All work

// Case study 02 · Accessibility governance · Avaloq

Break It
Yourself

European accessibility regulation set the deadline. WCAG 2.2 AA set our audit target. Neither supplied an operating method. Avaloq's design team ran the accessibility work; I built the they audit with.

It checks surfaces rather than features and adds a third status — inherited — so a criterion resolved once at platform level is never re-litigated on the forty-first form.

I built the method and the sheet. Avaloq owns the audit findings, adoption data and cost of remediation.

Live The inspection sheet on this page is running. Up to ten selected WCAG criteria per surface, five surfaces, computed against the specimen in your browser — not a screenshot of a spreadsheet. Open the sheet
My role
Process ownerThe inspection sheet and its taxonomy
Team
Avaloq designRan the audit across five surfaces
Audit target
WCAG 2.2 AAUp to ten selected criteria per surface
Scope
Five surfacesOne platform pass, then inheritance
5
Surfaces in the sheet
≤10
Selected AA criteria per surface
01 · The audit, live

Not screens. Surfaces.

Auditing feature by feature would never have finished. So the unit of audit became the surface — the recurring construct that every feature is assembled from. Four carry their own criteria. The fifth carries everyone else's.

Every control on the bench is a decision a designer or developer actually makes. The sheet on the right is the inspection sheet rebuilt in this site's own system — same taxonomy, same status vocabulary, same shape as the one the team works from. It re-renders as you work.

Passed
Tested on this surface, meets the criterion.
Failed
Defect raised against this feature.
Inherited
Resolved once at the platform. Carried, not re-tested.
Live Break a criterion. Watch the verdict turn. Nothing here is a screenshot

Up to ten selected criteria · yours to failPick a surface

Controls Tables

Savings plan overviewselected checks pass

Yourbank

Home › Trading

Savings plan

Instrument Frequency Amount Status
SGS Ltd Nam.CH0009000016MonthlyEUR 50 Active
Credit Agricole SAFR0009000029MonthlyEUR 75 Active
Nestlé SA Nam.CH0009000032MonthlyEUR 100
Novartis AG NamenCH0009000040MonthlyEUR 125 Closed
Screen-reader simulation Tab or hover into the specimen to inspect the simulated announcement.

Accessibility · specimen Selected checks pass

Reviewed · specimenD. Hernandez · UX

The specimens and inspection sheet are reconstructed in this site's own system. Companies shown are real; identifiers and positions are illustrative.

02 · Inherited

Audited once. Carried forever.

The first version of the sheet made every feature test all ten selected criteria. It was correct and it was unusable — nobody was going to re-measure the focus ring on the forty-first form.

So the taxonomy grew a third status. Inherited means the criterion is satisfied by a governed platform component, was audited once against Web apps & web services, and is carried by every feature that consumes it. A feature audit only tests what the feature itself introduces.

Open the platform block on the sheet, then switch surfaces. The four blue rows are identical on Tables, Forms, Status indicators and Transactions — same criteria, same wording, same source. That repetition isn't laziness in the artifact. It's the mechanism: a single platform pass, then nothing to re-litigate. Which is why the sheet keeps them folded shut until you ask.

03 · This page

It passes the checks it demonstrates.

Every control here is reachable and operable from the keyboard alone. Each slider is duplicated by paired −/+ buttons, so no part of this page depends on a dragging movement — the same criterion the artifact marks inherited. The verdict panel is a live region, so it is announced rather than merely shown. Contrast ratios are computed with the WCAG relative-luminance formula, not estimated.

Claiming accessibility work without shipping an accessible artifact would be the tell.

04 · What I can show you

The instrument is mine. The readings are not.

Defect counts, closure rates, current platform scores and remediation costs are Avaloq's data. They are not mine to publish.

The evidence I can publish is the instrument itself, rebuilt and running. You can operate every control, break the feature-level criteria exposed on each surface and judge whether the method holds. No quoted outcome could rescue a method that does not.

The same rule governs every case on this site: the artifact is the evidence, the client keeps the outcome.