Accessibility Charters and Quadrants

Teams in software delivery come in all shapes, sizes and methodologies. There are a lot of things they have in common such as tools, documents and processes. What is also very common in every team is the undocumented or “unwritten rules”. As the name implies they are not discussed and you should just know them, From someone new coming into the team. or with a different neurodiverse background it makes working together just a little more difficult or frustrating at the beginning. As an example, an unwritten rule could be to not schedule meetings before 9.15 to accommodate the school run. This small accommodation could be key to an individual but be useful to most.

Accessibility is often the last thing to be thought of when we create software. We can make more accessible systems and applications if we think about accessibility from the start. Accessibility has many comparisons to security in that people think it is only for specialists or that you may do something ‘wrong’ to make it worse. Just as there’s no such thing as perfect security, there is no such thing as perfect accessibility. We can only be more secure or more accessible. Everyone can think about accessibility from the start just as everyone can execute accessibility tests as the MoT article, ‘Simple Tests For Accessibility Every Tester Should Know’ shows us. 

In this workshop you will learn all about charters, with a focus on building your own Accessibility Charter. We will also cover how the Accessibility Quadrants can be a guide to help form the charter for your team. The Quadrants are a visual heuristic that looks to shift thinking from not only compliance, but to a more rounded and inclusive view of accessibility as a whole. The heuristic shows that compliance with principles like the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) or the European Accessibility Act (EAA) is only one aspect of accessibility and inclusion. 

Using the Quadrants as our guide we will explore each section, both raising awareness and offering real examples of how we can make accessibility a core part of development. This workshop will help prompt ideas and provoke deeper thought about accessibility’s scope of application as part of creating inclusive software. Attendees will work through a series of exercises helping them gain wider knowledge of the four quadrant areas through practical application and applying them to their own charters. Which will then help them apply those new skills to their own work situations.