Making Accessibility Part of Your Development Process

Now that you know some of the technical aspects of making your applications more accessible, you need a means of controlling a development project and ensuring that the accessibility aspects are met. You probably already have a process in place for your development projects. Here we'll go over some suggestions for incorporating accessibility considerations into that process. Keep in mind that a development process is nonlinear; I personally have never known a development life cycle to go cleanly straight through to the end without discovering something new at the next stage that changes what was decided in the previous stage.

The Planning Stage

Every process begins with a plan. This is the stage where you set your goals and decide what it is you want to accomplish with your software application. As you review potential features of your software, determine how these features will be affected by accessibility issues. For example, let's say you decide to put a scrolling banner across the top of your introductory window. Keep a list handy with the disability categories we covered earlier in this chapter. Go through the list and decide whether this feature will impact anyone within those categories in a negative, or a positive, way. Will the scrolling text cause problems for a screen reader used by a blind person? Will someone with cognitive limitations be distracted and confused by the moving text?

It's a good idea at this early stage to include users with disabilities in the discussions. If you don't have anyone on the planning team, find someone to review the plan once you begin to get it outlined. The reviewer should be an expert in disabilities, or you'll need to find several people with different disabilities to be reviewers.

The Design Stage

The design stage is where you decide which options go and which ones stay. Go over the list of features determined in the planning stage, and decide how you're going to implement accessibility into each one. Suppose it was decided at the planning stage that the scrolling banner was a great idea and would add a lot of interest to the application. Now is the time to decide if you want to provide an option that will stop the banner from scrolling or even remove it altogether. Maybe you want an audio clip that will read the banner the first time it scrolls by. Do you want an option to turn the audio clip off?

The Coding Stage

Developers need to closely follow the guidelines set up in the design stage. Say it's been decided that the introductory window will have a scrolling banner at the top; the banner runs with an audio clip that reads the banner the first time across. But it's also been decided that certain restrictions should apply. If a screen reader is detected, the banner will appear once and not scroll. An option that the user can set will be available to turn off the audio clip. Developers need to find the system and programming tools to implement these design guidelines. There might be cases where the user will find the workaround to be too difficult to bother with. Since this is an introductory screen, the sound clip begins playing at the same time the user has access to the disabling mechanism. By the time the user can disable the clip, it's already played. So the developers determine this design guideline to be impractical. However, they are free to come up with an alternative. The developers decide to include a button on the introductory screen that will play the audio clip when the button is pressed.

The Testing Stage

Part of the guidelines for testers in any organization should be testing accessibility features. Every test plan should have guidelines outlining testing with the different system accessibility options set. Screen resolutions should be specified and tests without the mouse should be planned. Most important, find testers with disabilities. If you don't have anyone on staff, organizations exist throughout most of the software-developing world where you can find the testers you need.

Feedback

After you've released a version of your software, always gather feedback from customers to use in your next planning stage. Seek out users with disabilities to find out what features make using the application difficult and which ones are helpful.