Continuous Accessibility is on our minds…
What is Continuous Accessibility and where should it show up in your product development lifecycle? What are we at Assistiv Labs doing to help our customers achieve it?
What is Continuous Accessibility and where should it show up in your product development lifecycle? What are we at Assistiv Labs doing to help our customers achieve it?
The Assist is the official newsletter of Assistiv Labs. We build tools to help the people who make the web make it more inclusive. 💙
The Assist publishes 3 or 4 times per year and includes our perspective on trends in web accessibility, company and product updates, as well as tips & tricks and other news relevant to accessibility teams, developers, and QA professionals.
Continuous Accessibility
Continuous Accessibility is a term coined by Melanie Sumner and described in some depth on her eponymous website: ContinuousAccessibility.com. As builders of software, we agree with Melanie that there is so much more we can delegate to the machines around accessibility.
We ran a poll on LinkedIn recently where we asked how familiar people are with the term continuous accessibility.
The sample size was small, but 63% of respondents—including accessibility experts—were not familiar with the term while 37% had at least heard of it.
Let’s see what we can do to flip those numbers!
Here at Assistiv Labs, we think about Continuous Accessibility a lot and recently published the following articles around the topic:
- Continuous Accessibility: What, Why, How – In this article we argue in favor of Continuous Accessibility going beyond static analysis tools and linters. TL;dr, there’s more the machines can do to help us build accessible experiences.
- How End-to-End Testing moves us closer to Continuous Accessibility – We believe it’s possible to detect far more accessibility problems using automated testing than the traditional scan-the-page-and-tell-me-everything-that’s-wrong tests currently do. In this article we talk about our solution to the problem.
Is Continuous Accessibility something you’re aware of and actively working towards? We’d love to know!
Getting started with our live-testing platform
Nick, one of our software engineers, put together a series of short videos to help customers get up and running with using our live-testing platform. Here’s an example, “Starting an Assistiv Labs session.”
All of the videos include subtitles, and the page with the full set of videos includes links to versions with audio descriptions.
We’re hiring!
We’re excited to be expanding our team! Ours is a small company, so every hire is important and has a big influence on our direction and company culture. We’re building tools to help the people who make the web make it more inclusive. Join us!
See you at CSUN?
For the first time, Assistiv Labs will have a presence at CSUN’s annual Assistive Technology Conference. We’ve attended #a11yTOConf the past two years and have found it incredibly beneficial to be able to learn from the community and talk to our customers in person.
We’ll be there starting Wednesday, both attending sessions and meeting with current and prospective customers. We’re working on co-sponsoring a fun social event on Wednesday evening… 🥳
Will you be in Anaheim in March? We’d love to meet you!
We hope you enjoyed this issue of The Assist! Let us know what you think by leaving a comment or sending us an email at contact@assistivlabs.com.