This content originally appeared on TPGi and was authored by Melissa Morse
For product managers, every minute counts, and efficiently solving accessibility barriers is significant for maintaining momentum in your development process and creating an inclusive user experience.
However, your team must understand these barriers before they can successfully remove them from your website or digital application. Using the Discover. Solve. Manage. framework, you can confidently identify barriers, correct them quickly, and maintain inclusive digital experiences for all users.
TPGi’s testing framework simplifies your accessibility management approach and creates organizational efficiency.
As previously discussed, in the ‘Discover’ phase, you and your team are focused on identifying accessibility barriers using a blend of automated tools and manual audits. This phase involves evaluating accessibility findings and addressing the issues most impacting user experience.
As we transition into the ‘Solve’ phase, let’s walk through the steps in the ARC Platform to address your accessibility findings.
Understanding the ‘Solve’ Phase
Now, your focus shifts from identifying issues to remediating them. This phase involves evaluating accessibility findings and addressing the issues which most impact user experience.
Start by reviewing each identified issue to understand its origin and impact. The ARC Platform combines results from both automated accessibility testing and manual audits, providing clear guidance. With insights from ARC’s Knowledge Center, you can better understand the guidelines behind each issue, assess its impact on the user experience, and apply ARC’s proven recommendations to address the errors in your code.
Resolving those findings requires collaboration between your development and design teams to implement solutions accurately. After applying fixes, it’s imperative to rescan and validate the updates to confirm that your team has fixed the issues –– this is important for maintaining an accessible and compliant digital experience.
Prioritizing Accessibility Issues
Streamlining your remediation efforts helps you address the most critical barriers first, but this depends on effectively prioritizing accessibility issues. The ARC Dashboard provides complete visibility into your entire accessibility landscape. It allows you to analyze and categorize findings based on their severity and impact across all web domains.
Severity refers to the extent of the accessibility barrier. Impact considers how the issue affects users and their ability to interact with your content.
Prioritizing accessibility findings based on severity and impact empowers your team to address the most important barriers first, facilitating a more efficient remediation workflow.
This is why automated testing and manual testing go hand in hand. Automated testing requires manual inspection by an accessibility expert to review each finding, gauge its impact on user experience, and select which high-priority issues to address first.
Continuous Improvement and Feedback Loops Empower Teams
Creating accessible user experiences is not just a one-time project; it is an ongoing commitment to inclusivity. Therefore, as your team and accessibility efforts mature, you must shift your efforts toward continuous improvement.
Embracing a continuous improvement mindset guarantees that your digital products evolve alongside user needs and emerging standards, maintaining accessible experiences and high user satisfaction.
By continuously improving your accessibility practices, you ensure that your digital experiences remain inclusive and effective for all users. This approach helps prevent the accumulation of an endless backlog of accessibility issues.
It also helps teams catch more issues before they reach the public and negatively impact the user experience. This approach of continuous improvement — working on a batch of findings each sprint — is the best and most cost-effective way to reduce risk.
Feedback Loops
Establishing feedback loops is essential for understanding how users interact with your digital products and identifying areas for improvement. Implement systems to gather user feedback, such as surveys, user testing sessions, and low-touch ways, such as tools like JAWS Connect.
JAWS Connect allows screen reader users to provide feedback if they experience a barrier on your site. Best of all, it requires no code changes to implement and start receiving feedback! Using these tools and opportunities to communicate with your end users will help you create usable products for all.
This direct input from users with diverse needs provides valuable insights that guide your accessibility efforts. Feedback loops enable you to make informed adjustments and enhancements, ensuring your digital products remain accessible and usable by people with disabilities.
Maturing Your Accessibility Program
Evolving your accessibility program is a journey measured by progress over perfection. Recognize that achieving complete accessibility is an ongoing process and focus on incremental improvements.
Leverage the ARC Platform’s Knowledge Center to provide your teams with the resources and training needed for continuous learning and development. By creating a culture of constant improvement, you build a resilient and adaptive accessibility program that can quickly respond to new findings.
For product managers, shifting left and adopting a continuous accessibility mindset is vital for delivering exceptional user experiences and mitigating risks.
Establishing feedback loops and monitoring systems guarantees that your products meet regulatory requirements and exceed user expectations. Additionally, you can support your teams’ education through training and role-based learning.
Training Teams for Ongoing Web Accessibility
Training helps your teams stay updated with the latest best practices, tools, and regulatory requirements, enabling them to address new and emerging accessibility issues confidently. Empowering your teams with the right tools and knowledge is essential for maintaining high accessibility standards and fostering a culture of inclusivity.
