Ask the Expert - Accessibility with Meghan Atkins & Chris LaChance
Join Meghan Atkins (@MeghanAtkins) and Chris LaChance (@lachc) in this Ask the Expert session (30th Sept - 4th Oct) on Accessibility!
Meet Meghan: Meghan Atkins has been in the tech industry for around 15 years and has been working at Pega since 2012. She is currently a Senior Manager of Software Engineering where she leads multiple US-based engineering teams that are responsible for the User Interface and Reporting features in the Pega platform. Passionate about technology and people, she enjoys creating tools that are both easy to use and that make life easier for those that use them. As part of this she advocates for accessibility within her teams and has also worked on some of the accessibility tooling offered in the Pega platform.
Meet Chris: Chris LaChance has been a professional UX Designer for 15+ years and has worked with global organizations such as BMW, and Subaru of America. As a passionate accessibility expert, he has given talks (Achieving Accessibility Compliance: Design and Testing Best Practices), written whitepapers (Demystifying Application Accessibility and Testing), and coordinated Pega’s first-ever Accessibility Summit last year. Chris actively pursues, promotes, and champions the latest international accessibility standards, and additionally tests with actual users that require assistive tech to further identify issues where compliance falls short of usability. Chris is currently serving in the Product UX group as the Lead for Functional Design.
Message from Meghan & Chris: Hi all! Chris and I love talking about and promoting accessibility within the software space. We are more than happy to answer any question you may have on the topic such as tooling, testing and accessibility standards. It really is just one more way our products build for change; showing empathy for our clients, regardless of ability.
Ask the Expert Rules
- Follow the Pega Support Community's Community Rules of Engagement
- This is not a Live Chat - Meghan/Chris will reply to your questions over the course of the week (30 Sept - 04 October)
- Questions should be clearly and succinctly expressed
- Questions should be of interest to many others in the audience
- Have fun!
Pegasystems Inc.
IN
Hi Megan & Chris,
Does Pega support browser zoom levels higher than 100% to support visually impaired people? We have seen many scenarios where the pega portal breaks its responsiveness when user zooms it to above 100%.
Pegasystems Inc.
US
Great question. All UI Kit & Cosmos Pega applications and Development environments should support zoom up to 200% as per the WCAG 2 AA 1.4.4 standard. (https://www.w3.org/WAI/WCAG21/Understanding/resize-text.html). Pega Portal is likely running an older codebase.
Pegasystems Inc.
US
Hi All,
Web accessibility is such an important topic in the software space as it allows applications to be leveraged by any user, regardless of ability.
Tooling is big part of the accessibility discussion, so I wanted to share with you a Pega Community article that highlights some of the tooling that Pega provides as well as some of the tools we use internally.
https://collaborate.pega.com/discussion/accessibility-testing-your-pega-application
Enjoy!
-Meghan
Pegasystems Inc.
PL
Hello Megan and Chris,
Is it good approach to use PegaWAI ruleset to fix some accessibility issues?
I'm asking because recently I add this ruleset to my test application and it indeed solve one of the accessibility issues (error message wasn't link to input field without this ruleset).
After that I've got an email from consulting that "WAI is deprecated so customer need to identify a solution that doesn’t use that ruleset".
AFAIK PegaWAI rulset is delivered as part of the Pega Platformzip file in the ResourceKit\AccessibilityFramework\pxWAI_08.01.01.zip so if it is deprecated I think we should consider not to including this as a part of resource kit in the pega platform.
Thanks,
Karol
Pegasystems Inc.
US
Great question. While PegaWAI can provide certain helpful features for accessibility, it won't solve all the issues you may be having. Additionally, I have seen cases where it creates new accessibility issues as well. The core features for providing accessibility support (Skip to Nav menu, and some IE specific fixes) are planned to be a part of our new UI, Cosmos, by default in the future.
Meghan may also have a few more specific answers around this topic as well.
Pegasystems Inc.
US
For those that may be interested in understand the current landscape of how people are using AT (assistive technology) today, WebAIM just released their latest survey!
Some of the most important highlights are that, for the first time ever, Mobile is now the most commonly used device with AT. Additionally, NVDA now is the leader (not JAWS) in terms of desktop usage for AT.
Pegasystems Inc.
IN
Thank you for all the great questions and the knowledge share! Thank you to our experts :)
We will be closing this session to questions. Please continue asking your questions related to Accessibility by creating new posts! Go ahead and @mention the name of our experts in case you need specialized help!
Regards,