Developer Testing for Accessibility

Developers are constantly learning new tools, tech stacks, and development practices. When they’re told they have to learn accessibility, it can often feel like an unwelcome and overwhelming disruption, slowing them down and forcing them to rewrite what they thought was perfectly good code.

The good news is accessibility tools and training are more developer-friendly than ever. Automated accessibility tools fit seamlessly into modern development environments, and there are new ways for dev teams to build their understanding of what accessibility means in practice and how people with disabilities experience technology. 

Watch this webinar to learn how Providence Health built automation into its development process to practice accessibility at scale. 

About Jeff Cato:
Jeff is a Quality Assurance Test Manager at Providence Health Group. He has been working in the healthcare industry for 34 years at Providence St. Joseph Health. Jeff has also been working in IT for 22 years and is now the leader for Section 508 compliance and accessibility from an IT standpoint, encompassing web and mobile content.

About Mark Steadman:
Mark is an accessibility developer services consultant at Deque. Mark has been working in the accessibility field for 4 years now. He is extremely passionate about the work that he does and strives to make all content on the web/mobile accessible for all.

Mark's main focus is researching single-page applications (EmberJS, ReactJS), how accessibility affects them, and how to remedy the issues that are in the frameworks.

About Tony Kornmeier:
Tony Kornmeier is the Developer Services Team Lead at Deque. Tony has been practicing accessibility for 5 years and has been working in development for 16 years. Tony cares deeply about accessibility and helps companies achieve accessibility in their dev teams.

Watch below:

Jump to specific parts of this video using our chapters list:

• 00:00 Introductions
• 01:06 Story outline
• 02:04 Challenges of a11y testing for developers
• 05:44 Meet Jeff Cato of Providence
• 06:20 Where Providence a11y started
• 08:04 Providence begins automation & policy
• 10:54 Providence rolls out tooling
• 13:44 Automated testing demo (Attest)
• 20:23 Page insights feature demo
• 23:28 Build-time automated testing demo (Puppeteer integration)
• 34:00 Engineering feedback from Providence
• 38:40 Questions and Answers

(Note: WorldSpace Attest, WorldSpace Comply, and WorldSpace Assure are now referred to as axe DevTools, axe Monitor and axe Auditor, respectively.)

Start your 14-day free trial of axe DevTools Pro to leverage the most powerful accessibility toolkit on the market and get 80% coverage or more during development.