Making Accessibility Happen

A QA-Focused Approach

Speaker: Chris M. Law

Is accessibility integrated throughout your development process? We’re not asking about testing near the end of the production process by a team of accessibility specialists. We’re actually talking about accessibility being programmed in and checked at every gate review. It certainly costs less to have accessibility baked in, and it results in less remediation tasks at the time your development team is looking to ‘go live’.

Old testing tools and old ways of thinking resulted in specialized accessibility testing tasks that were extremely difficult to integrate. Specialist tools of choice included screen readers and other assistive technologies. But newer testing tools use code inspection methods that are much easier to learn and use by mainstream programmers. If we take advantage of this fact, we can transform mainstream programmers into accessibility checkers, and we can transform accessibility teams into quality assurance inspectors. The right approach to testing is the key to process integration.

What you’ll learn:

• What sorts of tools are QA-Enabled
• When to use manual and when to use automated testing tools for QA
• Start saving money and lowering risk: an overview of how to get started with a QA-Focused approach

Topics covered:

The benefits of QA-Enabled testing versus traditional assistive technology testing

• A programming bug and an accessibility bug are essentially the same thing. Code inspection tools help us find bugs.
• Why screen readers are hard to use by programmers. Why screen readers are also hard to use by accessibility specialists(!) … and why screen readers are not QA-Enabled.

How to switch to a QA model of operation

• Assessing your current situation
• Considering the new testing options
• Tweaking your existing software development lifecycle
• Comparing the merits of various implementation options

What sort of resistance you are likely to encounter. (And how to tackle it.)

• “This seems like extra work!” (It’s actually less work for developers in the long run.)
• “I don’t know anything about accessibility!” (You don’t have to know anything about accessibility; you just need to be able to use code inspection tools.)

If you need any accommodations, please email onlineseminars@nngroup.com. 

About the Speaker:
Chris M. Law is the president and owner of Accessibility Track Consulting, LLC, a company that provides consulting services to federal government and industry clients on their organizational responses to accessibility issues. Recently, while at the Department of Homeland Security, Chris was part of the team that developed online training for the Interagency Trusted Tester Program, and he spearheaded the project to assist federal partners in their organization-wide implementation of the Trusted Tester Approach. His doctoral thesis was on business responses to accessibility, in which he revealed success factors for integrated, organization-wide approaches.

Chris has over 20 years of experience in universal design and accessibility, including industry consulting, university-based R&D, and in Section 508 programs within the US federal government. He has participated in standards committees for electronic documents (US federal government), self-service transaction machines (Canada & UK), and telecommunications (EU). Chris holds a PhD in Business from RMIT University (Australia), an MSc in Industrial Engineering from the University of Wisconsin-Madison (USA), and a BSc in Ergonomics from Loughborough University (UK).