Last June, Remarkable’s QA Practice Lead, Aaron Ingram, joined forces with Alex Mocioi at the Romanian Testing Conference to discuss his work in accessibility. Aaron highlighted the importance of web accessibility and the work that Remarkable have been doing with accessiBe to make our clients’ websites inclusive, accessible spaces.
You can read the transcript of Aaron’s interview below, or watch the full interview here, to find out more about the work that Aaron and our QA team have been doing to maximise accessibility for our clients and their customers.
You can also sign up for a free accessibility audit from Remarkable today, to make sure that you comply with the European Accessibility Act regulations coming into effect on the 28th June 2025.
Alex Mocioi: My focus lately was to build, along with my colleagues, a community that helps us share reusable software solutions that any team within the organisation can benefit from. Have you ever thought about how difficult it is to build tech products for tech guys? What if on top of this, you need to deliver accessibility for your digital experiences? In the end, humans need empathy: they need support to move forward, and we are going to discuss this with Aaron Ingram.
We’ve prepared content for you on how you can build tech products for tech people, and especially about accessibility. So, hello Aaron Ingram, thank you for taking time for this.
Aaron Ingram: Thank you for having me.
Alex: We’re going to start easy, to let the viewers know who you are, so please introduce yourself.
Aaron: I’m Aaron, I’ve been involved in tech and testing for about a decade now. I started out as a QA tester, worked my way up through to a QA Lead, Head of Testing, and more recently I’ve focused on accessibility, and productisation of packages to sell to our clients.
Alex: When did you find out, Aaron, that you should go into a career in tech?
Aaron: So, I worked at an insurance company, and my job was no longer required, but I worked in a very niche job that sat within the testing team, and when my job was no longer required they offered me a position in testing, so I sort of just fell into it, but I really quite enjoyed it from that moment on. I’ve always been quite curious about that type of stuff, so from that moment on I just really enjoyed it and just rolled with it from there.
Alex: Can you point out some early experiences, maybe even some experiences from your childhood or your teenage years, that you think were useful for the professional you are today?
Aaron: Yeah, I’ve always enjoyed just trying to break things, really! I’ve always been that person, I’d take the TV remote apart, find patterns in things, even when it came down to gaming and things like that, just finding patterns within gaming that were useful. I’ve always been curious about how things worked; can you find a pattern, can you break something and put it back together again, how things work; it’s always been something I’ve looked into.
I’ve always been curious about how things worked; can you find a pattern, can you break something and put it back together again?
Alex: Interesting, so breaking things helps you find out how you can build things.
Aaron: Exactly: you take it apart, and then you’ve got to try and put it back together again.
Alex: Maybe that’s why children these days are very into – or actually not these days, since a lot of time – they’re into Lego games and building new stuff and breaking it and building again.
Aaron: I’ve got two children, and they’re very much both into it. My son loves Lego, he’s always building stuff, so I’m hoping maybe at some point I can employ him to start testing things for me!
Alex: What I noticed, buying new stuff for my kid, or seeing stuff bought for him – when I was a kid with my brother we had a big box with lots of parts – no instructions, we were just building stuff out of our imaginations. Now most things are themed; you have the recipe.
Aaron: Yep, instructions – my son’s got loads of Harry Potter Lego, and although that’s good, we also just have a big box of things we’ve found and put together. So, he uses them quite a bit, but not as much any more as when he was younger. He used to love it when he was younger.
Alex: I hope it won’t kill their imagination.
Aaron: Hopefully not.
Alex: Good, so, I’m going to shift the discussion towards the topic of our episode, which is building tech products for tech guys, and somehow this is a dream for a lot of guys in tech, right? How can I use my experience and my knowledge to build something?
First of all, is it tech-driven innovation, or product people that drive the building of a new software?
Aaron: I think it’s predominantly the product people, in my opinion. I think they will find something that needs to be done, whether it’s a request from a client, working with an agency – we’ll get a number of clients coming in that will want very specific things, and from then the product guys would take it to the tech teams and say ‘what can we do?’, and that’s when they’ll start putting their minds together. So, I’d say a lot of it is very client-driven over what the clients need, and can we service those needs from a product?
