Instructions for VFS teams to turn 508 Office accessibility audit findings into GitHub issues

briandeconinck commented 1 year ago

User Story

"As a VFS team PM, I want to know how to turn VA Section 508 Office accessibility audit findings into GitHub issues, so that I can appropriately scope and plan remediation efforts."

"As the Governance team accessibility specialist, I want to know how my findings at staging reviews compare to the findings of the VA Section 508 Office, so that I can assess the quality of my work and our review processes."

Assignee: Peer Reviewer:

Description

@jeana-adhoc asked in the private a11y specialist channel:

Hi Friends! Does anyone know if there is a page that exists on platform or github that would help a Product Manager turn a 508 office audit into accessibility defect tickets? A Product Manager is requesting to do this for me and then I would review later, and I don't want to say no to the help, but part of me thinks it might be easier if I just wrote it up/translated the 508 audit. In the past, I've used this template. And I would just send this link to our PM. Anything else that might be helpful?

Right now, our guidance to VFS teams is to go to the 508 Office for an audit --- and then it's up to them what comes next. Once the team exits the Collab Cycle, we don't have any guidance for what comes next. That makes sense, since we're not responsible for anything that takes place outside our processes. But it leaves VFS teams to figure out on their own what they're supposed to do with the audit report the receive from the 508 Office.

The goal in this ticket would be to provide what Jeana requested: Guidance for VFS teams on how to convert the audit report they received into GitHub issues. This includes:

How to organize the ticket (likely following the existing a11y-issue template), and what parts of the audit report to copy/paste into the ticket
What labels to apply to the ticket (eg. follow the defect severity rubric, add product labels, etc)
What epic(s) to attach to the tickets
How to reference any unresolved issues from the staging review that cover the same accessibility barrier
How and when to pass the issue to the Design System Team (or anyone else responsible for the issue logged)

As a secondary benefit, Governance team would gain visibility into what the 508 Office is finding in order to improve our own review processes. It wouldn't be a complete picture, since it would be up to the VFS teams to choose when to convert 508 Office findings into GitHub tickets. But with appropriate GitHub labeling we may be able to detect instances where the 508 Office findings are significantly different from our own. (And eventually maybe bring that into the Domo dashboard???)

Impacted Artifacts

New page on Platform website

Tasks

[ ] Placeholder task

Peer Review

To be completed by peer reviewer

[ ] User story and acceptance criteria are met

Acceptance Criteria

[ ] Placeholder AC

How to prepare this issue

Refinement

[ ] Ticket has user story, description, tasks, and acceptance criteria
[ ] Ticket has additional appropriate labels, if applicable
[ ] Ticket has been sized
[ ] Once all above items are checked, add the 'Ready' label.
Planning

If this ticket is picked up from the Backlog mid-sprint, connect with Shira to ensure the below items are completed correctly
[ ] Ticket has been discussed as a team at Planning
[ ] Ticket has been assigned to appropriate initiative or quarterly epic
[ ] Ticket has been assigned to a Sprint
[ ] Ticket has been moved to the Planned pipeline in the Governance team board
[ ] Ticket as an assignee and peer reviewer

briandeconinck commented 1 year ago

Note: Jeana has shared a sample 508 Office audit report with me, and we can probably track down a few more as well to help with this work.

shiragoodman commented 1 year ago

@artsymartha68 Brian brought this up at our team refinement today. While I agree it's valuable for VFS teams to have a way to transform the VA 508 Office feedback into an actionable ticket, I'm wondering why the VA 508 Office isn't delivering their feedback in this format already? Is this something we can discuss with them? Please let me know. Happy to chat over Zoom if needed.

artsymartha68 commented 1 year ago

I love your notion of expediency and not doing duplicate work but I would never ask for that kind of special treatment from the 508 Office. This would be special treatment because they are delivering audits for ALL VA sites, apps, intranet sites, systems, employee software, training classes, videos, etc etc etc and they need to work they way that is best for them. I would never ask them to learn our GH system just for our audit results.

shiragoodman commented 1 year ago

I totally understand. However Brian told me that the current way their feedback is delivered is via PDF report. is this true???

artsymartha68 commented 1 year ago

I've always seen a Word doc or an Excel file. Something accessible.

shiragoodman commented 1 year ago

Would it be possible to see a copies of a few of them? If this is a ticket we're going to pick up, it would be helpful to know how the word or excel files are formatted. Thank you @artsymartha68 !

artsymartha68 commented 1 year ago

Sure thing! Here are a few. The ID.me one has a bunch of notes and strike throughs since I was using it to keep track of issues and updates, the original version didn't have all that, of course.

VA Health and Benefits Version 1.0.xlsx 31796Authorize ReleaseOfVANonMedicalToVA 508 Audit Report 20230807 CEW.docx 31552_Id.me login_InterimAudit_20230301_V1.0.docx

jeana-adhoc commented 1 year ago

Here's one more: Digitized form 26-4555 Ad pated Housing Grant 508 Audit Report 20230411 CEW.docx

shiragoodman commented 1 year ago

thank you @artsymartha68 and @jeana-adhoc !

I am not sure when Governance will be able to pick this up, however if the accessibility specialists want to work toward a solution, we'd be able to support it and ensure the guidance is published on Platform Website.

if you have any questions, please let me know!

shiragoodman commented 8 months ago

@artsymartha68 this ticket came up in Governance team refinement in January 2024. After discussing it with the team, we recognized that this ticket is a bit outside the scope of our work. However, we still feel it has value. Would this be something the CAIA accessibility specialists could work on? Please let us know. For now, I have removed the governance-team label. cc @briandeconinck

department-of-veterans-affairs / va.gov-team