I was wondering how other organisations are supporting accessibility testing?
Not so long ago we had nothing. Now we have an Accessibility Strategist and 2 Accessibility Test Leads. Those roles are fairly new and were not really defined. It is some dedicated support for people with questions about the topic from people with experience. We created Confluence pages about tools, offered 15min information sessions and worked on a getting started guide. In the future I would like to create an internal training course about accessibility testing, have Accessibility Leads for other departments like Dev and PM and create an event for Global Accessibility Awareness Day.
As the role of Accessibility Test Lead was never clearly defined beyond supporting testers I’m currently trying out different approaches to see what works. If anyone here has done something similar or would like to know more I’d be happy to chat.
In my current role I run an accessibility guild and previously I’ve done coaching and training for accessibility but not heard of a dedicated accessibility test lead before.
I have questions!
Is this for a single project / product or more as a service to help across multiple projects / products?
You mention that the roles are not really defined so how did the job description list the role and responsibilities?
Were these internal transfers or external hires?
I’d love to hear more about the work and what you are doing and of course if I can help by sharing some of the things I’ve done I will.
Of course they didn’t go and hire more testers. We just got the new role on top of our other responsibilities as Test Leads for products. My manager set some of my time aside for the new tasks while my colleague wasn’t so lucky. That’s why they got away with not really describing it. In a way I like it as it gives me a lot of freedom.
As Accessibility Test Leads we are supporting testers of all products. I’m in Europe and my colleague is in the US. So we are providing a service. In the company we already had something similar for automation. It’s part of an initiative to offer people further career options outside of management and supporting teams with internal expertise.