Business Analyst Information This page offers suggestions to Business Analysts for writing accessibility requirements. The EAQAT provides guidance in all areas of accessibility, including recommendations for writing accessible requirements. This will lead to good development and design of accessible applications and forms for all end users.
Writing accessibility requirements can be difficult at times. A tip to writing accessibility requirements is to consider the desired behavior on the page or form, and how a user might interact with the elements found on the page or form. Well-written accessibility requirements provide a foundation for developers to code for accessibility/usability, and provide test case expectations for accessibility quality assurance testing. This benefits assistive technology users when they access the site or form, as it is now usable.
Question: Is it an acceptable requirement to state that an application
must adhere to the WCAG 2.1 AA Guidelines for Accessibility?
Answer:Yes, this is an acceptable requirement for any application. However, the assistive technology end user will benefit from detailed accessibility/usability requirements that are used for coding. This allows the assistive technology end user to be successful when using state products.
If the general requirement to make it accessible is the only requirement, the EAQAT assembled a set of standardized tests that can be used to verify adherence to 508 Standards and WCAG Guidelines. However, note that this generic requirement does not help the development team code for accessibility as it is not specific to the needs of the assistive technology end users. Therefore, please contact the EAQAT about assistance in writing accessibility/usability requirements.
Question: What else can be done to make requirements more accessible?
Answer: Great question! In addition to following WCAG guidelines, requirements, both functional and nonfunctional, can be targeted at specific behaviors of pages and elements to make them more accessible. Requirements that describe accessible behavioral characteristics of page elements can go a long way to helping development and quality assurance activities. This ensures that systems are developed according to accessibility principles, and the results can be verified by EAQAT.
Question: What can the EAQAT do to help with accessibility requirements?
Answer:The EAQAT is available to help answer questions about accessibility requirements. We assist by reviewing and approving accessibility requirements, and making recommendations using accessibility guidelines.
The EAQAT will also give live demonstrations of various elements and the desired behaviors for accessibility. In addition, we demonstrate how screen readers react when encountering various elements on a page or PDF document.
The items in the list above are a few examples of elements encountered during accessibility testing that could benefit from enhanced requirements. By providing enhanced requirements, a developer has a better roadmap to code specific properties and attributes that are helpful to assistive technology end users.
Writing for Web Accessibility
This link will take you to the Web Accessibility Initiative (W3C WAI) site page for Accessible Design
Accessibility and Usability Requirements Checklist
This link will download a helpful Word document titled: Web Site and Application Accessibility and Usability Requirements
Checklist, Version 2.3 (02/2017)
508:
508 compliance checklist from WebAIM
WCAG:
WCAG 2.x checklist from WebAIM, covers 2.0, 2.1, 2.2
Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1
This link has a lot of helpful information for a BA about requirements for accessibility.