Integrating Accessibility and Usability into DevOps

The accessibility pyramid

Maintaining a balance between new development and digital quality becomes increasingly difficult as the defect backlog grows, as it’s always easier to kick the can down the road than deal with it in the present. Tomorrow’s problems, however, eventually become today’s nightmare, which is why a proactive approach to accessibility and usability in DevOps is absolutely necessary to maintain productivity, low-stress work environments and high quality.

Accessibility issues can feel overwhelming to triage and remediate. To systematically address accessibility and usability within DevOps, here’s a three-layer pyramid that can help:

Layer 1: Address critical violations

Start with the low-hanging fruit. Tackle the most severe accessibility issues first, as WCAG violations put the business at risk and threaten the credibility of the entire digital experience. Address enough of the backlog to get your head above water and avoid significant disruptions. Partition the back log to address accessibility or usability issues alongside functional issues — the latter will always outweigh the former. Don’t stop here; without a consistent program in place, WCAG violations will always pop up.

Layer 2: Promote good engineering practices

Here’s where the collaborative and communicative elements of DevOps can pay big dividends. Educate teams on accessibility guidelines, such as WCAG standards, and ingrain best practices in the development process. Create and maintain centralized documentation. Provide ongoing education, perhaps through an accessibility or usability consultant, to derive best coding practices and ensure high standards. While some issues can be addressed in-sprint, such as WCAG checkpoints, other studies will need to be conducted over longer periods of time, which means there must be a plan in place to incorporate these findings on an asynchronous, ongoing basis. Thorough education and continuous processes, while difficult to establish in the beginning, help developers do their work more efficiently in the long run and avoids technical debt.

Layer 3: Keep up with new technologies and approaches

Now that you’re addressing accessibility and usability issues proactively, rather than reactively, make sure you can keep pace with the revolving door of new devices and technologies. Integrate new assistive technologies into your testing strategy as they’re developed to stay ahead of potential accessibility issues down the road. Even though it’s challenging to keep up with all of these new devices in house, it’s a necessary element of ensuring customer satisfaction and accessibility conformance. On top of that, conduct empathy sessions and other emerging approaches to gather real-world perspectives on the products.

The usability pyramid

Usability is much like accessibility in that organizations must adhere to industry standards, meet customer expectations and account for it throughout the development lifecycle to avoid costly missteps and brand damage.

To address usability issues on an ongoing basis, prioritize these three levels in the usability pyramid:

Layer 1: Establish quick wins

Identify and fix easy usability issues that keep a balance of new feature development and technical debt reduction in place. Quick fixes help reduce the backlog and improve the user experience without requiring significant resources. Once you establish which checkpoints and guidelines the team will prioritize in usability testing, a snowball effect happens. Establish a timeline to stay on track. Perhaps you knock off three easier challenges by the end of the month. Draw down the defects sprint by sprint to reduce the backlog burden and create momentum. 

Layer 2: Enhance the customer journey

Determine whether (and how well) you’re able to conduct business in an end-to-end customer journey. Identify pain points and make incremental improvements to ensure a seamless experience. Run real people through customer journeys to pinpoint problem areas, and use that information to enhance user satisfaction and revenue retention. While customer journey issues often aren’t technically defects, you should treat and translate them as such to establish a path to remediation, as friction has just as much power to affect brand reputation.

Layer 3: Establish ongoing UX practices or programs

Conduct UX studies — or consult with experts who can — to integrate usability challenges into the DevOps cycle and translate them into actionable items on an ongoing basis. This continuous improvement process ensures that new usability issues are addressed in a timely manner and that the user experience continues to evolve and improve. Take the DevOps mindset: design, plan, code and gather feedback with usability in mind.

The power of crowdtesting for accessibility and usability

Customers regard companies that prioritize accessibility and usability as ethical and caring. This positive brand perception directly leads to increased customer loyalty and market share. In today’s market, doing the ethical thing matters more to customers than ever before, and their spending habits support that notion.

But these areas go beyond brand reputation. Streamlined processes that incorporate accessibility and usability in DevOps workflows lead to faster development cycles, more efficient development, better digital products and improved team morale — perhaps even engineering happiness. This efficiency allows teams to focus on innovation while maintaining high standards of quality.

It’s all about building a sustainable, efficient process that benefits both the organization and its users. But how do organizations keep up with emerging technologies, evolving customer personas and changing standards, all while maintaining a community of testers, including those with disabilities, to provide feedback on their experiences?

Crowdtesting offers a powerful solution to these challenges by bringing in diverse perspectives that traditional testing environments miss. Applause leverages a global community of more than one million digital experts around the globe to provide real-world feedback, uncovering edge cases and defects often missed in limited testing environments. This approach helps us identify and address issues related to accessibility, usability and environment parity before they become overwhelming.

Integrating accessibility and usability in DevOps is not just a best practice — it’s a strategic imperative. By leveraging crowdtesting and adopting a structured approach throughout the DevOps lifecycle, organizations can enhance engineering efficiency, reduce technical debt and deliver superior user experiences. Applause, with its global community of digital experts, is uniquely positioned to help organizations achieve these goals.

As the digital landscape continues to evolve, the strategic and regulatory need for inclusive and user-friendly products will only grow. Let’s evaluate your digital quality strategy today and discuss how to integrate accessibility and usability testing into DevOps practices to drive long-term success.