- USER EXPERIENCE DESIGN
- UX LEADERSHIP
Creating a plan to become AA Accessibility conformant
Project overview
Project Details
Nintex's lack of accessibility compliance created challenges for customers, particularly in meeting government legal obligations.
Process
After years of sharing knowledge on accessibility compliance, and opportunity presented itself to develop a plan to meet AA compliance for end-user facing product.
Outcome
- A form designer could produce an AA WCAG/Section 508 compliant form for the first time. - Senior VPs introduced a policy of no new Accessibility debt with all future releases.
MY ROLE:
User Experience Manager/Lead
PRODUCT:
Nintex Workflow Cloud
Problem
Nintex, like many organisations, hadn’t prioritised accessible considerations as they developed their products. This resulted in challenges for customers, especially the government, as they had legal obligations to meet accessibility standards for interfaces their users interacted with.
While the UX team always advocated for better adoption of accessibility standards, this was always at risk of being descoped by product owners when delivery deadlines were tight.
Process
The journey to creating accessible products at Nintex took several years and was accelerated once a business need arose due to the lack of compliance, which began to impact sales. These are detailed below.
Education and evangelising the benefits
I started running brief engagement meetings and conducting brown bag sessions to explain accessibility compliance, why it is essential, and how it benefits everyone. These helped to remove some misconceptions and to allay some of the concerns around the perceived effort involved in delivery.
A small step forward
After reading a blog post on colour systems, I wondered how practical it would be to intertwine them so that AA colour contrast would be easy to pass without much thought.
With a looming project to uplift recently acquired products to the Nintex brand, I sought permission to introduce this new colour system as part of the project. I sold it to senior leaders as a low-effort risk for the engineering team as our first step to meeting accessibility standards.
Looking for champions
Through the engagement sessions, a Product Manager who was colourblind was identified. He became a valuable resource when highlighting the advantage of making something accessible benefitted all users.
The sales team became an unlikely ally as Nintex began to lose sales, particularly with government customers who had legal obligations to ensure interfaces were accessible for their users. I started to leverage the sales team to influence senior leaders in the organisation. We also began to catalogue the financial impact of lost sales.
The opportunity
Nintex was investing heavily in FedRAMP certification for its cloud platform, to remove friction in sales to all levels of government in the United States.
Understanding the market FedRAMP certification was targeted at and armed with data on lost sales, I began to influence senior leaders about the potential risk to ROI of FedRAMP functionality without meeting AA accessibility compliance for our end-user-facing product offering, Nintex Forms.
I was successful in gaining support for the team’s development of a plan to meet AA accessibility compliance. This plan was later endorsed by senior leadership.
The process
As making the entire product accessible was a multi-year undertaking, we needed to develop a plan to allow the team to deliver accessibility compliance in six months so that it would be ready when FedRam certification was due.
The initial focus was to make the form container compliant, as forms were currently embedded in existing pages utilising an iFrame that disconnected the content from the user agent.
Working with the product manager, we evaluated existing usage data to understand the form elements that offer end users the most significant immediate value. We created a prioritised road map for form control delivery and identified a handful of required controls for the first phase.
In addition to form elements, we identified all the supporting elements required to be AA compliant. These included form-level validation errors, form submission buttons and confirmation messages.
Results
- A form designer could produce an AA WCAG/Section 508 compliant form for the first time.
- Sales conversations shifted from what can’t be achieved to what you can achieve.
- Accessibility compliance improved sales conversions with US Federal and State Government institutions and customers in the education sector.
- Through our education and delivery of the first phase of compliance, we reduced the fear of extra effort involved in producing accessible products.
- Senior VPs introduced a policy of no new Accessibility debt with all future releases.
About Nintex Automation Cloud
Nintex Automation Cloud is a cloud-based platform where you can design workflows to automate simple to complex processes using drag-and-drop interactions without writing code.