Educational Testing Service (ETS) is the world’s largest private nonprofit educational testing and assessment organization. They know about accessibility, and the need for digital inclusion. I’ve collaborated with them informally for many years in open standards.
So, I was very pleased to be able to consult with Jason White, one of their more talented engineers, on a project. Previously, Jason and I worked together at W3C in the Accessible SVG Task Force of the SVG Working Group and Web Accessibility Initiative.
I can’t say much about the project until it goes public, but Jason had a novel approach to screen reader interaction, and wanted to include some interactive SVG for low-vision users. This was an interesting project that I think has great potential, and working with ETS was rewarding and fun.
Jason approached me with a well-architected prototype, which I refined and enhanced into a robust proof-of-concept. These are some of the tasks I performed:
- Established collaborative infrastructure, including a git repo and issue tracker, and integrating and developing unit and regression tests with Jest
- Implemented a graphical interface prototype
- Incorporated the prototype into a cross-browser extension, with a build system for transpiling the source code to multiple targets (and a nice logo icon)
- Did additional development, including enhancing the performance from
O(n2)toO(n)time complexity and designing an extensible customization architecture - Made suggestions for future directions
I’m looking forward to seeing this project talked about more publicly.