Hi @steve.green
we had a conversation last year - time flies! Iâve posted a link to the chat below. I would assume that many are in the same boat as me - having good intentions but trying to do more with less.
Itâs useful for me to know what âgood enoughâ looks like and what âfully compliantâ looks like. Youâre clearly saying that the latter is impossible for most generalist test teams.
Hi @sles12
I stumbled on the VPAT recently and the fact that it is a checklist immediately caught my attention.
Noting that although it has a WCAG version it is presumably a little biased towards the US market? Ie the US Rehabilitation Act of 1973. Would you recommend this as a resource for UK-based companies or might there be better options.
Hi @danuk ,
I just learned something about the history of VPATs.
Our VPAT is an Excelsheet with a row for every WCAG 2.2 AA success criterion. So Iâm not sure how any US bias would happen. I think Ady gave a good answer.
âFully compliantâ is light years beyond what a generalist testing team can achieve. âGood enoughâ is difficult to define, and it is the job of the product owner to define it, not the testers. There are potentially legal and other consequences of this decision (such as loss of revenue or reputation) so you should kick it upstairs to someone who gets paid to make decisions like this.
âGood enoughâ might focus on a few success criteria that provide a worthwhile benefit and are relatively easy to understand and test, such as keyboard navigation and text alternatives for images. Testing the colour contrast of text isnât difficult, and nor is testing the colour contrast of some non-text items such as focus indicators and the borders of form controls, although a full non-text contrast test will be beyond most generalist testers.
Alternatively, the people upstairs might also define âGood enoughâ as âWhatever you can do in any spare timeâ or âDonât do anything until someone complainsâ.
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@steve.green, donât scare people away from accessibility 
If you tell someone they canât do it, why even try?
My project just got officially assessed by a third party assessment provider (really nit picky) and we are 98% WCAG 2.2 compliant. No one in the team apart from Design had any idea about accessibility when we started improvements. A couple of years later the review didnât bring many surprises, but it gave us the push to tackle those âwe canât fix itâ topics.
I started knowing nothing and the first version wasnât perfectly tested, but itâs progress over perfection and now Iâm QA Accessibility Lead. Teaching others I can see how some training and the right tools and a contact for the tricky questions empowers all testers.
Iâm not saying they are not capable of doing it and that they shouldnât try. Iâm saying they canât do it properly at the moment and that they have a vast amount to learn if they want to do it properly.
Nothing wrong with that - we all have to start at the beginning. But if some people donât want to put in the effort to learn something thatâs extremely difficult, maybe they shouldnât start. I get the impression that nowadays, testers want to become instant experts in things they know nothing about. They donât want to put in the years of study needed to genuinely become expert.
I donât know who did your assessment, but no reputable accessibility consultancy would quote a percentage WCAG conformance figure because itâs meaningless.
In my case, the report is a statutory compliance requirement: it certifies our conformity to the agency that grants the accessibility label. Because of its critical importance, we have automated part of the workflow through APIs in our CI pipelineâat every production release, a monitoring job runs, checks the various categories of accessibility issues, and returns a result aligned with our reporting criteria. The generated reports are then archived on a dedicated server so they can be produced for legal purposes whenever necessary.