Alex: Okay, but on the other side it’s the guys in tech companies that start by doing, let’s say, manual testing, or if we are talking about developers, they build something that is required by a client and so on, and while working on their task they identify parts that could be reusable.
Aaron: We do try and reuse as much as we can. At the moment, whether it’s components or products, we’ll try and create things that can be reused over and over again several times, to make that build process quicker and quicker and quicker next time going forward.
Alex: So this is where experience in automation – which is coding, right? – helps you. You can put it together, just like the Lego pieces, right? And you can build a product. In your case it was a testing product that you built, right?
Aaron: We’ve done a couple. I’ve put together an automation framework that we can sell to clients. It comes with a number of standards and tests a very basic regression pack depending on where your website sits, for example, and from there we can just plug in the selectors, build a repository using the selectors on your site, and it means we can scale up a very quick regression pack very fast for clients or the products they want to buy.
The other one we did was for an accessibility service: so, what we’ve done is we’ve partnered with a company called accessiBe. They have a plugin that goes in a website, that allows the user to completely amend the UI on their website depending on that person’s specific needs.
So, what we’ve done is we’ve partnered with accessiBe; we go out and sell the license to their clients, but along with the licensing we sell dev time, QA time; so I’d do an audit on a website, I’d identify any accessibility needs. From there, we’d put them into a Jira ticket, the business analyst would look through them, the developer would fix them and plug in the accessiBe plugin.
The idea is it’s a subscription service: they pay monthly for the plugin. I’s a continous source of income for the company as well as accessiBe, and we can ensure that we maintain that accessible process going forward on their website. It’ll come with a quarterly review to ensure that no changes they’ve made going forward have affected their site, so it’s very much a subscription service.
Alex: You mentioned accessibility a couple of times, and it’s actually one our main topics for this episode. Maybe some of our users are not aware of what it is, so what’s accessibility and accessibility testing?
Aaron: So, accessibility testing and web accessibility is allowing users to navigate websites, mobile applications, if they’ve got a range of disabilities – they can be visual, hearing impairments, they can be cognitive or neurodivergent issues, even for things like colour blindness, or complete loss of hearing, things like that.
So, it’ll be simple things, like if someone’s colourblind, making sure that they are able to use a high contrast mode in their website, just so that they can see all the images and things that are relevant. Or, if you’ve got a lot of flickering images, a lot of gifs or whatever on your website, ensuring you have a seizure-safe profile, so you can pause them and dull the colours down so that they don’t trigger tings like epilepsy, and prevent seizures and things like that.
Alex: This is a very important topic to take into consideration when you are building your software. What puzzles me is that in 14 years of my career, I haven’t been hearing about this problem from any of the product team I’ve been working with. I’ve known about it for some years now because I’ve been working closely with some guys that were providing IT support for some websites that were used by a governmental agency, and there are some EU laws recently that enforce governmental agencies to provide accessibility features.
Aaron: The European Accessibility Act [EAA] is due to come into effect on the 28th of June [2025], so it’s similar to the ADA [American Disability Act] in America. Whereas the ADA is across a wide range of things, the EAA is specifically to do with digital content, so it’s a lot more around websites, mobile applications, and it legislates that a lot of certain WCAG guidelines have to be met by websites and applications.
The EAA legislates that a lot of certain WCAG guidelines have to be met by websites and applications.
Alex: It’s a bit cruel that we need regulations in order to take this into consideration. How did you and your team make the decision to get into accessibility digital solutions?
Aaron: It was more that I was looking at these websites and – going back to the children – it actually came up in a conversation with my daughter.
So, we were walking home from school one day, and she’d fallen out with one of her friends at school because they were arguing over the colour of a pen. I was talking to her, and it came up that this little boy was colour blind. I tried to explain to her what the issue was, and if you go into Firefox, for example, in the dev tools you can simulate certain levels of colour blindness. So, I showed her what protonapia is – it’s where people struggle with shades of red – and I showed her a box of crayons [as seen by] someone that suffers from protonapia, and I was like, ‘can you tell what these colours are?’. And she said no, so she then understood what this boy was seeing, and that sort of got me thinking. So, I was working a little bit on it at the time.
