Presenter: Ian Pouncey, @IanPouncey
(Be sure to look at Ian’s Feb 23 retweet of theVine video of a guitar playing with a dog drumming. It’s awesome.)
This is the third presentation I attended on Wednesday, March 4 at the #CSUN15 conference. Ian’s presentations have been entertaining in the past, so I’m looking forward to this one.
Ian shared a couple quotes from BBC higher-ups:
- “Everyone deserves the best” quote from Tony Hall, BBC director General, 2013
- Hugh Huddy quote on the iPlayer
BBC Accessibility Team
- 3 people responsible for: training, standards & guidelines, techniques, framework support
- Not responsible for accessibility of sites or apps. We have 7,000+ content producers, our team would need to be enormous to cover all this!
Training
- Accessibility for web developers: this is an online course that takes about two hours and shows how real people with disabilities use their products.
- Introduction to screen readers: one-day workshop that provides hands-on use of screen readers, including iOS and Android OSes. It’s primarily for front-end developers.
- Question: is it for Jaws? Yes, but if the users have NVDA, we provide guidance for them as well.
- Question: can you make this training publicly available (laughter ensued). For the web developer course, we’d really like to, but we may not be able to for competition reasons.
Upcoming training
- QA
- UX
- Product Management
- Mobile application development
Standards & Guidelines
- Mobile Accessibility
- HTML
- Assistive Tech
Mobile Accessibility Standards & Guidelines
- Technology agnostic, but platform specific techniques
- All have success criteria
HTML Accessibility Standards
- Minimal set of expected standards for our products
- Standards are unambiguous so there can be no arguing when we engage with content partners
Assistive Technology Testing Guidelines
- Currently for screen reader only
- Not support guidelines
- Showed a very long list of guidelines that they use for testing
Question: How do you choose/define your “window of support?” We have a standard approach for screen readers and browsers. Generally, we use “current version minus one,” with an exclusion for some versions of Internet Explorer.
Question: do you have any tools for automated testing? Yes, I’ll discuss that shortly.
Standards vs Guidelines
A standard is:
- Must or must not
- unambiguous
- Unambiguously testable
Guideline
- Should or should not
- Must or must not that is: open to interpretation; testing requires judgement
Anatomy of a well written standard
- Short description: a document must have exactly one H1 element
- Rationale: must be useful, i.e. “Users should be able to use the document’s <h1> to identify its main content. Documents should have one main subject”
- Examples
- Testing Criteria: Procedure, i.e. “Use WAVE toolbar or similar to generate a document outline, there must be exactly one <h1>”
Secret bit
- bbc-a11y ruby gem
Standards vs Understanding
- Understanding is more important than standards, but organizational awareness is more important than understanding
- Goal is to enable people to do their jobs as easily as possible
- We don’t want accessibility to be a checklist activity, but we realize that sometimes it does work that way
- It should be embedded into everything we do so that the knowledge gets “locked in”
Accessibility Champions Network
- Extends our team’s reach
- Spreads knowledge and understanding
- Our eyes, ears, and voice in products
- Not just for developers
- Don’t have to be an expert
- Not responsible for accessibility
- Shares knowledge
Benefits of being a champion
- Additional training
- Closer contact with accessibility team
- Work with other teams
- 10% time project
- Prestige! Fame! Glory!
- There will
Question: do you do any assessments of the work the developers are doing? Occasionally, but it’s often more about the frameworks and components that are used in a product.
Question: How often to accessibility champions answer to their team? It’s a new thing we’re starting.
UX: Roles and Responsibilities
- Visual design
- Semantics
- Markup and content order
- Hidden content
Design is Critical
- Development may not be the most important part of the project! This one looked painful for Ian to say 🙂
Beyond Design & Development
- Product Owners: encourage training; make the accessible decision, not the easy decision; plan for testing with disabled user
- Content producers: understand alternatives, plan for audio desc, subtitling, etc.
Global Experience Language: GEL
- Similar to Google’s, but not as well maintained. It’s a bit out of date
- Showed an example of an overlay/carousel panel
Document design knowledge
- Enable design iteration
- prevents repeated mistakes
- encourages evidence based desing
- educates
Code Based GEL
- Production quality code
- White labelled
- Acceptance tests included
