Our presentation at CSUN Internation Techonoly and People with Disabilities Conference. It describes how a group of designers and devopers made accessibility a part of the organization culture at FINN.no .
Building a Culture Supporting Accessibility from Within Your Organization
1. Building a Culture Supporting
Accessibility from Within Your
Organization
Lotte Johansen, Tom Widerøe, Stein Erik Skotkjerra
CSUN, San Diego, March 2016
3. • How can organizations build a strong
accessibility culture from nearly nothing?
• We managed to do it, and believe our story will
help inspire other companies!
10. New Legislation in the News
http://www.tu.no/it/2014/01/23/na-ma-webutviklere-forholde-seg-til-helt-nye-reglerhttp://www.aftenposten.no/okonomi/Tvinger-alle-virksomheter-til-a-skaffe-seg-nye-nettsider-7526952.html
32. The workshop was an eye opener for usability.
It struck me how many people who actually are disabled.
We found that “my messages” can be confusing with
dates read out before or after the text. The fix is in our backlog.
33. Very cool that it is so easy to fix. It is just about being aware of the disabled.
By using plain html, it works out of the box for all browsers and all disabled.
47. Summary
8 Steps
1. Form a Group
2. Achieve Mandate
3. Educate Yourselves
4. External Expertise
5. Spread the Word
6. Workshops
7. User Tests
8. Automatic Validation
4 Success Factors
1. Goals and objectives
2. Strategy and plan
3. Training
4. Quality assurance
How can you build a strong culture supporting accessibility from within your organization?
That is what you will learn more about this session.
Welcome to our presentation at the CSUN conference.
The Norwegian Association of the Blind and Partially Sighted - NABP
We managed to do it, and in this presentation we will tell our story of how Norway’s number one online marketplace went from no focus on accessibility at all to having accessibility as a natural part of our the design and development process.
We believe this story will help inspire you and other companies!
To make our story more concrete:
8 steps to achieve accessibility culture
4 success factors to succeeding in building a strong accessibility culture within an organization
Results so far
Questions at the end
Questions at the end
So, how were things before we started?
More than 100 developers, more than 6 mill users
Finn is the Norwegian word for «find»
The prime classified website in Norway
Everyone finds used cars, homes, bikes and jobs here
That’s why it’s important for us to be accessible
Traditionally accessibility has not had much focus among developers and designers. It has been viewed as difficult, annoying, and yielding little return on time and money invested.
The regulations were approved 21 June 2013 and took effect 1 July 2013. This means that new ICT solutions should be universally designed from 1 July 2014. Existing ICT solutions should be universally designed from 2021.
Supervisory authority
The Norwegian Agency for Public Management and eGovernment (Difi) is responsible for monitoring whether the regulations will be met. Difi, represented by the Authority for Universal Design of ICT, supervise the regulations. Information and guidance work is one of the main tasks for the authority.
The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 level AA is the standard for the universal design of websites. There are some exceptions regarding time-based media: 1.2.3 Audio Description or Media Alternative (Prerecorded content), 1.2.4 Captions (Live content) and 1.2.5 Audio Description (Prerecorded content)
See W3C's website about WCAG 2.0
Negative news when legislation came
Keep this?
Stein Erik
Our job is divided into 8 steps
Hope you find them useful and try them in your company
Find colleagues who care
A group is visible, get things done more effectively, organize larger measues
Would be too much work for a simple developer, paid to develop
Our group was formed after a forum debate
5 developers, one ux designer
Anyone can be a member
What did we want from the management team?
Communicated support - Without management support, it can be hard to get anything done even with the best of intentions.
Time to work on accessibility
Mandate to impose developers to follow the legislation
Funding to do user tests
How?
Law: Have to
17 percent with disabilities – can loose business if these not able to use the site
Also positive sides: Make the site easier and better for both seller and buyer
Show examples on how thinking of accessibility makes the site better
One of the first things we did was to talk with management. “Are you aware of this new law? Do you have a plan on how to face these requirements? If you don't, would you let us work out a strategy on how to improve our site?”. Not surprisingly, the management had little more than a vague knowledge of the law, and were happy to hand over responsibility to us.
Based on our newly acquired knowledge, and the inspiration we got from this introductory workshop, we approached management to anchor our work. Without management support, it can be hard to get anything done even with the best of intentions. The management at FINN.no liked our idea about teaching accessibility to designers and developers. However, they did not support our request for a budget to leverage external consultants in our quest to make our online marketplace more accessible and usable to all users.
Remove a burden from the shoulders of the management group.
If accessibility part of the planning, the cost won’t be much
More expensive to fix the errors when you should have been done
Lessons learnt
Don’t get all the funding we want for user tests and external expertise
Connect to the strategy - Easier to sell and buy
They did not support our request for a budget to leverage external consultants in our quest to make our online marketplace more accessible and usable to all users.
