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Visa's Global Accessibility Requirements Tool (VGAR)

taught by: James Green
co-presented by: Brandon McCartney, Michael Grandpre

Session Summary

Visa believes that when products conform to the WCAG standard, they are better products for people all around the globe, with fewer barriers and greater ease of use for people with disabilities. But our product teams struggled with WCAG language and lack of specific relevance to their tasks. We will share the tools we developed to support our teams.

Description

While WCAG is designed to remove barriers for people with disabilities, the actual users of the resource are designers, developers, and testers. Research of how these solution makers work and learn led us to translate WCAG 2.1 AA into a set of simple requirements and test cases that would allow Visa staff to more easily and consistently create accessible products. We call them Visa's Global Accessibility Requirements, or the VGAR, for short.

Besides writing our own set of 120+ requirements that work for Visa products, we asked our staff how they could best use such requirements.  While WCAG 2.1 is organized by user goals, the VGAR is organized in two different ways. This class will explore the VGAR through the lens of designers, developers and QA testers. With included code samples, the VGAR Requirements give developers what they need, in context, and on demand. For QA testers, the VGAR Test Procedures are organized by testing tool.  With links and descriptions for each tool (and how-to videos on the way), these procedures give testers what they need in an order more conducive to the testing environment.  The VGAR is an open source tool and we hope it can help other compnaies make more accessible products out of the box.

Practical Skills

  • Developers and designers will learn to use the VGAR Requirements based on type of work and then by component.
  • QA testers will learn that the VGAR Test Procedures are organized by testing tool and presented in a useful order for integrating into QA processes.
  • Project managers will learn how to translate WCAG policy language into actionable, measurable development and testing protocols and integrate them into your processes.