Your daily frequent11y newsletter, brought to you by @ChrisBAshton:
Collaborative planning, the forgotten step of accessible development
- A deque article describing “a11yBID”, or “Accessibility Business Informed Development”.
- It’s essentially BDD (“Behaviour Driven Development”), in that it involves conversations between stakeholders and cross-functional team members to define Acceptance Criteria (AC), often in a formatted plain language format called Gherkin.
- a11yBID is different to BDD as it “doesn’t discover classic business requirements as BDD does. Instead, it clarifies the accessibility-specific aspects of those business requirements”.
- Starting with high-fidelity designs (i.e. PDFs), the process begins with an “a11y Amigos” meeting between the designer, the tester and the business analyst. The group reviews the design from an a11y perspective, asking questions around focus management etc, and drafting the “a11yAC” user stories. Here is an example of one:
- Scenario: A blind screen reader user can understand that content is loading
- Given I am a blind screen reader user
- And I have submitted the form
- And a loading spinner is visible as I await a response from the server
- When I navigate to the loading spinner image
- Then I hear the image role
- And I hear the alt text as “loading”
- The article concludes with some general advice to make a11yBID scale. For example, making use of a design system and component library, so that you can reuse tried-and-tested designs.
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