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FAQs

How do I calculate progress to GAR 4?

Progress is calculated by the ratio of passing use cases per product. For example, if your product has a total of 100 use cases and 80 pass all GAR criteria, the reported score should be 80%.

Who can I share the GAR assessments with?

For GAR, please do not open access, and share only with those on the Products for All Accessibility Team, PA Accessibility leads, and on a need-to-know basis for QA testers, and Product team members.

How can I report and escalate external dependencies?

The Central Accessibility Team is tracking external dependencies affecting all company products, and surfacing them to the appropriate teams that are in position to resolve these external dependencies. Please follow the process at go/gar-external-dependencies-form, so that the Products for All Accessibility Team can track these issues.

How can I implement an accessibility launch bit?

An accessibility launch bit is important to ensure new product launches and incremental launches meet GAR4 requirements and prevent regressions. Please refer to go/a11y-launch-reviews for guidance on implementing an accessibility bit to your Ariane launch calendars. If you are on the Chrome or Chrome OS teams and use Monorail (crbug.com) instead of Ariane, note that there is already an accessibility bit in place as part of that launch calendar.

If my team is already working on GAR, why is it important to run AGUA?

GAR looks at technical accessibility. AGUA assesses the usability of a product, which is often different from technical accessibility. Initial Inspections, or Heuristic Evaluations, evaluate the product against a11y UX pitfalls (heuristic standards) and Root Causes include users for a usability study.

For example, the settings menu of a product might be technically accessible through keyboard navigation (GAR Compliant) but it takes 40 tabs to get there, which from a usability lens is time consuming and unpleasant (AGUA Issue).

What if my team doesn't have CUJs for AGUA?

Utilize go/CUJ. This has a playbook on how to create CUJs. You can also look at your GAR tasks and review which tasks would be most important to understand the usability for (taking it beyond the technical accessibility!).

How should I keep track of my progress?

For GAR, we recommend using Accessibility Tracker. You can link a GAR assessment in a spreadsheet to the Accessibility Tracker to automatically calculate scores without having to manually update status from bugs and count number of use cases, and monitor progress over time.

For AGUA, once your Inspection spreadsheets are completed, we recommend creating entries in Buganizer for easier tracking and real-time updates. We have added the Culvert extension to the AGUA Inspection spreadsheet templates [Culvert x AGUA user guide], which can help automate bug creation. Within each Inspection spreadsheet template, you will also find scorecards that you may use.

Who should I reach out to if I need help?

  • If you need help fixing a bug (designing, troubleshooting, developing), the fastest way to get help is by posting a question on go/yaqs and tagging it with "a11y" to summon an expert. You can also sign up for office hours at go/a11y-oh if you want to discuss a topic in detail with an expert.

  • We provide testing services for teams who don't have a testing team trained or have low bandwidth, you can request testing at go/a11ytestingrequest.

  • If you need help implementing an accessibility program, you can reach out to the existing accessibility lead in your organization and awg@.

  • If you need support executing AGUA or improving usability, visit go/agua or reach out to agua@.

How can I train my teams on accessibility?