We’ve worked on dozens of accessibility projects over the years, and have helped nonprofits, associations, businesses, and regulated industries navigate the tricky waters of accessibility compliance.
We are excited to launch our five-part series on Product Leader’s Guide To Accessibility & AODA with Simone Abel - Director of Digital Strategy at Enginess. Over the next couple of weeks, we will post several articles sharing the best practices and key recommendations around implementing accessibility and AODA with your project.
BLOG SERIES
A Product Leader’s Guide To Accessibility & AODA
Part 1: Understanding accessibility compliance
Part 2: Project delivery
Part 3: Managing costs
Part 4: Ongoing maintenance
Part 5:Common risks and pitfalls
Can't wait to see more tips? Download the complete guide today.
Successfully Delivering an Accessibility Compliant Digital Product
In our previous post we discussed project requirements. In today's post we dig deeper into the product / software development lifecycle (SDLC), and where accessibility compliance fits in. In this chapter, we’ll cover:
- User experience design
- Visual/graphic design
- Compliance-friendly QA
- User acceptance testing (UAT)
During the user experience planning stages of your project, it’s critical to consider SDLC. UX often becomes the accessibility champion on the web development team because it’s so critical to how the rest of the job gets done, influencing every team to make better, more accessible decisions.
After UX designers, graphic designers have a significant role to play in achieving accessibility standards. That’s because they have the biggest impact on what the end-user sees, they’re often charged with enforcing or defining brand guidelines and building out the visual components needed for the patterns and interactions UX designers have outlined.
An important piece of any project is the QA phase, but how do you go about compliance-friendly QA? The QA phase of a waterfall project comes after all development is finished, sometimes prior to content entry, and is an internal-facing project team activity. If you’re working agile, you’ll do QA on each release in your roadmap queue. The QA phase is primarily focused on functional and performance testing.
One of the final stages of the SDLC is end-user acceptance testing. Finally, the work for the team is put in the hands of actual users to see if they use it the way that it was built.
By the end of this chapter, you’ll know what needs to be done throughout the production lifecycle to finish with a website that meets your stated compliance, accessibility, and usability goals.
Download the complete guide today: A Product Leader’s Guide To Accessibility and AODA.
