Wrapping Up

[00:00:00]
>> To consider accessibility in our organizations, either where you work now, a place you worked in the past, where you would like to work. Let's say you're working on a Web app with a lot of interactions in it, a lot of reordering, a lot of really intricate things requiring focus management, but none of it is accessible.

[00:00:22]
You just know there's some blocking issues in there. So let's consider some questions. Who would you have to convince to prioritize accessibility? In your position, who is in the way? What motivates them? When you're really getting down to the nitty-gritty details of presenting your estimates and things, how would you scope or prioritize your feedback to increase the chances of them saying yes?

[00:00:49]
And is there anything you can do to change the accessibility issues? What steps would you take to actually go and fix it? Cuz that can be helpful as a tech lead, to send people in the right direction. So if you have any thoughts on any of these questions, let's chat for a minute, and then we'll be done today.

[00:01:14]
I mean, are you comfortable saying kinda just, theoretically, where are the blockers with accessibility? Or where were the blockers? Cuz you said you had a big, 11th hour audit that all of a sudden was like, God, we have to fix this.
>> In terms of what's blocking the team I'm on, specifically, or some of the work we're doing, yeah, it's a complicated question, mostly to do with resourcing, and time, and prioritization.

[00:01:48]
Where the priority for that application is really to meet existing business commitments, where accessibility is not, strictly speaking, a part of the requirements for that. Which is disappointing. But I can understand high level, from a business objective, why that's a concern. And yeah, the project prioritization is very much around, we have to meet these existing commitments to other partnerships and then we can move on to the other stuff.

[00:02:24]
And it's like, okay, well, great. I'll be patient in the meantime, I suppose, and try to continue encouraging the developers to learn from their peers on other teams that are making this more of a regular practice, and trying to build up the muscles for how do we include it in regular work.

[00:02:45]
But yeah, it's a difficult scope and balancing act with an application that serves a lot of existing business. And so the potential impact for doing some of this kind of clean up work would be very good, but it's also costly. And long term, the investment has a shelf life.

[00:03:12]
And that's where quantifying that can be useful in making, I'll give an example. Just on quality metrics in general, we had an automation framework using Cypress that was really not providing a lot of benefit. It wasn't covering the Core user flows. It was constantly flaky for developers. And the future facing direction was very much chosen to be, use Playwright instead.

[00:03:46]
And we had a QA contractor who would have needed a lot of retraining to do that. So we ended up letting that person go and hiring a new contractor to write Playwright tests. And I was literally messaging with him today at lunch. But that's where we would like to add the Axe-Core Auditor to that and add some metric-ing around it.

[00:04:10]
But even that, it's not a huge effort. And I expect I might be able to get a sprint or so, for one person to work on that in Q1, but I have to wait.
>> Yeah, it's interesting. Even within one organization, you can have multiple things that come up.

[00:04:30]
On one line of business, it might be that it's a legacy product that has an end in sight, that the cost of investing the accessibility into it just doesn't pencil out. So there's that, and then there's the just lack of awareness. Which, yeah, it's not that anyone's explicitly blocking accessibility per se, it's that they just don't know.

[00:04:54]
But then you get, we have to go back and fix it. That's when some of the leadership blocks happened, cuz that decision has to be made. Do we go fix it after the fact or not? Or do we get investment time up front or not, so?
>> Yeah, and luckily, the investment time up front is happening on the future facing things.

[00:05:14]
And I'm glad for that.
>> That's awesome.
>> [LAUGH] It'll be a different conversation for 2.1 and 2.2 compliance. I had that conversation recently with a new partnership opportunity that came up. And they were talking about, yeah, they want 2.1 compliance. And I'm like, that's great. We needed to do different work in order for that to be possible on the timeline you're suggesting.

[00:05:39]
>> Yeah, well, that's really interesting. So kinda getting back to the business case, I hope that works out. That could be some lost revenue because it's not compliant, right? So that's getting back to what I was talking about where the market pressure, you miss out on those contracts.

[00:05:57]
That is the side that starts to get people's attention, people who care a lot about finance, [LAUGH] or legal.
>> Carolina says we have an internal Notion page at our company. And I'm starting a guidelines documentation for developers to use from scratch during the development process. Now I'm making posts over there and even resharing to our web devs weekly, so people can actually understand the importance of it.

[00:06:28]
I've got people interested in the last few days, and yeah, talking about your workshops. And I'm happy to share it.
>> Yay, I love it. So you can start to see those light bulbs go on.
>> And Miles says it's sometimes very difficult to convince higher-ups to care about accessibility when it doesn't provide immediate shareholder value, even though everyone in the room knows that isn't true.

[00:06:55]
>> It can be very hard. Sometimes you have to find those quick wins that you could just sorta slip in there anyway. I'm kind of a rebel in that way, so I'm always gonna advocate for that. But it is hard to make that fly sometimes. Sometimes I can't do that.

[00:07:11]
And you might not be able to, if it breaks tether tests or it's just outside of the scope of the ticket you're working on. So yeah, it can be a challenge, but we're all in this together, really. I hope by coming to these workshops that you feel like you're part of the accessibility community now, because you are.

[00:07:34]
We're all just so excited to have people join the community and make a difference for accessibility. No matter where you are in your skill level, whether you're a tech lead and just getting started with it or you're more experienced, we're all here together. And I just really wanna thank you for spending all this time with me, learning about accessibility.

[00:07:53]
>> [APPLAUSE]