Incorporating Accessibility Practices to Your Project Teams

Oftentimes organizations will say “yes, we do practice accessibility”. You then ask them exactly how they manage that and quite often you hear something along the lines of: “oh we have it in our done statement to be WCAG 2.1 A and AA compliant, then we link it to the W3C website.” This might be all they do.

So how does my organization become accessible?

Take a proactive approach to accessibility and implement these accessibility practices to your agile team.

Step 1: Build empathy

Build empathy among your team members and turn them into accessibility advocates. Have them watch a user with a disability (for example a screen reader user with no mouse) use your or someone else’s product or application. There is nothing more powerful than watching someone struggle to use a system that is inaccessible.

Step 2: Provide training

Train your developers, designers, and content creators in accessibility concepts and techniques. Build a training curriculum that is geared towards each role (designers, developers, content creators).

Step 3: Establish high-level accessibility roles for team members

• Front end development: Ensure front-end code and markup is written in an accessible fashion and conduct manual and automated testing.
• Content design: Ensure content is written in plain language and headings, images, and links are accurately labeled.
• Visual design: Ensure that designs are accessible, pages are laid out in a logical order, and content meets color contrast requirements.
• UX design: Ensure that overall experience is built and designed in an accessible fashion, conduct usability testing with people who need accessibility features.

Step 4: Establish an internal testing process

Establish internal processes to ensure that markup and code for new features are thoroughly tested and reviewed prior to deployment.

• Equip your development teams with tools to integrate automated accessibility testing into all stages of the development process.
• Get new designs and prototypes reviewed for accessibility optimization and identify issues that can be addressed early on.
• Account for accessibility when creating and estimating stories.
• Add accessibility as an acceptance criteria or definition of done for new user stories and features.
• Add accessibility testing into each development sprint or QA check.
• Prioritize accessibility issues appropriately against other development concerns: Categorize them by critical, serious and minor issues.
• Share with your team how to perform manual accessibility testing using a screen reader or only your keyboard.

Testing for keyboard accessibility

Testing with screen readers

Step 5: Build accessibility into your pattern library

• Defining accessibility features for patterns within a library can greatly reduce the amount of work needed to make a site accessible.
• Accessible color combinations can be defined to prevent designers from using text with low contrast.
• For interactive elements like form fields, a pattern library could include label placement, error messaging tone and style, and instructions on how to programmatically associate help text and error messages.
• Custom components like calendar widgets or combo boxes can benefit greatly from being included in a pattern library.

Proactive accessibility puts you at lower risk of receiving a complaint and also makes the entire accessibility process more efficient and cost-effective.