Accessibility questions? Get in contact: george@goodwally.ca.
The redesign of scotiabank.com presented an ideal opportunity to truly embed accessibility into the project and management processes.
This is presentation 1 of 2. There are two presentations in this series and in both presentations we highlight the most important lessons we learned, best practices that worked and the challenges we faced and how to overcome them. However, they do complement each other:
- the 1st presentation speaks to the governance, policies and management process around the project
- the 2nd presentation describes the accessibility tasks undertaken at each SDLC phase
You'll learn how we gained participation from various stakeholders, shared best practices and built accessibility skills throughout the team.
The accessibility team at Scotia was engaged from the very beginning and collaborated with many stakeholders and as a result took the opportunity to build an accessible framework from day 1 by injecting the accessibility requirements and best practices throughout the entire Software Development Lifecycle Cycle (SDLC).
-- Objectives
The redesign of a large, national website is a complex undertaking. It is also an opportunity to do accessibility right from the beginning.
The objective of the session is to share lessons learned and practical tips about how to successfully integrate accessibility into a large project. This included:
- the ability to work with multiple teams in parallel or sequentially
- working on standards and best practices with the planning team
- working on technical solutions with the development team
-- Some questions that we answered:
- What is the role of the accessibility team in a large project? Does the role need to adapt and how?
- What are the accessibility policies & standards that apply?
- How do you manage and communicate accessibility standards and technical solutions between the various management, design, development and testing teams?
- Do you have to follow WCAG 2 by the letter? What’s the alternative?
We will provide insight into policy, planning, technical solutions and best practices that we hope will be of great benefit and use to the accessibility community.
Accessibility Integration in a Global Customer Website - Scotiabank.com - A Success Story 1/2
1. Accessibility Integration in a Global Customer Website
– A Success Story
Part 1: Governance, policies & project management
Part 2: SDLC processes, solutions & best practices
Enabling Solutions & Pina D’Intino
Monica Ackermann
Support Management George Zamfir
#accessconf - The Accessibility Conference - University of Guelph
9. The scotiabank.com Redesign Project
Why is this particular project very successful?
Project Considerations & Key Drivers
What steps were taken towards accessibility?
How was accessibility integrated at each phase?
20. scotiabank.com Redesign – Lessons Learned
Early acceptance & good planning
Relentless work to champion accessibility and raise awareness translated into early
acceptance. Good planning ensured there’s time for complete accessibility evaluations;
Breaking the mountain into small hills
Divide and conquer – small, manageable pieces, don’t get lost in the breadth of details.
Prioritization – “yes, let’s start with the framework issues first before we fix widgets”
ESSM - single point of contact:
consistent approach to solutioning.
80 / 20 rule
Aimed for high accessibility level in most cases but not for perfect; learned to compromise
and sometimes mitigate where resulted in less stress on the other teams.
Early feedback & solutioning
Easy and digestible format and often very custom to the team’s expertise (code vs design)
21. scotiabank.com Redesign – Technical Challenges
Ongoing technology changes
Users access and will access the web with an ever-increasing number of devices. Web
standards seem to be in a continuous flux.
“We’ll do it in phase 2”
Sometimes we will, sometimes we won’t, either way, it gets complicated.
Maintaining accessibility after launch
1. Due to timelines and priorities code fixes (including accessibility ones) may be taken out
to address any release issues. A remediation process should be in place.
2. Content updates can dilute accessibility on otherwise perfectly accessible pages.
Content management is critical in a distributed environment with several authors / editors
34. 4. Integrating Accessibility – Scope – Dynamic UI
Dynamic UI Elements – used throughout the site
Repository: any department can use them in their content
We had to deal with them early and at a template level rather
than later and handle every small variation
Selectors, Flip tiles, Calculators, Info Pop-Ups
Accessibility Integration in a Global Customer Website – A Success Story
35. 4. Integrating Accessibility – Scope – Main Content
Main Content
• Lots of content!
To move the content into
the new design each
department submitted a list
of the pages they owned –
there were thousands.
