Global Accessibility Awareness Day
A Great Time for Reflection
19 May 2022 - Global Accessibility Awareness Day!
If you’ve never heard of this before, it’s a day intended to raise awareness about digital accessibility.
In the organiser’s own words:
The purpose of GAAD is to get everyone talking, thinking and learning about digital access and inclusion, and the more than One Billion people with disabilities/impairments.
It’s a special day for SAAS (Software As A Service) companies like First AML who provide their services through digital interfaces and who hold themselves accountable for meeting or missing accessibility standards.
Ultimately, for us, it is a great day for reflection! A time to stop, take a moment and think about the year that’s just gone…
What are our accessibility goals? Let’s realign on these.
What improvements have we made? Let’s celebrate them!
What improvements do we still need to make? Let’s list them out and prioritise for the year to come.
Hold up… what is digital accessibility?
Think about, say, a school hall - like, the physical building. When thinking about accessibility for a building like this a few questions might come up:
Is the building wheelchair accessible?
Are the exits clearly marked?
Are the doors wide enough or tall enough for a variety of different bodies to fit through?
These sorts of questions help us highlight potential accessibility concerns which should be considered either at build time or (hopefully not) as an after thought.
It’s ideal for the school to accomodate the most number of people - for ethical, legal and commercial reasons.
And just like physical structures, digital interfaces also (hopefully) need to meet certain standards. Questions might arise like:
Are the fonts readable?
How about images… do they have alt text (alternative text)?
🎨 Colours! 🎨 Do our colours provide enough contrast?
Is the page generally accessible to screen readers?
How well does our app work on poor internet connections or old devices?
Can users of varying age groups navigate the UI (user interface) successfully?
And again, just like our school example, accessibility is important for ethical, legal and commercial reasons…. It’s also better for users and cheaper for organisations to build accessibility in from the get go rather than trying to find the budget and scope to retrofit accessibility fixes.
What are our accessibility goals at First AML?
Simple: make our end user app and marketing website as accessible to the largest number of people possible.
💦 Easier said than done 💦
In practice accessibility is difficult to do right and we’ve got a lot of work to do. There’s so much to think about… so many different types of people out there! So many different ways our users try to interact with our software! Especially on our core digital forms which end users from all walks of life fill out as a key part of our anti money laundering process.
Just like we want to enable financial inclusion through simple and frictionless anti money laundering software, we also want to enable digital inclusion through mindful software design and careful technical implementation.
When thinking of all the things this entails, it’s hard not to become overwhelmed 😰 The most important thing is just to make a start, be kind to yourselves and hold yourselves accountable for the good and the bad.
While we are still a ways off from our goal at First AML, we’re nonetheless excited about the improvements and small wins we’ve been able to accomplish over the last year.
We’re slowly weaving accessibility into the fabric of what we do and why we do it - and that feels ✨ great. ✨
Source: https://accessibility.day/
What improvements have we made?
We can organise our accessibility work into three categories:
Discovery work
Improvements to practices and mindsets
Concrete changes
”Discovery” means the work we’ve done to 🔍 find and document ✍️ the things we need to work on. This includes things like:
Tech and UX (user experience) audits conducted separately by both developers and our QA (quality assurance) team using tools like tools like Lighthouse and Axe.
Design-specific audits using tools like ContrastChecker, Stark Sketch Plugin and Contrast Grid.
And documentation (in Notion) around audit findings, goals and considerations:
Changing practices means education, updating mindsets and encouraging participation. This leans toward things like:
Holding lunch and learn sessions to discuss what digital accessibility is, why it’s important and how to contribute
Regularly bringing up accessibility requirements as part of new features or tasks and including that work in the overall task scoping
Adding a Github pull request checklist item for frontend developers to encourage self-assessment:
QA making accessibility part of their quality checks and pre-work ticket discussion sessions
Making accessibility checks part of our code-review process
Creating and prioritising accessibility improvement tasks as part of the frontend team’s meta work (i.e. non-feature work)
🎉 Blog posts like this 🎉
And finally we have concrete changes which refer to ‘hard’ changes made to code or design. These changes are often a direct result of the setup work we just covered 🚀 This includes things like:
Using the jsx-a11y plugin to automatically suggest and enforce accessibility improvements in the FE (frontend) codebase
Making our shared FE component library accessible via things like semantic tags, form labelling, alt text for images and mindful colour contrasting (this work then spills over to much of our software UI)
Using react-testing-library for unit testing which strongly encourages testing like an ability-diverse user and the use of aria attributes and semantic html
Loads of work done by our wonderful designers to ensure our sketch files align with our accessibility goals (which also spills over into new feature work)
A bunch of CSS fixes on this blog site (which still needs work 😭) to improve accessibility and readability
Keeping the final bundle size of our frontend end-user form assets low and improving resilience in the case of slow or poor connections
Using tools like Babel to support older devices (based on user browser and device data)
Rewriting components like our shared date-picker component to be easier to understand and use based on end-user feedback
I’m probably forgetting a few and there is still a looong way to go but regardless I’m super proud of the progress we’ve made over the last year. It’s so good to reflect on the positive changes we were able to usher in!
Now to look forward… 👁️ 👄 👁️
What improvements do we still need to do?
As I say, there’s still a lot of 👷♀️ work 👷♀️ to do! But acknowledging and documenting this is a great first step forward 📈
Here are just some of the many things we still need to get to:
Working through task tickets created as part of our various audits
I.e. Improving keyboard navigation, re-assessing browser support requirements and digging into things like form usability and lowering bundle size
Increasing socialisation of accessibility work through the introduction of a regular frontend guild meeting agenda item (where we discuss accessibility tasks and showcase related work)
Actively looking to work with an organisation like UserWay to improve our marketing website’s accessibility
Improving this blog lol 🤦
In summary
Global Accessibility Awareness Day provides a great milestone for us to look back on all the good we’ve done and look forward to the next year and all the exciting changes we want to introduce.
We hope that posts like this encourage other SAAS companies to use this day in a similar way.
Some final advice for those companies is to be kind to yourselves (everyone starts somewhere!) but at the same time be honest and hold yourselves accountable.
Making our digital world more accessible starts with companies like ours! Let’s put in that effort in and reap those rewards together.
🤙