Accessibility – in the heart of FINN’s strategy
None of us were experts to begin with
Attend courses and seminars
This is when we met Stein Erik and The Norwgian Association of Blind and Partially Sighted
NABP provide services tocustomers within user testing, technical advise, workshops and training.
External expertice is important to raise level of competence among all employees. Not only developers and designers, but management, content producers etc.
The need for external support is reduced as internal knowledge and quality assurance routines are developed
Hjelpemiddel = (assistive technology) / tool
Lotte: Wednesday November 19th, FINN arranged an accessibility workshop in cooperation with NABP. About 30 developers, designers and product owners attended the keynote by Stein Erik Skotkjerra who is blind and by Kristoffer Lium who is partially sighted. It was an eye-opener for people to see how these two who represented a fairly large group of blind and visually impaired, orients themselves on finn.no.
A smaller group of developers and interaction designers attended the whole workshop. We got an introduction to the law of accessibility and the requirements in practice. Stein Erik and Kristoffer both emphesized that the most important is to make sites user friendly; not the law itself. If we think of people with disabilities when we develop finn.no, it will lead to a better site for everyone. Even for those who have a headache one day or are sitting on a bumpy bus while browsing finn.no.
Tom:
On every workshop with Stein Erik & co we have to eat lunch blindfolded
We must put on ski goggles painted black and go to another room to eat
Not a pretty sight
Insight to their world and their challenges
Suspect they think this was more fun than we did
Internal
The employees get a better understanding and more positive attitude
Write on intranet when something happens, e.g. honorable mention in universal design innovation competition
Stand at internal conference
Share horrible image in internal forum
Make the problems local:
Disabilities are not problems in themelvesThe problem is the impediments we meet
External
The management picks it up and start bragging about us and what we do on accessibility
Gives a good reputation
Let the developers feel the same pain as the users by using the same tools
Invite each team
Explain how accessibility fixes have made features better for everyone
The straw test simulates how people with low vision see the page when they zoom
Here we see that the labels and values in a definition list are too far away from each other
Navigate the page by keyboard only to ensure logical order of content
Makes it work for screen readers and people with mouse arm
For people sensitive to bright light.
Check that images still appear and text is still readable
Most popular
For users unable to read
Uncovered huge number of bugs
They test their own stuff
Solving pre-defined tasks by usings the methods we just taught them
Problems are written on notes
Notes are put on the wall and problems discussed
Nice if all bugs gets fixed immediately, but most important not to repeat the mistakes
On this workshop, screen reader didn’t tell who sent which message
People think this is fun and enthusiasm is great
More effective than making people memorise wcag rules
Team Ad Input Workshop
Very cool that it is so simple to fix. It is just about being aware of the disabled.
- Not so interesting to hear “horisontal line with shadow” several times when reading a page,
and it becomes more difficult to find the important items
By using plain html, it works out of the box for all browsers and all disabled.
-We screw it up and spend more time by using custom check boxes where we have
to fix tab index and all help that browsers have been thinking of for years.
Important information was not read when tabbing inserted tab index
“good to get the kick from time to time. Now, I will remember to test with voice over and keyboard in the next issues”
“Great to have a central style guide. If this follows the standards, we are safe. If something is fixed here fixes the issue all over finn.no”
By improving this page (took only a couple of days) from impossible to possible to insert an ad for a blind person. And it goes from possible to really easy for the rest of us”
Tom: On the workshops, the most obvious bugs are uncovered. But we cannot know how it actually feels to use our site for users with disabilities.
We need to run a user test with blind and partially sighted users.
We have people who run user tests at finn, but we don’t always understand why they react as they do.
Once again, we turned back to Stein Erik and NABP, who knows all too well what it’s like to be blind.
Lotte: Intro
SE: How, findings
Videos: Heidi
Lotte: Intro
SE: How, findings
Videos: Heidi
Lotte: Intro
SE: How, findings
Videos: Heidi
Our next step is to install pa11y to our build tests
When wcag doesn’t validate, the build fails
Will cause panic, so we must start with a friendly configuration
Important to set goals and objectives. What do we want to achieve?
A Strategy explains how we will achieve it, what resources are allocated etc
Training and Knowledge isimportant to make good decissions
Quality Assurance ensures that we do not make the same mistakes again
Money for user tests
Fixed website – better for everyone
More awareness
Positive attitude
Accessibility culture
Honorable mention
Not perfect yet, it is a process
Add “mine meldinger”
Apps team fixed voice over error after a complaint from a user with low vision
Three teams made their sites scalable on the mobile phone less than one day after an accessibility talk
Example:
<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1, user-scalable=no”>
Take away
user-scalable=no
Accessibility workshops
Grassroots movement
A group gets more things done
Get the time and money you need
Before you train others
To spark the interest in the organisation
To keep the topic warm
To train your colleagues
To see how it works for real users
To prevent future bugs
Best design happens when we have limitations (David Berman)