Improving Accessible Quality through Automated Tools and DevOps Practices

Description:

Software development processes have changed. While the promise of composable services is becoming a reality through platform as a service (PaaS), the stakes are high for thorough testing and maintaining high quality of service in an environment with rapid change. Developers have made tremendous strides in automation and tooling to reduce the brute force effort and resources that are needed for traditional, manual testing. Those new methods and techniques must be applied to accessibility testing as well. If DevOps teams include automation into the process from the beginning, they can identify and quickly fix accessibility-related issues, and ultimately save costs.

While automated testing isn’t an afterthought, accessibility automation can be. IBM is committed to accessibility and maintains a variety of testing tools to support IBM and IBM’s customers. These tools are used to scan millions of pages of content per month.

We will lead a session to teach participants how to use two of these tools, and demonstrate how these tools can be used in the context of continuous integration environments.

Practical Skills:

• Participants will learn how to use IBM’s automated tools to identify accessibility issues in ARIA applications. They will learn how to write some basic test procedures using Cucumber and Selenium with Node.js. We will then show how these skills can be utilized in larger development environments.

Prerequisites:

• Obtain an IBMid. Participants will be prompted to create one if they visit https://aat.mybluemix.net
• Install the Chrome browser
• Install Node 8.9.4 LTS from https://nodejs.org Participants who do not wish to do the above may just observe and follow along.

Presentation Materials:

• Download course materialsfor