One of the practical strategies consistently identified and discussed at the European Dialogues on Web Accessibility is the importance and usefulness of defining a process for creating and maintaining accessible Web sites. This chapter will describe what an effective process based approach might look like.
Approaching Web content quality management as an afterthought can be a circular and costly strategy. Organizations that include accessible design and quality management as part of their development plans, quality assurance and testing practices will have a tremendous economic advantage. For example, according to a study by Forrester Research, the cost of retrofitting a Web site for accessibility can be as much as ten times the cost of designing an accessible site from the ground up.1
Web sites that contain accessibility issues, such as broken links, improperly tagged or missing image alternatives and slow loading pages create a negative experience for users. Any negative experience will adversely impact organizations that rely upon online communication to send their product message as well as businesses built upon online transactions.
Testing, remediation and monitoring solutions that easily integrate into current practices enable organizations to build standards based compliancy testing into their existing planning, development, quality assurance, and defect tracking processes. These solutions can empower content managers and executives to implement, remediate, and monitor compliance to regulatory and corporate Web standards. An integrated approach will also help organizations troubleshoot sources of quality issues and identify inaccessible Web content.
Three important components of a process based approach to accessibility include the following elements:
The Right Leadership and buy in from key stakeholders in the organization;
Education of all stakeholders on the current state of accessibility and creation of a plan of action and;
Empowerment of everyone that is impacted throughout the design, development, quality assurance and monitoring process.
The Right Leadership
As with any project, putting the right leadership team in place is essential. An accessibility project team should include individuals from every group that contributes to the development and maintenance of a Web site. In the average organization the following groups would most likely be represented:
Marketing – For their knowledge of who uses the site and for their knowledge of site usage statistics.
Design – For their knowledge of the usability, interaction, and visual aspects of the site.
Development – For their knowledge of what skills and technologies will be needed to complete the task.
Public relations – To determine whether or not the accessibility effort should be made public.
End users – From internal users , to usability testers, to an outside beta tester group, actual users will help to make any accessibility project successful. Accessibility is part of user interface, and users often have surprising interactions with any user interface.
Executive management – Corporate or Executive representation on the team will help to keep the project funded and a top priority for the organization.
Operations – This group is generally responsible for overall Web site performance and testing. This group will be critical in the development of a long term site accessibility strategy.
Professional development / training – This group should be part of the project from the beginning so they can better understand training requirements.
Participation and support from key members of the organization can assist in providing the funding and effort to incorporate accessibility testing into the Web project life cycle. It is extremely important that an organization develop both a top down strategy, with commitment and executive sponsorship of the accessibility plan, as well as bottom up support from the Web architects and Web developers. Through this combined approach, accessibility can be seamlessly integrated into existing company practices for Web planning, development, testing and deployment.
Three Types of Testing
As Web sites become more complex and interactive, development of Web sites becomes more and more like software development. If we look to the processes of software testing, we will see that there other types of testing besides what is typically done for Web sites.
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Functional testing – is the product working as it is designed? Does the design incorporate accessibility requirements?
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Usability testing – Can people (with and without disabilities) complete tasks using the product?
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Compliance testing –Does the Web site conform to guidelines and standards? This can be automated to a certain extent, particularly for sites that contain mostly documents and few interactive application features. Some aspects of compliance will require functional testing, and others will require human inspection of test results generated by automated tools.
Oftentimes, the three types of testing are combined or confused, or they are completed out of order. Completing them in the given order is important for achieving accurate results. For example, while usability testing is valuable early in the process, it can be blocked by functional bugs. So, it is best to engage in usability testing after you have identified and fixed functional issues. Automated compliance testing can also be blocked by functional problems, preventing the tools from reaching all parts of the site.
Involving users throughout the design and development process provides valuable feedback and there are a variety of methods to gather feedback from potential users: focus groups, usability testing on previous versions of the product, and testing with paper prototypes among others.
Automated testing solutions can be used to great effect in compliance testing a site or groups of documents. It is very important to remember that no tool alone can validate the absolute accessibility of a Web site. However a good software solution can identify a majority of what needs to be manually inspected. Additionally, a good solution will identify which pages do not need to be manually inspected, based on the absence of elements that require manual inspection. Remember: A human will still need to assure that all manual checkpoints identified by the solution are accessible, and some aspects of compliance require functional testing.
Therefore, all three types of testing are important and each has its place in the software development process. This becomes more important as Web sites become Web applications and software testing methodologies are employed. Testing is no longer just about crawling the code looking for specific attributes, elements, and tree structures, it becomes a matter of ensuring that the application works as designed and that the interface is perceivable, operable, and understandable by end users.
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