ARC Accessibility Resources
Everyone involved in your process must have the appropriate knowledge and skills to manage the accessibility of digital resources. Role-based accessibility training can assist your team with understanding digital accessibility, disability inclusion, and role-specific best practices.
Consider equipping each team member with expert knowledge resources, like the ARC Tutor courses found in the ARC Knowledge Center, which encourages a shared responsibility for accessibility, resulting in more sustainable and scalable practices. Instructor-led training can also help to minimize risks and promote a cohesive effort to maintain high accessibility standards.
The ARC Knowledge Center’s extensive accessibility library, ARC Knowledge Base, goes beyond training modules. These resources provide your team with actionable insights and practical knowledge, covering various accessibility topics, from fundamental principles to advanced remediation techniques aligned to the accessibility barriers discovered on your website(s).
When you take a proactive approach to accessibility through training, you enable your teams to identify and resolve issues independently and boost their expertise and confidence.
Why Accessibility Training Matters for Product Managers
For product managers, ensuring that your development and design teams are well-trained in accessibility and best practices goes beyond compliance. It’s about delivering a superior user experience and mitigating potential legal risks.
As technologies and accessibility requirements evolve and new people join your team, continuous education is essential. Proper training helps prevent accessibility issues from becoming costly problems later and supports a more efficient workflow. Not only that, but it guarantees that your teams are equipped to meet accessibility challenges head-on, elevating your digital products’ overall quality and inclusivity.
6 Steps for Solving Accessibility Barriers with ARC
Addressing accessibility barriers involves a methodical approach to verify that every aspect of your digital content meets inclusive design standards. Here’s a step-by-step guide to effectively implement accessibility solutions using the ARC Platform:
- Set and Run Automated Scans: Use the ARC Platform to scan, monitor, and report issues across your entire website. A domain scan can be set up in minutes. This quickly identifies potential accessibility barriers across your site.
- Test User Journeys: Conduct thorough testing of your most important user journeys using the ARC User Flow feature. ARC user flows simulate a user navigating through the application, allowing you to monitor your teams as they test through the entire span of a user journey.
- Evaluate Results: Carefully review the test results to understand the nature and scope of your accessibility findings. This evaluation helps determine the necessary remediation actions.
- Map Issues to KnowledgeBase: Refer to the KnowledgeBase resources linked within the ARC Platform for each identified issue. These resources describe the accessibility findings and explain which WCAG guidelines are not being adhered to. This detailed remediation guidance helps your team address each barrier confidently.
- Prioritize and Fix: Prioritize the identified issues based on severity and impact, then use the ARC Toolkit to test updated and corrected code to make sure you have resolved the bugs before pushing changes to production or live environments.
- Rescan Website and Continuously Monitor: After implementing fixes, use ARC Monitoring to rescan your website and confirm that the issues have been resolved. ARC Monitoring offers defensible data points that validate your teams’ progress in accessibility, ensuring that the improvements are effective and verifiable.
Reporting is a critical responsibility for maturing your accessibility program, but it doesn’t have to be a manual process. ARC Monitoring automatically scans your domains each month, streamlining the process and reducing the manual effort required for ongoing compliance.
One other step to consider throughout this process is collaboration. Promoting collaboration among developers, designers, and content creators helps teams to work together to seamlessly implement accessibility solutions and maintain consistent standards across digital content.
Let the ARC Platform Help Your Team ‘Solve’ Digital Accessibility Findings
The ‘Solve’ phase is pivotal in your accessibility journey, translating insights into tangible improvements across your digital landscape. Committing to proactively addressing accessibility findings provides better user experiences, mitigates risks, and ensures that your digital products meet and exceed accessibility standards.
Stay tuned for our next article, where we’ll explore the ‘Manage’ phase and share how you can sustain and optimize your digital accessibility efforts for the long haul.
Ready to see how the ARC Platform can transform your accessibility strategy? ARC can do that! Schedule a demo to learn how ARC can help solve your digital accessibility challenges, driving your organization toward a more inclusive digital environment.
The post Solving Accessibility Barriers: How Ongoing Training Can Help Prioritize and Remediate Issues appeared first on TPGi.
This content originally appeared on TPGi and was authored by Melissa Morse
Melissa Morse | Sciencx (2024-08-12T18:41:14+00:00) Solving Accessibility Barriers: How Ongoing Training Can Help Prioritize and Remediate Issues. Retrieved from https://www.scien.cx/2024/08/12/solving-accessibility-barriers-how-ongoing-training-can-help-prioritize-and-remediate-issues/
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