with deep knowledge of WCAG success criteria, Section 508 alignment, and hands-on experience testing modern CMS-based websites. This individual must be confident advising designers, developers, and content contributors while independently identifying issues, recommending solutions, and validating fixes in a fast-paced, collaborative environment.

This role is well-suited for a professional who values public-sector mission impact and understands the importance of equitable access to digital government services.

Summary of the Contractor Role

The Accessibility & QA Lead is responsible for planning, executing, and governing accessibility compliance and quality assurance activities for the City’s new website. The role ensures that accessibility is not treated as a final checklist item, but rather as an integrated, continuous practice across the project lifecycle.

The candidate will evaluate designs, templates, components, and content against WCAG criteria, conduct both automated and manual accessibility testing, and lead remediation validation prior to launch. In parallel, the role oversees functional QA testing to confirm that the website performs reliably across supported browsers, devices, and user scenarios.

The successful candidate brings a strong sense of ownership, the ability to work with minimal supervision, and the judgment to prioritize issues based on user impact and compliance risk. They will help the City reduce long-term accessibility risk by recommending sustainable workflows, tooling, and governance practices that City staff can maintain post-launch.

Tools and processes commonly used in this role include accessibility testing platforms, browser-based developer tools, screen readers, structured defect tracking systems, and collaborative review workflows.

Position Day-to-Day Activities

The Accessibility & QA Lead will:

• Define and maintain the accessibility and QA strategy aligned to WCAG 2.1 AA and Section 508 standards
• Review UX/UI designs, wireframes, and prototypes for accessibility risks prior to development
• Conduct automated accessibility scans using industry-standard tools
• Perform manual accessibility testing using screen readers, keyboard-only navigation, and assistive technologies
• Validate color contrast, heading structure, form labeling, focus order, and ARIA usage
• Test multilingual functionality to ensure accessibility is preserved across translated content
• Execute cross-browser and cross-device QA testing to validate functionality and responsiveness
• Document accessibility and QA defects with clear reproduction steps and remediation guidance
• Collaborate with developers and designers to resolve accessibility and functional issues efficiently
• Re-test and validate fixes to confirm compliance and quality closure
• Support CMS workflow testing to ensure accessible content authoring practices
• Contribute to accessibility documentation and training materials for City staff
• Support pre-launch and post-launch validation efforts to ensure ongoing compliance readiness