Working with Teams

It’s one thing if you’re working by yourself on a project–you can make all the decisions you want. When you’re working with teams and shared codebases, however, you’ll need to think about team concerns and processes.

Here are some ideas around making accessibility more successful in a team context. You might even use some of these topics as questions when you’re interviewing for a new role, as you are interviewing a company just as much as they are interviewing you.

Make accessibility part of the definition of done

• Investigate how accessibility is handled in UI development. Aim to have accessibility requirements listed up front to spread the skill-building around.
• When accessibility issues are found in development and testing, solve them in place where possible. For larger issues, open issues in the backlog to be prioritized and fixed.
• Break problems down into smaller, solvable parts and phases. Is there a simpler way to build something for an earlier phase?
• There is a need for accountability up the leadership chain. Who takes responsibility if an inaccessible product is the subject of a lawsuit? Can you provide honest assessments of the job to be done with accessibility when the blocker is in design or product management?

Surface accessibility issues in Pull Requests

• PR Reviews are an excellent time to provide accessibility feedback. Perhaps you or your teammate forgot to do some manual checks, or perhaps your automated tooling missed something. It might not always be convenient, but this is what review cycles are for. Normalize thorough and effective code reviews!
• Advocate for deploy preview URLs as infrastructure to make it easier to review UIs in a browser. This makes testing in general easier for reviewers, but particularly for regular accessibility testing.
• Make time for blocking accessibility fixes during review cycles wherever possible and file new tickets in the backlog if something is too large to solve in the current cycle.

Use consistent tooling and processes across an organization

Share your process with your teammates to gain some consistency and spread the accessibility knowledge around. For more mature development and accessibility teams, using the same tools and auditing rulesets will help to solidify consistent issues and processes. It’s worth mentioning that many teams also use multiple tools.

This is the intent of many acessibility product companies: to provide a holistic suite of tools for different roles in your organization. Deque Systems (opens in a new tab), Level Access (opens in a new tab), SiteImprove (opens in a new tab) and Evinced (opens in a new tab) all have offerings in this area.