Teaching Digital Accessibility to Industry Professionals using the Community of Practice Framework: An Experience Report

After completing the course, the participants will be able to:

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  Identify web accessibility’s scope and relevance,

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  Illustrate the need for developing accessible software,

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  Recognize digital accessibility features and barriers,

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  Identify Challenges persons with disabilities could face while interacting with a software product,

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  Locate accessibility standards and guidelines.

By the end of the course, learners will be able to

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  Explain how design principles and practices affect accessibility,

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  Exemplify how accessible design helps persons with disabilities interact with software products,

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  Compare Universal Design and Individual Accommodations model,

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  Summarize different accessible design strategies for visual, information, multimedia, animation, and form design.

By the end of the course, learners will be able to

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  Identify key terms used in accessibility engineering such as shadow-DOM (Document Object Model), Accessible Rich Internet Applications (ARIA), etc.,

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  Apply accessible markup,

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  Replicate accessibility issues,

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  Evaluate various automated and manual accessibility testing strategies.

By the end of the course, learners will be able to

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  Analyze the severity of accessibility bugs,

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  Apply the appropriate reporting tool,

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  Formulate a plan for addressing accessibility issues given a report.

This module offers a broader perspective on accessibility, emphasizing its place within the larger context of inclusion and diversity, with the goal of shifting the paradigm from viewing accessibility merely as a compliance item to understanding the importance of enhancing the user experience for persons with disabilities. It encourages consideration of the why behind accessibility, not just the how. It covered these topics:

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  Disabilities, Challenges, and Assistive Technologies:

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    Theoretical Disability Models, Evaluating the Advantages and Limitations of their Fundamental Assumptions.

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    Categories and Characteristics of Disabilities and Associated Barriers.

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    Individual-Level Assistive Technologies and Adaptive Approaches for Permanent, Temporary, and Episodic Disabilities.

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  Disability Demographics and Statistical Data Patterns, Along with Their Significance.

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  International Declarations and Conventions on Disability Rights.

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  Accessibility Standards and Regulations to ICT (Information and Communications Technology).

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  Business case for accessibility, including brand enhancement, market reach, innovation, and legal risk reduction.

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  Essentials of Web Accessibility: Covering accessibility POUR principles (Perceivable, Operable, Understandable, and Robust) and basics of WCAG standards.

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  Strategies to integrate ICT Accessibility across the company.

This module introduces universal design, emphasizing that the responsibility for accessibility extends beyond software engineers to include designers (and other stakeholders). It underscores the importance of collaboration between software engineers and user experience (UX) designers to guarantee better accessibility. The module delved into the following topics:

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  Individualized Accommodations vs Universal Design

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  Principles of Universal Design

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  WCAG - A designers’ view:

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    Visual Design with emphasis on usage of color, cues, styles and flexible layouts

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    Information Design with emphasis on tables, naming and grouping, structure of text.

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    Navigation Design delving with menus, site and page navigation, including shortcuts.

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    Interaction Design with detailing of keyboard and gesture-based interactions.

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    Images, Graphics and Form design with specific details to alt text, animations, error handling and notifications.

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    Accessibility annotations to convey components and additional information to engineers.

This module focuses on the engineering aspects of creating accessible software, such as using semantic HTML, shadow-DOM, and ARIA and WCAG 2.1. The topics covered are:

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  Developing Accessible Software

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    Guidelines, principles, and techniques for meeting success criteria of WCAG.

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    Semantic HTML, Standard controls, and building custom widgets using WAI-ARIA best practices.

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    Coding for accessible Structures, Tables, Rich applications and Forms.

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  Accessibility issues

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    Interoperability and compatibility issues.

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    Debugging and replicating Accessibility issues.

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    Accessibility quality assurance.

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    Testing with assistive technologies.

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    Testing tools for the web.

This module addresses how to report accessibility issues and remediate them. The topic covered in this module are:

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  Identification of severity of accessibility bugs and prioritization of bugs (Potential to cause harm, Task blocking, difficult to complete, low impact).

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  Template and usage of ACR (Accessibility Conformance Report) and VPAT(Voluntary Product Accessibility Template)

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  Providing suggestions and/or approaches for resolving software bugs based on criteria such as optimal solutions, broad usability, feasibility, the choice between fixing or redesigning, and the steps for implementing the solution.

