Making accessibility conformance easier

The end-to-end design and build of an internal tool to help product teams at Service NSW report on accessibility– nominated for a Department of Customer Service Excellence award 🏆

Recreation of the overview page of the dashboard

📍 Due to government privacy, the visuals shown here are only recreations and the specific tools are omitted

Challenge

Product teams needed to share their accessibility results in a way that is visible to both technical and non technical folk.

Context

While at Service NSW, I worked with the Head of Accessibility to solve a challenge product teams had in submitting and reporting their accessibility results. Lead by my fantastic PM, I wore both a design and technical hat while helping scope, design, engineer, and implement a solution for the 60+ product teams to use.

The tool saved product teams valuable hours and effort in manually reporting, as well as the Head of Accessibility over 2 weeks in sifting through the data. More importantly, the tool brought visibility to product accessibility across portfolios and allowed directors and executives to lead from this data.

Process

  • one week research spike
  • mapping user and data journey
  • writing user stories and acceptance criteria
  • design and development
  • 5 user testing sessions
  • deployment

Solution

The tool involved three main components:

  1. an upload screen for users to select their product details and attach their results
  2. an automated script that
    • converted the JSON data into Excel files
    • moved filed into a folder structure
    • ingested the data into a data visualisation tool
    • created interactive and comparative visuals
  3. an interactive visual dashboard that allowed users to filter results by their product, team, or portfolio

Prior to the this solution, it took product managers around 1 hour of manual effort to complete the process for a single product. It would have also taken “over 2 weeks” in effort from the Head of Accessibility to collate data from all products.

This solution skimmed this down to 1 minute of manual effort per product with a fully automated script to collate and visualise the data.

In terms of outcomes, the tool brought visibility to Service NSW product’s accessibility in a way that hadn’t existed before. Additionally, it saved valuable manual effort and pushed accessibility further into the product development lifecycle.

Being the first time Service NSW had implemented accessibility reporting at this scale, I felt lucky to be able to contribute where I did.

Future iterations

While my rotation has ended, future iterations of the tool could look at:

  • integration with team’s planning and backlog tools,
  • support for mobile testing tools
  • dashboard visualising prior results

If you want to learn more about this process, please reach out.