Business Problem
Customers require VPATs for WCAG compliance per release. Dollars spent in hiring external auditors to write VPATs. But, no internal expertise to understand and fix identified issues.
User Problem
Inaccessible products create barriers for users with disabilities.
Project Goals
Make accessibility a core design team competence
Bring accessibility testing in-house
Success Metrics
01 Understand
We need to understand all the accessibility standards that we need to support. Have a good understanding among at least 3 team members.
02 Educate
The core accessibility team need to educate other designers and developers on what will be required from them to support accessibility going forward. Educate at least 3 team members.
03 Integrate & Automate
We need to evaluate tools that can automate accessibility testing. Work with at least 2 lead UI engineers to automate accessibility testing.
Understanding product's accessibility
01 Planning tasks
I created a plan in Asana and documented all the tasks accordingly.
02 Reporting Issues
Audited the product and documented all the issues in an Airtable
03 Continuously Learning
Reading WCAG guidelines, doing courses on Udacity, reading books and watching youtube videos on the subject.
Educating the team on accessibility
I created presentations on different topics of accessibility and conducted brownbag sessions to disseminate knowledge and spark conversations with the entire design team.
Integrating and automating accessibility
01 Design
Audited color palette for contrast issues, properly documented component specs and ensured components are designed in accordance with accessibility guidelines.
02 Code
I worked with the engineers to integrate axe with cypress as part of the unit testing framework. This enabled engineers to fix accessibility issues as they were writing code.
03 Report
I then created an automated reporting process where the cypress accessibility violations were pulled into Airtable to view trends over time as more issues get fixed.
04 Weekly Updates
I also presented weekly status updates as I was making progress every week to promote visibility to keep everyone accountable.
Impact
01
I presented the work to leadership and got executive buy-in to increase funding in this area. This also led to the hiring of a seasoned accessibility lead to take things forward.
02
Throughout the process I was able to scale learning and educated the team around accessibility. I also wrote our product's VPAT.
03
Made accessibility a core competence for Cohesity. Got it listed in the company OKRs as well.
