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Re: Accessibility for Project Managers - your thoughts?

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From: Chagnon | PubCom
Date: Sep 19, 2013 9:52AM

Excellent advice from Cameron and Karl.
Thanks. This thread is a keeper!

—Bevi Chagnon
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-----Original Message-----
From: <EMAIL REMOVED> [mailto: <EMAIL REMOVED> ] On Behalf Of Karl Groves

+1 to what Cameron said. That level of specificity is important,
especially when the dev team is new to accessibility.

One hugely useful asset to have, at the organization level, is a Style Guide and even a component library. I recall a presentation on LeanUX from
Jeff Gothelf. Lean/ Agile isn't about doing stuff in a hurry, but rather
doing stuff efficiently. Existing resources such as a coding style
guide, visual design & branding style guide and code libraries go a long
way toward ensuring quality and agility. When generating these things,
bake accessibility into them. For instance, in the visual design style
guide, make sure the fonts, font colors, font sizes, component designs & colors, etc. all ensure proper contrast and so on. Make sure tables are designed so that headers exist. If the headers are sortable, make sure the
design makes the sort affordances obvious, etcl. When creating a coding
style guide, make sure it talks about binding keypress events as well as click events on controls.

Then, instead of having to constantly talk about accessibility requirements, etc. you can point to these assets.


On Thu, Sep 19, 2013 at 9:10 AM, Cameron Cundiff < <EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:

> A slight spin on what Karl said: if you have very specific
> requirements, be very specific in the feature description. For
> instance, if you know a particular WCAG guideline will apply to a
> feature, put that criteria in the acceptance/done criteria. Do not
> just say "it should be accessible" or "it should be WCAG2 compliant".
> The latter statements will create frustration and confusion for devs.
> In an Agile environment, devs thrive on specificity, and its the PMs job to narrow the feature to that point.
>
> To this point also, you should not be adding "it should have alt text".
> Universal best practices and issues of craftsmanship are not
> requirements, they're Things You Just Do™. You'll certainly see gaps
> in these areas at first, as you may occasionally see gaps fidelity to
> designs. If you're working on a Rails project, you can circumvent
> oversight of best practices to some extent by building accessibility
> "linting" into CI with capybara-accessible. I'm a maintainer of that
> project and I'm happy to answer questions.
>