MM5.8 Accessibility: methodology

1 Introduction
2 Research
3 New designs
4 Implementation and testing

Introduction

When tackling the accessibility project, we have gone through several stages:

Research
Creating new designs compatible with WCAG 2.1
Implementation and testing.

Research

First of all, our research team analyzed the most widely accepted standards for digital accessibility and decided that Digizuite’s ultimate goal is level AA conformance with WCAG 2.1.

We have used a number of resources to learn and understand the guidelines, but these were our prime sources of information:

https://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG21/#compatible

We have analyzed each of the 4 major principles together with their components and divided them into concrete tasks. Each task was then discussed in terms of workload, the extent of needed changes, the allocation of internal resources and prioritization.

It was decided that due to complexity of our application, the accessibility project will stretch over more than a single major version of the Media Manager. i.e. the progress for 5.8 release would be significant, but the ultimate goal, a.k.a. full level AA conformance, would not be fully reached by then.

New designs

We have then identified several major tasks involving, among others:

the ability to navigate the Media Manager using only keyboard
treatment of non-text components
color contrast
spacing between elements
size and uniform shape of the components
size of the hit area.

The next step was to split the application into components and re-design them according to the WCAG 2.1 guidelines. The result was a brand new interactive and dynamic Design Guide that contain detailed specification on how every single Media Manager should be built, together with a rich portfolio of examples.

These are some of the examples from the Guide and from the sample portfolio:

Implementation and testing

Media Manager has a higher complexity than an average webpage, due to a high number of elements, an wide array of feature and a certain amount of the uncontrollable as it is meant to be a host to content uploaded by third parties, i.e. our customers. This is why the implementation process involved significant workload.

The research performed by the team and the subsequent Design Guide resulted in more than 40 tickets.

As accessibility has a different nature than the usual new functionality, the process of testing was also more complex. Apart from the standard Quality Assurance processes, the new Media Manager was also subject to testing with accessibility-checking tools. These tools are:

WAVE Evaluation Tool
Lighthouse.