As user experiences become integral to customer engagement, inclusivity can no longer be an afterthought. However, a key challenge for many product managers is seamlessly integrating accessibility testing into the development process without overwhelming their teams.
What if there was a straightforward approach you could take to streamline the management of digital accessibility barriers?
Introducing ‘Discover. Solve. Manage’ Framework
While it’s ideal to bake accessibility into the beginning of your product development lifecycle, we all know there’s no perfect world. Therefore, you must adopt a structured approach to your accessibility management program. Enter the Discover, Solve, and Manage Framework.
Developed by TPGi’s Customer Success team, this framework simplifies the accessibility journey and enhances efficiency across your organization’s accessibility efforts.
Over the next few weeks, we’ll explore this approach and share how you can utilize accessibility tools, like TPGi’s ARC platform, to enhance your team’s efficiency and create consistency throughout your digital accessibility journey.
Building the Accessibility Foundation: Discover Accessibility Barriers and Set Clear Goals with Automated Accessibility Tests
During the ‘Discover’ phase, your attention is focused on identifying existing accessibility barriers that prevent people with disabilities from achieving their objectives on your website or application. This phase is crucial to determine what improvements are required to enhance the user experience.
How do you go about discovering your issues? To get started, you’ll want to utilize a combination of accessibility testing tools and manual audits to assess the user experience of your digital products.
Establishing a baseline is critical to launching a successful program, ensuring your organization’s digital content is usable by everyone, including people with disabilities.
Free testing tools like TPGi’s ARC Toolkit allow you to scan and analyze web pages before committing them to production or when reviewing live pages as part of your remediation process. These tools help identify your baseline of common accessibility barriers and provide insights into areas needing improvement.
For a more comprehensive analysis, you’ll want to consider a manual audit; after performing a series of manual tests on your site, our accessibility engineers will provide a report outlining existing barriers, offering a clear snapshot of your accessibility status as well as guidance for how to improve it.
By leveraging both automated tools and professional audits, you can “discover” the accessibility barriers on your website and begin addressing them effectively.
Prioritize and Maintain Continuous Accessibility with Manual Audits
Audits are not a one-time event but a continuous and critical step in your testing process to ensure you maintain accessible products and UX. After completing the automated scans, you will need to review the accessibility findings manually to confirm whether they are valid or not.
Manual accessibility audits allow teams to prioritize which accessibility findings to work on first and provide a clear snapshot of existing barriers across web applications and digital products.
Integrating automated accessibility scans and regular manual audits throughout the software development lifecycle (SDLC) will help identify accessibility barriers early in your process and allow you to track progress over time.
How Do You Conduct an Accessibility Audit?
Conducting an accessibility audit involves systematically evaluating digital content to ensure it conforms with accessibility standards, such as the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG).
The process begins with defining your scope and objectives. Next, you can either select tools for automated scanning or partner with accessibility experts who will perform manual testing.
These tests will generate accessibility findings and remediation guidance to help support your team as they address these issues. Once you have resolved the disclosed accessibility findings, your engineers can re-test the same content to confirm the improvements.
What’s the Difference Between Manual and Automated Accessibility Testing?
Automated tools quickly identify common issues like missing alternative text or color-contrast findings. Tools like ARC Monitoring can quickly scan large volumes of content across your domain to identify findings that do not conform to WCAG Success Criteria, alert you to potential nonconforming issues, and even highlight industry best practices.
That said, automation can only identify about 40% of your website’s potential accessibility issues. This is where manual testing can come in and pick up the slack.
Manual testing differs from automated testing in that a human actually tests and audits your website’s accessibility. Manual testing ensures webpage components are thoroughly evaluated for conformance, particularly in interactive or dynamic elements.
The data collected from these methods includes detailed reports on the frequency and severity of these violations across different areas of the website, providing a clear picture of your site’s accessibility.
The main difference between automated and manual accessibility audits is that automation can help expedite your audit but will not provide you with a comprehensive review.
Testing User Flows for Deeper Insights
While automated domain monitoring analyzes your entire site, as your accessibility program matures, you’ll want to monitor your most important user flows for accessibility barriers.
Automated tests only provide a snapshot of accessibility issues across web pages. Using tools like ARC User Flows, your team can zoom in and glean insights by testing specific components your users interact with throughout their digital journey.
User flows mimic real-world interactions, allowing teams to assess accessibility at critical touchpoints and scenarios. Incorporating user flow data into your audit reports will give you deeper insights into accessibility challenges within key user pathways. This method validates audit findings and provides context on how users with disabilities navigate and interact with digital content.
Utilizing your audit reports and user flow data to document, categorize, and prioritize remediation efforts ensures continuous progress toward your organization’s accessibility goals.
Adopting a Continuous Accessibility Approach
Achieving accessibility conformance isn’t a one-time task; it’s an ongoing commitment. That’s why integrating accessibility testing into your DevOps process and continuously checking for accessibility bugs at each stage of the software development lifecycle is the backbone of an effective digital accessibility strategy.
Taking a proactive and continuous approach allows you to:
- Identify issues early:
- Catching accessibility barriers in the initial stages of development means fewer headaches down the line. It’s much easier to fix problems before they become embedded in your site’s architecture
- Increased efficiency:
- Continuous testing for accessibility streamlines your teams’ efforts by integrating accessibility checks into your regular workflow. This approach saves time and resources, allowing your team to stay agile.
- Maintain a high-quality user experience:
- By identifying and resolving accessibility issues early, you reduce the risk of publishing an accessibility barrier and create a more inclusive and user-friendly experience. This not only improves usability for people with disabilities but also enhances the experience for all users.
- Remain in conformance:
- Regular testing helps ensure your site conforms with ADA, WCAG, Section 508, and EN 301 549 guidelines. Staying conformant reduces the risk of legal challenges and demonstrates your commitment to accessibility.
By adopting a continuous accessibility approach, you lay a strong foundation for a robust and accessible digital program. Once you’ve reviewed your accessibility data and are ready to start fixing the bugs, how do you resolve these issues?
That’s where the ‘Solve’ stage comes in. In part two of this series, you will learn how to solve the accessibility findings you’ve discovered.
Digital Accessibility as a Strategic Advantage
For product and project managers, ensuring digital accessibility is not just a checkbox on your to-do list but an ongoing process that requires constant monitoring and testing – and impeccable organization.
TPGi’s ARC Platform streamlines your accessibility program management by consolidating all automated and manual audit data into one central location. ARC’s single, unified ruleset ensures consistent coverage of WCAG Success Criteria when performing manual accessibility audits.
Eliminate confusion in your accessibility program with ARC Dashboard and
- Easily track and report on your progress.
- Prioritize remediation efforts.
- Maintain a clear view of your teams’ digital accessibility progress.
Ready to discover how to make digital accessibility a strategic advantage for your organization? ARC can do that! Schedule a demo of the ARC Platform today!