Accessibility for product managers & product owners

1. Accessibility for product managers & product owners

To ensure everyone can use Colt's products and services, Colt has established an Accessibility Roadmap which is a key strategic business objective both in terms of being an inclusive organisation and to help meet legal requirements.

What that means in terms of user experience is that applications and pages should be accessible to users of assistive technologies. This includes simple objectives such as ensuring that everything is accessible using a keyboard only, to ensuring that if a user cannot see the screen, what they hear using their screen reader makes perfect sense. When any project begins there are no accessibility issues, and only if design and technical thinking do not include accessibility as part of the process, then accessibility issues occur which can be expensive to rectify as accessibility is much harder to resolve retrospectively.

In order to ensure accessibility is embedded into current processes, easy to follow guides have been created that contain all the key elements of accessibility to make it easy to deliver, effective and ensure there is minimum impact on any project that utilises them.

Project Managers have guidance which is aimed at ensuring recommended activities in the C1, C2 and C3 processes are fully supported, and dedicated resources for Developers and Testers have been created to ensure everyone has access not only to who needs to be done, but also how to do it.

For Product Managers and Product Owners there is a degree of responsibility to ensure that this work is undertaken and reported. This will not only support the delivery of Colt strategy, but also ensure that Legal Risk for specific regions is lowered.

To ensure everything is delivered there are five key areas of responsibility:

Procuring third party applications and widgets

If there are any third party plugins, applications, services or widgets being used in the development of a customer or internal facing Colt digital product or service. Ensure that a [VPAT (Voluntary Accessibility product Template)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voluntary_Product_Accessibility_Template#:~:text=A%20Voluntary%20Product%20Accessibility%20Template,1973%2C%20as%20amended%20(29%20U.S.C.) is requested from the supplier. This is a standard report of how accessible the third party addition is, and this should be reviewed and any outstanding issues should have dates for when fixes will be actioned. The VPAT should be archived and revisited annually.

Ensuring accessibility is included as a project requirement

At the start of a project Accessibility should be included as a key deliverable, the guidance should be reviewed by the Project Manager and a plan put in place that ensures it is implemented at every stage and not descoped or deferred. This will ensure better effectiveness at a reduced project cost. As part of the RAID, accessibility should be included and the level of risk should be determined by the requirements outlined in the relevant accessibility laws.

Accessibility testing report archiving

There are multiple countries and regions that have laws that govern accessibility. Ensure that the team is aware of these as like laws on data security, they can add risk of serious litigation that can come with fines and reputational damage to Colt. Archiving the good work undertaken by a team means that if a legal challenge is made, then Colt can demonstrate that accessibility work is being undertaken.

Ensuring backlog and reports are transferred to operations

If there are still some outstanding accessibility bugs that have been identified by the Test Manager, then these should be included in the handover to Operations.

Post implementation - prioritise backlog based on level of risk identified in RAID

All outstanding accessibility bugs should be prioritised based on the requirements outlined in the relevant accessibility laws as well as from the perspective of supporting Colt's accessibility roadmap.

2. What is accessibility?

Accessibility as defined by the W3C has 4 principles; Perceivable, Operable, Understandable and Robust. The first three of these refer to the user experience that you should consider when creating user requirements.

To make this easier Colt has created a set of accessibility guides which start by explaining what the desired user outcome is, as well as the methodologies, techniques and tests that will enable this to be delivered successfully.

To ensure these can be evaluated there is an accompanying manual test script that can be added to the UAT activity undertaken by the Test Manager.

To get an idea of how enabling the inclusion of user requirements can be, this video about screen reader user experience from Microsoft's Accessibility Team demonstrates the effectiveness of small considerations.

Experiencing your product with the Narrator Screen Reader is advised. How to do this is explained by the Colt guide, Using Windows Narrator to Test Web Accessibility.

When using a White background, the following colour combinations are colour contrast compliant, and avoid flourescence or colour blindness issues.