I've been thinking about how accessibility fits into team processes.
DevOps is an established practice which is designed to improve the processes between software development and teams. It does this through the use of automation, feedback loops, collaboration and iteration.
This will sound really familiar to anyone involved in accessibility and attempting to get teams to add it to their daily routine.
DevSecOps is a way of integrating security best practice into DevOps, so why not have a similar approach to integrate accessibility too.
So I'm going to rename the integration of accessibility into team workflows in a meaningful and deliberate way as DevA11yOps.
Let's run through how this may look using the key principles of DevOps (as defined by Wikipedia):
Shared ownership
Proactive measures to prevent inaccessible code from being committed.
- Code reviews include accessibility checks
- Manual testing
- Assistive technology testing
- Check against user preferences such as reduced motion, font-size and so on
Workflow automation
- Commit hooks run automated checks
- Automated testing
- End-to-end testing utilising accessible selectors and keyboard-focussed processes
Rapid feedback and continuous improvement
Involve people with accessibility knowledge and users in planning of an application or feature.
- catches inaccessible designs early on
- prevents rewrites later on