Shift Accessibility testing to the Left

At least 1 in 5 people in the UK have a long term illness, impairment or disability. Many more have a temporary disability. A recent study found that 4 in 10 local council homepages failed basic tests for accessibility.

Accessibility is all about removing barriers and providing the benefits of technology for everyone - Steve Ballmer.

A11y is quite a vital topic in the technology world and the sooner we as testers can advocate and showcase the value into our teams the sooner we reduce the risk of bad product reviews, reputation and be an innovative product. Let's shift left and make accessibility testing built-in our teams. Remember accessibility should not be an afterthought, 65% of disabled population in the UK were/are in employment and are we making it accessible for them?

In this workshop you will learn all about accessibility and the best practises, ready enough to take them back to your current work place and make your teams more socially aware.

Structure:

1) Introduction to accessibility (The 101 session)

• Understand what accessibility actually is 
• Why should we think about accessibility 
• How can it help us become a team/company that stands out

2) The importance of having accessibility as part of your non-functional testing

• Why should we have accessibility as part of our testing strategy
• Do you have something already in place? (how did you approach it?)
• The Where, the what and the How to reach the ultimate scenario

3) Discussions with the audience as per the audience's experience

• Engaging with the audience and hearing their stories
• Doing some accessibility exercises 

4) The tools that exist and how we can during the session explore some of the tools via keyboards, screen readers, and plugins for vision deficiencies, motor or learning difficulties only, and what we learn from them.

• We will use a screen reader 
• We will use developer tools
• We will use google chrome plugins for the front end of an application and to learn if we are following best practises 

5) Help the audience make a checklist 

• Where can we start from 
• Create a checklist according to the audience that they can take back to their teams

6) Manual vs Automation, we will build some automated checks 

• The Manual side of Accessibility
• The automated side of accessibility (Browserstack) 

7) Legislation to do with Accessibility 

• Showcasing some law documents from the 
• EU/UK/USA

Audiences would need a laptop and if they have Mac books then they need to see which screen reader they have inbuilt or download NVDA. Windows users will have a screen reader too inbuilt or can download NVDA. 

I will be doing some interactive activities too hopefully with some goodies to give away.