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Study Tasks

• Characterise and differentiate between the disciplines of Agile and Waterfall project management methodologies and compare the approaches each methodology would have for accessibility quality assurance.
• Demonstrate an understanding of the benefits of designing digital content with accessibility in mind as opposed to remediation.
• Characterise and differentiate between the disciplines of accessibility and user experience design and compare assumptions of each discipline.
• Understand how accessibility needs to be integrated into the entire product life cycle, including concept, requirements, design, prototyping, development, quality assurance (QA), user testing, support, and regression testing.
• Identify ways in which each person’s role in the product life cycle can include some aspect of accessibility. </aside>

Resources

Waterfall

A linear process that breaks activities down into sequential phases. Each phase depends on deliverables from the previous phase. All testing happens at the end of development (more expensive, time crunched, not thorough)

Benefits: Well-defined milestones and deadlines, Standardized documentation (link)

Agile

Accessibility is integrated at every step of the product lifecycle

• Plan
  • Consider accessibility from the beginning.
  • Include people with disabilities in research.
  • Document your goals. Define conformance to accessibility standards in the “Definition of done”.
  • Assign responsibilities to individuals and incorporate them into their job descriptions.
  • Determine budget and resources.
  • Ensure team members and content creators have access to accessibility expertise and training.
  • Review environment (e.g., existing guidelines, coding libraries, accessibility checks being included in quality assurance)
• Create
  • Implement accessibility in the information architecture (IA) and user experience (UX).
  • Address all user needs in design decisions, including people with disabilities.
  • Developers must ensure that the code meets accessibility requirements.
  • Content creators are responsible for producing accessible content, such as structured content, alternatives for images and multimedia, and descriptive headings, links, and labels.
• Test
  • Quality assurance and accessibility auditors need to test markup and content.
  • Use automated and manual testing. Be aware of the limitations of automated testing.
  • The accessibility testing process should follow the intended standard throughout the iterative development.
  • Use a standard report structure for evaluation findings.
  • Ensure that accessibility bugs are fixed and reviewed again.
  • Track and communicate progress