Accessibility: Ally Financial Insights

Problem

The web in its entirety should be accessible, but as a financial institution, Ally must be extra vigilant in maintaining compliance with WCAG 2.0 accessibility standards. A new accessibility initiative was mustered to audit and bring our site up to standard. My team was in the middle of a project (Ally Financial Insights) that was chosen as one of the first to increase our accessibility compliance up to the WCAG 2.0 standard.

Solution

The project in itself was difficult due to the constraints of the timeline, a new third party developer trying to use an out of the box solution that neither matched our UX standards, nor was compliant with WCAG 2.0. Our final designs outlined our UX standards and accessibility through comps and accessibility annotations along with general WCAG 2.0 guidelines documentation.

My role

I was the IA on this project that spanned over 11 months. I interacted with product owners, content strategists, visual designers, marketing teams, third parties, mobile and web development teams and backend development teams. Specifically I had to do a lot of catch up work researching guidelines, best practices, along with success criteria and communicating with Deque support teams who could relate better ways to document accessibility annotations on our specific designs. I also extended the work from this project into communication to our other internal UX teams to aid in better accessibility communication to future internal and third party development. My work aided in conveying the importance of web accessibility for our customers to the organization. Eventually our teams work contributed to assembling a dedicated accessibility team at Ally.