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Create Product Accessibility working group

Paulina Sedlak-Jakubowska requested to merge psj-create-accessibility-working-group into master

Needed before merge

Why is this change being made?

There is a focus and effort towards accessibility in GitLab UI. However, having a design system with components that follow the guidelines doesn’t guarantee an accessible platform. We want to increase awareness and put tools in place, so that the hard work from the Foundations group is not lost.

We want to take advantage of a proof of concept with axe-core gem to automate accessibility checks in feature specs. They can enforce correct use of the components and help catch approximately 57% of basic accessibility issues that users face. Including such test cases in the pipeline allows us to check every merge request that goes into our codebase and continuously ensure compliance.

A list with exact occurrences of errors will make it easier to track where we are at and what the progress is. We will be able create easy-win issues, which could be quick 5-min fixes. Those can be used to drive more contributions from both team members and community, and as a result, increasing awareness of the the accessibility compliance.

Analysing common errors will help us identify knowledge gaps and plan for better, role-specific training.

More rigour around acceptance criteria and QA will ensure that newly developed feature (both GA and experiments) are available to all the users and are in line with out VPAT evaluations.

We believe that there is an opportunity for ensuring better product accessibility and making sure that everyone can contribute, no matter the way they interact with our product. We need a thought-through process and tooling in place, so that we can keep on delivering an accessible platform in a sustainable manner.

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Edited by Paulina Sedlak-Jakubowska

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