To keep a CPACC certification, accessibility professionals need 45 continuing education credits every three years. The problem isn't the requirement - it's that the system doesn't recognise much of the work most practitioners are already doing.
One of our accessibility specialists at We Create Digital has worked in the field since 2017, and gained their CPACC certification last year. To keep it, the International Association of Accessibility Professionals (IAAP) requires 45 continuing education credits every three years. It’s a reasonable idea: certified professionals should keep learning. But the rules on what counts don’t reflect how most of that learning actually happens.
The credits that don’t count
If you deliver a webinar as part of your paid work, it doesn’t count. Write a guide to help educate people on accessibility, it doesn’t count. Record a YouTube video explaining a WCAG criterion as part of your job, it doesn’t count. Run an accessible writing class for a client, also doesn’t count. Podcasts don’t count at all too.
That’s a strange line to draw. The only activity that reliably counts within working hours is watching other people’s content. Someone actively creating accessibility education is worth less to the credit system than someone passively consuming it, even when the person creating it is also unpaid and outside their job role for it to qualify at all. The people this system is meant to develop are often the same people already doing the work it won’t recognise.
It’s not that the will is missing either. We Create Digital is happy for this work to happen in paid time, and our specialist already volunteers outside of work too. Neither of those things helps here, because the credit scheme is built around a narrow definition of what counts, not around whether the work is genuinely happening.
What we’re doing instead
We haven’t waited for a credit scheme to tell us this work matters, because we already treat it as core to how we operate, not something bolted on for a certification. Over the past few years that’s included:
- Training every member of staff on accessibility fundamentals
- Getting a developer specific accessibility training, on top of general team training
- Running a public webinar on accessibility, with another planned
- Publishing accessibility guides and educational content online
- Delivering an accessible writing class directly to a client
- Building Kindweb, our own accessibility, SEO, and carbon auditing tool, which we’re refining ahead of a public launch aimed at making accessibility affordable for smaller businesses
- Starting work on a sector-based accessibility leaderboard, beginning with finance and legal, to show where the biggest gaps still are
None of that shows up as a credit anywhere. But it’s a far better measure of whether someone is actively contributing to accessibility than whether they sat through another person’s webinar.
What we think should count
If IAAP wants continuing education credits to reflect genuine contribution to the field, rather than just consumption of it, a few changes would go a long way:
Creating educational content should count, not just watching it. Webinars delivered, guides written, videos made: these push the field forward more than passive viewing does.
Client-facing accessibility training should count. Teaching a client’s team to write accessibly, or to think about contrast and layout, spreads the same knowledge the credit system is trying to encourage.
The line shouldn’t sit purely on payment. Right now even unpaid webinars only count under a separate, capped category, which means the system splits learning from doing rather than rewarding contribution itself.
The system for logging all of this needs to work. The current portal for tracking credits is hard to use and has its own accessibility issues, which undermines the credibility of the whole scheme.
There’s a related barrier further back too. IAAP’s WAS exam requires 3 to 5 years of experience before you can even sit it. That shuts out junior developers who want to specialise in accessibility early, at exactly the point the profession needs more people coming in, not fewer.
Why we’re saying this
This isn’t criticism for its own sake. Accessibility professionals spend their careers asking organisations to think harder about who gets left out of their products, and to make sure their systems hold up under real use. It’s a reasonable expectation that the body representing that profession applies the same thinking to its own credit scheme, and to the tools used to submit it.
We’re not short of things to share: guides, cheat sheets, webinars, more AAA-standard work, and tools like Kindweb that we hope get more organisations doing this properly. We’d like a system that recognises that kind of work for what it is, rather than one that only counts the hours spent watching someone else do it.
We’d genuinely like to hear how others navigate this, whether it’s IAAP credits or a different scheme. We’re keen to be involved in an open discussion and also even to be told why it has to be this way.
