Case Study: Building an Accessibility Center of Excellence
QualityLogic was engaged to help transition a global telecom company’s external accessibility testing into an internal accessibility center of excellence through the creation and operation of a customized training curriculum. Within six months, the client’s team advanced from beginners to skilled auditors in accessibility, combining compliance, usability, and internal advocacy.
Taking Control of Accessibility Testing
The client is one of the world’s largest telecommunication providers. At the time, they had been relying on an external partner to provide accessibility testing for their numerous websites and software applications. Due to a change in organizational priorities and a heightened regulatory environment, the client decided they needed greater control over the accessibility testing process.
Their new strategy was to move from external reliance to implementing an internal solution with a singular focus: to align with their overall vision and provide the seamless experiences that their customers deserve. This would entail building an internal accessibility testing center of excellence.
QualityLogic was engaged to provide subject matter expertise and to develop and deliver a customized training curriculum that would be used to build the accessibility testing center of excellence. The training was to be delivered to a new cohort to help establish them as a professional auditing team, and to build the training in such a way that it could be scaled and reused throughout the client following the engagement.
Designing a Scalable, Context-Driven Accessibility Program
QualityLogic worked collaboratively with the client to develop a deep understanding of their needs and challenges. From this process, we developed a comprehensive plan with the following primary objectives:
- Scalable and Reusable: The program needed to be built in such a way that it could be scaled across the client and continued by their internal team to train and develop more testing staff.
- Context Appropriate: The program needed to match the client’s internal environment, including the real-world software systems and documents they managed, their internal software development cadence and technologies, and related aspects of life at the company.
- Supportive of Career Progression: The program needed to support the progression of testers from junior to senior positions and enable exemplary employees to shine.
- Sustainable: The program needed to be relevant for future contexts, even as the industry changes.
Turning Plans into Action
QualityLogic worked with the client to implement and operate the training program, which proceeded along the following steps:
Step #1 – Talent Acquisition
QualityLogic initially proposed assessing and redefining the hiring process from the ground up, considering how to attract native assistive technology users and build team diversity by ensuring hiring pathways were accessible and hiring methods appropriately attracted the right temperament and skillset.
The client was able to free up internal resources from a Philippines-based development center and identify individuals who came from a technical background and had an interest in digital accessibility.
QualityLogic provided some light consulting and recommendations to support the future talent acquisition of the program, then redirected efforts to assessing the baseline knowledge and competency of the team. This helped inform lesson planning and topic emphasis to match where knowledge gaps were most prominent.
Step #2 – Content Development
QualityLogic built a comprehensive training program consisting of offline course materials, handouts, and quizzes that were hosted in the client’s proprietary learning management system. By hosting the content in the client’s environment, the content could easily be reused by their internal team.
This content was structured in a modular fashion with each lesson building upon the prior. Content focused on establishing a foundational knowledge of accessibility, then helped learners understand testing techniques with websites, web applications, mobile applications, and documents. The final content helped transition the cohort to a real-world testing and development environment, and furthermore equipped them with resources for continued learning, guidance on IAAP certification, and techniques for internal advocacy.
Step #3 – Content Delivery
QualityLogic’s accessibility training team held regular instructor-led presentations and Q&A to help learners proceed through the course material. This was paired with real-world exercises to help them implement the key concepts and ideas, which included a combination of independent and group exercises. These were further paired with knowledge checks and practice audits to gauge the continued growth of the team.
Regular meetings were held with the client’s leadership to advise on the progression of the students and collaborate on closing any gaps to maximize the odds of success. Collaboration also included highlighting high-performers who were then recommended to take on positions of greater leadership post-training.
The cohort demonstrated rapid growth in skillset and knowledge over the six-month program, enabling them to be professionally performant when compared against auditors with years of tenure.
Each step of the process was thoroughly documented so that any accessibility professional with the requisite experience could go back and replicate the same level of success.
Step #4 – Iteration and Final Performance
Throughout the engagement, QualityLogic’s training team worked to refine training material and incorporate feedback from the client’s leadership and the testing cohort to continuously improve the effectiveness of the content.
QualityLogic’s final assessment of the team included pairing them against QualityLogic’s professional accessibility auditing team which, we are happy to report, the cohort performed excellently against.
The Result: An Empowered In-House Team
After the six-month engagement, QualityLogic helped the client successfully establish the first team of the Accessibility Testing Center of Excellence, transitioning individuals with technical aptitude into a professionally performant accessibility auditing team. Following the training, this team possessed the capabilities to audit web and mobile applications (across multiple configurations and assistive technologies) as well as digital documents for WCAG compliance and overall usability. They provide justification by balancing conformance requirements and usability concerns, citing semantic requirements while passionately advocating for the needs of the client’s customers.
The training program was also successful in nurturing natural leaders who went on to take more senior positions in the team post-training.
Finally, the client has been left with a robust, accessibility testing training program hosted in their learning management system and reusable by other client employees. This program is complete with instructor notes, guidance, and process feedback that enables the client team to continuously move future cohorts through the same process.
With this, the client has been able to move away from external reliance on vendors and toward internal capability and future sustainability.
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