I also came here [Romanian Testing Conference] last year, and I saw a really good talk on accessibility then, which sort of cemented the idea that this is something that really does need to be taken seriously. Then with the EAA coming in, it’s just snowballed from there, and it’s become more and more prevalent.
Alex: It’s great, and I love that you shared this personal experience. And it’s something that we should do more often, right? After all, we are in this industry to try and build software for humans.
This is the target that we have for this new season, try to explain why software should be built by humans for humans, that understand all their needs, which is something that maybe an AI tool won’t understand.
Aaron: Obviously you get a lot of AI and automated tools around accessibility testing, things like that. They can pick up a lot of things, but they don’t pick up everything, so things like a logical tabbing order: as long as everything can be hit by a tab, a lot of the time they’re just happy with that, whereas a logical tabbing order for a website for someone that can’t use a mouse and need to use a keyboard for shortcuts, the tabbing order needs to be logical. There’s no point jumping from the top of the page to the bottom and back up; it needs to make sense and go with a good flow on the website, which is something I think a lot of AI tools will struggle with.
Alex: I remember a discussion that I had in the first season, and we were talking about how we can use social media more effectively, and the idea that came out was that social media should help you to understand people’s problems, people’s needs, when dealing with software, and out of this understand how important it is to build this software with an emphasis on empathy. Because, if I’m not going to expose this to other humans, then who can do it? The computers, right?
Let me go back a bit to the topic of building this kind of testing. I am very interested in this topic because I’m part of a wonderful team of tech guys, testers, developers, that understand that when we are building something for some end needs, maybe a project that is required by a product team and so on, we are building stuff that can be reusable, something that we can use in other projects or that other teams can use.
However, with this in mind and building white label products, white tech for tech guys, we found it challenging to maintain it, to grow it, and in the end, even though we sometimes discuss it over a coffee, we don’t end up with a product that can be sold to others or offered to others, like an open source. What were some of your challenges in this process, and what are some recommendations you might have to stay focused?
Aaron: We actually went through various different products when we were looking at it. We were looking at an automated one, testing only services, an accessibility one, some performance and load testing, those types of things. So we did look at a few, and the accessibility one was always there, but the other ones were things we really had to think about, and some of them fell aside because there wasn’t any real potential in them, and I guess at the time it was more about focusing on, what was the most realistic thing we could get to market?
The performance and stress testing, that never really grew any legs; it was something we spoke about, we discussed it, some non-functional stuff, and it just never really made a lot of sense to pursue that. Then we looked at some automation things, and again, it was good, but it would then take a lot of maintenance as websites change all the time, and it’d be a constant retainer. Rather than being a product it’s more of a retainer, unless you then train out.
Another thing we looked at was training services, so we could get them in, build a regression with them, train them how to use the automated software, then sell the license and let them go and be on support. That’s still something we’re looking at, to be fair, that support type of service, but the accessibility one was very much more about buying from various areas of the business.
Obviously, working in an agency we’re very client-facing, we discuss with clients a lot of the time, but it was about discussing with myself and the QA team, our CTO, the developers, the business analysts, because everyone needs to be able to buy in. So, it was very much a round table situation, where I’d come in and say ‘I’ve got this idea, I want to build this product and do this, blah blah blah, and then the business analysts would be like, right, we can do that, but from our perspective for every one of these you sell you’ve got to sell X amount of our time and the developers’ time.
So, we then whittled down into 4 different packages (we had a bronze, silver, a gold and platinum tier), and depending on what the client’s requirements were, depending on which package they bought – obviously they varied in price – they all came with a license for the plugin, but then from there they had varying levels.
The bronze, for example, off the top of my head would have been a couple of days of my time to do an audit, a developer’s time to do the plugin, then that was it. Then they would send the report of what the problem was, they’d have to plug in, then they’d decide what to do from there. Silver would have been a bit more dev time, a little bit of BA time to take the report, put in the Jira tickets and start fixing things.
