Summer of (Accessibility) Love 💜

Clearly, y’all want to make this the Summer of (Accessibility) Love because we’ve seen a big increase in interest in our products & services recently, especially our accessibility-first end-to-end testing service (yep, the same one that Asana credits with leveling up their approach to accessibility). And that was even before our recent webinar (more about that below).

Between conducting demo calls & writing quotes, wrapping up our ISO 27001 certification process (more about that below), and traveling to some key conferences (more about that below), it was a busy second quarter of the year here at Assistiv Labs!

Seems like a good time to pop our heads up to share more about what we’ve been up to. So, without further ado…

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.

Accessibility-First End-to-End Testing Webinar

Have you explored (or thought of exploring) how end-to-end testing fits into your automated accessibility testing regime? We’ve thought about this. A lot. So we decided to share what we’ve learned about the space as well as do a deep dive into the approach we landed on for end-to-end testing.

On the call, Weston & Nick shared our perspective on the state of automatic/automated accessibility testing and took an in-depth look at our solution—a blend of expert human evaluation reinforced by a unique approach to test automation.

Spoiler alert: end-to-end testing shows real promise and what we’ve built goes way beyond scanners such as axe but is actually designed to replace old-school, periodic audits with something that delivers equally-high quality + near-instant insights.

Watch the webinar recording on our site and let us know what you think!

Automating Screen Readers for Accessibility Testing

Considering we’ve invested so much into creating our end-to-end accessibility testing service, we clearly believe there’s value in automating screen readers for the purpose of accessibility testing.

Turns out we’re not alone in that belief! The w3c/at-driver project and Guidepup are two examples of similar efforts.

Weston recently published an in-depth article about the value that can be provided by screen reader test automation including a detailed comparison of our solution relative to the others.

The bottom line is our approach validates 80% of WCAG criteria and can do so on every code change. 💪 + 🦾 = 📈

Conference recaps

AccessU

Nick attended the most recent AccessU conference put on by Knowbility in sunny Austin, Texas. He presented a session where he cut through the hype around automated/automatic accessibility tools. His talk was so thorough that Adrian Roselli referenced it in the keynote later that day in response to a question about testing tools and resources, saying, “Yeah, just go talk to him.” 😮👏

The conference followed a format that was closer to class discussions rather than lectures, where presenters were encouraged to include interaction in their presentations. The keynotes and “unconference” sessions were all unique and informative, and Nick found all of the talks he attended to be great! He definitely recommends it as a conference to attend if you’re looking for one to where discussion is emphasized.

Accessibility Camp Bay Area

Andrew recently attended Accessibility Camp Bay Area organized by Jennison Asuncion and held for the first time at GitHub’s ultra-hip San Francisco offices. Highlights of the day included Alexis Lucio’s & Kendall Gassner’s impressive talk on how GitHub made an accessible drag-and-drop component and Quintin Balsdon’s presentation on Ally-Keys, a tool to facilitate mobile keyboard testing.

Many of the talks this year focused on AI, not surprisingly. With so much consternation within the accessibility community about AI, it was heartening to hear about AIMAC, Joe Devon’s effort to get LLM vendors to compete on the quality of their answers to accessibility-related questions.

#a11yTO Conf

Will you be at #a11yTO Conf this year? We’ll be attending our favorite tech conference for the 4th year in a row and would love to meet/catch up with as many of you as possible! There will be swag…

ISO 27001 🥳

File under #fun! OK, “fun” might not be quite the word for it 😂 but going through the process to achieve a security certification is definitely educational. Assistiv Labs gained our first SOC 2 Type II attestation in 2023. Since then, we’ve worked hard to improve our information security program.

We’re excited to announce that we recently attained our ISO/IEC 27001:2022 certification (ISO 27001 for short-er)!

In case you’re unfamiliar, ISO 27001 is a globally recognized standard designed to assess a company’s security program against a broad range of criteria including risk management, business continuity, people management, data privacy, and of course, technical systems.

We’ve also just renewed our SOC 2 Type II and completed another round of penetration tests. Whew!

The work is never done on the information security front, but this was a major milestone that we wanted to share. For all the nitty gritty details, check out our security page. 🔒

How’s Ghost working for folks? 👻

We do our best to work with the limitations of our newsletter platform to make our content as accessible as possible (alt text, color contrast, etc.), but if there’s anything you’ve found difficult to perceive in the emails we’ve sent out, we’d love to know!

The platform we use, Ghost, is open source, so we will absolutely submit a change request or even code patch (we’ve done it before) to them if it’s something that can be fixed! 🙌