Ascension LLC is seeking a highly experienced Accessibility Specialist to support the Washington Suburban Sanitary Commission (WSSC Water) Corporate Website Re-Design initiative.

WSSC Water provides mission-critical public utility services to 1.9M+ customers across Montgomery and Prince George’s Counties. Their corporate website serves as a high-visibility, public-facing digital platform used by residents, businesses, contractors, and employees for emergency alerts, service requests, billing, public notices, construction maps, and water quality information WSSC Water Homepage Mockup.

This role is essential to ensuring that the redesigned website meets and sustains:

• WCAG 2.1 AA compliance
• Section 508 standards
• ADA accessibility requirements
• Usability for aging populations and assistive technology users
• Accessibility validation during development, migration, and post-launch testing

The ideal candidate is a detail-oriented accessibility expert who combines technical rigor with practical user empathy. This individual understands how to embed accessibility into UX design, CMS configuration, front-end development, content migration, and QA—not as an afterthought, but as a foundational principle.

This role is critical to ensuring that WSSC’s emergency communications, public alerts, and essential services remain accessible to all users, including individuals with disabilities.

Summary of the Contractor Role

The Accessibility Specialist supports the WSSC Water Corporate Website Re-Design by ensuring that accessibility compliance is built into:

• Design systems
• Page templates
• CMS components
• Content migration processes
• Interactive maps and dashboards
• Third-party integrations
• Testing and final acceptance validation

This role supports SOW J – Testing of Final Website and Tab 4.A.7.

The Accessibility Specialist is expected to:

• Anticipate accessibility risks early in the design and development lifecycle
• Conduct both automated and manual accessibility testing
• Provide remediation guidance to developers
• Validate accessible patterns in navigation, emergency alerts, interactive maps, and dashboards
• Ensure color contrast, semantic structure, keyboard operability, and ARIA implementation are compliant
• Produce formal accessibility validation documentation

This individual will help protect WSSC Water from legal exposure, improve customer trust, and ensure equitable digital access to essential public services.

Day-to-Day / Project-Based Responsibilities

• Conduct comprehensive WCAG 2.1 AA audits of templates and components
• Validate semantic HTML structure and ARIA roles
• Test keyboard-only navigation across all pages and workflows
• Perform screen reader testing (NVDA, JAWS, VoiceOver)
• Review emergency alert banners for contrast and priority visibility
• Validate focus states and interactive elements
• Review CMS authoring environment for accessible content creation
• Test interactive construction maps and dashboards for compliance
• Perform automated scans using axe, WAVE, Lighthouse, and similar tools
• Provide remediation guidance to front-end and CMS developers
• Review PDFs and documents for accessibility compliance
• Participate in sprint reviews and UAT validation sessions
• Produce Accessibility Compliance Reports for milestone approvals
• Support final accessibility validation before go-live
• Assist in post-launch accessibility monitoring strategy