Accessibility: a system-wide strategy
Accessibility from the ground up
date and role
Principal researcher, requirements gatherer
2019-onward
summary
To put it simply, our system’s end-user experience was not built accessibly. That’s a problem full-stop, and it’s one that the Product team was dedicated to fix. I led the charge on a system-wide audit and strategically prioritized the order and severity of updates we needed to make.
Through this process, I: re-certified my knowledge of accessibility; developed requirements of how we needed to update every component in our consumer-facing system to be WCAG-compliant, and; reviewed the implemented code prior to launch with in-depth quality-assurance testing as the project owner.
challenge
Our biggest challenge was a general lack of knowledge and resource allocation. My education on accessibility was a few years old, so I sought industry-leading education and learned WCAG standards in-depth to make sure that my audits were as detailed as possible. Another challenge was our engineers not having any training towards writing accessible code, so I worked with the engineering manager and lead to find a program for our engineers to learn and master.
solution
With this education and a strategic mindset, I led the audit with detailed requirements on how to fix the plethora of issues. I also prioritized the order in which we needed to tackle the impacted components through the severity of the number of issues, degree of usage (clients impacted) for those components, and degree of exposure to end-consumers. We tackled the list component-by-component, and made a significant impact on our end-user experience.
results
Our system was made much more accessible, rendering inoperable sites to fully-functioning with a screenreader and other access technology. It was a huge win for us, and it’s an effort that is still ongoing.
Currently, we are ramping up our testing program and plan to take these enhanced components into real situations to further enhance and fortify our accessibility.
