Accessibility in an Agile Methodology

Session Summary:

A practical walk through of applying accessibility principles to an Agile workflow. This includes examples and how to apply it successfully in your business. If you are looking to implement accessibility within an Agile framework, this class will help with the tried and tested techniques for you to use in your company.

Description:

Initially, any good or bad experiences will be asked for that relate to accessibility, Agile methodologies, and combining them together. These experiences will be used to help direct the overall direction of the session. After the group share their experiences so far, the best practices in a high-level overview will be covered. Some will include relevant examples from the shared experiences. This includes:

1. The Agile approach of small iterations of design, development, test and implementation to allow for reduced cost in money and time;
2. Accessibility and areas it can be applied to any development project;
3. How Agile and Accessibility interlink per step and can practically work together.

The room will be split into groups to discuss one of the given scenarios and to work out how they would approach solving the issue described. The examples are:

1. An Agile team wanting to implement accessibility with no experience of accessibility
2. A team using a waterfall approach and finding their overheads are too much for accessibility at the end of the project
3. A team partially applying accessibility in their Agile process but finding blockers, mainly as using it after the development phases
4. The accessibility approach being adopted into Agile but not succeeding due to a lack of team buy in. User stories created in the design phase are often ignored until the testing iterations start.

After the group work, we will walk through the solutions created by each group to understand potential issues or ideas that are proven to work. This includes some real examples that relate to the scenarios given (not including company names) to highlight points.

After discussing the solutions, the groups can offer insights to review the plans previously suggested.

The end of the session will be a summary of the findings and provide key points to keep in mind. Questions will be allowed throughout the session, but will have time at the end to go through any not answered.

Practical Skills:

• Agile methodology and accessibility integration
• Risk management for introducing new frameworks
• Team communication

Presentation Materials:

• Link to slide deck as provided by the speaker (external site) (external site) for