Record a Goose Sighting

Last month, we held Harker Summit, a day-long mini conference of various discussions and workshops. One session that particularly stood out to me was our Record a Goose Sighting workshop, organised and ran by Zack, Chief Operating Officer. The aim of the session was to give us, as a team, a better idea of how we can make our frontend more accessible to people who might find it challenging to use a device due to a disability.

The task we worked on was an interactive web experience built by Beverly Newing, Accessibility Lead at the UK Ministry of Justice, which revolved around finding accessibility flaws in a fictional web app, which was to serve the playful idea of recording goose sightings. The design scheme of the app was based on that of GOV.UK, an absolute gold standard example of an accessible frontend, but slightly broken for the purpose of finding flaws.

After a brief introduction from Zack, we were split into pairs to crack on with the task collaboratively. It took us through several web pages, where we had to find issues that might make it hard for some people to use the website. Some things were easy to spot, such as not being able to press the tab key to navigate through all the interactive elements of a page, or a button not having enough contrast to the background to be clearly visible to people with visual impairments. Others were quite a bit tricker to pick up, such as a field of radio buttons not having a legend (basically a label), which could give visually impaired people a hard time understanding what the field is for. Some of these things we caught onto ourselves, while others we found with the help of the WAVE Accessibility Plugin, a browser extension which was recommended for the task. We found this plugin really useful since it instantly picked up on a variety of problems, some which would never even have crossed our minds. Our team has decided to use this plugin in the future for testing our own software products.

When we finished working through the pages, we all shared our ideas, and compared them to the official answers, which explained everything really well. This was really constructive, and sparked a lot of discussion on how we can make small tweaks to our frontend to make it easy to use for everyone.

Overall, we found the session very eye-opening. Our teamwork and discussion gave us a much clearer idea on how we’re going to be building and testing Harker’s frontend going forward, with accessibility in mind. As a Disability Confident organisation, we believe that accessibility shouldn't be an afterthought when building software. The workshop was also a useful exercise to support our long term goal of ensuring all of our software is WCAG 2.2 complaint. All in all, the most important takeaway from this session was how the small things are going to make the difference.