Live: Accessibility Tools and Guidance for Designers and Developers

Watch this presentation in the Knowbility Learning Center

In 2020, IBM Accessibility transformed the guidance and tools that we have developed and used internally over the last two decades into a public site and set of open source tools. We work closely with application development teams to understand where novice users struggle to identify and fix accessibility concerns. In this session, we give a brief demonstration of these tools with a highlight of newer features, and show you how you can use these tools in your own practice.

More about the Design tools and guidance:
The Design kit is a tool for designers to use in their work environment that pulls from our design guidance to create a set of checklists, bite-sized guidance, and annotation assets for handoff. This allows designers to refer to accessibility guidance and resources in their workflow and environment, with the ability to link back to our platform for more in-depth guidance. 
 
More about the Accessibility Checker:
The Accessibility Checker is offered as a Chrome and Firefox extension which integrates into the browsers’ development tools. The engine can also be integrated into various CI/CD processes. It utilizes IBM's accessibility rules engine, which detects WCAG 2.1 accessibility issues for web-based content or applications. Our tool enables teams to rapidly complete page-level testing and helps users quickly identify the source of accessibility issues and try suggested fixes. We have created specialized views to help make the test and remediation process quicker, depending on your role:

Web developers can more easily identify issues and remediate them during unit testing.
Test professionals can more easily associate issues with WCAG requirements, to document in an Accessibility Conformance Report or to pass on to a developer as individual issues for a particular requirement. 
 
During this session, we will demonstrate and explain many of the features of the Accessibility Checker so you can more effectively use our tool. You'll be given instructions to try out some of the features while you test a website on your own.