• Lots of it was not in scope!
We decided early that we
can’t evaluate all of it – it
would be a project on its
own with each respective
department
• However, we did evaluate
important flows, pages that
have dynamic UI elements
and most used templates
Accessibility Integration in a Global Customer Website – A Success Story
Team introductions, who we are, what we do Pina D’Intino is Senior Manager, Scotiabank Information Technology and Solutions. She is the founder of Enabling Solutions Support Management at Scotiabank and is currently leading the accessibility strategy roadmap from an IT perspective including standards, policy reviews, awareness and education, and inclusiveness as it relates to business. At Scotiabank, she is a member of the Scotiabank Employment Relationship Council, the founder of the Scotiabankers for Universal Access Employee Resource Group and was a member of the IT&S advancement of women. Pina is the chair of the Canadian Financial Institution on Assistive Technology; bringing together financial organizations to leverage and share accessibility practices and strategies. She was a member of the AODA Information and Communication Standards Development Committee. She has been a guest speaker at various International accessibility roundtables and events. Pina travels with her service dog, Gilligan. Pina has a PMP Master from Schulich and is certified by the ITIL organization. Monica Ackermann is the Accessibility Project Lead at Scotiabank’s Enabling Solutions Support Management Group and is responsible for implementing systemic IT accessibility solutions and supporting assistive technology users at Scotiabank. She is an accessibility consultant and owner of Assistive Vocational Technology Associates working alongside people with disabilities and their employers in the financial, government, education and commercial sectors helping them to achieve their equity and inclusion goals. Monica is Systems Design Engineer and member of the PEO and Vocational Rehabilitation Association. While completing her Masters degree in the York University Critical Disability Studies program she explored the intersection of accommodation and accessible software design through both her research into Accessible Technology Infrastructures and as a Research Associate for the DIS-IT research alliance.She was a member of the AODA Employment Accessibility Standards Development Committee and has been a board member at ARCH Disability Law Centre for the past 5 years. George Zamfir is a Technical Accessibility consultant with Scotiabank’s accessibility team. His focus and passion is IT accessibility and is thrilled to have improved accessibility on some of the biggest web projects at the bank. He had to wear many (technical) hats on various projects including accessibility testing & planning, web development & prototyping and doing many, many bug fixes. George has a BSc Computer Science from Ryerson University. He stumbled into the field of accessibility during his university years when he worked first as a programmer then as a research assistant under Dr. Deborah Fels in a great research lab called The Center for Learning Technologies. George did his undergraduate thesis on Deaf culture and the benefits of sign-languages on the web. In his spare time he likes to meddle into other people’s web projects in order to make them (more) accessible. He’s currently volunteering some of his time to CitizenBridge and his wife’s cooking blog.
Quickly run through the agenda.
The following are all of ESSM's Roles and Responsibilities. However for the purposes of this presentation we will focus on IT Accessibility All roles & responsibilities: Governance Training Tools AT – IT Solutions Job Accomodation Support IT Accessibilty Education, information, awareness
4-phase roadmap Step 1: Define Scotiabank’s Accessibility Vision Step 2: Deliver an integration roadmap Step 3: Integrate accessibility processes, tools and education Step 4: Review overall effectiveness 4-phase Roadmap - Developed in partnership with IBM
As people worldwide began to fully understand the importance of the Internet to societal participation, many have started taking action to ensure that everyone can benefit from it. Today: Increasingly vocal consumers and advocacy organizations are holding public- and private-sector organizations accountable for accessibility and inclusion. Evolving legislation is driving accessibility into private sector and onto the web. And governments are adopting international conventions and technology standards for inclusion [Highlight examples on the chart] ONTARIO – private sector with over 50 employees - that’s about 20,000 companies, or 5.2% of the 380,000 small and medium enterprises in the province .
