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Discussion on: I am the head of platform and standards at one of the UK's largest children's charities, Ask Me Anything!

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vip3rousmango profile image
Al Romano • Edited

How does your team handle accessibility development and testing within projects? Is your charity subject to WCAG guidelines?

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Toby Osbourn

Great question!

Yes, we are subject to them, but even for areas where we could "get away" without being accessible, we treat accessibility as a first-class requirement.

We automate where possible, so build tooling to do a lot of checks that can be done and then do manual testing for the rest.

Where possible we try and provide tooling to the other teams that builds in accessibility for free. For example, our design system is made with accessibility in mind.

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Al Romano

That's great to hear that its first class!

To dive a bit deeper, when automating are you manually running code tests using automated checking tools (Wave,Tenon, etc...) and/or with unit testing as part of CI/CD?

Have any tips on helping to "toolchain" the process for DevOps?

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Toby Osbourn

Both and it kind of varies by the project (something we're hoping to standardise).

Generally, we do:

  • linters at the point of development
  • pre-commit hooks for some static analysis
  • CI for unit and automated checks. In that order (no point in everything passing colour contrast if unit tests fail)
  • Manual QA before deploy