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Designing & Developing for Accessibility throughout the Life Cycle


Overview

The study and practice of Web and software accessibility has placed much focus on the creation of coding and design guidelines. Two of the most well-known accessibility standards, the W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) and U.S. Section 508, offer such guidelines and help developers produce accessible Web content and applications by outlining proper coding and design principles with respect to text, images, forms, multimedia, and the like. In addition, there are many testing tools that have been created to assist developers in evaluating the accessibility of Web content and applications. However, these tools and coding guidelines only address detailed implementation issues at a single point in the phase of a Web application's life-cycle. The individual tools and standards often do not address fully how to inject accessibility into the overall application life cycle — from its conception through requirements, design, development, testing and launch.

Much more is involved in designing and developing a quality accessible Web application than just conforming to a set of guidelines or evaluating using a suite of tools. Activities must be performed by the team throughout the development life cycle to help ensure the developed application is usable, meets both business and user needs, and has a high level of quality. To perform these activities well, accessibility and development experts must work together effectively throughout the life cycle to understand the relationship of various work products that help the team collectively develop an accessible application.

Pre-design Phase

In this phase, the development team needs to make sure that an accessibility strategy for the application is defined. In order to do so, many questions need to be answered including the following:

  • Does the technology selection have an impact on accessibility?
  • Is there a certain demographic of users that will be using this particular application?
  • What kind of assistance will be provided to the assistive technology user beyond any built-in accessibility features or functions of the application?
  • Which accessibility standards are applicable and how will they be followed?

Design Phase

In this phase, the development team needs to create an application design that takes into account the business and user requirements for accessibility as well as the technical limitations identified in the pre-design phase. Some key questions asked in this phase are:

  • Now that decisions have been made about what technology and standards will be used, what impact will they have on the technical and user interface design of the solution?
  • What design approaches can be used in the given technology platform to support standards conformance?

Development Phase

In this phase, the development team needs to implement the application accessibility strategy and the design decisions made in the previous phase. Questions that need to be addressed include:

  • Which accessibility testing tools will be used to perform "unit testing" of developed code to help ensure that it conforms to the given standards as early in development as possible?
  • How will designers and developers be trained to use these tools, and to understand the rationale and importance of accessibility standards conformance and usable access?
  • What processes will developers use to manage their code builds, checking units into the repository after they have performed accessibility unit testing to minimize the need for retroactive bug fixes?

Testing Phase

In this phase, the accessibility team seeks to assure the quality of the implementation of the application accessibility strategy. The main questions to address in this phase include:

  • How thorough is the accessibility testing and what types of testing will be performed?
  • What are some of the best testing approaches to use to evaluate accessibility, such that the accessibility testing will be repeatable and reliable?
  • How should accessibility defects be documented and communicated such that they are consumable and understood by developers and then tracked to resolution?

IBM offers a range of strategic consulting services, including standards integration, governance practices training, and design, development and testing of accessible technology solutions. Government agencies, universities, and private-sector companies can all benefit from these IBM Accessibility Services.

For information on obtaining the full text of Olive and Bill's paper "Designing & Developing for Accessibility throughout the Life Cycle," to inquire about IBM's Accessibility Services, or engage IBM Interactive :: Toronto's Accessibility Practice, please contact:

Richard Daoust
416-478-2596
daoust@ca.ibm.com