As people worldwide began to fully understand the importance of the Internet to societal participation, many have started taking action to ensure that everyone can benefit from it. Today: Increasingly vocal consumers and advocacy organizations are holding public- and private-sector organizations accountable for accessibility and inclusion. Evolving legislation is driving accessibility into private sector and onto the web. And governments are adopting international conventions and technology standards for inclusion [Highlight examples on the chart] ONTARIO – private sector with over 50 employees - that’s about 20,000 companies, or 5.2% of the 380,000 small and medium enterprises in the province .
The scotiabank.com Redesign Project Why is this particular project successful? Project Considerations & Key Drivers What steps did we take? How was accessibility embedded at each phase?
Project Considerations: The business team had solid accessibility awareness prior to engaging us : All the years of hard work on awareness paid off Immediate buy-in: Early in the planning phase the management team embedded the accessibility work effort and resources in the project plan Financial backing: The business team had high overall expectations (not just accessibility) and the budget was there to do accessibility early. It makes good business sense not to exclude potential customers Also, it sets a good precedent for a successful accessibility project!
This flowchart shows the 5 phases of the project delivery lifecycle. Phase 1: Project Concept. Phase 2: Project Initiation. Phase 3: Project Planning. Phase 4: Design. Phase 5: Implementation. The next level of the flow chart shows the process / material available through ESSM: Accessibility Compliance Statement Accessibility Compliance Checklist Test Tools; WebKing, AIS Toolbar, JAWS, CommonLook Test Scripts and processes including HP Mercury test scripts. Level 3 shows the services / processes available that support accessibility Accessibility Consultation / Testing by ESSM staff Educational tools; including accessibility community, Accessibility Portal, training.
From the beginning we identified that we have to embed accessibility early and look at all the phases that impact content, design, navigation and user interaction 1. Planning: Accessibility compliance & checklist 2. Wireframes & Design: Visual logic, navigation, readability 3. HTML Prototype: Full-suite accessibility evaluation & solutioning 4. Steady State: Maintenance, content management, remediation
Screenshot of one of the design templates showing the main UI elements: header, navigation, main content, footer
Early acceptance & good planning: Pina’s relentless work to champion accessibility and make it a requirements got us early acceptance Monica’s good planning gave us enough time at each stage to evaluate accessibility and provide solid technical solutions. Breaking the mountain into small hills – CMS, framework, templates, widgets: Divide and conquer, smaller pieces means people don’t get lost in the breadth of details. We can prioritize smaller pieces: talk about CMS, framework, templates, widgets 1 point of contact – when in doubt the ask us. It has now become standard to run things by us even without a formal service request.
We’ll do it in phase 2 – not our words However, it’s a balancing act. Maybe our issue is not that important and can wait. Breaking accessibility at launch-time, oupsy! In order to go live some code was taken out and different component were affected (not just for accessibility). We already had the solutions done so we whether resent the code or we rebuilt some of the fixes right away. Saying “Yes” to everything http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2012/05/the_biggest_lie_in_corporate_a.html
We’ll do it in phase 2 – not our words However, it’s a balancing act. Maybe our issue is not that important and can wait. Breaking accessibility at launch-time, oupsy! In order to go live some code was taken out and different component were affected (not just for accessibility). We already had the solutions done so we whether resent the code or we rebuilt some of the fixes right away. Saying “Yes” to everything http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2012/05/the_biggest_lie_in_corporate_a.html
Possibility - to get in early and truly embed accessibility in the project plan, allocate resources, plan for accessibility testing. It was a possibility to not do accessibility as an after-thought. Opportunity - to educate many internal teams hands-on so that next time we don’t discuss alt text again, we discuss navigation principles. BONUS: this set a precedent both for quality of work and managing the accessibility stages Action - build accessibility from the bottom-up, CMS to rendered HTML, get engaged at every stage, attend those status calls. Even if it takes you 5 minutes to review wireframes everybody needs to know that it has to be done.
- Content templates: main content on any given page; it doesn’t include framework elements, like header, footer, nav, etc. - We’re not going to show you all 13 templates
Aaaaand we haven’t even shown a page with just plain text content