30 out of the 66 participants who indicated they can only spend about 2.5 hours per week as part of the accessibility cohort were assigned to this group. They were expected to watch video lectures based on the modules as described in Section 3.2 made available via the organization’s internal learning management system (LMS). The LMS also featured additional resources such as links to open-source resources, including text and videos. The LMS incorporated gamification elements, providing points and badges upon completion of various submodules. Each submodule was to be completed in a week, and resources were carefully organized, ensuring it could be finished within a 2.5-hour timeframe.

The resources included:

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  Internally created videos and knowledge articles on each module by accessibility experts in the organization.

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  A Coursera course titled An Introduction to Accessibility and Inclusive Design by Univerisity of Illinois - Participants had to audit the course.

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  The Udacity course titled Web Accessibility: Developing with Empathy a free course offered in collaboration with Google.

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  Resources sourced from Deque University (Free version).

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  Blogs such as a11y-cats²²2https://a11y-cats.com/, MaxAbility³³3https://www.maxability.co.in/Blog/, and Digitala11y⁴⁴4https://www.digitala11y.com/acccessibility-archives/.

To promote communication and address questions among participants, all members of group one were included in a Slack workspace, an online instant-messaging platform widely used for workplace communication.

The other 33 participants who said they could spend more than 2.5 hours per week were assigned to this group. The CoP group focused on forming a community and engaging in practice. A weekly 2-hour session was conducted every Wednesday. Members at the workplace in India participated in-person at the on-campus telepresence room, while the members from Australia or those working from home joined online. Each session was structured as follows:

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  Exploration (45 min): Participants who self-identified as having expert or intermediate knowledge of accessibility presented a topic from the modules as outlined in Section 3.2.

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  Experience Sharing (45 min): Members actively participated by sharing their experiences, insights, and knowledge related to the week’s topic through presentations, discussions, case studies, or demonstrations.

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  Practice (20 min): Members solved some exercises relevant to the week’s topic individually or in groups. The exercises involved resolution of existing accessibility issues or the exploration of examples, both good and bad, available on the internet.

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  Reflection (10 min): Members summarized the key takeaways from the session, discussed potential action items, and contemplated how the insights gained could be applied in their respective work or practices. Additionally, volunteers to present topics for the next sessions were selected, and a summary of the session was posted in a designated Slack channel.

An event were organized for the Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD) by the organization on May 18, 2023, a few weeks after the accessibility cohort ended. The event featured several components, including a visually impaired guest speaker who addressed the audience on how Generative AI is helping visually impaired individuals in their day-to-day tasks, and a bug-bash program in which each participant resolved accessibility issues within their respective team’s actual product, and interactive awareness activities such as crosswords and puzzles focused on accessibility. All 66 accessibility cohort members attended this event.

Before and after the accessibility cohort, participants in both groups self reported their accessibility proficiency on two questions:

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  the level of their accessibility knowledge (beginner, intermediate, or expert) and

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  a 5-point Agree-Disagree Likert scale on the statement: “I can act as an accessibility ally for my team.”

Participants in both groups were expected to answer three quizzes on the LMS, one each after the Accessibility Basics Module, Accessibility Design Module, and Accessibility Development Module. These quizzes were administered as multiple-choice assessments, with a maximum score of 25 points within 30 minutes. The quiz was auto-evaluated and the solution key was made available after the quiz.

At the end of the cohort, we asked the participants to audit an internal, outdated, deprecated web application for accessibility issues. The accessibility team of our organization had previously audited this web app and identified 30 accessibility issues.

To establish a baseline for comparison, at the start of the cohort, the participants were asked to ‘test’ the app and report any issues they feel may impact how a PWD would interact with the app.

The end of the cohort assignment was to compile a detailed report highlighting the accessibility issues they identified, the corresponding WCAG guidelines that these issues pertained to, the priority level assigned to each issue, and the recommended solutions. Additionally, participants were required to include evidence of the accessibility problems, such as screenshots or videos. They were given two weeks to complete the assignment. Organizers evaluated each report by applying the following 5-point rubric to each accessibility issue and provided detailed feedback via 1-on-1 in-person or online meets:

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  Recognition of each accessibility issue: 2 points.

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  Corresponding WCAG guideline for each issue: 1 point.

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  Accurate assignment of priority level (e.g., potential user harm, task hindrance, task complexity, low impact): 0.5 points.

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  Precise documentation of the issue through screenshots and screen recordings: 0.5 points.

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  Recommendation to fix the issue: 1 point

The application had 30 accessibility issues. Hence, the maximum score possible in this assignment was 150 points.

