How We Built Accessible Websites For A Consumer Goods Manufacturer

Customer: A Market-leading Commercial Products Manufacturer   In Partnership With:

Industry: Consumer Brands Services: Accessibility Testing | Manual Testing | Compatibility Testing (browsers and mobile devices) | Acceptance Testing

Technologies: Drupal 8 Tools: VoiceOver | NonVisual Desktop Access | JAWS | Colour Contrast Analyser | WAVE | Lighthouse | Zephyr | Behat | BrowserStack | Acquia Cloud Site Factory | Acquia Digital Asset Manager Platform: Acquia Cloud

Ensuring a great customer experience for all

With the aim to provide a uniform website browsing experience to all types of site visitors, Axelerant’s QA team conducted various kinds of accessibility tests using a combination of human tested and automated checks, improving the overall customer experience.

Business challenge

The customer was planning to revamp its stationery section. This consisted of multiple brands, where each brand had a dedicated site. These websites had multiple features and components, like a country switcher, email subscription, product listing pages (with filtering and sorting options), modals, swatches, carousels, a zoomed product view, mega menu, search feature, etc.

Through online surveys, the customer’s team had identified that ~35 percent of site visitors were finding it difficult to access the site due to motor skills and visual impairments.

Believing that accessibility is not a privilege but a basic right, Axelerant team members worked along with the customer’s team to ensure a holistically accessible user experience to all site visitors.

The customer’s requirements included:

• Uniform look and feel across all stationery brands
• Easier maintenance
• World class user experience by releasing ~100 percent accessible websites

Results

All four sites that we developed were WCAG 2.0 AA compliant on all major browsers like Firefox, Safari, Chrome and IE 11, along with mobile phones and tablets using both iOS and Android operating systems. All four sites were keyboard and screen reader compatible, and passed the Colour Contrast Analyser tests for all individual screens.

Testing by skilled QA engineers ensured that the sites were accessible to all users. Automated audit tools helped us evaluate the technical challenges associated with accessibility issues and resolve them.