Waitrose Digital: Our accessibility journey
A few years ago we set up a lab testing session with the Royal National Institute of Blind People (RNIB) to see if we were meeting the needs of our visually impaired customers. In this session, we witnessed people struggle, blame themselves, and become frustrated with the simplest of tasks. It was a humbling day and we only experienced that for a few hours …how must our users feel every day?
Accessibility was a little-used word (and is still rarely understood in the digital world) but it was something we were and still are passionate about. As a brand, we want Waitrose to be accessible to all. We pride ourselves on being open, fair, and honest with our suppliers, but what if some customers weren’t able to access our products?
In this post, I will share the steps we’ve taken since the lab session to make Waitrose.com more accessible.
Building a community
Following the results from the lab testing, a small group of designers and developers got together to find out why products were being created that were not easy for everyone to understand and use intuitively. After reviewing our website for accessibility issues we learned a key lesson: Retrospectively fixing accessibility issues is hard and time-consuming.
We made a decision that to start building more accessible products we would need to embed accessibility best practices into the workflow of our product development teams. From there, our Accessibility Community began.
This statement defines our purpose:
The Waitrose Digital Accessibility Community is dedicated to championing awareness, understanding and appreciation of accessibility — so everyone has the opportunity to shop with us easily and equally.
We have since implemented better accessibility testing practices, training and increased awareness of accessibility across Waitrose Digital.
Accessibility testing
Since we started working with the RNIB we have been auditing our site for accessibility issues and fixing any bugs. This is very important, but we can’t solely rely on third parties to make our site accessible. The Accessibility Community has created new in-house testing processes to help us think about accessibility at every stage of product development and ensure we catch any issues before new changes reach production.
In-house reviews
We regularly carry out in-house accessibility reviews, not only auditing our live website but also looking at prototypes and any new features that are in test. These tests include everyone from the product team in a particular area. We then help train them in accessibility best practices. The reviews allow our team to think about how users with access needs might use a web page and ensure we fix more issues before the code reaches production.
Automated testing dashboard
Google Lighthouse uses axe-core (developed by Deque) to run automated accessibility audits. This runs directly from the Chrome browser to provide an accessibility score out of 100 and suggests fixes for any issues. Although automated accessibility tests only cover up to 40% of issues, it’s very easy to run.
We have Lighthouse reports running automatically every day on all of our pages and populate the results into a dashboard so we can see all the scores in one place. In the past we’ve found it hard to measure accessibility and the impact of our changes, the dashboard gives us an easy metric to use.
Accessibility checklist
Our most recent improvement in accessibility testing is our checklist. This is adapted from the success criteria in the WCAG 2.1 guidelines to ensure our site is AA compliant or better. It covers different areas of keyboard navigation, focus management, screen readers, magnification and page structure. This is used for all components in our design system and in any in-house accessibility reviews we carry out on our website.
Training and support
The Royal National Institute of Blind People (RNIB) is one of the UK’s leading sight loss charities. We have been working with them to better understand our customers’ access needs and to provide accessibility audits on our website. This has been crucial to furthering our knowledge of web accessibility.
To help and support our Partners we have created an internal accessibility website. This provides information on our accessibility principles, all our latest work, upcoming talks and some useful tools and extensions. It also contains our quick reference guide which provides more information on how to test each of the questions in the accessibility checklist.
Training our Partners on the importance of accessibility and best practices is critical to us having a more accessible website and becoming a more inclusive business. Our Accessibility Community now regularly runs training sessions on accessibility. The aim is to increase confidence and knowledge so it continues to be common practice within the Digital team.
Summary
We know we still have more to do but we now have the processes in place and the knowledge within the team to get to where we want to be — so watch this space!
