Automated Accessibility Checking Open-Sourced by IBM

Date & Time

Thursday, March 16, 2023 - 3:20 PM PST  

Location

Orange County 3-4  

Description

IBM’s accessibility team has opened-sourced and completely redesigned its accessibility checking software. This talk will not be a product sales pitch. Our tools are now freely available to designers, developers, and accessibility auditors on the Chrome store GitHub. Lessons learned and innovations in this talk come from IBM’s own journey over the last several years to have accessibility issues fixed earlier in the product’s life cycle and from moving accessibility into the design phase. By leveraging IBM Design Thinking, open-sourcing its software tools, expanding the frameworks and browser coverage, improving automation, increasing comprehensive rules, and by focusing on the end user, we have done exactly that. The open-source code hosted on GitHub was used to re-develop the entire suite of accessibility software tools. With support for both Chrome and Firefox, development operations with Karma and NodeJS modules, and expanding to include Cypress, and testing frameworks such as Selenium and Jest. We have been successful in seeing adoption of these tools with over 13,000 active users in the Chrome and Firefox stores. Our users are now more efficiently able to design (prevent issues), quickly identify accessibility issues, more effectively tackle accessibility problems, and more easily report to stakeholders. User feedback over the last couple years from the freely available tools has led to improvements that will be highlighted in this talk.

This Presentation Link is provided by the Presenter(s) and not hosted by the Center on Disabilities at CSUN. The Center on Disabilities has confirmed, as of March 13, 2023, content linked is relevant to the presentation, but has not been reviewed for accessibility nor will the Center on Disabilities attempt to remediate any accessibility issues in the linked content. Please contact the Presenter(s) with any accessibility concerns.

 

Audience

• Higher Education
• Information & Communications Technology
• Government
• Healthcare & Rehabilitation
• Finance & Banking

Audience Level

Intermediate  

Session Summary (Abstract)

Delve deep into the IBM Equal Access Accessibility Checker. This open-source tool will help you get your web application from inaccessible to accessible with easy-to-understand tools making developers and auditors become accessibility experts.  

Primary Topic

Evaluation & Remediation  

Secondary Topics

• Development
• Digital Accessibility
• Information & Communications Technology (ICT)
• Web

 

Session Type

General Track  

Presenters

• Ali Unwala
  IBM Accessibility
• Josiah Hoskins
  IBM Accessibility
• Phill Jenkins
  IBM Accessibility

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