Web and mobile development focuses on technological inclusiveness, such as across operating systems, browsers and devices. Yet, as organizations become even more digital over time, human accessibility still isn’t getting the attention it should because there’s a general lack of awareness about the issue and how best to address it.
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Where to start
If your team hasn’t started thinking about web accessibility and how that impacts your products and your customers, the time to start thinking about it (and doing something about it) is now. However, it isn’t necessarily obvious how or where such efforts should begin.Capital One follows the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG 2.0), which address a plethora of accessibility issues for web and mobile applications through the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI).
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“We preview all of the W3C standards during development to make sure they can support the accessibility needs of any user. If there’s an issue, we talk with working groups to address barriers and advance accessibility opportunities in that standard,” said Judy Brewer, director of the W3C’s Web Accessibility Initiative. “Additionally we develop specifications that are specific to accessibility, such as Accessible Rich Internet Applications (ARIA).”
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Brewer also notes the business advantage of using tools that support the Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines (ATAG) 2.0.
Capital One’s four-prong approach
As the Capital One digital accessibility team has grown from one to a team of 12 employees and consultants, it has formalized an approach to ensure that web accessibility is implemented well across the organization.“We spent a lot of time and effort looking at the way we can move accessibility further up the chain in the software development lifecycle to help our engineers, designers and product owners who are working on all of our digital properties,” said Penicook. “Number one is they have to know about accessibility, so we want to make sure that everyone’s aware of and understands our corporate standard so they can execute against that.”
Importantly, Capital One’s accessibility group is proactively addressing four issues simultaneously:
- Ensuring accessibility is built into the pipeline
- Continually monitoring and testing what’s in production
- Providing self-service digital accessibility training and testing tools
- Marketing the digital accessibility “brand,” so other parts of the organization understand what Penicook’s team does and how to find it
“There was a time when we had to do all of the testing, all of the consulting and make all of the recommendations,” said Penicook. “Self-service is about continuing this journey to enable others to be able to take on some of the responsibilities our team has been providing in the past.”
The internal efforts are complemented with external efforts that keep the group involved in the accessibility community, via conferences and websites.
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Curated by (Lifekludger)
Read full article at Source: Web Accessibility: The effort at Capital One Bank – SD Times
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