Workshop: manually testing a component’s accessibility

During my time on the GOV.UK Design System team, I developed a workshop in collaboration with Imran Hussain.

Watch a recording of the manual accessibility testing workshop on YouTube.

The idea was twofold:

  • We wanted to help demonstrate how teams across the UK public sector can test and assess the accessibility of components they contribute to the GOV.UK Design System
  • We wanted to test the accessibility of the community-built update for the task list component

With the support and advice of Frankie Roberto and the task list working group community, Imran and I developed the workshop, and scheduled it for March 2023.

The workshop was 90 minutes long and consisted of 5 segments:

  1. Info about the task list component and it working group
  2. Learning about manual accessibility testing methods
  3. Demonstrations of manual accessibility tests
  4. Info on available assistive technologies and reporting tools
  5. Questions and feedback

We ended up selling out the first event, and decided to run a second session 1 week later to meet demand. In total there were 500 attendees across the two sessions.