Beyond the improved gains in accessibility knowledge demonstrated by the quantitative analysis above, the CoP approach developed a sense of community and identity as ‘accessibility experts.’ Through anecdotal evidence from the Slack logs and conversations with colleagues and managers, we found that many CoP members continued their learning beyond the cohort through the network gained in the program. CoP encourages customization, active engagement, social learning, practical application, continuous learning, and networking—ideal for industry professionals. While self-paced learning has its advantages, CoP’s informal and peer-focused approach can better suit (medium sized groups of) industry professionals. We recommend considering CoP at least as an optional, additional approach, rather than offering self-paced learning alone.

While accessibility is a shared concern, providing a one size fits all training approach has proven ineffective. In our experience, engineers were less motivated to delve into accessible design, while designers felt overwhelmed by the intricate technical aspects of accessibility development and testing. After a general modules about fundamentals at the start, we recommend using separate modules tailored for separate roles.

In our case, active participants in Communities of Practice (CoP) displayed a deeper understanding of accessibility. This can be attributed to their thorough discussions addressing accessibility challenges and solutions directly tied to their organization’s unique context. Consequently, this led to improved performance in the final accessibility audit assessment and subsequent releases of their product. In contrast, participants in SP group grasped fundamental principles but encountered challenges in applying them practically due to the absence of context-specific discussion around accessibility bugs, including organizational design subsystems and engineering techniques. We recommend enhancing the effectiveness of accessibility training by customizing examples to align with real-world use cases from participants’ own organizations. This approach yields more substantial and directly applicable results compared to the generic examples typically used in MOOCs to illustrate accessibility principles and guidelines.

Based on our observations, engineers often showed a keen interest in tools and techniques, focusing on the “how” aspect of achieving accessibility. However, this approach may fall short in intricate scenarios, as developers may not fully grasp the broader “why” behind the need for these techniques and who benefits from them. They tend to implement accessibility more effectively when they comprehend the rationale behind accessibility features and gain insight into how individuals with disabilities utilize them. Therefore, we recommend emphasizing the “why” aspects of accessibility alongside the “how”, and encourage participants to engage with individuals with disabilities to better understand their lived experiences and perspectives on accessible software.

Previous research conducted in academic settings has shown that engaging with individuals with disabilities (PWDs) can significantly enhance participants’ learning experiences, foster empathy, and boost motivation when it comes to accessibility topics, especially when compared to simulations (El-Glaly et al., 2020). Accessibility simulations in educational contexts have been found problematic by various researchers (Tigwell, 2021; Bennett and Rosner, 2019). In our specific case, the active involvement of three participants who identified as persons with disabilities proved highly beneficial. Their contributions during cohort design and their ongoing support within the Community of Practice were instrumental in dispelling misconceptions and providing valuable input. Therefore, we strongly recommend practitioners involve individuals with disabilities in their courses. By inviting PWDs to demonstrate how they utilize assistive technologies, the accessibility features that are crucial for them, and the barriers they encounter, participants can gain invaluable insights.

Aligned with the guidance provided by the W3C accessibility curriculum, we recommend practitioners take a comprehensive approach to accessibility training covering all disabilities. Our experience in curating materials highlighted an unintentional bias toward particular disability categories, such as an excessive emphasis on visual disabilities and screen reader usage, with limited coverage of cognitive disabilities. It’s crucial to acknowledge that digital accessibility is important for individuals spanning a broad spectrum of disabilities, encompassing those related to hearing, cognition, learning, mobility, speech, and vision.

Motivate accomplished participants to pledge their commitment to accessibility advocacy, integrating it seamlessly into their yearly goals and personal growth plans. This dedication will equip them to consistently implement the skills they’ve gained in practical scenarios. Our firsthand experience demonstrated that CoP participants, who collectively embraced this commitment by pledging to convene regularly and sustain their involvement in accessibility matters, continued their engagement even beyond the cohort’s conclusion. They actively participated in accessibility code reviews, addressed accessibility issues, and more. Conversely, MOOC participants often viewed their certification as a mere credential and lacked the motivation to put their acquired skills into practice.

To sustain participant interest and involvement, we employed crossword puzzles at regular intervals in our Slack channels and integrated them into our Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD) event. Additionally, we introduced gamification badges throughout the cohort journey, rewarding participants for various achievements like attending sessions, completing MOOC modules, and contributing to accessibility issue resolutions. This approach garnered positive participant feedback, affirming its effectiveness. Therefore, we recommend utilizing games and gamification techniques to motivate participants whenever feasible.

Apart from the above, ensure that the course itself is accessible by making all materials and platforms used accessible, providing necessary support like captions and descriptions, and ensuring accessibility in physical venues, creating an inclusive learning experience for everyone.