So that’s one of the things we really took a lot of time to flesh out, and again, it was something particularly with a lot of change in personnel and things like that, we had to keep getting continuous buy-in from people, and the biggest issue has been getting people to understand – getting clients and potential buyers to understand – the importance of it and why they need it.
Alex: Judging by what you just said, we can draw the conclusion that it’s quite complex to build something like this, and involves a lot of components, involves a lot of systems. And, it being a technical challenge, it’s interesting for tech guys, right? Engineers are into building complex stuff, on one side: on the other side, it’s the main feature of your tool, in the end, which is helping other digital solutions providers to offer accessibility.
What wakes you and your team up in the morning? Is it the tech challenges, or is it the sense of purpose in being able to deliver something that can solve some problems for some humans that will use the digital solutions that you’re enhancing with your tool.
Aaron: For me personally, it’s more about the idea of assisting that end user. Knowing that it obviously helps our clients along the way – we provide a service to clients, the clients provide a service to the end user – so, if it’s an ecommerce client, the idea that we’re assisting that end user in purchasing things they need to buy, or something they want to buy, things like that, they couldn’t previously have done on the website without it being accessible. So that’s what helps me, that’s what gets me through it, is being aware that these people are then able to buy that service. And that’s what I enjoy; it’s not so much the tech problem, it’s more I enjoy seeing the end result. I like working towards that.
that’s what I enjoy; it’s not so much the tech problem, it’s more I enjoy seeing the end result.
Alex: It’s something that when I’m involved in some training, teaching activities, I’m always telling the young ones: ‘okay, tech is nice, we have a lot of things that today are useful for us, but in 10 days things will change and we’ll do something different. But what is constant is that we need to understand the importance of the tools we are building, because this gives us a sense of meaning’.
Aaron: It’s a sense of purpose isn’t it, to know that you’re helping a person that you don’t know but is right on the other end of that journey, but that’s why you’re doing it, is to help that person do what they need to do online.
Alex: I’ve thought about something else now: I’m sure that you guys building all these plugins and all these tools that can be embedded by others, I’m sure there’s a lot of technical documentation required there, right, that the other teams will need? The biggest challenge in the teams I’ve been part of: how to make the tech guys write technical documentation. We even have a meeting in our calendar every Friday to do it! So, what works for you guys?
Aaron: Fortunately, with us, with accessiBe for example, they are very good at keeping that documentation up to date. We look at it, it’s always got very basic step-by-step instructions on how to plug it in, apply updates (it’s updated quite regularly). They are very good at keeping it up to date. They know what they’re doing, even if it’s just a bit of calendar time blocked out purely for documentation updating, just making sure that they allowed that time, rather than being expected to fit it in in amongst everything else, it’s allowing them time to do it.
Alex: Okay, good. One final question for you: how do you sharpen your skills?
Aaron: Coming to things like the Romanian Testing Conference, mostly! I enjoy coming to things like this, I attend a lot of webinars… I’d say mostly it’s just natural curiosity, really. If I see something I’m interested in or I’m curious about, I’ll just sort of sit down and keep playing with it until I make it work. Whether that’s a new automation software, a new accessibility thing, whatever it is: if I see it and I’m curious about it, I’ll spend hours just figuring it out until it works, and that just naturally helps me grow and helps my knowledge expand.
Alex: Nice. I think you presented a pack of strategies and mindset and ways of feeling comfortable with the career you have, right? You know, people are afraid these days that somebody else will do their job. You said that you were in this position, so our viewers have some good recommendations now on how to stay safe and work on the things they love, and deliver quality in their software initiatives.
Are there any things that I haven’t asked and you want to share, or some final thoughts for our viewers?
Aaron: Just mainly coming back to accessibility: as the EAA does creep closer, I think the sooner that people start taking it seriously and looking at it will benefit everyone, because the later they leave it the more rushed it’s going to be, and it’s not something you can rush: it is something that needs serious time and investment into it. It does take time, it takes a budgetary investment as well, so the sooner they start taking it seriously, the better.
Alex: I’m happy that we put a light on this accessibility topic, so thank you for taking time for this discussion.
The sooner they start taking the EAA seriously, the better.
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