Patterns For Improving Accessible Quality Through Automated Tools In Development Environments

Software development processes have changed. While the promise of composable services is becoming a reality through platform as a service (PaaS), the stakes are high for thorough testing and maintaining high quality of service in an environment with rapid change and ill-defined ownership. Developers have made tremendous strides in automation and tooling to reduce the brute force effort and resources that are needed for traditional, manual testing. Those new methods and techniques must be applied to accessibility testing as well. If DevOps teams include automation into the process from the beginning, they can identify and quickly fix accessibility-related issues, and ultimately save costs.

While automated testing isn’t an afterthought, accessibility automation can be. IBM is committed to accessibility and maintains a variety of testing tools to support IBM and IBM’s customers. These tools are used to scan millions of pages of content per month.

We will lead a session to teach participants how to use two of these tools, and demonstrate how these tools can be used in the context of continuous integration environments.